The Landscapes We Carry: A Conversation with Bradley Paul

For Bradley Paul, poetry has always been a way of paying attention—to language, to sound, to the landscapes we carry within us, and to the fleeting experiences we know we cannot keep forever. His newest collection, Plasma, grew out of watching his son discover the world: learning to clap, inventing words, and gradually becoming his own person. The poems preserve those small discoveries while also confronting the losses that come with time, from fatherhood and changing landscapes to the death of a beloved dog.

Paul is the author of three poetry collections, including The Animals All Are Gathering and Plasma. He was also the winner of the 2009 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Fence, Pleiades, and other literary journals. He has also spent much of his career writing for television, with credits including Lodge 49, Animal Kingdom, Better Call Saul, Hawaii Five-0, and Tulsa King. This fall, Bradley spent time at Texas State talking with students and sharing his experience of the writing life—both the work that pays the bills and the poetry that, as he puts it, has always held his heart.

Burgin: When did you first start writing?

Bradley: I got serious about writing poetry when I was in high school. I had always written stories when I was a little kid. The very first thing I wrote was called Day of the Dogs, about some dogs that took themselves for a walk. I wrote it on loose-leaf paper and stapled it inside a manila folder. I took it to my grandmother’s beauty salon and put a price tag on it for 25 cents. And I think somebody might have bought it. So maybe it’s still with one of my grandmother’s former clients in a cabinet somewhere. Beyond that, in high school, I started writing little stories that were a paragraph long. I was 15 and edgy, so I would write these kind of dumb little stories that would always end in somebody dying a violent, gory death. I tried to make them ironic and funny. My English teacher in 10th grade was very much a poet, very into beatnik stuff. He was one of those teachers who made their classroom into this little oasis. There were plants and, like, armchairs he’d gotten cheap somewhere. His classroom was this really cool space where you could go and read poems. One day, after I turned in my journal, he handed it back and he said to me, “You know, you’re screwing around and trying to write these dopey little horror things where people die ridiculous deaths. But you’re actually, you know, you’re a good writer. You’re actually doing something here.” It was honestly the first time anybody told me I was smart enough. But, you know, I was an insecure teenager and I was very touched by it, and I tried not to show it, but he could tell.

Burgin: Those are the best kinds of teachers. What was his name?

Bradley: Gary Blankenberg. In the 11th grade, I didn’t have him as a teacher, but he sought me out, and he wrote down a list of books and said, “Go buy these and read them.” And I did. One I remember specifically was A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It actually changed my life. After that, I started trying to write poems seriously. In 12th grade, he invited me to join something called a poetry tutorial, a class he had made up. This was public school, by the way. There was only one student, me, and the poetry tutorial was basically in a kind of supply closet that had, like, textbooks lined up. It had one desk with a typewriter on it. For that one period, I sat by myself in a room with a typewriter and was told to write.

Burgin: Your whole senior year?

Bradley: My entire senior year. It’s the most important class I ever had because it was the first time somebody said, “Be a writer.” And he took me seriously, and treated me like an adult. At this point, I told him, “I think I want to be a poet, and I love writing poetry. And it’s the first thing that’s really connected with me and makes sense.”

Burgin: What an opportunity as a young person. And to discover that you love writing in that way.

Bradley: I’ve always loved reading poetry more than I like reading fiction. Gary told me, “You’ll never make any money as a poet.” But I didn’t care. I wasn’t thinking too far ahead. This was Cadenceville, Maryland. It’s basically Baltimore, and Gary said, “There is this college, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and they have an honors college, and there’s a great creative writing program there.” I’d never heard of Chattanooga, Tennessee, but I applied, and I got in, and they gave me a scholarship. My grades were OK, but not great. But they saw that even though I goofed off in high school and was not a serious student, I was very serious about writing.

Burgin: So many times it just comes down to one person or one place believing in you to make all the difference.

Bradley: At UT Chattanooga, there was a professor named Richard Jackson, and he ran this amazing poetry program. I just got very wrapped up in it, and I met my wife. I got into an MFA program when I was 23, straight out of college. I was very serious about poetry, and that’s how I wanted to live. I was drawn to it because I could be as expressive and weird as I wanted. I was very interested in the sound of language, probably because I listened to music way more than I read books. There is a natural segue into poetry, and I like its lyrical, non-narrative nature. That said, I always loved movies, too.

Burgin: Tell me some more about how you transitioned from being a struggling poet and a professor to being a TV writer and published poet.

Bradley: I’ve loved television since I was little. The very first show I truly loved–I was five years old when it debuted–was Three’s Company. In a way, it felt like they were my friends and I was hanging out with them. I loved watching TV. And I thought, wow, one day I’m going to move to Santa Monica where I’ll get a two-bedroom apartment for three hundred dollars. That was their rent. They always had to make rent.

Burgin: That show used to drive me crazy because John Ritter’s character Jack was always getting in trouble for making assumptions. I was always yelling at the screen.

Bradley: Yeah, the misunderstandings, the things taken out of context. And I always thought it was hilarious. And, you know, the fact that John was also funny. It was a great show.

