The Best American Poetry

Lawrence Joseph on "The Great Modern City"

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The Observer and the poet Lawrence Joseph, two Detroiters living in New York, were talking in a café in Battery Park City.

“You asked me about the connection between Detroit and New York,” Mr. Joseph said. “Detroit is the great modern city. And it becomes metaphorically the great industrial city. Céline writes about two cities when he comes to America in Journey to the End of the Night: New York and Detroit. Why? In 1932, when he writes perhaps the first great international novel of the 20th century, why does he choose New York and Detroit? What are your central metaphors internationally in 1932, when you’re going into a Depression? The center of the United States was Detroit and New York.” He slapped the table. “And I’m aware of that. Is Detroit still the center? It doesn’t matter. Detroiters will tell you that it is. And the world seems to think it’s pretty important.”
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For the rest of this New York Observer interview, click here.
From the archive, first posted September 28, 2011.

An Interview with Rachel Hadas [by Aspen Matis]

Rachel Hadas is the author of more than twenty books of verse and prose, including the acclaimed poetry collections Poems for Camilla, Questions in the Vestibule and, most recently, Love and Dread. Her poems appear in many magazines, journals, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, and she is a frequent reviewer and columnist for the LondonTimes Literary Supplement. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant in poetry, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and she has taught courses in literature and writing at Columbia and Princeton and is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, where she has taught for many years. She lives in New York City.

I corresponded with Ms. Hadas via email about poetry’s power to offer “the life raft of language by fusing the private and the universal. We also discussed imagination’s ability to press back against the pressure of reality and the gritty nature of the poetry that feels most alive — that these poems are “often made of mundanity and suffering,” not merely sterile sentiments and “truths.”

And through the poet’s transcendent work, we glimpse the complex weave of love and dread called life. 

Photo credit: Shalom Gorewitz

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

Poetry has always meant for me the place where inner life and outer world meet. It helps and challenges me to express, observe, clarify, get a second chance. At different stages of my life, poetry has enabled me to remember; to replay; to find courage; to tell the truth. Although I haven’t always been aware of this salient role poetry has played, I’ve been writing steadily for well over half a century, and poetry has always offered what James Merrill, a friend and guiding light, called “the life raft of language.” So even if I didn’t always know why, I turned to poetry from an early age and never stopped.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course? 

I’m wary of making grandiose claims for poetry. (Would that it were, that anything were, a unifying force!) Poets have always loved to talk about how powerful and important poetry is, and I’m no exception. Poetry’s power to fuse the private and the universal always amazes me, as does its ability to offer a reprieve (as you aptly phrase it) from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence. But poetry’s role is more complicated than that. Poetry is often made of mundanity and suffering; if it excludes or flees them, it risks being empty, generic, sentimental. Each poet has to manage their own balancing act, whether in formal or thematic terms, or both, between the mundane and the visionary, the public and the private — one could add so many pairs. A complicating factor is that poets come with their own talents and temperaments, their own obsessions and models, their own reading and experience.

Your most recent book of poems, Love and Dread, was published by Measure Press in July of this year to widespread praise. Poet Jessica Greenbaum describes the collection as “contemplative and joyous,” writing that — in this collection — you have “set up shop at the borders of inside and out, past and future, life and death, the conscious and the subconscious,” and your “wares from these liminal thresholds are those rarest of treasured souvenirs that absolutely cannot be found anywhere else.” Poet and translator A.E. Stallings describes the collection as prophetic, its tone and content evoking the pandemic months before it ravaged the globe, writing that the work “seems to speak already to that world of closeness and anxiety,” and poet Andrés Cerpa writes that the book finds “the quiet truths that exist in the everyday ceremony of love,” calling the book “poised and ecstatic.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection? 

Finding titles for my books used to pose a challenge — not anymore.  Since I fell in love with Shalom Gorewitz early in 2013, and later that same year was quite sick, and then when Trump started to loom on the horizon, and since, the twin themes or poles of love and dread have seemed incredibly clear. They’re even clearer now, in our time of unremitting disasters: lots of daily dread, yet not only dread.

To step back a bit, my poems have addressed mortality, have tended toward the elegiac, since my father’s death when I was seventeen. In the decades since then, the largeness, the universality both of our sense of attachment and of the fear of losing what we’re attached to — this has felt increasingly like my master idea.  Often this doubleness has played out in a single poem — not only the title poem of “Love and Dread” but in, say, “A Poultice” or “Midair,” and other poems in the collection, most of which was written between 2015 and 2017.  Originally I thought of dividing the manuscript into a Love section and a Dread section, but it seemed truer to life and art to weave the dark and the light together — as they are woven together every day.

Your stunning poem “In the Cloud,” published in The New Yorker in May of this year, beautifully evokes two dual abstractions: language and digital technology, such as Zoom and the cloud, where contact and content exist — but virtually. You write: “Words deeply pondered start to freeze — / as when before our tired eyes / Zoom stalls and stops (and no surprise), / leaving a dark screen, a blank hour / to fill with after and before.” What moment or interaction — or ongoing experience and feeling — sparked the light of this powerful poem?

“In the Cloud” had the original and very flat title “The List,” and it really was inspired by a list, which I really did lose, of words my poetry students (in a Gen. Ed. Poetry course I was teaching remotely for Rutgers-Newark in the fall of 2020) didn’t know. Once I began to jot down those words from memory, the rhyme and meter carried me swiftly along.

A lot of the poems I’ve written in the past few years are rhymed tetrameter couplets. A.E. Stallings, in her Foreword to Love and Dread, writes that “the indicative mood of this volume is the couplet, the wedding of opposites, as if translated from a language where “love” and “dread” do indeed rhyme.” I’d only add that for better or worse, I rarely overthink (or even think consciously at all about) formal matters; the decision tends to make itself, and off I go.

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

In the seventeenth century I especially love George Herbert (I’m hardly alone in that), and in the eighteenth, perhaps following in Merrill’s footsteps, Alexander Pope.  Compression, elegance, wit.

Your new book of essays, Piece by Piece, was published by Paul Dry Books in June of this year. Scholar David Mikics calls the work “haunting and intensely memorable,” and the publisher describes the collection as a book “about paying attention.” In the introduction, you write that you are “interested in…the obliterations and transformations of memory,” and, in this exploration, you pose the questions, “What and how do I recall what I’ve read, sometimes many years before? How, at different times in my life, did books help me?” What is the role of literature in your life? And how do reading and living well and fully relate to one another, in your eyes?

Piece by Piece is in many ways a memoir of reading: what I read, what I remember, how it helped. What Wallace Stevens said about the imagination, that it helps us to press back against the pressure of reality, comes to mind; reading does that, it can offer or seem to offer us a safe place, an escape. But just as I said earlier that mundanity and suffering are crucial elements of poetry, in the same way the very reality against which reading might seem to exert a saving counter-pressure is also found in books. 

Sharing a book, reading to a child, teaching a text to students — I don’t know a better way of caring, of human helping, person by person, page by page — whether with a toddler on one’s lap or staring at a screen full of faces. I’m the child of bookish parents, the mother of a bookish son, sister of a bookish sister, and the fortunate teacher of hundreds of students.

Piece by Piece, I hope, is about all these things.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

I’m not the only older person to opine that young poets should read.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?

I’ve recently finished a collection of poems entitled Pandemic Almanac. Also, my translation of one of forty-eight sections of the Dionysiaca, a zany and baroque Greek poem from late antiquity, should appear next spring. Working on this translation kept me happily occupied during the first stages of the pandemic.

“Translating,” says my husband Shalom, “is your Sudoku.”

Terrance Hayes in Conversation with Alan Michael Parker: Syntax, Sound, and Sensation

In June, 2016, Terrance Hayes visited Florida to read and teach in the University of Tampa low-residency M.F.A. program. In the course of his presentation, he made a comment about syntax and sound that struck me as important, and worth exploring. Despite our both being distracted by the seventh game of the N.B.A. Finals later that evening—a game to ruin any Davidson College professor’s mood—we agreed to correspond via email, and this conversation ensued.

Terrance Hayes is the author of five collections of poetry, including How To Be Drawn in 2015. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014.  He received the 2010 National Book Award, a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship and a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. His website is terrancehayes.com.

 AMP: Welcome to the non-place of email. Let's dive in, over our heads.... If I understood correctly, sometime in your artisitic development, you began to associate the extension of syntax with the production of a different kind of music within the poem. Is that an identifiable moment? Would you care to elaborate?

TH: I was drawn to syntax early in my reading life. It was the feeling something beyond words was being communicated in the bones of  poems. Certainly that was my experience of Keats’ “To Autumn”— specially that first stanza. When I first read it in college, I didn’t associate its power (mellow, carnal oozing power) with the fact it was a single over brimming sentence: 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, 

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 

And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

Until they think warm days will never cease, 

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 

The same feeling came in certain passages of prose. I remember a college professor beginning to sob as he read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of yes in Ulysses. It’s one of the longest sentences in the English language (4391 words according to Wikipedia).  I must have associated the sentence’s breathless charge with his emotional reaction. There were no periods—he couldn’t take a breath to collect himself.  I’m still trying to create that sense of charge and “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in my work.

AMP: I love your description of the “o’er-brimm’d”: that’s a great ambition. In that passage, Keats also holds it together contrapuntally, via end-rhyme and those almost-parallel caesuras in lines 7-9, which lead us to read backwards into memory as we move forward in the sentence. Is that something you do too? Or, rather, what’s your way of managing the length and breath of such a charged sentence?

TH: I see “contrapuntal” and “caesuras” and get a tad nervous. Especially when thinking about my early drafts of a poem. I mostly follow something closer to what Frost called “the sound of sense”:

“Now it is possible to have sense without the sound of sense (as in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in Wonderland which makes anything but dull reading). The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words.”

I am trying to find the sense in a sentence: its sense of rhythm, its sense of verbs and nouns, its sense of thought and sound.  I work in units of sentences as often as I work in units of line and image.

AMP: Cool, those connections that you draw between a sentence’s musical properties and its meanings....

“Rhythm” is a term that I tend to fudge when I’m discussing sound and sense; it’s such a difficult concept. Maybe I can ask you to consider an example from Frost, and talk a little more about rhythm.

In “West-Running Brook,” Frost observes of the water:

It has this throwing backward on itself

So that the fall of most of it is always 

Raising a little, sending up a little.

I think that one way to read these lines is as a discussion of rhythm, the riffles in the water “contraries,” as Frost calls them elsewhere in the poem. Would such a metaphor be consistent with your use of “rhythm”? Or are you thinking of the rhythm of a sentence in another way? Could you elaborate upon your use of the term?

TH: The word “rhythm" is fluid. Sometimes I’m thinking about varying the length and speed of a sentence. As in the first poem in my collection Wind In A Box. (Is it self-important to refer to one my own poems?) That’s sort of an exercise in staccato sentences. And in the ways punctuation impact a sentence. A series of periods, some slashes, a dash:

WIND IN A BOX

This ink. This name. This blood. This blunder.

This blood. This loss. This lonesome wind. This canyon.

This / twin / swiftly / paddling / shadow blooming

an inch above the carpet—. This cry. This mud.

But most times I’m thinking of rhythm as a kind of pattern. As in the ways subordinate clauses and repetition can expand a sentence. Especially the way lists can expand a sentence. The catalogues of Whitman and his Beat progeny, for example. Ginsberg spins wildly creating a fog of image that first long, elastic sentence of “Howl.”  That first sentence is one of the most technically dazzling dimensions of “Howl.” I don’t know if that answers your question. I agree rhythm is a difficult concept. Because it is such a personal/intuitive concept.

AMP: Now that we’re talking about sentences in your work expressly, I’d love to hear you comment upon one or more of the poems in your latest book, How To Be Drawn. In light of this conversation, I’m especially interested in the formal play in “Who Are The Tribes," the “Portrait of Etheridge Knight…," and “Some Maps to Indicate Pittsburgh”—all of which use words inside boxes and/or charts. Care to dig in a bit?

TH: The notion of “formal play” is on the mark. What it suggests is I’m just playing—or trying to play outside my given tendencies. Since sentences are my default inclination, the poems you mentioned are instances of trying something different. Of trying to shift my focus. They are genuine, intimate experiments. Meaning I don’t see them as natural extensions of the sentence. Though you’ll find maybe some syntactical play, the attention is given to form. Not that I’m Jordan—I’m no Jordan, but it’s akin to asking Jordan the relationship between his dunks and his work on his jumper or his defense. He was, when he developed his jumper and defensive prowess, only trying to broaden his skills… 

AMP: So what’s next, in terms of formal play? Is there a kind of poem you’re working on, that you haven’t been able to write?

TH: Great question. I’m mostly/usually concerned with the last poem and the next poem. The last poem was accompanied with drawings. The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape. The poems of late have been pretty long. The poem before the last poem was over 1200 words. So I’ve been trying to work my way back to compression via sonnets lately. But I don’t know. I don’t mind not knowing.

AMP: I’m going to highlight a phrase from your latest excellent response, and take the conversation in a slightly different direction. 

You write, “The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape.” Do you think this is true—that phrases, or scraps, or oddments, are “waiting to find a shape”? Maybe the shape is yours, and you have certain shapes internalized that wait for the scraps you collect by writing? Or… maybe there are shapes waiting to find scraps… in the culture? Care to comment?

TH: Yes, I mean scraps waiting to find a shape. As in what I suspect happens in quilt making. I’m just gathering bright bits of thoughts and conversations, imagery in my notebook. Waiting to stitch/thread something compelling together. Usually the brightest bit becomes the poem’s heart, its engine.

AMP: You mention your notebook. Could you talk a bit about how your process might elucidate the quest for “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in the syntax? How do you handle, literally, the writing, so as to facilitate in the composition process the ambitions you identified earlier?

TH: I have to talk about basketball again here. I can’t say I’m handling the writing so much as continuously practicing with it. I am trying to broaden my facility with it. I am practicing form, of course, but I am also practicing thinking and feeling. It’s all practice. That’s what Thelonius Monk says. For me, poetry is all practice. Occasionally practice pauses for a game—which is to say, some of my poems get published— but my habit is practice. I’m practicing to sustain my strengths while strengthening my weaknesses. I like a long sentence, for example. So I have to push myself towards new challenges with long sentences. One of my challenges/experiments in How to Be Drawn was to push myself into longer poems. These days I’m trying to work my way back to the sonnet. It all takes practice. One can fail in practice. One can experiment and scrimmage. There is intimacy and measure. Practice is a laboratory, a workhouse, a habit. For me, poetry is the practice of language. —June-September, 2016

from the archive; first posted September 29, 2016

 AMP: Welcome to the non-place of email. Let's dive in, over our heads.... If I understood correctly, sometime in your artisitic development, you began to associate the extension of syntax with the production of a different kind of music within the poem. Is that an identifiable moment? Would you care to elaborate?

TH: I was drawn to syntax early in my reading life. It was the feeling something beyond words was being communicated in the bones of  poems. Certainly that was my experience of Keats’ “To Autumn”— specially that first stanza. When I first read it in college, I didn’t associate its power (mellow, carnal oozing power) with the fact it was a single over brimming sentence: 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, 

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 

And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

Until they think warm days will never cease, 

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 

The same feeling came in certain passages of prose. I remember a college professor beginning to sob as he read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of yes in Ulysses. It’s one of the longest sentences in the English language (4391 words according to Wikipedia).  I must have associated the sentence’s breathless charge with his emotional reaction. There were no periods—he couldn’t take a breath to collect himself.  I’m still trying to create that sense of charge and “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in my work.

AMP: I love your description of the “o’er-brimm’d”: that’s a great ambition. In that passage, Keats also holds it together contrapuntally, via end-rhyme and those almost-parallel caesuras in lines 7-9, which lead us to read backwards into memory as we move forward in the sentence. Is that something you do too? Or, rather, what’s your way of managing the length and breath of such a charged sentence?

TH: I see “contrapuntal” and “caesuras” and get a tad nervous. Especially when thinking about my early drafts of a poem. I mostly follow something closer to what Frost called “the sound of sense”:

“Now it is possible to have sense without the sound of sense (as in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in Wonderland which makes anything but dull reading). The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words.”

I am trying to find the sense in a sentence: its sense of rhythm, its sense of verbs and nouns, its sense of thought and sound.  I work in units of sentences as often as I work in units of line and image.

AMP: Cool, those connections that you draw between a sentence’s musical properties and its meanings....

“Rhythm” is a term that I tend to fudge when I’m discussing sound and sense; it’s such a difficult concept. Maybe I can ask you to consider an example from Frost, and talk a little more about rhythm.

In “West-Running Brook,” Frost observes of the water:

It has this throwing backward on itself

So that the fall of most of it is always 

Raising a little, sending up a little.

I think that one way to read these lines is as a discussion of rhythm, the riffles in the water “contraries,” as Frost calls them elsewhere in the poem. Would such a metaphor be consistent with your use of “rhythm”? Or are you thinking of the rhythm of a sentence in another way? Could you elaborate upon your use of the term?

