Creating space for our creations

An Interview with Rufo Quintavalle

There’s no set path for a writer’s life: from teaching workshops to working on Wall Street, poets have unique stories to tell. Rufo Quintavalle has explored several entry points to poetry since moving from Iowa where he studied Whitman to Paris where he’s been an actor and writer, most recently publishing his collection Shelf, a “tribute album” based off the iconic “Song of Myself” (“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you…”). In our conversation, Quintavalle questions the traditional formula to becoming a published poet by sharing his work through digital media and even theatre—what matters is that you make space for you art to exist, he tells us. Constraints, from linguistic to physical, “can be a real impetus to creativity...a real push to discover new forms and ways of communicating.”

We were struck by the internal cadences, linguistic inversions and acute imageries in your 52-part poem Shelf. What was your inspiration for this poem as well as your process—especially as it’s divided like the weeks of a year.

I did an undergraduate English degree at Oxford which means you start with Beowulf and you go up to the early 20th century. I'm not going to knock it because it gave me a great foundation in English literature. But I was always more interested in American popular culture and American literature. So, keen to get more exposure to what I was reading on the side, I made the decision to go to Iowa City to be close to some sort of contemporaneous creativity. When I got there, quite by chance the first job I had as a graduate student was as a research assistant for a professor called Ed Folsom who was a big Whitman specialist. In the US, people come across Whitman at a young age, but I wouldn't have been able to tell you much about him at all until I went to Iowa City. 

My first job as a research assistant at graduate school was helping with the Whitman Archive which is an online archive with all his materials. As a research assistant, I would take the original 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass and scan it so that scholars or curious people could access this first edition.

Back in the day (2001), it took a long time for a high-definition scan to upload. So, while it was uploading I would read each page—and Whitman’s collection blew me away, it was such a breath of fresh air, it was so unlike anything I’d read, so unlike what was going on in British or French literature in the 19th century. I felt a very visceral connection.

I was meant to be writing a PhD on Whitman when I met the woman who would later become the mother of my children; she was French and I moved to Paris to be with her. In Paris I was spending time in the library ostensibly working on the PhD, but it fell by the wayside and I found myself writing my own poetry instead. Whitman was always there alongside the unfinished PhD so instead of writing about him, I did this kind of tribute album.

In Shelf, I followed Whitman’s “Song of Myself” line by line: I took the first and the last letter of every line, including the title (“S” and “F” become my “Shelf”). It was a crazy rule I set for myself with all 52 sections. So, the number of sections in my poem was predetermined by Whitman. But when you asked me this question, I also thought it’s likely that he had in mind the 52 weeks in a year. 

There's one section in the poem, section 33, that is very long and very repetitive. I chose to treat that section differently because I was having a hard time writing it. You may or may not have picked up on this when reading the poem but in my section 33, there's only three words per line. Ultimately, the sort of overarching structure of the poem was decided by Whitman, not by me. But in the actual writing process, he provided two letters and I provided the rest.

Have you had any trials-and-errors when developing your writing practice? How has it changed, and what methods are you drawn to now?

Before I started writing Shelf, which was ten years ago, a lot of the poetry I was writing was quite structurally, stylistically and sometimes thematically minimalist. I was interested in the dividing line between nothing and something—when does nothing tip into something? What is the bare minimum needed for creativity? And I started to think I wanted to do something a bit different—I thought, Rufo, it’s time to get yourself out of this minimalist rut. Why not take on this very big sprawling maximalist, universalist poet? 

In the end, I treated Whitman as if performing liposuction on him. Somebody the other day observed that Shelf looks like a cross between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson—I’d taken “Song of Myself” and shrunk it down to what looks like a Dickinson poem. One can get stuck in all sorts of ruts, and there's a tendency with poetry to write something that begins at the top of the page and ends at the bottom of the page to mirror a thought process. Within the Anglo-Saxon Western tradition, a sonnet would be a good example of that. By the end, it reaches a conclusion. After writing this big Whitman-esque poem, my next two books after that were, in different ways, attempts to get away from that begin-at-the-beginning of the page end-at-the-bottom mindset.

Your video poetry is breathtaking. Words take on new meaning while superimposed onto what you see. How did you begin this multimedia practice? Are there certain themes you’re more likely to explore through the camera?

As you observed about working in silos, one thing I like about poetry is that you can potentially put absolutely anything in a poem. Of course, we need to pay the bills and put food on the table so when making a living as a poet, that route can feel quite linear. You go and get an MFA then you go and teach poetry which gives you a certain level of security that allows you to write. Then there’s translation work or editing work or copywriting on the periphery. This can all be wonderful, but there is a potential risk that you’ll end up siloed in the poetry world and its tense economics. I was in for a rude awakening once I got to that point when, after having put out five or six books, they still weren’t enough to make a living.

