LISTEN – A RHYME IN TIME –

Nov. 10, 2021 –

Jordan: Do you mean you truly couldn’t, or you felt like you shouldn’t?

Greg: I think both, and I’m trying to figure out if there’s a distinction there. Because it wasn’t the first time I attempted to get sober. Previous times that I tried to get sober, when I imagined a life post rock bottom, that process of imagining my life would cause me to drink again because I didn’t like the life that I was imagining. I didn’t want that life. I wanted a life in which I could still trick myself into “oblivion” on occasion—I’m using air quotes there. So part of the necessary process was not imagining what was on the other side, giving up a desire to know what was on the other side.

As I’m talking about this, I hear myself talking about the writing process very much, in entering into a poem. As soon as I try and predetermine “this is what the poem is going to say,” it falls on its face. There’s a kind of faith that I’ve been—toying with isn’t the word, but kind of cozying up to. I don’t know if it’s a function of my age, I don’t know what it is, but I have been expanding my idea of what constitutes faith, and in that is a notion of trusting what’s on the other side and not needing to construct it imaginatively in my mind ahead of time. Gregory Pardlo’s collection Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Other honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts for translation. His first poetry collection Totem won the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review. His most recent book is Air Traffic, a memoir in essays.

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