by Scott Samuelson

I’ve been interviewed a few times for radio shows and podcasts. In the runup to the interviews, I used to fantasize about bubbling up with witty and insightful points in shapely speech paragraphs of grammatically flawless sentences. Sometimes (I’m embarrassed to admit) I’d even write out answers to potential questions and try to memorize them.

Then, in the wake of the interviews, I’d kick myself for all my stuttering, self-questioning, and awkwardness. Is that how I really talk?! Despite having struggled to learn the diction and grammar of civilized speech, I was afraid that my accent would always betray me as a native barbarian.

After one such disaster, I happened to be rereading some Elizabeth Bishop, one of my all-time favorite poets, and had an epiphany that both chastened me and cheered me up.

The poem I was reading is the one entitled “Poem,” which begins with a description of what’s depicted in an amateur landscape painting. It’s full of wonderful observations such as “a wild iris, white and yellow, / fresh-squiggled from the tube.”

As she’s describing what’s in the painting, Bishop sometimes hesitates—“a thin church steeple / —that gray-blue wisp—or is it? . . . A specklike bird is flying to the left. / Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?” In the wake of my interview performances, my first glum thought was, “I’m just like that hack painter—making poorly executed points that leave people scratching their heads.”

Then Bishop has a thrilling realization:

Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!
It’s behind—I can almost remember the farmer’s name.
His barn backed on that meadow. There it is,
titanium white, one dab. The hint of a steeple,
filaments of brush-hairs, barely there,
must be the Presbyterian church.
Would that be Miss Gillespie’s house?

Here are lines that reveal a mind in action, a mind finding things out on the fly, a mind making sense of someone else in a—well, in a stuttering, self-questioning, and awkward way. The poem’s curious perfection is in accepting and even foregrounding the excited imperfections of how we actually talk, think, and paint. It shows that we connect through these imperfections.

So, maybe it’s a good thing that when I open my mouth the prose of Vladimir Nabokov doesn’t gush out. (As an aside, one of the things I find most unsettling about chatbots is their lightning-fast fluency.) I formed a whole new goal for what I want in my interviews and, far more importantly, what I want in talking and writing: language fresh-squiggled from the tube. Read more »