Singing the Visionary Sight
An Interview with poet W.F. Lantry
THIS Literary Magazine poetry editors J.P. Reese, Nicholas Y.B. Wong, and Bill Yarrow, along with THIS editor Lacey N. Dunham, asked W.F. Lantry about past and present poetic influences, the female body in poetry, the creative writing MFA, and Twitter. Lantry is honored with our third Poet Spotlight.
THIS Literary Magazine: Many of your poems have the sense of a deep well of earlier poetic work resonating within them and informing them. How important is your knowledge of classic works to the shaping of your own?
WFL: The view from my writing office window is a forest’s edge, overlooking the wooded flood plain of the Anacostia River. The valley seems alive, the stream banks are constantly changing. Deer walk about the meadows, so many it’s nearly impossible to have a garden. I once counted seventeen on the back lawn. They’re white tails, smaller than the mule deer of my homeland. I’ve gone down in the middle of the night and found raccoons in my shop. There are beaver gnawed trees within a hundred yards. I have a cat whose only job is to roam the perimeter of the grounds and keep the rodents down. James [my son] calls her Catchmouse. When I’m between cats, mice invade the interior rooms. Kate [my wife] leaves the windows open so she can hear the birdsong and crickets, depending on the time of day. She likes to feel as if her bedroom’s in a treehouse.
All this is less than eight miles from the White House, in the center of the Megalopolis. We hear owls from our deck, cries in the night when foxes are hunting. I think I’m good at listening, watching, noticing, and yet Kate is constantly pointing out things I’ve missed. We all need to listen better.
There’s a constant presence within us. I don’t know where it comes from. I was lucky: my father took me to the Sierras over and over, so often I feel as if I grew up in the Giant Forest. People turn to me and ask, “What birds are those?” They ask about trees and flowers.
Especially flowers. Since I couldn’t be in the mountains all the time, I made gardens, and wrote about them. In Houston, I once had a hundred species in bloom on the same day. You’d be amazed how much drama goes on in your backyard garden. I used to think I knew everything that happened there.
Then I met Kate, and discovered there was more than I had ever imagined. If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. But I don’t bother making gardens anymore. I have other tasks.
TLM: Could you tell us something about how significant the female body is in your poems? You seem to incorporate the female body often - and in many forms - in your poetry but always with great reverence.
WFL: Seriously, I’m trying my best!
WFL: I owe everything to Carolyn. Imagine: there I was, I was like nineteen, and scruffy as the day is long, when I heard there was a real live poet teaching at the local college. So I bundled up all my poems, and went to see her.
She was so generous. She took a quick glance at the first couple, put them aside, and talked to me about what contemporary poetry could actually be. I was so lost, I’d never heard anyone use the word “image” before. It lasted about an hour, and I just listened, taking it in. But I must not have been completely hopeless: she invited me to sit in on her graduate workshop. It was a different world. For three hours a week, for a whole semester, I wrote down everything she and everyone else there said. After every meeting, I’d sit outside somewhere, and make sure that it was all burned into my memory. By semester’s end, I was unrecognizable. She’d changed my life without knowing it.
That was the year she was going back and forth to Salvador. So, while she talked about poetry, she also talked about her experiences there. She was working on the poems that would become The Country Between Us, she was working on “The Colonel.” I never asked myself if poems should have a political element, I just assumed they did, the way a fish assumes water, a bird air. She said to us, “Pay attention to what you read, it’s a hint of what your own work will be.” I was reading Wright, Kinnell, Merwin, Bly, the antiwar poets, the social justice poets. I must have been predisposed.
But your question implies a terrible dilemma I have. I have two conflicting sides to me. One is my strong belief in social justice, the part that’s driven most of my professional life. But at other times, I see myself as a metaphysical love poet. So when I write a love poem, I feel degenerate, when I write a social justice poem, I feel unfaithful. Carolyn has no trouble combining the two, but it troubled me for a long time.
Then, last year, I won a peace prize for poetry. In Israel. The same week, I published a love poem, based on a passage from the Koran, in Damascus. So I guess I’ve found a way to bridge different worlds, but always, always, I hold in mind the thought of Carolyn reading over my shoulder. In a way, her work is an ethical compass for me, a moral star, true north. When Against Forgetting came out, I used it as the primary text for a course I was teaching on aesthetics. And just a few months ago, she published an article about the reality and use of Poetry of Witness. It told the story of Akhmatova, standing outside the prison, and being able to describe the scene. That exactness, that strong belief in the real instead of the imagined, is central to my own thought. We shouldn’t be making stuff up: we should be trying to set things down, with all the clarity we can muster, modestly, and with exactness. It’s our responsibility, it’s our gift, it’s what we do.
TLM: In addition to Carolyn Forché, who are other contemporary poets you admire? What is it about their work that draws you to them?
WFL: Someone asked Kinnell this question, and he prevaricated, saying he never reads contemporary work. They asked Nabokov, and he refused to name names, saying, “Anonymous pleasure hurts no one.” So no living people, except those I’ve actually known and worked with. That means I can talk about Derek Walcott, who changed me as much as Carolyn did. Derek made me read Horace and Martial and the text of Guys and Dolls. On the one hand, he gave me permission to think of world forms, instead of the narrow American grain I’d been working in. On the other, he knocked all the poetic language out of me. “I’ve got a horse right here, his name is Paul Revere...” And he made me consider dramatic reality. How would someone read the words on a stage? He changed my whole approach to giving readings. Of course, he’s got a great natural voice.
I owe a tremendous debt to René Char, as well. You may have noticed I have a lot of debts. I never actually met him, although our time in Provence overlapped. I can’t imagine anyone whose forms are more different from mine, but I love his approach. He makes apparent the hidden connections between things, without abstraction or misstep. And his work comes from the actual world, he was engaged with reality in a way few of us can imagine. Maquisard, resistance fighter, and he was just as comfortable with salons and surrealists. I feel almost as much affinity with Bonnefoy, although he likely wouldn’t see it. The way he tried to look at Douve with absolutely clear sight, I wish I had those eyes. I worship the absolute modernity of Bousquet.
Maybe you’ll allow me one more living poet. I’ve never met her, you’ve never heard of her. Her name is Marlene Tissot. It’s hard to explain why I find her work so attractive, there’s just something about her work that draws me in. Maybe that’s enough.
TLM: How did you get started in poetry? Who or what was the spark that ignited your interest? Who and what works have influenced your style and poetics and how did they influence you?
WFL: So this is the Jacqueline question. Jacqueline Ollier. After Carolyn left San Diego, I started taking actual classes. I was a voracious omnivore, and devoured them without aid of a menu. One semester I took eleven classes, all in Lit. But I wasn’t getting any closer to a degree. Then Jacqueline showed up, on some kind of professor exchange program. I signed up for her class on Williams.
I didn’t know it then, but she was the leading expert on American poetry in France. We were quickly immersed in Paterson, and she and I worked on a few projects together. It turned out she knew Kinnell from his time in Grenoble, and she went to visit him in Hawaii. I didn’t know it at the time, but she took some of my work with her. I never found out what he said to her, but she came back with a letter of recommendation in hand. She didn’t show it to me, she just said, “Bill, you must come to Nice.” I said, “Jacqueline, things like that don’t happen to people like me. Besides, I don’t have a degree. And I don’t speak French.” She just said, “All will be well.”
And it was. I taught, I wrote. I learned French, slowly. Enough to get a couple degrees. Suddenly life was a whirlwind of art and philosophy and music. I did readings: Paris, Rome, Monte Carlo. Publications and collaborations. Wild stuff: lunch with Robbe-Grillet, dinner with Toni Morrison, drinks with James Baldwin. It was, well, it was what we all imagine the literary life should be. If I could get my wish, it would be that every young poet could have that life, even if for just a few years.
