Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Robert Witmer about his book Sunrise, in a Rabbit Hole

Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Robert Witmer about his book Sunrise, In a Rabbit Hole.

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RS: Your book Sunrise in a Rabbit Hole blends narrative, surrealism, polemic, and humour within the frame of prose poetry. What led you to choose prose poetry as the vehicle for such a wide stylistic range, and what freedoms or constraints did the form provide that traditional lineated poetry could not?

 

RW:  First, let me offer a technical explanation and then a more personal one. There is a pretty convincing theory that lyrical poetry emerged from particularly emotive, songlike passages in epic narratives. In other words, the distinction between prose and poetry is not as clear as it might seem. Besides that, I think it was the extreme conventions of some 18th-century views regarding what constitutes a poem that led some writers to create what we now call the prose poem, which is, intentionally I believe, a contradiction in terms. For me, and I think everyone who writes prose poems, the hybrid form is suitable to a wide range of perception and expression, allowing for not only ambivalent form but also ambivalent content, that is, bringing together qualities and meanings that seem to be contradictory.

 

I think that a successful prose poem retains the high-patterning, rhythmic repetition, metaphorical exploration, and emotional intensity of a free verse poem, without the line breaks. The absence of line breaks, for me anyway, puts greater emphasis on the sentence, which in the pieces I write can be anything from a series of fragments to a very long sentence, and often a combination of the two. There are also wonderful possibilities for the use of ellipsis. I like the way the piece can move in one direction only to be cut off suddenly and go in another direction. This also allows for a freer use of humor.

 

It is a difficult thing to explain, but when I am writing one of my pieces, which in my notebooks I call – ironically – Easy Pieces, I feel as if I am able to follow an unconscious flow. Often the theme of a piece emerges only after I have put down a lot of words that are somehow following the beat of their own drummer.

 

 

RS: Your prose often operates through layered allusions, and imagery. How do you navigate the fine line between enriching a piece with hidden references and maintaining a sense of openness, so that readers who may not catch every allusion still find compelling emotional and intellectual pathways into the work?

 

RW: The poet Robert Bly once said that the artist pulls aside some comforting, humanly made veil, so that the face of the universe appears for an instant. That metaphor suggests that the face of the universe, or let’s say, something closely connected to the meaning of life, is veiled in the first place. So, I suppose, the search for that meaning necessarily involves trying to get at what is hidden. All literary texts – poems, novels, short stories, plays, some essays – are hidden behind words.

 

Allusions can enrich a poem by incorporating further meaning, but they do not constitute the entire or even the central meaning of a text. Readers who recognize a reference will not only enjoy making that connection but will also bring to their interpretation of my piece whatever that source (another piece of writing, a film, or maybe something else) meant to them. This should enhance the experience of playing a part in the making of the poem’s meaning, its openness to interpretation.

 

According to the technical definition of allusion, it is not only manifested in words but may establish a conceptual connection as well as verbal one. My own reading experience tells me that you are constantly thinking of other, somehow related things as you read a poem. Again, I think this is at the root of the relationship between the poet, his poem, and the reader – shared experience.

 

So, in the end, it doesn’t really matter whether a reader can say, “Oh yeah, that phrase or that image is drawn from Hamlet or the book of Genesis.” What is important is whatever value my piece might borrow from prior achievements or events to enrich its own value.

 

 

RS: In Glass Houses, the movement from aquariums to Prufrock, from sea-girls to Baltimore buffets, creates a surprising constellation of images that feels both whimsical and quietly disconcerting. What guides your intuition when choosing such images or cultural references, and how does the element of surprise help shape the tone and trajectory of your creative process?

 

RW: That piece began with the image of an aquarium placed in front of a picture window. I thought about how the world outside a living room in an ordinary suburban house, perhaps somewhere in the American Midwest (I grew up in the state of Indiana), would look with brightly colored tropical fish swimming in the air in between the viewer and the scene outside the window. As I wrote, the person looking out the window turned into the sad man in the poem, whose wife has apparently left him. Once there was a man whose relationship with his significant other was troubled, I thought of Eliot’s Prufrock. I taught the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” for many years in a poetry course at my university, and so I remembered the lines about “sea-girls wreathed with seaweed .. till human voices wake us, and we drown,” as well as the image of “a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

 

The ragged claws I believe must belong to some kind of crab, which brought to mind the delicious crab cakes that are a specialty in Baltimore, Maryland, and that led me to the restaurant, and my penchant for alliteration led me to naming the restaurant Benny’s Baltimore Buffet. As I suggested before, the writing becomes a kind of strategic wandering that is something like those uncanny dreams that stick with a person. One thing leads weirdly to another, and often I am surprised by where things go. I have to admit that sometimes, sitting in the park where I do a lot of my writing, after I have composed the first draft of a piece, I read it over and laugh out loud with surprise at what the writing says.

