I recently moved back to my hometown, Charlottesville, Virginia. One of the most exciting events in Charlottesville is their annual Virginia Festival of the Book. In preparation for the festival, I have been reading the books of some of the featured presenters. I thought I might interview a few of the poets that I am most looking forward to hearing read, starting with David Wojahn's collection, For the Scribe.
NA: Tell me about the evolution of your latest collection, For the Scribe? How did it begin?
DW: Thanks for the kind words. I’ve always considered myself an elegiac poet, but in the case of this book I wanted to break out of that mode. I’d never really had much interest in writing about “nature,” so I thought I might start there—with some animal poems, for example. But I found that the only poems of this sort that I could write were about extinct animals: passenger pigeons, Tasmanian tigers, ivory-billed woodpeckers. These poems became a series within the book, and the collection started to arrange itself around them. And so I couldn’t escape from elegy after all, despite my efforts! The intention of the book, I guess, is to find the means to move between personal losses—death of family, beloveds, and friends—and loss on a grander scale: threats to what used to be called our democratic institutions, ecological destruction, apocalypse. I also tend to arrange my books around sequences, groups of related poems, or poems in multiple sections that can run to ten or more pages. There are five such sequences in the new book, and I try to get these longer pieces to be in dialogue with the shorter lyrics.
NA: I love how you make the political personal and vice versa. While eating bivalves, for example, you think of prisoners being force-fed at Guantanamo. I’m wondering if you might say a few words about your poetic intuition, your process, and this kind of weaving you so beautifully do.
DW: The poets who have most inspired me over the years are figures like George Oppen, Thomas McGrath, Muriel Rukeyser, and especially Robert Lowell. These writers didn’t draw a great distinction between the personal and the ideological, and they taught me how important it is for a poem to try to navigate between the micro and the macro, the private life of the individual and a public reckoning with history and politics. Finding the means to make those two things merge and commingle is a task that feels essential to me--as a moral imperative as much as an aesthetic one. “Political” poetry that merely rants in a preaching-to-the-choir way simply bores me; so does autobiographical poetry that doesn’t seek to find some respite from mere self-disclosure. But when these two intentions can come together, can alchemize into a third thing, then the poem has a chance to avoid agit-prop on the one hand, navel-gazing on the other.
NA: I had to laugh out loud when I started reading “Nineteen Eleven Blues,” which opens with Ronald Reagan talking about Elizabeth Bishop. I wondered if we could post that here. And maybe say a few words about it?
DW: I wrote an essay awhile back about Bishop and Reagan, about the America Reagan represents and the one that Bishop exemplifies. I am bewildered by the way that even people on the left who should know better think of Reagan as great leader—to me he was simply an intellectually impoverished reactionary and a genial criminal. Bishop was a fundamentally apolitical individual, but her work is profoundly democratic and progressive; it continues, on its smaller scale, the transcendentalist tradition of Emerson and Whitman.
Bishop and Reagan were born within 48 hours of one another, in February of 1911. Czselaw Milosz, another figure who’s a touchstone for me, was born a couple of months later, as was the greatest of the Delta Blues singers, Robert Johnson--in one of her letters to Robert Lowell, Bishop rhapsodizes about hearing an LP of Robert Johnson’s songs. Bishop, Milosz, and Johnson had more in common than their birthdates: they’re artists who obsessively write about the conditions of loneliness and exile, and do so with immense invention. So I wanted to find a way to write about them, and came up with the notion of having each of them compose little essays on one another. So Milosz speaks about Reagan in a sonnet that samples some lines from one of his essays; Johnson speaks about Bishop and Milosz in a poem modelled after one of his blues lyrics, and Bishop writes about Johnson in a villanelle. That left Reagan to write about Bishop, again in the form of a sonnet, though in the poem Reagan’s not exactly capable of much insight. In college he actually attempted to write some poems, although I can’t say I’d recommend them.
NA: When I was a student at Vermont, one of your colleagues called you a poet of dark lyricism and a poet who is not afraid to be challenging. He contrasted you with what he called “chatty, undisciplined poets of our day.” Is that how you see yourself?
