An Interview with Grace Schulman [by Aspen Matis]

Grace Schulman received the 2016 Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement awarded by the Poetry Society of America. One of the country’s most distinguished living poets, she was inducted as member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Schulman via email about her newest book The Marble Bed, poetry’s power to cut through rhetoric, and the transformation of personal excitement into art.

At age fourteen, you sent a poem you’d written to the poet Marianne Moore, thus opening the door to a long-lasting friendship. What was the greatest gift that relationship gave you?

In an exchange she wrote, “The flawless typing shows the work to its greatest advantage.” Elegant, humorous, what she couldn’t do to dress an honest response. The gift was her personal stature. I’ve envied her wisdom, humility, and courage in the face of adversity. She portrays the hero as having a “sense of human dignity / and a reverence for mystery.” I’ve tried to live up to those impossible standards. Failing to do so, I remember her saying that it’s all in the trying.

What is poetry’s role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Salvation. Because otherwise I’d be destroyed by the very thing I must express.

What do you see as poetry’s role in society?

Poetry is essential, all the more so now in a time of suffering. A good poem cuts through current rhetoric. It is written in the language of urgency. It bridges nations and genders that exist like unapproachable islands, enabling us to see things whole. It addresses the unspeakable with song. It allows us to listen to ourselves and to others. It annihilates death. Read a poem by Akhmatova, or even one by Li Bo, and hear the writer speak across time.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do?

Radical? Go to the library. It is the most radical institution we have. Read, read, read.

You served as the poetry editor of the Nation for over three decades and for twelve years you directed the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center. What’s something unexpected you learned at these exciting positions?

In my long tenure at The Nation, from 1971 to 2006, I came to treasure literary freedom, which is as crucial now as it was when Henry James mistakenly panned Whitman’s “Drum Taps” in an 1865 issue of the magazine. In my time there, I enjoyed reading all submissions myself, from the unknown farmer in Illinois to the latest offering from James Wright or May Swenson. I encouraged works in translation, and the publisher, James Storrow, gave pages of space to poems from Russia, Italy, Hungary. My work at the Poetry Center was built on my work at The Nation: some poets appeared in The Nation, read at the Y, and visited Baruch College, where I taught, and still do. I discovered that The Nation, which I steered, was the contest that offered readings and publication.

In many of your poems, mundane earthly moments become doorways through which to glimpse universal spiritual questions and truths. How do you achieve such agile leaps from the humdrum to the transcendent? 

I learned from Flaubert that if you look hard enough at any mundane thing, the result will be sympathetic. From the seventeenth-century poets, Donne, Vaughan, and Herbert, I discovered that close observation of the object will draw out human feelings and invite larger matters. From Marianne Moore I realized that even if universal truths are unattainable, the poet creates art in the search for them.

Your beautiful memoir Strange Paradise tells the story of your 50-year marriage to Dr. Jerome L. Schulman before his death in 2016. Did writing help your grieving process? 

My long marriage to Dr. Jerome Schulman has meant everything to me. A physician and scientist, he was passionate about the arts. Because his work centered on basic scientific principles and utilized a language above my comprehension, I didn’t know until now the extent of his contribution. He was a modest man, and so I’ll say this for him: his models are being used worldwide, and his laboratory’s findings in viral interferon and in messenger RNA are fundamental to vaccines in use today.

Science and poetry have much in common. Seeing is one. Einstein said he “saw” thought. DNA is built on a visual perception, the double helix. In poetry, there’s the image. Precision is another aim they share. The dead-rightness of accuracy. “Hurrah for positive science,” Whitman declared, and his cheer echoes in lines or particulars. The fusion of opposites is another trait, common to physicists and to poets like Blake and Keats. My own beloved scientist happened to read my work with discernment. Unfortunately, I could not fathom his language of t-cells and bi-functional antibodies and the like — until now, when I stretch my brain to understand his good work.

The Marble Bed transports readers into a subliminal landscape pulsing with love, loss, pain, wonder, and grief. The speaker offers what Poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips calls “an ode to life.” Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa writes that “Each poem journeys far, wandering the territory of love’s psyche.” For me, reading The Marble Bed was a transcendent experience, and an access into my own impulses and longing, mortality and imagination. What would you like to share about your process? 

Thank you. Rowan and Yusef are great poets and I’m grateful for their praise. And for yours. As for process, what matters most to me is the transformation of personal excitement into art — that is, to make my journey through Genoa everybody’s journey. To let everyone know precisely what it’s like to smell Russian sage or roll in a wave’s foam at the shore’s edge. Transformation is the work of language. Finding the best words.

Are there any reliable critics? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?

Yes, reliable in a broad sense. A multiplicity of critics, each with sensitive opinions that may differ on occasion. That seems fitting, since we have a multiplicity of poets, a twelve-foot shelf, giving us a gamut of knowledge and feeling. Crowded though it may be, the field is less limiting than in the past. Poetry in English embraces a wider range of cultures and demographics, and a richer language for them. As for usefulness, any informed feedback is fodder for the poet. Also, of course, insightful criticism can sell books.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate you?

Waking in the morning to junipers at the bay and unlit streetlamps in the city. Seeing old things new and new things with joyful curiosity. Music, especially the mournful chords of Coltrane, the shaggy runs of Thelonious, the quicksilver notes of Art Tatum, the muted trumpet of Miles, and, latterly, the hard tones of tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins.

What are you working on now?

Since my eighth book of poems came out last fall, I’ve been working on a “New and Selected Poems,” tentatively titled Again the Sun! For the New, the crises of our times have generated energy. And for the rest, I’m making difficult choices from past books. I’ve been partial to the poems that show change, I think toward freer forms, more natural speech. But — as Sondheim advises, “Let others make that decision, they usually do.”

Comments

[Antonio]

Wonderful, enjoyable, illuminating. Antonio

[Mary Stewart Hammond]

This is brilliant! Her language! The way she twirls it around leaves me on my knees. This bears reading several times. As do her poems.