The Songwriter as Poet. A Conversation with Phil Elverum
(Part Two)

- By Jon Hoel, with Phil Elverum

Jon Hoel: The natural world is pretty frequent in your work over the years; in these recent poems, though, there are two terms specifically I wanted to ask you about, “decolonization” and “land back.” Both are ideas many people are likely familiar with, but some might not be. I was curious what these words mean to you and in the context of the Pacific Northwest more broadly?

Phil Elverum: Land back specifically… those are powerful words. The idea of giving all the land back to the people that it was stolen from. Okay, yes. But how? The specifics of that? How do we give North America back? As far as I know, no one is articulating a step-by-step plan, but the spirit of it, the gesture of it, is admirable.

Like my progressive, well-meaning, white hippie-descended, punk peers, I’ve been frustrated and weirded out by the lack of curiosity about who was here first and how it happened. Land back, as an idea, is tied in with deep engagement with this place, with caring deeply about where we are, and with what’s beneath the soil that we’re walking on.

I write all these songs about being mystified by this place… I make place-based music and art. A huge part of that is deeper respect for people who were here and doing a beautiful job of being here for a very long time. Now—only very recently—that’s been not present. Instead, we’re doing our weird European-inspired capitalism and Christianity on top of it. So, there’s this clash; it’s harsh and everyone’s depressed. Global warming—all this gnarly stuff happening.

Hoel: The poem I was most obsessed with when reading, was “I Spoke with A Fish.” At first, it reminded me of the Elizabeth Bishop poem, as an ancestor poem. Then, there’s this subversion of expectation of wisdom… But there’s also something else, almost a Tim Robinson comedy moment. Trying to find meaning in nature, and nature being, like, “Yeah, okay, buddy.” It’s so difficult to write funny material, so I was curious. How you can possibly do that when the audience is anticipating the big letter emotions from you?

Elverum: Tim Robinson is a big inspiration for my work, actually! That’s funny, because dialogue with the fish doesn’t grow out of my inspiration from I Think You Should Leave, but from this esoteric Buddhist sutra quote from 1200, Dōgen’s Mountains and Water Sutra: If you speak to a fish or dragon and tell them what they see as a palace is flowing water, they will disagree. That’s pretty much a direct quote from the song. I read that and thought it was funny, but also deep, resonant… And Tim Robinson, talking to a fish and arguing about the nature of permanence.

That’s maybe my experience of life, profound big letter emotions and deep observations in Buddhist sutras, but also the absurd details of our interhuman interactions. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what is funny. But Tim Robinson’s writing has pointed my mind toward specific tweaks in language. It’s so interesting. I just I hear it in the world now—the strange ways people form sentences that are maybe just a little wrong and hilarious to me.

Hoel: I wonder if that’s a generational twist. My students—who are maybe ten or twelve years younger than me—the way they come to language is so different. It’s fascinating but hard as a teacher, to critique. Just try explaining to someone how what they are communicating is clear, but technically incorrect.

Elverum: Well, that’s not new. I feel like that’s what the Beats were doing, even pre-Beat, that’s the job of poets, right? To find the feeling beneath the grammar. That reminds me of a quote I read from Edvard Munch: “I don’t paint what I see, I paint what I saw.” That subtle distinction of painting the landscape as you see it: okay, boring. Dead. Easy. But seeing something, moving away from it, and painting how it lives in your emotional memory—that’s where the resonance comes out.

Hoel: You like Norway a lot. You wrote another song about Nikolai Astrup. What is your connection to Nordic culture?

Elverum: I lived there for a winter; I wrote a bunch of songs there. My family is Norwegian, my last name is Norwegian. I love those painters: Munch, Astrup, Kittelsen, Sohlberg, the whole scene of emotional landscape painters from the late 1800s. I’m a big fan. There’s a lot I’m curious about over there.

Hoel: How does visual art play into your work?

Elverum: I still think of myself as a painter, though it’s been over ten years. Music takes up more space, but like with poetry and song, I don’t draw a distinction between all these different kinds of creative pursuits. They’re all the same thing. This album, Night Palace… I think of it as this thing I made. Two records, and this big poster that unfolds, that has words, and images… It is a visual art as well. And I know that’s not how a lot of people experience their music they consume, but I still do. I think of it as a 3-D immersive thing, with colors, shapes… pictures.

Hoel: Yeah, I suppose you have your generation that grew up with maybe MTV or staring at the record sleeve. Or for people my age a CD booklet, or maybe a cassette. I guess that’s lost in the streaming era. The visual element is gone.

Elverum: Music is changing. It’s not better or worse, but it’s evolving with the technology. I’m a bit of a dinosaur, still thinking about things as: (album) with (artwork). Only a small percentage of people are doing that, but that’s my intention—to make a thing that thrives with that level of attention.

Hoel: You mentioned Will Oldham’s book earlier. I was curious if there are other songwriters that you’ve admired who have ventured into poetry? I know you already clarified there’s not too much of a distinction for you.

Elverum: Bob Dylan is pretty good. I feel like early on he was making the point. Like, hey, these lines? There’s no difference here. Having Allen Ginsberg present too… I’m into Bob Dylan now, but it took me a while, growing up with his work omnipresent… but I finally figured out how to enjoy it. Adrian Orange (Thanksgiving) is another artist like that, poetry and song… I’ve never read them as poems, but I think of them as poems, as sung poems.

Hoel: Here’s the flipside of that question: you said you always head to the small press sections of bookstores. Are there any writers or poets you admire that you might want to shout out?

Elverum: Kelly Schirmann, who is younger than me: she’s a great writer of poems. Mostly I’m gravitating towards the weird, one-off zines that came out in 1972. They’re all moldy and mostly bad, but so charming and with a couple of little nuggets in there… I just love that ideal—that poetry and writing can be this informal and community-shared thing, like a potluck. Everyone has a poem.

Imagine if it was our only entertainment. Like it was for humankind, for most of human existence, regaling each other with poems. Like in Viking sagas, where the most famous heroes were the ones who were best at reciting a poem on the spot. Imagine if they were our jocks. I think poetry gets put on a pedestal in a sealed-off way, like a museum… Sacred and letter-pressed on the finest broadside, then framed. That’s cool, but I also just love grubby, small press poetry things that have chicken grease stains on the paper… They’re lived and consumed. I think that’s the best place for any form of art to live.

Hoel: Presumably you’ll be touring Night Palace, but is there any chance you also might read the poem-songs without musical accompaniment?

Elverum: I went to a poetry reading here at a winery, where I live on this island. It was a monthly thing. I went and I had my poems; everyone was just reading their writing… but I sang mine. I didn’t bring my guitar, but I got melodic. It wasn’t acapella, but it was a challenge to cross that line between singing and speaking. Speaking is musical—our voices have rhythm and melody as we speak. I love the ambiguity between those two polarities. I have a friend, Tom Blood, a great poet. He would do his readings at book events, at poetry events, but also with bands at shows. His way of reading was so beautifully in that middle ground between speaking and singing. I went on tour with him, and really inspired me.

PHIL ELVERUM is a songwriter, poet, and artist from Anacortes, Washington. He releases music under the moniker Mount Eerie, and publishes books, albums, artwork, and more with his label P.W. Elverum & Sun ltd. His new album and book of poems Night Palace is out November 1st.

JON HOEL is a New England poet and critic. He is the author of a monograph on Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker with Liverpool University press and has published essays, poems, and interviews with Black Lawrence Press, Joyzine, Lumina, and elsewhere. He is a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.