Jeff Gundy’s words have lived on in my head for years after I’ve read them. In moments of stress I return to them regardless of where I am, regardless of if I have his books with me. Here’s one example from his book “Spoken Among the Trees”:
and how can I worry about the gray in my beard
or soaring Chinese oil consumption or even
the misery and rubble my tax dollars are buying
when the cardinals are showing off
and the mallard sprints toward the far shore
My introduction to Jeff’s poetry came five years ago when he came to visit us young poets in Todd Davis’s poetry class at Penn State Altoona. It was the first time I had fallen in love with a book of poems then had the chance to meet with the poet. A few years later I wrote a review of his work in Rattle, and although we haven’t talked since he was gracious enough to grant me an interview.
CC: Jeff, you’ve been a faculty member at Bluffton University for quite some time. What has your experience been like there? How have you grown as a teacher? What is it about the environment that allows you to draw inspiration for your own work as a poet?
JG: Bluffton has been a great place to call home, even while I’ve always had a sense, as William Stafford put it in a poem, that I didn’t want to “just live here.”
I’m a farm boy, a Midwesterner, and while I complain plenty about the weather, the provincial quality of my home territory, and the work load, in my daily life there are a lot of good things about teaching at a small college in a small town. I can walk to work, and I have great colleagues and fine students. I get to teach a variety of courses, from writing workshops to literature classes to general ed courses that let me explore politics and the state of the world. I get to spend time with like-minded people and a steady stream of visitors from all over the place.
Teaching is endlessly absorbing, I find—even if it’s trying to figure out how to convince a class full of semi-motivated and under-prepared freshman comp students to put together something resembling a coherent essay.
There are tradeoffs everywhere, of course. When I’m teaching four courses and submerged in papers, meetings, advising, and all the rest, I yearn for the cushy loads of my friends at big research schools. When I’m facing a room full of business, rec management, and dietetics majors who could not care less that I’ve written a poem or two, I wish for a little circle of literary disciples hanging on my every word. But I think it’s healthy in a lot of ways not to be taken too seriously, much of the time anyway.
There’s a plain sort of beauty in the landscape I inhabit, and an incredible variety that comes with the seasons. Not much changes from day to day, and yet everything changes. It’s useful to a writer stay in one place long enough to know it well, and to get weary and bored with it, and then perhaps to come out the other side.
At the same time, this is hardly the whole world. My wife is from British Columbia, so we visit there regularly, and I look for other chances to travel as well—workshops, conferences, readings, and just general exploration. I’m really grateful for the great privileges of a steady academic job: summers off, conferences and workshops to attend, and enough income to do some wandering. We spent several months in Salzburg on a Fulbright in 2008, and loved and learned a great deal from that. With the web, books, journals and all the rest, it’s possible to be connected with people and great writing and ideas from all over the world.
CC: Although creative nonfiction is a hot topic in the literary writing community now, it’s a little known fact that you’ve been working in this genre for close to twenty years. As one there from the beginning of the boom (See Gundy’s creative nonfiction book from 1995 titled: A Community of Memory: My Days with George and Clara), what changes have you noticed? How has your study as a poet translated into your work as a creative nonfiction writer?
JG: When I started the project that became Community of Memory I had no real background in writing narrative beyond reading a lot and teaching some fiction-writing classes because no one else here knew anything about it. I got sucked into writing nonfiction prose because I wanted to tell these family stories about my Amish and Mennonite ancestors in an accessible way—though I wasn’t able to resist some postmodern maneuvers, including the frequent interruptions of my own voice into the story whenever I ran short of information or the narrative started to bog down.
I found, though, that all my practice writing poems and academic prose did enable me to write pretty good sentences and string them together. There was some relief in discovering that narrative prose required a certain relaxation of the intense pressure that’s on every word and line in a poem. Sometimes in prose you just have to write something like “He got up and walked over to the window,” without worrying about whether it’s stated absolutely perfectly or whether you might wring a few words out of every sentence. If prose is to be readable, in fact, it’s better if it’s not always pitched at a high level of lyrical density.
From the start of this project I was aware of two quite different ways of writing nonfiction. The nonfiction bestsellers tend to involve spectacular confessions of one sort or another, as we all know—usually involving sex, drugs, crime, and other sorts of transgression. But there’s a lot of fine writing that’s driven by subtler concerns, and by the quality of the writing itself. I understand the attraction of the first, but partly because my own life has been relatively non-lurid, I’m much more drawn both to reading and writing the second. As a writer of nonfiction I’ve had little choice but to pursue the second course, unless I want to join some famous examples and just start making stuff up. It’s sort of tempting, because the first sort of writing is clearly much easier to sell. But so far I’ve held out.
There are excellent writers with extreme life material, of course, and I read some of them with pleasure, but generally when I want something over the top I gravitate to space operas rather than gritty accounts of life on the mean streets. This is just personal.
In writing about my father’s side of the family, I found very few skeletons, and so Community of Memory is really a book about cherishing the rediscovery of their particular, human stories, interwoven as they are with their times, their places and their Mennonite faith. My second nonfiction book, Scattering Point: The World in a Mennonite Eye, has some similar concerns, but even wider-ranging explorations of history and place.
CC: What keeps you hungry? What keeps you opening windows? Poet Dorianne Laux is renowned for her poem “Dust” which ends on the lines:
That's how it is sometimes--
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you're just too tired to open it.
