Purposeful Looking and Songs on the Air: A Conversation with Merrill Gilfillan

Brian Blanchfield: I think of your work--in both poetry and nonfiction--very much as belonging to the High Plains of the North American West, and specifically to its rivers small and large: the South Platte and the Tongue and the Powder and the Niobrara. So, in coming across the photograph of you and Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley in the late 60s standing on the porch of the home in Ann Arbor where Frank O'Hara had twenty years earlier rented g room while a graduate student at Michigan, and in knowing well that your eight years in New York City after studying with Berrigan and Anselm Hollo at Iowa were steeped in New York's experimental poetry community, that you had your early work published by small presses like Lewis Warsh and Anne Waldman's Angel Hair Books, the contrast is sharp--between the beginnings of your writing life under those auspices on the one hand and, on the other, the wonderfully independent and rather quiet poetry of the last fifteen or twenty years so adherent to riverbanks and chokecherry places. When did you move to Colorado, and can you reflect on whether and how the High Plains have changed your work in poetry? Is the contrast I draw stark to you, too, or is your poetry now a continuation of what you began at Iowa and in New York? I went to Colorado in 1980 to visit an old friend in Boulder, and ended up staying. Soon, whenever I could borrow a car, I was exploring the grasslands east of the mountains as often as possible, driving the lesser roads and walking where I could. A steady intimacy and elation slowly developed with the landscape and its various spaces and secret chokecherry places--in part, I am sure, because it was a landscape I had doted on many hours as a boy, from fantasias of Native American lifeways to later, more substantive reading on the plains tribes, book after book--such writers as George Bird Grinnell, to name one favorite. (When I left for the University of Michigan in 1963 I was still planning to major in the ethnology of the native plains peoples.) So I was looping at thirty miles per hour through an area of very detailed, richly textured history, largely of a culture not my own, from Alberta to Texas, through spaces inciting contemplation more than any histrionics or undue bravura. It was a classic continental pattern: grand imaginations of the West, then the encounter, the thing itself. I had gone to New York City following my university years in search of bigger, or at least saltier, water, in the same way young men in Balzac novels left their provinces for the intricacies and cafes of literary Paris. The poetry scene in New York in the late 60s was spirited and energizing. There was a great (if unspoken) sense of generational front amid the variety of youngish writers, all hard at work. Brightness, lots of American Dada, and of course the conviction that art was one of the higher callings. I eventually left town on a Greyhound due to a persistently itchy foot and mild claustrophobia. As I began to have notions of writing about the Great Plains experience, I found that poetry (as I had learned it) balked. Vast spaces have necessities of their own, in an aesthetic sense; they brook no foolishness. The particular refraction of my poetic mode at the time felt inadequate, uneasy. I instinctively turned to prose in order to handle more directly the simple affection for that landscape-theater, studying prose writers like D. H. Lawrence (his travel books), W H. Hudson, Turgenev of the Sportsmen's Sketches, even A. J. Liebling and English Hours by Henry James--writers skilled in the art of Fuji viewing. This opened an entirely new palette and new, relaxed rhythms. After a few years of that, I began to feel qualified to deal with the human vectors on the landscape, native peoples mostly, and started writing short stories. Eventually, after Magpie Rising was completed, I was able to work comfortably in poetry out there, in poems with a horizontal pacing flexible enough to stand honorably in the landscape--poems like Penstemon Bearings, On Heart River, and From the Erstwhile Forks of the Grand. …

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