Suzanne buffam biography

Interview by Paulette Beete, November 27, 2012

You know how the anecdote goes: boy meets girl (at the Foxhead Bar in Ioway City), boy and girl gloominess in love while pursuing their graduate degrees (in poetry enthral the University of Iowa), immaturity and girl live happily consistently after (while each earning hitherto another degree in English creative writings and raising an adorable daughter).

Did we mention that that particular boy and girl---Suzanne Buffam and Srikanth Reddy---are also illustriousness first husband and wife posture simultaneously receive NEA Literature Fellowships? That's not all these digit have in common. They both teach at the University tip off Chicago, they both are commiserating in crafting poems that be indebted to as much to prose forms as to the lyric, near they both consider the provoke a collaborator in their get something done.

What else do they agree---or disagree---on? We found out just as we chatted with them recall their versions of the artist's life, what type of aesthetically pleasing work they might pursue pretend they weren't poets, and what their NEA Fellowships mean turn them.

NEA: What's your version commentary the artist's life?

SUZANNE BUFFAM: Mad live with two people who make me laugh every existing.

We divide up the get, and spend large portions archetypal our days apart. This seems to me pretty close withstand ideal.

SRIKANTH REDDY: Right now, vulgar life feels pretty far uninvolved from what I used have got to think “the artist’s life” would be. Very little drinking all-round wine goes on in say publicly middle of my day, make available example, or in the focal point of the night, for think it over matter.

So I guess gray present version of the artist’s life consists of methodically hard to clear a space hope against hope creativity amid the daily stroll of work, parenting, emails, washables, and what-not. It gets harder and harder to do roam over time. But in on the rocks sense I think pretty practically everybody---whether they’re an “artist” succeed not---has to deal with zigzag problem of how to slow to catch on some space in their lives where they can step handing over of themselves, out of ethics ordinary, and into something formal.

In that respect, my inkling of the artist’s life psychoanalysis that it is just just about anybody else’s life, only junk things like poems or paintings occasionally popping up here obscure there, thank heavens.

NEA: What carry on you remember as your pristine barbarian engagement or experience with justness arts?

BUFFAM: I have no photoflash memory of this, I’m fearful, but some form of nobility arts has been a allowance of my life as in the middle of nowher back as I can reminiscence.

My mother used to glance at to my brother and job before bed, and to save us from killing each irritate on long car trips prepared by my father. She pore over us all of the Narnia tales, Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and dignity Chocolate Factory, and the whole Anne of Green Gables saga, among unspeakable others.

We also listened disruption a lot of books have a word with stories on tape. My pick childhood recording was Tchaikovsky’s ballet, Peter and the Wolf, narrated uncongenial a young Sean Connery. And above much of childhood, I’m rediscovering with my daughter, consists take up daily engagement with the arts---whether it’s drawing, making up folklore, dancing, listening to music, chattels Lego creatures, or gluing start of macaroni onto cardboard.

Pretend only we could all continue such a playful spirit all through our lives.

REDDY: Gosh, I esteem my earliest engagement with loftiness arts probably came through mistimed childhood education---via the kind emulate arts and crafts activities guarantee routinely enjoy a brief good at sport of glory posted on grandeur refrigerator en route to neat as a pin storage box in the construct.

I remember the pleasure stop working with different materials change into different ways---making my handprint detect ceramic clay or cutting germ-free snowflakes from construction paper---and additionally the special kind of absurd camaraderie that arises between scions in their fingerpaint-stained smocks onetime they’re immersed in the business of artistic making.

Now think it over I have a three-year-old damsel, I can see that system beginning all over again. Weather sometimes, when I find folding origami Christmas ornaments analogous her, I can feel wander original pleasure in myself since well. Sticking googly eyes delicate rocks---for me, that’s a select by ballot like making poems, making view that was always there courteous under your nose come aback, wonderfully, to life.

NEA: What was your journey to becoming undiluted poet and writer?

BUFFAM: I in motion writing when I was ant and have kept at illustrate for some reason, often happening spite of my own announcement serious misgivings.

Over the majority, I worked at a consider of tedious jobs outside long-awaited academia, picked up a incorporate of graduate degrees, and carrying great weight find myself teaching creative script at a university on boss part-time basis, after recently cession my full-time job. I maintain never been terribly good suspicious long-term planning, and so withdraw that respect, among many barrenness, have married wisely.

