Renowned poet and literary critic James Longenbach is the author of six poetry collections ― including Earthling, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award ― and eight books of prose. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the Nation, and he is the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim +Fellowship, among other honors. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Mr. Longenbach via email about his forthcoming book of poems, Forever. We also discussed wisdom as a way of trying to stop time, how immediacy is constructed through language, the reality that "everyone writes what they’re given to write," and how perhaps poets ― and all people ― need a lot of road blocks in order to find a road.
What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?
I like how writing poems makes me feel. We all listen to pop songs we love many times, and we don’t generally listen again because we can’t remember how the song goes; we like how it feels to move from the beginning to the end. I think our experience of poems, especially as we write them, is like that, like living acutely in time.
What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society?
I’m not sure there is one! — though it’s important to believe there is one. Over the last 20,000 years most poems have been lost, and five or six have changed society; these days, how many people read Theocritus or Tennyson? It’s important to do the work, important not to formulate rules from anything; it takes a lot of forgotten poets to make a Theocritus.
What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?
Make a poem, which is also the most mundane thing.
If you were to teach a course in modern poetry, where would you begin?
Since the 80s, I’ve done just that lots of ways. These days I organize such a course not by authors (who in this format recur several times) but by verse forms — prose, several different kinds of free verse, sonnets, other rhyme and metrical schemes, songs, and so on. This arrangement changes, but the advantage is that I can better emphasize the great diversity of modernism.
How, in your view, is immediacy constructed through language?
As I say in The Lyric Now, a great poem creates a sense of the now; the language is happening now; this is why we might keep reading Theocritus. There are lots of ways to do that, but I end up talking a lot about syntax, about how the order of the words creates in each poem a repeatable event in time; this is why, looking back, great poems have been written about (say) both the Holocaust and about sunflowers.
What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of Earthling?
The poems of Earthling are all overshadowed, as I look back, by my mother’s death. She was old, it was both expected and shocking; but it took me years to figure out how to write about it, and really it wasn’t until, in “The Crocodile,” I haphazardly hit upon the idea of seeming to speak in a very contrived voice that I began to tell what felt like the truth. As that poem points out, maybe we need a lot of road blocks to find a road...
Writers who do more than one thing often face the problem of expectation: people tend to like to pigeonhole them. As a celebrated poet and critic, have you had to navigate the limiting assumptions of your readers and reviewers?
Yup. And my own limiting assumptions, too. But all poets are brilliant critics; they may not write their criticism down, that’s all. You need to have read (so to speak) a hundred great poems in order to write one good one.
Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his or her perspective useful? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?
Tons of them. Frost said famously that poetry is what is lost in translation, and Pound said poetry is what is made in translation — with that interesting word in English that corresponds to Theocritus’s Greek. To me, the latter definition has the advantage of seeming less mystical, more material, and poetry is of course a material art, a making of objects out of the medium, in our case the English language. Every human being has had the most complex emotions, but very few human beings have written poems.
Is your forthcoming book of poems, Forever, your most personal collection? What would you like to share about its conception and your vision for its life?
In one sense, anything we write is deeply personal — what else could it be? But certainly the poems of Forever happened because of my ongoing coping with kidney cancer, and without question I have dealt with questions about mortality (which, looking back, I thought I already had!). Especially inasmuch as these poems are bound up with grappling with such questions, questions that often feel uncomfortably primal, questions of love, the poems feel to me deeply present.
Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?
Conrad Aiken won the National Book Award, and Aiken is a good poet, though he’s not often read. Prizes are of the moment, made of the moment and the moment’s judges, and sometimes history is eventually there, too.
Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets?
The philosopher Emil Cioran once said we become wise when we should have been depressed! That’s a little sly, but there’s something to it, too; wisdom is a way of trying to stop time, and time can’t be stopped, as our constantly and surprisingly changing poetry reminds us. There are no rules, and what works really well for one poem or one poet has nothing to do with the next poem or poet. All artists know a lot about sliding back to the bottom of the mountain...
What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?
I’ve been working on some new poems and some new essays, too. An essay on punctuation (especially its absence) in poetry from the 8th-century “The Seafarer” to the current Jos Charles just appeared in Poetry magazine, and a new poem called “Now and Then” has just come out in The Threepenny Review. I’m grateful. Everybody writes what they’re given to write, and doing so sounds as if it should be easy; but it’s very hard, and in my experience it gets beautifully harder. Often I wish I got to decide anything.
Great post! Super interesting.
Posted by: Hematologist NJ | June 30, 2021 at 10:28 AM