An Interview with Malachi Black – Writers House Review

By: Mike Nazzaro

Indirect Light by Malachi Black, ISBN: 9781961897120

Malachi Black is a poet (obviously,) writer, and professor currently teaching at the University of San Diego. His published collections include Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014,) Quarantine (2012,) Echolocation (2010,) and, the subject of this interview, Indirect Light, which will be coming out Fall of 2023. In addition to this, he is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, and has been featured in numerous collections.

Among the lists of poets we could interview, Malachi Black stood out to me because of his themes of grief and his environmental storytelling. Through the course of the interview, Malachi revealed enlightening insights into poetic device, environment, objects, poetic philosophy, and technique.

Editor’s Note: The interview was recorded over a zoom call and transcribed with Glean. The transcript’s inaccuracies were removed and fixed, and it was lightly edited to decrease filler words and sharpen the questions to improve readability. Bolded lines are to highlight questions and answers. Italicized is the interviewer. Black is Malachi Black.

Yeah, so I liked your book. I really liked the just impressionistic descriptions. I really love to sit on a bench and just describe light and stuff like that. I’m a big fan of Impressionism and painting, as you can guess from the poster [behind me.] So, I notice you…often use objects and places described to reflect emotion and mood. And there’s so much focus on light, (like in indirect light on page eight) and on elements, texture, color, air, motion, and liquidity, (like in Mother Pearl) …. Do you have any like inspirations for your impressionistic writing and descriptions? Is there anything that really draws you to describing light and things like that?

Well, my hope in this particular collection was that light specifically would accrue symbolic weight in the course of the book, something that was recurrent, but minimally invasive, illuminating. To your question about this element of impressionism…I wouldn’t say that I’ve been influenced by this exactly, but in my in my reading life at some juncture I encountered TS Eliot’s notion of the objective correlative. This comes from his essay, Hamlet and His Problems.

And in it, he suggests, kind of audaciously, actually, that one of the challenges with that particular play is that Shakespeare might not have succeeded in developing exactly as described this objective correlative. By that he means, more or less, that there’s a kind of textual machinery that can constitute an equivalency for an interior or dramatic condition.

And that’s something I would say pretty deliberate about in the course of my own writing life, is how to translate a psycho-emotional state or a particular human situation or circumstance of feeling into an external evocation of that.

And I think that’s really part of the work of literature. I don’t want to be too prescriptive and I certainly don’t want to say anything that would exclude really inventive, experimental or imaginative deviations from this path.

But by and large, it might be considered that, at least with respect to the lyric poem, the main work of representation there is the work of representing interiority, states of thought and feeling. The means by which those can be represented or conveyed is object-based. You know, it has to do with material items that can be evocative in a way that is, as I said, equivalent to these more amorphous, ineffable, intangible conditions of human being, in the sense of the verb.

So do I love light? I mean, I love impressionism. Of course I do. And one of the most resonant experiences of my childhood, frankly, was watching light fall through windows. Just the dust motes inside of it, the strange little galaxy that might be suddenly apparent in the beam of light.

But I don’t think I’ll be able to quote it verbatim, there is a statement in Whitman’s Preface to Leaves of Grass that the work of the poet is sort of to fall like light around, or on a helpless thing. And it is my hope that the poems in this collection are perhaps at times performing work analogous to that.

In terms of the impressionists, yeah, I mean, their great insight was that Light is the constituent element in our visual image making and reception. I’m also really moved by certain architects here. I live in San Diego now, and here we have the Salk Institute, which is a masterpiece by Louis Kahn.

And what is so phenomenal about that structure is the way it reciprocates forms of brightness or capitalizes on the southern, quasi–Mediterranean San Diego sun, and frames light and shadow and makes of those part of its own environment, like a structure.

Not like all the Dutch Colonials in my suburbs.

Not quite, yeah.

Yeah, but thank you so much for that…And more on objects, on telling stories through physical objects..[In “Holding a Book I Haven’t Read for Many Years”]…there’s a lot of storytelling just that you can infer from the descriptions of the car of it being beat up over time…It makes you ask why not get a new car? Maybe the speaker can afford a new car [and they] don’t want to give something up.

