No, Not A Poet: An Interview with Jean Thompson about “The Poet’s House”

Jean Thompson/Photo: Justine Bursoni

When I meet Jean Thompson on Zoom—a late Friday morning in late April—she is rushing in from doing yardwork and jokes, “So I’m especially well-groomed.” Her yard is in southeast Urbana, off Windsor Road, a community she knows well, having lived near the University of Illinois campus (minus a few years) since she landed her first teaching job in 1973. I know Jean just barely, having been her student in an introductory fiction writing course circa 1986, when I was not quite twenty-one years old and she thirty-six. That one class, an elective that was open to anybody, was my way of sticking a toe in the water, and Jean’s teaching had a profound impact on my life in ways that I didn’t comprehend until much later. For one, she introduced me to Raymond Carver’s work, which led me to Tobias Wolff, which inspired me to get my MFA in fiction writing at Syracuse University, which, among other things, is where I met my future wife. I’m sure there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of others on whom Jean has made such impact.

Even then, more than thirty-five years ago, Jean Thompson was an author with whom to be reckoned. Her debut short-story collection, “Gasoline Wars” (1979), had won critical acclaim, collecting praise in the likes of the New York Times and Washington Post. A few years later, she published the novel “My Wisdom” (1982), establishing herself as an ascending dual threat. That ascension was gradual but sure. Thompson, with her latest offering, “The Poet’s House,” has written seven novels, and six short-story collections, including the National Book Award-nominated “Who Do You Love” (1999). “The Poet’s House” is a story immersed in the world of poetry and academia, to a lesser extent, a coming-of-age story shrouded in a mysterious, J.D. Salinger-type missing manuscript. It gets down to serious issues of self-discovery and legacy, but includes sprinkles of fun on the plunge to its depths.

I read something about Raymond Carver making a big impact on your career writing trajectory.

Possibly. Just because he was so in vogue, if nothing else. At the time that I was a young writer, beginning grad school, there was this big push for experimental fiction, John Barth and Donald Barthelme, for instance. Many people were standing fictional constructs on their head. They were playing with readers’ expectations, perhaps with a self-conscious narrator, or announcing themselves as the puppet master of their characters, making readers conscious of the artifice involved. And Raymond Carver came along with his “Yeah, we’re going shopping at the Kmart today in our new car,” you know, just a very matter-of-fact American voice, and he cut all of that posing to ribbons.

I was never comfortable with people telling me that I couldn’t write more or less conventional fiction anymore because you had to do transgressive this or that. I was like, “No, I could write like Carver.” He’s been so influential, but we don’t really recognize it now. Richard Ford, a lot of Tobias Wolff, who was a friend of Carver, a lot of kind of “just the facts, ma’am” fiction kind of flows from that. As opposed to “Hello, reader, I am telling you a story today,” which was one of the self-conscious experimental stances. I was never very fond of it.

There are traces of Carver in your expertise with dialogue. I’m thinking of “The Poet’s House” and a line that I went back and reread because it’s so simple and yet so telling, which is why it reminds me of Carver. Carla is griping about going back to put this yucca tree in a client’s yard, and then, as an aside during her description, she says, “I’m making this sound too easy.” A lot of writers might have drowned the reader in details, but you let that one line do all the work, just like Carver might give you one line to put you in a room that Henry James took four pages to describe.

I think you’re a product of everything you’ve ever read. So, yeah, I suppose there were a couple cups of Carver.

You’re not a poet.

No, no. No, not a bit. I don’t think I’ve written any poems since perhaps sophomore year in college. And yes, they were sophomoric. You might write a poem because it’s easier to manipulate, it’s easier to write than prose. It’s a good starting place, even if you’re not going to be a poet, which I wasn’t. James Joyce at one point said. “I won’t write any more poetry unless something unforeseen happens to my brain.”

So no, not a poet.

I picked poetry as the novel’s subject rather than fiction because I don’t write poetry. And it’s more of a pure art form. If you’re a poet, you’re not in it to make the big bucks. They won’t be making a movie about your poem, or sell the TV rights. But in the book, Poet stands in for Writer. The same truths apply.

You’ve created a character who is a revered poet, a generational talent whose work has inspired an almost cult-like following. At some point, it’s inevitable, right? We need to sample that extraordinary work. It’s an act of virtuosity for a prose writer like yourself to take on the challenge of writing the poems that must live up to Viridian’s reputation. Tell us about that.

