An Interview with Robert Fitterman
Robert Fitterman is reading at HIgh Low, 3301 Washington Ave, St. Louis at 7 pm on April 2nd, 2025 and also for the High Noon series at the same location at 12 pm on April 3rd, 2025.
Robert Fitterman is the author of sixteen books of poetry. He grew up on a street flanked by a Shell gas station on one side, and a Mobile station on the other—“His writing is kinda conceptual and sorta involves identity issues that are complicated by the web,” Fitterman’s bio reads, “and the Mall.”
Fitterman teaches writing and poetry at New York University and has taught at the Bard College Milton Avery School of Graduate Studies. His latest book of poetry is Creve Coeur, published with Winter Editions—a collection of woven-together verse composed of found materials, lore, news, and the meditations of a roving, suburban, power-walking Virgil.
Our cast of characters include the walker, Monsanto Chemical Corporation, and the St. Louis suburb of Fitterman’s childhood, which serves as a zone of interest for investigating white flight, restrictive housing covenants, and the various poisonings in St. Louis’s history which, ultimately, culminated in the murder of Micheal Brown in a nearby St. Louis suburb, Ferguson.
Devin Thomas O’Shea: When did you start collecting things for Creve Coeur? And did you know from the start that William Carlos Williams’s Paterson would guide the project?
Rob Fitterman: About six years ago, which is a long time for me. I usually work a little more quickly. It evolved after the Michael Brown murder, where I felt like I needed to respond in some way and it percolated for a long time. I didn't want to respond in a poem or two. I don't really write like that anyway, but I thought the only way to do it would be to do something large that looked at the history of St. Louis, you know, a very segregated St. Louis, where places like Ferguson came to be.
At the same time, the content-driven part asks, how am I going to take this on respectfully? And not like, cheapen it? I was really interested in asking, how am I going to make myself complicit in a way that made sense and didn't seem cheesy.
So, I was doing a lot of research, and often, I use a lot of appropriation—for several decades, most of my books borrow a lot of online material. I was thinking back to William Carlos Williams’s Paterson. I'm a big Williams fan, but I don't love Paterson, actually. It’s kind of uneven. There’s some real problems with it. But I was walking down the street, and it hit me: Williams uses local news stories, colloquial language, personal letters, etc.—totally unironically. He uses it historically as part of this weave, the fabric of Paterson.
DTO: I love Williams as well, but Creve Coeur also reminded me of Whitman. Reading it felt like I am just a regular guy walking around piecing things together, sort of puzzling through how to articulate America as represented in St. Louis, but in this book, you stumble upon the broken heart itself. Walter Johnson happened to have it in the title of his St. Louis history book, Broken Heart of America. Or did you start with that as a direct reference?
RF: In terms of research, it was a great starting place. I was describing my Creve Coeur idea to a friend, and he was like, oh, you have to read Johnson’s Broken Heart of America. And I was like, is he referring to Creve Coeur?
DTO: I love that. The book includes so many different versions of the lore surrounding why this area of St. Louis is called Creve Coeur. Like, whose heart is being broken? A native woman’s? The settling colonialists? Each involved a tremendous amount of research—are you somebody who goes and digs through the archives? Or are you always pursuing a million different things at once?
RF: More the latter. I'm not a scholar; I'm a poet. And I'm not even a poet-scholar in that, say, Olson-ian sense. Creve Coeur aligns with a micro-history tradition, so the field of research is more narrow, but the dive is deep. In this case what's interesting, in terms of the research direction, is that not only is my book a mimesis of the form of Paterson, but also I am echoing his themes—not always, but often and sometimes explicitly, usually implicitly. It's close enough: If Williams is writing about music, I'm writing about “Philadelphia Freedom.” So the research is often propelled by that. On the other hand, some of the research is very St. Louis specific. I’ll discover that I need to know more about these real estate policies, as an example, and so, better go check it out.
