On Fassbinder, Film and Form: Interview with Drew Pisarra
Jordan E Franklin: Hello, Drew. Thank you for doing this interview for Harpur Palate.
DP: Hello. Thank you for having me.
JEF: I read your new collection, Fassbinder, His Movies, My Poems, over the last week or so and I really dug it!
DP: Oh, thank you! I’m glad!
JEF: I especially like how it blurred the line between film and poetry while drawing upon the works of Fassbinder to communicate the personal. I also noticed that the collection experimented with form. Before we get to the craft and intentions behind the book, I
want to start with an introductory question so readers can get to know you. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? How did you get your start as a writer/artist?
DP: Of course! So, just speaking in terms of my work as a poet and how I got my start, there’s a couple of factors here. One is that there was a period where I was a performance artist on the West Coast in Oregon and I worked with the Imago Theater, a masked movement theater. I was doing a lot of solo shows and eventually I got this commission from the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art and I did a piece called
“Singularly Grotesque” and it’s about multiple personality disorder. I taught myself ventriloquism. That was the last thing I did in Portland before I came to New York as an aspiring monologuist. So, as you can imagine, ventriloquism has not had a second golden age…
Drew and JEF laugh
DP: So it was a tough sell, a ventriloquist act on Multiple Personality Disorder. So then I shifted. I did some collaborations with dancers but I ended up spending some time as a theater critic first with the Village Voice and then a site called City Search, followed by New York Magazine, although my duties weren’t theater critic duties primarily.
But then I started to shift into this other realm, I started to feel like I was losing the space for self expression as an artist and poetry seemed most available because you could squeeze it into a busy schedule. So, I ended working at AMC—the network—and I worked on the digital content for shows like “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” and “the Walking Dead,” and I loved that experience but it wasn’t a job that allowed for a lot of self expression and I found myself drawn to poetry as an avenue because poems can be really short.
JEF: Understandable, and relatable as hell. It also explains your interest in form.
Drew: Right?!? Like, if you’re talking about a haiku, that’s seventeen syllables. Initially, it was completely a practical choice, and then over time, I really became enamored with the form and I got this book by Lewis Turco called the Book of Forms. It’s a catalog of easily over a hundred different poetic forms to try and that became very stimulating to me on how to write forms like the madrigal, sonnet, and villanelle. I got into the structural aspects of poetry and then I started writing sonnets, many of them about a breakup.
I was invited to a poetry festival in DC called “Capturing Fire” and read a sonnet I wrote called “Sonnet 6″” The person who ran the festival also happened to run a publishing house and asked me if I had a book. I said, “yes” based on the idea that I could write more and that’s really where my career took off. I ended up writing, and publishing a book of sonnets.
I felt like that collection was where I started to take myself more seriously as a poet as opposed to someone who is just squeezing it in between 11pm and 1am. Like okay, maybe this is a thing. Maybe I am a poet. Right?
JEF: Yeah!
DP: Like, who knew? And I ended up writing a second collection of sonnets called Periodic Boyfriends, but the interesting thing about the Fassbinder book is that it actually predates these other books, in part because some of those poems were from the time where I was experimenting with form and writing my 2am poems and some of them overlap. That book has been in the works since 2013.
JEF: Wow! Way to stick with it!
Drew: It certainly has evolved, as in I probably finished the first draft about six years later, and then I kept going back to it, going like “this poem stinks. Write a better version,” or even like “you need to have a different type of poem in this book” as in the
case of the poem, “The Coffee House,” because I remembered thinking that I wanted a poem that had a really strong rhyme scheme because when you ask people what makes a poem, a lot of people say that “it rhymes” and many modern poems don’t. So, I wanted to honor this idea of a poem that rhymed “hard.” There’s another “Coffee House” poem in the book that reads more like a script, so in that instance, I liked the original and for some reason I went back to that “tv movie” to create a second poem because I wanted to represent another type of poem within the larger collection.
