Many know him as the professor of the usually feared
subject with a fancy name: English Skills in Cultural Communication. The
less-known reality is that Stephan Delbos is also a poet, playwright,
translator and essayist whose works have been published in numerous literary
journals. He is also a founding editor of the online literary journal B O D Y,
and he previously worked with The Prague Post and The Prague Revue. The
following interview reveals more about this New England-born man of letters.
When I enquired my fellow students if they have any
questions for you, most of them were personal ones from the female portion…
Does it make for easier lecturing when one naturally attracts attention?
(Smiles)
I just do my thing. Someone told me one time I was intimidating. I was
surprised, because obviously I don’t think of myself that way. But
pedagogically, I think it’s best to orchestrate your relationship with students
and clarify expectations early on – because if we’re best buddies from the
start, how can we get anywhere?
Also there appeared a request for the link of a movie
you were featured in.
Oh,
that... (looks down, smiling) Actually I don’t have a copy either! Hopefully
it’s been relegated to the bowels of cinematography. I saw it premier at
Světozor, but I lost touch with the producers. It wasn’t an amazing movie – but
it was a good experience and something I wanted to try. Filming is boring
though; a lot of waiting around for the lights to be arranged.
Out of interest, what are the origins of your surname?
French.
My great-great-great-grandfather’s name was Du Bois – which means “from wood,”
as in, a woodsman – and when he emigrated to the States his name was
Americanized at Ellis island, as were many foreign names. So I’m French and
German on my father’s side and Irish on my mother’s side.
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| Image credit: Stephan Delbos |
- · Early years
You graduated college with a BA American Literature,
poetry and writing.
Actually,
I majored in English and took classes in creative writing, which got me a
“minor,” or a “focus” in the subject. After that I did my MFA in Poetry. Now
I’m working on my PhD.
Do you recall the first university essays you wrote?
Were they good or did you also need time to sharpen up your argument and polish
your style?
Um...
good question! One early essay I remember was on Robert Lowell’s “Waking Early
Sunday Morning.” I read it a little while back. It was, well... it was clear I
should have taken English Skills. So yes, I definitely needed time to get
better at essay writing.
Besides more and more writing, what helped? Do you have some specific advice?
The
best advice I got was from my uncle. It wasn’t actually advice, but a
statement: “A writer is a reader first.”
What was your motivation for studying what you did at
university; did you have an idea about what job you’d like to have in the
future?
I don’t really consider what I do “a job.” I can’t say I studied English
with the same excitement as I had when I was 7 and said I wanted to become a
fireman. But I’ve enjoyed writing as long as I can remember. I was
writing stories and poems from a really young age and my facility with language
was never matched by my facility with numbers. In other words, math was never
my thing. I wanted to become a veterinarian for a while... I also played jazz
guitar very seriously and was thinking of studying music. But when it came to
deciding on a subject at university, the choice was clear.
A majority of people in the 2nd year are
putting together ideas for their BA thesis. Do you recall what was yours on?
I was
really into the Beats in college, so I wrote on Gary Snyder. His somewhat
ideogrammatic poetry style, and his ecology.
What other pursuits were you engaged in while at
college?
(Smiling, after a while of thinking)
Dissipation. No, I was actually very busy. This was the height of my musical
pursuits, so I was studying jazz guitar, teaching at a music school, and
playing gigs with several bands. I worked at the school newspaper, and was
always publishing ‘zines and poetry pamphlets, and skateboarding and travelling
on Greyhound busses. Also ornithology.
What’s that?
Bird-watching.
Are birds different here than in the States?
Oh,
sure. For example, the gulls here are a smaller version of the gulls in New
England. They’re like gargoyles. And bold enough to snatch whatever you have in
your hands; an ice cream cone, or a cucumber sandwich... The ducks here are
different from New England too. There it’s mostly Mallards. In Port Arthur,
Texas one time I was at a sailor’s watering hole down by the docks and outside
in the parking lot were these huge ducks that had the drooping red chin like a
turkey. We called them “durkeys”.
·
Prague’s English language literary circles
It was also during your undergraduate years that you
came to Prague to study. Why Prague?
There
were other countries I could choose from, like Spain or England. I remember
that people who wanted to go to Spain had to speak Spanish; then London wasn’t
exotic enough. I knew Kafka, and Rilke was the first poet who really affected
me. So that combination was enough to entice me.
And you studied at the Faculty of Arts?
Yes,
but it was kind of a scattering of classes across programs. I also took classes
outside my major, like Food Psychology - that was interesting.
What was the English language literary scene in Prague
like when you arrived?