DTO: That can be hard stuff to slog through. Bank records for restrictive land agreements and stuff like that. But my experience of reading the book felt like each research expedition added another tiny metaphor to something that was re-occurring. For example, I’ve been thinking about the Pruitt-Igoe sprayer experiments ever since writing about them, and you link that to Monsanto and Roundup. That was really beautiful. Why is there so much evil spraying happening in St. Louis?
RF: Right!? I'm so glad you picked up on that because, like, there's a whole list of Monsanto applicators, like weed sprayers, that show up in the book. And I was hoping that they echo the Cadmium, zinc sulfide blowers used around Pruitt-Igoe.
DTO: It makes you feel like you're paranoid, right? But then when you mentioned the sprayers, I'm thinking, oh yeah, well, there's the industrialization of the city combined with chemical companies. That’s an explanation.
RF: How did all this happen for you? How did you get so interested in the political history of St. Louis?
DTO: I was doing my MFA, and I wanted to write a novel about St. Louis. I was really responding to the maximalists. Like, the totality in Gravity's Rainbow. And I also thought that GR was extremely hard to read, and not very fun to read. And so I was like, what if I did something dumber with something I'm really familiar with. So I started doing Saint Louis research; My mom mentioned the Veiled Prophet Society. And I was like, oh, this is a really good one. The Veiled Prophet is something at the periphery of everyone's knowledge. When you were growing up, did you know about the Veiled Prophet Parade and all that?
RF: Yeah, I did. I have an embarrassing confession. I misheard it my whole life. Until your TrueAnon podcast, I thought it was like French; I thought it was something like Valprofette. Like one word. I knew someone who went to the ball—a kind of close high school friend. Her dad just made a ton of cash, but she wasn't like that. She was kind of a hippie type. She was cool. Anyway, she was a runner-up one year in the debutante ball but very casual about it. We must have been like seventeen. But, yeah, I thought it was another French fur trapper family name—Valprofette!
DTO: I think you can be forgiven for that because there's the Catholic one that's called the Fleur-de-lis Ball, so…
RF: You know, a lot of the research that’s in Creve Coeur comes directly from you, and from Johnson’s Broken Heart. I never would have included the Veiled Prophet without reading your work on that and then discovering that Schnucks—so prevalent in the book—turns out to be a Veiled Prophet high roller.
DTO: Yeah, Todd Schnuck is proud to be a member to this day. In the best way, your sections in Schnucks grocery reminded me of De Lillo and White Noise. How did you go about capturing that part of the suburban milieu?
RF: Mostly, it’s just growing up in it, especially growing up in that particular moment. The end of the counterculture, the beginning of something like the Neo-liberal 80s. When people are thinking about Baudrillard’s simulacra, they're thinking about that moment where we start to feel like everything is not only artifice, but like—in quotes almost—it's like you're walking on Olive Boulevard, and I see these strip malls and stores with quotation marks around them.
A lot of my books take on consumerism and the language that constructs it. But Creve Coeur critiques a different kind of collapse—the collapse of the American inner city, which is a collapse of the soul, in a different kind of way. Instead of being crushed by products in the suburbs, inner-city poor folks are being crushed by segregated real-estate policies, among other things of course, but those policies affect health, education, etc. Then, we have this power walker, who, to me, is a kind of Virgil character—except more oblivious—touring us through a very brightly-lit hell.
Kind of like a Todd Haynes film maybe. He does that really well: this very saturated, almost Technicolor suburban landscape in contrast to some really dark undercurrents.
DTO: The Virgil/power walker parallel is so perfect. As you're reading, you can definitely get that rhythm of the power walker—an ambitious and almost optimistic observer. But also he's in danger sometimes, like when he goes to see Casino Royale, and a guy stands up and starts praying loudly before the movie. I feel like that's specifically Missouri-core. We’re kind of peppered with insane Christians out here.