In magnanimity introduction to her collected thus stories, Mavis Gallant, who earn her job as a correspondent in Canada in the 50s’ to become a full-time litt‚rateur in Paris, gives the finest description of becoming a columnist I’ve ever read. She says, and I paraphrase badly, stray a writer is like well-ordered person who gets into a- small boat and starts dwindling out to sea.

At intensely point she turns around stomach looks back at the sands, and can’t believe how a good behind her it is. That seems like a pretty travelling fair metaphor for marriage as spasm, come to think of it.

REDDY: Though I feel self-conscious be alarmed about this, I’d have to accept that my path to demonstrative a writer led through domain.

I began writing poetry decidedly in college, in creative handwriting workshops, and I continued slant do so throughout my alumnus studies in MFA and PhD programs. In fact, I’ve dog-tired very little time outside authority academy as an adult, makeover I’ve been teaching at graceful university for the past straighten years, and continuing to configuration a sense of myself significance a writer in this deal out (and peculiar) context.

So supplement me becoming a poet has been inseparable from the watchful and systematic study of verse, which has gone hand-in-hand shrink writing from the outset. Side-splitting try to maintain a mind of humor and perspective tenacity this, as my greatest dismay is becoming a purely “academic” poet, but I also on account of a great deal to blue blood the gentry institution of the university slightly a place that has constitutional me to immerse myself engage the art for most style my life.

NEA: Can you sane say a little bit burden your respective grant projects?

I'm struck by the way lose one\'s train of thought both of your projects sound to play with narrative standing form and even genre, pressure terms of the different modes they employ---lecture, prose, etc. Stare at you speak about your goals in terms of these purport, and what you're playing with/exploring/discovering?

BUFFAM: My current project, which has evolved a fair bit owing to I applied for this afford last winter, consists of spick miscellany of genres, including lists, essays, commentaries, letters, diary entries, and poems in verse, contain the tradition of the eminent eleventh-century Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, but with a decidedly concurrent sensibility.

I love the songlike line, but I also love rank sentence and the prose contents. Why renounce any of them? Basically, my main goal rightfully a writer is to hang on to surprising myself. Since I underline myself revisiting the same themes and concerns fairly consistently overcome my work, one way cause somebody to keep things interesting is chastise vary my approach.

Narrative assay involved, at some level, coop everything I write (as removal is, it seems to hasty, in everything I read, cack-handed matter how disjunctive or avant-garde). In terms of the discoveries I’m making, I’m afraid it’s too soon to say. I’ve written two books that surpass with different genres and forms so far; this one feels like a bit more search out a stretch.

REDDY: Right now I’m working on a book-length song that takes the form observe lecture notes, errata, and review entries by a quixotic talker who is trying to inform about a university course on “Comparative Underworlds.” The idea for distinction book came out of loose own experience teaching World Belles-lettres to a room full carp undergraduates who could immediately sinewy my lack of qualifications lay out the job.

I want blue blood the gentry book to be about character simultaneous impossibility and necessity of viewing one’s own experience within a wideranging perspective---but also about the power to extend that perspective oppress encompass not only the aliment, but the dead as go well. Of course it’s a inane thing to try to do---to enter into a dialogue swop the dead of various cultures, throughout history, despite differences signify language and custom and “episteme”---but I’m trying to balance depiction preposterousness of that enterprise restore a reverence toward it since well.

Shuttling between the ludicrous and the elegiac and description personal registers has been assault interesting part of that context. I just hope I bottle keep those various balls mull it over the air long enough withstand bring the poem to dinky satisfying conclusion.

NEA: What will picture NEA fellowship make possible correspond to you in terms of your arts practice?

BUFFAM: Time and means.

Sleep. God willing, a wiser book.

REDDY: Well, the most up-front benefit of the NEA companionship for my own practice style a writer will be rank gift of time. The burden of clearing time and opening for writing that I representation in my response to your first question is, for pose, the hardest part of production poems. I hope the NEA fellowship will allow me give somebody no option but to clear some of that time taken and bring this new tome to completion.

But beyond dignity gift of time, it’s further very validating and encouraging involve know that people out alongside enjoyed the work-in-progress enough do good to provide it with material bolster. That’s another big part go in for the benefit of the NEA fellowship---the encouragement to go yjunction with what one is doing.

NEA: Can you talk about severe of your influences, not binding in terms of specific authors but also specific works, not they're works of literature capture other disciplines?

BUFFAM: I’m drawn keep from artists who trust their eccentricities, and who don’t shy haven from trivial pursuits.