DW: I suppose my poems are dark. I love good comic poetry—Kenneth Koch is a favorite of mine—but couldn’t write comedy if you put a gun to my head. But I have a special affection for poetry that challenges me, intellectually and emotively. And that often means difficult or allusive poetry. I love something Geoffrey Hill wrote: “Whatever strange relationship we have with the poem, it is not one of enjoyment. It is like being brushed past, or aside, by an alien being.” My sense of what a poem should do isn’t that haughty and dyspeptic, but the poems I most admire are always aware that the diction of poetry can be different from the conversational, that it can be strange and majestic like the language of The Book of Common Prayer—you heard passages from that book a lot if you grew up, as I did, as an Episcopalian in the ‘50s. On the other hand, I write a lot about popular culture, music especially, and also films. Subjects like these don’t always mix very well with a Grand Style. I like it when my poems can function as mash-ups of high and low cultural allusions, of high and vernacular diction. I also like to write in a variety of formal and metrical approaches—free verse in one poem, received form in another. What purpose does it serve to favor one method over the other? Louis Zukofsky said that poetry’s upper limit is music, its lower limit speech. I want a poetry that moves steadily between one limit and the other.
NA: You are often referred to as a political poet. How do you keep your head, your heart—your poetry alive in this insane time?
NA: In your poem, “Watching Fox News on the Holiday of Martin Luther King, Jr.” you refer to your children making snow angels in the final section. Before reading the poem, I didn’t know you had children, and I wondered suddenly how your children might have influenced your life as a poet?
DW: Yeah, twin boys, who are now sixteen. You probably didn’t know about them because my wife and I were parents fairly late in life—I was 48 and she was 43. Parenting teenagers is a challenge for someone of any age, but raising them in stereo when you’re in your sixties tests you in some special ways, and parenting changes you in ways I’m still coming to understand. It’s astonishing, and it’s also draining, though the astonishment trumps the exhaustion. As for what having children does for your writing, of course it enriches life in general and writing in particular, but sometimes it’s hard to remember that when you feel you have to struggle to carve out time to write. The boys appear a lot in my last two books and in the new poems section of my selected. They’re a source of wonder, but also a source of worry. They’ve grown up in Richmond, the Capital of the Confederacy, and it’s a struggle to raise kids to have the values you want them to have in a place that’s so fraught and haunted.
I have a poet friend who swears he can read a poem and tell in a few lines whether its writer has had children or not. I’m not sure I believe him when he says this, but there’s something about rearing kids that changes you utterly—and generally for the better.
NA: And your parents? What kind of influence were they? You write of your father’s death and of your mother as a George Wallace supporter?
DW: I keep returning to my parents in my poems, more so now that I have children myself, and with much greater affection and admiration than I had when they were alive. My father came from South Dakota and my mother from Minnesota, which is where I grew up. She was a bookkeeper and he was a railroad man; neither of them finished high school. Both of them were solitaries; both were clinically depressed and drank quite a bit. The Midwestern Scandinavian culture they came from taught them to be taciturn and stoic. They just didn’t talk much, either to one another or to the rest of the world. They were deeply devoted to one another, and they sort of epitomized Rilke’s definition of marriage as “a union of two solitaries against the world.” Rilke said a lot of dreamy and stupid things, and that was one of the more egregious of them: it’s an awful recipe for intimacy. They were lonely souls and I was a lonely child. But their devotion to one another was deep and abiding, as was their devotion to me. Maybe because they were people of such few words, it’s always felt important to me to try to memorialize them in words, to try to find a way to let them speak about themselves through me. Allen Grossman says somewhere that the task of poetry is “to preserve the memory of the person.” I love that statement, maybe because it can be interpreted in so many ways, all of them accurate. The task of preserving my parents’ memory is something I take very seriously, more so now that I’m almost the age my parents were when they died. There’s no one left to speak for them but me.
NA: What is the most challenging part of writing poetry in general, and of writing For the Scribe specifically?
DW: My old teacher Jon Anderson has a poem in which he says that poetry “tells me how I am/and it sometimes lies.” The language of poetry tells you amazing truths at one moment, but then it will get slippery and mercurial in the next. You think you’re using the language, then suddenly you realize that the language is using you, and you can never tell what its purpose for you is. At one point in my life having to deal with all of these paradoxes and oxymorons was maddening and depressing, but now it’s—during my better days—a source of delight. I love putting poems together; it gives me immense pleasure. It took me awhile to understand this, though. I was probably in my fifties before I realized the simple fact that writing is its own reward! I suppose the greatest challenge I face as a writer at this point in my life is simply trying to surprise myself, trying to challenge myself, trying to refine and deepen the sorts of things I’m good at while at the same time not falling into self-imitation or self-parody. I know what a David Wojahn poem looks and sounds like, and I want to keep writing those poems. I just don’t want to get too comfortable with them.