There’s the spiritual gravity and awe of the speaker in…”Entering the Cathedral”..the spiritual gravity and awe of God is displayed through just this huge cathedral and being like, oh, it’s so huge, it’s scary. Is there anything [more] you could say on storytelling with object and environment descriptions?

Also, I also noticed that “The Mouth of Saints”, that kind of reminded me of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets…[in] the physical relationship with God. I really love John Donne. I really like “Batter My Heart.” [It’s] one of my favorite poems.

Yeah, I love that too. You mentioned that in an email. And I’m flattered by the comparison. I’m delighted that one would bring the other to mind, namely my modest text. And I do think that in that particular poem, the subtext of Eros and erotic encounter is definitely tangible and also part of the mode of conveying the density of embodiment, the experience of embodiment.

And so maybe that’s a reasonable way to transition to answer your broader question, which is that in my writing practice, I tend to imagine that the mode of literary production is one of implication as much as explanation or explication.

There’s certainly a long and strong tradition of the poetry of direct statement, but much as when I watch a film, I find myself being most infected by the transference of emotion through representations of characters-actors attempting to resist emotion-that’s when my eyes really fill up with tears; when I watch somebody on screen trying hard not to cry.

It’s not so much the full-throated expression of feeling that allows me to mirror that feeling or to transmit it to me. It’s more watching somebody try to negotiate the responsibility of feeling that I find captivating and deeply affecting.

And so, I think that’s the mode of implication of the texts that I’m attracted to making. I think of myself as a pretty eclectic reader and a pluralist, like a devoted pluralist in my broader enthusiasm. But in terms of my own particular approach, I’m certainly aware that objects have the potential to convey an enormous amount.

And that is part of the work of implication. A story can be told through objects in a more resonant but also moderately more indefinite way. And so being less riveted to explanatory or expository language, essayistic writing, it allows for a proliferation of possible meanings and complexities that I think is really consistent with our engagement with the physical world.

I think lately more and more about the nature of language in texts, partly because we live in such a digital age. It has occurred to me that it might be said that all meaning, such as it is, is metaphysical. I mean that in the sense of being above, beyond, or more than the merely physical, the meaning of a word, though we imagine it resides inside of the word, actually resides in an intellectual cognitive space that’s beyond the ink that is on the paper that we read. And so even on that level, the meaning of a thing hovers around above and beyond its physicality. It has something to do with our attribution, yeah?

When we read that, we think, ‘I’m entering the book,’ [but] really the book is reaching into us and our lexicon and it’s playing our brains as fingers would play a piano, pulling on all of our associations and all of our knowledge of language and meaning. So I think that’s part of the symbolic potential of objects in poetry is to kind of accrue or invite this metaphysical layer of significance over the pure physicality of the thing itself.

Our movement through the world is a constant series of projections of meaning and perception onto these things that in themselves may not so fully know they’re participating in our construction of meaning. Without personalizing it in an unnecessary way, my father died not long ago, and among the most affecting events of his passing was spending time with his effects, these humble things that were part of his life and convey the tangible nature of his existence.

It’s not sitting in a chair per se and contemplating the magnitude of that loss that devastates me. it’s holding the necklace in my hand that I remember looking up at as a child. Poems can capitalize on the power of objects in that way and offer enormous implication in ripples of suggestion and nuance [of] different forms of light and shadow.

You’ve answered [this next question] in some ways already, but why be indirect at times, why show windows of moments, impressions of moments, and not a broader story or context of some kind?[For Example] I really loved the Indirect Light on page 92, the final poem in [that series,] but it contains a lot [despite describing such a short moment.]

Well, I guess There are different forms of communication available to us. I often receive questions for my students when I’m teaching, especially lower division students, the thrills of poetry. Sometimes a question will arise, more or less equivalent to this. Why do this? So inefficient. If you’re sad, just tell us you’re sad. Why beat around the bush? Why go behind things? And I often observe that There’s just a qualitative, and I might even suggest a kind of quantitative difference in the meaningfulness of the following statement: ‘I am sad,’ vs. ‘I am a broken window.’

When I speak in terms of metaphor or figuration, when I use the powers of language to exemplify a particular condition, what I have offered is a greater quantity of participation by the recipient of that language. A reader can encounter that phrase and occupy almost as much of the space it generates as I can. It also accommodates that reader in the development, as I said earlier, in a way, of their own emotional response.