RF: Yeah, exactly. I wanted to make sure they got their say. I'm going to misquote it, but there's this great Robert Rauschenberg quote of something like, if you want to illustrate the real world, you should use materials from the real world. What I mean by that is in Creve Coeur there are parts that sound like me, or something that happened to me, personally. But, in fact, these are sometimes found episodes—like that one in the cinema. It sounds like it's me and my personal experience, but it’s not my personal experience. It's close, but like, let me see if someone else online has had an experience at the Creve Coeur Cineplex that might be more interesting than my experience.
What you were saying about Whitman… I really like the idea of this roaming American spirit. But if you took that open, Whitmanesque democratic spirit into 2024, and you decentered the “I” or just fucked it up, or tripped it up in some way, then you get a problem: Where is the center? Who gets to talk? In my approach, I feel more comfortable if I'm just one of the passengers on the bus. I'm not the driver.
DTO: I love that approach. It's more like a collage. That's also a theme in Paterson, just like the raw material seamlessly knit together into a whole world.
RF: That's a great point. Could you call Paterson a collage? It does have that patchwork or weave element. Collage doesn't quite fit for me because of the scale of Paterson. Maybe similar to Pynchon in that way. I’ve only read chunks of Gravity’s Rainbow, but it's kind of like an event in language.
DTO: It’s a very post-modern thing where, in the past, censorship meant the elimination of information from the public sphere, usually by withholding. Now we just live in the total deluge. Not just the computer age but the last hundred years. I've always thought of it as like reading Pynchon trains your brain to not ever know the totality of what is being talked about, but to get the big shape of the rocket endlessly circling.
RF: That ambient, conceptual relationship to storytelling and narrative—I think that's a big part of it. How did you move from Veiled Prophet onto the larger political history of St. Louis? You're writing about a lot of St. Louis micro-histories.
DTO: Yeah, the Veiled Prophet was a really fruitful stepping stone into a lot of St. Louis history. Did you ever read Catfish and Crystal?
RF: No.
DTO: You would love it. I have it here somewhere. It was done by this 1950s author, and it's marketed as the folklore history of St. Louis. It's supposed to be a sort of fun and uplifting rollick through Saint Louis history that’s told by the every-man. That version of St. Louis history you're familiar with growing up—everything was basically good.
We founded the city, and Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau are sort of like little mythical figures, and if you look closely here on the book’s collage cover, next to the steamboat and the chandelier, there's a white woman being mauled by Native Americans. So, there's that happy version of the city that’s a paper-thin artifice—the kind that Creve Coeur picks apart with the contrast between the grocery store and Monsanto’s Roundup.
RF: Yeah, exactly. I love that. This would be great because I’m continuing with Creve Coeur so I'll have new material! There are five books of Paterson actually so I have my work cut out for me. Right now I’m looking at the military records fire, which you talk about on the TrueAnon podcast.
DTO: Yeah that's the same designer of both Pruitt-Igoe and the World Trade Center.
RF: Yeah, Minoru Yamasaki.
DTO: He insisted on putting sprinklers on the top floor, and somebody said no. It's very suspicious—the burning of a library. That would be such a perfect way to start another Creve Coeur book: a big void of information.
RF: Exactly! Paterson: Book Three begins with libraries, fires, and floods… so here we go!
Devin Thomas O'Shea's writing is in The Nation, Boulevard, Slate, Jacobin, Chicago Quarterly Review and elsewhere. Represented by Erik Hane, Headwater Literary.
Robert Fitterman is the author of sixteen books of poetry. His most recent book, Creve Coeur, is a long poem recently published with Winter Editions (2024). Other titles include: This Window Makes Me Feel (Ugly Duckling Presse), No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself. (Ugly Duckling Presse), Nevermind (Wonder Books), and Rob the Plagiarist (Roof Books). He has collaborated with several visual artists, including Serkan Ozkaya, Nayland Blake, Sabine Herrmann, Natalie Czech, Tim Davis, and Klaus Killisch. He is the founding member of the artists-poets collective Collective Task (www.collectivetask.org). He lives in New York City and teaches writing at New York University.