Then I began to say, why not just give stuff away for free? Put it up online, forget about going through that process of submitting to a magazine and waiting six months, twelve months, to get a rejection? It's dispiriting. Though I had a blog for a while, I felt there was something a little bit more immediate with the video poetry. 

I love reading my poetry aloud and this last year or so has been difficult for that. But video poetry was another way of sharing it directly with an audience. Maybe it was also inspired by that minimalist thinking––there's always a part of me that feels there's only so much you can say with words. Sometimes I shoot some footage then slow it down to such a point that the actual live sounds begin to sound like music; the sound of cars going by so slowly you can't tell what it is anymore. I think the impetus was coming from various places: desire for immediacy as well as skepticism about how much one can do with words alone. Last spring when here in France, as in many places of the world, we went into a very strict lockdown and it wasn't clear to anyone how long it was going to last, I decided to impose a bit of rhythm on myself by making one video poem a week. 

You should never say never but it feels like this series has reached some kind of completion—there's 50 something videos now. 

To match the sections in Shelf, you could add or subtract a couple videos to reach 52! Switching gears a bit to your career as an actor, has your experience on the stage or screen influenced your poetry and vice versa?

This past year has obviously created many constraints which, as we were talking about before, can be a real impetus to creativity. On the one hand, an experience like lockdown can completely knock you—you do nothing except crawl into a ball. But it can also be a real push to discover new forms and ways of communicating. To pick up on your question, there is a continuity for me between the video poetry and between a recent film/play that I also performed during lockdown. Even though it's not a live performance, it hopefully reproduces some of a live performance’s immediacy. It has the added benefit that somebody in New Jersey can see it, someone in Kenya can see it, not just somebody in Paris.

When I was a teenager, acting and writing poetry were both important to me. Then, when I was nineteen, my father died in a very odd circumstance. He was an Italian writer, and he’d gone to New York to put on one of his plays. Unfortunately, he died of a heart attack on the night before the premiere of his play and I learned this news when I was on stage at the Oxford playhouse for the dress rehearsal of a play I was acting in. So, it was a very strange concatenation of circumstances and after that acting became traumatic so I stopped for quite some time but carried on writing poetry and performing poetry. Maybe getting back into acting came via performing poetry—and maybe the performance poetry was itself  a way to keep the acting on a slow simmer over all those years. The step back into the world of acting came when my friend Bruce, with whom I also did the play during lockdown, bumped into me at a spoken word night. There, he asked if I might join him in making a poetical: like a musical but with poetry instead of music. We made that film and it was the gateway drug they got me back into acting.

If a poem can work on the page and it can work out loud, then that's fantastic. Of course, you have certain poets who are fabulous poets but they're not very good performers—I wouldn't judge somebody on the quality of their performance alone. 

What advice would you give to emerging writers on how to combine their interests, especially in our age that promotes disciplinary silos?

I alluded before to that conventional expectation of how to exist as a poet: you write the poems, then you submit them to journals until you have enough journal publications to publish a chapbook, then you publish a full collection... it is a model that can work, but it can also be very dispiriting. It takes so long for anyone to get back to you. Months and months. Sometimes they don’t even reply. In most walks of life, you wouldn't put up with this. Even in the acting business, you get treated a bit better! 

In order to remain happy and take care of your mental health, you need to have some good things going on—to be putting stuff out into the world and to be existing in whatever form that might take. Maybe you start publishing your own magazine, or you create a local arts collective with the people immediately around you.

It’s better to just do something creative with your mates, anything really, rather than sit around waiting for validation from a third party because that can nip your creativity in the bud before you've even started.

My other piece of advice would be don't be afraid to make a fool of yourself. When I started making video poems, I didn't know how to make a video poem. Maybe the first results are okay, or maybe they're embarrassingly bad, but if you're always worried that they're going to be embarrassingly bad then you’ll never do anything outside your comfort zone.

There's another book of mine that went out of print. These things happen, it’s part of the life of a writer, but still it’s not a pleasant experience; you always hope your work will be widely read and appreciated. Then just last year during lockdown, out of the blue I got a message from a Brazilian translator living in London, Elton Uliana. He said, “Look, I came across this book in a secondhand bookstore and I really liked it—has it already been translated into Portuguese?” I was thinking, Hm, let me check with my personal assistant...! So, despite me thinking the book had disappeared, someone found it and it resonated with them, and now it will have a second lease of life.

For people who are just starting out, it can take a long time and you need to be mentally equipped to cope with that. We all have our own different mental makeups and mental baggage, but even if you're a very tough, grounded person, this feeling that you don't exist is hard to deal with. So find ways for your art to exist, and that will allow you to meet all sorts of people you wouldn't have met otherwise and build a community that will give you the solace to get through.