 

A humorous aside: besides the fact that the Eliot poem is a good one, displaying the modernist features that inform much of my writing, and much of all the poetry being written these days, it was one that I often referred to in conversation. Living here in Japan, with some friends who are films buffs like me, I often talk about the films of Akira Kurosawa, in many of which the actor Toshiro Mifune appears. In these conversations, I always recall something I read in a magazine almost 50 years ago when I first arrived in Japan. Apparently, Mifune used to attend parties with a lot of English speakers, and he would often enter the room reciting the lines from the beginning of Prufrock, slightly altered: “Women come and go, talking of Mifune Toshiro.”

 

 

RS: You have spent decades immersed in Japanese poetic traditions, particularly haiku and haibun. In what ways have haikai sensibilities carried over into your prose poetry? Do elements such as seasonal awareness, the discipline of compression, or the haiku-like attention to the ordinary inform the texture and architecture of Sunrise in a Rabbit Hole?

 

RW:  Certainly compression and attention to ordinary things, which are so important to haiku, are part of the sensibilities I bring to my prose poems. Seasonal awareness is there in the sense that I really feel the seasons, so the natural features of a particular season are woven into whatever I see in the world. And as I mentioned before, I do a lot of the writing of early drafts outdoors, in a pretty little park near my home.

 

Actually, it was the writing of haibun, which I began long after I started writing haiku, that led to the writing of prose pieces without a poem attached. In fact, some of the pieces in the book that include a short poem have been published as haibun. Eventually, the prose pieces I was writing began to move further away from anything that might be considered a haibun prose. The strange irresolutions and simultaneous perceptions owe more to my readings of so-called cubist poets like Pierre Reverdy and the surrealists.

 

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RS: Your work invites the reader to become a co-creator, discovering meaning rather than being handed a definitive interpretation. Is this invitation intentional? What do you believe the reader’s responsibility is when engaging with prose poetry that resists closure or certainty?

 

RW:  Yes. I think the reader is always a co-creator with the writer, simply because we interpret what we read, and interpretations vary. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can make a poem mean whatever you want it to mean. Words have particular denotations, which cannot, or least should not, be ignored. And while the connotations of words can vary, the value that connotation adds to meaning is there only if it can be shared.

 

A reader will bring whatever his or her experience might be to the reading of a poem, and as you discover when you talk about poems with other people, it is the connection between the piece and an individual reader’s personal experience that is most interesting and significant.

 

As I always say in the cover letters I writer to editors when submitting some of my work: As much as I enjoy writing this stuff, it is in the end intended for the eyes of interested readers.

 

There is always an element of discovery in anything we really enjoy doing. I suppose this is part of what Heraclitus meant when he said that you can’t step in the same river twice.

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RS: Sunrise in a Rabbit Hole includes social and political polemics woven into lyrical and surreal frameworks. What challenges did you face in integrating contemporary political or social critique into a form often associated with ambiguity and lyric inwardness?

 

RW: Well, I have been accused of being a rather argumentative person, in a good way I hope. I think we need to question constantly the things that many people take for granted. Recently, for example, much has been written about how the early promises connected with social media have shifted to quite critical concerns, and now it seems that the same thing is happening with regard to AI: big promises that will almost inevitably turn into things we need to be very careful with. We need to look critically at what is going on around us.

 

I agree with something Salman Rushdie said somewhere: that all literary writing is unavoidably political in one way or another. But I have neither the knowledge, the ability, nor the inclination to write political or social essays. I prefer to write strange, weirdly humorous, playful but serious stuff that pulls in all kinds of things I have come across in my reading, in rhythmically and figuratively interesting ways. And the social and political polemics come along for the ride.

 

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RS: Humor surfaces throughout your work, sometimes gently absurd and sometimes barbed. What function does humor serve for you in prose poetry—release, revelation, deflection, or something else entirely?

 

RW:  It is all of that and more. In my previous book, Serendipity, there is a section of humorous poems that I introduce with a few quotations. I think they all apply to what I am doing with humor in my prose poems. Let me read some of those quotes.