TH: The word “rhythm" is fluid. Sometimes I’m thinking about varying the length and speed of a sentence. As in the first poem in my collection Wind In A Box. (Is it self-important to refer to one my own poems?) That’s sort of an exercise in staccato sentences. And in the ways punctuation impact a sentence. A series of periods, some slashes, a dash:

WIND IN A BOX

This ink. This name. This blood. This blunder.

This blood. This loss. This lonesome wind. This canyon.

This / twin / swiftly / paddling / shadow blooming

an inch above the carpet—. This cry. This mud.

But most times I’m thinking of rhythm as a kind of pattern. As in the ways subordinate clauses and repetition can expand a sentence. Especially the way lists can expand a sentence. The catalogues of Whitman and his Beat progeny, for example. Ginsberg spins wildly creating a fog of image that first long, elastic sentence of “Howl.”  That first sentence is one of the most technically dazzling dimensions of “Howl.” I don’t know if that answers your question. I agree rhythm is a difficult concept. Because it is such a personal/intuitive concept.

AMP: Now that we’re talking about sentences in your work expressly, I’d love to hear you comment upon one or more of the poems in your latest book, How To Be Drawn. In light of this conversation, I’m especially interested in the formal play in “Who Are The Tribes," the “Portrait of Etheridge Knight…," and “Some Maps to Indicate Pittsburgh”—all of which use words inside boxes and/or charts. Care to dig in a bit?

TH: The notion of “formal play” is on the mark. What it suggests is I’m just playing—or trying to play outside my given tendencies. Since sentences are my default inclination, the poems you mentioned are instances of trying something different. Of trying to shift my focus. They are genuine, intimate experiments. Meaning I don’t see them as natural extensions of the sentence. Though you’ll find maybe some syntactical play, the attention is given to form. Not that I’m Jordan—I’m no Jordan, but it’s akin to asking Jordan the relationship between his dunks and his work on his jumper or his defense. He was, when he developed his jumper and defensive prowess, only trying to broaden his skills… 

AMP: So what’s next, in terms of formal play? Is there a kind of poem you’re working on, that you haven’t been able to write?

TH: Great question. I’m mostly/usually concerned with the last poem and the next poem. The last poem was accompanied with drawings. The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape. The poems of late have been pretty long. The poem before the last poem was over 1200 words. So I’ve been trying to work my way back to compression via sonnets lately. But I don’t know. I don’t mind not knowing.

AMP: I’m going to highlight a phrase from your latest excellent response, and take the conversation in a slightly different direction. 

You write, “The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape.” Do you think this is true—that phrases, or scraps, or oddments, are “waiting to find a shape”? Maybe the shape is yours, and you have certain shapes internalized that wait for the scraps you collect by writing? Or… maybe there are shapes waiting to find scraps… in the culture? Care to comment?

TH: Yes, I mean scraps waiting to find a shape. As in what I suspect happens in quilt making. I’m just gathering bright bits of thoughts and conversations, imagery in my notebook. Waiting to stitch/thread something compelling together. Usually the brightest bit becomes the poem’s heart, its engine.

AMP: You mention your notebook. Could you talk a bit about how your process might elucidate the quest for “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in the syntax? How do you handle, literally, the writing, so as to facilitate in the composition process the ambitions you identified earlier?

TH: I have to talk about basketball again here. I can’t say I’m handling the writing so much as continuously practicing with it. I am trying to broaden my facility with it. I am practicing form, of course, but I am also practicing thinking and feeling. It’s all practice. That’s what Thelonius Monk says. For me, poetry is all practice. Occasionally practice pauses for a game—which is to say, some of my poems get published— but my habit is practice. I’m practicing to sustain my strengths while strengthening my weaknesses. I like a long sentence, for example. So I have to push myself towards new challenges with long sentences. One of my challenges/experiments in How to Be Drawn was to push myself into longer poems. These days I’m trying to work my way back to the sonnet. It all takes practice. One can fail in practice. One can experiment and scrimmage. There is intimacy and measure. Practice is a laboratory, a workhouse, a habit. For me, poetry is the practice of language. —June-September, 2016

from the archive; first posted September 29, 2016

Stephanie Paterik: Finding Success in Business & Creativity with the Editor-in-Chief of Adweek

Stephanie Paterik, editor in chief and senior vice president of Adweek (as well as a contributor to the BAP blog), on the role the study of poetry has played in her career:

Why Not Now? with Amy Jo Martin

Stephanie Paterik is editor in chief and SVP of Adweek. In this episode, Stephanie shares a Why Not Now? story with Amy Jo that shaped the journey of her life and career. She had been working as a journalist in Phoenix for several years when she made the decision to quit her job, move to New York City, become a poet, and start an editorial consulting business on the side. This part of Stephanie’s journey felt like a detour, but it ultimately led to the role of editor in chief of Adweek.

Click here for the interview. And she was a mixed doubles champion in tennis (2013).

Meet the Press: Etruscan Press's Tribus Imprint

Dante Di Stefano: In the introduction to Trio and to the book that preceded it, Triptych, you discuss the concept behind Etruscan Press’s new Tribus imprint. Could you talk about how Etruscan’s new model came into being and some of the benefits of publishing a three-in-one volume?

Philip Brady: The idea for Tribus was partly an aesthetic choice, and partly a logistical one. Aesthetically, Etruscan is committed to a dialogue among genres, and Tribus has given us a chance to see poetry in a new, dialogic, light. In Tribus, authorship is shared; we are reminded of the communal origins of poetry; and we are given a new lens through which to see the connectedness of verse. Readers approach the text in a new way — it’s not just a beginning and ending, but three connected narratives. Readers are invited to browse, compare and contrast.

As for logistics — as years pass, Etruscan has acquired more and more authors, but we continue to publish only six titles a year, of which only three to four are volumes of poetry.

The hardest thing I have to do as an editor is turn down work by poets I love whom we’ve previously published. It’s heartbreaking because it’s one thing to be turned down by a stranger and quite another thing to be rejected by someone who has already shown commitment to your work. Yet, it has become more and more common. Doing three books in one volume is enormously helpful in publishing great work and showing continued commitment to authors we love. And we hope that the audiences for each poet will be introduced to the other poets in the Tribus.

The first Tribus, Triptych, came about because I had submissions from two Etruscan authors, Peter Grandbois and James McCorkle. Then another book came along by a colleague from the (Ohio) NEOMFA program. I had always admired Robert Miltner’s work. That’s when the idea of Tribus came to me. The more I thought about it, the more connections I saw among the three manuscripts. I contacted the three authors. Fortunately, they enthusiastically agreed, and the result is Triptych.

But I could see that this might be a way to address the problem described above. So now I was looking for connections among submissions from Etruscan veterans. And sure enough, I found that the manuscripts submitted over a five-month period by Karen Donovan, Diane Raptosh, and Daneen Wardrop shared tonality and motifs, while being wildly different in settings and themes. Karen, Diane and Daneen all agreed to join in Trio, and they took the collaboration a step further, exploring connections and working together.

DD: What was it about the work of Karen Donovan, Diane Raptosh, and Daneen Wardrop that threaded together for you when you began to think of the project that would become Trio?

PB: Each book is replete and fully empowered. Still, presented in one codex, webs of continuity appear. Trio highlights the way that women, in the penumbra of the patriarchy, fashion conduits for life, power, and loss. Trio augurs identity within and beyond selfhood. Trio reconfigures utterance by stretching, almost to breaking, line and syntax (as Daneen Wardorp says in an interview, “I love enjambment.”).

Composing their books separately, together three poets orchestrated what Diane Raptosh calls a “triunity.” In a “Trialogue” included in this volume, they converse, riffing off each other, weaving “centos” of one another’s lines, a poetics which, as Raptosh writes, let her “feel the  tendrils themselves turning into a new kind of work.”

DD: There are two more Tribus selections in the offing, one including a collection I wrote. Could you talk about these two forthcoming books?

PB: So, the next step was to actually solicit a Tribus. Our two flagship authors, National Book Award finalists William Heyen and H. L. Hix, are both wildly prolific. and produce far more work than Etruscan could ever publish, even though we’ve done 13 Hix and five Heyen titles. Meanwhile, Dante, your new manuscript showed up. So, I thought that a new kind of connection might be made here — one more consciously wrought: Etruscan Generations. You agreed first, and then I sent Hix and Heyen your manuscript and asked for something to go with it. They both replied right away, and we have a new Tribus.

The latest is a collection including one Etruscan poet and two poets who aren’t previously published by Etruscan, but whose work seems powerfully connected. Ann Pedone’s Medea, Katherine Soniat’s Starfish Wash-up, and D.M Spitzer’s Overflow of An Unknown Self all came to us, with very different modalities—yet each renews the connection between contemporary and antiquity. 

DD: Sadly, Daneen Wardrop, whose collection Endless Body, closes out Trio, passed away before the book’s publication. What do you find most memorable about her work, in this volume and elsewhere?

PB: Dante, I sit before this question and come back to it over and again. So many images: first seeing Silk Road—the delight of entering into that magical, historical journey of Donata Badoer; watching as the work emerged, working with Daneen through a succession of cover images—she was an astute art lover with a trove of references and connections—talking about the poetics of evoking  the past in poems which employ and resist narration…And then on to Endless Body—an unframed sequence crafted out of one of poetry’s prime elements—the art of enjambment—as if in breaking, lineaments reveal the oracular—the space where story yearns forward onto the empty page, the exhaled breath. All too soon to speak of. All too soon to be.

DD: Karen, I was first introduced to your work through Aard-vark to Axolotl, a collection of what you call tiny stories and essays. From 1985 to 2005 you co-edited ¶: A Magazine of Paragraphs, a journal of very short prose. I’m curious to hear any thoughts you have about your long engagement with short prose. There’s only one prose poem in Planet Parable, “I Saw Egrets Flying.” What has short prose taught you about lineated poetry (and vice versa)? How did your understanding of short prose inform the multiplicity of stanzaic patterns and formal choices on display in Planet Parable? When you are composing, how do your poems begin to assert themselves in formal terms?

Karen Donovan: Thanks for all these questions, Dante. Yes, Walker Rumble and I founded ¶ way back in 1985 and published 25 issues over 20 years, working with hundreds of writers doing ingenious things with short prose. The work spanned categories – prose poem, flash fiction, microfiction, creative nonfiction, essays, letters, lists, rants. We described the contents of ¶ as “short bursts of ordered sensibility of 250 words or less” and let folks decide what to submit under that wide sky. Forging literary ground in the universe of shortness was a fantastic editorial experience. All during that time, I was making my living as an editor and professional writer, but in my creative life I was writing lineated poetry and never thought of myself as a writer of prose. When I started doing the prose pieces that wound up as Aard-vark to Axolotl, it was mainly just to play with the cool vintage illustrations in an old Webster’s dictionary we owned. Before too long, I realized I was writing paragraphs and had to laugh. The form had evidently percolated into my body and all it needed for a spigot was that dictionary.

What short prose taught me is that it must be as well written as poetry, to set Ezra Pound’s dictum on its head. You can’t have a wasted syllable. “That first line is pretty close to that last line,” as Walker once said.

Whether I’m writing poetry or prose, I try to craft strong sentences and put them in the right order. It's usually very clear when I need end-stopped lines and when I don’t. The egrets piece in Planet Parable that you mentioned is a good example. It tries to make transparent the long, loose discursive process of thinking while taking in continuous, seemingly random data from the world. It’s a slightly distracted internal disquisition that unfolds in time, so I wanted a stream of prose. Versus poetry, which is really a method of obliterating time. Everything in a poem happens at once, even in a narrative. The idea crystallizes and pops into existence and hits the reader like a photon.

Making a formal choice is a matter of knowing where the energy is in my idea. What form will allow me to capture it? Sometimes I think about form before I start writing, and sometimes I let the content pile up and dictate its form to me as I go (trusting in Levertov’s great description of form as “a revelation of content”). Form sticks to content quite mysteriously. Form is also a good editing tool. I often like to write in syllabics, which has its own handy, built-in Exacto knife. One of the most formally experimental pieces in Planet Parable, “This Is Why Advanced Ontics Is Taken Pass/Fail,” is constructed of decasyllabic lines that break apart as the poem moves forward and then reheal as the poem concludes. I needed to handle an onslaught of ideas from biology, chemistry, quantum physics, metaphysics, and more, and I wanted the poem to be both show and tell. Syllabics gave me the structure to hang on to this trapeze act. But still – it’s made with sentences.

DD: There’s a prose piece from Aard-vark to Axolotl that I kept thinking of when I was reading Trio, “The memory fruit,” which begins: “You are not singular. You are not really yourself. Something else makes you: deep snow, grief offered names, love as portable as a small stone.” Could you riff on the experience of publishing your work in a three-in-one volume, and the work of Diane Raptosh and Daneen Wardrop in light of “The memory fruit”?

KD: Dante, you are clairvoyant. Calling up “The memory fruit” from Aard-vark to Axolotl is more relevant to the making of Trio than you could know. The illustration that goes with this piece is titled “Achene of Buttercup in vertical section, showing solitary seed.” I was writing about loneliness, the experience of losing a friend to whom I had a lifelong soul connection, the shock of realizing how much of my identity had been formed in her presence and now felt as if it had disappeared with her. And now… Diane and I lost Daneen to very sudden death, right when we were getting ready to celebrate the publishing of Trio, after months of intimate poetry conversation, immersed in one another’s language, resewing our lines together as centos, and birthing this volume together. The sense of loss is very similar. Our work and our minds are in explicit relationship, literally bound together. Trio itself is now the memory fruit. My hope is that it will go on generating attachments among our books every time a reader looks into it.

DD: I love one of the last lines in Planet Parable, “the vast thirsty ashes of the world” over which the rain speaks. There’s something so lovely and sad about the intense music of this moment, a moment that emblematizes Planet Parable’s thematic and formal concerns. What points of connection do you see in Planet Parable’s telescoping ecopoetics, the historical excavations of Run: A Verse History of Victoria Woodhull, and Endless Body’s exploration of corporeality and consciousness?

KD: Why the hell isn’t this beautiful project we are living going better? Is it possible to do it another way? All our books cohabitate with this question from different sides. Diane’s book sings with the mind and spirit of a woman who saw an alternative: “My advice was cultivate that love / which craves the happiness / of partner most, his or her / person next. Yourself last. / Be kind to the new. // In freedom / is safety. When people / learn this, they’ll know equality.” Daneen says, “Don’t worry about the awe. / There is no history except slate, / no biography except occasional winter wheat, / deer treading sun.” In the last poem in Endless Body, she asks, “At what rip in the gravity do we enter?” In its vast, thirsty ashes, the world yearns always to re-create itself after it is destroyed.

DD: Would you share a memory of Daneen Wardrop while working on this project and talk about the significance of Endless Body for you as a reader?

KD: Endless Body is endlessly generative – in subject matter, language, image, tone. Reading it is an experience of motion, tendency, current, experiment. Many of the poems are titled using word variants from Dickenson’s drafts. The book’s openness flows from Daneen’s receptive, absolutely original sensibility. Every conversation and email thread we shared brought that same light.

Here’s an example. One of her ideas for doing a reading together was to invite the whole audience in. I quote her: “If we end up doing readings virtually, we might ask people to use the chat function to suggest an image or idea they’re interested in/obsessed by that day at that minute. We might then, among the three of us, be able to find one of our poems that speaks to or complements that idea and choose to read that. It would probably be chaotic to do that for the whole reading, but we could have a couple of those interludes? This may be totally out there, but given the claustrophobia I sometimes feel with zoom, it might be cool to think of ways to air things out, widen things out.” Exactly. Air. Wideness. Out. That’s Daneen!

DD: Diane, In Run: A Verse History of Victoria Woodhull, you write through multiple personae inhabiting a variety of formal approaches. You’ve written many persona poems throughout your career, most notably in your collection, American Amnesiac, which was longlisted for the National Book Award. I’ve heard you speak eloquently about writing persona poems here. How was writing through and about the historical figures in Run different from persona poems you’ve written in the past? What other thoughts can you share about writing persona poems? What are some of your favorite persona poems written by other poets?

Diane Raptosh: I believe every poem is a persona poem, including—and perhaps especially—poems crafted from the I. American Amnesiac is in some respects a weirdly autobiographical poem, despite the fact that its speaker, Calvin Rinehart/John Doe (from Amnesiac) is a formerly affluent white man whose life specifics do not much resemble my own. But his status as participant-observer, his sense of being simultaneously subject and object, his many neuroses and certainly his anxious obsessing over the state of America are characteristics I consider my own. As for why write anyone writes persona poems, this portion of John Keats’s Negative Capability seems helpful: “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, The Moon, The Sea . . . —the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures.” These sentences make good sense to me.

John Doe felt like someone I needed to fill in for; he felt more or less like a real person think-feeling in my mind. Writing about and through Victoria Woodhull—with her array of secondary characters—felt similar. I identified with her in many ways: she was all raw energy, unschooled, eccentric. I am “educated,” yes, but I come from humble beginnings. It felt easy to “become” Woodhull, as I have bucked many of the same restrictive scripts put in place for women, including traditional marriage, lifelong monogamy, and more. I love to take on voices and topics that allow me to learn as I compose. Why write what I know?