So, I got a little derailed…
JEF: No, that’s perfect. In fact, a lot of what you’ve been saying segues into the later questions I had about the book. One of the things I noticed about your collection is that you experiment with form. Out of all the poetic forms you could have chosen, you began with the poem “Dear Rainer” which is both an epistolary poem as well as a villanelle. I admit that I’ve been experimenting with forms myself lately so to see your work integrate them is exciting!
DP: Oh good!
JEF: Thanks! Your book has epistolary poems, sonnets, villanelles, and even one that takes its cues from a script. What gives a villanelle its power is its usage of repetition and variation. Can you talk a bit about why you chose to begin the book with this form?
DP: I love that question because one, you mention that “Dear Rainer” is an epistolary poem because the book is a love letter to Fassbinder in some ways. That poem, when I was first putting the collection together, was the last poem because I had written it very late in the process and thought it really sums up what the book was doing. And then I realized it didn’t work at the end and that it was a perfect launchpad because it’s telling you the book is a love letter to this director which is ironic since Fassbinder was so “anti-love” in his sensibility
JEF: A love letter to someone “anti-love?”
DP: Yes. I was thinking about that today and wondering what he would have made of this book. There’s this quote I wrote down—a Fassbinder quote—where he said, “Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social oppression.” So he felt that love was being used by capitalism as a way to keep people stuck. So, a lot of his films are satirical or deconstructing romantic love, ripping it to shreds and yet, at the same time, I’m a huge advocate of love as a guiding force. So, it is kind of interesting that I was drawn to this director whose sensibility is so contrary to mine. I feel like the world could use more love as opposed to it being this tool of oppression, but he does say specifically “romantic love”, at least I feel that is what he suggests presses us down.
I chose the villanelle because it is an obsessive form.
JEF: That is the perfect way to describe it.
DP: Right? Its use of repetition is kind of maddening and it’s really challenging to not have those repetitions irritate. I tried to find ways within the structure to make you hear the line anew every time it came up. It’s a love letter and a fan letter and both love and fanhood have an obsessive quality, or can. So, it just felt like the perfect form. In the poem’s early stages, I toyed with a sonnet but I felt that the repetition is so key and I come back to Fassbinder again and again even in poems where, as you mentioned, I get really personal, I still use him as a filter or a frame. Even when I look at myself in these poems, he’s in the room.
JEF: It makes sense that you would be torn between a villanelle and a sonnet because a sonnet is a form traditionally associated with love.
DP: Right? Exactly!
JEF: However, I see why you ultimately went with the villanelle. It really is an obsessive form due to its repetition. For example, when you think of the form, you think of probably Plath’s one.
DP: Yeah.
JEF: And the contrasts between you and Fassbinder’s perspectives on love is fascinating. There are so many ideas coming together in this book and the blending of forms in “Dear Rainer” is exciting because so many people forget that the first poem in a poetry collection is the anchor of the book as it sets the stage for the rest. So I love to hear how you break it down, especially since it was the last poem written for the book.
DP: Even as I was coming up with the order of the poems, I thought of placing them in the order the films were made. He had his own evolution as an artist and his obsessions which shifted over time and so did his style. But suddenly, the poems were talking to each other and the underlying obsessions and how they were shifting were going along the same path he was instead of the path that I was taking. So it felt like his voice was creeping into the poems too.
JEF: I am so glad you went on this tangent because I did a bit of background research and realized oh, each poem is named after one of his films and they’re in chronological order. (Laughs) This was literally going to be one of the questions I asked you later on! So, let’s delve deeper into that. Another thing I loved about your book is how it does the aforementioned things. These aspects also affect the poem themselves as they may address a plot thread of the films they are named after regardless if the piece is rooted in the personal or not.
For example, a poem that caught my eye is “the Merchant of Four Seasons” and, after reading the synopsis of that film, I realized that you were writing a persona poem from the perspective of one of the other vendors who, even at one point, hints that he interacts with the protagonist of that film, a fruit vendor.
DP: Yeah.
