H e a r t S o n s & H e a r t D a u g h t e r s of A l l e n G i n s b e r g

N a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 4 : A r c h i v e s E d i t i o n

ANTLER

from "Antler: Learning the Constellations"

Interview by Brandon Lewis

Antler is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Antler: Selected Poems

(Soft Skull Press, 2001). His new chapbook, Exclamation Points, Ad Infinitum!, is

forthcoming from Centennial Press. Winner of a Pushcart Prize and the Walt Whitman

Award, Antler's poems have appeared in many anthologies including American Poets Say

Goodbye to the 20th Century, Wild Song: Poems from Wilderness, and September 11,

2001: American Writers Respond. In February 2002, he was chosen the new Poet

Laureate of Milwaukee.

Brandon Lewis: As we sit here along the Milwaukee River, I'm struck by how

important the river is to you and to your work.

Antler: It's important to me in that it's always flowing. Coming here regularly is one of

the only things that makes it possible for me to live in Milwaukee. I can experience

solitude down here, especially during winter after midnight when it's snowing. It's great

to come and have coffee. I can stay for hours. In winter I like being able to cross over to

the other side, experience walking on the ice and lying on the ice... and in summer, with

all the birds - I come because I love birds. I've been writing poems that have to do with

the river ever since I started living here. So it is something that entered my poetry early

on, and became a part of my life. I have snapping turtle experiences, big snapping turtles.

And I saw a snake right down there a couple of days ago. I don't see snakes as much

anymore.

BL: Is there a divide that surfaces in your poetry between the river, what it represents as

a sanctuary for you, and the rest of Milwaukee as an industrial city?

Antler: Yeah- and I like that word sanctuary a lot, it seems like a key word. When I first

moved here, the rest of Milwaukee ceased to exist. I never went downtown anymore. I

didn't go into the stores because I didn't have any money. So I would just come down

here and read. When I went up north to live, I disengaged from the reality of living in the

city. There's something about having a river nearby, even a lake, that's very helpful to me.

But every writer is different.

BL: Watching the river, seeing that blue heron land, I somehow feel restored. It's like a

refuge here. But I wonder what it says about one's ability to appreciate the realities of the

city. Do you think you could be a poet in, say, downtown Manhattan?

Antler: Sure. I think you would see the human drama, and the skyscrapers standing in

long streets like endless Jehovahs, as Ginsberg says... confirming the human tribe and its

domain among millions of people. Both worlds exist. I like the river, but I don't reject the

human tribe. I don't think it's a black and white thing, the natural world being just this

river escape.

All we know for sure is

all places that exist

we re once one place.

All we know for certain is

all the beings that exist

or will exist

or have existed

we re originally all together

in an infinitesimal dot.

All we can know for sure is

if humans went from dugout canoes

to spaceships to the Moon

in 10,000 years,

in 10,000 years humans can go from

spaceships to the Moon

to Moons made into spaceships

traveling to other galaxies.

––from “Know for Sure”

BL: When you go on your two-month wilderness sabbaticals, what is it you discover?

What do you recover?

Antler: I get in touch with my earlier selves: my grade school self, my baby self, early

and late boyhood, early youth, later youth, young manhood. All the various chapters

become one. Then I can replay the tapes of my life without any interruption, and review

what happened on the playground in fifth grade that one day. I recall all the teachers I

once had, all the people I knew and loved, and what happened to them. After the tapes are

played out and the memories reviewed, then silence and the sense of going beyond

myself - especially when juxtaposed against huge vistas of old growth forest without

human beings in sight, and the endless Milky Way scintillating above.

BL: Why come back at all?

Antler: That's what I always ask myself. But in some way, one never returns. And what

one becomes by the end of an extended stay remains there. Later on, growing older, you

return to those places and reconnect with your more youthful apparition. You pal around

with that youthful spirit and it re-enters you. So you do come back, but something else

doesn't. In a way you have incarnated where you were, and that returns with you and is

part of you. I can say that I am in Milwaukee and I am in my house and writing there, but

it's as if I'm still where I was, still what I became.

BL: So the depth of experience while you were away creates a reservoir for you to draw

on with your poetry.

Antler: Yeah. Because in a way, you're risking your life - especially going off by

yourself. Once you risk your life and there are bears around, there's a different aspect of

commitment toward poetry. If you must die to do it, you will. And you risk everything:

poverty, scorn, madness, disillusionment, alienation. It's all at risk to ultimately embrace

what the spirit of poetry is.

BL: You're describing the wilderness poet.

Antler: Maybe any poet at any time. But there's something magical about going off

away from people, sensing your self, your desires and history, seeing yourself as a tiny

little speck surrounded by trees that were around before Christ was sucking his mother's

breast.

BL: When you're walking through a forest and gazing up at treetops, can you

simultaneously be noting ideas or lines for poems? Or do you have to take in your

experiences purely, without thought?

Antler: Sometimes I get ideas and write them down in my notebook, or poems will

come to me finalized in a single moment of delight.