It wasn’t all romance. I had a garden on the terraced slopes of St. Pancrace, and the wild boars broke down the fences and ate everything they could. University politics are not constrained by borders. And there’s something odd about being on stage all the time. One time I tried to get away, and took the ferry to Corsica. My plan was to find a little quiet and isolation, by climbing Monte Cinto. And I did: I made it, and stood alone on the peak. I even made it back to my base camp by dark. The next day, I walked into a tiny little mountain town, and sat down outside the only cafe. A colleague was there.
Still, that time helped me discover an entirely new kind of poetry, in a place where poets are valued. Yes, really valued. Honored, even, in a way that never happens in America, even for the greats. There was creative freedom, and even more importantly, a knowledge that the work would be heard and read, even anticipated. I’d never quite believed Whitman when he said, “The world is always waiting for its poet,” but it was true, at least then, in that place. And I owe it all to Jacqueline.
I’ve tried to help other poets the way she helped me. It’s not because I’m good by nature, I’m not. But it’s the only way I have to pay Jacqueline back, for all she did. One time she said to me, “Once you’ve shown you can produce something worthwhile, you have a responsibility to devote yourself completely to it.” Everyday I think of letting myself off the hook, of just kicking back, if only for a few hours, I think about her, and all she did and said. And I sit back down at the keyboard.
WFL: I wasn’t surprised. I was shocked. The first time I opened a copy of Snow White, I was stunned. Here was an intensity of language, a leaping playfulness, one only saw in poetry. “Her hair black as ebony, her skin white as snow...” Of course, Don stole that from an old Irish poem, “Dierdre,” but let that pass. He was doing it in prose. The dots on her back set me up for “She was Dolores on the dotted line.” I’m probably the only one in the history of fiction who read Nabokov after I read Barthelme.
Someone looked at one of my poems and said, “You know, you could write fiction if you wanted.” I told her there was no way I could sustain that kind of intensity over a long span. Someone else said, “You’re always telling stories.” I said I had no concept of character, or sequence, or plot. I read the last page of any novel first. It helps me enjoy it. Or I’ll just open the book in some random place and start reading. I love sentences, tone, diction, rhythm. I find them, well, exciting. Language sparkles for me.
Think about that for a second. And then think of Pater: “To burn always with a hard, gem-like flame, to maintain your ecstasy, is the only goal.” Putting those two things together made me rethink the whole project. After all, Derek did both poetry and theatre, they fed into each other. And so I headed for Houston, because Barthelme was there.
He greeted me warmly. Clearly, people had been talking. Or maybe he just recognized a kindred spirit. The first words he ever said to me were, “You look like a man who enjoys good Scotch.” Then he offered me a little. More than a little.
A hurricane was brewing out over the Gulf on the day he saw my first story. We did it in workshop. By the time it was over, I was drunk with ecstasy, the way Baudelaire wanted us to be. I staggered out of there, not caring the winds were about to trash my shotgun shack, and its modest garden. It seemed a worthwhile trade. Of course, things didn’t always go so well. The next one got trashed. I took other workshops: Jim, Mary. Mary told me I didn’t know anything about paragraphing. I said, “You’re right.” I still don’t know what she meant. But she was generous, the way Jim and Don were.
Of course, I ruined it for everyone. I did a double dissertation: a full one in poetry, and a full one in fiction. They’ve since changed the rules so no-one can do that. Or maybe they just don’t believe one can be both a singer and a storyteller. One time, Don was talking to us about what it took to succeed. He was talking about artists, and by that he meant fiction writers. He said, “Musicians, painters, they’re not like us.” And then he looked at me, with that mischievous look he sometimes got, and said, “Poets aren’t like us, either.” I’m still grateful for that. I’ve never felt more welcomed, anywhere, in any genre.
TLM: Are you willing to weigh in on the current whipping boy of the writing world, the MFA? You have a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston, so how might the landscape of the current MFA program change, in your opinion, with introduction of more and more Ph.D.'s to the field? For you, what are the advantages of receiving a formal degree in writing? Can writing be “taught” or do these programs exist more to refine the skills of a talented -- but as yet unrecognized -- writer?
TLM: It will never do to start skipping the hard ones.
WFL: But...
TLM: Answer!
WFL: Okay, okay. Dang! So, I’ll be sitting at some dinner table, and someone will wonder aloud about something, some detail. She might even ask some rhetorical questions, like, say, “Why do people say, ‘Mencius’ mother moved three times?’” And I’ll tell her about the graveyard, the market, and the school. She’ll say “How do you know that?” And I’ll say “Four degrees from two continents, Darlin’. I’m supposed to know that!”
Sartre was right. The answer depends on who you ask. In France, they call people like me a Universitaire, so of course I’m in favor of instruction, degrees, learning. I’m like the scholar Chaucer made fun of: “...and gladly would he learn and gladly teach.” I have nothing bad to say about anyone pursuing any kind of degree. As Jacqueline would say, “It is better than building bombs.”
And while I never saw the MFA as a terminal degree, some awfully good poets have gotten one, and were able to treat it as a union card, and actually make a living as a poet, which is a great thing. Poetry is flourishing more than it ever has, in the history of the world, and it’s because of these programs. Anyone who complains about them, looks down their nose, calls them a pyramid scheme, just isn’t seeing the big picture.
But it’s not as if there aren’t problems. In my earliest youth, I knew people who didn’t want to study anyone else’s work, who didn’t want to read others, because they didn’t want to be ‘polluted.’ They believed in the purity of originality, and didn’t want to run the risk of being derivative. It’s a respectable position, even if it’s not one I share. But maybe a University isn’t the best place for someone who feels that way.
Take this scenario. Imagine I call you up and say, “Derek’s coming over. We’re going to have a few beers, eat some barbeque, maybe talk a little poetry. Seamus might drop in. You should show up. And maybe bring something for dessert.” Would you do it? Would you mind bringing dessert, if you got to hear Derek and a bunch of other people talking poetry, maybe even read one of yours? If you did it for a whole summer, would you tell people you hung out there for a season? Like, if the subject came up?
Can writing be taught? I don’t know why this question even gets asked. Kate’s a coloratura soprano, a soul of exquisitely developed art. She took years of lessons. Jewelers can’t just cut a rough stone into a beautiful gem without training, without long apprenticeship and practice. Research shows it takes about 10,000 hours of work to get really good at something. That’s five years of devotion to it. Why should poetry be any different? Because it’s full of mystery? You’re talking to a mystical poet here, my friend. Learning to write that kind of thing takes even longer.
It’s all Yeats’ fault. While he was busy sailing to Byzantium, where he talked about studying the fabrication of golden birds, he said, “Nor is there singing school, but studying / monuments...” As if we should all be sitting in museums or libraries, copying out the masters in our spare time. He liked Milton way more than I do, but he forgets Milton got a double-double first at Cambridge! He wrote Lycidas as part of his education. He shared drafts of it with his fellow students, and his professors. It helped make his reputation. Writing programs may seem new, but they just formalize what has been happening for a long time. You think Catullus didn’t share his poems with people around him, didn’t change his approach based on their advice? Please. Martial quite literally honed his rapier at countless public dinners, in the face of hoots, catcalls... and other poets. It was like heading for the bar after a workshop.
WFL: “Leaves on leaves on leaves of books I’ve turned / and I know nothing!” That’s Berryman, agreeing with Master Kong, we should all strive for the paradise of enlightened ignorance. Then there’s this story, from Merwin. He went to see Pound in the asylum, and ask how to become a poet. And Pound said, ‘You need to write 75 lines a day. But you don’t have that much material in you. You think you do, but you don’t. So spend your time translating. That way, you’ll see how it’s done.”
