David Mason

Glasrud Lecture brings David Mason

Seth Kelly
Contributing Writer

Thursday marks the return to Moorhead of former MSUM English professor David Mason, a celebrated and decorated poet, memoirist, and…librettist?!  Mason was recently named Colorado’s Poet Laureate, and his breathtaking prose and no-nonsense poetry have found homes in “Harper’s,” “The New Yorker,” “Poetry,” and “The Nation,” to name a few. I recently had the privilege of interviewing him about his development, his process and his versatility across genres:

HPR: By my records, you taught for nine years at MSUM. Knowing that you are a well-traveled writer in general, in what ways have your experiences specific to here followed you into future endeavors?

DM: The first thing to say is that I worked with a lot of wonderful people in Moorhead and made friends who remain among the best I have. I learned a lot about teaching as well as the literature and art of the region, including poets like Tom McGrath, Tim Murphy, Jim Moore and others. It was an MSUM faculty member, Mark Vinz, who published my first chapbook of poems—along with a collection by Bob King, who used to teach in Grand Forks and now lives here in Colorado, so a lot of my writing life got kick-started while I lived in Moorhead. One of my poker buddies told me I only moved away because I had no imagination and needed real mountains to look at and walk in. He had a point. But I have deep roots in the West, and that means a lot to me.

HPR: You have published award winning books in multiple genres. In what ways do your approach and habits differ when you shift into different modes?

DM: I’m a writer, and have been since I was 20 years old. I write poems, stories, essays, reviews, memoirs and when I can’t think of anything to write I try translation. For the past fifteen years it seems there have always been several books going at once, and I come to each folder when I feel I’m ready to work on that project and not another. Now that I also work with a composer and we have a lot of new projects and forthcoming productions, some of the energy comes from other people—they need the work by such and such a date, they need revisions, etc. I am not these days inclined to sit at the desk every day. In fact, I’m more inclined to do anything else, and let the energy for writing come to me in fits of urgency, when I do the best work. I think I have learned to let silences happen and not panic at them, to trust that the unconscious is always working and that the real work will happen when it needs to. For 20 years I have taken deadline work from editors, and now I’m trying to take at least a year off from that.

HPR: Your memoirs have very rich, poetic prose. Do poetry and prose strengthen each other symbiotically, or do you sense them battling at times?

DM: Thank you for saying that about the prose. Yes, I think poetry and prose inform each other in wonderful ways. Prose can teach you about the deep structure of stories, poetry about economy and pace. Over many years of practice you begin to sense what genre you’ll be working in. I don’t go rapidly back and forth between them, but shift according to some tidal rhythm I feel inside. When writing poetry, the job is to exorcise the prosaic. Oddly, the same might be true when writing prose. As Richard Hugo said, “Once language exists only to convey information, it is dying.”

HPR: Are there any specific poets or memoirists who you would list as influences?  Any specific texts?

DM: My memoir is an odd affair, worked at for 16 years in fits and starts, changing with the passage of time. I would never say I have a knack for memoir, and only pulled the book together out of compulsion—I just felt that such a big, important part of my life had to be shaped on paper somehow. It is not really a confessional memoir—I left out a lot of things I thought might hurt other peoples’ feelings, and a lot of the best memoirists don’t really give a damn about that. Instead, my story is about the passage of time, the circularity of experience, the continuity and loss involved with friendship. I deeply admire The Flight of Ikaros, by Kevin Andrews, the books by my friend Patrick Leigh Fermor, some of the work of Bruce Chatwin—none of these is confessional in the contemporary sense, but involved with story and memorable prose.

HPR:  You have also written award winning librettos.  How were you drawn to this craft?  Do you have a musical background?  Please help me wrap my head around this!

DM:  I wrote the libretto for Lori Laitman’s second opera, “The Scarlet Letter,” based on the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, because she got a commission to do it and asked me to join her. Smartest professional decision I ever made—to latch on to a great American composer and watch her go. You can find information about this opera at a website: http://www.scarletletteropera.com, including some studio recordings of the music with piano accompaniment. A full professional premiere of the opera will will be announced in the spring of 2011 at Opera Colorado in Denver, stage directed by Beth Greenberg of New York ‘s City Opera. A really big deal. I’m quite proud of my libretto, which will be published next year in book form. While I played piano and cello (badly) in childhood and sang in a few choirs, I am not in the least bit sophisticated about music. I do have a good feel for stories in verse, though, for drama in verse, and Hawthorne’s story is perfect for opera, allowing me to think of ways to use a chorus, or a witch’s song, or a lullaby, or a love duet. Our second major project together was an oratorio, Vedem, which premiered last May in Seattle. It will be out on CD from Naxos in May, and a film, “The Boys of Terezin,” making use of our project, will premiere in Seattle about the same time.

This is just gorgeous music for a children’s choir, two adult soloists and four instrumentalists. I am so, so proud to be part of it. For the libretto I simply used six poems by boys who had been interned at Terezin in the war, and wrote a dramatic script linking them and making use of different characters and tones. The magic happens when Lori goes to work on it. She calls me up from New York or Maryland, sets the phone on the piano, and my words come to life in wholly unexpected ways. I usually feel reduced to quivering jelly when I hang up the phone. Our next big project is to turn my own book, Ludlow, into an opera, and that is off to a good start. Generally the librettist has to do a lot of distilling and to reimagine the lyric voices appropriate for the story. Collaborations like this are a blast, and all the good fortune that comes with them is pure gravy.

HPR:  Might you elaborate a bit on your writing process (for any genre, really)?

DM:  Writing process. Hm. Less said the better, I think. Mainly if I am not writing for a commission, I just wait for a certain energy to build up inside me that seems to be heading in a particular direction and follow where it goes, calling on everything I have ever learned or studied or lived to help me find the trail.

HPR:  Do you have any pet peeves when reading?

DM:  Wordiness is becoming a pet peeve. Damn near anything can be improved with cutting. I’m still learning this one. Too many contemporary poems go on longer than they need to. Self-importance is another. The letter “I” gets boring very fast. Prose that is not written to be read aloud, to come off the tongue with vitality and ease, usually feels like a waste of time to me.

HPR:  Sage advice if ever there were any. Could you impart any advice for developing and established writers?

DM:  Don’t be in a hurry to publish. Pay attention to your friends, your family, your job, your food, your drink. Learn to love. Try to stay at least relatively healthy—I know it’s hard, but try. No point in getting thrown out of the game any earlier than necessary.

HPR:  I apologize for this one, but at the risk of over-simplifying, what are the ultimate goals of your writing?

DM:  This one is hard. Robert Frost said (I’m paraphrasing) that the whole of ambition was to lodge a few poems where they will be difficult to get rid of. I like that. I feel like my soul is bursting with voices, and I just want to let them out as gracefully as I can. I also know that the real life is never the life a stranger will find in my poems or stories. That’s okay. I want that stranger to find some eloquence in my work, perhaps even some delight. If I’m really lucky, perhaps some readers will find passages they cannot forget.

HPR: I’d score that a perfect 10!  Thank you for your time.

On Thursday, March 24, the ever-humble David Mason will give this year’s Glasrud Lecture, titled “Poetry and the Public,” at 4 pm with a reading from his own work to follow at 8 pm, in room 101 of MSUM’s Coffman Memorial Union.

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IF YOU GO:
What: David Mason gives Glasrud Lecture and reads own work
Where: MSUM’s Coffman Memorial Union, Room 101
When: Thurs. March 24, 4 p.m. (lecture) and 8 p.m. (reading)