Save as feeling if they don't know of me or the stars

what do I not know of

that's looking

through me

at something far grander

than itself...

––from “Save as an Idea”

But often there is no thought. I become an animal spirit wandering endless forests, gazing

out at sublime non-human vistas. Somehow the wordless realm of no-thought takes over

and my identity as a poet is lost, my memories of myself are lost, everything is lost, and

as Emerson says about the eyeball...

BL: I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all...

Antler: Yeah, I become transparent in that way. Part of it is embracing myself, and

being content with wordlessness.

BL: So if a poet is jotting down lines while in the midst of the poetic experience, does

that take away from the depth of their experience?

Antler: Some might say you're robbing yourself of the cosmic moment by trying to

capture it, and maybe emotion recollected in tranquility, as Wordsworth said, is a better

way to go, and not go out expecting or demanding anything. But I don't think one way is

necessarily right and the other is wrong. Some people do best in crowded cafes,

observing other people with an endless cup of coffee. And for others that's totally foreign,

they have to be alone with no interruptions.

BL: Where does your dreaming inner voice arise from - the voice that wonders about

frozen bubbles and amoebas swimming on your eyes. Is it a childlike voice?

Antler: I hope it is. It seems one of the difficulties is that a lot of people have their child

wonder-essence lobotomized. They grow up to be responsible adults but never reconnect

with that wonder again. Maybe it's just openness toward a visionary experience that goes

beyond knowing what's true and not true anymore, and just being in awe of aspects of the

natural world that have never occurred to you before.

BL: What books influenced you as a child?

Antler: The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan. Those had a big effect on

me. They beckoned a fantasy realm which was and still is a part of my feelings. Later,

Leaves of Grass would be a major book in my life - there was this vision of love and

death and nature that was truer than what I found in the Old and New Testaments, or

other sacred texts of human-centered spiritual traditions. It seemed Whitman's vision was

more complete, more passionate, more understanding and celebratory of human reality,

the reality of the Eros energy and the human promise. I didn't have any friends, but you

can read Leaves of Grass and Whitman can become your friend. He actually has lines

which suggest it's something that can happen. So there's a kind of seance effect that takes

place, and then the spirit of Walt Whitman walks by your side, protecting you, and you

have fun taking Leaves of Grass along - that's your pal, you have fun with Leaves of

Grass!

BL: Maybe you're Walt Whitman reincarnated.

Antler: I don't think so - although on some level I may be. I think it's more complex than

that. The spirit and the energy Whitman put forth was absorbed by thousands of poets and

spiritual seekers who then had the awareness that he embraced inside himself. I don't

think any one person can be an incarnation of Walt Whitman.

BL: How did your friendship with Allen Ginsberg shape your view of poets and poetry?

Antler: One of the main things he represented for me was complete courage to trust who

I was without fear, and to write poetry with complete candor and openness. He criticized

society's injustice and intolerance, and did so with compassion, tenderness, hopefulness,

and humor. He had something to replace it, or balance it with. Endless encouragement of

younger poets was also a big part of his mission.

BL: Do you have a sense of yourself maturing as a poet?

Antler: I hope so, and I believe in that. I think there's a poet you can be in love with, a

thought you can move through as your sensitivities change during metamorphosis from

childhood through adolescence, and through the various stages of adulthood. As one

matures, one's work goes to different levels.  Some people think poets are better in their

younger phases than in their older phases - like, say, Whitman, Wordsworth, and

Swinburne. I never felt that way.

BL: Would you still be a poet if, after today, you could write no more words? 

Antler: Yes. The definition of poetry on one level in our society is that you write things

down on paper and get them into print, which proves to others in your tribe that you are a

poet. But that's just step one. Your book then has to receive positive reviews, then

another book must be coming, and you have to keep cranking out books until you're a

corpse. That seems to certify you as a poet, but endless ages unfold, review what you've

done, and make their own judgments. There are poets today who we think are the

greatest on Earth, but who we might have nothing to do with three hundred years from

now.  And in ten thousand years everything is dust. So on a huge time-frame, all that we

do ends up obliterated, the Earth ends up being swallowed by the sun and the sun cools. 

But I find, especially in early adolescence, there is something very poetic- that boys and

girls don't even know they have. Some people write poetry when they are young, but go

on to other things and stop writing. And yet, because they touched base with it once, it's

always a part of their story. I don't think there's anything to be afraid of - the spirit and

feeling of it is more important than its publication. Before there were books and literary

magazines, the spirit of poetry existed, and the pulse of the connection with the Big

Mystery was felt and experienced, and the tender realization of mortality was present.

The fact that Neanderthals buried their dead with flowers sixty thousand years before

Christ is very affirming and reaffirming of human beauty and soulfulness.

[This interview first appeared in BL Literary Arts Magazine. Vol. 7, Issue 1, Jan 2004. Originally published in NHS 2004, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs04/Antler.html.]