Michael Bazzett

Can you remember the moment the idea for your poetry collection The Echo Chamber came to you?

I teach a high school class on mythology, called Myth and Memory. It’s concerned with how old stories still exist with us. In fact, when people refer to the gender binary, the glyphs that we default to are shorthand for Mars and Venus, or Ares and Aphrodite. They’re actually hieroglyphs. The circle is the shield and what looks like an arrow is a spear coming out behind it – protective armour with the potential for attack. And the other circle has a cross, which is a handle on a looking glass. That has connotations of vanity, but also self-reflection. If you tilt the mirror, you begin to alter someone’s perception of reality. You can see those glyphs as symbols in Macbeth. Lady Macbeth is holding the mirror and Macbeth is holding the dagger doing things, but who is in control of that reality, who has agency? We see how those symbols can be inverted. Even in the slaying of Medusa, Jason uses his shield as a mirror so that he can look backwards and slay the medusa. His power comes from blending the binary and using both symbols.

It was in the midst of a discussion on this when a student brought up the myth of Echo. The student had confused Echo with Narcissus, and we started talking about that story. It hit me that the classic motif of the narcissistic feedback loop fits extremely well with how algorithms work. Social media and online shopping websites track us, especially if we’re not careful with our cookies and browser privacy settings. When we look out to the world today, we see some version of ourselves being marketed back to us. The fact that that needs transparency or the stillness of the pool – it triggered something in me. I found it so fascinating. We think that meditative stillness is always good, but if you realise that the world is moving water – Heraclitus’ river – you can see yourself in the movement. The world is always shifting and moving, and we can see, not just ourselves, but also how our projections live on the surface, with more depth below. This line of thinking opened up a new layer of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and I knew I needed to write about that. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that Echo and Narcissus would’ve been the perfect couple. Echo can only repeat, she was made to be with a narcissist. They weren’t able to connect or come together because they were trapped in their own loops.

Walk me through the process – from gestation to the page. Were there significant shifts as you worked on the project?

One thing is that the book is pretty lean. As I sent it in, the manuscript was about sixty to seventy pages. That was culled from probably two hundred pages. I wrote a ton for the book and it felt as though I were trying to corner something at times. It was the first book for me that had an anchor. It has a central poem in which I retell the story of Echo and Narcissus. The first half of the book is very much about contemporary society and every poem has its antecedent in this refracted idea of the myth, without directly mentioning Echo, Narcissus, or anything that happened in the story. That all happens in the second half of the book just as a signal. I know people don’t always read poetry books in a linear fashion, but I give them the story before it’s referenced. It felt weird to rewrite Ovid. I read seven or eight different translations and went back to Latin. My youngest child was taking Latin at the time and I met with his teacher to look at what Ovid was actually writing. The earliest story of Narcissus is two lines long. It’s just someone seeing themselves in a mirror and then not leaving. To me, that was fascinating. I’d never before had a book that orbited a single idea.

What were you listening to, reading and/or watching for inspiration for this project? What spoke to you during that time?

I listened to a lot of Debussy – ‘Nuages (Clouds)’. There’s a great piece by Arvo Pärt too called ‘Mirror in Mirror’. It was mostly music, but music without words. And, of course, just re-immersing myself in some of these stories. Saul Bellow has a quote that I love: ‘A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation’. While I was working on The Echo Chamber, I was still working on my translation of the Popol Vuh. The process of translation became like a bridge. I wanted to get beyond the surface to make sure that I wasn’t just projecting. Those two projects informed each other in a way that I probably can’t even understand.

This book interrogates social media and the confirmation biases that we create across platforms. Do you think any intellectual good is possible with social media or is it a detriment to human thought?

I don’t know. I was going to say it is mostly detrimental to human thought, but I think it has some potential. I’ve been intrigued by Mastodon as an alternate platform and have been poking around on that a bit. I think the problem is how social media intersects with our corporate overlords. We are always inside of capitalism when we participate in these modes of communication. And we are the product that’s being mined, our data, our clicks, our attention. We are being snared by the illusion that we’re being connected. The platforms fire dopamine triggers to keep us there as long as possible.

I still don’t have a smartphone. I didn’t know social media at all until my mid forties. I didn’t get on Facebook until my first book came out and I was forty-eight years old. I joined Twitter so that I could try to get a residency in which I could ride on an Amtrak train and tweet about it. This was back in 2014. I was a very late adopter, so I realise that it’s a weird game where Likes are Monopoly money. Eventually, I deleted everything that I had, other than Twitter so that people could find me. It’s too good, the machines are too smart and they do get inside of your mind.

The fact that the term they use in Silicon Valley is ‘mind share’ instead of market share says everything. They’re trying to get ‘mind share’ – they actually want a certain part of your brain and attention. That said, there are modes of communication and genuine connection that can be found. I don’t know if the trade off in the end will be worth it. With Elon buying Twitter, I don’t know if I’ll be around on that app. I was poking around on Mastodon because I think there can be genuine relationships that grow over time, that are authentic in other ways outside of the platform. I think that’s a wonderful way to keep tenuous little tendrils, which was so necessary during the pandemic. It’s such a love-hate relationship. I wish I had a cleaner answer, but I don’t think that there is one.

I’ve been calling the phenomenon of online extremism a “cult of narcissism.” How intertwined do you see narcissism with extremism, particularly in how it manifests on social media?

