Shaun Miller Interviews James Galvin at LARB

An iconic poet of the American West, James Galvin is in the spotlight at Los Angeles Review of Books. The author of eight poetry collections, Galvin joins Shaun Miller to discuss his history, subjects, and process. "Through his portrayal of the natural landscapes and agricultural lives of the Wyoming-Colorado border region, his poetry offers the bitterly hard-won insights that can result from the toughness and vulnerability of such austere ways of living. No one writes better about the Front Range," Miller writes in his introduction. Let's start there:

To define Galvin as a writer of the American West, though, is to ignore the extraordinary range of his poetry throughout his career. While it has remained rooted in the Western landscape, its concerns extend far beyond the tall stands of lodgepole pine and the view of the Medicine Bow. In Everything We Always Knew Was True, his eighth and most recent collection, Galvin delivers some of his most playful and most surprising poems to date, and in so doing addresses subjects such as the paintings of Marc Chagall, the restoration of the Sistine Chapel, and a question posed to Wynton Marsalis by a girl in a small-town Iowa high school jazz combo. The volume also finds the poet returning to the Western landscape, this time in the face of our planet’s impending environmental catastrophe. We are all asking the question: is it too late for humanity to change course? The poet replies that though he may be pessimistic, he hasn’t lost hope. If Everything We Always Knew Was True is any indication, James Galvin is still discovering ways to translate hopefulness into new and uncharacteristic joy. I sat down with Galvin after he participated in a panel on the private and public language of poetry during the LA Times Festival of Books.

SHAUN MILLER: Thanks for being here with me. You know, asking you for this interview gave me a lot of anxiety, because I had read a 1994 interview (in The Iowa Review) in which you said that you don’t like to give interviews because it’s too easy for someone to interpret your response as an opinion rather than as a tentative idea.

JAMES GALVIN: Well, thank you. I’m glad to be reminded that I once remembered to say that. Does that anxiety have something to do with the necessity of utterance? As an interviewee, you have to say something, not necessarily because you feel you have something to say. Well, what is poetry besides the necessity of utterance? Who wants to read a poem that doesn’t have that urgency — the poem demanding that it be written? If it doesn’t have that quality, then we don’t know where it comes from.

Read more at Los Angeles Review of Books.