In terms of other persona poems, I studied carefully Tyehimba Jess’s incredible verse collection Leadbelly as a primary model for writing persona poems about a historical figure with a cast of other, necessary characters included. His was my go-to text for how to bring to life a historical character. So too, I would like to give a shout-out to my Trio mate, Daneen Wardrop’s Silk Road, which, as Phil mentioned, is written in the persona of Donata Badoer, Marco Polo’s wife. What an incredible book! Beyond these, Patricia Smith writes some of the most powerful persona poems I have ever encountered. Her “Skinhead” is stunning. Of course, Robert Browning’s duchess is in the background, looking as if she were alive. James Tate has great persona poems, as do Robert Hayden (“Night, Death, Mississippi”) and the poet Ai. I love her work. For the past decade or two, I have found it easier to arrive at emotional truths through writing persona poems; doing so allows me to enter a sense of boundlessness. That said, right now, I am at work on a manuscript written from the I. The time feels right to risk some things from that pronoun.

DD: What did you learn about nineteenth century American culture and literature through the creative process that you hadn’t learned through scholarly research?

DR: I’ve always been an American history buff and did a lot of scholarly research for Run. Understandably, I encountered differing narratives about who Woodhull was. But I wasn’t looking for that exactly. I wanted to uncover and offer a possible version of her—from birth through her presidential campaign—based in “fact” and informed, imaginative conjecture. I wrote the book from a conviction that all history is what Plutarch called historia: both fact (chronicle history) and fiction (feigned history). Mostly I wanted to get Woodhull’s story out there in the best way I knew how: through poetry. I was bugged that it took me until I was almost 55 years old even to have heard of her! Doing the research, I was reminded of how much the 1870s mirror our times in terms of, well, the usual categories: oligarchical economic structures, slavery-centered political frameworks, misogynistic scripts, caste systems, racism…. I was researching and drafting the book during the Trump/Clinton campaign. It comes as no surprise that long before presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was mocked as “the devil” by certain sources, nineteenth-century tabloids used Woodhull family photos, featuring bedraggled characters and caricatures of Woodhull as “Mrs. Satan” as stock to lampoon all suffragists. To answer your thoughtful question (at last!), I feel that to understand someone, you have to become them. I’d like to try being everyone! This is what literature helps us do. Rather than aiming to arrive at an “objective” understanding or at some definitive rendition of Woodhull, the creative process enabled me to enter—through acts of imaginative, empathic transport—the essence of Woodhull, as well as to channel the energies and voices of other figures important in her inner circle.  

DD: Could you share some thoughts on the Emily Dickinson who appears in Endless Body? What is the Dickinsonian influence or imprint on Trio as a whole?   How does Dickinson inform what Daneen Wardrop called the “spiritual conversation” unfolding in this three-in-one book?

DR: What a wonderful question. I would say there is a Dickinsonian tonal complexity, or perhaps better: a tonal mischievousness at work in Trio as a whole. Equally present: an overall Dickinsonian wit. More on Emily Dickinson’s overall imprint in the final paragraph.

Dickinson appears in Wardrop’s Endless Body implicitly and overtly. I would go so far as to say that Dickinson is “the blade in the melody” of Endless Body, which Wardrop herself points to in her poem “+ Glowed + Absent—through.” Dickinson inheres in every endless dash—that pointer, that magisterial gesture, that “vast barrette” mentioned in Wardrop’s “+ Catch my + slips so easy.”

More specifically, I would say that her poem “Emily Dickinson undressing” (which begins with this epigraph by Roland Barthes: Imagine [if possible] a woman dressed in an endless garment...”) is a map by which we might effectively navigate Wardrop’s whole book. In this piece the poet suggests that “If I knew how to pray, words would cross wefts / of endless garment / bobbins still spinning in the world—” This is precisely what Endless Body does: with every taut line, with each knowing turn, it stitches a limitless fabric: “Some veils are red. // Some tulle is ripped. // In this deep tippet the world starts”—the full while the poet rips through to eternity. As Wardrop’s I types out her words, seams redden and glow—. These seams form the spiritual conversation that all of us in Trio are having. I hope readers too will experience this numinous quality. This immanence. These bladed melodies.

The + Glow + Absent—through. Similarly, Karen Donovan invites us all in her poem “So Many Swans Could Mean Something” to stand “on the great divide where the mind / is always leaving the body behind.”

DD: Would you also share a memory of Daneen Wardrop and talk about her legacy as a poet, scholar, teacher, and person?

DR: There is so much to know about Daneen; every day I uncover some new mystery about her. Her roles in rock, folk, and bluegrass bands—as lead singer and guitarist throughout her college years—transformed into a tenured English professorship at Western Michigan University, 1990-2020. During that career, she earned many awards, including the Distinguished Faculty Award at WMU and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She was a nationally renowned Emily Dickinson scholar (Emily Dickinson's Gothic: Goblin with a Gauge (1996), Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (2009), as well as Dickinson’s poetic heir apparent. She inspired her colleagues, students, and friends—from those associated with WMU to poetry lovers and climate advocacy communities.

In 1997 Daneen adopted her daughter Lian from China: Lian is featured in many of the poems in Endless Body (“LiLi and I speak to each other raining hands—” says the poet in “Afternoon”). I also have a daughter from China right around Lian’s age. Daneen and I had a number of conversations about our adoption experiences. We traded stories over Zoom about airport experiences with our “backpack babies”: how we literally had to sprint—daughters buckled onto our bodies—from one mysterious office to another, for meetings with adoption officials in China. Daneen’s multi-layered poems about adoption continue to move me—through. I’ve no doubt that she was a first-rate mother, daughter, sister (“My family speaks to each other with thunder on their sleeves, / whiskers in their bellies,” according to “Afternoon.”)

Honestly, I feel as if I was just beginning to know her as a friend. She was very funny, deeply authentic, and modest to a fault. She was incredibly large hearted. A kinder person we might never know.

As for Daneen’s poetic legacy, I would point to her ability to take on almost any subject, any persona, any tone, with mastery. I would easily place her among the most brilliant American poets I have encountered. Her work is a high-wire act of heart and erudition, pause and profusion, compression and munificence.  Endless Body is her tenth book.

---

Poem from Daneen Wardrop’s Endless Body:

Gift

A mix-up—the package arriving two weeks after she was.
White box painted with red and yellow flowers
bright as patois. No perches like on a bird house?
. . . a butterfly house. Each slot hardly wider than a match—
the wings must have to shut together to enter.
Do the butterflies tilt and fly in without stopping— 
clapped-closed and no stopping?
She was dry, thin lips
cut as the line around a country.
The box came without instructions.
This is not sadness. I come in and out of the blunt.
Why would they want to be in there,
darker than an inside.
I will not retract a single tilt of her face.    

---

Poem from Karen Donovan’s Planet Parable

So Many Swans Could Mean Something

I don’t want to talk about what we have lost, I am not sure
there is a difference between prayer and conversation

anymore, why anything happens, why thinking
is like this breathless occupied midnight.

Out back where the clouds skim the black surface
of the pond, it’s as if we called them, and now

you are saying, Look, the whole flock is here.
They drift, nickering, white boats on a moonless tide,

making and breaking engagements on a night when everything
gets decided. It is time to sleep, but who can sleep?

The water could not be blacker. We watch them,
lights off in the house, window slid wide,

standing on the great divide where the mind
is always leaving the body behind.

---

Poem from Diane Raptosh’s Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull

Victoria Solos the Stuff of Free Love

This is my lover, but when I cease to love him I will leave him.
This is my lover. For him I am, of an evening, leaf and hymnal.
This is my lover. But when I seize love, summer trees sing off-key.
This is my him. But should I leave love, I will seize the hymning.

This is my hymn. When love is squeezed by law, it is despotism.
This is my law: it is ruddy—leaf love, heady, and shouldered by all.
This: if I want intercourse with one hundred men, so I will have it.
These are my loves: my leeway to think freely, to feel out thought.

This is my lover: it is this her-dominion—my reedy belief-weave.
This is my love: it is how bees dance maps and plants eat the light.
This is love. When I cease using my, seas ease leaves into freefall.
This is my love: this slipping of strings, fringe reef leafing into tree.

This is the love: limbs that snap through the lungs to sycamore out.
This, how love lilacs: I stand arm in arm with every act of my life.

---

Philip Brady is the author of five collections of poetry: The Elsewhere: Poems and Poetics (Broadstone Books, 2021); To Banquet with the Ethiopians (Broadstone Books, 2015); Fathom (Word Press, 2007); Weal (Ashland Poetry Press, 1999) winner of the 1999 Snyder Prize; and Forged Correspondences (New Myths, 1996) chosen for Ploughshares’ “Editors’ Shelf” by Maxine Kumin. Brady’s poetry has received the Ohioana Poetry Award, The Ohio Governor’s Award and six Individual Artists Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, a Best of Ohio Writers Contest Prizes, a Newhouse Award and a Thayer Fellowship in the Arts from New York State, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Listowel Writer’s Prize (Ireland) and residencies at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Hambidge Center, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Arts, Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), and Cimelice Castle, (Czech Republic). He has also been a visiting lecturer at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and the Poets’ House in Donegal, Ireland.

Karen Donovan’s new collection of poems, Planet Parable, was published in 2021 by Etruscan Press in an innovative multi-author volume called Trio, which also includes complete books by the poets Diane Raptosh and Daneen Wardrop. Her two other books of poems are Your Enzymes Are Calling the Ancients (Persea Books), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky / Editor’s Choice Award, and Fugitive Red (University of Massachusetts Press), which won the Juniper Prize. She is also the author of Aard-vark to Axolotl (Etruscan Press), a collection of tiny stories and essays inspired by the illustrations in a vintage Webster’s dictionary owned by her grandfather. From 1985 to 2005 she co-edited ¶: A Magazine of Paragraphs, a journal of very short prose.

Diane Raptosh’s verse collection, American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press), was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award as well as for the Housatonic Book Award in poetry. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the Boise Poet Laureate (2013) as well as the Idaho Writer-in-Residence (2013-2016). In 2018 she won the Idaho Governor’s Arts Award in Excellence. An active ambassador for poetry, she has given workshops and readings everywhere from riverbanks to prisons. The holder of the Eyck-Berringer Endowed Chair in English, she teaches literature and writing at the College of Idaho, where she also co-chairs the program in criminal justice/prison studies. Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull, published in a collection of three poets’ works, is her seventh and most recent book (Trio, Etruscan Press, 2021). www.dianeraptosh.com

 

Daneen Wardrop was the author of five poetry collections: Endless Body (Trio, Etruscan Press, 2021); Silk Road (Etruscan Press, 2018); Life as It (Ashland Poetry Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 Independent Publisher Book Award; Cyclorama (Fordham University Press, 2015); and The Odds of Being (Silverfish Review Press, 2008). She was also the author of several works of literary criticism, including Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (University Press of New England, 2009). Wardrop’s honors include a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America’s 2006 Robert H. Winner Award, judged by Jean Valentine. She was a professor of English at Western Michigan University, and died on April 8, 2021.

An Interview with Justin Jamail [by Aspen Matis]

Poet and attorney Justin Jamail is the author of Exchangeable Bonds, published by Hanging Loose Press in 2018. His poems and commentary have appeared in many journals and online publications, and he is the General Counsel of The New York Botanical Garden. Raised in Houston, Texas, he now lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

I corresponded with Mr. Jamail via email about the radical nature of uncommon wit, the arena of poetry criticism as a realm “where people who have a desperation to say something when there is nothing to be said seem to have that defect most exposed,” and the pleasure of rereading great works many times over. We also discussed the intimate relationship between clarity and metaphor thought Mr. Jamail’s original definition of “exchangeable bonds” in the context of a poem: “Any mechanism that turns one thing into something apparently unrelated to the first thing. Like a chrysalis that turns a caterpillar into a pocket knife.”

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

I write poems for fun, as an intellectual challenge or game, and because I think poems can be beautiful. Also to impress my wife and other friends.

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

Very generally speaking, it seems to me that art is necessary for the good life. I just mean that as an empirical observation — I don’t have any explanation for why it is necessary or what it “does,” and I am not interested in those questions at all. That man does not live on bread alone can also be taken as an empirical observation rather than as a moral or theological principle. That is what I mean here. Poetry is a kind of art, so it fills that role in “our present society” as it has in every other society. Its comparative advantage, I guess, is that it fits in the pocket or average memory and, among literary arts, seems to me to place the least burden on the audience. Its apparent necessity notwithstanding, our present society rather overvalues art and poetry than undervalues it — or so it seems to me.

In your view, in what way does our present society overvalue art and poetry? I imagine that’s an uncommon perspective, among poets.

Oh, I mainly mean expressions that seem to reveal an expectation that promises more from art than it can give. Expectations that poetry will make the audience better, wiser, or more successful people or citizens, for example. Or, as a very different example, any expectation that any aesthetic experience can approach the value placed on oil paintings. It’s modern cant (there’s an 18th century influence!). I would gladly have all awareness of the existence of Picasso erased from my mind in exchange for the current market value of one of his paintings. Probably.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

Demonstrate uncommon skill and wit without the appearance of effort or diligence or pride.

Your book of poems, Exchangeable Bonds, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2018. Poet and editor David Lehman praised the collection as a “book worthy of its legacy,” in which one “can sense the benign influence of such major New York School figures as Kenneth Koch and Paul Violi.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this debut collection? Is there a particular inquiry or exploration that unifies the book? And what do you hope readers will be left with, after the final page?

These were what seemed to be most of the best poems I had written over a pretty long period. Tony Towle, one of my favorite poets, was nice enough to give me advice on the ordering in addition to some splendid editorial comments. I hope the audience likes the poems. For someone as authoritative as David to have sensed the influence of poets as great as Koch and Violi is pretty humbling. There is no doubt that those poets exert a huge influence on my sense of what makes a poem successful.

What do you do (beyond listening) when “The room pulls away” and you are standing, as in your fine poem Early April Subway?

Write poetry! — or anyway a line or two.

What are exchangeable bonds, metaphorically speaking?

Any mechanism that turns one thing into something apparently unrelated to the first thing. Like a chrysalis that turns a caterpillar into a pocket knife.

You dedicated your book to “My fathers” — who are these men? 

Jeffrey Jamail and David Lifson

You are an accomplished attorney, currently the General Counsel of The New York Botanical Garden; is there a place in your creative practice where your legal and poetic fascinations unify? Or are these lines of work necessarily distinct — two independent threads of your life’s tapestry? 

I don’t see much connection. The scenes and clichés of office work life enter poems fairly often, I notice. Hmmm… I may write a Georgics of the office…

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

Robert Herrick. Andrew Marvell. Shakespeare of course if we are talking early 17th century (is he part of the “long 16th”? Probably.). I read a lot of 17th and 18th century sermons; I think it is a neglected area of excellent English literature. If I had the time for an academical career I would concentrate on this. I read some poems by Sarah Egerton and Anne Finch last year and liked them quite a bit. I like Oliver Goldsmith’s writing. It’s hard to be inspired by 18th century poetry because there is a lot of “inside baseball” — references to each other and contemporary events and so forth. But I admire it a great deal. Those poets were masters of skills I don’t seem to have developed to any meaningful degree.

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his or her perspective useful? If no, why not? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?

Poetry criticism is an area where people who have a desperation to say something when there is nothing to be said seem to have that defect most exposed. I have been told that one should not argue about taste, but that is not a reason for extending one’s exposure to bad taste. When poetry is critiqued well, what happens is that a critic has told convincingly in what way a poem or poet is successful or unsuccessful. This is valuable because it can form what is really only an impression of taste (or something) into clear ideas. Sometimes criticism can be the occasion for general remarks on mankind, of course. Such writing is often also a pleasurable or beautiful thing in its own right.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

I haven’t noticed much correlation, but I don’t read enough to take an intelligent view. The results of the system seem consistent with the construction of the system?  

The reason great works become obscure is that there are too many great works to read conveniently and there is also (as Johnson noted) a social pressure that many seem to feel to keep up with whatever is current, so good things get neglected. I mean, I am 41 years old, have enjoyed English literature for decades, and am only now reading Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy with attention. Yet there are serious people who consider it the most admirable work in the language! For every such book that I have neglected, there must be dozens of less famous works. Also, I think I could defend an observation that there has been a steady increase in the quantity of literature of all kinds and all qualities. What keeps me, in particular, among those responsible for great works falling into obscurity is that I reread favorite works many times over. I guess I have a terrible memory for literature!

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

Read more.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?

A Georgics of the office and more short lyric poems that I hope my wife will like.

An Interview with Lawrence Joseph [by Aspen Matis]

Lawrence Joseph is the author of seven books of poems, most recently A Certain Clarity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). His other books of poems include So Where Are We? (FSG, 2017), Into It (FSG, 2005) and Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973 – 1993 (FSG, 2005). He is also the author of Lawyerland (FSG, 1997), a nonfiction novel. He is Tinnelly Professor of Law (emeritus) at St. John’s University School of Law and lives with his wife in New York City.