Embrace ambiguity. It’s your best friend. Remember what you enjoy, what moves you. Don’t ever trust your instincts: What you react against most strongly when you first see it may be what you embrace closely a few weeks from now. Notice what you return to, over and over. Celebrate every little victory.
Watch the opening credits of “True Blood.” Your poem should be at least that good. If it’s not, what are you doing? Watch Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games.” It’s a lyric poem. Is yours as good?
Have an aesthetic. Be ready to defend it. Ask other poets about theirs. Listen very carefully. They know more than you do.
The point isn’t to change the world. It’s not even to add something new to the world. The point is to give your reader new eyes. A different way of seeing, every day. That’s what visionary means, a way of sight.
Bergson is good on this subject. He says we spend most of our lives just going through the motions, but every once in a while something shakes us, takes us deeper, and that’s when we’re really alive. It’s like Virginia Woolf’s fishing line, there are things you can’t imagine down there. Real things, not these little paper airplanes people are always throwing around. Those aren’t poetry. Poetry isn’t even about what you find down there. It’s about the act of finding it. It’s a guide, a book of maps, for your readers.
And sing. Most people forget they’re singing. Sing as loud as you can, as clearly. You’re not an owl, you’re not a wolf, you’re a songbird. It’s supposed to be beautiful, a pleasure to listen to, rapt. You want people weeping with ecstasy. Sing!
TLM: Do you have particular poems or poets you love to read aloud? What does the act of verbalizing poetry do for you, as a poet, and perhaps for the anonymous reader who will eventually read your work?
TLM: Where do you see the future of poetry heading?
WFL: What a joyous time this is for poetry! I can write a poem quietly on Tuesday, get it accepted for publication on Thursday, have it go up in Indonesia on Saturday, and get a note from a reader in Norway on Sunday. Even twenty years ago, no-one could have imagined that.
There’s an old story about Po Chu-i. For some reason, he was sent into exile in the South. It was a long journey. Along the way, he stopped at a tavern. He heard singing coming from a back room. It sounded sweet, so he listened closely. The girl sharpening the knives in the kitchen was singing one of his poems. That was possible then because of the Grand Canal and the communication it allowed. And those connections just keep growing. The future looks good.
But some things don’t change. At some level, it’s still just one person speaking, or singing, to another. It’s not like a new kind of poet has ever been invented. There are still only four: the singer, the namer, the maker, and the seer. Most of us have pieces of all four.
So we’ll still have love poems, the singer will always be with us. And why not? Paolo and Franchesca are still reading poems to each other, in every city. “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and a book of verse to while away the hours.” And we’ll still have namers, the people who know the true names of things, poets of remembrance, of witness, poets who can tell us, “This is what it was like to be a human being, in this place, at this moment.” Think of Whitman, or Du Fu. We’ll still have visionaries, like Mirabai, or Teresa, people who can pull back the veil. But I’m most interested in the Makers. There’s a world of possibilities.
Some guy, in the last century, said, “I’d like to introduce a few poets to the pleasures of building a locomotive.” I really love that. The idea a poem is like a machine is an old one now, but the idea of building something, of constructing it, keeps moving forward. It informs most of my time, and I see it more and more in the work of others.
We need to ask ourselves now, what exactly is the raw material of art? I have a friend who’s a woodturner. Someone brought him a piece of manzanita, half burned in a wildfire. He put it on his lathe, and turned it, chips flying everywhere, over his shoulder, until it was a bowl, holding the record of that fire, holding the very essence of flame.
But even more than that, I’ve always thought of words as small gems, as pieces of stained glass. We can make the frame any size and shape we want, of any material, with any kind of back lighting. But we’re still taking those small bits of colored glass and putting them together, in patterns or shapes or images. They all work together in the act of composition.
Or let me put it differently. I was putting in a countertop, using Talavera tile. Each piece was unique, handmade, most of them a deep, pleasing blue, some of them with glazed images. We selected them, moved them around, rearranged. The form fit the space, but there was nearly infinite flexibility in the pattern. Lines of grout ran between them. I looked at them, and thought, “That’s the perfect metaphor for poetry.”
Then I thought better of it. Yes, those tiles make the basis of poetry, and it’s important to know how to lay them, how to mix the grout, how to space them. But the poem should be an environment where things happen, so I imagined a Persian garden, with a small bird called a Wallcreeper, using his feet to move back and forth along the tiled fountain wall, hunting insects along the lines, half hidden by the flowers and the fountain spray.
Or think of the rainbow bridge in the Qingming Festival scroll. How do you use straight beams to form a curved arch which can bear weight? And even if you figured that out, how would you bind them together? I wrote a poem about how to do exactly that, in rhymed pentameter, the lines as straight as those beams, the rhyme-scheme curving the whole into an arch. I read it to a small group at a conference. Wendy Cope was there. She looked at me and said, “I had no idea one could write a poem about something like that.”
I think this is where poetry is going. This is the way to bridge the huge divide between the language people on one side, and the passion on the other shore. We need both at once. I have a poem called “Five Years,” about Kate’s breast cancer surgery. Yes, it has all the modern tools, the radiation devices, the scalpels, the careful construction of form. But it also has the passion, the delicacy of flesh, the singing. At a reading, I can’t get through it without literally weeping for joy that she survived, that she’s been cancer free for five years. In the trance of reading, I still feel that emotion, and I can see everyone listening, sharing in it.
So, where is poetry going? Towards the middle of that bridge, towards a passionate construction.
TLM: Is Twitter a contemporary form of poetry? If not, could it be used as such?
WFL: I admire people who can write in short forms. It really isn’t me. I’m the kind who likes to juggle seven or eight glittering balls at once, trying to dazzle the viewer with unexpected patterns of movement. I can’t do that in 140 characters. But constraints make for interesting turns, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens.
In the 90s, most of my poems were less than 20 lines. I was composing and publishing electronically, and you couldn’t fit much more than that on a screen. Now I have a much bigger monitor, and the poems tend to be longer. People never admit it, but this has always been how it works. The size of the printed page limited line length. Scrolls had their own effect on forms. Every change in technology changes poetry.
The best thing about technology is how much it’s opened things up, allowed the development of new venues for publishing. Not that long ago, a few editors could keep a stranglehold on new developments. If one of those people didn’t like you, it was time to hang up your cleats. Those days are gone, and they are never coming back. Some people feel nostalgia for some imagined Golden Age, but not me.
It’s far better to look forward. Look at what Nic Sebastion’s doing with audio chapbooks, look at what Mary Ann Sullivan’s doing with video poems. I live on the bleeding edge of technology, and it’s even hard for me to keep up with what poets are making of the new tools as soon as they get their hands on them. It’s a great time to be a poet!
TLM: What are the most beautiful words in the English language?
WFL: “Cellar Door.” Seriously, lots of people have said that, from Poe to Dorothy Parker to Tolkien. I’m a little suspicious. Maybe it had something to do with speakeasies, or opium dens. Or Somerset accents.
I know people who don’t believe in beauty, who think it’s a mistake to pursue loveliness of sound or language, people who want to get rid of melody and image, who believe adherence to beauty is a culturally determined trap. Their arguments are engaged, involved, unanswerable. And yet...
I would really, really like to stake out some ground for beauty. There must be some small corner of the garden where we can do that. Is poetry possible after Rwanda? If Thich Nhat Hahn thinks peace is possible after what he went through, I think it must be.
But what would it look like? Words in jewel tones? An animated forest, in early morning, with the sun making shadows through the last of the morning fog, bark on the tree trunks still wet and glistening? The lower slopes of a volcano, verdant beyond imagination, floriferous, scattered butterflies moving inventively between the vines?