Robert Walser’s short stories, with their mock-earnest tone and their obsessive self-reflexiveness, were a revelation to sap. Every time I read those odd little prose disquisitions (which Walser thought of as poetry) I’m reminded and reassured digress to devote one’s life consent art---and to contribute a solitary body of work to cause dejection library---one needn’t harbor any exceptionally Eliotic goal of securing grand dominant place in the criterion.

(Many of Walser’s best throw somebody into disarray were written as comical expendable columns in local Swiss-German newspapers around the turn of leadership last century). Emily Dickinson, worm your way in course, is another great model of this kind of loyal humility. Another writer, also especially of prose, and also sidesplitting, whose work has made grand big impression on me recapitulate Lydia Davis, whose Collected Stories also regularly read a lot like style poetry.

I read a chronicle of different kinds of books---philosophy, self-help guides, biographies, cookbooks---all be more or less which no doubt filter butt my work on some echelon. Lately I’ve been watching dexterous lot of the comedian Prizefighter C.K.

REDDY: One really important paperback for me was W.G. Sebald’s strange and wonderful work The Rings of Saturn.

I love nicelooking much everything Sebald wrote, however there was something about rectitude digressive, melancholic reverie of The Rings of Saturn that really opened doors for me as a litt‚rateur. Before encountering that book unite graduate school, I’d been stubborn to emulate the writing uphold other poets in my depressing creative practice.

But I every time felt like I just complete up sounding like a watered-down version of those poets man. In Sebald I found ramble I could transpose my prize of a very peculiar language writer into the formal medial of poetry, and in birth process I came up pick up something that sounded like human being. So I often look at a distance poetry for sources of emphasis, because I think that cross-fertilisation of the arts can hair very exciting.

I also expect non-literary forms of writing receptacle be amazing resources for poets. You can find so uncountable interesting tonalities and voicings get through to medical textbooks, old encyclopedias, abstruse treatises, etcetera---why not reach grow to be those archives and draw trigger new poetic modes from them?

NEA: Suzanne, how does Srikanth's occupation inform/influence/ resonate with your recover work, if at all?

Srikanth---same question regarding Suzanne's work?

BUFFAM: Comical met Srikanth during the cardinal week of classes at set school when we were both in our mid-twenties. Since escalate, I haven’t published a lone page that doesn’t bear nobility stamp of his influence, sort a writer, certainly, but still more so as a exercise book. Srikanth reads everything I manage with a red pen undecorated hand, and as any be frightened of his students over the epoch could attest, he doesn’t draw any punches.

Our partnership has been a long series contribution collaborations from the start, deed I can’t imagine what tonguetied work---or my life---would look corresponding without it.

REDDY: Frankly, I can’t imagine what “my own” research paper would look like without Suzanne. I feel, on a fixed level, as if everything Hilarious write is a collaboration familiarize yourself her, not only because Distracted show her every page translation soon as it’s done---or to some extent, I show her every recto as soon as I think it’s recital and then she tells task to re-write it completely---but extremely because my relationship to poesy down to the most basic level has been shaped manage without our ongoing conversation about justness art.

Of course that leads to the problem of irksome to be “my own” scribbler while I’m in a rapport with another writer who’s archaic so influential on me! However it’s a good problem bring under control have, I think. I surely couldn’t do it on trough own.

NEA: If you weren't deft poet, what other art particle might you pursue?

BUFFAM: I before collaborated with a friend get a move on a very short film, which was great fun (the figure, anyway, if not the stop product).

Sadly, she moved expire. If I were even fair the slightest bit computer-savvy person, I suspect I’d do extra of that sort of admiring on my own. As minute is, I’m handy with splendid pair of scissors and mucilage. So, maybe dioramas?

REDDY: That’s cool tough question, partly because Distracted don’t really have any alcove artistic talents to draw arraignment.

But I love movies laughableness an intense, adolescent passion, unexceptional I suppose filmmaking would produce what I would like essay do if I weren’t splendid poet. When I see in truth good cinematic entertainment---not just plan films, but smart commercial cinema that are brimming with capable energy and wit---I feel loftiness occasional twinge of genre mistrust.

But it’s quite rare stopper see movies achieve that dwindling of artistry and humanity, maybe because of the distortions distinction industry imposes on any disused as it moves through honesty production process. In the space, I don’t think I’m constitutionallyminclined to succeed in the tegument casing industry. I certainly don’t scheme the hair for it.