I corresponded with Mr. Joseph via email about poetry as an access to viewing and comprehending “the inner lives of a culture,” the language of law, and the power of musicality to jolt us into new worlds. We also discussed the writing of poems as a “prayer for illumination and perfection.”

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

I write poems because I need to. Making poems is an integral part of my sensibility, of who I am. Poetry, for me, is human language in its most charged, distilled form, deeply infused with emotion and feeling, intellect and sensuality. A poem is an aesthetically composed object, an expression of the poet’s interior and exterior worlds. Robert Hayden described “the writing of poems as one way of coming to grips with inner and outer realities,” as “a spiritual act, really, a sort of prayer for illumination and perfection.” I wholeheartedly agree.  

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course?

Poetry helps us make sense of, and see, the realities of the worlds that we individually and collectively live in. It shows us the inner lives of a culture. At any given time it is the common voice with in us.  

Your most recent book of poems, A Certain Clarity, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in March of 2020. Described by the publisher as “passionately driven by an acute awareness of a deeper order in which beauty, love, and justice are indistinguishable,” the work presents selections from your six prior books of poetry. The New York Times calls the book “a major work of American art.” In your perception, is there an inquiry or exploration that unifies this newest collection? An underlying intention? And what do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

Each of my books has been written as a book, not as a collection of poems. My intention was that A Certain Clarity also be read as a book in itself. From the beginning — my first book, Shouting at No One, was published in 1983, and included poems written back to the mid-70s — my poems have addressed the power structures of American imperial war-making, finance capital, racism, misogyny, and ecological destruction, revealing the vicious hatred in America of the poor and weak. But, also from the beginning, I’ve set against these worlds of cruelty, violence and subjugation deeper truths — for me, the most human truths — of beauty and love — truths which, first of all, I believe in, and are, ultimately, what in my work I wish to leave my reader with.

You are the Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law in New York City, and — writing as an attorney — you have published on the subjects of employment, tort and compensation law, labor, jurisprudence, and legal theory. John Ashbery once called your work “poetry of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness.” Is there a place in your vision where your legal and poetic fascinations meld, like tin-lead alloy wires becoming solder? Or are these professional threads necessarily distinct — two independent filaments of your mind’s tapestry?

In the United States the language of law covers every social, economic and political issue. During my forty-five years professionally as lawyer, I’ve practiced and taught this language, written critically about it, know it well, and have used it in my poetry. When Wallace Stevens, a career-long practicing lawyer, was asked about writing poetry and being a lawyer, he replied: “I don’t have a separate mind for legal work and another for writing poetry. I do each with my whole mind.” I feel the same way.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?

I’m writing my next book of poems, which will pick up where my last book, So Where Are We? left off, in early 2016, before Trump’s presidency and the pandemic. I’m also working on several prose projects, in various forms and genres.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

I’m always learning my language, the American language, which, of course, is constantly changing, as America itself is constantly changing. Over time, I’ve created my own tradition. I look for poets and poems that jolt me into their worlds. I take apart poems that I love on every level of form and content that I can imagine and try to write poems that will have the same effect on a reader that these poems have had on me. And music, sound — poetry is, above all, sound. Be as attentive to the sounds of your words as you are to what your words say.

Blog Exclusive: Emily Fragos in conversation with Suzanne Farrell

Suzanne Farrell was the purest paradigm of the Balanchine dancer. The great choreographer created one masterpiece after another for her. During her illustrious career with the New York City Ballet, she danced 150 roles in over 2,000 performances. In the course of their work together, Farrell and “Mr. B” transformed the very face of dance, experimenting and inventing, enlarging the scale and altering the speed and structures of ballet.

I spoke with Suzanne Farrell by email for this interview. I was interested in exploring those areas where dance and poetry overlap. With eloquent speech, she allowed me to enter “the state of balletic grace” which is, she said, “unlike anything else in the world.”

Suzanne Farrell and George Balanchine in "Don Quixote", mid-1960s

EF: Where there was empty space, how did George Balanchine fill it with pure movement, deep emotion, and mystery? How did the great choreographer go about his work?

SF: When Mr. B started working on a new ballet for me, there would often be no one in the room except the pianist, George, and myself. He would show me a little something and I would try to imitate or decode what he indicated. He would only indicate, never command, and then I would try.

Choreography is not born as choreography. It grows out of a suggestion or movement indication and then it gets shaped into the dance. Sometimes I would make a mistake and that might become a part of the choreography--not that every mistake can be put to music and become beautiful, but he made me see life differently. I learned to remain open to chance, the spontaneous, the moment.

In his later years, something would just spill out of his body. He could rarely duplicate it, so I had to see precisely what he wanted the first time, but that came over years of being soulmates.

EF: When you speak of mistakes, I think of Balanchine’s first great masterpiece, Serenade, when one of the dancers fell down while exiting and he included that fall in the ballet. I have often wondered how he created his heart-stopping lifts that fill me with so much emotion. In one of his last masterpieces, Davidsbündlertänze, he created a lift for you and your wonderful partner, Jacques d’Amboise, that made people in the audience gasp. How did that come about?

SF: Jacques was in the later stage of his career and almost retiring. George said, “Jacques, maybe you can lift Suzanne,” and Jacques said, “Oh, sorry, Mr. B, I’ve got bursitis in my shoulder,” and George said, “Okay, then maybe you can kneel and Suzanne can do something around you and support herself while you’re on your knee,” and Jacques said, “Sorry, George, I’ve got a bad knee.” Every time Mr. B tried to give us something, there were obstacles. Eventually, George came up with a unique kind of lift when Jacques carries me offstage. I support myself partly, with one arm over Jacques’s shoulder and the weight is distributed in a different way. It would not have been devised for a healthy body. It was original because sometimes life forces you to be original, although it won’t work if you contrive to be original.  

EF: Imagery is vital in the work of a poet and the imagery in a Balanchine ballet is astounding. In the majestic Chaconne, for example, you swim through the air. How did Balanchine get across his notions of imagery to the dancers? Did he demonstrate, tell stories, use metaphors or similes?  

SF: I remember my first rehearsal for Meditation. It was the very first ballet Mr. B did for me. I was only 18. He didn’t mention any storyline. He described only what he wanted physically. My entrance from stage right was a mere two steps from the wing and then two steps up on pointe and then stay on pointe for several counts. It was to be as if I were parting an invisible curtain, parting clouds, with my arms out to the side. “You just hold on to the air, when you’re up there [on pointe],” he said. It sounded so simple, and I tried to envision what he wanted, but every time I stepped up there I’d teeter and wobble and keel over. Finally, he said, “Well, we can’t stay here forever. Let’s pretend you’re already in and take it from there.”

EF: I’m sure you felt badly at the time, but his remark amuses me.

SF: I’m happy to say that for as much trouble as I had that first day, I never wobbled again in performance.

EF: I understand that Balanchine did not want you to take piano lessons, afraid that it would interfere with your famed musicality, your natural gift for dance. You have coached hundreds of dancers, you have directed your own, acclaimed dance company, The Suzanne Farrell Ballet, you continue to teach. Your work with dancers is revered. How do you bring out the best in dancers, without intimidating them?

SF: It depends on the student. Every dancer is individual to me. It’s up to me to find out what they need to have their dancing be their own individual thumbprint. There are many layers that make up a person, many possibilities within us, and sometimes I have to strip some of those layers away, those preconceived, protective notions, so that the individual dancer can blossom.  

I handle dancers with care, in the right environment, without destroying something that they might bring to their roles. This requires trust and honesty alongside experimentation. I don’t consistently correct my dancers. They usually know when they’ve made a mistake and if you continually correct them, they feel limited and fear any movement that has not been sanctioned. I usually withhold comments until there is a cluster of things that have started to chip away at the work process, the performance, or the rehearsal. I also want to wait to see how they are going to develop their rehearsal, because it’s not always immediately apparent.

I believe that the more you reveal of yourself to an audience, the more mysterious you become. The less you reveal, the less interesting you are. Every night, I put my life out there on the stage in front of everyone. I could not not give everything. People said, “She is so mysterious.” But if you work at being mysterious, it just comes off as disingenuous. I want to help them in this process.

Dancers don’t use anything other than who they are. We are not machines where the volume can be turned up. We are our own technology, our own instruments. We have to do it all visually and energetically. I say to my dancers, “Ladies and gentlemen, please turn up the volume in your movement, turn up the technicolor in your eyes.” There will be days when you cannot balance as long or you don’t turn as many times or you cannot jump as high. I want to teach my dancers to have a facility to use another vocabulary, just like a writer searches for a better word. We should have that kind of thesaurus in our technique, the ability to delve deeper into our dance voice. It’s more visceral, more vulnerable. It’s where music and space come into play. You can express the ballet technically well, but you must also express it poetically.

EF: You are celebrated all over the world. You have won every prestigious award there is to win. If there were a Nobel Prize for Dance, you would be the winner. Many poets work without this kind of recognition. They may deal with disappointment and self-doubt. Does fame have meaning for you or is it something remote from the work? Do you counsel your dancers for a life in the arts?

SF: If you choose to dance, you should have this wonderful feeling unlike anything else in life: the state of balletic grace. I caution dancers not to focus on being a star or to demand the star treatment. I want them to remember why they wanted to be a dancer. I want to restore for them the purity of the art form, the excitement of dancing.

You know, as you become experienced and you perfect the technique, you have to remain vulnerable and not lose that wonderful innocence, that freshness. I always loved to move to beautiful music. As a child, I danced in our living room, but would stop if anyone watched. It wasn’t the applause or the adulation. I would have been happy dancing, even if no one saw me. I needed to dance; I only dreamed of being a ballerina. This means that I am never bored or unhappy with dance. I have had unhappiness in my life, but dance never betrayed me. There should always be happiness and comfort in responding to music. Good theater should always send people away feeling changed. The arts are the hospitals for our souls. I have said this many times before: Life is hard, it is meant to be a test, but while you’re studying for that test, isn’t it nice to be dancing.

EF: With time, so many dances become diminished or distorted. Styles change, dancers change, audiences change. How do you hold on to great dance, the most ephemeral of all the arts?

SF: The words of a great poem are written down. They don’t change, but choreography is subjected to many variables. Our medium is humanness. The human body is constantly changing. It alters with time, emotion, humidity, with health. It has lived one day longer. You should never assume that a human body will be predictable. If Balanchine ballets retain his integrity, his musicality, his energy, spirit, and lifelong philosophy, I believe that the right environment will hold them together. We can’t recapture those past days, but I want to bring that same sense of urgency and importance to the time we’re living in.

Suzanne Farrell continues to be a sought-after répétiteur for Balanchine ballets all over the world. Here she works with NYCB dancers Maria Kowroski and Tyler Angle on a partnering sequence from "Diamonds," a ballet Balanchine created on her in 1967. (photo © Rosalie O'Connor)

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Emily Fragos is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. She is the author of four acclaimed books of poetry. The newest, Unrest (Sheep Meadow Press), is due out in November. She is also the editor of seven poetry anthologies for The Everyman’s Pocket Library: Music’s Spell, Art & Artists, The Great Cat, The Dance, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Poems of Gratitude, and Poems of Paris. Fragos has written numerous articles on music and dance and has taught at Columbia, Yale, and NYU.

An Interview with Loren Goodman [by Aspen Matis]

Loren Goodman is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Non-Existent Facts (otata’s bookshelf, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Suppository Writing (The Chuckwagon, 2008), New Products (Proper Tales Press, 2010) and, with Pirooz Kalayeh, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems (New Michigan Press, 2020). A Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, he serves as the Chair of Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing Director.

I corresponded with Mr. Goodman via email about the ephemeral nature of insight, old poets who are powerful alarm clocks, the dreamtime origin of responsibility, poetry “as sacred language: a compass that gets you to a party,” the unique capacity of thematic minds to unearth truth, and the inspiring optimism of a particular young Japanese boxer. We also discussed the definition of greatness “as what slips through the cracks; nothing has yet been built to contain it.”

photo credit: Mike Figgis

In your poem entitled “Poem,” you define a poem as “a face as empty / As the full page is blank.” What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Is poetry a part of me, or am I a part of poetry? What is my greatest role in the inner life of poetry? Why have certain poems chosen to write themselves through me? I’d like to thank poetry for collaborating with me.

This is a question we ask — or set out to answer — every time we write one: What can a poem be?

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

I like the idea of poetry as a compass: a compass that gets you lost, when getting lost is the only way to find a way. Which is the greater being/force — the more inclusive, all-encompassing — poetry or society? The radicals “god” + “soil” + “to throw a party” comprise the Chinese characters for society (社会) while “language” + “temple” make up poetry (詩). Combine the two and we have poetry as sacred language: a compass that gets you to a party.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

Hang ten.

Your most recent book of poems, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems, was published in February of 2020. Poet and songwriter Michael Rothenberg calls the collection “Irreverent…a Dadaistic self-portrait of twins in an existential playground, where everyone and no one gets hurt too badly. …Truth slips between meanings, some words become other words, a conceptual kind of magician’s poetry that skips through a minefield of radioactive icons and self-detonating idols, each itinerant reflection, each telegraphic puzzle, expiring in zany isolation and nostalgia. We have come to this. Bankrupt and rejoicing. This twitchy book of poetry is history and hope.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection? 

Pirooz Kalayeh and I co-wrote this book together. It was a wonderful experience. We wrote it line by line, back and forth over the years, on Google Hangouts. It was fun goofing around with language, not intending to write a book, just having a good time, corresponding in and outside the parameters of ordinary language. Then at some point we looked back at our chats and said, “hey, we have some poems!” The Google Hangout poetry process is one I’ve used with students from many years before, which continues to inspire. My “ambition” is to keep on doing it. Please contact me if you’d like to collaborate!

Your first collection, Famous Americans, was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin as the winner of the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets and subsequently published by Yale University Press. Described by the publisher as “a rollercoaster of a ride through the absurdities of American pop culture,” the poems in Famous Americans question our definition and understanding of the concept of icon. Merwin compared you to the Dadaists and commended your poetry’s “plain ridicule.” In your mind, what inquiry or exploration unifies the work? What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

The back cover. Between that and the final page, I hope that readers will be left with the first page of their own new poem or book.

Explorations: how to make a book, and to make the most of my own mistakes.

You live in Seoul, Korea, where you serve as the Chair of Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing Director at Yonsei University/Underwood International College. As a Kansas-born American living in Seoul, what unexpected delights have you come across? What difficulties and disappointments? Have you experienced culture shock; or have you discovered that, to a great extent, students are students and English departments are insular and familiar? 

It is my first time being the Chair, and let me tell you, it is not easy. It requires a certain amount of readiness and stability, and over time, one learns to accept the pleasures of being sat upon. I’m working on becoming a table.

The students are great. Each unique, a brilliant, lively and considerate bunch — beyond comparison. Primarily third-culture kids.

So it’s really not that far from the heartland to Seoul. One thing I’ve learned in Seoul is that groove is in the heart.

I experience culture shock on a regular basis, and moonlight as a cultural shock therapist.

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

I use 17th century and 18th century poets as internal alarm clocks.

The works of Blake, Coleridge, and Bashō have awakened in me dreams. As Tukaram writes:

I was sleeping when Namdeo and Vitthal Stepped into my dream.
“Your job is to make poems. Stop wasting time,” Namdeo said.
Vitthal gave me the measure and gently aroused me from a dream inside a dream.
Namdeo vowed to write one billion poems.
“Tuka, all the unwritten ones are your responsibility.”

In dreams begin responsibilities!

What have you learned from your practice of Japanese boxing? Are you now competing? 

I learned many things, and forgot many things — do you find life is like that, a process of learning and forgetting?

Of the many things I learned, I’d like to share three: 1) While training with Japanese boxers, I enjoyed talking with them, interviewing them, recording, transcribing, and reflecting on their life stories. One of my standard interview questions was “What is the best thing that happened to you in boxing?” The answer that stays with me most came from a young pro boxer. He paused, looked up for a second, and said, “It hasn’t happened yet.” What a wonderful optimism with which to approach the world: the best is always yet to come. 2) Don’t get hit. 3) Use your legs.

I’m still in the game. See you on August 14th, from Tulsa, on ESPN.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

Thematic minds sometimes find out what inquiring ones don’t want to know.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

Yes. But sometimes there are books that are better than the best. And the greatest works are the mortar that holds everything together — without them — and the books that go beyond greatness—the cracks themselves — our world would be little more than a heap of bricks. 

It feels good to be asked about greatness.

Didn’t Thomas Nashe say the best art is the most obscure?

One of my favorite stories on this subject involves Stanley Kunitz’ selection of Michael Casey.

It’s nice to find the greatness in everything.

I like the definition of greatness as what slips through the cracks; nothing has yet been built to contain it.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets?

I only share wisdom and guidance with old poets. Never let anyone convince you out of your youth.

All big things are made of little things. Bon Courage! Everything is practice for everything else. Do one thing at a time. Sleep.