No. The second most beautiful thing I’ve seen: I was sitting on a granite bench. Late fall, the afternoon moving on towards evening. The plaza was nearly empty, there were long patterned shadows from columns. She was late, I wondered if she’d arrive at all. The first thing I saw was movement between the columns, a swirling motion gracefully coming towards me. I could hear her steps on the marble pavement, a unique rhythm only hers. A flowing skirt, a scarf almost floating in the light breeze, like the rest of her, her styled hair backlit by the low sun, light glinting off her bracelets as she moved closer.
Or the most. Midmorning light almost making it through my bedroom window. Candles and incense and a red cloth in a blue ceramic bowl, filled with warm scented water. A statue of Green Tara on the night table. She’d stood at the foot of my bed and said: “How do you want me?” Now she lay next to me, completely undraped, that small wind I mentioned swirling around us, every element of the universe channeling through her.
I don’t have access to the most beautiful words. But if I did, they’d describe that moment. Thanks for asking.
An Interview with poet W.F. Lantry
THIS Literary Magazine poetry editors J.P. Reese, Nicholas Y.B. Wong, and Bill Yarrow, along with THIS editor Lacey N. Dunham, asked W.F. Lantry about past and present poetic influences, the female body in poetry, the creative writing MFA, and Twitter. Lantry is honored with our third Poet Spotlight.
THIS Literary Magazine: Many of your poems have the sense of a deep well of earlier poetic work resonating within them and informing them. How important is your knowledge of classic works to the shaping of your own?
W.F. Lantry: What do you love the most? What excites your most desperate passions, the deepest, most silent well within you? How can you drink from that well, and how can you get your reader to drink from it? Ask yourself who else felt those same emotions. Sappho? Du Fu? Ovid? Herrick? Teresa? Tagore? How did they write about them? How did they make poetry out of them?
Because it's the making that matters. Horace said “I have made monuments of bronze.” Borges made a garden of forking paths. And whenever we write, we're in conversation with all of them. Yeats said he wanted to dine, at journey's end, with Landor and with Donne. I think some part of us all wants that. And what would we talk about? Stonemasons would discuss ashlar techniques, woodworkers texture and grain. I think poets would talk about making things.
But me, I think I'd ask Sappho “Did that man really seem like a god sitting there next to her?” Of Du Fu: “Those geese flying overhead -- which way were they going?” I bet he could tell me. Herrick could tell me if Julia's strawberries touched silk or gauze, Ovid could describe those beeswax tablets. I bet Teresa could sit down and draw me a map of the interior castle!
What I'm building is far more modest. A kitchen island, a talavera countertop. A few bowls turned on a lathe. A small bridge, some garden benches. But when I'm done, and those poets are all standing around considering them, and one of them looks me straight in the eye and says “Tell us what you did and how you did it,” I want to have a good answer ready. You know, just in case.
TLM: Are you thinking of answering our question at some point?
WFL: Yes.
TLM: Nature is a dominant subject matter in your poetry, yet you live in an urban area of the U.S. Do you find there’s a disconnect between your immediate geography and the vibrancy of natural worlds that exists within your work? Or does the lack of one inform the presence of the other?
Because it's the making that matters. Horace said “I have made monuments of bronze.” Borges made a garden of forking paths. And whenever we write, we're in conversation with all of them. Yeats said he wanted to dine, at journey's end, with Landor and with Donne. I think some part of us all wants that. And what would we talk about? Stonemasons would discuss ashlar techniques, woodworkers texture and grain. I think poets would talk about making things.
But me, I think I'd ask Sappho “Did that man really seem like a god sitting there next to her?” Of Du Fu: “Those geese flying overhead -- which way were they going?” I bet he could tell me. Herrick could tell me if Julia's strawberries touched silk or gauze, Ovid could describe those beeswax tablets. I bet Teresa could sit down and draw me a map of the interior castle!
What I'm building is far more modest. A kitchen island, a talavera countertop. A few bowls turned on a lathe. A small bridge, some garden benches. But when I'm done, and those poets are all standing around considering them, and one of them looks me straight in the eye and says “Tell us what you did and how you did it,” I want to have a good answer ready. You know, just in case.
TLM: Are you thinking of answering our question at some point?
WFL: Yes.
TLM: Nature is a dominant subject matter in your poetry, yet you live in an urban area of the U.S. Do you find there’s a disconnect between your immediate geography and the vibrancy of natural worlds that exists within your work? Or does the lack of one inform the presence of the other?
WFL: The view from my writing office window is a forest’s edge, overlooking the wooded flood plain of the Anacostia River. The valley seems alive, the stream banks are constantly changing. Deer walk about the meadows, so many it’s nearly impossible to have a garden. I once counted seventeen on the back lawn. They’re white tails, smaller than the mule deer of my homeland. I’ve gone down in the middle of the night and found raccoons in my shop. There are beaver gnawed trees within a hundred yards. I have a cat whose only job is to roam the perimeter of the grounds and keep the rodents down. James [my son] calls her Catchmouse. When I’m between cats, mice invade the interior rooms. Kate [my wife] leaves the windows open so she can hear the birdsong and crickets, depending on the time of day. She likes to feel as if her bedroom’s in a treehouse.
All this is less than eight miles from the White House, in the center of the Megalopolis. We hear owls from our deck, cries in the night when foxes are hunting. I think I’m good at listening, watching, noticing, and yet Kate is constantly pointing out things I’ve missed. We all need to listen better.
There’s a constant presence within us. I don’t know where it comes from. I was lucky: my father took me to the Sierras over and over, so often I feel as if I grew up in the Giant Forest. People turn to me and ask, “What birds are those?” They ask about trees and flowers.
Especially flowers. Since I couldn’t be in the mountains all the time, I made gardens, and wrote about them. In Houston, I once had a hundred species in bloom on the same day. You’d be amazed how much drama goes on in your backyard garden. I used to think I knew everything that happened there.
Then I met Kate, and discovered there was more than I had ever imagined. If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. But I don’t bother making gardens anymore. I have other tasks.
TLM: Could you tell us something about how significant the female body is in your poems? You seem to incorporate the female body often - and in many forms - in your poetry but always with great reverence.
WFL: Picture this: a sunny day in California. San Diego: Tierrasanta. The name is so good it sounds like I made it up, but it exists. I was young, doing contracted garden work. I’d hitchhike to the site, always with a book of poems in my back pocket. That day, it was Neruda. The Captain’s Verses. I left the book on the porch, and started digging.
The woman who lived there, who hired me, who wanted a garden, came out to watch me work. She sat on the porch steps, drinking lemonade and reading Neruda. At mid-afternoon I took a break, and went to sit in the shade near her. We were talking South American poetry. I was interested in technique, in language, in the leap from one stanza to another. She had completely separate interests. She held up Neruda, and said “I wish someone loved me as much as he loved her.”
It was my first real clue. I stopped asking myself questions like “What should I write about,” and started asking, “What is the nature of art? What can it do, what’s possible?” I did research, and came across the notion of the Saaki.
The Saaki is a kind of cupbearer, but she's not like any you’ve ever known. Not like Ganymede. She’s a beautiful woman, carrying a cup of wine. It’s almost a chalice. You’ll be sitting somewhere, a bar, a forest, a garden, and there she’ll be. Yes, she’s the one who brings wine, but it’s not for getting tipsy. If you accept what she offers, if you drink from her cup, there’s the possibility of union with the divine. At least, that’s how the story goes. I wonder sometimes about the terms. Divine seems inexact. But something: something that’s not possible without the Saaki, without the wine she offers. Something outside of us, but always around us, like a small wind, constantly there.
