Revelation in Poetry: An Interview with Javen Tanner
Interviewed by Doug Talley

Editor’s note: This is part one of a two-part interview with poet-actor-director Javen Tanner. Look for part 2 soon in Meridian.

Javen Tanner runs the theatre department at the Waterford School in Salt Lake City and guest teaches an acting class at Brigham Young University.  He majored in theatre and English at BYU, and later received a Master of Fine Arts in Acting from The Old Globe in San Diego.

After graduate school, he moved to Manhattan where he worked as the Associate Artistic Director of Handcart Ensemble, a theatre company specializing in verse drama. With Handcart Ensemble he performed in W.B. Yeats’ The Cat and the Moon and The Only Jealousy of Emer, and he co-produced the New York premier of Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes, a version of Sophocles’ Antigone. 

Recent directing credits include The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Antigone, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and an adaptation of Animal Farm. He recently won best actor at the 2007 New York Independent Film Festival for his role in Return with Honor. He is currently directing a production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.

He has published poetry in The Midwest Quarterly, Roanoke Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Raintown Review, Dialogue, From Here Magazine and several other literary journals.  His recent chapbook of poems, Curses for Your Sake, was reviewed by Meridian this past December. A year ago this past August during a luncheon in New York City, Tanner consented to an interview with Meridian Magazine, the first part of which, long overdue, now follows. 

********

Meridian: The poems in Curses for Your Sake are not overtly religious, yet the reader still senses a religious influence in them, as in the opening poem “Eden” and the poem “Two for Samuel Beckett” with subtitles of “Bethesda” and “The Widow Woman’s Son.” How does your religious sensibility inform and guide your work? 

Tanner:As an undergraduate at BYU, I attended a Czeslaw Milosz reading. While explaining why he (fluent in English) always wrote his poems first in Polish and then translated them to English, he said something like, “you must write in the language you learned as a child.”

Later that year, knocked out by poems like “Stone Canyon Nocturne” and “Homage to Paul Cezanne,” I was writing a paper on the poet Charles Wright. Unsatisfied with my sources, I decided to call him. (Poets aren’t exactly hounded by paparazzi, after all.) He was kind enough to answer a few questions. I asked him about Christianity in his poems. He said he was not Christian, but he was raised Christian and so, naturally, the language of Christianity sometimes appears in his poems.

Milosz and Wright were talking about two different kinds of language, but these experiences changed the way I approached my own work. I am a practicing Latter-day Saint, but I was also raised a Latter-day Saint — Mormonism is the language I learned as a child. And what a language it is: visions, prophecies, miracles, and scriptures. It was as if these two poets had given me permission to speak that language. So it’s true, my poems are not overtly religious, but the language of my experience is in them.

Meridian: And a follow-up question, what boundaries, if any, do you think must be set to religious belief in art in order to avoid art slipping into dogma? How does one present religious belief artistically without creating a proselyting tract?

Tanner: I think you can write about anything. It’s about the approach. If you approach your work with the intent of teaching, you will likely create a tract. If you approach your work with the intent of learning, there’s a good chance you will create art. It takes a lot of practice to allow a poem to write itself, and to learn from it, and to be astounded by it. I remember reading poets who talked about this phenomenon, and it sounded like an impossibility to me — which it is. It’s a miracle. That’s why it’s art. Tracts fold up neatly, art unfolds.

Meridian:  In the poem “Manhattan,” reprinted here in its entirety, you address the subject of revelation. 

While the images of the poem are clear and vivid, the poem itself suggests a kind of inconclusiveness in the effort to interpret revelation, calling to mind the slipperiness of the ancient oracle of Delphi in Greek mythology. The narrator of the poem bluntly acknowledges: “Revelation is difficult.” Can you elaborate upon that idea? 

Tanner:To continue with the idea of unfolding, revelation means unfolding. The difficult thing about it is that it never stops unfolding. You think you’ve seen the whole picture, but no, there’s more. A revelation that means one thing to you in one context means so much more in another context. We love things to work out clearly: this means this; that means that. But God, the creator, manages to teach us line upon line, with the same line.

Meridian: The final image of the poem suggests a deepening labyrinth — picture within picture, window within window — as if they were riddle within riddle within riddle, the journey to answer one question merely opening up other questions.  It seems a concise and compelling metaphor for the quest to find truth, yet you suggest a quest with none of the conventional “stars” overhead to guide the effort. Rather you suggest a guide of “glimpses and cryptic lyrics,” the windows in windows, which may either be “black,” suggesting a dead end, or “burning,” which may, like a star, illuminate a truth path. This sounds similar to the Mormon concept of revelation being informed either by a “stupor of thought” or a “burning” sensation.  Is this a fair reading? 

Tanner: That certainly is a fair reading. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but one of the things I love about putting my poetry out there is hearing what others get out of it. That’s another way I learn from my own works of art. Revelation and art have many things in common, and this is one of them.

A particular revelation and a particular piece of art can mean different things to different people. Which is why, in the case of larger revelations, Latter-day Saints have a leader who has the final say. It is also why personal revelation should, in most cases, remain personal. The meaning of a piece of art, on the other hand, always comes down to the individual.