I have plenty of ignorance to share with young poets, and a lot of wisdom and guidance I’d like young poets to share with me!

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?

The trivial ones! The trivium.

Working on: a shijo workshop in Newfoundland, dreams, boxing, translations of Humberto Ak’abal, a Sci-Fi musical without the letter “I,” a Kung Fu sestina, and a series of dark chocolate-covered poems. Also collaborating with a Korean cosmetics company on poems that cleanse pores, and with Puma International on a line of shoes composed of recycled verses from the 17th/18th century.

Thank you for asking so many insightful and inspiring questions. Now for the question behind the questions: the answer is green.

The Poet's Notebook: Interview with erica kaufman [by Andrew McCarron]

[Guest author note: In addition to being an accomplished and innovative poet, erica kaufman is the Director of the Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking. The institute, which has been offering professional development workshops for teachers and students since its inception in 1982, is built around the primacy of the notebook and pen as instruments of investigation. Even after the institute was forced to go remote by the pandemic, the notebook and pen remained the pillar and ground of the texts and questions that its various workshops pursued. Not surprisingly, erica’s two books of poems INSTANT CLASSIC and POST CLASSIC (both out from Roof Books) emerged out of the forge of her notebooks. I am delighted that erica agreed to be interviewed for this blog!]

AM: When did you begin keeping a notebook as part of your creative process? 

ejk:  I’ve kept a notebook as part of my creative process for as long as I can remember. I’ve always loved notebooks as an object--there’s something that is just innately appealing about opening a fresh notebook and completing the last line of the last page of a notebook. Not too long ago I was visiting my parents and found a stack of notebooks from elementary school (3rd grade). It was fascinating because I don’t actually remember writing and keeping any sort of journal at that time, but I did. The notebooks were labeled with my name and the year, and filled with poems with the occasional dated prose entry. My elementary school notebooks are hardcover, often from the Looney Tunes store (if there was such a thing in the 1980’s on Staten Island).

AM: What roles have your notebooks/journals played in your creative process over the years?

ejk: I prefer to write by hand. I use notebooks to keep notes, often lists of things I hear or see, strings of words or phrases that I find interesting. I am always writing--it is how I focus my attention, how I digest information I’m taking in, how I learn. I always try to keep separate notebooks for different purposes--one for notes, one for poem drafting, one for job work...But inevitably these categories bleed into each other so I also spend a lot of time recopying materials from one notebook to another. When I draft a poem I almost always do it in a notebook first, and I revise by recopying drafts and seeing how different small changes feel as I try them out. Writing poetry is a very physical process--I need to experience multiple drafts and I need to have all of my notes and versions of a single piece in one place so I can move back and forth between renditions of a poem before settling on what might be the closest to a final one. The notebook is also where I might test out something I’m thinking about through prose that might later become a poem.

 AM: What happens when you write in a notebook that doesn’t happen when you type?

ejk:  This is a topic that has gotten a lot of attention in recent years--I’ve read articles with titles like “What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades” (NY Times), “Handwriting shown to be better for memory than typing” (Big Think), and “Attention, Students, put your laptops away!” (NPR). In short, it seems as though we have scientific proof that typing and writing by hand are actually different cognitive processes that lead to different things happening in the brain. I know that for me, anything I write by hand sticks in my head in a very different way than if I’m typing. I retain or remember anything that I write in a notebook, the same is just not true when I’m typing. Increasingly I’m also aware that I bring a certain anxiety with me to the keyboard--when I’m typing it is as if whatever I’m working on has different stakes attached to it. When I’m ready to type I’m usually on my way to finishing and submitting something (for my job or for my personal work). So, that’s a totally different experience as well. I’m just not a person who really writes on a screen for pleasure. I’ve even tried the ipad with stylus approach where I could write by hand and have that translated to type, but it didn’t or doesn’t feel the same. The notebook is my version of a sandbox or a laboratory. The keyboard is more like the stage or lecture hall.
AM: Would you like your notebook  to be read by others, or are they private?

ejk:  My notebooks aren’t private, but at the same time, I’m not sure that they would make sense to anyone but me. I have a tendency to create catalogs and lists of phrases and words more than anything else. So the notebooks are full of these dispersed between poem drafts. I suppose there’s a way in which the notebook then becomes a puzzle?

 AM: Can you reflect on the experience of seeing the notebooks of a poet whose work you admire?

ejk:  When I was in college I had the privilege of taking a workshop with Anselm Berrigan. At that time he was writing “Zero Star Hotel,” and I remember walking with him after class and he showed me what the poem looked like in his notebook. I remember thinking that the stanzas looked like windows, the poem a large building. I also remember that this was a moment that marked a shift in how I thought about my writing practice. I suddenly realized that the “journaling” I’d always done was writing in its own right. I continue to relish (and remember) moments where I notice a poet writing in a notebook because of how it makes their writing process tangible (to me) in a different way. 

AM: Why would you encourage someone interested in writing poetry to keep a notebook?

ejk: I think it is essential! I would encourage someone interested in writing anything to keep a notebook and to think of that notebook as a space with no predetermined goals. When I’ve worked with younger writers, there still seems to be a certain idealization of the notebook as a diary, a place to put one’s secrets and gossip. But, really, the notebook, for me at least, is a place to put anything that is done in writing. What is most useful is the discoveries that happen when I look back through all the writing I’ve done along the way. I’m able to find pieces of poems that can then find new homes in other projects. I can also see how my own writing is changing and how I want it to change. Because I do so much of my revision by hand, seeing the earliest drafts of pieces can often remind me of where I began in a project, and can also then guide me back to certain important questions that the work I’ve made might not have answered as of yet. I’ve been working on an epic trilogy for the past decade or so—thus far it includes INSTANT CLASSIC and POST CLASSIC (both out from Roof Books). I knew the project was a trilogy because of what I found in my notebooks.

An Interview with Laura Cronk [by Aspen Matis]

Laura Cronk is the author of two books of poems, Ghost Hour and Having Been an Accomplice, both  from Persea Books. She is the chair of undergraduate writing at The New School in New York City where she teaches courses on pedagogy and creative practice and coordinates programs for writers such as the Summer Writers Colony and The Riggio Honors Writing & Democracy program. Originally from Indiana, she currently lives with her family in New Jersey.

I corresponded with Ms. Cronk via email about poetry as “a spiritual practice like meditation or prayer,” poems as an instrument of investigation, and American citizens’ “complicity with… everything that was being done in our names.” We also discussed the profound value of literary community, people with whom one can enjoy “long, late night conversations about poems and writing… meandering, deep” talks that open new pathways forward.  

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

Lately I’ve been thinking of writing poems as a spiritual practice like meditation or prayer. This is my latest attempt at getting out of my own way, sidestepping my own pessimism. 

Your most recent book of poems, Ghost Hour, was published by Persea Books in December. Poet and literary critic Craig Morgan Teicher describes the collection as “a fierce coming of age, a coming into—with heart, humor, and humility—one’s own,” and poet Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta calls the work “brilliant.” Your publisher categorizes the collection as emanating “from adolescence and other liminal spaces” and evoking “profound consideration of contemporary violence.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection?

Ghost Hour is divided into three sections. The first group of poems circles around origins and lineage and is set in a rural Midwestern landscape. The long middle poem is an elegy for a queer first love set against the same backdrop. The third section of poems are more varied formally, more experimental, tend to be located in urban settings, and grapple with the complexities of contemporary adulthood. As in my first book, I was interested in investigating complicity in my new book. The investigation in Ghost Hour is more personal, considering the things that have most haunted me over the years I was writing these poems. 

For several years, you curated the Monday Night Poetry Series at the famed KGB Bar in the East Village. Why, in your view, is the public performance of poetry important? And what is something unexpected you learned from your long tenure in that exciting position? What’s the greatest gift the experience offered you?

To mark the 20th anniversary of the Monday Night Poetry Series, those of us who have hosted reminisced about the experience here. Looking back at it, I’m so glad we captured some of those memories. Star Black and David Lehman started something really special that’s still going strong — most recently with Zoom readings and a reading on the iconic 4th Street stoop. Hosting the Monday Night Poetry series was an amazing experience and an incredible education. As an audience member or host I’ve heard almost all of my idols read at KGB. I learned how important it is for poets to have a place to perform for each other, relax and cut up with each other, and appreciate a well-poured drink. 

Your first collection, Having Been an Accomplice, won the 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. Poet Anne Waldman praises the book for its exploration of “the vicissitudes and pleasures of the relational and often domestic beloved,” observing that the work “then proceeds to invent a fascinating persona in the figure of the child-like Citizen Queen, a disarmed goddess sitting in her apartment, questioning her power and efficacy.” Poet Brenda Shaughnessy describes the collection as “Dreamy yet certain, lovelorn and love-buoyed,” adding that “the sadness in the poems has joy-rounded edges, the delight scooped out of melancholy and offered, shining.” To me, the book seemed unified and composed by the desire for a powerful voice of clarity in a time of dangerous opacity and unthinkable destruction. In your mind, what inquiry or exploration unifies the work? What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

I began this book as the U.S. was launching its invasion of Iraq and I felt enraged and hopeless, full of the need to do something. The thing I ended up doing was writing poems about my complicity as an American citizen with the war, with the president, with everything that was being done in our names. I was also interested in the joy and the sacrifices involved in falling in love, embarking on an adult life. At a point those two very different interests blurred and merged. I don’t know what I hope people are left with. I’m always hoping to really capture the full depth of feeling I’m writing about and to have it land like a punch in the gut. So I want people to feel punched, I guess? 

You serve as chair of undergraduate writing at The New School, where you coordinate the Riggio Honors Program: Writing and Democracy. What has been the greatest pleasure of this educational post, for you? And the greatest challenge? What are your hopes for the program, through this time of remote learning academic redefinition?

John Reed’s wonderful book about The New School, A Drama in Time characterized the Riggio Honors Program as “the first academic program to treat writing, equality, and justice as a single subject, and to implement its philosophy in its internal structure.” I’m so passionate about this program. Besides the connections the program draws between writing and justice, the commitment to fostering a true community for students is the program’s most important goal. I think, for recent alumni, knowing that there’s this serious, generous group of writers who are really in your corner can make all of the difference. We’ve weirdly come through the pandemic stronger than ever. There’s been a clarifying aspect of this experience. No one wants to waste any time. Even over Zoom some really deep connections have been made. There are ways that being online made aspects of the program more accessible for some, like those who have caretaking responsibilities, and that has been something we want to continue to support. And shy people do love a good Zoom chat. It’s especially good for jokes, asides, some of the things that confident people manage to say in person. Of course it’s been really, really hard to not be in each other’s physical presence. I’m looking forward to the fall and the beautiful sensory overload of being in a room together talking about writing. 

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

There is so much incredible contemporary poetry being published now that I’ve really been focusing my reading there. I did just wander into a local used bookstore, though, and buy The Portable William Blake which I’m planning to dig into this summer, even though it has a musty smell. Do any BAP readers have any tricks for refreshing bad-smelling used books?

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his or her perspective useful? If no, why not? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?

Most contemporary critical writing about poetry seems to be coming from a place of love and deep engagement. Or that’s what I happen to read. I’m thinking of Craig Morgan Teicher’s book We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress. It’s such a joyful book, one that makes me feel really connected to poetry and poets. I love Sean Singer’s newsletter The Sharpener. Megin Jimenez, who also hosted the Monday Night Poetry Series, is a poet who has been writing reviews of international fiction and nonfiction. The experience of reading good critical writing is like being immersed in a conversation with a really smart friend. So satisfying.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

Justice, candor, memory, conversation, romantic love.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

I really think we can’t worry about this as artists. We just have to do our work and support other poets in the ways that we can. There are so many things we can do to contribute to the poetry ecosystem. There’s writing but there’s also editing, hosting readings, writing reviews, interviewing other writers as you’re doing now, teaching, starting writing or reading groups, the list goes on...

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets?

Now is the time to have long, late night conversations about poems and writing. Find your people to have meandering, deep conversations with. 

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?

I really love essay-like poems and poetic essays. I have a few in the works…

An Interview with Jennifer L. Knox [by Aspen Matis]

Jennifer L. Knox is the author of five acclaimed poetry collections: Days of Shame and Failure, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Drunk by Noon, A Gringo Like Me, and, most recently, Crushing It. Her poems appear in many anthologies, including five volumes of The Best American Poetry, and in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker and American Poetry Review. Her non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. The developer and curator of the crowd-sourced poetry project Iowa Bird of Mouth, she teaches at Iowa State University.

I corresponded with Ms. Knox via email about poetry as an access to our subconscious, the joy (and profundity) of incongruous humor, humanity’s “endless capacity for self-deception,” and writing poetry as a means of purposeful dissociation—a counterintuitive, healthy path to healing. We also discussed the subtle beauty of poems that “have a bridge player’s memory,” the masterful way the “bells that are rung in the title and the first line reverberate through until the end, shifting tones all the while in unexpected ways.”

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

I write poems to dissociate in a healthy, purposeful way that doesn’t leave me hungover, in jail, or dead. I’ve long suspected that there was a physical component to the act of writing poems, because I feel good when I write poems, but I feel stupid when I engage in exclusively mental pursuits, like math. Recently I read that traumatized brains access an unprecedented calmness when they dissociate; though that calm is, in itself, addictive, purposeful dissociation is a healthy path to healing. Imagine putting on an astronaut suit and bounding around the smoldering ruins of your childhood. You see an object that terrified you long ago: an empty tin can with a fork sticking out. “We can use this!” you shout to the reader and hold up the can, which no longer scares you at all. Our “conversations” are different every time; I never have to be the same speaker. I can be Zsa Zsa Gabor, or a tree stump, or an SOS signal floating up from the ocean floor. As poems are relatively short, I only have to breathe the atmosphere for a brief time.

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

Poetry gives us access to our subconscious, which we need to heal and evolve.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in her work?

Defy expectations.

Your work is often praised for its sharp humor. The New York Times calls your poetry “massively entertaining,” and the Los Angeles Review writes of your “laugh-demanding wit.” Of your work’s tone, The Critical Flame says “Knox’s humor is the kind of funny which is surprising, generous, and vulnerable, and which demands generosity and vulnerability from the reader. This is the kind of funny we have found in writers as various as Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, and Kenneth Koch.” What, in your view, is the relationship between humor and truth? Between levity and profundity?

There are different kinds of humor. The one I enjoy using most often is incongruous humor, which defies the reader’s expectations, and my own as I write the poem. Sometimes the result is funny, sometimes it’s scary. Either way, not getting what I thought I was going to get feels very “true.”

Your most recent book of poems, Crushing It, is widely acclaimed. Publisher’s Weekly calls the collection “Darkly inventive… This is a careful, thoughtful book about the complexities of identity and the difficulty of words,” and The New York Times Book Review says that the work “hits, with deceptive ease, all the poetic marks a reader could want: intellectual curiosity, emotional impact, beautiful language, surprising revelation and arresting imagery.” What inquiry or exploration unifies the collection?

Our endless capacity for self-deception—even in the face of the Anthropocene. 

What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

I would love it if readers felt that they had been seen in a perfectly imperfect way.

From 2016 through 2017, you developed and curated the online crowd-sourced poetry project Iowa Bird of Mouth, which honored Iowa birds through “the words and stories of bird lovers, bird watchers, writers, artists, musicians, teachers, students, scientists, nonprofits, federal and state organizations, environmental stewards, and nature lovers.” The project was supported by the Iowa Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and over 750 people from around the world contributed original writing. What inspired this exciting project? And what exists at the nexus of poetry and flight? Of birds and wonder? Are you yourself a birder?

Iowa Bird of Mouth began with the question: why are some people compelled to create and others are not? For the Iowa Arts Council fellowship, I envisioned an online space in which people felt their words belonged, as if they were all part of one giant squawking, undulating flock. I researched crowdsourced poems (such as David Lehman’s long-running “Next Line, Please” project at The American Scholar) and saw that anonymity, access, and an inspiring subject were essential in motivating “norms” to participate. Iowans have an affinity for wild birds. Iowa Filmmaker Colleen Krantz told me, “I grew up on a cattle farm in western Iowa. There was absolutely nothing to look at and nothing to hear. But birds were the bling on our farm.”

I hoped that wild birds would draw people to the poem, and they did. Though I have adopted many parakeets and lovebirds, I knew nothing about wild birds. Thankfully, Iowa Young Birders Director, Tyler Harms, volunteered all his mad ornithological skills. I’m gobsmacked that Iowa Bird of Mouth happened. I’m pretty sure the reason I was able to pull it off was that the universe needed it to exist, though I don’t know why. You can see the website here. My essay about the project in American Poetry Review is here. The text and code are available for use in non-commercial projects. 

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

Folly, hubris, self-deception, coping mechanisms, animals, TV, counter-intuitive manifestations of kindness and love, mushrooms, telecognition, homing instincts, science, crime.

The Los Angeles Review writes that your poetry “leaves the reader a different person.” To what extent is a great poem like a chemical element, reactive, interacting with the atmosphere of the moment—forever altering those who discover it, like sun on seeds?