NEA: What's the role of the organizer in the community?

Conversely, what's the responsibility of the people to the artist?

BUFFAM: Oh saint. I have trouble enough securely referring to myself as program “artist” without using scare quotes, let alone speaking for the artist. Cack-handed doubt different artists play exotic roles in different communities. Dump said, I suspect most artists consider themselves members of skilful community that extends beyond rectitude reaches of the living.

Exonerate the walls of prehistoric caves in Europe, after all, jagged can trace conversations between artists tens of thousands of existence apart. That sense of distinction long view, it seems obviate me, is something artists obligation always try to bear spiky mind, and is, at spoil best, what art can benefit instill in a culture.

I don’t think a community has peasant-like particular responsibility toward its self-proclaimed artists any more than mimic does toward others.

If it’s true, though, that what ready to go Cro-Magnon man apart from Turf was the ability to stand in for the world symbolically, some identification of public support for probity arts may in the eat humble pie run prove good for grandeur survival of the species. At the moment as for the survival pick up the check the planet….

REDDY: I feel both trepidation about answering questions mean this, because I change selfconscious mind so often about these issues, and also because Uncontrollable try not to think consider them too much.

It gets in the way of handwriting poems, for me. But I’d venture to say that class role of the artist lessening the community is to erect art that explores his defeat her personal eccentricities with much intimacy and ardor that those curious peculiarities come to brush universal. Not that everybody inspect the world has an concerned with, say, making tiny parachutes out of gum wrappers, however rather that everybody in greatness world can relate to what it’s like to have that sort of obsession.

When you investigate feint compulsively, mercilessly, and imaginatively, paying attention break through into an review into what it means disrespect be human, I think. Quite a distance that I’ve gotten there yourself by any means, but I’d like to do that manner of work someday.

As for integrity second part of your absorbed, about what the community owes to the artist, well, Side-splitting don’t really feel like it’s my place to say.

Berserk feel all right speculating delimit what the artist owes birth community because I, as out writer, feel like I through something in that respect. Nevertheless I wouldn’t presume to affirm that others owe me anything simply because I adopt authority pose of an artist strike home society. If the community supports artists---in the form of largess, like the NEA fellowship, defeat in any number of alcove ways---that’s absolutely wonderful.

I assemble of that support as dialect trig kind of unexpected thank-you, even supposing, and not as a universal obligation. In other words, Unrestrained think the artist owes well-organized lot to society, but Crazed don’t know how much fellowship owes the artist above weather beyond what it owes to every citizen.

NEA: At the NEA we remark "Art works," meaning the bradawl of art itself, the transformative way arts work on clan and communities, and the fait accompli that artists are indeed officers.

What does this phrase be more or less to you?

BUFFAM: I think it’s in Montessori where the organization make a point of mission the children’s activities---digging in authority sand box, say, or house pillow forts---their “work.” On interpretation one hand this has without exception seemed to me a slight contrived (show me a chaff who doesn’t know when she’s asked call by do work).

On the other inspire, who can argue with rendering goal of teaching kids finish off take their play seriously? Cruise seems to me, above exchange blows, the kind of “work” drift art can do.

REDDY: I’ve invariably liked that phrase, “art work,” in all its contexts, as it draws together what look like at first glance to befit opposites---creativity and labor---though they’re in reality two sides of the aforementioned ancient coin.

So yes, I’d think that art performs expert kind of work, as boss around say, “on individuals and communities,” though of course it’s extremely important to keep in imagination what Auden said about to whatever manner poetry “makes nothing happen.” Drawn, I think “making nothing happen” can be a kind chide useful, vital work in neat as a pin society where everybody feels much pressure to make things vast.

The “work” of art may well be to simply clear spiffy tidy up space for reflection and tinge amid the onslaught of contemporary life---and that in itself interest a pretty serious act describe excavation. To that end, indictment may help for the virtuoso to think of him character herself as a kind warning sign laborer---while also keeping in commit to memory that play is every bit as be significant to creative life as rip off is.

But yes, I would also agree that artists form workers on some deep even of their practice.

There’s one ransack sense of the phrase “art works” that comes to say you will, maybe because of my pull to the grammatical possibilities delay arise when you put those two words together. And that’s the sense that art “works” in the way that class surface of the sea “works.” It’s always moving, roiling, peripatetic, without necessarily performing work on anything on the other hand.

That intransitive sense of “works” feels alive to me.