CQ: Facets of the mythic appear in several of your poems (“Daedalus Builds a Treehouse” and “This City Hands Me Myths; I Hand Them Back”), not only evoking and playing with Joseph Campell’s understanding that “It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward,” but also through the sense of wonder that invades that which is unknown and larger than ourselves. How do you conceptualize the mythological in your poems? What work do myths do in your writing?
Ben Goldberg: It’s interesting, because I often feel like myths shrink in my poems, and the mundane becomes more myth-sized. When I write (at least in early drafts) I happen upon the mythological unintentionally and usually through something mundane. It’s been that way in my life, I think. When I was about twelve years old, I read an article in science class about a self-powered plane called the Daedalus. It took off in Crete and had a successful flight of over seventy miles before “crashing” a few meters offshore near Santorini. At that age, I was unaware of all the ways the event echoed and subverted the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. To be honest, I was unaware of the myth. I just liked the word Daedalus. It wasn’t even a word to me really, or a name. It was a grouping of sounds I found pleasing. I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I called my dad Daedalus that evening at dinner. Over the following weeks, this became a habit and the name stuck, though it would be several years before I understood the significance of “renaming” my father this way. Nearly two decades later, I still call him Daedalus, and he’s quite patient about it. That’s how the mystical and the mythic work on me, though. They stick to the bottom of a sensory experience or memory and dissolve in my subconscious. They become habits and obsessions. They catalyze poems.
CQ: Your work juxtaposes the ordinary with the extraordinary: “another tunnel turned gospel by headlight,” “any trash bag swept / from a storm grate can apotheosize above skyscrapers,” etc. Why do you give such everyday things this sacred element of the divine?
Ben Goldberg: I feel I’m a pretty vehement agnostic, but people I trust tell me that my poems suggest otherwise. To be sure, my answer to the question of “god, yes or no?” varies considerably (often from moment to moment), as does my belief in the relevance of such a question. However, I am fascinated by spiritual dichotomies—sacred vs. profane, mystical vs. mundane, transcendence vs. presence—and have been for much of my life. It occurs to me, though, that dichotomizing such ideas is a reductive way of engaging with them. They are so much larger than our binaries. I feel like many belief structures teach to us to do this with them, though—to pit them against one another and insist that we choose.
Certainly there is an intrinsic conflict arising from these sorts of words being in such close proximity, and simply subtracting the word “versus” won’t change that. But does this make these words irreconcilable? For me, sublimity is any moment opposing ideas coexist without producing dissonance. Perhaps that’s what I’m trying to write toward. I want my doubts, faith, rationality, unreasonableness, and wonder to belong on the same pedestal. Then I want to kick the pedestal out from underneath. I want my ugliness to be as praiseworthy as my virtues, the state of ruin to be as holy as that of reclamation. I want a religion that keeps its deities in a spray paint canister. I want a heaven I can root through a dumpster for when I realize I’ve accidentally thrown it away.
CQ: Building off of the contrast between the everyday and the divine, “Daedalus Builds a Treehouse” has a tension between the peaceful innocence of youth and the peril of growing older. The son is safe with his father but we also get a glimpse into the danger that his future holds, because we witness him in a time “before the pills that douse what he can’t name, / before the feather in his hand means blade.” How do safety and danger interrelate for you, and why do you choose to focus on the transition from innocent to damaged?
Ben Goldberg: I guess it goes back to opposing ideas, the way they so often contain one another. There’s a danger in safety, and a safety in danger. I think sometimes of the tradition at Jewish weddings of smashing the glass. I find it brilliant and devastating. Yes, the temple is destroyed. Yes, to forget this, even in our joy, is to potentially invite sorrow to blindside us once more. But it will, regardless of our vigilance. Really, then, what does our awareness prevent? What does it honor, and at what cost?
However, the genius of the tradition, I feel, lies in how attuned it is to the psychology of loss. There’s something achingly human about the need to remember our traumas, personal or cultural, as a way of exerting agency over the pain they continue to cause us. Or is it humbler than that—a way of laying claim to that pain, or even offering oneself to it?
As all this relates to the poem, the speaker’s father stands at the edge of what will hurt him most in the world: the suffering of his child. The autobiographical aspects of this poem reflect my attempt to look from a (my) father’s perspective upon a moment during which a (his) son is unreservedly safe, if not happy. Of course he knows that neither this kind of safety nor happiness exists, let alone endures. Yet, the breaking of the glass works both ways. Or at least it should. The father is going to see his temple smashed. I want him to have a memory of joy, however splintered, to bring into that future.
CQ: This contrast between the innocence of youth and the danger that comes along with growing up highlights the use of time in your work. We see the son in “Daedalus Builds a Treehouse” simultaneously as a child and as an older, struggling person. “The City Hands Me Myths; I Hand Them Back” references both the past –“Someday I’ll stop measuring / my distance from certain memories in fire escapes,”— and the future— “Tomorrow, I’ll go to where I laid beside a woman / I’d never see again outside of sleep.” The narrator also says, “our windows keep a kind of time.” What’s happening with the blurring of the boundaries of time and stepping beyond chronological order?
Ben Goldberg: Lucidity so often feels like a luxury to me. I guess I’m looking for ways of presenting this as authentically as I can, of lucidly (for the most part) rendering the state of not being lucid. In this regard, I’m definitely trying for a sense of destabilization and dislocation—geographical, psychological, sensory, temporal. Time, I believe, is one shade of lucidity. The nature of time, like that of lucidity, is negotiated within and among individuals, and thus requires some kind of consensus. So yes, time exists objectively to the extent that societies rely on it as a construct, and individuals within those societies schematize it similarly enough to belong, more or less. But I’m interested in less.
CQ: In your work, words themselves come to life. You describe a relationship with a woman in which “every word we never spoke was either a city I hoped / we’d live in, or a cinder dusting an ashtray / whose smoke I woke to, and then you “throw down the only holy word I know. I’ll see if it becomes a dove before it hits the pavement.” Why do you choose to write about words?
Ben Goldberg: I really do believe words are magic; I believe it as literally as I can allow myself without feeling embarrassed. But why am I qualifying this? Honestly, if I were writing this in a journal, I’d delete every word of the first sentence after magic. How original, right—a poet who believes in the magic of language? But really what else is it (even after all the ways one might rationally answer or evade this very question)? And why is the trope of words as magic so perennial? In so many belief structures, words are the codons of the cosmos as well as catalysts for the forces governing it. I’ve always been compelled by this idea.
But let me make it a little more personal. A word is, among many things, an affirmation until it becomes reality or doesn’t. We name a city we want to live in, and wherever we end up, we align ourselves more closely (for a moment, at least) with a reality in which living in that city is more possible. We say “love,” and if we mean it, it’s immediately physiological, just as when we say “over.” The emotion precedes the words, of course, but the words concretize the emotion, which is part of what makes using them is so terrifying and exhilarating.
I also believe that some sensations are too large for the body to process, and that some experiences don’t entirely fit within the consciousness. For me, words have been the best vessels I could find to hold these sorts of things while I clear space for them. So, I’ll continue to attempt making memory-shaped vessels until my life and I fit one another.
Benjamin Goldberg’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2014, TriQuarterly, West Branch, Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, Blackbird, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of an award from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and was a finalist for the 2014 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest, the 2013 Third Coast Poetry Prize, and the 2012 Gearhart Poetry Prize. He lives with his wife outside Washington, D.C., and currently attends the MFA program at Johns Hopkins University. Find him online at www.benrgold.com.