An Owl Light Interview with Author George Guida

• D.E. Bentley –

I first met George Guida in June of 2017, at a reading in Dansville, NY. Since then, I have had the opportunity to hear George read many times—and have enjoyed many other authors he has hosted for public readings. During a bright November day, strolling on his land in Cohocton, we talked about his love of New York City, his family’s happy migration to rural western New York, and, of course, writing. 

I have been enjoying a contemplative read of your most recent collection of poems Zen of Pop. Many (perhaps all) of these poems pay homage to your life experiences as well as to the cultural influences of pop icons; some are clearly more personal—including Winter 1944, a gentle nod to George Senior. Some of the subjects explored in this collection were enough a part of my radio days for it to click immediately. Like “Baker Street”— I could feel the lyrics lingering in a place inside, fragments of a half-remembered past. Nonetheless, I still had to pull up a recording online to listen to the song, to remember and fully connect with the poem. Even “Moon Walk,” the shortest poem in the collection—which conveys so much in so few words—leaves a thirst, a desire to know more. Did you anticipate the potential for these poems to inspire journeys of exploration that were both historical and personal? 

I wrote the first ten or so of the poems in Zen of Pop in 2017 and 2018, and turned those into a chapbook, which was a finalist for a couple of different prizes. I knew at that point that I had something good, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was. In 2019 an editor asked me if I might want to make a full-length collection out of the chapbook, so I returned to it and wrote another 25 or so poems during the summer of 2019. Pretty early in that process I realized that the subject of each poem was hiding a truth about human nature. The trick was to use each poem as a way—maybe a journey is the right metaphor—to these truths, not really understanding what they were until I actually wrote the poems. Once I had that template, I also had a strong sense of purpose and a clear path, which made writing each poem a pleasure and made it easy to complete the project. That process of becoming aware of the project’s purpose and of the pattern of its poems can happen at the stage of compiling already written poems, as was the case with my two collections from 2015, Pugilistic and The Sleeping Gulf. Or it can happen early in the process of writing the poems, as it also did in my first collections, Low Italian and New York and Other Lovers. 

What did this writing process look like, once you picked a subject to meditate on?

Once I had the general subject, the purpose of seeking truths in the experience of music and other art that many people know, the rest of the process lay in identifying the best specific subjects. Honestly, that was pretty easy, although also, I admit, as random as one author’s peculiar tastes. When you’re writing with a purpose about figures who have always fascinated you, the poems, the hits, as they say, just keep on coming. I could have written probably a couple of hundred of these poems if I had taken another few months. Among the poems I didn’t write was, for example, one about Linda Ronstadt and her losing her voice. The list of promising subjects is endless, and the only limitation I felt was the music and pop culture that I didn’t know. The result is a book focused on pop stars and pop songs who were big at different points in my 50-odd years on the planet. If I were younger, I’m sure more of the subjects would have been artists and songs of the last 20 years, though I still snuck a few of those in.

How much time did you spend on research, to fill in the missing pieces, and were there memorable revelations along the way? 

I did some research, referring to a few music books I had on my shelves but relying mostly on Web searches to fill in blanks in memory and gaps in knowledge. So, I wound up learning a lot of what some might call trivia about groups like ABBA and the Gypsy Kings, and songs like “Guantanamera” and “Yellow Ledbetter.”

Along the way I definitely discovered—maybe “uncovered” is a more accurate word—some semblance of emotional truth in the lives of the people I was exploring. I got to imagine what it was like to be indefatigable when I considered the career of Jose Feliciano. Then I got to imagine alternate outcomes for a tragic figure like Amy Winehouse. What if she had just stayed in rehab for years, and been happy there? Writing the poems also revealed to me just how much of an emotional impact these songs and artists had and, in many cases, still have on me, how much they have inspired me to write. I believe strongly that being around other artists and art, and talking about art—visual art, music, writing—is—I won’t say a necessity—but a great benefit to most artists, including writers.

I saw your recent post on Facebook where you asked followers, “Is ekphrastic poetry just glorified caption writing?  What’s your opinion of the genre? Why does it matter?” As the online conversation around the topic heated up you commented,  “Hey, Everybody. Just want to clarify that I’m not against ekphrastics at all. My last book was almost all ekphrastic poems.” Were you talking about Zen of Pop? And, if so, can you elaborate a bit more on how you see these poems as fitting in that genre (what defines something as a “work of art”)?