I think that Venn diagram is moving more and more into a circle. Whether it’s around political extremism or vaccine extremism, if someone is looking for clicks and traffic then it’s only the most extreme stuff that draws. It’s immediately validating. You read the thing that’s being retweeted before you even read the debunking of it or vice versa. And all you’re doing is feeding the beast. I think that thoughtful, nuanced, complex, messy, authentic, empathic thinking does hold the possibility for connection and the recognition of our imperfections as human beings. We are going to mess up in real time. Granting grace and compassion around that is not going to find purchase if this is the shape of the machine. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, I think it does, but if you’re having conversations with people who are living in a different world …

A reason we’re so fascinated by the multiverse right now is that we’re living in it. Let’s say I have a family member who is watching Fox News and we come together, we are living in two different political realities. It’s not that we don’t agree. They are ingesting different information to me. As a result, and given the tug of extremism, our Venn diagram becomes two circles on either side of the room with just a gap between us. I very much see extremism and narcissism feeding into one another. Narcissism is what sells us, what loops us in, what gives us that trigger. We see the Likes and we see connection. But what is happening is increased disintegration. We’re getting connected to smaller and smaller pods.

Personally, a poem that stood out to me was ‘Career Day’. A line that haunts me is ‘Can you tell us where the mind ends and the world / begins?’ I love the metaphor of a hunter presenting at career day and a girl seeing herself in the dead hare. Can you talk about that poem? Where did it come from and what was the revision process like?

I think that one came from reading so much Ovid. I didn’t realise until after the fact, but I was showing it to a poet friend when revising and he pointed out the Ovidian transformation. This idea is a little reversed – usually people are being transformed into animals or trees in Ovid. Here the hare has been skinned and gutted by the hunter. It becomes the girl who is suddenly there. That’s what I mean by the writer being the reader moved to emulation. I was drawn to Actaeon’s transformation into a stag when Diana flicks the water across him. Those moments to me are transfixing. Fluid, transformative moments. It wasn’t conscious, but that moment was there.

I was starting from a place of anecdote, joke structure and humour. As a teacher, there’s always genuine trepidation and energy in the room when I bring someone in who is not a teacher, who maybe hasn’t been in a high school in 20 years. I brought an elk hunter in to my class when we were reading The Honourable Harvest by Robin Kimmerer. It was fascinating. Kids are smarter, more genuine, and ask bigger questions. There’s so much there, and the way we educate them can dent and ruin and break that. At the end of the poem, the humour comes from the hunter when he says that he’s going to keep talking despite the little child asking a wonderfully profound question.

The poem came out mostly whole, but I did cut it. Now it just ends with ‘I was a wild hare / just a few minutes ago’. The version published in Southeast Review ends with her white tail flashing as she explodes from the room. She retransforms back to the hare. It was too much too soon, particularly in the context of the book. It was more resonant to leave it where there’s a part of her that this process has killed and it’s hanging in the front of the room. And he doesn’t even know her name. Even though it’s a funny poem, there’s a lot in there about being a teacher. There’s sadness and loss and weird joy.

There are a few poems with subtle references to other literary works. For example, Emily Dickinson’s ‘I heard a Fly buzz – when I died’ came to mind when I read ‘Hunger’ and then Robert Lowell’s ‘Waking in the Blue’ came to mind when I read ‘Things to Think About While Shaving’. What lies behind those references?

That Dickinson one, I think a fly was buzzing in the same room. The Lowell one, I’ll have to go back and look. Lowell was very important to me when I was young, but I haven’t read him in a while. I bet that connection is correct. I wrote and read and tried to get published for twenty years before much happened. My first book was picked up when I was forty-eight. There is a lot of reading and accumulation that isn't well charted and tracked. A lot is buried. Sometimes I’ll hear that some work reminded someone of something else and I’ll go back to see whether there’s a connection. I guess we don’t know where the mind ends and the world begins.

What has the reception of The Echo Chamber been like?

I’ve been pleased with what I’ve gotten back from readers. It’s been a pleasure to read in person again. There have also been plenty of Zoom readings. It’s my fourth collection of poems – and my third from Milkweed Editions. It’s weird that I have books plural, I still can’t believe it. I went well into my forties wondering whether I’d even have one. The word that leaps to mind is gratitude, on my end, when it comes to reception. I was on All Things Considered for an interview and I realised that my mom was going to hear me on the radio. I did a podcast here and there. I’m teaching tenth grade American literature, and I’m certainly not there as a poet. When my students would hear me on the radio, they would ask about me being on the radio and having a book out. It’s lovely, it makes me feel blessed. It delights me when readers make connections with my poems. This is why we write. Especially with poetry because we don’t get as wide of an audience. When you have a book of poems come out, most of the readers are going to be other poets and writers. It is kind of an echo chamber in that way.

Extremism has been thriving in the age of social media. How can poets most effectively address the growing phenomena of online narcissism and extremism?

I think just writing the best poems that they can will help because poems live in complexity and negative capability. That might be an old school way of thinking, but I’m a believer in it. To every poet everywhere, writing and telling the truth is a political act. Telling your truth as best you can will inherently be disruptive to folks who are trying to separate words from their meaning. The job of the poet is political. It is an act of precision, accuracy, and resistance. There are times when the poem is trying so hard to be good or be right that it loses some truth. We’re not always good, we’re not always right. No one is. When I heard Seamus Heaney read in Minneapolis a decade ago, someone asked him how he would define poetry in three words. He said: ‘Exact. Truthful. Melodious.’ I’ve never forgotten that. It can be sharp and exact and beautiful. To me, that is maybe the best antidote to extremism because it reminds us of who we are.

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Michael Bazzett is a poet and teacher. He is the author of four collections, two chapbooks, and one book of poetry-in-translation. His work appears in Ploughshares, West Branch, Guernica, Copper Nickle, The Sun, Tin House, and 32 Poems, among others. You can find more of Bazzett’s work at michaelbazzett.com.