And I think it’s always been there. One of the oldest poems is the Sumerian song of Innana. She’s no romantic lover. Yes, she’s associated with rain and storms, but she also moves back and forth between worlds, and knows secrets we can’t consider. She wasn’t above snatching men out of taverns, and having her way with them, right in the street. When she finally sings a wedding song to the man she marries, it’s more explicit than anything else you’re likely to hear. But it's the passion that draws us in, the promise of union with the divine, or whatever we can call it. The chance to be surrounded by that small wind. To be carried off by it during the moment of union.
Rilke was right about this one. Let’s paraphrase him: ‘Learn to forget everything you thought poetry is. Real singing is a different movement in the air. A breathing in a goddess. A wind.’ He said something close to that, or close enough. But he was too sentimental, and here’s why.
Let’s go back to Sumeria. It was a very different time. Before she married, before she even became engaged, every woman went to the temple, and sat outside. She waited there, with all the others, until a man -- and it had to be a complete stranger -- said to her, “I invite you in the name of Innana,” and offered her a single coin as token. She’d then make love to him, right there, in the spirit of the goddess. Remember, Innana’s the one who just dragged any man she wanted out of the tavern. Then the young woman would return home. Every woman did this at least once, some of them more often. They weren’t like the women Rilke imagined. They had a kind of savage passion, like the Maenads. There’s a bit of that spirit in every woman I’ve ever known, but it only comes out when that small wind begins to move around her. It took me a long time to learn to recognize it. But poets have always written about it. Listen to Yeats: “The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs.” We all have different terms, but it's the same thing.
So yes, I feel reverence. But it's about more than simply the physical form. It's about the wind moving around her, the small drops of water on her skin as she walks out of the sea, not her breasts themselves, but the pearl necklace that hangs knotted between them. If you look closely at those pearls, you can see surprising reflections. That’s where art is.
The woman who lived there, who hired me, who wanted a garden, came out to watch me work. She sat on the porch steps, drinking lemonade and reading Neruda. At mid-afternoon I took a break, and went to sit in the shade near her. We were talking South American poetry. I was interested in technique, in language, in the leap from one stanza to another. She had completely separate interests. She held up Neruda, and said “I wish someone loved me as much as he loved her.”
It was my first real clue. I stopped asking myself questions like “What should I write about,” and started asking, “What is the nature of art? What can it do, what’s possible?” I did research, and came across the notion of the Saaki.
The Saaki is a kind of cupbearer, but she's not like any you’ve ever known. Not like Ganymede. She’s a beautiful woman, carrying a cup of wine. It’s almost a chalice. You’ll be sitting somewhere, a bar, a forest, a garden, and there she’ll be. Yes, she’s the one who brings wine, but it’s not for getting tipsy. If you accept what she offers, if you drink from her cup, there’s the possibility of union with the divine. At least, that’s how the story goes. I wonder sometimes about the terms. Divine seems inexact. But something: something that’s not possible without the Saaki, without the wine she offers. Something outside of us, but always around us, like a small wind, constantly there.
And I think it’s always been there. One of the oldest poems is the Sumerian song of Innana. She’s no romantic lover. Yes, she’s associated with rain and storms, but she also moves back and forth between worlds, and knows secrets we can’t consider. She wasn’t above snatching men out of taverns, and having her way with them, right in the street. When she finally sings a wedding song to the man she marries, it’s more explicit than anything else you’re likely to hear. But it's the passion that draws us in, the promise of union with the divine, or whatever we can call it. The chance to be surrounded by that small wind. To be carried off by it during the moment of union.
Rilke was right about this one. Let’s paraphrase him: ‘Learn to forget everything you thought poetry is. Real singing is a different movement in the air. A breathing in a goddess. A wind.’ He said something close to that, or close enough. But he was too sentimental, and here’s why.
Let’s go back to Sumeria. It was a very different time. Before she married, before she even became engaged, every woman went to the temple, and sat outside. She waited there, with all the others, until a man -- and it had to be a complete stranger -- said to her, “I invite you in the name of Innana,” and offered her a single coin as token. She’d then make love to him, right there, in the spirit of the goddess. Remember, Innana’s the one who just dragged any man she wanted out of the tavern. Then the young woman would return home. Every woman did this at least once, some of them more often. They weren’t like the women Rilke imagined. They had a kind of savage passion, like the Maenads. There’s a bit of that spirit in every woman I’ve ever known, but it only comes out when that small wind begins to move around her. It took me a long time to learn to recognize it. But poets have always written about it. Listen to Yeats: “The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs.” We all have different terms, but it's the same thing.
So yes, I feel reverence. But it's about more than simply the physical form. It's about the wind moving around her, the small drops of water on her skin as she walks out of the sea, not her breasts themselves, but the pearl necklace that hangs knotted between them. If you look closely at those pearls, you can see surprising reflections. That’s where art is.
TLM: Are you going to answer any of these questions?
WFL: Seriously, I’m trying my best!
TLM: You mentioned that Carolyn Forché is your favorite poet because of her courage and cutting-edge style. Her early works are quite political, especially the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry as Witness. Can you talk about the political and social landscape in your writing career?
WFL: I owe everything to Carolyn. Imagine: there I was, I was like nineteen, and scruffy as the day is long, when I heard there was a real live poet teaching at the local college. So I bundled up all my poems, and went to see her.
She was so generous. She took a quick glance at the first couple, put them aside, and talked to me about what contemporary poetry could actually be. I was so lost, I’d never heard anyone use the word “image” before. It lasted about an hour, and I just listened, taking it in. But I must not have been completely hopeless: she invited me to sit in on her graduate workshop. It was a different world. For three hours a week, for a whole semester, I wrote down everything she and everyone else there said. After every meeting, I’d sit outside somewhere, and make sure that it was all burned into my memory. By semester’s end, I was unrecognizable. She’d changed my life without knowing it.
That was the year she was going back and forth to Salvador. So, while she talked about poetry, she also talked about her experiences there. She was working on the poems that would become The Country Between Us, she was working on “The Colonel.” I never asked myself if poems should have a political element, I just assumed they did, the way a fish assumes water, a bird air. She said to us, “Pay attention to what you read, it’s a hint of what your own work will be.” I was reading Wright, Kinnell, Merwin, Bly, the antiwar poets, the social justice poets. I must have been predisposed.
But your question implies a terrible dilemma I have. I have two conflicting sides to me. One is my strong belief in social justice, the part that’s driven most of my professional life. But at other times, I see myself as a metaphysical love poet. So when I write a love poem, I feel degenerate, when I write a social justice poem, I feel unfaithful. Carolyn has no trouble combining the two, but it troubled me for a long time.
Then, last year, I won a peace prize for poetry. In Israel. The same week, I published a love poem, based on a passage from the Koran, in Damascus. So I guess I’ve found a way to bridge different worlds, but always, always, I hold in mind the thought of Carolyn reading over my shoulder. In a way, her work is an ethical compass for me, a moral star, true north. When Against Forgetting came out, I used it as the primary text for a course I was teaching on aesthetics. And just a few months ago, she published an article about the reality and use of Poetry of Witness. It told the story of Akhmatova, standing outside the prison, and being able to describe the scene. That exactness, that strong belief in the real instead of the imagined, is central to my own thought. We shouldn’t be making stuff up: we should be trying to set things down, with all the clarity we can muster, modestly, and with exactness. It’s our responsibility, it’s our gift, it’s what we do.
TLM: In addition to Carolyn Forché, who are other contemporary poets you admire? What is it about their work that draws you to them?