 

“Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.”
           — Mark Twain

 

“Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.”
           — William James

 

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RS: Your work spans the haiku’s distilled instant and the prose poem’s spacious, meandering expanse—two forms that appear to inhabit opposite poles of poetic possibility. What, for you, is the hidden filament that binds these modes together? And as you journeyed from the haiku’s razor-honed moment to the prose poem’s unfolding terrain, how has this passage reshaped your understanding of what poetic language is capable of holding, revealing, or becoming?

 

RW: As I suggested in my earlier comments, I think that poetry comprises a wide range of possible forms and can make use of all kinds of language: formal, casual, high style, plain style, jargon, slang, dialect. But the big question is: what makes a poem, or perhaps better stated, what composition of words could be considered a poem. The commonly given definition of poetry as “heightened forms of perception, experience, meaning, or consciousness delivered in heightened language” makes good sense to me. Although it is implicit in that definition, I think it is important to emphasize that a poem gives close attention to both sound and meaning.

 

I should say that when I need to choose a category for my pieces when making a submission to a literary journal, I sometimes struggle with the distinction between flash fiction and poetry. In the end, I usually submit my stuff as poetry. Also, more and more journals acknowledge in their guidelines that genre categories can be rather restrictive, and they often allow one to submit pieces as “hybrids,” a term that makes me smile, as the first definition of hybrid given in the OED is “the offspring of two animals or plants of different species.”

 

As far as what holds together the modes of haiku and prose poetry in my own approach to writing, I think the most significant things are compression of expression and the use of juxtaposition of images.

 

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RS: The title Sunrise in a Rabbit Hole conjures a paradox—light blooming in a place of descent, illumination arising where one expects dark shadows . It feels at once mythic, playful, and maybe a little surreal. Tell us the story behind this intriguing title.

 

RW: Although I usually leave it out in emails and it could be missed on the cover of the book because of the way the title is printed, there is a comma after “Sunrise.” The comma is intended to multiply the meanings of the title. Reading the phrase without giving particular attention to the comma, you get the meaning you described: a sunrise as it would be seen in a rabbit hole. As you say, there is something paradoxical about that: light in a place of darkness. In addition, there is the upward movement of the sun at sunrise, as well as the upward movement of a rabbit coming out of its hole at daybreak, together with the downward movement of the sunlight penetrating the opening to the rabbit hole, something like light penetrating a short way into a cave. This, I think, can be connected with the mind and its perceptions and understanding: consciousness, the subconscious, and the unconscious.

 

With emphasis on the comma, there are actually two distinct things: the sun, rising and thereby bringing light to what had been darkness, and a rabbit hole, which, in addition to being the burrow where rabbits live, is figuratively speaking a confusing or nonsensical situation from which it is difficult to extricate oneself. In this figurative sense, the phrase can be used to indicate both favorable and unfavorable situations. Favorably, going down a rabbit hole can mean moving toward something wondrously strange, like much of what happens to Alice in Wonderland, Unfavorably, going down a rabbit hole can refer to something like getting caught up in a conspiracy theory.

 

When sunrise comes to wonderland, it is a marvelously pleasing experience. When sunrise comes to a mind darkened by false information and hateful ideas, it can be happily enlightening. It is my hope that the pieces in my book accomplish both of these things: bringing a measure of pleasure and getting readers to think further about some things that we might prefer to ignore.

 

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RS: Having moved from the brevity and precision of haiku to the expansive, exploratory field of prose poetry, where do you see your creative trajectory heading next? Are there new forms, themes, or experiments that beckon you, or does Sunrise in a Rabbit Hole represent a culmination of impulses you’ve long been nurturing?

 

RW: I still write lots of haiku and I continue to write the kind of prose poems found in Sunrise, in a Rabbit Hole. I am pretty sure I will keep writing both. The prose poetry form is very flexible, and so I think that the pieces I write might change in different ways, ways that I can’t predict. Among the pieces I’ve written recently, I have done a bit more with prosemetrics, that is, bringing together prose with lineated poetry, though not specifically in a haibun-like way. And I have tried writing some pieces that give a greater emphasis to the story element, where I let myself go with the language and the juxtaposition of images and ideas, while aiming at a tighter narrative.

 

I just passed my 74th birthday and my mind reels each morning when I read the news. At the same time, most days my wife and I talk to our two grandchildren, ages 7 and 4, through the internet. So in my life these days there is a pervading sense of the end of times and the beginning of times. As Eliot says in one of the Quartets, the end is in the beginning and the beginning is in the end. I suppose Robert Frost expressed best my attitude toward the writing of poems: It is my stay against confusion.