JG: Those are great lines, though I can’t say I’ve had that exact experience . . . more often, for me, what I fear is sinking into the wearying but comfortable round of daily life, with all its easy distractions, and not even noticing God at the window. Or, worse, opening the window and looking around eagerly but finding “only” the world.
What should we do with this singular life? How astonishing is it that we’re here at all? Shouldn’t we go about in a state of constant amazement, laughing and praising and demanding justice and mercy for all?
I grew up going to church regularly, am still part of the Mennonite church, and teach at a Mennonite college. For better or worse, Christian discourse has been in the air I’ve breathed all my life. But I’m most drawn to the eccentric, singular, possibly heretical voices on the edges of things—Blake, Dickinson, Whitman. I get more nourishment from Rumi and Li-Young Lee than from the defenders of orthodoxy. If I believe anything for sure, it’s that God isn’t done with us yet, and that the work of poets is to listen for that voice that comes from within and outside ourselves.
CC: Literary writing has taken quite a hit lately. The publishing industry has come under some scrutiny, many quality writers are going the self-publishing route and some critics have even suggested that our age will be the “end of the book.” In the face of it all, though, writers throughout the nation continue to enroll in MFA programs. How do you see the value of the written word changing? Who are some young poets and writers you could see carrying the art into its next dimension?
JG: As usual, it’s the best of times and the worst of times. I was part of a fascinating panel at the 2011 AWP conference in D.C. on what makes a project into “a book.” The two “literary” writers on the panel (poets with academic jobs, one of them me) talked all about the magic and mystery of the process, about patience and pursuing visions of Art and Truth. The agent talked about what would sell in New York: nonfiction books with clear hooks, about tiger mothers and how the web is changing human nature and so forth. She was (I think) absolutely right in terms of what will sell, and people lined up afterwards to talk to her, and I found myself thinking that I had pretty much zero interest in any project of the sort she’d described.
But one very young guy came up to me, thanked me enthusiastically for my unrealistic talk about writing great poems and not caving in to commercial pressure, and sent me two of his own poems later.
It’s hardly a new thing that what sells is not what will endure—assuming that we endure as a dominant species. If Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville had taken the market as the arbiter of what they wrote, we wouldn’t have their best work. Of course, this is easier to say while I’m not trying to make a living by writing.
As for all those MFA students and programs, I think they’re wonderful as long as people go into them with a clear head. There can never be teaching jobs for everybody who comes out of them—that’s simple mathematics. I tell my students that they should see grad school as a chance to spend a few years doing the work they love and learning as much as they can, not as a path to ready employment—and to avoid piling up big debt if at all possible.
But I want to stand against those who argue that the writing scene would be better if somehow “we” kept the little people out of it. There’s a really snobbish and anti-democratic thread in American writing, an elitism that looks back longingly to the (partly imagined, partly real) day when a small circle of the privileged passed the honors and awards around, congratulated themselves on their own brilliance, and kept the hoi polloi where they belonged. Some of the elite magazines and presses still do their best to function in that way, but that’s probably inevitable; there’s just not room for everybody to read everything, especially when the reading audience for poets is composed largely of other poets.
Like every other poet I know, I wish I had more readers. But then I discover another grand book by someone new to me, and feel humbled and astonished that I’ve been able to take part in this grand and ongoing project of poetry at all. Part of what makes the descendants of those people nervous is knowing that things have passed out of there control—that their sons and daughters are beyond their command. Too bad.
The diminishing centrality of New York publishing and the emergence of so many regional presses and literary circles is an excellent development overall, I think, and so is the flowering of writing by all sorts of under-represented people. The web is obviously a great leveler as well—does anybody even know how many literary magazines there are any more? I keep discovering new ones that are publishing great writing. All right, most of it will be ephemeral, but that’s always been the case, and if a good poem finds even a few readers who are moved by it, that’s something.
The physical, paper book will play a smaller role in the reading people do, as handwritten manuscripts and papyrus scrolls have been mostly replaced by other technologies. How we read will no doubt change as the technology changes, but I don’t think reading and writing are in any danger of dying out.
CC: Lastly, you were recent included in Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets but what’s next for Jeff Gundy?
JG: Well, who knows? I’m working on several projects, as usual. One is a book of poems that’s currently titled Somewhere Near Defiance, after a little town not far from Bluffton. It got its name from a battle between Native Americans and soldiers led by General Anthony Wayne, aka “Mad Anthony,” and a fort he built there after his triumph. There’s a political strand in the book, along with a lot of lyrical attention to the natural and human worlds and what lies within and around them.
Another prose project is a venture into the intersection of poetry and theology, or what some people are calling “theopoetics.” For a long time I’ve been both fascinated with and troubled by the enormous discourse and practice built up around what we call “God,” and interested in approaches that lighten the burden of doctrines and systems and put more trust in image, narrative, and mystery.
And a third project comes out of my time in Salzburg, a beautiful and prosperous city, for centuries near the center of a mighty empire in what is now a small, obscure, yet apparently quite viable country on the other side of empire. It’s still a very Catholic city—they killed some Anabaptists there in the sixteenth century, and drove out the Protestants en masse in 1731—and yet in some ways it comes closer to creating the sort of “beloved community” that we dreamers envision than any place I’ve ever lived, without the burden of empire to drain off so much energy and treasure. I’m still sorting out the personal and political implications of that experience, and aiming to put together a manuscript exploring it in both poetry and prose.
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