I was talking about Zen of Pop, although I’ve written many ekphrastic poems that aren’t in that collection. I’ve published earlier poems about the rock groups Boston and the Clash that were in other books, and I’ve written a lot of ekphrastics that are still floating around. Right before the pandemic, I spent a whole afternoon of a three-day trip to Houston drafting what is still a failed poem about one of the city’s art treasures, the Rothko Chapel, which I’d hoped to visit but which was closed for renovation when I arrived. The Rothko Chapel might be more exquisite than an ABBA song, but then again, maybe “Dancing Queen” is just as exquisite, as the screenwriter of another favorite work of art, the film “Muriel’s Wedding,” clearly thought.

If poems exist to help us pay closer attention to the material world and to uncover lasting truths, then subjects can certainly include works of art that can fulfill us as much as children, trees, or the night sky. In a lyric poem, what matters is how our little creations, our speakers, interact with their subjects. The emotional and intellectual intensity of that interaction can produce poems that, as Seamus Heaney said, dig for truth and stay with us. I would argue that very few things in our lives make us feel and think as intensely as music does. Which is why, I guess, I have been drawn to writing about music. One of my current projects is a book of poems that respond to different classic operas. I’ve grown to love opera over the years. The stories offer real insight into human nature, and a lot of the music is pure soul. The questions for me are: What are those insights? and How can the music and performance move us the way they often do? How does the way we respond to them reflect the way the human mind and soul work? 

I saw that your manuscript novel, The Uniform, was a semifinalist for the University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize. I love fiction and can’t wait for that one to find a home. Do tell!? 

The Uniform is a long novel that is epic in structure and modernist in its technique. It follows the life of an aspiring musician, police officer, son, brother, lover, lost soul, and, ultimately, visual artist, over the course of forty years, from 1948 to 1989. The constant thread is this character’s romantic love for his first cousin, an elusive woman whom he literally pursues across the country, or at least through several different parts of the country. I say it’s an epic, because it works in episodes over a long period of time, not exactly following Aristotle’s suggestions about the unities of time and place. It’s modernist in its focus on a single character’s consciousness in third-person narration. I started planning it twenty-five years ago and wrote the first draft of it while I was living in Dansville during the winter of 2015-2016. I’ve since added long sections, cut other passages and generally tried to refine the characterizations and the language. A few publishers have expressed interest, a couple of those very serious interest, but, for now, it’s still a book in search of a home. I’m optimistic it will find one before too long. *

Encircle Publications, a small press in Maine, is publishing my first novel, Posts from Suburbia, which I’ve also been writing and revising for a long time. That will be my second book of fiction, after my 2012 collection The Pope Stories and Other Tales of Troubled Times (Bordighera Press). Both of these books are mostly satirical in tone. The Pope Stories satirizes organized religion—not faith, I would be quick to add—and Posts from Suburbia satirizes contemporary suburban life. The Uniform is a more “serious” novel, not trying to be funny, but trying to be true to the main character’s consciousness and experiences, whether those lead to comedy or tragedy. My current fiction project is a sequel to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in which the oldest of those brothers emigrates to the U. S. and winds up working at the Jackson Sanatorium in Dansville during the 1870s. His youngest brother eventually visits him, causing all kinds of problems and shedding new light on Dostoevsky’s original tale. It’s the first of my novels that will not in some way draw on my Italian American cultural background, and it’s an extended response to another work of art, so it’s a huge departure. 

I have always been fascinated with differences in how writers approach their writing. How would you characterize your writing styles and how different are your approaches to writing poetry v. fiction?   

I think I’m capable of writing in different styles, but, like all writers, I’m limited by my tendencies and ability to make certain choices in diction and sentence structure. My world view shapes both my style and my choice of subjects. I’m a sardonic optimist. I appreciate the joys of life, but I also see human beings as frail beings who often try to be grand and, in the process, become ridiculous. 

Most of the time I tend to write poems as the inspiration for individual poems strikes me. If I notice that I’m writing a number of poems with something in common, I might then try to write more poems on that subject or in that spirit, as I did in Zen of Pop. Sometimes that something in common is just a broad theme. The poems in Pugilistic were written without a specific theme or organizing principle, but in seven years’ worth of occasional poems, I came to see a broad theme of struggle, of fighting, which reflected a difficult period in my life, which I was able to project onto other people and situations in the world. I don’t think I could write that book now. Except for the health problems that come with aging, I’m better off and happier than I was ten years ago. Now I’m finding inspiration in music and popular culture, but that fascination, I can see, will fade soon enough. I’m already writing more poems about family than I ever have, although lately I have not written much poetry. 

My focus has been on fiction this year. For me, writing fiction tends to be a more deliberate process of preliminary research, planning, and more methodical execution. The Uniform required years of research—Internet-based, archival, and on site. And right now I’m re-reading and taking extensive notes on The Brothers Karamazov, outlining the plot of my sequel, Mitya, as I go. I’ll then move to local research on Dansville in the 1870s and on the Jackson Sanitorium during the same period. So, I plan to spend a good amount of time in the Dansville Library’s local history room and at the local historical society. And I’ll also talk to fellow residents about their Castle on the Hill stories. The happy coincidence is that my wife Denise owns and runs the MacFadden Coffee Company, which is named for Bernard MacFadden, the last guru of Dansville’s famous spa.  