When I
came back to Prague after finishing my BA, I did some research on the internet
about poetry readings and came upon Alchemy. At that time it was held in a
place called Kenny’s Island. It had a kind of African cartel feel, with owners
from Ghana, I think. The reading was in the basement, which was dark and dank
and swampy-smoky, but it fit the atmosphere, it had a šmrnc. The host Ken Nash
(interviewed in the April 2014 MP, ed. note) was very friendly, the people were
great. And it felt like being welcomed into something that had its own
momentum, which was just what I was looking for.
In 2012, you, Christopher Crawford and Joshua Mensch founded the literary journal B O D Y. How would you define B O D Y – what is its purpose?
- B O D Y
In 2012, you, Christopher Crawford and Joshua Mensch founded the literary journal B O D Y. How would you define B O D Y – what is its purpose?
It’s
an international online literary journal. Its purpose is to find and promote
great writing.
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| Image credit: bodyliterature.com |
Both
realistically and ideally, we’ll still be publishing writing that’s as strong
as what we’ve published so far. Still finding great work, staying active, building
our archive and keeping alive the editors’ tradition of donning velvet cloaks
during the crescent moon to drink sumptuous single-malt Scotch in our secret
tower. Also, we’ll still be hosting events, like our Spring reading series this
May.
Will B O D Y be available also in print form in the
future?
That
is unlikely. I see B O D Y remaining an online journal, which makes it
accessible to everyone with an internet connection. This way we don’t have to
worry about finances and distribution and we can just focus on the writing
without monetizing it and become alienated laborers.
- University life
Apart from working on B O D Y and writing, you teach
at the Anglo American University and of course, at the Faculty of Arts. Did you
want to become a professor or did that happen by chance?
Yes, I
teach at AAU and the Faculty of Arts, technically though I’m not a professor,
but a lecturer. I guess it’s been a mixture of chance and design. I love
teaching.
If you could do BA or MA Anglophone Studies, would
you?
Certainly,
the department is great. The students are motivated and the professors are
brilliant. In general the level is quite high, I think. I’m happy for the
chance to work here.
Before The Musepaper, there was GRASP magazine to
which you contributed fairly regularly. However, it ended when its editors
finished their studies – how do you feel about student magazines?
I had
a few poems in GRASP. I think student magazines are invaluable – they connect
students at the university, and also give the faculty a porthole into the
student community. At American universities, magazines and newspapers play a
major role in establishing the community, while providing an outlet for student
writers.
- On literature
You mentioned Kafka and Rilke to be part of the reason
why you chose to come to Prague. Which of their works impressed you the most
(one from each)?
I'd
read Kafka's short stories in high school and then later as an undergraduate.
They were unlike anything I'd read before and challenged all my ideas about
what fiction should be. They seemed to operate by a completely different
system, with their own logic, which was Kafka's. It wasn't until I came to
Prague and got to seriously study his work that I realized where that sense of
otherness was coming from, that sense of what Deleuze and Guattari call a
"minor literature," and that interesting position of being between
societies, between languages at this moment of intense historical transition.
Today his aphorisms are most interesting for me.
Who introduced you to Rilke?
I was
introduced to Rilke by my older brother, who gave me a copy of the Letters to a Young Poet around the time
I was 16. Of course I fell in love with the lushness of the writing and the
alluring life of the pure artist as Rilke presents it. From there I moved to
the Pocket Edition of his poems, a little pink hardcover that I carried with me
all throughout Europe. It had translations by a number of different people,
including Stephen Mitchell. When I got to Prague I devoured Ralph Freedman's sumptuous
biography, Life of a Poet. By that
time I'd also discovered Rilke's French poems in Al Poulin Jr.'s translations.
He was a great poet and translator from Maine who was a friend of my uncle's.
His I think are some of the best English translations of Rilke. Looking at
Mitchell's translations now, especially with some sense of the German texts, a
lot of early English versions of Rilke are like what Pound called the poems in
his first book, looking back at them years later: Stale cream puffs.
Rilke wrote: "ask yourself in the most silent
hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if
this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this question with a strong,
simple 'I must', then build your life in accordance with this necessity..."
Have you yourself gone through this process? Should one give up writing if
he/she doesn't feel this rather dramatic need?