JEF: With that approach in mind, kind of using the film titles and plots as a kind of path stone, can you talk a bit about how you stumbled upon this approach for the book or any research you did to help?
DP: I watched every movie of his except one, which I could never track down called “Jailbait,” and then I tracked down his miniseries for television and watched those. Then I tracked down his plays that had been translated into English and, even though they aren’t films, I engaged with them. He died at 37 yet left behind so much work and at that point, I was totally into him, and thought that maybe he would make that play into a movie. I literally went through his whole filmography and was hungry for more so I watched his work. I even wrote a poem about a film of his that is now lost and just imagined what it would’ve been like.
JEF: The film geek in me respects this approach.
DP: It’s interesting you brought up “the Merchant of Four Seasons”, because I just saw it again maybe three weeks ago. I was reading my book at a a Rainer Werner Fassbinder film festival at Huntington, NY. The festival’s beginning coincided with my book’s publication on May 31st which is Rainer’s birthday. I read my poems for this crowd not knowing if they were with me but, next thing you know, they’re buying books!
JEF: Nice! That sounds dope! It must’ve been such an honor to read at that festival!
DP: It was amazing! It was so great to read right before one of his films! I read on like the third or fourth night of the festival so some of the audience members had just seen some of the films I was reading about so they were still fresh in their minds. I hadn’t seen “the Merchant of Four Seasons” in at least 5 or 6 years and it was so affirming to fall in love with that movie again because that poem was so fun to write and, I remember when I saw that film, it reminded me of this man who worked the coffee cart outside of AMC. He was so sweet and I would see him every morning and we’d have the “good morning” social exchange. I knew he had a daughter, didn’t know if he was married, yet his life was a bit of mystery.
Fassbinder, in his films, often told the story of working-class people and, watching “the Merchant of the Four Seasons” and it got me thinking. Here I was working at this television company telling the story of these cultural markers and yet outside of this building was this guy selling coffee and a donut and who was telling his story? I ended telling this narrative that is related to the film and also offered insight into someone I really liked but really didn’t know.
JEF: That’s cool! So you’re right there with the contrast of AMC and the guy working the coffee cart and it happens to tie back into Fassbinder’s work which is extremely interesting.
Another thing I love about your book is that it’s a collection in a long line of works that has poetry and cinema intermixing. For example, the Cineaste by A. Van Jordan does that while on the other side, you have filmmakers like Maya Deren who creates visual poetry.
So, I wanted to ask you that outside of being artistic mediums, what do you think poetry and film have in common? Were there times when you found yourself having some difficulty in communicating aspects of Fassbinder’s filmmaking through poetry?
DP: Okay. Here is what I’m thinking in response to that. One of the pleasures of writing this book is that I felt that Fassbinder is someone who liked to experiment himself. When I sort of embraced the project, I thought I needed to embrace experimentation and that I didn’t want to try to “mirror” his films. For example, if the film is a documentary or a political satire then the poem didn’t need to be “real” or a political satire in turn. But I did have to constantly be open to trying different forms as a way to communicate ideas. Looking at different forms like the villanelle or the madrigal or the rondeau, that was one way. And then there’s a poem that’s a recipe or another that’s a film script. I really wanted to reflect the kind of restlessness that typifies his work and echo that in my own way.
Does that answer the question?
JEF: I love that. It kind of reminds me of Patricia Smith and how she often tailors the form of the poem to the voice. Like, in one of her books, Blood Dazzler, which discusses Hurricane Katrina, one of the poems in the book is from the perspective of an older woman, Ethel Freeman, and Smith uses the sestina for this poem because it is a form that relies on repetition and older people tend to repeat themselves a lot. So, what you’re saying reminds me a lot of Smith because, on one hand, you want to challenge yourself, but on the other hand you want to make a fitting tribute. You wanted to experiment like Fassbinder but you didn’t want to seem like you were completely imitating his style which is cool.