I’m not talking about reader response here. I mean to say that regardless of who presents art, talks to us about art, or writes about it, we will take a personal meaning from it. And artists should be glad of this — their works continue to unfold after they have presented them to an audience.

Meridian:  A former General Authority of the Church, George Q. Cannon, once stated that we receive revelation imperfectly at times because we are mortal. Do you feel this idea is inherent in the poem also? 

Tanner: Yes, and this is one of the things I like about this poem. The speaker assumes that the person saying apocalypse is referring to “fire and darkness.” He then proceeds to unfold the idea of revelation only to end up with “black or burning.” This is one of those things that surprised me as it happened. I like it because “black or burning” is both entirely different from “fire and darkness” and exactly the same. (The poem manages to end where it begins without being a poem that ends where it begins.) We are like the passer-by in the poem: perhaps our understanding is incomplete, but we get there.

Meridian: The reader may notice a predominant parallelism at play in the poem. At the outset there is repetition between two opposing ideas of “doom” and “revelation” deriving from the word “Apocalypse”. The ideas are set up in a parallel framework of the following lines:

In this brief passage there are at least two types of poetic parallelism. One is the technique of antimetabole — a parallel structure that frames a contrast of ideas, in this case the contrast between doom being “easy” and revelation being “difficult.” 

Another technique is the simple alternate repetition of the words “doom” and “revelation.” A great deal of scholarship has been devoted to identifying similar techniques of poetic parallelism in the Book of Mormon. For instance, a passage in Alma 5:40 offers a good example of antimetabole:

So the question is, have you consciously attempted to adopt these poetic techniques into your work? Do you find the Book of Mormon influencing the technical aspects of your writing?

Tanner: I am always interested in words and phrases turning each other inside out. Antimetabole is a great way to set this in motion. Doom is arrived at easily in the beginning of the poem, but it is also arrived at through the more difficult means of revelation. And then, to push it further, if the word apocalypse is thought to mean doom, but is corrected to mean revelation, and then the revelation turns out to be doom, then the original assumption could be a revelation (because it was the same as the actual revelation). So, in a way, doom becomes difficult and revelation becomes easy, creating the antimetabole.

As soon as you set up simple, contrasting statements, they pull each other apart and collapse in on each other. It is as if they have competing gravities. Your quote from Alma is a classic example of this. It’s so simple and clear, but just read it in elders quorum and see what happens.

Antimetabole also deals with repetition, and repetition is important to me. This is also where the language of the Book of Mormon comes into my writing. I don’t consciously use the Book of Mormon as a technical guide, but the language of the scriptures is a kind of background music in my head. Those sounds are always influencing me, and they are repetitive. Take this verse from Helaman:

Remember, whosoever, perish, self/ selves, free, behold, doeth iniquity/ doeth it unto him — the repetition is astounding. Perhaps this is done for emphasis, but when words are repeated so often, something else begins to happen. They have a kind of calculus, or a rate of change. The meaning starts to evolve right in front of your eyes: perishing and perishing unto yourself, doing iniquity and doing it unto yourself, being free and being made free and being permitted. The repeated word begins to contrast with original word.

In my own poems I like the meaning of a word to change, and then I like the word itself to change: “They sing, “Please, please,” but from here it sounds like “peace.”

Shakespeare, of course, was the master at this. Nobody uses repetition or antimetabole better: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” He, too, took cues from the scriptures: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil…” (Isaiah 5:20)

Meridian:  The setting of the poem in Manhattan suggests great complexity arising from crowds of people, numerous narrow streets and blocked views because of high-rise buildings, a metaphor again reflecting the challenge of finding one’s way in the world. How has life in New York City created opportunities and challenges for you?

Tanner: I love New York City. I feel like Whitman when I think about it. I love it because it is visceral and immediate, the perfect place for a young artist. It creates both opportunities and challenges by keeping you hungry.

You put on a $10,000 play in a rented space while trying to figure out how you’re going to pay the $1,300 rent on your apartment — all the while keeping your kids feeling that they lack nothing. You wait for your agent to call, or you check the mail for the editor’s response. You spend money you don’t have to hear Stanley Kunitz read before he dies, and at the reading you see that same guy with the black beret who shows up at every poetry reading you go to, and you want to rip his lungs out for wearing that stupid beret.

You ask for money. You ask for more time to pay. You write poems to the sound of your wife’s soft breath as she sleeps. You act in a play and the theatre is full. You act in another play and nobody shows up.

And what about nature, someone asks. Well, you go home to Utah and everyone is talking about how the bears are encroaching on the valleys this year, but you never see them. You only see them on the news, falling from trees, bouncing on trampolines. But back in New York it’s 1:00 in the morning and you trip over a rat as you walk from the subway station to your apartment. And when you get home a mouse runs across the kitchen floor and underneath the oven. So you pull a rolling pin from the drawer, turn the knob to broil, squat in front of the oven, and wait. How’s that for nature?

(Part 2 of this interview will follow in Meridian’s next poetry column.)