My mother is an excellent bridge player. She has to pay attention to and remember everything that happens during the play of a hand. The poems I love have a bridge player’s memory. The bells that are rung in the title and the first line reverberate through until the end, shifting tones all the while in unexpected ways. Flannery O’Connor’s surprising yet inevitable ending is established by the end of the first line. So like a seed, the poem is waiting to pop. All it needs is the light of your attention. 

An Interview with Adrienne Su [by Aspen Matis]

Adrienne Su is the author of five acclaimed poetry collections: Peach State, Living Quarters, Having None of It, Sanctuary, and Middle Kingdom. Her poems appear in many anthologies, including four volumes of The Best American Poetry. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she is professor of creative writing and poet-in-residence at Dickinson College.

I corresponded with Ms. Su via email about poetry’s ability to translate “a question or problem into comprehensible form” and to “make our everyday vocabulary do something no one previously thought it could.” We also discussed the exciting nature of creative works that elicit “a gut response, an understanding one feels rather than thinks” and the power of strong and timely language to make “a constructive difference” in our world.

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

Writing poems is the most difficult and original thing I’m capable of doing. It uses all of my intellectual resources, as well as whatever small abilities I might possess in music, visual art, storytelling, and the many languages I’ve studied but can’t speak. Also, I find that writing a poem reduces the pain of nagging uncertainties, not by providing certainties, but by putting a question or problem into comprehensible form.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

First, to make our everyday vocabulary do something no one previously thought it could. Usually this has something to do with the roots of words, the root of “radical” being radix, “root.” Second, to keep at poetry regardless of the recognition that does or doesn’t appear in the poet’s lifetime.

This past March, you wrote a powerful and wrenching opinion-editorial in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about how “As the pandemic raged and many in power blamed China for everything, attacks on Asians followed.” In the context of the horrific racially-motivated Atlanta mass-shooting of Asian women, your essay shares a glimpse of your own experience as an Asian American woman from Atlanta. Relaying the ways in which you’ve navigated the rise in hostility and discrimination you’ve experienced in the past months, you write: “My job is safer than the jobs of spa employees, but I see anew how I coped with the pandemic under an openly racist president. When gyms closed and many took to walking for exercise, I cut back on going outside. After dark, I drove, even to travel two blocks. I appreciated the obscuring effect of masks.” What moved you to write this very personal op-ed, and what impact do you hope your words will have?

Thank you for this response to the piece. I wrote it because the news of the shooting left me feeling pinned by a boulder, and my initial efforts to roll it away — donating money, attending a rally — gave no relief. The boulder didn’t budge. Its weight was saying that I was not only capable of more, the task was also non-optional. Jennifer Joseph of Manic D Press, publisher of three of my books, gave me the needed nudge. As an Asian American writer who not only grew up in Atlanta but was one week from publishing a book of poems centering on Asian American Atlanta, I would be wrong not to speak up — and I needed to do it in a genre that moves faster and is more widely read than poetry. How long would the media be interested in Asian America? One, two weeks? If enough writers took up the cause, that interest could last longer. Strong op-eds by other Asian American writers were appearing by the day, so I also knew I needed to say something others hadn’t already said. In terms of speed, I’m the opposite of a journalist, so even with Jen and other writer friends responding to drafts, and with every obligation I could cancel canceled, that short piece took me four full days of obsessive writing and rewriting. My hope is that it conveys something others may have wanted to say about being Asian American in a time of pandemic and racial unrest but didn’t have the writing experience, access to publishing, or possibly even the English language to express — and that that makes a constructive difference, on any scale.

Your most recent book of poems, Peach State, explores Atlanta, Georgia’s transformation from the mid-twentieth century to today, as seen and shaped by Chinese Americans. Poet Mark Jarman describes the collection as “elegant, lucid, formally inventive,” and Paisley Rekdal, who edited The Best American Poetry 2020, calls the book “sly, smart and accessible, formally sophisticated and moving,” adding that Peach State is “a beautiful and thought-provoking meditation on food, race, and identity.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection?

In 2015 I saw how international Atlanta had become; being of Asian descent there was no longer the lonely condition I remembered from the 1970s. Both of these things had become clear to me through food: restaurants, grocery stores. In the early days, my family had simply done without many Chinese ingredients, but every now and then someone arrived with a suitcase full of treasures from New York, San Francisco, Taiwan, or Singapore. Today I’m the one who brings a suitcase full of treasures home to central Pennsylvania — from Atlanta. I wanted to write about these changes because, while Atlanta’s transformation was what I had wanted all along, it also meant the erasure of an era. I wanted to acknowledge and celebrate the Chinese Americans, including my parents, who were there many years before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 inadvertently created major demographic shifts. I found that I was best able to portray their resourcefulness, creativity, loneliness, and joy through food. They laid a path for the substantial Asian population of today’s Atlanta — which I also wanted to celebrate. The writing process was a mixture of mourning and delight.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

When I look at shortlists, even longlists, for prizes, I think there is no “best” book. The books are usually doing different things and aren’t meant to be compared to each other. That’s why I think it’s so important that independent publishers and university presses stay around; they care most about the integrity of the work, and while they certainly need to sell books, they aren’t in it for the immediate public response. One day the overlooked great works may receive the recognition they deserve because someone kept them in print. Best American Poetry is a great vehicle for that, too, putting both known and unknown poets’ names in public libraries everywhere.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets?

Have faith that your non-literary talents will turn out to be relevant to your poetry, but give it time to find its place. For many years, I was ambivalent about my interest in cooking. Cooking ability often translates into added labor, especially for women — labor that is generally unseen and repetitive and done at the cumulative expense of writing time. Eventually, my interest in food became a cornerstone of my writing life.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?

Lately I’ve been writing prose, including a forthcoming piece on children’s books for New Ohio Review; a short piece for the Instagram page Apparel for Authors; and another short piece on Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month for USA Today. I’m working on a longer essay on Chinese restaurants. Poetry is still my main genre, but this moment in history seems also to be calling for prose. As when I first read poems that moved me, I remain the most excited by creative works that elicit a visceral response; I wish I could generalize about what constitutes such works, but it’s a gut response, an understanding one feels rather than thinks.  

Meet the Press: Roof Books & Queenzenglish.mp3

N.B. The following conversation with Kyoo Lee (also known as Q) and James Sherry centers on Q’s anthology, Queenzenglish.mp3, an amazing book I highly recommend picking up. ~DD

Dante Di Stefano: How did this project come into being?

Q: First, thank you so much, Dante, for your kind appreciation of the book.

The anthology grew out of the “mp3: merging poetry, philosophy, performativity” public seminar I launched in 2017 at the CUNY Graduate Center, supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Center for the Humanities. As the faculty leader of the seminar, I started this sub-project on the “QueensEnglishToday.mp3” by organizing a reading and panel discussion at the GC on November 30, 2017. Then later that weekend, on December 3, 2017, we threw a sort of party, a more extensive and festive performance event at Queens Museum, [email protected] which I organized with Lee Ann Brown, where we formed an impromptu qLab (my name being “Q”). About a year later on December 08, 2018, some of the authors from the volume presented their texts and drafts at a session I curated for Queens Museum Biennale 2018, “QueensEnglish International 2018.” Poetic Justice is the initial and overarching theme for the “mp3” series I was exploring between 2017 and 2019, and so Queenzenglish.mp3 has this philopoetic genesis as well.  

This idea of doing a book was part of the project concept from the start, and so while I am the editor, Queenzenglish.mp3 remains truly and structurally a collaborative endeavor. I am ever so grateful to everyone involved, especially all the authors who have so enthusiastically and generously accepted the invitation to participate. I remember having some great conversations with Lee Ann and Paolo Javier, for instance, doing some brainstorming and napkin-writing. I was glad and grateful that James Sherry at Roof Books, a leading publisher in language poetry, was immediately receptive to the idea of putting together a book of this kind, and luckily, the fund from Mellon Foundation made that initial step possible. Rebecca Teich, Grace Caiazza, and Deborah Thomas at the press, along with James, also worked so hard on the project at every step of the way. So, this book benefited greatly from everyone’s expertise, enthusiasm, trust, goodwill, experiences, wisdom, support, and friendship, including Rachel Rose, the great artist and friend, who generously donated the exquisitely aquatic cover image which also rhymes so well with the conceptual vitality of the book.

DD: In your brilliant introduction to the anthology, you describe the project and explain the title. Could you provide a thumbnail version of these explanations for potential readers?

Q: Dynamic “Englishing” happening in Queenzenglish.mp3 performs the polyphonic futurity of the language in transit(ion): for us here, creative writing is critical thinking is connective reading.  

DD: One of the poems in this volume that stands out as a great example of what you call “dynamic ‘Englishing’ and its polyphonic futurity” is Steven Alvarez’s “Queens: Quiero Que Me Quieras.” I was wondering if you could talk a bit about this piece and how it embodies your project as a whole?

Q: It’s all “in the cracks” of and between and among languages, words, lines, its creative vacuities or transgenerative cavities. Steven’s “Queens: Quiero Que Me Quieras,” too, remembering  

        the reality that you are todos tus lengunas—yes—all yr tongues__
        remembering the peaceful of Queens—
        remembering those who wrote genius—& blissful drunkness__

and so on with such slidingly serial smooth jazziness re-members English as transEnglish in action. This translingual soundscaping in English is also deeply rooted in—while routed to—Queens as the site specified as such.  

DD: What did you learn about poetry (and your own relationship to language) through the work presented in this anthology?

Q: I always learn more about philosophy whatever “else” I seem to be doing or not doing or undoing. For this project, a sense of the magic of happening that is also made has been particularly palpable.

Philosophers: poetry envy is real, get over (here) with your Plato. This anthology is also one of the best things that happened to the field of the philosophy of language in recent years: The very fact that this category in the academic sub-field, “the philosophy of language” as in the philosophy of mind, is so monolingually and monologically framed, is already telling. I see the complex singularities of this anthology not just self-servingly as the editor of the book but as a future-facing reader and practitioner of philopoetics. Caroline Bergvall’s “Onward Afterword” also saw that so brilliantly.     

DD: Yanyi’s “Family Tree” stood out to me as a profound examination of what you call in your introduction “entanglished borderiding.” You say in the introduction: “Activating our own voices from where we are and are seen and heard and encountered, each of us began by actively listening, scribing, scribbling—across the boundaries and borders of all sorts and scales.” Could you talk about Yanyi’s piece and some of the other pieces that critically engage linguistic, national, and personal boundaries?

Q: Actually, the other day, I was telling Yanyi how wonderful it is that the book ends/reopens with the “Family Tree (After Luc Sante).” It was the alphabetical imperative of the name Yanyi that placed the piece at the end, yet the serendipity of it was notable as I was looking through the book again.  

Yanyi’s piece resonates with Steve’s to the extent that it also concerns linguo-cultural re-member-ing and life-wor(l)ding in motion/migration. Yet, it unfolds more edgily on a register more discursively corporeal and specifically genealogical and geopolitical, as it is set against the backdrop of the colonial modernity, the ideogrammatized “East-West” divide, and transactional transnationality of English as the language of trade (tradere “deliver, hand over,” part of tradition, too) as in “a primary text of Orientalism. My work as an artist is to try and talk to myself about my own race”:  

        The cost of being Chinese American is absorbing English as the primary text. […]
        […] I begin to remember. After all, I remembered it. Should it not belong to me? If I
        comes from my mouth, did I not eat it originally?

“I” and “It” emerging in these passages (first two paragraphs) perform their own gradual, irreferential entanglements via English that—literally—dissolves into the words on the page, especially in the second paragraph where you do not see “English” but only hear it performed; “My education begins to resemble my life, but also is not familiar.” This is indeed, as you observe, a very interesting embodiment of “entanglished borderiding,” part of what I myself happened to have started theorizing by recoding Writing-in-English into “Writing Entanglish” (Belladonna* Chapbook #188, 2015). Steve, Yanyi, and Q, among others, all play their music differently, yet all that is part of this music called Englishing. To re-cite the last epigram for my introduction to Queenzenglish.mp3:

        I remember coming across “comyn englysshe” a long time ago in a history of
                                                                                                    English class […]
        I agree with Ann Lauterbach, “a rose, after all, is still only a rose,
                                                                                                    but it smells sweeter
        when there are three of them” and even more when there are more of them.
                – Kyoo Lee, Writing Entanglish

DD: Thanks so much for your nuanced and insightful answers and for editing such a remarkable anthology, Q. James, what do you find most notable about Queenzenglish.mp3?

James Sherry: QE3 is notable for the amount of variation that might lead to change, mutation if you will. Some write from a personal point of view, some from a social point of view, some from the point of view of their surroundings and all of the permutations of those three. People are writing in prose, poetry, citation, and prose-poetry. People are writing with formal innovation and people are writing within a more transparent or received style. Will any of these different approaches to the issues catch on with a larger number of writers and lead to changing how we think about standards?

DD: In your essay, “Change and the Golden Rule.” The following paragraph struck me as particularly brilliant:

“Precisely because treating everyone as you would be treated assumes that everyone is like you when they aren’t, you know, because we have different selves, different cultures and different surroundings. We have different genes, experience, epi-genetics and environs. Variations galore. Meanwhile, the politics of grammar is based on a game where the prize is power. If I can make you write syntax like I do then you have a predilection to construct ideas like I do. While we may then have conflicts of self-interest, we continue to play the game of prisoner over and again as opposed to breaking omerta.”

Could you point out a few examples in the anthology where your ideas in this paragraph are put into practice?

JS: Most of the people in the book torque standards, leading to adaptation and change. Paolo Javier in “Programmed to Love: Remain as Beast” questions how much humans remain animal in a syntax that makes me read very slowly word to word to be sure I don’t revert to my usual mode of skimming to get the gist. When I read slowly, I get the point. When I read too fast, the intent of the piece eludes me. Kyoo Lee’s piece written with comments by Amy Evans Bauer and Laura Wetherington assumes that each reader takes a unique point of view, questioning the validity of standards. The very first line of Erica Hunt’s “Compliance” points out that we don’t live and hence cannot write in a single mode. M. NourbeSe Philip shows the many variations of a single word, “bamsie,” meaning rear end. Valentine Conaty raises questions that range from species variation to how individuals are both one and multiple all in the context of a field poem. Again, what’s notable about this book is variety, difference, and the individual expectation, the politics, and the ecology that writing needs to find methods, interest, and channels of connection to accommodate difference.

DD: How did Roof Books come into being?

JS: Roof Books started in 1979 with my interest in expanding Roof Magazine to longer formats. I was writing and editing on the cusp of NY School and Language Poetry, leaning toward finding new ways to express meaning. I have written long form essays on the trajectory of the publishing venture, showing how it changes with changes in the poetry world in my effort to keep current. There’s a whole chapter on this subject in my upcoming book Selfie: Poetry & Ecology coming from Palgrave later in 2021.

DD: How does this anthology relate to the other titles in your catalogue?

JS: In recent years, I’ve been moving Roof Books toward presenting an environmental model of writing rather than the language-centered writing of the 20^th century. QE3 by addressing how change occurs and presenting examples of change as well as discussions of the methods of change speaks to how I see writing evolving not only in a uniquely human way but according to the way change occurs throughout the biosphere. Language is not a human invention, but rather something humans discovered about how our world is constructed. I’d assert many of Roof’s recent titles as examples of how humanity and nature operate as a single complex entity.

DD: What else can we look forward to from Roof Books?

JS: Since QE3 was published in late 2020, Roof published an anthology of 31 contemporary Chinese poets in translation titled Urban Poetry from China edited by Huang Fan of Nanjing University and Daniel Tay, a NY-based translation editor. We just published Will Alexander’s magnum opus The Combustion Cycle that makes poetry of what Nathaniel Mackey calls “deep seas and distant galaxies that would make such a demand that his expended soliloquies implicitly ask and overtly answer.” Will’s Cycle relates to QE3 in the way it brings out ancient cultures and contemporary concepts overlooked by mainstream standards. And Brenda Iijima’s ecological masterpiece Bionic Communality, poems shaped to interface “all flora, all fauna, all mineral” in her search for a common ground for all living creatures.

---

Kyoo Lee is a Professor of Philosophy, Gender Studies and Women’s Studies at John Jay College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the editor of Queenzenglish.mp3 (2020) and the author of Reading Descartes Otherwise: Blind, Mad, Dreamy, and Bad (2013) and Writing Entanglish: Come in Englysshing with Gertrude Stein, Zhuangzi … (2015, chapbook). She is also the coeditor of journal issues on “Safe” (WSQ 2011), “Xenophobia & Racism” (Critical Philosophy of Race 2014) and “Derrida in China Today” (Derrida Today 2018).

Some of her recent academic recognitions include faculty fellowships from Cambridge University, the Mellon Foundation, Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS) and the Graduate Center, CUNY, along with a John Jay Faculty Research Excellence Award. Her philopoetic writings have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Asian American Literary Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Dis, Flash Art, Randian, and The Volta among others. A member of PEN America Translation Committee and Poetry Translation Center (London, UK), she serves as the coeditor of philoSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism and is on the editorial boards of Derrida Today, Open Humanities Press, Simone de Beauvoir Studies, and Women's Studies Quarterly.

