Nancy Mitchell (pictured below) : David thanks so much for agreeing to chat with us on the eve of the publication of your new book Poems in the Manner Of, which Scribner will publish in spring 2017. You know, I don’t think I’m aware of any living poet who so thoroughly inhabits poetry and its milieu, as you seem to do. An award-winning, well and widely-published poet, the founding editor of the respected annual Best American Poetry, an erudite, brilliant scholar, essayist and critic, you are, as I once heard Nikki Giovanni call herself, “a cultural icon.” And if that wasn’t enough to intimidate this rube from the eastern shore of Maryland, you, in the words of your editors, represent “the contemporary New York sensibility at its most splendidly cosmopolitan.” You are of the true literati, dashing and debonair! Don’t disclaim—I’ve seen your photos! I have to confess that I was, in the words of a self-styled redneck friend “fixin’ to get scared” as I prepared for our interview. But, what assuaged my fears were your wonderful poems, many of them sparked by other poets/poems. For example, the lovely “Aubade” chimes with Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” with “…a peeled orange, /espresso cups and saucers” long before we get to the direct reference “… The Necessary Angel by / Wallace Stevens, a little violet /paperback opened to page 58:” I mean, who could read those lines without plucking that violet paperback from the shelf and re-reading it well into the night?
David Lehman: Thank you for the great compliments. I’m glad you liked “Aubade.” Having always wanted to capture the feeling of love in the morning, the love you feel after making love and enjoying the deep sleep of contentment, I thought of the universal “her” getting out of the bathtub, as in a Degas, and I ran with that image.
NM: And I, in turn, ran to search archives of visual images to find my mind’s-eye match. It was great fun, especially the website Western Art: 600 Years of Women Getting Out of Bathtubs! Amazing stuff! As I turned to The Necessary Angel immediately after I read “Aubade” and before the other poems in this selection, I couldn’t help but read and think about them through Stevens’ lens. That said, it’s fascinating how the first five lines of “Aubade” demonstrate what Stevens writes is “poetry’s nature to resolve the interdependence of imagination and reality as equals” via the taxonomic shift from the abstract “universal woman” to the specific “you”:
I could stare for hours
at her, the woman stepping
out of her bath, breasts
bare, towel around her waist
before I knew it was you,
DL: Her beauty in his eyes transforms the ordinary breakfast table-top into a still life, and life itself becomes an aesthetic adventure.
From Plume
February 2017
Click on link to read the entire interview.
https://plumepoetry.com/2017/01/featured-selection-david-lehman/
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