The hardest thing that I had to do in this book was write some poetry. I did my tiny best. And I’m perfectly willing for somebody to step up and clobber me and say, “You know, Thompson, you really should have had some help with this.” So far nobody’s done that; people have been willing to let me get away. But I am braced for any criticism. Fine: bring it on.

I thought they worked perfectly. Viridian was an avant-garde poet. She’s much more interested in ideas, and the narrative quality to your Viridian poems held true to her aesthetics.

Yeah, I can’t shake the narrative part of me.

Viridian Boone, poet, is the subject of this novel, but she’s not the heroine. That distinction goes to the narrator, Carla Sawyer, a dyslexic landscaper who, prior to meeting Mrs. Boone, as she first knows her, is a blank poetry slate. Tell us about this conceit. How does it set us up for the lines of pursuit to come?

It was a very deliberate choice to have a narrator who doesn’t know anything about poems or poetry. She’s the naïve observer who also has more smarts than she gives herself credit for. She can lay it all out for us. Carla, even though she is a younger character, she is easier for me to figure out. Part of Viridian’s appeal is that she is a remote, queenly figure, worshipped from afar. Carla is just somebody who wakes up and eats her cornflakes like we do. She’s easier to render because she’s not wildly talented, not a cult figure, not a cult poetess.

Jean Thompson/Photo: Marion Ettlinger

Who are the poets you read?

The exposure I’ve had to poetry has to do more with poets I’ve known teaching, going to conferences, that sort of thing. I taught with Brigit Kelly and with Mike Van Walleghen, both of them very influential and admirable. Then sometimes I’ll find myself going back to poetry that I perhaps only half read at the time.. “The Eve of St. Agnes,” say, or others of the Romantics. Or the more modern contemporaries. Something might surface in your daily thoughts, as in, emotion recollected in tranquility, or, so much depends upon that red wheelbarrow. Sob poetry is formative, but in a way that is not really part of my daily practice. But I could still probably recite some Tennyson, if I had to.

The poetry world is so foreign to some people because, frankly, it’s harder to read and decipher. The average person doesn’t read much of it. Carla allows us readers to have her same journey. We go into it saying, “Okay, let’s figure this out together.” Carla’s helping us to figure it out.

Carla’s a somewhat unformed girl, but she’s undertaking some serious study. She has her own complexities, her own talents that she’s going to discover later. She’s on a learning journey about these people and their writing. “Who are these people?” “What’s going on here?” I wanted the reader to share in her sense of strangeness.

Carla, at the onset of the story, loves her fantastic live-in boyfriend, enjoys and is good at her job, and is devoted to the northern California terrain she was born into. There are a couple of excellent lines, though, that hint at the angst in Carla’s life. She says, “You could get tired of all the encouragement.” A little later, “I wish I could live my life so that I didn’t disappoint anyone.” At just twenty-one, she becomes immersed in a world of much older poets, academics, and those just hanging on.

She’s content, but not entirely. Everybody around her keeps saying, “Oh, honey, don’t you want to do something more?” She’s the underachiever. For you and me looking at a twenty-one-year-old who doesn’t know what they’re doing, it’s sort of like, “Oh, kid, you got decades to figure this out.” But it’s totally serious when you’re that age. She’s stable and quiet, but she doesn’t know who she is or what she’s doing. Losing her job and having to figure out what she does next is what propels the plot. And here finally is something that she becomes good at. She has to assert herself in the poetry world. She achieves a kind of power in that arena.

One of the things you do so well is to get inside the internal life and also capture the dialogue of these young characters.

Even though Carla’s a younger character, she’s easier for me to figure out. I needed her to be a young character, and she needed to be around established poets. I think if she fell into a group of poets in their twenties, she’d run away screaming, I think she’d feel that she just had no place among them. What works for Carla is she’s a young, energetic well-liked person, and [the established poets] are perfectly happy to have her answering phones and taking care of the garden. She’s a useful person because of her willingness.

Viridian is much more opaque.

I circled her for a long while in the book. Viridian is extremely charismatic, she’s beautiful and stunning, very secure in herself. She wears eccentric costumes that she makes acceptable. I always wanted her to be a little bit mysterious. There are secrets and she’s not very forthcoming about herself. It’s a portion of her appeal, she’s a harder character. Part of the impetus of the plot is, “What’s going to happen to Viridian?” Turns out she has a backstory to tell. She’s nearing the end of her life and her powers. There’s this impulse among her friends to take care of her, which is lovely.