James Sherry is the author of 13 books of poetry and theory and one of the leading proponents of both Language Writing and Environmental Poetics. His books includeThe Oligarch: Rewriting Machiavelli’s The Prince for Our Time (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), Entangled Bank (Chax, 2016), Oops! Environmental Poetics (BlazeVox, 2013), Four For (Meow, 1995), Our Nuclear Heritage (Sun & Moon Press, 1991), Lazy Sonnets (Potes and Poets Press, 1986), In Case (Sun & Moon Press, 1980), Part Songs (Awede Press, 1978). His work has been translated into nine languages including the Chinese edition of Selected Language Poems (Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House: Chengdu, 1993), translated by Ziqing Zhang and Huang Yunte. He is the editor of Roof Magazine and Roof Books, a seminal literary publisher, associated with virtually every innovative strategy in English language writing of the past 40 years, publishing over 150 titles of seminal works of language writing, flarf, conceptual poetry, new narrative and environmental poetry and poetics. He started the Segue Foundation in 1977 that has produced over 10,000 events in New York. Sherry was born December 30, 1946, and lives in New York City. 

 

An Interview with A. E. Stallings [by Aspen Matis]

A. E. Stallings is the author of four books of poetry: Archaic Smile, which won the Richard Wilbur Award; Hapax, which won the Poet’s Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Benjamin H. Danks Award; Olives; and, most recently, Like. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2011 MacArthur Fellow, she lives in Athens, Greece.

I corresponded with Ms. Stallings via email about the addictive nature of creative discovery, poetry’s ability to “give life more abundantly,” a poem’s power to rescue readers across time and generations, poetry’s inexorable connection with humanity (and, thus, the medium’s longevity), and the fearlessness required of great critics—the boldness to lead with one’s aesthetics and taste. We also discussed the beautiful notion of “poetry as its own emotion, a mood in which the world, even in minor glimpses, is perceived as vibrating with significance.”

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

Reading or knowing or memorizing poems probably has a greater role in my inner life than writing poems. A lot of writing poems is frustration or not getting anywhere or having crises of confidence: it means being willing to write bad poems. Of course, when you write a really good poem and you are discovering something as you write there is no other feeling in the world like it—it is addictive. I think what poetry can do in a way is give life more abundantly… there is a feeling of being fully alive and alert to the various-ness of the world. In a great poem, I feel fully conscious.

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

I think poetry has a diminished role in our present society at large, if we are talking about the Western Anglophone world. But that doesn’t trouble me much. Poetry tends not to be part of our discourse—I would put that down largely to its diminished place in our education. At the same time, you can look at the popularity of MFA programs—the number of people actively studying to be poets—or what a sensation Amanda Gorman was at the Inauguration, and you can see there is still a hunger for it. I don’t think it matters that poetry isn’t wildly popular, as long as it is deeply appreciated by some. Poetry was around before the alphabet and it will be around when thousands of species of plants and animals alive today are gone, when the glaciers are gone, when languages that exist now are gone, basically for as long as there are human beings. So I don’t worry about poetry at all. But a poem can rescue you, can keep you company even across time and generations. A memorized poem becomes part of your brain, and no one can take it away.

There are many people for whom poetry would be important if they were exposed to it as an enriching pleasure, rather than a school text for decoding. Imagine if people only learned music as music theory. Memorization and recitation, reading for pleasure, learning poetry by heart, these are the most important parts of poetic education.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in her work?

Be out of fashion with the times. Write what you like. Write for your ideal audience.

Renowned literary critic Sir Christopher Ricks describes your poems as “never less than the true voice of feeling, and always more.” The MacArthur Fellowship committee praised your “mastery” of poetic form. What, in your opinion, is the relationship between form and meaning? Between structure and ingenuity? 

Structure and form, meaning and ingenuity, are ideally entangled. A sonnet that is also a great poem could only have been a kind of sonnet, not an ode or a ballad. A form—whatever that is, it could be a sinuous ribbon of spare free verse, or the blocky paragraph of a prose poem—should feel that it is pushing interesting choices and also undergirding those uncanny decisions. What you aim for ideally is something that feels both surprising and inevitable.

Your most recent book of poems, Like, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The judges called it “a collection of inventive formal poetry that challenges, gives shape to, and delights in how the art form mimics and distorts the universalities of life.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection?

I don’t tend to write poems in a programmatic way—I write the poems that are available to me at the time. As such, they tend to map loosely onto life events, and so be thematically related by accident. I think the biggest difference with this collection was the decision to put the poems in alphabetical order by title, which seemed to work surprisingly well.

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

I am fond of the Metaphysicals, particularly Marvell and Donne and Herbert. There is a poem by Matthew Prior I love (“Jinny the Just”). I am a fan of Keats and Byron (not so much Shelley, “Ozymandias” aside). With the Metaphysicals, the crash of science, intellect and emotion. From Byron, a way of writing about current events. From Keats, vowel music.

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his or her perspective useful? If no, why not? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?

I think the best critic writing today hands down is Ange Mlinko. She is willing to lead with her aesthetics and taste, something a lot of critics are afraid to do now, and then to support with her intellect and her ear and her wide reading. She is fearless. William Logan also leads with taste, and I often read him with pleasure (unless it is about me), but I don’t always trust the scathing wit to be in proportion to the “offense.” Still he is always worth reading, thought provoking, and, like Mlinko, fearless. 

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

Some very good books do win prizes of course. But no, it isn’t always the best ones. I’ve been on committees for prizes, and the race does not always go to the swift—a committee has to come to a consensus, and consensus is often compromise. Also the sheer number of poetry books out there (this I think is partly to do with poetry’s professionalization) can make it hard to winnow. I’d like to think that while a lot of accomplished poetry drops away, great poetry will tend to emerge from the background noise sooner or later.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

Write what you like! Read outside of your generation. Read poems from other languages.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?

I am always trying to eke out the odd poem. I have been writing a lot of prose this year, essays of various kinds. Translation is endlessly fascinating to me. At present I am working on Virgil’s Georgics, which, as a poem concerned about the environment and politics, seems particularly topical.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

At first I read “inquiries” as “injuries,” which perhaps says something. I write a lot about discord and about under- and afterworlds, so I suppose these must interest me. Often it is an emotion I am after. I have started to think about poetry as its own emotion, a mood in which the world, even in minor glimpses, is perceived as vibrating with significance.

"There's always someone who says that poetry is dead" [by Milan Dezinsky]

From Prague a reader sends us this link to an article by Milan Dezinsky titled "There's always someone who says that poetry is dead," reproducing an interview the author did with David Lehman in 2008. The interview  includes this account of the genesis of, and rationale for, The Best American Poetry. 

<<<
While reading different internet articles about American poetry, Milan Dezinsky chanced on a midnight blogger who could not withstand a certain professor Lehman from New York. David Lehman is a poet, but he especially arouses disputes as the editor of the most famous anthology of American poetry which bears a somewhat controversial title: The Best American Poetry. Dezinsky asked him for an interview.

Milan Dezinsky: The BAP series is not a baby. Its life began in 1988. Can you tell a Czech reader how the whole idea developed and what your expectations were?

David Lehman: The idea for the series came to me in 1987 – August 1, 1987. I know the exact date because it was the day after my family and I moved from Ludlowville, a tiny rural hamlet, to Ithaca, New York, ten miles away. I was driving back to the old place to pick up some house plants when the idea occurred to me. There were annual anthologies devoted to essays and stories. Why not poetry?

My agent and I had the dickens of a time trying to find a publisher. The two that made the most sense for the project passed on it. I had just about given up when, in November, I brought it up while having drinks with John Glusman, a young editor at Scribner. In those days I was reviewing books for Newsweek, and John was briefing me on the books he was publishing. To my astonishment he said he liked my idea for The Best American Poetry and was willing to give it a go. We were all, I think, even more astonished when the inaugural volume sold out before its official publication date in October 1988. Poetry wasn’t supposed to sell. Yet our poetry anthology was a hit of the season that went into multiple prints to meet demand.

No one back then would have predicted that we would be going strong twenty volumes later.

Then, in the 1980s, a friend of mine told me that I was the one poet she knew who read the poems in literary magazines. She said most poets read only their own work. I don’t know whether that broad categorization is true, but I remember feeling that poetry was far more vital and varied in America than anyone suspected, and I felt that a book, or a series of books, that reflected this energy would make a lot of sense. So many anthologies are partial, partisan, limited to a specific aesthetic viewpoint. And that’s fine. But I felt that we would be doing a service to the general reader – the reader who would like to like poetry but feels intimidated by it – if we had a distinguished poet, a different one each year, select the “best” of everything, including poems that were supposedly incompatible. And if we published the book imaginatively and made it as reader-friendly as possible – with notes from the poets themselves, a foreword by me, an introduction by the year’s guest editor – we could reach the readership that has always existed, if only in a potential state, for poetry.

MD: The same year you published the first volume in the series, Joseph Epstein wrote his “mordant critique” Who killed poetry? claiming that poetry is dead. And he definitely wasn’t the only one who declared that poetry had declined in cultural importance. Yet your anthology showed that this might not strictly speaking be true. Or how would you explain its success?

DL: Ever since I can remember, people have been announcing the death of poetry. It’s the premature-death syndrome. Obituaries are written before deaths occur, but they shouldn’t be published until after the fatality.

In his introduction to The Best American Poetry 1989 Donald Hall invoked doomsayers going back to the 1920s. Joseph Epstein’s piece was only the latest in a long line, but it made a big impression. Donald Hall wrote defiantly, “death to the death of poetry!”

It is possible that poetry’s prestige and public influence fluctuate cyclically. In the 1960s, poetry was very chic, very cool, intimately bound up with the reaction against the Vietnam War. Robert Lowell made the cover of Time magazine. In the late 1980s, this may have seemed a distant memory. But in fact poetry began to enjoy a major resurgence just around this time.

The salient point, I think, is that poetry in the United States has a rare vitality that is recognized increasingly in other countries – and enjoys a substantial readership at home that makes up in its dedication and cultural significance what it may lack in sheer force of numbers. The readership for poetry is like that for jazz or for Rodgers and Hart. While it doesn’t compare to the number of people who watch the Academy Awards on television, it is a real audience, committed and passionate unlike the passive spectator courted by the mass media.

MD: I bet that such a widely bought and popular anthology must also provoke a lot of negative reactions as any anthology would obviously do – it is always hard to find the proper criteria upon which to include the poems. Therefore, there must be a lot of “jilted” poets. Also, a commercial success will always be looked down on, at least here in the Czech Republic. And I am sure that some critics and scholars are afraid that such anthologies create a canon which they would like to see differently. The title The Best American Poetry is controversial in itself. Is editing an anthology like walking on thin ice?

DL: Yes, and for precisely the reasons you state.

MD: You mentioned Donald Hall and his essay “Death to the Death of Poetry,” where he states: “If you write about Poetry Now, you must acknowledge that most poetry is terrible – that most poetry of any moment is terrible. When, at any historical moment, you write an article claiming that poetry is now in a terrible shape, you are always right.” So, David, tell me what contemporary American poetry is like.

DL: Hall is probably right. But that’s like saying that in any age there are always at most five or six great poets whose work will survive a century hence. But I’ve noticed, too, that those who make this argument are seldom the ones most likely to endure. If you feel, as I do, that it is important to enlarge the audience for poetry, then you have to go beyond your own narrow self-interest; you have to go beyond the interest of your faction. Contemporary poetry is marked by factions and factionalism. Each faction thinks well of itself and belittles the others. This is a natural state of affairs.

MD: It appears to me that in The Best American Poetry-series there are a lot of poems which seem to use humour, parody and even certain “witticisms” to tell us about the world of the poets, a good number of poems seem to me even a little light-minded. I don’t mean this in a derogatory way – they want to talk about the world so much and so little about themselves. There is very little writing that seems to come out of pain. Perhaps I am a careless reader but I must ask: is confessional poetry out of fashion now? Did poets like Berryman, Roethke, Lowell, Plath, Sexton or Ginsberg leave so little to our contemporaries?

DL: I believe you’re on to something there, Milan. A significant change in recent American poetry is the greater acceptance of comedy and humour as intrinsically valuable – not only as literary ends but as means to ends that are not necessarily comic. Poets are increasingly using comic elements, wit, jokes and humour to enhance and complicate a poem’s “statement.” The prejudice against funny poems – institutionalized in the very category of “light verse” – is less pronounced than it used to be, maybe because poetry readings are so popular and a mirth-provoking poem is always in favour on such occasions.

It would be a good thing if poets wrote more about the world and less about themselves. Many poems suffer from a feeling of claustrophobia. Unless the mind of the poet is capacious, you tend to feel hemmed in. One way to improve almost any self-absorbed poem is to introduce a second character (“you”).

There is plenty of confessionalism in poetry today, but it does seem as though the reputations of Lowell and Berryman and some of the others you named have declined somewhat in the last twenty years.

MD: That reminds me of the Latin poet Horace who once said, “The task of a poet is to instruct and entertain.” Do you think that most American poets would agree with that? Do they think about “the task of a poet”?

DL: While I can’t speak for all or even most other poets, I know that I constantly ask myself these questions. The purpose of poetry is by no means self-evident. It is a question that must be revisited rather than addressed once and for all. I happen to agree with Horace’s formulation: I feel that to delight and to instruct are the poet’s minimal obligations to the reader. But I also believe that implicit in the act of writing poetry is praise of creation – creation as a process, a way of being, no less than as a product. Coleridge’s formulation in the Biographia Literaria has always held a great charm for me. He writes that what he calls the primary imagination – meaning something greater than fancy – is a “repetition in the finite mind of the infinite act of creation in the eternal I AM”. These statements scarcely exhaust the topic, of course. What do you think, Milan?

MD: I wouldn’t dare to say what the task of a poet is. Somehow I just feel that the task must always be redefined by every individual poet. Poetry, as I understand the term, is my selfish way of sharing my world with others, and my task is then to live my life as a work of art, a poem.

You mentioned that the poets have their obligations to the reader. Are the readers more important now than they used to be? And should a/the reader be present when the poem is being written? And, finally, what makes poetry such a special art form that unlike music or theatre it seems to be consumed primarily by other poets?

DL: I like your definition a lot.

The first obligation of any poet is to please the reader – to earn the reader’s attention and to sustain it. If you don’t do that, you can’t do anything else. Readers are as important today as ever before, and we need to make the effort to reach them. It is an exceptional circumstance when a reader is present at the creation, though it can and does happen.

To the extent that poetry is “consumed primarily by other poets” we have a problem on our hands. The need for poetry is universal and we can and should generously think of those in any and every profession who do not write but who need and deserve to have poetry in their lives.

Published 5 February 2009
Original in Czech
First published by Host 9/2008

Contributed by Host © Milan Dezinsky / Host / Eurozine
https://www.eurozine.com/theres-always-someone-who-says-that-poetry-is-dead/

An Interview with Ishion Hutchinson [by Aspen Matis]

Ishion Hutchinson is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. A contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, he is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and many other prizes. Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, he now directs the graduate writing program at Cornell University.

I had the pleasure of corresponding with Mr. Hutchinson via email about how great poems, by their nature, console us while they also judge us severely. We also discussed the relationship between poetry and melody, the intersection of sound and meaning, and the necessity of becoming a “kindler” ― a fierce agitator against injustice, burning like kindle, always firmly fixed in the altruistic spirit of the root word kind.

Why do you write poems?

I write poems because it is my calling.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course? 

In all those cases you’ve named, it’s the work of language to assert justice which is most pressing. Poetry is certainly central to that assertion, but whether in a gubernatorial way, to use a clumsy phrase, is at best questionable. What isn’t questionable is that the best poems give us consolation while, at the same time, they judge us severely. The way poems judge us is to demand that our capacity to imagine, which is to say our conscience, be more alive to the world and to never settle on a single view of it.

Still, I don't believe poetry tells “our present society” how to enact the things you’ve outlined.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

If a poem is happening, then it is its own most radical thing, whether that poem might be the beautiful indignation of Robert Hayden’s miniature epic “The Middle Passage,” or the seemingly chaste lyric of Robert Herrick’s “Upon Julia’s Dress” (you can imagine the poetic inventiveness that goes into just the word “liquefaction” to capture the movement of silk!). It takes courage to do such making.

But I believe it takes an even greater courage to come to such making. Consider, for instance, that right now in Belarus and Myanmar poets are being killed and jailed for doing their work, poets who might be just writing about the movement of silk or bearing witness to governmental tyranny: in both cases, they continue to find the courage to write poems of integrity. Poets the world over, in less extreme circumstances, struggle to do their work with as much integrity. Sometimes they fail. And yet they find the courage to write poems. So every resonate poem is a radical thing, and an act of courage. 