WFL: Someone asked Kinnell this question, and he prevaricated, saying he never reads contemporary work. They asked Nabokov, and he refused to name names, saying, “Anonymous pleasure hurts no one.” So no living people, except those I’ve actually known and worked with. That means I can talk about Derek Walcott, who changed me as much as Carolyn did. Derek made me read Horace and Martial and the text of Guys and Dolls. On the one hand, he gave me permission to think of world forms, instead of the narrow American grain I’d been working in. On the other, he knocked all the poetic language out of me. “I’ve got a horse right here, his name is Paul Revere...” And he made me consider dramatic reality. How would someone read the words on a stage? He changed my whole approach to giving readings. Of course, he’s got a great natural voice.
I owe a tremendous debt to René Char, as well. You may have noticed I have a lot of debts. I never actually met him, although our time in Provence overlapped. I can’t imagine anyone whose forms are more different from mine, but I love his approach. He makes apparent the hidden connections between things, without abstraction or misstep. And his work comes from the actual world, he was engaged with reality in a way few of us can imagine. Maquisard, resistance fighter, and he was just as comfortable with salons and surrealists. I feel almost as much affinity with Bonnefoy, although he likely wouldn’t see it. The way he tried to look at Douve with absolutely clear sight, I wish I had those eyes. I worship the absolute modernity of Bousquet.
Maybe you’ll allow me one more living poet. I’ve never met her, you’ve never heard of her. Her name is Marlene Tissot. It’s hard to explain why I find her work so attractive, there’s just something about her work that draws me in. Maybe that’s enough.
TLM: How did you get started in poetry? Who or what was the spark that ignited your interest? Who and what works have influenced your style and poetics and how did they influence you?
WFL: So this is the Jacqueline question. Jacqueline Ollier. After Carolyn left San Diego, I started taking actual classes. I was a voracious omnivore, and devoured them without aid of a menu. One semester I took eleven classes, all in Lit. But I wasn’t getting any closer to a degree. Then Jacqueline showed up, on some kind of professor exchange program. I signed up for her class on Williams.
I didn’t know it then, but she was the leading expert on American poetry in France. We were quickly immersed in Paterson, and she and I worked on a few projects together. It turned out she knew Kinnell from his time in Grenoble, and she went to visit him in Hawaii. I didn’t know it at the time, but she took some of my work with her. I never found out what he said to her, but she came back with a letter of recommendation in hand. She didn’t show it to me, she just said, “Bill, you must come to Nice.” I said, “Jacqueline, things like that don’t happen to people like me. Besides, I don’t have a degree. And I don’t speak French.” She just said, “All will be well.”
And it was. I taught, I wrote. I learned French, slowly. Enough to get a couple degrees. Suddenly life was a whirlwind of art and philosophy and music. I did readings: Paris, Rome, Monte Carlo. Publications and collaborations. Wild stuff: lunch with Robbe-Grillet, dinner with Toni Morrison, drinks with James Baldwin. It was, well, it was what we all imagine the literary life should be. If I could get my wish, it would be that every young poet could have that life, even if for just a few years.
It wasn’t all romance. I had a garden on the terraced slopes of St. Pancrace, and the wild boars broke down the fences and ate everything they could. University politics are not constrained by borders. And there’s something odd about being on stage all the time. One time I tried to get away, and took the ferry to Corsica. My plan was to find a little quiet and isolation, by climbing Monte Cinto. And I did: I made it, and stood alone on the peak. I even made it back to my base camp by dark. The next day, I walked into a tiny little mountain town, and sat down outside the only cafe. A colleague was there.
Still, that time helped me discover an entirely new kind of poetry, in a place where poets are valued. Yes, really valued. Honored, even, in a way that never happens in America, even for the greats. There was creative freedom, and even more importantly, a knowledge that the work would be heard and read, even anticipated. I’d never quite believed Whitman when he said, “The world is always waiting for its poet,” but it was true, at least then, in that place. And I owe it all to Jacqueline.
I’ve tried to help other poets the way she helped me. It’s not because I’m good by nature, I’m not. But it’s the only way I have to pay Jacqueline back, for all she did. One time she said to me, “Once you’ve shown you can produce something worthwhile, you have a responsibility to devote yourself completely to it.” Everyday I think of letting myself off the hook, of just kicking back, if only for a few hours, I think about her, and all she did and said. And I sit back down at the keyboard.
TLM: In addition to poetry, you’re also a writer of prose. Was the transition from poetry to prose a natural move for you? Were you surprised to find yourself working in a different medium?
WFL: I wasn’t surprised. I was shocked. The first time I opened a copy of Snow White, I was stunned. Here was an intensity of language, a leaping playfulness, one only saw in poetry. “Her hair black as ebony, her skin white as snow...” Of course, Don stole that from an old Irish poem, “Dierdre,” but let that pass. He was doing it in prose. The dots on her back set me up for “She was Dolores on the dotted line.” I’m probably the only one in the history of fiction who read Nabokov after I read Barthelme.
Someone looked at one of my poems and said, “You know, you could write fiction if you wanted.” I told her there was no way I could sustain that kind of intensity over a long span. Someone else said, “You’re always telling stories.” I said I had no concept of character, or sequence, or plot. I read the last page of any novel first. It helps me enjoy it. Or I’ll just open the book in some random place and start reading. I love sentences, tone, diction, rhythm. I find them, well, exciting. Language sparkles for me.
Think about that for a second. And then think of Pater: “To burn always with a hard, gem-like flame, to maintain your ecstasy, is the only goal.” Putting those two things together made me rethink the whole project. After all, Derek did both poetry and theatre, they fed into each other. And so I headed for Houston, because Barthelme was there.
He greeted me warmly. Clearly, people had been talking. Or maybe he just recognized a kindred spirit. The first words he ever said to me were, “You look like a man who enjoys good Scotch.” Then he offered me a little. More than a little.
A hurricane was brewing out over the Gulf on the day he saw my first story. We did it in workshop. By the time it was over, I was drunk with ecstasy, the way Baudelaire wanted us to be. I staggered out of there, not caring the winds were about to trash my shotgun shack, and its modest garden. It seemed a worthwhile trade. Of course, things didn’t always go so well. The next one got trashed. I took other workshops: Jim, Mary. Mary told me I didn’t know anything about paragraphing. I said, “You’re right.” I still don’t know what she meant. But she was generous, the way Jim and Don were.
Of course, I ruined it for everyone. I did a double dissertation: a full one in poetry, and a full one in fiction. They’ve since changed the rules so no-one can do that. Or maybe they just don’t believe one can be both a singer and a storyteller. One time, Don was talking to us about what it took to succeed. He was talking about artists, and by that he meant fiction writers. He said, “Musicians, painters, they’re not like us.” And then he looked at me, with that mischievous look he sometimes got, and said, “Poets aren’t like us, either.” I’m still grateful for that. I’ve never felt more welcomed, anywhere, in any genre.
TLM: Are you willing to weigh in on the current whipping boy of the writing world, the MFA? You have a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston, so how might the landscape of the current MFA program change, in your opinion, with introduction of more and more Ph.D.'s to the field? For you, what are the advantages of receiving a formal degree in writing? Can writing be “taught” or do these programs exist more to refine the skills of a talented -- but as yet unrecognized -- writer?
WFL: Can I skip this one?
TLM: It will never do to start skipping the hard ones.
WFL: But...
TLM: Answer!
WFL: Okay, okay. Dang! So, I’ll be sitting at some dinner table, and someone will wonder aloud about something, some detail. She might even ask some rhetorical questions, like, say, “Why do people say, ‘Mencius’ mother moved three times?’” And I’ll tell her about the graveyard, the market, and the school. She’ll say “How do you know that?” And I’ll say “Four degrees from two continents, Darlin’. I’m supposed to know that!”