NA: I am always interested in titles. When did you know that “For the Scribe” was your title?
DW: I came across a factoid in a book about how the Sumerians developed writing: there’s a cuneiform tablet excavated in Uruk, dating about 3,000 BC, that contains the earliest known example of a scribe signing his signature—the first time someone put his name to a piece of writing. I started to work on a poem in praise of that scribe, who was named Gar. Una. Around the same time, I was at work on another poem entirely. My late wife, Lynda Hull, was one of the most remarkable poets of our time. She died in a car accident in 1994, and what I learned from her writing and from watching how she worked on poems was a lesson of incalculable value to me. Lynda was a genius, and you can see that over and over again in her Collected Poems, which is still in print from Graywolf. A few years ago I kept drafting a poem about an experience I often have that involves Lynda: I’ll go to the bookshelf looking for a book of poetry, open it up, and find the margins full of notes she took—very ornate handwriting, very detailed notes. Sometimes when this happens I feel consoled and enthralled, but other times it fills me with a sorrow that’s close to terror: it’s as if the pages are burning my hands. The poem about having this experience never seemed right. But at one point I realized that my poem about the scribe Gar.Una and my poem about finding Lynda’s margin notes in a book—in this case it was notes to Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—were really the same poem, and I took the two poems I’d been trying to write and fused them together. So the poem is first and foremost an elegy, but it’s also a kind or ars poetica. Everything I wanted to do in the new book seemed to coalesce around this poem, and it gave me the title for the collection.
NA: If all the poetry books in your library were on fire, but you could magically save just one, which would it be? And why? And if you could save just one poem?
DW: Wow, that’s a hard question. I’ve been mulling over it for days and I can’t narrow the list down to one—though maybe down to two, and they’re books completely different from one another. One would be the Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy: his writing is always very humane, and generally very bitter; he takes some wild risks with narrative and the reader’s expectations; his prosody is immensely inventive, and usually a little crazy. And the poems are never smooth or elegant: they’re too invested in human tragedy to allow that. The second book would be the poems of the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer. I heard him read his poems with Robert Bly when I was in college, and they changed my life. And the thrill I get from reading his poems have never left me. He likes to write from the borderlands, those liminal places between reality and dream. His imagery is always stunning, and his gaze is always steady and nonplussed. He’s a great mystical poet, maybe as good as George Herbert or Henry Vaughn. I had to take one poem by each of them out of a burning building, the Hardy poem would be one of his most famous, called “During Wind and Rain.” The poem is filled with rueful wisdom and dread, and its narrative is stunning; it’s as though he’s condensed the contents of a big 19th Century novel down to thirty-odd lines. And the poem’s final line is gorgeous and shocking. The speaker is looking at a family cemetery, and says, “Down the carved names the raindrop ploughs.” Such an astonishing image! And the meter knock you out: the line’s made up entirely of spondees. My choice for Transtromer would be an exquisite little prose poem called “Funchal.” It’s a love poem, about a long-married couple who are visiting the Azores; there’s a gorgeous description of the landscape they walk through, followed by a scene of the couple making love in their hotel room. The poem ends with a glorious, Whitmanic evocation of what he calls “the human whirlpool.” And this is all rendered through enigma and contradiction. Here’s the ending: “The innermost paradox, the garage flower, the ventilator in the good darkness. A drink that bubbles in an empty glass. A loudspeaker that sends out silence. A pathway that overgrows behind each step. A book that can be read only in the dark.” If this were the only poem that still existed after some nuclear winter or mass extinction, we could still count ourselves lucky.
David Wojahn was educated at the University of Minnesota and the University of Arizona. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004 (2006), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. His collection World Tree (2011) received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Library of Virginia Book Award in Poetry, and the Poets’ Prize. His most recent collection, For the Scribe, was published in 2017 in the Pitt Poetry Series. Wojahn has also produced two books of essays on contemporary poetry, most recently From the Valley of Making, University of Michigan Press, 2015. A Guggenheim fellow, he has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, and an Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, among others. He is professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and a member of the program faculty of the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of the Fine Arts.
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