The poet who wants to go to school
Gregory Pardlo: Disarming candour, both in his personality and poetry
Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Gregory Pardlo’s path to poetry has a staccato-like quality. He briefly debated becoming a lawyer and studied political science, enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve for two years, worked in a restaurant in Copenhagen, learned to speak Danish, translated Danish poetry, helped his grandfather run a blues and jazz bar, obtained a real estate licence and has also taught along the way.
Recently in Sri Lanka for the Fairway Galle Literary Festival, Pardlo is easy to talk to. He is armed with the same disarming candour, measure and reflection glimpsed in his poetry as well as a gentle sense of humour – sentences often evaporating into laughter while in conversation.
From his anecdotes and early memories about what attracted him to the genre, you get the impression that an unacknowledged penchant for words, literature and poetry has shadowed him for most of his life, only to be coaxed into the spotlight in his later years.
There were of course, the rite of passage writing phases which accompany most adolescents and come to haunt them in their adult life.
He cringes as he laughingly remembers a phase where he started producing bad rap lyrics but admits that the teenage love poems scrawled during his sophomore year at high school were surprisingly popular and well received. “That was the first time I really got a lot of positive reinforcements – from people I wanted positive reinforcement from,” he quips.
But perhaps the earliest indication he had about the descriptive power of words was watching his mother, a graphic designer who drew Yellow Page ads.
Often working at home, she would draw numerous Yellow Page ads within days, Pardlo explains. He would watch as sales reps would give a narrative account of what was required and carefully observe how his mother would rapidly begin drawing, using the verbal descriptions as a fulcrum.
Frustrated with his inability to replicate his mother’s drawing and lack of skill, a younger Pardlo would appease himself by instead describing to her the things he wanted to draw. Looking back, this compensation for a lack of drawing skills through word-worlds was elemental to Pardlo’s sense of aesthetics and process when he started pursuing writing seriously.
The first in his family to attend university, Pardlo returned to his studies after a few detours and also graduated with an M.F.A from New York University. Now finishing up his second M.F.A. in nonfiction at Columbia University, Pardlo is concurrently reading for his doctorate in English.
“I haven’t followed a very conventional career path to begin with. A difficulty for me was always justifying doing the things that I wanted to do,” he mulls, “So, I wanted to be a poet and everything in society tells me that is the most ridiculous ambition one can have.”
I wanted to go to graduate school for poetry and there are no support systems that says ‘hey this is a good idea’ to a young man from a working class background and public school education, explains Pardlo, adding that he received the same resistance when mulling over a PhD and a second MFA.
After constantly explaining his decision to return to education and choosing the literary life as a career path, now Pardlo finds himself fending queries asking why he’s still continuing with his education after winning the Pulitzer.
“I’m used to pushing through and staying focused on the things that I want to enrich me and my writing. But when the Pulitzer came along, it just raised those stakes in a way that now everyone is telling me – ‘Why are you in school? Why are you studying for this degree? None of that is necessary.’
But none of that was necessary to begin with. My ambitions are not directed by need,” asserts Pardlo. “We’ve talked about the way the prize shapes me but I’m exerting just as much of an effort and influence on the public persona of Gregory Pardlo as well.
And I want that figure (and I’m conscious of the fact that my children are watching) to say you don’t go to school to get the degree, you go to school for the education.”
Pardlo’s 2007 book ‘Totem’ created modest ripples in poetry circles but his 2015 Pulitzer prize last year prompted a wave of responses, firmly nudging the self-professed introvert into the spotlight. ‘Digest’, Pardlo’s second collection of poetry was praised by the Pulitzer Board for its “Clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private.”
Before the Pulitzer propelled it to fame, the slim collection of poetry was rejected by the entire publishing industry and was finally picked up by a small literary press and sold modestly.
There’s an irreverence and deceptive informality in the tone and style of Pardlo’s poetry and also sly satirizing of academic discourse with poems disguised as mock-essays. The themes fermented in the poems intersect philosophy, family life, fatherhood and popular culture.
“I finally friended my brother/It may be we will never/speak again. Why speak/ when we have this crystal ball/ through which/to judge one another’s lives?” asks Pardlo wryly in a poem.
The themes of fatherhood, embedded both in his experiences as a father and his father’s influence, spill over into the book and there are two related poems which stand out. One is a poem about Pardlo’s request for a tattoo from his father (At thirteen I asked my father for a tattoo./I might as well have asked for a bar mitzvah./He said I had no right to alter the body/ he gave me) and the resultant lesson. The other is a pithy poem detailing a scene at the supermarket with his daughter which deftly explores the perennial fears of parenthood.
Often, literary figures are thrust into the roles of cultural ambassador and politician when speaking about their work internationally, and are expected to freely step into both the political and personal terrain.
With the opportunities that the Pulitzer brought was also this sense of representing something much more than himself, a responsibility that Pardlo is keenly aware of.
His father was a political activist and labour union leader as was his grandfather – the more Pardlo is out in public now, the more he is reminded of the shared parallels intertwined in his family lineage.
He is also sensitive to a more discerning and critical audience who are beginning to be aware of his work and public persona and also feature in his work– his children.
These days, Pardlo has swapped poetry and is wading into the labour history of America. He is currently working on a collection of non-fiction essays exploring the landmark air traffic controller strikes in 1981 in America.
During the strikes, an angry President Reagan fired over 11,000 air-traffic controllers who had participated in the strike, declaring a lifetime ban on the rehiring of the strikers. Pardlo’s father was one of those who were affected in the strike.