Sartre was right. The answer depends on who you ask. In France, they call people like me a Universitaire, so of course I’m in favor of instruction, degrees, learning. I’m like the scholar Chaucer made fun of: “...and gladly would he learn and gladly teach.” I have nothing bad to say about anyone pursuing any kind of degree. As Jacqueline would say, “It is better than building bombs.”
And while I never saw the MFA as a terminal degree, some awfully good poets have gotten one, and were able to treat it as a union card, and actually make a living as a poet, which is a great thing. Poetry is flourishing more than it ever has, in the history of the world, and it’s because of these programs. Anyone who complains about them, looks down their nose, calls them a pyramid scheme, just isn’t seeing the big picture.
But it’s not as if there aren’t problems. In my earliest youth, I knew people who didn’t want to study anyone else’s work, who didn’t want to read others, because they didn’t want to be ‘polluted.’ They believed in the purity of originality, and didn’t want to run the risk of being derivative. It’s a respectable position, even if it’s not one I share. But maybe a University isn’t the best place for someone who feels that way.
Take this scenario. Imagine I call you up and say, “Derek’s coming over. We’re going to have a few beers, eat some barbeque, maybe talk a little poetry. Seamus might drop in. You should show up. And maybe bring something for dessert.” Would you do it? Would you mind bringing dessert, if you got to hear Derek and a bunch of other people talking poetry, maybe even read one of yours? If you did it for a whole summer, would you tell people you hung out there for a season? Like, if the subject came up?
Can writing be taught? I don’t know why this question even gets asked. Kate’s a coloratura soprano, a soul of exquisitely developed art. She took years of lessons. Jewelers can’t just cut a rough stone into a beautiful gem without training, without long apprenticeship and practice. Research shows it takes about 10,000 hours of work to get really good at something. That’s five years of devotion to it. Why should poetry be any different? Because it’s full of mystery? You’re talking to a mystical poet here, my friend. Learning to write that kind of thing takes even longer.
It’s all Yeats’ fault. While he was busy sailing to Byzantium, where he talked about studying the fabrication of golden birds, he said, “Nor is there singing school, but studying / monuments...” As if we should all be sitting in museums or libraries, copying out the masters in our spare time. He liked Milton way more than I do, but he forgets Milton got a double-double first at Cambridge! He wrote Lycidas as part of his education. He shared drafts of it with his fellow students, and his professors. It helped make his reputation. Writing programs may seem new, but they just formalize what has been happening for a long time. You think Catullus didn’t share his poems with people around him, didn’t change his approach based on their advice? Please. Martial quite literally honed his rapier at countless public dinners, in the face of hoots, catcalls... and other poets. It was like heading for the bar after a workshop.
TLM: What advice do you have for new poets?
WFL: “Leaves on leaves on leaves of books I’ve turned / and I know nothing!” That’s Berryman, agreeing with Master Kong, we should all strive for the paradise of enlightened ignorance. Then there’s this story, from Merwin. He went to see Pound in the asylum, and ask how to become a poet. And Pound said, ‘You need to write 75 lines a day. But you don’t have that much material in you. You think you do, but you don’t. So spend your time translating. That way, you’ll see how it’s done.”
Embrace ambiguity. It’s your best friend. Remember what you enjoy, what moves you. Don’t ever trust your instincts: What you react against most strongly when you first see it may be what you embrace closely a few weeks from now. Notice what you return to, over and over. Celebrate every little victory.
Watch the opening credits of “True Blood.” Your poem should be at least that good. If it’s not, what are you doing? Watch Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games.” It’s a lyric poem. Is yours as good?
Have an aesthetic. Be ready to defend it. Ask other poets about theirs. Listen very carefully. They know more than you do.
The point isn’t to change the world. It’s not even to add something new to the world. The point is to give your reader new eyes. A different way of seeing, every day. That’s what visionary means, a way of sight.
Bergson is good on this subject. He says we spend most of our lives just going through the motions, but every once in a while something shakes us, takes us deeper, and that’s when we’re really alive. It’s like Virginia Woolf’s fishing line, there are things you can’t imagine down there. Real things, not these little paper airplanes people are always throwing around. Those aren’t poetry. Poetry isn’t even about what you find down there. It’s about the act of finding it. It’s a guide, a book of maps, for your readers.
And sing. Most people forget they’re singing. Sing as loud as you can, as clearly. You’re not an owl, you’re not a wolf, you’re a songbird. It’s supposed to be beautiful, a pleasure to listen to, rapt. You want people weeping with ecstasy. Sing!
TLM: Do you have particular poems or poets you love to read aloud? What does the act of verbalizing poetry do for you, as a poet, and perhaps for the anonymous reader who will eventually read your work?
WFL: I like flow. When I’m skiing, I want to glide along the mountainside, to focus on what’s there without having to worry where I’m putting my feet. I’ll take fresh powder over moguls any day. Or, as someone says, “Just get out of the way, please, and let me read the poem in peace.”
So I love Yeats and loath Hopkins. I prefer bronze butterflies over Easter Wings, Lesbia’s sparrow over skylarks. Alliteration is a cheap trick, and so is assonance, and you’ll discover that as soon as you read a poem filled with them aloud. You’ll stumble all over the place, and fall. Remember those moguls? Hitting the ice ain’t fun.
I’ll tell you a secret. I go into a kind of passionate trance when I write. Nothing exists beyond me and the screen. Psychologists call it flow, Foucault called it ‘the gaze.’ Full concentration, complete focus, almost possession. When I’m doing a reading, once I start a poem, it’s like that. And that’s what I hope for from listeners, as well. We should all be in the same trance, the same shared hallucination. When it’s over, we should all be looking around saying, “Whoa! Where am I? What just happened?” When I read someone else’s poems, I actually read them aloud in my head. With the good ones, I forget that I’m reading, forget the meaning, I just move through the sounds in my head, gliding along the stanzas like a skier. When I get to the end, I’ve forgotten most of the ride. I just remember how I felt as I went through it.
This is why I’ve changed my position about memorizing. I know people who brag about memorizing thousands of lines. Well, I believe them, they probably did, and it shows in their work. It shows in their readings. I heard someone read a memorized poem at a conference this year. There was no trance, no connection, no shared reality, no art. It was all just a trick of memory, a set of mnemonic devices.
Then I saw a woman read in a bar. She was full of life, of energy, of passion. She said, “Give me a number!” “Thirty eight!” someone called out. She opened the book to page thirty-eight, and read the poem there, as if she were surprised to see it, as if it was the first time she’d ever read it. She was full of joy, and grateful for the poem. And we were full of joy with her, as surprised as she was by the poem. Her poem. Which we all knew before hand. It was beautiful.
So I love Yeats and loath Hopkins. I prefer bronze butterflies over Easter Wings, Lesbia’s sparrow over skylarks. Alliteration is a cheap trick, and so is assonance, and you’ll discover that as soon as you read a poem filled with them aloud. You’ll stumble all over the place, and fall. Remember those moguls? Hitting the ice ain’t fun.
I’ll tell you a secret. I go into a kind of passionate trance when I write. Nothing exists beyond me and the screen. Psychologists call it flow, Foucault called it ‘the gaze.’ Full concentration, complete focus, almost possession. When I’m doing a reading, once I start a poem, it’s like that. And that’s what I hope for from listeners, as well. We should all be in the same trance, the same shared hallucination. When it’s over, we should all be looking around saying, “Whoa! Where am I? What just happened?” When I read someone else’s poems, I actually read them aloud in my head. With the good ones, I forget that I’m reading, forget the meaning, I just move through the sounds in my head, gliding along the stanzas like a skier. When I get to the end, I’ve forgotten most of the ride. I just remember how I felt as I went through it.