I love the energy of NYC and loved being able to absorb some of that in reading New York and Other Lovers—re-released in 2020 by Encircle (especially given how long it has been since I was there; a planned 2020 trip was postponed due to covid). I repeatedly—obsessively we might say—read your poem, “I Fall in Love.”  I could feel in that poem the rhythm of your daily city experience, a sense of place defined by human interactions. “The Good People of New York City” is another one that stood out in a similar way. Reading these poems helped me better understand what draws people to urban living. Were you intentionally trying to get others to share in your love for the city or were these just personal love poems to a place (and time)? 

Well, the book is a love song to the city and to youth. I lived in New York most of my young adult life, for about 15 years total, with some breaks for time on Eastern Long Island, in Kansas and in Italy. I left when I was 41, which is when my wife and I adopted our son. We left so he could be closer to family—mine in fact, because hers lived and lives mostly in Tampa, Florida, where neither of us had a job.

I started writing the poems in the first edition of New York and Other Lovers when I was 24 and probably wrote the final one when I was 40. It’s about a young man’s love for the city and for its people. And it is very much about the city itself, at least as it was during that time. The revised edition, which came out in 2020, includes a few new poems, that I think fit with the vision of the city in the original book. They fit, I think, because, after leaving the city for a decade, except for work and the occasional social engagement, I was ready to embrace it again. 

People often think of cities as the core creative centers for cultural experiences and fail to see the cultural richness of rural areas. These perceptions are slowly changing as art galleries and performing art venues (including listening rooms for music and readings) expand into the countryside. What prompted your migration out of the city to these parts and how has the move impacted your creativity and literary connections? 

Our son’s appearance first prompted my migration back to my hometown on Long Island, where my wife and I lived for eleven years (minus one for sabbatical in Dansville), before moving to Dansville permanently in 2020, just after we bought MacFadden’s and realized Denise’s dream of running a café, which was of course complicated by the pandemic. Living in Dansville has given me more time to write, at least in theory. I say in theory because keeping up an old house and keeping up our little piece of property in Cohocton and the café have required some time. The place in Cohocton was my original foothold in the area, a place my ex-wife and I bought when we moved back to New York City from Long Island. It was my price for having to leave Eastern Long Island, a place I really loved. The place in Cohocton turned out to be a great consolation and a place where my family has spent the majority of every summer since 2004. In 2012 we decided that we were outgrowing the RV we lived in there, so we looked for a house in my favorite local town, Dansville. I first came here in 2003, to sign the contract on my property. At that point the town was a little more down in the mouth, economically, but it was still charming. In 2013 we bought our house here as a summer home, with the idea that we’d figure out a way to move here eventually. We lived here for a year during our sabbatical, which is, for professors, a research year without teaching responsibilities. We loved our year in Dansville, and, in 2019, we decided to take the leap and move here full time. So, once we go back to work in person, in 2022, we’ll commute to Brooklyn, during the academic year. 

Professors’ teaching schedules are often compressed, and we stagger them so that one of us is, with the exception of a day or two each week, always home. Our high-school age son is old enough to stay with a sitter—maybe a minder is a better word—for those few days, and our family is letting us stay in one of their apartments on Long Island while we work. The travel is a lot, but we feel incredibly lucky to be able to live where we want, in Dansville, and still have a connection with New York City. 

I love life in the city and life in the country. I get that, I suppose, from my father, who was raised in both Rome, New York and in Brooklyn. I like quiet and beauty, and I like talking to people—friends and strangers alike. Both the city and the country offer beauty and interesting people. Quiet, I admit, is more or less exclusively a country phenomenon. By being connected to both places, I can maintain relationships I’ve had and new ones, and I can invite other writers to visit Dansville and perform at the café when they do. Connecting with writers is easy enough to do on line, especially over the last couple of years, although it always is. Writers travel for readings and occasional workshops and conferences, so we’re able to keep in touch. I’ve really enjoyed bringing some of the writers I know from other places to read alongside writers from the area. I plan to continue doing that as soon as covid allows. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts and land; nothing beats being outside in the wilds of western New York. Having grown up (very) rural, with the city experience as secondary, it is interesting to hear about your city to rural transformation. I look forward to reading Posts from Suburbia, and especially look forward to future readings at MacFadden’s as our social worlds continue to expand.

• After our interview, George received news that THE UNIFORM will be published by Guernica Editions in 2024. Congratulations!