Quizzes… and Poetry as a Place Where It’s Okay Not to Know
A Conversation between Natalie Shapero and Yanita Georgieva
Yanita Georgieva, Natalie Shapero
Yanita Georgieva: Natalie, there’s so much I want to ask you. But first I need to know: what’s your relationship to pub quizzes?
Natalie Shapero: Hello and it’s so nice to be doing this! For the last few years, I’ve played on a very serious yet also very unserious pub trivia team through Brendan Sargent’s Lucky Guess Trivia, the best trivia in Los Angeles. Our team’s strongest areas have historically been literature, history, and sometimes sports, depending on which sport. Our worst has been anything having to do with the MCU; none of us knows it, and no one has stepped up to take one for the team and just learn who Groot is or whatever.
YG: I love this. I’m relieved and delighted that all the movie moments, space facts, and quotes by abstract expressionists from your poems are actively helping a trivia team somewhere. The reason I ask is because, if I had to describe Stay Dead to someone who hasn’t read it, I’d say it’s a bit like being at an extremely wide-ranging pub quiz where every so often, from the corner of the room, someone will shout out something devastating. Then you have to go back to a question about Willem de Kooning’s biggest rival. I love this device in your work; it keeps the reader on their toes. I’m curious to know how you see the role of trivia in this book. Do you think it helps obscure the truth or amplify it?
NS: The answer to that question changes! Sometimes I think it’s a defence mechanism that distracts from the truth of the poems. Sometimes I think it’s a way of literalizing the idea of defence mechanisms, and that this is the truth of the poem. Sometimes I think it’s the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down; sometimes I think I’m just writing a stealth compendium of the parts of the world I’m obsessed with, and the poems are just noise around that. Not really. But maybe.
YG: I feel all of those things in your work – especially the spoonful of sugar. It makes me think of a line in one of the early poems about why “former conscripts wouldn’t talk about the war. It turned out / to be because nobody wanted to hear it.” How much do you think about tricking the reader into hearing something they don’t want to hear?
NS: Ha, I appreciate this question. I don’t usually think of my poetry as trickery, but that definitely might be a useful paradigm. More often, though, I think of it as the opposite: the heavy stuff in the poem is what the reader might expect. Or if not expect, at least not be surprised by. Just on the theory that a poem (and maybe especially a poem in a book called STAY DEAD with a melancholic colour palette and empty chairs in the desert on the cover) isn’t a casual conversation or a venue for small talk where it would be surprising to bring up something heavy. People have to come to the poem, generally, rather than having the poem come to them, so the poem is talking to a bit of a captive audience. So one way that the poem can reciprocate the audience for their attention is to offer them some surprise, which people like? I think? In theory?
YG: Yes! I think the thing that keeps you really paying attention is not knowing what’s coming. Sometimes you know where you’ll end up (death) but you don’t know how or when it’s going to come. Like watching a film that’s tagged HORROR though the first few scenes feel decidedly not scary, or getting the rug pulled out from underneath you while blindfolded. I think there’s another reason why the rug-pulling is so successful in this book. The speaker generally comes across as quite reserved, so when, once in a while, a very direct truth cuts through the impersonal, it makes the reader feel like they’ve tricked the speaker into revealing something by accident. Does that make sense? It feels like an accident, but of course, it’s no accident. How careful are you about what you will and won’t reveal?
NS: Yes, that does make sense! I like how you’ve reversed the reader and the poems in terms of agency. I do favour poems where there is this big kind of reveal of something intense and ideally somewhat counter-intuitive but still logical. Maybe that’s just basic principles of storytelling. In terms of what the poems will and won’t reveal, I want them to go hard in one sense, dropping big emotional bombshells and all that. But also I keep them pretty cagey as to the underlying narrative circumstances. I want their emotional content to be potentially applicable to a spectrum of circumstances. And I want to be able to write about significant tough stuff without having to tell my whole life story (pro-privacy) and also to write about big feelings in the everyday without having to take the reader too much through the quotidian (anti-boredom).
YG: I’m glad you brought up privacy. In some ways, that’s the word I most associate with you and your work. It makes me think of something you said in an interview a couple of years ago about how, when you moved to LA, you wanted to do the most LA thing ever: be on TV. You then not only got on TV but ended up winning Wheel of Fortune. In some ways, that’s probably the most “visible” you’ve been with their average of 7-8 million viewers per episode. I’d love to know how that experience has changed your relationship to privacy, both on and off the page. Also, what came first: the chicken (being on TV, acting) or the egg (the preoccupation with acting in your work)?
NS: Well, I’ve been thinking this week about the affinity between writing and acting because I’ve been seeing a bunch of really nice remembrances of Tom Stoppard, who recently passed away. One of the first, like, real adult engagements with literature I had was when I performed in a student production of his play The Real Thing as a first-year college student. I was 17 and looked 12; I played the kid. I don’t see performance as at odds with privacy; even on a game show where you are “yourself,” you’re still inhabiting a persona and not presenting yourself as you “actually are” (at least that’s my experience….can’t speak for everyone, obviously!). By the way, I was on Jeopardy! too, earlier this year. It is similar to Wheel of Fortune except it has an exclamation mark at the end of the title, making it more infinitely dorky to write out.
YG: Oh wow, I didn’t realise you were on a national quiz show tour! How did you feel the second time round, exclamation mark and all? I like to think of all these different hats you’ve worn – TV show contestant, lawyer, comedian, actor, professor – as elaborate research projects that are ultimately in service of your writing, which seems so deeply driven by research. Is that a fair assumption? Or is it just for fun and the poems are a nice bonus?
NS: Jeopardy! was very fun and it does feel pretty bucket list-y to have been on both Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. I hope those TV signals are beaming to wherever my grandparents are. Something I do feel disappointed about is that I did try to prepare for Jeopardy!, just in terms of studying things I didn’t feel like I knew offhand, but now that the show is over, I somehow don’t feel like I know anything more than I knew before. Like recently I was at Desert Christ Park, a biblical sculpture installation out in the Mojave Desert here. There’s this enormous depiction of the Sermon on the Mount, and I asked my partner if he could identify which apostle was which, and he was immediately like, “Well that one is Paul, because he’s bald…” And I just felt like – ugh, that’s the exact kind of thing I would have thought I would know post-Jeopardy! studying: Paul was bald. Yet here I am in the desert, unable to tell Paul from anyone else. I also never learned about boxing, even though I told myself I would.
Regarding how things go together, I guess I will be a dork and say that maybe everything one does is all part of the same inquiry, part of trying to engage meaningfully with the world around and contribute something common and communicate something singular and vibe out amid all the garbage and endeavour to do some things that are useful for someone else?
YG: And this frustration with your inability to learn it all, to know it all, to name all the bald apostles…is poetry a way of rebelling against that feeling? Especially in the context of a book that so actively tries to make us notice everything, to really learn the world: its idioms, its street signage, its plays, its abstract expressionists and their places of death?
NS: Poetry has always been for me a place where it’s okay not to know! It’s something I really appreciate about the space a poem makes — you can traffic in uncertainty, or you can traffic in absolute certainty in one poem and then argue for the complete opposite proposition in the next. We’re lucky that way.
Natalie Shapero is the author, most recently, of Stay Dead, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at UC Irvine.
Yanita Georgieva is the author of Small Undetectable Thefts, which received the Eric Gregory Prize. She was born in Bulgaria, raised in Lebanon, and now lives in London.