This is why I’ve changed my position about memorizing. I know people who brag about memorizing thousands of lines. Well, I believe them, they probably did, and it shows in their work. It shows in their readings. I heard someone read a memorized poem at a conference this year. There was no trance, no connection, no shared reality, no art. It was all just a trick of memory, a set of mnemonic devices.
Then I saw a woman read in a bar. She was full of life, of energy, of passion. She said, “Give me a number!” “Thirty eight!” someone called out. She opened the book to page thirty-eight, and read the poem there, as if she were surprised to see it, as if it was the first time she’d ever read it. She was full of joy, and grateful for the poem. And we were full of joy with her, as surprised as she was by the poem. Her poem. Which we all knew before hand. It was beautiful.
TLM: Where do you see the future of poetry heading?WFL: What a joyous time this is for poetry! I can write a poem quietly on Tuesday, get it accepted for publication on Thursday, have it go up in Indonesia on Saturday, and get a note from a reader in Norway on Sunday. Even twenty years ago, no-one could have imagined that.
There’s an old story about Po Chu-i. For some reason, he was sent into exile in the South. It was a long journey. Along the way, he stopped at a tavern. He heard singing coming from a back room. It sounded sweet, so he listened closely. The girl sharpening the knives in the kitchen was singing one of his poems. That was possible then because of the Grand Canal and the communication it allowed. And those connections just keep growing. The future looks good.
But some things don’t change. At some level, it’s still just one person speaking, or singing, to another. It’s not like a new kind of poet has ever been invented. There are still only four: the singer, the namer, the maker, and the seer. Most of us have pieces of all four.
So we’ll still have love poems, the singer will always be with us. And why not? Paolo and Franchesca are still reading poems to each other, in every city. “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and a book of verse to while away the hours.” And we’ll still have namers, the people who know the true names of things, poets of remembrance, of witness, poets who can tell us, “This is what it was like to be a human being, in this place, at this moment.” Think of Whitman, or Du Fu. We’ll still have visionaries, like Mirabai, or Teresa, people who can pull back the veil. But I’m most interested in the Makers. There’s a world of possibilities.
Some guy, in the last century, said, “I’d like to introduce a few poets to the pleasures of building a locomotive.” I really love that. The idea a poem is like a machine is an old one now, but the idea of building something, of constructing it, keeps moving forward. It informs most of my time, and I see it more and more in the work of others.
We need to ask ourselves now, what exactly is the raw material of art? I have a friend who’s a woodturner. Someone brought him a piece of manzanita, half burned in a wildfire. He put it on his lathe, and turned it, chips flying everywhere, over his shoulder, until it was a bowl, holding the record of that fire, holding the very essence of flame.
But even more than that, I’ve always thought of words as small gems, as pieces of stained glass. We can make the frame any size and shape we want, of any material, with any kind of back lighting. But we’re still taking those small bits of colored glass and putting them together, in patterns or shapes or images. They all work together in the act of composition.
Or let me put it differently. I was putting in a countertop, using Talavera tile. Each piece was unique, handmade, most of them a deep, pleasing blue, some of them with glazed images. We selected them, moved them around, rearranged. The form fit the space, but there was nearly infinite flexibility in the pattern. Lines of grout ran between them. I looked at them, and thought, “That’s the perfect metaphor for poetry.”
Then I thought better of it. Yes, those tiles make the basis of poetry, and it’s important to know how to lay them, how to mix the grout, how to space them. But the poem should be an environment where things happen, so I imagined a Persian garden, with a small bird called a Wallcreeper, using his feet to move back and forth along the tiled fountain wall, hunting insects along the lines, half hidden by the flowers and the fountain spray.
Or think of the rainbow bridge in the Qingming Festival scroll. How do you use straight beams to form a curved arch which can bear weight? And even if you figured that out, how would you bind them together? I wrote a poem about how to do exactly that, in rhymed pentameter, the lines as straight as those beams, the rhyme-scheme curving the whole into an arch. I read it to a small group at a conference. Wendy Cope was there. She looked at me and said, “I had no idea one could write a poem about something like that.”
I think this is where poetry is going. This is the way to bridge the huge divide between the language people on one side, and the passion on the other shore. We need both at once. I have a poem called “Five Years,” about Kate’s breast cancer surgery. Yes, it has all the modern tools, the radiation devices, the scalpels, the careful construction of form. But it also has the passion, the delicacy of flesh, the singing. At a reading, I can’t get through it without literally weeping for joy that she survived, that she’s been cancer free for five years. In the trance of reading, I still feel that emotion, and I can see everyone listening, sharing in it.
So, where is poetry going? Towards the middle of that bridge, towards a passionate construction.
TLM: Is Twitter a contemporary form of poetry? If not, could it be used as such?
WFL: I admire people who can write in short forms. It really isn’t me. I’m the kind who likes to juggle seven or eight glittering balls at once, trying to dazzle the viewer with unexpected patterns of movement. I can’t do that in 140 characters. But constraints make for interesting turns, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens.
In the 90s, most of my poems were less than 20 lines. I was composing and publishing electronically, and you couldn’t fit much more than that on a screen. Now I have a much bigger monitor, and the poems tend to be longer. People never admit it, but this has always been how it works. The size of the printed page limited line length. Scrolls had their own effect on forms. Every change in technology changes poetry.
The best thing about technology is how much it’s opened things up, allowed the development of new venues for publishing. Not that long ago, a few editors could keep a stranglehold on new developments. If one of those people didn’t like you, it was time to hang up your cleats. Those days are gone, and they are never coming back. Some people feel nostalgia for some imagined Golden Age, but not me.
It’s far better to look forward. Look at what Nic Sebastion’s doing with audio chapbooks, look at what Mary Ann Sullivan’s doing with video poems. I live on the bleeding edge of technology, and it’s even hard for me to keep up with what poets are making of the new tools as soon as they get their hands on them. It’s a great time to be a poet!
TLM: What are the most beautiful words in the English language?
WFL: “Cellar Door.” Seriously, lots of people have said that, from Poe to Dorothy Parker to Tolkien. I’m a little suspicious. Maybe it had something to do with speakeasies, or opium dens. Or Somerset accents.
I know people who don’t believe in beauty, who think it’s a mistake to pursue loveliness of sound or language, people who want to get rid of melody and image, who believe adherence to beauty is a culturally determined trap. Their arguments are engaged, involved, unanswerable. And yet...
I would really, really like to stake out some ground for beauty. There must be some small corner of the garden where we can do that. Is poetry possible after Rwanda? If Thich Nhat Hahn thinks peace is possible after what he went through, I think it must be.
But what would it look like? Words in jewel tones? An animated forest, in early morning, with the sun making shadows through the last of the morning fog, bark on the tree trunks still wet and glistening? The lower slopes of a volcano, verdant beyond imagination, floriferous, scattered butterflies moving inventively between the vines?
No. The second most beautiful thing I’ve seen: I was sitting on a granite bench. Late fall, the afternoon moving on towards evening. The plaza was nearly empty, there were long patterned shadows from columns. She was late, I wondered if she’d arrive at all. The first thing I saw was movement between the columns, a swirling motion gracefully coming towards me. I could hear her steps on the marble pavement, a unique rhythm only hers. A flowing skirt, a scarf almost floating in the light breeze, like the rest of her, her styled hair backlit by the low sun, light glinting off her bracelets as she moved closer.
Or the most. Midmorning light almost making it through my bedroom window. Candles and incense and a red cloth in a blue ceramic bowl, filled with warm scented water. A statue of Green Tara on the night table. She’d stood at the foot of my bed and said: “How do you want me?” Now she lay next to me, completely undraped, that small wind I mentioned swirling around us, every element of the universe channeling through her.
I don’t have access to the most beautiful words. But if I did, they’d describe that moment. Thanks for asking.