📼 Poetic Identity: A Conversation with Amit Majmudar

📅 March 4, 2022

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A few years ago I had a conversation with Amit Majmudar, Ohio's first poet laureate, about his poetic work. The following is a part of that conversation.

Joseph: Much of my previous work has dealt with the idea that an author must be called a "certain type of writer": that they must write a specific genre, or style. As a contemporary novelist, how do you feel about the increasing trend of labeling authors as authors of a particular genre? Authors like Joseph Heller contend with this their whole career, and some, like Heller, eventually fold under the pressure to maintain the same kind of work. Do you feel that it is helpful to refer to someone as a “Young Adult Author” or a “Science-Fiction Author,” or do you think that it is limiting and might have a negative effect on the author and their audience’s perceptions of their work? Some have labeled you a “Historical Fiction Novelist” – do you think this accurately describes your work? Would you prefer to not be tied to a particular genre? Might it be unfair to label somebody after only one or two novels having been written?

Amit: Consider that critics and readers alike are inordinately focused on "pigeonholing" writers. They want to hold a writer as a single thought in their minds, they want a writer to keep doing the one thing they liked and not branch out. Writers eventually collude with this (as you mention Heller himself did) and turn out more of the same, more of what worked last time and got them praise and sales. This holds true of poets as well.

Joseph: So, what is it that’s similar? We don’t often think of poets as pigeonholed, but of course every writer (or, filmmaker, etc) is prone to it. How does this pigeonholing of genre apply to poets?

Amit: Most poets have poems that are all the same in their collections. They are one-trick ponies. I put all sorts of different materials in my collections--all of it vetted, though, by the most discerning editors in the country before it makes it into the book. That runs the risk of some poems hitting a given reader's "sweet spot" and other poems transmitting at a frequency at which the limited reader is not receiving.

Joseph: The process of writing these types of poems I’d imagine also wildly differs. When writing, say “Crocodile Porn,” for example, did you do a lot of revision to get it to where it is, or was this something you wrote in one sitting? It feels rather free-flowing, as if it, to borrow the cliché, “came to you”: is that how it happened?

Catch-22, Neil Packer (2019)

Green Crocodile, Natalia Shchipakina (2019)

Amit: It came out all in one piece, in one sitting; there were no revisions and no reworking of its form.

Joseph: It’s an interesting poem, too, as it defies a lot of convention. My reading of the poem hinges on the idea of sublimity: do you think that the idea of the sublime has faded away in the last few decades? Do you feel that with the rise of the information age, the discussion of sublimity (particularly beauty and terror at the hands of nature) has sort of disappeared in contemporary poetry?

Amit: Sublimity as a poetic virtue is bygone; even the dictionary entry may be soon to become listed as archaic. But people experience it anyway, though they may call it beauty or power or something else.

Joseph: Why do you think it has left us, then, as a society?

Amit: As the word "Sublime" contains a sense of "awe," a "leveling" and religion-devoid democratic intellectual monoculture such as our own is naturally averse to the concept per se. But the sublime is there anyway, whether or not contemporary academic critics talk about it by name.

If you are interested in learning more about Amit Majmudar click here.

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