Fogged Clarity Podcast

Will Oldham aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy covers Leonard Cohen’s “Hunter’s Lullaby”.

Will Oldham is a musician and actor living in Louisville, Kentucky. Since 1993, he has released over twenty albums as Palace Brothers, Palace Music, Palace Songs, and the pseudonym under which he has recorded for the past seventeen years, Bonnie “Prince” Billy. As an actor, Oldham has appeared in the films Eden, Pioneer, New Jerusalem, Junebug, Wendy and Lucy, and Old Joy, among others.

A conversation about life, and living in the world, with one of the finest musicians of our time. Thanks to Michael McDermit, a full transcription of this audio interview can be found below.

TRANSCRIPTION

Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This evening, I’m pleased to be joined again by my friend, Will Oldham. Will acts in films under his own name and records and performs music under the name Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. He lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky. Will, thanks for coming back to talk.

Will Oldham: Ben, thanks for asking me back into your conversational world.

BE: Absolutely. It’s a pleasure. So, you said something in our last talk, about two years ago, that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately as I continue to grow, change, and recognize patterns of potentially destructive thought in myself. You said, “There are ideas that used to be in my head that were a hell of a lot better than ideas that I’ve recently had in my head, and I could do well to spend some time and energy now getting back to those ideas that have been patiently waiting.” I wonder, in the time since you said that, if you’d been able to get back to those better ideas, and I’m curious what revelations, breakthroughs, or setbacks you’ve had lately in regard to your existential outlook?

WO: It’s funny, you know, anytime you get a chance to bump into somebody’s reality, you never know what you’re gonna find, and that includes our own realities. I was looking at photographs today of my mom’s house throughout our lives and mindsets were things I could not necessarily recognize. I could recognize people, but I don’t know who exactly those people were or when the photograph was taken. And I don’t know–I do–I imagine, a fair amount of returning to ideas, although that’s also–do you think that you’re the same person that you were twenty years ago in any way?

BE: I think the core has remained the same, but I think how I perceive that core–and myself as a human being and a participant in this world–has changed vastly.

WO: Do you think it’s healthier to recognize yourself from twenty years ago or healthier to not recognize yourself from twenty years ago or from when you were five years old or twelve years old?

BE: I think when I think of myself at that age, I was more intuitive and living more purely, and I think that’s all I can recognize about that. At five years old, that’s pre-pollution, pre-exposure to the chaos in a lot of senses. I can go back fifteen years and look at a poem I wrote and know that’s how I was thinking of those things then. Those are good markers, but I don’t think you have to take anything or give anything to an identification with a past self. It’s just that: a past self.

WO: It is. It’s a past self. Sometimes I wonder if I’m potentially too connected, that it’s too much of an unbroken chain. Or if I’m fooling myself in thinking that it even is.

BE: I’ve been thinking a lot about meta-cognition lately, and recognizing patterns. Right now in my life, I’ve got some of the darkness that’s creeping in again, and I know what it is, and I know what’s causing it, and I recognize it, and still it hurts. To me, that feels very much like the old Ben. The haunting is the same. I don’t want to recognize that again. I think we’re all unbroken chains, but I think we can choose to forget the already established links.

WO: When I meet folks who spent a significant amount of their childhood or youth or any other part of their life as, for example, fundamentalist Christians who are no longer or, at the present, aren’t, I wonder how much they recognize themselves.

Across the street most mornings

the field’s far patch looks shorn

The light has a brilliant edge

that evens across the grass

But it’s not cut, really

This morning though the whole of it

is brown with billets and I remember

I lost you

I took the blade of my crazy

and cut us down

Now the birds come for the confused insects

They eat the field           They fly away

Martha Serpas is the author of three collections of poetry: Côte Blanche (New Issues), The Dirty Side of the Storm (W.W. Norton), and 2015’s, The Diener (LSU). Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. Active in efforts to restore Louisiana’s wetlands, she co-produced Veins in the Gulf, a documentary about coastal erosion. She teaches at the University of Houston and serves as a hospital trauma chaplain.

I think, in the end, we must just fall

under the weight of all

our undigested measures

The brown anole

on the green banana leaf

tugging at its sleeve

drawing the skin into its boat-shaped mouth

sipping it really

like hot coffee and then gulping a second raft of scales

I’ve seen its yellow diamonds shine

for decades now but missed

how slow its first loosed steps are, how vulnerable

it might be to a bird

or a human child

who could lift it easily by the tail

like a kite

Martha Serpas is the author of three collections of poetry: Côte Blanche (New Issues), The Dirty Side of the Storm (W.W. Norton), and 2015’s, The Diener (LSU). Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. Active in efforts to restore Louisiana’s wetlands, she co-produced Veins in the Gulf, a documentary about coastal erosion. She teaches at the University of Houston and serves as a hospital trauma chaplain.

