The Case Against Happiness: An Interview with Jean-Paul Pecqueur
Alice James Books: Why poetry?
Jean-Paul Pecqueur: This is my favorite question because it allows me to reminisce briefly about my time in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where I earned my Masters degree. While in Graduate school there, a professor named Harriet Linkin introduced me to the English romantics. In particular, she showed me how Coleridge was all tore up while trying to yoke western metaphysics to a lyrical engine. Coleridge had tremendous intellectual powers, but he ultimately failed as both a philosopher and a poet. Did I want to suffer the same fate? Harriet’s question, which now seems pretty funny, really frightened me at the time. This fear compelled me to think more clearly about the disciplinary histories of poetry and philosophy. So I read some more James and some Hegel; I read more Wordsworth and a lot of Blake. I read and I read and I read.
Now shift forward in time and experience. It was, I believe, through studying the inferential complexities of James’ pragmatic challenge that I became a poet, that I began to fully understand what a poet could do, what the poet’s responsibilities were. In a sense, I understand the poet’s role as being an exemplar—poets are obligated to demonstrate what it looks and feels like to live one’s life as a complex, incomplete human being. The poet is, in other words, a public philosopher, lexicographer, story-teller, local historian, and fool all rolled up into one burr-studded horse blanket. Personally, if I walk away from a book of poems, or from a poetry reading, not having experienced this complexity of feeling, if poetry doesn’t effect me vitally, I feel myself gravely cheated. So why poetry? Because poetry, in granting me a fuller access to my life, has become my life.
AJB: The Case Against Happiness is rife with philosophical references. What’s your background in philosophy, if there is one? How has that influenced your style and subject matter—apart from the obvious ways, like knowing how to spell “Neoplatonic” correctly?
JP: I really like this metaphor, “background in philosophy,” not least of all for the possibilities buried in the abstraction. Try to visualize it for a minute. There you are on a hill, a street corner, in the bathtub, and behind you, backgrounding you, is this mysterious thing called Philosophy. What does it look like? Does it have a discernable form? An odor? Are there colors involved? I see viridian. Some violets borrowed from Cezanne. A curtain of vapors and then a deafening white wall. Or maybe it is more accurate to see yourself as progressing through this strange thing, Philosophy, in order to secure your very own negative space, to post your own flag, your personal background, in a shared environment. Inside/outside. Upside/down.
So there is my initial answer to the question. More literally, I came to philosophical reading through religious reading. I had problems, so I sought out solutions. The Bible was nearest to hand, so that’s where I began. However, the gospels soon gave way to Ram Dass, and Ram Dass quickly surrendered to Nietzsche. Later, I learned that Nietzsche had read and profited from Emerson, as had William James. William James, a fellow American, wrote “the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.” I liked the sound of this. James taught me to ask myself—What is the use of that idea? What can you do with it? In a sense, he helped me to understand philosophy as a way of life rather than an academic subject.
When I am writing, James’ pragmatic challenge is always hovering in the background. Someone on the street says, “After they finished horsing around, they began necking.” If I’m awake, I ask myself—How can you use that phrase? The necks of horses. The necks of lamps. Desire. And thus begins a new poem. I only worry about the “Truth” of the matter in the sense that I’m interested in what happens when you make Truth the protagonist in such a soap opera. What are her motivations? What kind of outfit will he wear? If I can tell you a compelling story about this affair, make you laugh and feel sort of lofty, I myself feel happy and kind of excited.
AJB: When asked about what poets or movements influenced you, you said you have stories to tell, but these stories are pretty weird. Tell us a weird story.
JP: It all began on graduation day. My closest friend from college and I had made a compact—immediately after graduation, I was to move to Missoula, Montana and become a poet; he was to move to Mexico and become a Mexican. This was following the first Gulf War. Bret had grown sick of American foreign policy. He needed to get away. I had just finished studying the Lyrical Ballads which solidified my decision to be a poet rather than a philosopher. Our deal was concluded with long walk and a magnum of wine.
Several months later, Bret was down teaching English in Oaxaca, and I was renting a room in a transient hotel in downtown Missoula. This was an ideal situation, as far as I could tell, because I was only a block away from the river and its paths leading to the University. Soon after arriving, I also secured a job as assistant manager at Bob’s Pizza Plus, which was conveniently kitty-corner to the building where I rented my room. I was now ready to be a poet.
Not knowing exactly how to proceed with this new plan, I made a daily habit out of going to the University library and reading poetry. I began with Stevens, and Bloom on Stevens. I still have the notebook in which I copied out exotic words from Stevens’ poems. Here is the list of the E’s: eglantine, exchequering, emprize, effulgent, embosomer. In addition to Stevens, I read Yeats, tried to read Ashbery, and made my way through many randomly selected contemporary volumes.
Other than going to the library to read, or going to work to make and sell pizzas, I mostly stayed inside and wrote. My room consisted of a single bed, a small table with one iron folding chair, a Formica topped counter, and a small, self-standing sink topped by a spotted mirror. The whole room was maybe 200 square feet. One particularly cold evening found me sitting all bundled up in this room looking and feeling like a poet. I had just finished dinner—deer steak pan-fried with garlic on a hot plate—and was beginning to translate a Brecht poem when the door to the hallway opened. In stepped an ill-dressed, manic woman in her seventies or eighties. Though she did not appear physically unhealthy, you could clearly see some trouble in her eyes. As the room was not too large, her single step placed her immediately in front of the sink and mirror. And what does one do when confronted with a sink and a mirror in the late evening? Obviously, one brushes one’s teeth. As she scrubbed away with my toothbrush, I asked her if she was hungry. She said no, but that if I had any sweets she would like some. She really liked sweets. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any candy or cookies, but I did have a great curiosity as to who this woman was, so I invited her to sit in my chair and chat for a while. She sat and we chatted.
Thought I do not remember what we chatted about, I do remember feeling privileged. Being a poet meant that strangers visited your room while you were working on translations of absurd German songs. It didn’t occur to me, until years later, how abnormal my brief stay in that room had been. I was introduced to Stevens and Yeats and Ashbery, as well as to the sentient cockroach man and the man who put all his clothes in the hall and the toothbrush woman and the woman with the hats and the sad boy loitering around the shared bathroom. More importantly for my poetic development, I saw these characters as peopling the same universe—they became analogous in my newly minted imagination. In my small room, I glimpsed something of the infinite possibilities that make up this world and something of poetry’s central role in that making.
