Writing the Wrongs of Society: An Interview with Roger Reeves

Poet Roger Reeves visited HSPVA's Creative Writing department for a weeklong residency.

​Roger Reeves, New Jersey-born poet, professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and author of the poetry collection King Me, made a visit to HSPVA’s Creative Writing department for a weeklong residency. It was his second visit here, but this one was longer and more informative than before: with Tuesday through Friday reserved for lectures and group activities, Reeves had time to teach and have us analyze U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard, Jericho Brown’s Please, and Terrance Hayes’ Wind in a Box.

We discussed, among other topics, the poetic effects of parataxis versus hypotaxis (independent versus dependent clauses), the use of heteroglossia (how a set of poems can be a collection of voices), how “signifying” a word can subvert and thus reinhabit its meaning in a group or individual’s favor, and furthermore, the idea that life is a rhetorical structure. But more important, he gave us insights into the everyday life of an American poet, one that perhaps awaits many of us here at HSPVA.

It is nearing the end of his visit at our school, and it occurs to me what an awful shame it would be for him to leave without an interview. I ask politely if he has time for one, and he hesitates, then asks if I would be able to meet him in the back room of the library at lunch. I comply. I beat him to the library and start typing up an old poem I’d been working on, then take out my yogurt. Mr. Reeves arrives, followed by the department heads Ms. Switek and Ms. Apte, and we begin our lunch. The three literati sit across from me eating green salads with noodles, each modestly pleased by the occasion. I take a good look at Mr. Reeves before starting our interview.

He is a tall, gregarious figure with scant eyebrows and a carefully unshaven face, and his long braids contrast his conventionally academic sweater-vest and slacks. His manner is calm - intelligent but unpretentious; his conversation is lively but informal; his smile is wide but not forced. When he laughs, it is with his entire face.

The two department heads and I ask him questions freely and impromptu, and it is unclear when the interview formally begins. He tells stories of how he met his partner Monica - unlike most bar encounters, they bonded over a passion for poetry and constitutional law - and his successful high school years before becoming a mechanical and aerospace engineering major at Princeton. Then he describes to us the subjects of his two yet-unpublished novels, the details of which I shall withhold for the sake of privacy. He has the cordial habit of deflecting questions back to the initial asker (And you, do you write in other genres than the dramatic form?). Lunch passes by and I realize that I have forgotten to interview him. I commence pettily with the standard Paris Review fare: Do you have a particular writing schedule?

“I tend to write in the morning, but I can write at night as well,” he says, not giving much importance to the time of day, “sometimes from midnight or one till four in the morning.” He stops. “Also, I prefer to write hungry. If you eat beforehand, you are tired, you are satiated, and there’s less incentive to write well.”

I feel the grapefruit in my stomach growing sour as I write this. If only I were hungrier. I imagine Reeves in high school, sitting behind a computer after a long day, foregoing yet another meal as he dabbles in journalism. Was such a fantasy ever true?

“I did write for the school paper in high school, and became editor-in-chief,” he says. “Sophomore year, that’s when I learned that I really loved to write, that that’s what I wanted to do. I had a teacher who supervised the paper, and he believed in me. I was struggling with AP History - I couldn’t do those timed essays, and I think (I hope) people are realizing that good writing requires time and contemplation - but he gave me confidence that I could write. In the summers he gave me work to do. When I sent him a feature, say, about my friend whose parents died - or this column about black-white relations, it would come back to me covered in red marks. But when I sent him a poem, he was like, ‘Wow. This is deeper than me.” Reeves laughs heartily, as if astonished by his own luck.

But luck is not something he always had. When I ask him if he always knew he’d be a writer, he says that from a young age he began writing poems literally out of necessity.

“Growing up I was poor and couldn’t afford to give the other kids birthday presents,” he explains, “so I wrote them poems instead. I would gather scraps of newspaper, or write something myself, and present it to them. That is how I got my start.”

Poet Roger Reeves teaching in a classroom at HSPVA. 

Yet he was not always certain what the future held.

“There are a lot of things I’ve wanted to be,” he qualifies. “At one time or another, I’ve considered becoming an architect,” he starts counting on his fingers, “an Air Force pilot, an engineer. Heck, now I’m thinking about getting my J.D. and becoming a law professor.”

How much smoother legal tracts would read, it hits me, if poets wrote them.

“I always tell young writers,” he goes on, “learn a lot about something other than writing. Not only will you have something to fall back on, but it’ll provide you with a ton of content. Take my friend Katherine Larson, for example. I met her in Krakow. She’s a molecular biologist and a wonderful poet, but what’s so great is how seamlessly she connects the two. I like to say, you can be a writer second.”

Does Mr. Reeves feel, then, that creative writing degrees and MFA programs have a tendency to limit writers in their scope and pull them away from the outside interests that would make their writing, well, interesting?

“Not at all,” he says. “I am a big supporter of such programs. I think we need more of them, and more funding. The arts- writing chief among them - are as crucial to society and to the human experience as putting up another building, or medicine. Perhaps not as urgent or pragmatic, but the arts satisfy as central a need.”

When asked what he thinks of HSPVA’s Creative Writing program, he answers in the positive.

“I’m really quite impressed,” he admits. “A lot of these students are thinking at the level of sophomores and juniors in college, even graduate students. If I were teaching them, I would introduce them to literary theory - Derrida, Saussure, and such - and psychoanalysis, and see how they respond to it. It’s a different way of thinking that would be of interest to the more creatively-minded students. And your program has plenty of those.”

Ms. Switek points out a tendency of students in other disciplines to dismiss Creative Writing as a pseudo-art area, given its position as the youngest art area at HSPVA. It is at this point that Mr. Reeves, a mild-mannered man, leaps to the end of his proverbial tether.

“Of course literature is as much an art as any other,” he insists, halfway between a sneer and a whisper, “and to say otherwise is fascist.”

It may seem that Mr. Reeves spends all of his time writing and decrying the extreme authoritarian Right, but he stresses equally the importance of reading.

"I have always read voraciously,” he proclaims. “I was a big learning kid. I was really into quantum physics in high school. But lately I’ve been more into Ezra Pound, Terrance Hayes. I think I’ve read all of Haruki Murakami’s novels, and I just love that inventiveness. Novels are really important to me. I can’t write without reading. I’m a word man. Every morning I read for an hour or two. When I work on a poem first drafts or revisions I am invariably surrounded by books of all kinds. You’re always interacting with a lineage, reordering information and ideas and putting them into new contexts. It’s no secret that books are made of other books.”

Although he is a meticulous craftsman, one does not get the impression that Roger Reeves is full of secrets. He is a cordial, straightforward man. He is very generous with his time; too generous, in fact: I am running late to my physics class. I ask him before promptly running off, as gratefully as I can, if he has any final word of advice for young writers who are still navigating the early waters of their craft. Indeed, he does.

“Whenever someone tells you not to write about something,” he says, summoning with mischief the words he bestowed on us during his last visit, “go straight home and write about it.”