I press a lathered washcloth across your chest and belly. So this is all our lives have been

leading to. Retching fills the bathroom air. Reaching above my head, I open the window,

drawing the scent of sweet alyssum, like honey, like stillness after rage. Hush. You’re

talking nonsense. I lift your elbow to clean beneath your arm, and again, a gust of

musk. I’ve lost it. As if the search was over or had never begun. As if you’d been set

loose on the wind like ashes. But you’re right here. It’s this house. Those eyes, cloudy,

almost blue, following my hand as it glides toward your groin, which, for me, for the

first time, feels unseemly—to be washed, yet to be exposed, since, between them, there

is no distinction. Who speaks for you now? Then the silence of waiting, though an

answer will never come, for what can you say when even the truth is unbelievable?

Water dripping from the cloth, chiming in the tub, drumming on your chest, brings

me back into my flesh. Thank goodness the smell of you is gone, outside rushing in.

Korey Williams holds a B.A. from Illinois Wesleyan University and a M.A. from The University of Chicago. He is currently a poetry candidate in Cornell University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. His work appears in OFZOOS, Glitterwolf, Colloquium and Assaracus.

“People always say they’ll write [letters], but they never do.”

—Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Today, M.,

I rode the S59 bus to Sayville,

that typically kinder

iteration of our one-traffic-light

hyphenated station-name hometown,

and though I wasn’t looking for him

I did the Catholic

gestures when I noticed the statue Jude,

patron of dashed-hope causes,

near what developers call, lamely, a wooded area

between the station

and the Sun-Vet Mall—

not wooded area but wilderness slivers

you called them the one time

you visited Sayville. You

and your mother weren’t speaking,

just like now, and she forgave

you nothing: not the screen door

you broke leaving once, not the glass bottle

she broke once, aiming for your head.

In the taxi on your visit to Sayville

we talked about legends we’d heard:

how the Sayville founders

came from Salem—

kindly witches, keen believers

in saints, and mostly people

we, blessedly, didn’t know.

My mother babysat her sister, the dying one,

the arguer, the doubter, the prankster.

In the winter

to the telemarketers

my mother’s sister would say in a sweet voice,

have a nice day,

don’t fall on the ice!

before putting the receiver down.

In the taxi during your only visit you and I

played the game

of pointing out where

we might work

had we stayed on Long Island.

It didn’t last long,

the game.

There was a school, a hotel—

check, check, goose.

Neither of us could quite

see ourselves

bussing the catering hall.

And the strangely desolate

playground—

did we ever entertain any

idea about our own progeny?

A bench, two swings, more

wilderness slivers…

When we walked

up by ourselves

on the highway past the water tower

and the “weekly trips to Florida” van,

someone began heckling you

from a car, citing your tattoos.

Write to me, tell me

what you heard them say…

I don’t think we forget so

much as edit, a redirect of

lines and roots, and then say

so “this is what I remember.”

You have proved them wrong

and didn’t die at thirty, even at forty.

My mother never got the last word

with the doubter prankster, but that’s another poem.

I think our fathers would’ve been friends;

whenever their women and children

tell stories, the fathers play the ghosts.

So. This and that. And—on the same visit, because

you hadn’t seen one in years,

and maybe already missing the city,

an anthill filled you

for five seconds with wonder,

and send me your street address,

please, in Rockaway Park.

Send me burrs from the dunes,

splinters or dust from whatever’s

left of the boardwalk.

Michael Tyrell is the author of the poetry collection The Wanted. His poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2015 and The Traveler’s Vade Mecum (Helen Klein Ross, editor; Ren Hen Press, 2016). He teaches writing in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

In Genoa, the city where the Mary Celeste

never arrives every day,

the hour to become a ghost isn’t necessarily noon—

it’s when the young American student named Hemingway

reads, in the plaza,

The Collected Stories of her namesake—

reads the story of the white elephant hills again,

the story of the bickering lovers who say, Please, please, please,

if only they can keep the child out of their words

it will never be born,

the hills along the Ebro

like skin through a fire-screen of trees.

*

Our itinerary claims

a stop    a stop    a return—

it’s the vessels we have to trust,

the vessels always blameless,

like the Mary Celeste, amber alcohol

lozenges cached below deck,

its investigators whose verdict said

mutiny, fever ship—

*

Please, please, please, we’ve said to each other,

please: stop the tiff,

prolong the delirious thrust,

your carry-on you forgot at the Nice railway

must be in Firenze now.

Somewhere on the train here,

the languages changed and the ocean changed its sex.