DP: Yes. Yes. You know, I’m glad you brought up the sestina because “In a Year of Thirteen Moons” is a sestina. The thing about the sestina for me is it also has an obsessiveness to it but, unlike a villanelle, it is almost mathematical, right? There’s something about a sestina that taps into mathematical thinking because it is so much about patterns repeating. Isn’t the number for pi the most miraculous number in the world?
JEF laughs. Shrugs. Drew laughs.
DP: Because it never ends. There is a formula where, if you divide this by that, you get this number 3.14 and onward into infinity. I feel like a sestina is a kindred spirit. Even the way that it ends, even though the structure is so set, the last three lines where you just have the two words in the line that are drawn from the earlier parts, you can arrange them in that structure however you want. So there’s a freedom at the end even though the structure is so set.
JEF: Interesting. I never thought of the sestina as mathematical before.
DP: Yeah. I liked math in junior high and high school, but, to me, the sestina feels more like a formula instead of a form. In that poem, I really tried to have the words reinvent themselves. I had “dot” in the poem and, at one point, “dot” was a woman.
JEF: I’m really enjoying this interview. It’s nice to pick the brain of a fellow poet who also likes films and is open to exploring different genres. My own work of late deals with poetry and film so this has been very inspiring!
However, I don’t want to keep you. So, I want to ask you this last one for the road. So your bio mentions you write in different genres such as fiction and plays while also being a performing artist. What’s intriguing to me about you is that you don’t come at this with just one genre under your belt. Is there a particular genre that you prefer? Do you find this multi-genre approach to writing beneficial at all? If so, what are some ways that the genres you work in inform one another?
DP: Yes. I have no doubt that the performing arts background had a major influence on my work as a poet because I believe poems should be heard. I read my work aloud to myself as I’m working on it because I want to be sure it has a certain rhythm or sound. When I first started working as a monologuist, I used to go to the rehearsal studio with a tape recorder, and I would talk to myself for three hours, and then I would go home and listen to the tapes and take note of anything I said that was interesting. Then I would take the interesting part, go back to the rehearsal studio and I would repeat the interesting part and then I would just start rambling again for the rest of the time left I had in the rehearsal studio. I wrote my first two monologues that way, entirely through listening to myself out aloud.
When I started writing poetry, I was similarly interested in what it sounded like. The sonnets from the first collection were love poems I was writing to someone for them to hear. They had to have a certain clarity that couldn’t get too bogged down by the images and the metaphor—poems that cut to the quick.
I guess that’s why I love shorter poems because they require you to get to the point. There’s a pleasure to be had in a snack or a taco.
JEF: I’m so glad I did this interview. One of the reasons I fell in love with poetry is because of the sound of it! I latch onto the sounds first and then I think about what I’m trying to say and how to develop this image further! This approach was vital during my Slam poetry days!
DP: Sound is the root, right?!?
JEF: Exactly, and so many folks don’t appreciate that!
DP: I just finished teaching a Sonnet course at Poets House and I kept saying to the students that rhyme is memorable, right? Like, if something rhymes, it is easier to remember and that’s one of the reasons why it was such an intrinsic part of poetry because the poems were passed down in an oral tradition and it would be easier to remember if the poem was rhyming rather than not. And I added to that, if your goal is to be experimental, rhyme. The bulk of poetry being produced is anti-rhyme and if you want to really push against what’s common, rhyme.
But Slam poetry embraces rhyme in a way I love, because I think it’s partially because the Slam poet is connected to hearing poetry.
JEF: Yes.
DP: It’s less about what they see on the page, though I have no doubt it matters to them, but that it’s an oral tradition.
I’m not telling you something you don’t know.
JEF: Yeah, and I feel that, when some poets present their work, you can tell they really don’t take the time to read their work aloud beforehand and I go, “come on! You have this cool poem here and you’re not communicating it!”
DP: Right?!?
JEF: I feel like I have a kindred spirit on this line right now. Thank you so much for chatting with me today! It’s been a blast and a half!
DP: Thank you for having me! I’m delighted!