I believe that the use of fragmentation in this particular collection, from my perspective, is partly just on a mimetic level that one’s experience of time past, which I think is such a significant part of this book, is rarely complete in a novelistic way. It seems much more frequently to involve snippets of insight or recollection-you know how it is when memory resurges.

In the famous illustration of Proust, he puts a little Madeline cookie into some tea and he takes a bite and it brings him right back to being a child when his grandmother would allow him exactly that kind of sensory or olfactory experience. That’s so commonly the case, isn’t it? That we move through the world and something points us back towards something we know, but what we know when it arrives is just this glimmer or instant or still image from the large cinematic experience of life.

I think when you extract those still frames from the larger movie, one of the things that happens again is that each accrues its own total environment and offers more resonance in the margins for participation. It takes on a more symbolic value in my thinking than does a sort of completist’s approach.

Now, that’s not to say that narrative doesn’t have its own dynamism and power and that incompleteness is more profound than completeness, but it has a different way of moving through us. And I wanted, in these poems in particular, to try partly to reconstruct the experience of recollection, the experience of retrospection as it punctuates a life that’s moving in a different temporal frame.

I wake up every day. This is not an interview about my particular biography, but when I awaken, I’m in a mode of time that is present. In fact, there was a period where the psychologist, William James, tried to identify what he would consider to be the “specious present;” the duration of the present moment.I think he came up with six seconds. There’s this little six second train that just keeps moving forward and we’re inside of that-

–mine is three seconds, I’ve got ADHD–

-yeah, you’ve got that three second interval that you’re kind of moving forward in, but it’s constantly broken up. Isn’t it interfered with by our projections into the future? I’m driving my car to work, but I’m thinking about what I’m going to do when I get there, or…I’m remembering what happened when I was on that same drive yesterday.

So the present moment is always splintered and organized around movements of our consciousness into an unknown future, into a vaguely or more clearly recollected past. I think those fragments in the book help to dramatize that kind of experience in the reading process too, where you get just a glimpse of something, a moment, a sound, an image, a particular interval, and then have to move forward because that’s the nature of our reading experiences that it’s [a] strictly linear event.

Yeah, I really love thinking about…layers of memory and association. A lot of people avoid common phrases in poetry, which is good practice, but sometimes common phrases, objects…just have those associations.

When you’re showing these moments and making them open-ended, are you writing [poems that are] purely self-expression and your own emotional associations, or do you pointedly, (I think you do,) try to imagine what the audience’s most likely associations will be? Or is it [on the spectrum between these two goals]?

As you surmised, I do [consider the audience]. I think when we choose to write, we have to consider always our audience. Naturally, the longer we do it, the more we come to understand, (not to say it’s a static thing), but what at a given moment we want ourselves. I have to be pleased in some immediate way with the work before I would ever consider it finished, and that means that I’m writing toward my own enthusiasms.

I’m writing toward what I would like to see a poem do at that time in this way about that particular subject. In some very genuine sense, I begin by writing for myself in some respects writing to myself and making the elements of it game-like.

I think there’s a lot to be said for a beautiful book called Homo Ludens by a guy named Johann Heisinger. And I’m not sure that he was the first to try to explore this realm of thinking and theory in the general sense, the kind of literary sense of that word. But there have been a number of folks in the in the decades since who responded and kind of generated a category of human study called play-theory. I think that literary activity sometimes fits pretty well within the confines of what we would consider to be play.

Of course, it’s expressive, but on the level of the composition, it is not entirely unlike working out a crossword puzzle or playing a language game. Certainly, as a language game. And that game is for my own satisfaction and pleasure.

That’s the object. And so in that work, I may well be expressing myself. Generally, I’m most interested in things that facilitate self-expression, but I also think that the writing process-if it’s going to be really alive-has to contain some elements of surprise inside of it. So, to be over determined to begin is a complication, and often seems to reduce the vitality of the object that I’m making.

I want to remain open to what it’s asking me to do, much as a game, [with] the element of surprise inside of the play. That’s all of the suspense. I’m not a fanatical sports fan, but I have learned over the course of my life that in order to appreciate any sport, one has to understand the source of suspense within the rules of the game.