The poets in this novel live on the fringes of respectable society, or, more accurately, they have the veneer of middle class but in actuality struggle to maintain a comfortable lifestyle. You’re one of the sharpest observers in American letters and your observations about the poets might, to the well-washed masses, be a bit surprising. Is there a judgement to be made here, or just a kind of FYI?

It’s been my experience that people don’t write poetry for a living. I mean, maybe W.S. Merwin was able to do that by the end of his life, but unless you marry into or inherit wealth, you’re going to have to find a day job. A lot of poets, a lot of writers, teach. As one of my characters says, maybe you can put a poem in a literary journal and sell three copies of it at a literary conference and then go home and do it all over again.

Some of these characters are better fixed than others. Barb is rather cynical and embittered, but she’s also driven and she’s not going to stop writing. Oscar travels around from one temporary job to the other. There are fellowships, awards, prizes. There’s a cobbled together quality to many of their lives.

I think there’s a lot of ignorance, or perhaps a mystique, about how writers live their lives. We aren’t in Entertainment Weekly. Nobody is sending out photographers to photograph our messy houses. We don’t have beautiful swimming pools with a guest cottage. We don’t hire interior decorators.

Ultimately, we find that the poetry community in “The Poet’s House,” while sometimes sad, sometimes petty, often hard, coalesces as a kind of family. They support one another, protect one another, love one another, even feed and shelter and clothe one another. There’s something alluring about this idea of building a family that is chosen rather than inherited. Is this part of the attraction for Carla and others, or just an offshoot of their infatuation with poetry?

I like the idea of community, but it doesn’t have to function that way. There are certainly writers and poets who love solitude. There was Emily Dickinson corresponding passionately with people she never met. And certainly there are writers who bitterly despise each other, can’t be in the same room, blood feuds and all sorts of things. But I liked the idea of it being a sustaining community, a place you could go where people are reciting poetry, experiencing joy.

Place is so important and particular to your work. You’ve an enormous talent for capturing the essence of a community. You’re attentive to the landscape, down to the shades of light and floral varieties. But you’re equally interested in the interior spaces, down to details of kitchenware. But place, in a Jean Thompson novel, often comes into focus through the sensibilities of the inhabitants. In one novel, I think it was “The Woman Driver,” the narrator describes the music on the local radio station as “pasteurized yodeling.” That clever turn of phrase brought the rural Midwestern town right into focus and made it indispensable to the plot. Why did you choose this Northern California, Bay Area setting for “The Poet’s House?”

Sometimes you can get tired of writing about bleak, Midwestern winters, so let’s take a little vacation in Northern California. I only taught a year in San Francisco State, but I spent some time living in the Bay Area before and then after, two, three years. I was in Marin County, which is north of San Francisco, just across the Golden Gate Bridge. I had friends who lived in Mill Valley, and in San Rafael and in Nicasio, which is far west, toward the seashore. So, this is a little bit of a love letter to places I lived.

I could have written a book about similar things that was set in Indiana, I suppose. But I really wanted it to be Lotusland, everything lovely and beautiful. In Northern California, it’s a little bit easier to play with type. You can have all these fabulous eccentric characters wandering around. When I lived up there, you’d look at these people wearing their tennis clothes and drinking white wine at one in the afternoon. Where do these people come from? Who are they? It’s a little more exotic, at least to me.

Carla is funny, both because of her wit and her bluntness. Oscar makes us laugh. Carla’s mother, who among other things tries to pressure her daughter into growing pot, often serves as comic relief. There are many scenes that vibrate with the energy and good fun of a great sketch, though almost never is that their sole purpose.

In “The Poet’s House,” I was going for a certain amount of humor. Oscar is a fun, comic character, for the most part. There is a laugh whenever he walks onto the page. There’s Ken Spinner at the end, who is the guy who shows up at the conference and picks up students. I had a lot of fun humiliating him.

Without giving it away, I thought the ending was satisfactory, all these loose threads getting tied and pointing to a future that seems promising.

Carla steps up. There’s some agency that she participates in, that she accomplishes, in a way that she couldn’t do if she was just going to be a landscaper. There’s a stubbornness to Carla. Without it, she would just be her mother’s daughter, dressing up and working in the hospital and paying attention to her skincare and her manicure. She’d be like her sister. But there is something contrary about her that I think serves her well. She’s very true to herself. She’s no fool. And she does find her way.

“The Poet’s House”
By Jean Thompson
Algonquin Books, 320 pages, $26.95