I
certainly spent my fair share of dark nights puzzling out this demand. Lots of
time alone on trains in the Spanish wilderness, or on the streets of Paris,
having no money and eating a baguette a day, you know, really looking for what
Rilke saw. Whole days at the Rodin museum, the Jardin des Plantes... Rilke was formative partially because of the
seriousness with which he approaches writing. It can be hard to read these
quotes nowadays with a straight face -- irony has become such a part of our
response to and defence against the world. Irony, by the way, is "the gaze
that sees but does not penetrate," according to Rilke. The need he states
here is rather dramatic as you say. I think he's also gently telling Franz
Xavier Kappus that his poetry isn't much good. But from a very practical
standpoint, yes I think this is good advice. As Jack Spicer said, echoing
Dante: "No kid, don't enter here." Given that the financial rewards
for serious writing are virtually nil, given that even the personal rewards are
muted at best since your achievements on the actual page are simply never as
lustrous as they are in your mind (coming from the inadequacies of language),
given that writing necessitates a large solitary space that you build in the
centre of your life, requiring you to be selfish with time and cut yourself off
from society -- at least while you write -- no, I don't think it's a logical
pursuit for anyone who doesn't feel compelled to do it. Then again, what
is?
The aforementioned quotation was taken from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet - do you think
that one can be mentored towards good writing? How?
Yes
and no. Creativity can be mentored, but talent
cannot be taught. In terms of academic writing, absolutely one can be mentored
toward good writing. But in terms of having insight whether for great
criticism, or for creating poems, plays, novels and so forth, I think there
needs to be some spark there already. But actually, an established poet
in the US once told me: just survive long enough and you'll get your laurels. I
would say if you're going to write well creatively, you're going to do it on
your own eventually. Mentors can be invaluable essentially because they save
you time in terms of pointing you in certain directions for reading, or giving
you insight into your own work or the work of others that can been immeasurably
beneficial. So much of writing is developing the critical intelligence to judge
your writing objectively, and so much of critical writing is developing a sense
of the ongoing discourse on your subject and then entering that. But there's no
shortcut to accomplishment.
About Kafka, how do you interpret the feeling of guilt
in The Trial?
For me
the book is about the trial of life that really begins when you're 30. Now that
I've hit that landmark I can understand the truth of that in ways I didn't
understand a decade ago. I believe it was Bataille who said something like
suffering begins when you realize you can't do everything. As you get older you
inevitably move in certain directions that are irrevocable, and become more
involved in society and therefore have to play by those rules in order to get
things done. The guilt is attendant in that from all sides, from people telling
you you're guilty of one thing or another, from doing what you're
"supposed" to do, not what you want to do, from doing what you want
to do, not what you're "supposed" to do. It requires either fortitude
or ignorance to persevere.
- Concluding questions
How do you find time to write your own creations
(poetry, prose)?
For me
it's not really about "finding" time to write. The craft of writing
is so woven into the fabric of my life that it's just something that happens
every day. I've been lucky enough to be able to merge my personal and
professional interests. I'm always working on several projects at once, also my
own poetry is constantly bubbling up. So I usually wake up quite early and
devote the first few hours of the day to writing, before anything else. If it's
translations that day I'll do one poem. If it's my own poetry I'll maybe write
two pages in my notebook -- or have been doing that lately as I'm working on a
single long poem. Or if it's a script I'll work through one scene, or maybe
more depending on what kind of detail work I'm doing. But I certainly believe
that it's necessary to create the space for the work to take place. Like David
Byrne said, if you're not at the bus stop you can't catch the bus. You've got
to stay sharp, stay limber and stay open to the language, and to the
life.
Beside writing, teaching and working on B O D Y, what
are you working on?
I’m
joyfully overburdened. I just finished the first draft of a book-length poem
and I have a book of poetry I’m sending out to publishers. And I have a new
script that's going into production in the fall, so I’m fine-tuning that, and
I’m also working with Tereza Novicka translating Nezval’s ‘The Absolute
Gravedigger,’ which should be published next year. And of course I’m working on
my PhD. I’ll be attending conferences in the fall, so I have some papers to
write. And this summer I plan to write the first draft of my dissertation.
Do you have a notebook or do you write your poems on a
laptop?
I
don’t like writing on laptops. I carry a notebook around, then I re-write on a
typewriter, then finally on computer. Delaying the computer keeps you closer to
the language and establishes a physical relationship between you and each letter
or piece of punctuation.
What do you do when you have ‘writer’s block’?
Writer’s block just means you don’t feel like writing. I don’t believe
there’s a boundary between myself and a blank sheet of paper – you just write.
Where do you see yourself in five years – ideally and
realistically?
I’ve
been meaning to take up fencing, free diving and aeronautics. But certainly
I’ll be writing, teaching, reading, thinking… hopefully with a few more books
on the shelf, and some newly completed projects. My modus operandi has always
been to say yes to opportunities. Now I have the privilege of being selective.
Also I’d like to be looking at the sea more often.
Anna Hupcejová
Follow B O D Y at
twitter.com/bodylit