Burgin: So you mentioned this a little bit before, but obviously, like you quickly figured out, you weren’t going to be able to make a living as a poet.

Bradley: For a long time, I really wanted to be a professor, but I was an adjunct for a long time. The more I started learning about the sort of trends in academia, the more I saw that some people could end up what they call an adjunct emeritus. If you wanted to be tenure-track, you didn’t have much control over where the jobs were. I didn’t want to pick up and move my family or my wife to a random place I had no connection to. I think at some point I realized I just wanted to give it a shot at making money writing because that’s what I wanted to do.

Burgin: And you did it. You’ve had a great career in TV writing. Lodge 49, Animal Kingdom, Better Call Saul, Hawaii Five-0, and you currently write for Tulsa Kings, starring Sylvester Stallone.

Bradley: Writing for TV is where I ended up making a living, but my heart has always been with poetry.

Burgin: You’ve been publishing poems since high school and have written several poetry collections, including The Animals Are All Gathered, which won the 2009 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Tell me about this newest collection, Plasma.

Bradley: I wrote most of these poems after my son was born, and that was a life-changing event, obviously. My first two books are mostly short, lyrical poems. Very image-oriented, although I do try to include some narrative forms. I wrote these new poems while watching my son learn to live in the world and being amazed by his daily realizations. One day, when he was probably six months old, he was lying on his little mat, and I was over him, and we were just kind of playing, and he was laughing. And as he was moving his hands all around as babies do, he just hit his palms together, and he stopped, and he looked at his hands like, “What just happened?” And he did it again. He discovered clapping, and I watched it happen in front of me. And then he just started clapping and laughing. I thought, wow, I am watching a human being discover this very basic thing for the first time. It was very profound. The first section of this book is subtitled “Moments of Intrigue and Language Acquisition.” Because I’m a poet, language and sound mean so much to me, and watching this little human being obtaining language, bit by bit, was amazing. What he said and did as a toddler fascinated me. And now, things he says as a young adult. I got to see the evolution, the evolution of the personality, of his particular style of speaking.

Burgin: I particularly like the section ELEVEN QUESTIONS ON THE DEATH OF ANIMALS.

Bradley: That’s my poetic take on kids asking questions constantly. How do you do this? How do you do that? You know, what kind of this, what is that? And so all the poems in that section are: what kind of ____ are you?

There are some other ones in there where I talk about the loss of language. My son called the remote control, the grumote. He did that up until he was six. I loved hearing him say “where’s the grumote?” I knew that one day he would stop saying it. I almost lived in fear of it. You don’t want him to talk like a four-year-old his entire life, but a lot of the book is about the temporariness of not only bad things, but also good ones.

Burgin: The idea that we can capture those feelings into poems before they slip away is everything.

Bradley: A really meaningful poem to me is Gerald Stern’s Leaving Another Kingdom. He references this concept of building up these little kingdoms, these little experiences, these moments in which you have this estate that’s like intellectual or emotional, or even a world you live in. Whether it’s a neighborhood or your actual home. But eventually, because we all keep moving through our lives, one way or the other, you have to leave that kingdom. It’s something beautiful that you love, but you can’t live in these little kingdoms all your life. I left the kingdom of my four-year-old. It has to be that way. I love that, but you know, you feel grief for these losses.

Burgin: He can’t stay a child forever.

Bradley: Right, it’s temporary. Sometimes, now, but I will be sitting in our living room with my wife and my son and our dog, and I’ll think, this is my golden age, you know?

Burgin: My son just turned 21. Time moves fast.

Bradley: Right! He’ll grow old. We’ll grow old. I loved being a kid at my grandparents’ house. They’ve passed on, and that house is gone, but my grandmother’s kitchen still lives in me. I wonder: will this still live within my son? I grew up in Baltimore, and it’s a very quirky, unique city with a very particular look to the landscape. The way that architecture is, the way the air feels, and the way that people talk. All that is still very much something I carry inside of me. One day when my son was three or four, I took him to the Santa Monica Pier. We rode rides, and I got him an ice cream cone. And we went out, and we sat at the edge of the pier, and we ate ice cream. You can look out over the water and see the California coastline going up. I noticed he was just, like, eating his ice cream, looking at the coastline and looking out at the ocean. He was really just observing. And I thought, you know what, this is his, this is a landscape that’s going to be inside of him. And it’s not mine. I can be there, and I think it’s beautiful, but it’s not home to me. This is home to him. This is his interior landscape.

Burgin: Over how many years did you work on this book?

Bradley: Probably four or five years. You have to write about these things. These landscapes. The other thing is, the book is dedicated to Violet and my son, Stellan. Violet was my dog, the first I ever had as an adult. You know, you have dogs and your kids, but she was the first dog I ever raised from a puppy, and I truly loved her. She died two months before my son was born. And I have a picture of my wife lying on the couch, and she’s pregnant. And Violet, she’s in poor health. She’s 13 years old. She’s had kidney failure. We’ve done everything we can to keep her alive. We know that the end is near. But she’s lying on the couch on one of her final days. And I’m like, these are the three people I love, you know.

Burgin: Yeah. I know.