Q: You’ve been working on a new volume of daily poems like those collected in both The Daily Mirror and The Evening Sun. An interesting year to do that. Your daily poems have a powerful sense of movement, not just in the narratives but in the vision of daily life you describe. How have you adapted your writing to the pandemic and forced stillness of quarantines and shutdowns?
A: I start the same way: turn on the music, think of something to say, and go. My brush with my own mortality when I went through cancer is like a light wind that grazes my cheek every once in a while. The virus that is on everyone’s mind has made me nervous. For good reason; I am at high risk. There’s been no shortage of bad news, alarming news, distressing news. While I figure that some aspects of the current situation will sneak into my poems, I don’t plan on it. It just happens.
The reason I turn to poetry is not to confront Satan’s universe of death but to affirm the opposite – to take the side of life, freedom, and the imagination.
Q: Your work often meditates on or refers to classic films and songs (Playlist). Could you talk a bit about how these things inspire you and the place of pop culture in modern poetry?
A: By writing about what you love well, you enliven your poems, and so you have a better chance of catching the reader’s attention and holding it. The movies and music I love need to be perpetuated. Posterity can always use a helping hand. So I want to do my part to spread the word about, say, To Be Or Not To Be with Jack Benny and Carole Lombard in 1943, or Thelonious Monk’s “Monk’s Mood.” With luck I may be able to recruit new fans.
Q: Is there a subject you’ve tried unsuccessfully to capture in poetry, or perhaps a better way to put it, what subjects do you struggle to get down on paper?
A: When I was a very young man the war in Vietnam was raging and, like all the other poets, I wrote anti-war poems. But the poems of that period that I prize the most – by Ammons, Ashbery, Schuyler, Koch, Merrill, Bishop – have little to do with the news of the day. I detest politics; Clausewitz’s famous dictum has it that war is the continuation of politics by other means, and that may remain true if you invert the terms.
Q: As series editor of Best American Poetry, you read much more poetry than most folks. What is the last poem you read that you wished you had written, and what was it that made that piece so powerful?
A: Mary Jo Salter is a poet I greatly admire. Two terrific poems from her book Nothing By Design, which I just read, are “No Second Try” and “Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.” I love many poems in God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike by Stanley Moss, a wonderful poet whose work is not nearly as well-known and celebrated as it ought to be.
Q: Finally, an issue young writers face is doubt, both in themselves and their work. You’ve had a long and successful career so far. In spite of that, what doubts stick with you, and how have you adapted to them over the years?
A: Doubt. I have a master’s degree in doubt. The reading list for my oral certification examination included three books by Kierkegaard, Freud’s “Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” Thomas Mann, Henry James, Kafka, Borges, Mark Twain, the Confessions of Augustine, and Emily Dickinson. (My thesis was on Dickinson’s conception of “despair.”) Financial doubt, which can be terrifying, can go away of its own accord, with no changes in your circumstances. On the other hand, doubt regarding the value of your work, whether as a poet or author or editor, endures, because there is no way to demolish it. You never overcome the fear that your work may be as mortal as your body. There are no guarantees. After a while, you don’t think about it. There are other risks you are running. Keats thought that to be a poet, you had to be comfortable with half-truths, contradictions, ambiguities, doubts. You never want to disagree with Keats on such matters.
from The Adirondack Review. For the seven recent daily poems accompanying Ace Boggess's interview-- all from late September, early October 2020 -- please click here.
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