And that’s a similar activity when I’m writing. I wanna find the source of suspense within the rules of that game. And then I wanna be able to figure out how to play the game, keeping the suspense involved so that nothing is, no possibility is inherently collapsed. [When writing,] I am expressing myself and entertaining myself.

[On the other hand,] I’m very cognizant-especially at this point in my life-because I’ve been writing seriously since I was your age [20-something] and younger, I’ve recognized that if I’m going to part with [my writing] in a way that will be public…then I also bear some responsibility and a significant responsibility to them to ensure that they can have their own sources of access, or their own portals into the work.

That has everything to do with what we were talking about earlier, in terms of creating objective correlatives. When I say ‘I’m a broken window,’ very few people among us would have absolutely no idea what I mean. They might translate that meaning to paraphrase it in a variety of ways, but we all share in some core unspeakable knowledge about what the feeling of that utterance is.

I’m hopeful, yes, very much that I’m making choices that will engender fields of feeling that are consistent with my goal. What I want to say or express can be replicated in the reader through the object choices or image choices or formal choices that I have made.

And so the impressionism, I think, yeah, hopefully conveys a sense of liminality. If that’s part of the goal of a particular poem; a sense of the vulnerability of the speaker, a sense of the intoxicated joy of a speaker, or carefree-ness. I’m thinking any number of these poems [from Indirect Light] may have a certain concept of nostalgia or lament.

These experiences can be recreated through deliberate concern with what is available to experience in a poem by a reader. And so that makes it ultimately a work of service, where the game that you’re playing is one designed, in fact, to be worth seeing, or be worth reading by someone else.

That brings me into another question, [regarding the topic of] choosing what you’ll publish. For context, I like to write about grief at times, about a friend I had that passed away a few years ago, and I’m wondering; [do] these brief windows serve the [additional] purpose of being more respectful towards [the deceased]? How do you choose what to write and publish about [regarding] friends passing away? Do you communicate with [the deceased’s] family?

Yeah, yeah. Well, part of the strange thing for me, at this point in my life, 41, I live in Southern California. I grew up really close to where I think you’re talking to me from right now. I don’t know where exactly in the world you are, but I suspect it’s in suburban New Jersey, right? Probably not too far from New Brunswick. So, it’s a really unusual experience I have found.

I’ve never been this old before. So I’m always learning what it means to be alive every day. But to awaken in this realm where I live now, Southern California, in San Diego, it’s a space of escape for a lot of people. It’s a very comfortable climate. So, in that way, it almost feels like an afterlife. Also, it has a huge retirement draw. So, one of the sources of the housing economy here is people who want to move here to get ready to die. And then there’s another contingent of people in this community who are here for vacations. That means they’ve traveled to this region to avoid their normal lives and who they are.

And within all of that, I’m almost as far geographically as I could be within this country from the spaces in which I was raised. That means I’ve lost a lot of contact. It means that I maintain a great sense of remoteness from those origins, that the childhood that I experienced and the intimacies that I developed there. It doesn’t mean I’m totally out of touch, but I do believe that those fragments are a mode of preserving the dignity of privacy that these people warrant.

I was cautious in the way I approached those poems and direct like poems to avoid over disclosure. I wanted to acknowledge the losses without trying to deprive those people of their own narrative. I didn’t want to deprive anybody of their stories or elements of privacy.

So, I did feel that in using those shorter glimpses, I was allowing a larger experience to remain theirs and to just pull on the pieces that might be accessible to me or to which I would feel moderately entitled, again, without disclosing too much. My mother still lives in the house to which we moved when I was 13. We moved around quite a bit when I was younger than that, so it was hard to find a single place that felt like mine. But in my 13th year, she moved into [her current] home. And so, she’s there and she maintains contact. Some of the news I receive is from her embeddedness in the community.

Without belaboring it, I’ll say that the town in which she now lives has changed a lot since when I was growing up. I think the socioeconomic components are quite different than what they were. A lot of the people with whom I was raised have found that it’s easier to live elsewhere, for a number of reasons. My mother’s from a large family, and many of her siblings still live in the few square miles from where they grew up. And that was possible for them and their generation, but for our generation, for the grandchildren of my mother’s parents, we can’t find places in that region that are genuinely accessible.