I think you want me to be

a character from another story,

someone who goes missing

and can be suitably mourned,

but the hills in Genoa look too

green to be elephants—

it’s like Papa’s writing this

in the wrong universe,

no child to argue about,

and the future, as always, a ghost ship,

we can board it only

when we’ve shed some mutinous skins,

La mer becoming il mare

Michael Tyrell is the author of the poetry collection The Wanted. His poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2015 and The Traveler’s Vade Mecum (Helen Klein Ross, editor; Ren Hen Press, 2016). He teaches writing in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

It won’t be personal, though you will smell them for a week, their amphetamine whiteness

on everything. You were nothing to them. You were a kind of money. You were a mine or a

cave. You were in fact empty, a dispossession. Unguarded and perhaps even abandoned, it

might have seemed to them, when they pried open your window and slid through like minks.

The air in your room is silver, and dawn is just beginning to streak the bed pink and white.

How quiet the sheets are without you in them. And the room itself like a stage set from an

old Western. The burglars in their skinny jeans, alert as deer, are still a little high. The smell

of the drug is on their hands as they touch your clothes. In your underwear drawer, beneath

the cottons and the one fine piece of raw silk, the white boy with the tremor palms your

mother’s diamond pendant. The other one, in your closet, searches for the gold beneath the

coats. Outside the ponies rustle through the mint leaves. A little dog barks. Things are

disappearing, things that you will miss, other things that you will forget about. Your laptop

disappears. A beautiful rawhide briefcase. All of your luggage. When the burglars have

finished, they walk out casually through the front door, which they leave open behind them.

The door stands open all morning like a white bird flapping one wing. When you return you

will find, on the floor, a photograph under your heel. It is a photograph of yourself

at nineteen, your hair wild, the pupils of your eyes round as pennies. You’re lost. You’re

standing next to a man who does not love you, smiling at someone you’ve just betrayed.

Camille Norton’s book of poems, Corruption, was a National Poetry Series winner and was published by HarperCollins Perennial in 2005. Her work appeared in the The Best American Poetry 2010. A frequent collaborator with visual artists and composers, Norton is a Professor of English Literature at University of the Pacific and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at Harvard University in 2015 and 2016.

At the gate     I told the blond ranger a man headed

straight into me as if he’d knock me down

or walk right through my body a door     She smiled

said for some it’s a meeting place     I had to run a long way

to reach the tiny buildings for them to grow to a size

I could enter      At the police station they already had

the facts I’d given     I asked the cops to check

if intruders were in a yellow house I’d lived in fifteen

years ago on Summerlin wondered how I would

ever be safe the lock on the back door unstable

Lots of calm cops assigned to me & I was set on a dais

to be questioned      One cop pulled out box after box each

one labeled “Box of…” something like Box of the Underworld

but not underworld the words were of this world

like Box of Sit in the Car Box of Cloaks for the Traffic

Box of Actual Labor Box of Temporary Relief Box of

Smallest Efforts Box of Matches Box of Repair Methods

Box of Humdrum Box of Overnight Temperatures Box

of Nuts & Bolts Box of Oxygen but not that not those

& the cop would announce each box by its name labeled

on the side in magic marker      then ask me a question

from the box     & houses were faraway though plentiful

as if I were in a field in a painting     perspective made

everything small & distant

Once in a game on a make-believe desert island I wouldn’t

save anyone     I let them all fall off into the carpet that was

the ocean   I was trying not to drink again but did

disappearing into other rooms      I could feel them willing

me to scream quietly & be caught which was hard

to resist    the weight of their wanting.

Kelle Groom is the author of a memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster) and three poetry collections, most recently Five Kingdoms (Anhinga Press). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Her awards include a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Prose. She is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, and is Director of the Summer Program Workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

He did not go far, and the journey was long.

It seemed his quest was to enact the shadow

of a distant ridge, until it was the distant ridge

that became somehow the shadow of him.

This freed him to swaddle an entire stone,

to be a cloak, to gown the gray granite of a cog

in a mountain’s machinery, to be the skin of it,

to feed it such moisture as he could sift

from rain and snow and wind. He was happy.

Everything he thought became his being.

Everything was the same. He knew his place

and his place was everywhere he could feel.

The fire that killed him released his spirit,

and a woman breathed it and became

his grandmother, who planted a moss garden

behind her house. At first he did not know why

he loved the place so much. Then the wild lichen

that had affixed itself to the ear of a stone rabbit

spoke to him in a tongue he understood: a calling.

Speak of the silence, say nothing not a secret

to the world. Kiss the earth for all your life.

Robert Wrigley has published nine collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Anatomy of Melancholy (Penguin, 2013). His poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The Atlantic, Barrow Street, and The New Yorker, and were included in the 2003 and 2006 editions of Best American Poetry. Wrigley’s honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Idaho State Commission on the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine, the Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, and six Pushcart Prizes. From 1987 until 1988 he served as the state of Idaho’s writer-in-residence.