Your work is often praised for its musicality, intensity, and nerve. Of your collection House of Lords and Commons, literary critic John Freeman writes, “What nerve and music his poems possess, how beautifully they chart the poet’s search.” The poet Ilya Kaminsky writes that “Hutchinson comes to us from the country called music, he stuns the reader with the sheer symphony of his sentences.” He goes on to remark on the “choral presence” of multiple tonalities within your poems. Poet Henri Cole writes that your “hammered language has a jazzy, classical, rough, painterly beauty.” It seems no reviewer can speak of your poetry without invoking music. What, in your opinion, is the relationship between poetry and melody? And what exists at the intersection of sound and meaning? Of language and art?

I’m always seeking in the melody of my poem what Pound calls melopoeia: which he defines, rather obliquely, as when “the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning.” That the words are charged is what gives a poem its essential tension, and that charge is a definite resistance of the typical “sweet music” sense of melody which might not bear into account the fraught, ethical nature of words. I say “definite” then because the poem is a conscious act of interweaving unheard melodies embedded in words, so a hearer might hear what is not there in “their plain meaning.”

Actually, what’s not there but heard in those words are, I think, the “intersections” you referred to. In fact, these overlapping intersections make every poem an occasion of meaning. It’s in these intersections the reader of goodwill will find meaning on multiple registers. She will find herself there, too, magnified at a slightly elevated pitch. 

In a lecture at the Newcastle Poetry Festival 2019, you explored Frederick Douglass’s legacy, and what the idea of legacy means, through a close reading of poems by W.E.B. Dubois and Robert Hayden—and ultimately, you invited us all to become “kindlers.” What does it mean to be a kindler, and why is such an endeavor meaningful and important? 

The kindler idea I draw from a magnificent long poem by Frederick Douglass called, “The Tyrants’ Jubilee!,” from the line, “the fire thus kindled, may be kindled again” which became the title of my lecture. To be a kindler is to be someone involved deeply in the unfinished business of emancipation, to be the fierce-minded liberty lover Douglass was, to agitate in our moment against injustice, however construed. The agitation must be fierce, burning like kindle, but it must be fixed in the altruistic spirit of the root word kind.

Your most recent book of poems, House of Lords and Commons, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and was named one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2016. Poet Susan Stewart describes the collection as “the pure line of poetry, shaped by [Hutchinson’s] sun-lit vision and music,” adding that, “House of Lords and Commons has been wrested from suffering and cruelty, irony and violence. And, in the end, it is an act of forgiveness.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection? 

The collection was published five years ago, so it’s no longer so new. I like that you asked about ambitions, and what I recall, to give a very drastic summary, is my attempt to explore the different breaches of the relationship between civil polity and poetry. What that crack-up sounds like? As I was doing most of the listening from this country, many of the poems became about arranging the psychic pressures between home and abroad.

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

Really too many to name. The anthologies of those centuries, and not only in English, are my favorite to read. I return a lot to this stunning compilation of work from the pamphlet wars of the 17th—a favorite is Elizabeth Cellier’s Malice Defeated, a title I wish to steal one day. Milton is a constant, of course, especially his 1644 pamphlet Areopagitica. But of late I’ve been reading a lot of Milton’s younger contemporary, Lucy Hutchinson.

No way, again, a stable and short answer can be given to the question of what their work has awakened in me. I feel the raw alchemy of the intelligence and imagination of their fractious time working on my mind in the very syntax of their writing. Something gets transmuted, and usually whatever that it is, it has strong “relevance” to our contemporary moment. You need only to read, for instance, the first sentence of Milton’s Areopagitica to see what I mean.   

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?

I’m working on a collection of essays, due out next year. My Douglass lecture will be included, so I’m excited about that, the chance to get it right or as close to right as possible.

An Interview with Mary Jo Salter [by Aspen Matis]

Mary Jo Salter is the author of eight poetry collections including A Kiss in Space, Open Shutters, Nothing by Design, and A Phone Call to the Future. Her most recent book of poems, The Surveyors, invites readers to evaluate and ponder the way things have turned out—for the poems’ speakers, and for us all—in this new century. In a tone of ironic wonderment in the face of life’s surprises, the collection reveals both puzzlement and acceptance.

I had the pleasure of corresponding with Ms. Salter via email about the radical nature of unexaggerated truth, the 17th century poets who inspire her, and the foresight and brilliance of the rare reliable critic. We also discussed her newest book-in-progress, Zoom Rooms.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in her work?

Tell the truth. I don’t mean “tell the facts,” of course; poetry isn’t reportage. What I love about my favorite poets, what makes them “radical,” is that they neither bury their emotions (though they might profit from reticence or obliquity as a style) nor, even worse, exaggerate them. They dare to speak truly about human experience—or some personal subset of experience—by means of the genuineness of their emotional register. I’m impatient with writers who profess to be overcome by joy or outrage or despair in the face of relatively minor daily events. On the other hand, I love the way some of our greatest poets elevate daily detail itself, the in-the-moment weight of being alive, to the point of bringing us to laughter (Larkin) or goosebumps (Dickinson) or tears. Elizabeth Bishop, an emotionally reticent poet, is a master of this weighted dailiness—think of what she makes, in “Sestina,” of an almanac and a teakettle and some buttons that look like tears.

You’ve served as an assistant editor for the Atlantic Monthly, as the poetry editor of The New Republic, and you were a co-editor of the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. What was the most gratifying aspect of these editorial positions for you? What did you enjoy most about these jobs? Was there a common thread, a vein of gold each shared?

As a young slush-pile reader at The Atlantic, I wasn’t allowed to make decisions on my own; those were up to the poetry editor, the late Peter Davison. The happiest moment in my two years of opening envelopes at The Atlantic was in discovering some luminous poems by the self-described “late bloomer” Amy Clampitt, who had just started publishing a little. Peter did publish her, then and afterward. My writing her a fan letter (I was 24, she was 59) led to one of my richest literary friendships, which lasted for Amy’s final 15 years. I’ve edited two editions of her work and still serve as one of her literary executors, and I feel she is still present in some way every day of my life.

Being sole poetry editor at The New Republic was more challenging. But it was good aesthetic training to make independent choices for those three years. I gave up that job because of the demands of co-editing the Norton Anthology. And that experience—from 1992, when I started reading for the fourth edition, to the publication of the sixth edition in 2018—is too vast to encompass here. I’ll just say that it was an honor to be along for the ride with my co-editors Margaret Ferguson and Jon Stallworthy, and upon Jon’s death, Tim Kendall. They were modest souls, despite their erudition, and our literary taste was shared to such a degree that we could good-naturedly take each other’s suggestions. It was a given that we mere humans couldn’t possibly arrive at a definitive canon. Being humbled by that fact was actually freeing.

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

What a wonderful question! It just so happens that I spend a lot of my mental life in the 17th century. No poet has brought me more pleasure than Shakespeare (though my main attachment is to the plays), and then the 17th also includes Donne, Milton, and Herbert. I wrote my master’s thesis at Cambridge about Herbert, and an epigraph by him appears as an opening to my first book. I wrote a play once about Milton meeting Galileo (an encounter which actually happened), and I’ve slipped a scene from Paradise Lost into the title poem of my most recent book, The Surveyors. This is what happens to my literary crushes, I guess: they become characters in my work.

The affinity I feel with the 17th century extends to Dutch paintings of the period (I can think of at least four poems I’ve written about them). Maybe my answer here relates to your first question. I feel that the best artistic work of the 17th century tells the truth—from the hyper-realist still lifes to the low-rent tavern scenes to the warmly humanist portraits. That truth extends to the amusingly vulgar love poems of Donne, or to that side of Shakespeare that invents Falstaff or the “rude mechanicals.” It’s an era that is formally ingenious, a brainy feature that delights me. And yet the era aspires to purity of feeling, which finds no better exemplar than in Herbert. His feeling of inadequacy before the splendors of God’s creation is sincere, but the self-demanding craft by which he becomes a “creator” is, to me, almost super-humanly perfect.

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his or her perspective useful? If no, why not?

Certainly there are reliable critics. You may rely upon their values, even if you disagree ultimately with a particular judgment. Great poetry critics aren’t always practitioners, but most of my favorites are. No poem Wordsworth ever wrote was better than his prose preface to the Lyrical Ballads: he uncannily anticipated our sensationalist age, and the small, quiet, but necessary role poetry could play in counteracting it. Closer to our own time, nobody’s criticism seems better than Auden’s—not merely the witty, epigrammatic essays in The Dyer’s Hand (which Joseph Brodsky rightly said should be every poet’s Bible) but the insights he embeds in poems. Auden’s elegies for Yeats and for MacNeice are disquisitions on why art matters, but not more than existence; and his long prose poem at the end of The Sea and the Mirror, in which Caliban sounds more like Henry James, does the same.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?

I have a sonnet sequence about our current techno-human pandemic age that is the title poem of my forthcoming collection of poems, Zoom Rooms. I have no aptitude for science, but the history of science fascinates me, and projections about its future even more. What I’m trying to do is to write poems that might last a while, by means of addressing universal human concerns; and yet I feel compelled to engage with the speedily changing, cyborgian flavor of contemporary life. Our descendants may find it more interesting to read poems that were written by machine-learning machines than by old-fashioned humans. I was about to say “we’ll see”—but we won’t. We’ll just have to keep on writing.

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.”

An Interview with Amy Gerstler [by Aspen Matis]

Amy Gerstler is a critically acclaimed writer of fiction, poetry, and journalism whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Paris Review and The Best American Poetry. Her 1990 book Bitter Angel won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her newest collection of poems, Index of Women, is forthcoming from Penguin in April of 2021. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Ms. Gerstler via email about her newest book of poetry, her perspective on poetry’s role in our present society, the themes that most fascinate and inspire her, her current work, and her experience of and feelings about editing The Best American Poetry 2010.

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

Joan Didion, in her essay, “Why I Write,” said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” That sums it up! I also write poems to have an excuse to wallow in subjects I’m compelled by, to attempt to get inside other characters / minds (in order to better understand them), to speak to about the dead and the vanished, and to commune with and stretch my imagination.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course? 

Great list! All those things and more! Poetry can delight and comfort. Unsettle and expand consciousness. Help us comprehend/contend with being human. Allow us to pay little visits to each other’s wild minds. Keep us alert to the possibilities of language and how it differentiates and binds us together.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in her work?

She can devote herself to following her own course, as writer, thinker, and emotional animal—whatever that may mean at different times in her life. She can cultivate and explore her own obsessions without letting anything or anybody stop her.

Your forthcoming poetry collection, Index of Women (Penguin, April 2021), showcases exclusively female speakers in poems that wrestle with mortality, animality, love, gender, and the nature of humanity. What inspired this new collection on womanhood and the magic, meaning, humor, sorrow, and struggles of our days that create the hidden meaning of our lives?

Dramatic monologues thrill me. Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology stunned me when I was young. All those vivid voices spouting dark truth from the grave! I love the poet Ai’s dramatic monologues. My interest in women’s voices, spoken or sung, and their stories and experiences was also generative. Coming across the ancient Greek poet Hesiod’s book Catalogue of Women was a fortunate and influential accident. Such an odd, compelling idea to compile a catalogue of women! I wondered why one would do that and what it would be like if a female attempted such a project.

Your book of poems Scattered at Sea explores hedonism, gender, ancestry, reincarnation, the philosophy of the ancient Stoics, imagination, drug highs, memory loss, bereavement, spirituality, and the nature of prayer—many distinct arenas and inquiries! What unifies the pieces in this collection? How did Scattered at Sea find its form?

Since the book invokes scattering via its title and poems, I felt released from pressure to make the book “unified.” Instead, I tried to pursue the opposite: making it scattery, dispersed, a bit all over the place (which is reflective of the way my brain works, anyway).

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

Having very little formal education in poetry makes me a dubious source of intel about 17th and 18th century poets, sadly. Among the few I know I love Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, each for different reasons that I fear there is not nearly enough space to enumerate here.

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his/her perspective useful? If no, why not? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?

This is a fascinating notion, the idea of a “reliable” critic. I suppose it would depend on what you wish to rely on a critic for. Sharp, inventive writing? Humor? Interesting opinions? Erudition? Open-mindedness? Fairness? Ability to appreciate and describe the letter and spirit of a work? Historical context? Links to other works? Analysis? In other words, I think the idea of a “reliable” critic involves very individual judgements on the part of each reader, who determines for herself what she’s seeking when reading literary criticism, what she needs from it at that moment, and whether she gets that or not.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

Emotion is key for me. Sex, gender, love, mortality, animals, science, pseudo-science, spiritual longing, loss, and the occult are all abiding fascinations.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?

I’m collaborating on a musical play with composer/actor Steve Gunderson. There’s a possible comix project on the horizon that’s in the earliest stage of discussion. I really hope that will work out as I find graphic novels and comix an amazing medium.

You edited the 2010 edition of The Best American Poetry. What was that experience like for you? How, if all, did editing the anthology affect you? Are you proud of the book? How do you feel about the process—and the product of your labor—in retrospect?

Editing that anthology taught me tons and was profoundly inspiring. I will always be so grateful to the series editor, David Lehman, for trusting me and gifting me with that opportunity. The process brought home to me what a thriving, vital, various field American poetry is. Narrowing the book down to the requisite 75 poems was the hardest part.

An Interview with Major Jackson [by Aspen Matis]

January 19, 2021

AM: What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course?

MJ: Fascinating catalogue, all of which I have experienced over the years in reading and teaching poems, that in fact, are not mutually exclusive. Political poetry that I love, for example, pushes me toward a greater consciousness of complicated issues that point to imbalance of power and injustice, and many of them I’ve also found to be exact and beautiful in their lyricism. Yet almost always, with the best poems, I am awakened to language (its palpable presence in the body and mouth) and thus, too, sensory experience. I’ll add to that a growing sense of wonder that marks us as human beings. The best poems are multidimensional and multimodal in that way.

Your most recent book of poems, The Absurd Man, confronts the struggle for meaning in a technological world and ponders the value and nature of creation in the face of meaninglessness. What, in your view, is the meaning of your life?

Of course, on any given day I could answer this differently. You’ll have to forgive the lack of clarity as I truly believe the answer is far more complex than what will land here. In the past and today, I have talked about challenging the precincts of meaning, which takes a great dosage of critical intelligence and, believe it or not, love. I find meaning in the passionate pursuit of the “real” as Milosz phrases it. In writing poems, I am strongly committed to the possibility of uttering something that cracks and breaks through the veneer of my insecurities and fears, that pierces the armor I’ve built up that disconnects and alienates me from humanity. 

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

We are bound, regrettably, by the strictures of language; meaning is its own prison, and thus, our lives become faint replicas of outdated ideas and what was previously discovered. No matter how beautiful the garden evoked in language, if it merely alludes to some biblical origin story then it is valueless, and quite possibly redundant. We rarely discuss the ethical imperative of “making it new.” Understandably, it is a weighty responsibility to put on poetry, a tall order as we say. Yet still, out of relevancy and quite possibly a spiritual urgency, a poet has to discover radical ways of picturing and sounding out this moment. That’s pretty far-reaching to me. In this way, poetry speaks to the living fact of being alive today. For example, some in our country believe it is 1776; I have been saying lately that we need a new image of patriotism so that we do not fall victim to a vision of the past that constrains us.

What, in your view, should that new image of patriotism look like?

My favorite image of patriotism is new Americans taking the oath of allegiance which I had the pleasure of witnessing once during a friend’s naturalization ceremony. There was not a dry eye in the room. It made me hopeful about the future of our country, and the bedrock foundations of freedom and opportunity. Scraggly hordes of men pretending we are in colonial America carrying weapons is the stuff of history books that exploits political divisions and frankly stokes the flames of populism that seem aimed at the worst of our humanity. Every American is a patriot and no one group can claim greater right to that label than another. 

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

Probably the Metaphysical Poets, chiefly Andrew Marvell and John Donne. Donne’s poems “The Ecstasy” and “The Good-Morrow” are favorites. I like poems that are intellectually demanding yet aim for a single argument about love and life, not to mention the transcendent aspects of sex. Also, someone who reads my poems closely knows that I hinge quite a bit on metaphor and its ability to order thought and give it shape.

You edited the 2019 edition of The Best American Poetry. What was that experience like for you? How, if at all, did editing the anthology affect you? Are you proud of the book? How do you feel about the process—and the product of your labor—in retrospect?

As I write in the Introduction, editing the book had me fall in love again with poetry; after many years of teaching and editing, I was becoming cynical and dispassionate. The experience was akin to standing on a beach for a year and deciding to plunge into a series of crashing waves; the richness of life in American poetry is stunningly humbling. Human beings transcribe as much joy and love in poetry with great relish and embodiment as they do their pain. Such inner musings authentically rendered in language deeply impacted my spiritual life. I only wish I could have doubled or even tripled the anthology in size. So many other poems would have found their way into its pages. I read all of the previous Best American Poetry introductions, which was its own education. Also, too, I was reminded of the importance of magazine editors whose curating is so underappreciated. It was a joy to work with series editor David Lehman. One gets a sense of his and others’ huge contributions to literary culture.

Ed note: For Aspen's interview with Mitch Sisskind, which we posted last Thursday (Jan 14, 2021), please click here.