There’s been a great dispersal, but nevertheless, my mother [stayed but] my cousins have kept…moving farther and farther from that kind of central nucleus. But I do maintain contact [but] I’m not great in general at contact, I’ll be honest with you. But the people I see, I give a hug when I do see them-however frequently I may. I of course try to show my respects to survivors of profound loss. I think that’s important on a human level.

Thank you. Thank you. My final question.

I really like the line breaks technique you use of alternating triple indented lines, in the way that it shifts the eyes but also adds physical space [on the page].[These indents] reminded me a little bit of the Shakespearean five beats [in iambic scripts].I loved the movement in [your poems]. Broadly, are there any particular techniques; rhyme timing or meter or feet or something, that you prefer or that are your go-to [to express specific things]? [For example, one thing I] noticed in [regards to Meter was that “On Her Collarbone’, was very iambic and anapestic.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I will say that I find my ear is still really attracted to the core abstract pattern of ionic pentameter or trochaic pentameter.

When it comes to metrical scansion- you sound very capable so you probably already know this- there are special feet that exceed beyond these parameters, but if you’re talking about a dactyl or an anapest versus a trochee [or] an iamb, you’re talking about units of two and their sequence is almost immaterial. [For example, It’s] very common in the line of iambic pentameter defined in the trochaic substitution, so you have two slacks [stressed syllables] next to one another. That’s just inside of the nature of that kind of dual movement: up, down, up, down. Right?

It depends on where you start counting…[For example,] you can have a headless line of iambic pentameter, or you can have a line of trochaic pentameter that has something extra symmetrical, or [asymmetrically,] you can terminate before you conclude the final trochee. It’s a footless line. Anyway, the point is, you’ve got these three syllable feet and two syllable feet, and those have, in their way, a certain flexibility.

My core vulnerability to rhythm is grounded in the expectation of five and a certain measure of regularity in the iambic beat. But in the course of my reading life and as I’ve gotten more and more satisfied with my knowledge of technical means, I’ve tried to invigorate some platonic structures with a little more an improvisatory mode.

And I really favor a core iambic structure that has moments of accelerated or higher emphasis in quick succession. I sort of like these modes of relaxation, or kind of entranced regularity that then pop out with a little more percussiveness than one might expect. And I don’t think that’s as unusual in the history of metrical practice as could seem.

I think most of my favorite metrics we’ve already spoken about. [John] Donne loved to add some sub-rhythms that complicate and nuance or challenge the predominating pulse of a pentameter beat.

And the formal element of the Indirect Light poems, really, through the lineation, challenged me to accentuate elements of music that I think in other poems of mine-which are lineated in a more traditional syllabic mode-might seem less apparent. And so, I was really happy to introduce a literal formal typographical movement on the page that allowed for the musical components to become accessory [to], or at least, conspiratorially involved in that form of execution.

[Otherwise,] I wouldn’t say that I have any favorite technical modes. One of the things that I love to do when I’m writing-and one of the things that I hope is true about this book- is to experiment with form in some way so that I have to avoid repeating myself, partly because I’ve discovered a new language game which requires a new series of solutions in order to get from beginning to end.

In my first book, which we’re not here to talk about, I had a lot of sonnets in it. I really became captivated by that form. I started to think of it as something like a room that I could redecorate, repaint. Everything changed the more I moved the furniture around and I’d open the windows really wide, just let things be reorganized there. But it became, on some level, (much as I could enjoy the experimentation and the variation,) a little too consistent.

The quantity of 14 lines and 140 syllables, if you’re doing it in a sort of classical way, became a little too constraining, and I really wanted to figure out how to write as variously as possible. To quote [Frank] O’Hara’s Oranges, “live variously as possible.”

I probably discover in the end that most of these poems sound more like me than I know, but I imagine when I’m making them, these formal divergences necessitate, novel solutions and new rhythms in some way to accommodate new forms.

Okay, thank you for that. I love technique and stuff a lot. I love counting syllables. When I try and see the syllables stress, I turn it into an Irish last name…Anyway thank you so much for the interview! A lot of really valuable information for me to look up and find out more about.

Thank you. I’m really delighted that you took an interest in the reading [my] book, and I’m really gratified by your responses.

Michael Nazzaro is a 2024 graduate with a degree in English and history, with a creative writing minor. They love reading, poetry, drawing, and writing. They also like bricks and WD40.