Cathy Smith Bowers is author of three poetry collections, including The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas, which was the first winner of the Texas Tech University Press Poetry Award Series, subsequently named for Walt McDonald. Her other books are Traveling in Time of Danger and her most recent, A Book of Minutes, from Iris Press. A native of South Carolina, she has received a South Carolina Poetry Fellowship and was a winner of the 1990 General Electric Award for Younger Writers. Her poems appear in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and The Gettysburg Review, among other journals. She teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program at Queens University of Charlotte. I spoke with her in Tryon, North Carolina, her new town of residence, which offers a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Groceries

I had a boyfriend once, after my mother
and brothers and sisters and I
fled my father’s house, who worked
at the Piggly Wiggly where he stocked
shelves on Fridays until midnight
then drove to my house to sneak me out,
take me down to the tracks by the cotton mill
where he lifted me and the quilt I’d brought
into an empty boxcar. All night
the wild thunder of looms. The roar of trains
passing on adjacent tracks hauling
their difficult cargo, cotton bales
or rolls of muslin on their way
to the bleachery to be whitened, patterned
into stripes and checks, into still-life gardens
of wisteria and rose. And when the whistle
signaled third shift free, he would lift me
down again onto the gravel and take me home.
If my mother ever knew she didn’t say, so glad
in her new freedom, so grateful for the bags
of damaged goods stolen from the stockroom
and left on our kitchen table. Slashed
bags of rice and beans he had bandaged
with masking tape, the labelless cans,
the cereals and detergents in varying
stages of destruction. Plenty
to get us through the week, and even some plums
and cherries, tender and delicious,
still whole inside the mutilated cans
and floating in their own sweet juice.




Kingdom

When my brother
finally spoke its name,
the white cells of his body
having relinquished
their ancient
instruments of war
the small bombs
silenced
and the hand grenades
the tanks slow
retreat into mirage
the horses
dismounted
and the bright swords
sheathed
the sticks
the stones
laid
finally down
and the little lost
animal of the spirit
rising
stepping its soft
hooves into the light,
I wanted
to know that peace
walk into that quiet
kingdom
to lie down
in a life like that.




Three

                             “It was one of those moments
                            you wish you could
                            marry forever.”
                                          —James Seay

                             My father, as he pulled
off his beaten shoes and unbuttoned his shirt
after a hard day in the spinning
room, the whistle he would ease through the slit
between his tongue and palate, too tired
to press his lips into the tight o
of the realer whistle whistled Sunday mornings
before the world went bad, the clear,
pure strains of Fraulein called up
from his healing lungs

                             Beth’s snowflakes,
before she died, how, when she opened
the door to let us in, hundreds
of them she had cut and hung from the ceiling—
sloppy paper flakes spinning above the heat
of the big-bellied stove, unbelievable
soft blizzard of white

                             the look on Flint’s face,
its sweet incredulity of loss
as if in the telling of the story
he suddenly realized the girl
in the men’s restroom of that New Orleans
oyster house was the one true love of his life,
the way he turned from the urinal
and there she was, pushing him aside
pleading—I’m going to throw up
and I’ll need you to hold my hair—
and, done, she was gone, as he stood there
stunned, still holding his penis,
his other hand cupped tight to his mouth and nose,
breathing in, breathing deep
the still lingering jasmine of her hair.




Anatomy of a Southern Kiss

She said, Just put your stuff right there.
He said, Right whar?
Mimicking her
Carolina

drawl. Tells now how it took so long,
that dreaded No,
(Oh, man's worst curse)
oozing from her

lovely mouth, he’d tasted each slow
sweet O, O, O
before she could
get the word out.




Chamomile

Maythen to the Anglo-Saxon.
Egypt’s minion
offered up to
sun. Little weed

of our childhood picked to appease
our mother’s ire
when father turned
to drink. Too soon

we learn, as field and cove and ditch
we tread, the more
it is trodden
the more it spreads.




Pansy

So I’ve come to love the flower
whose name some jerk
shouted at my
brother as we

walked past. Beneath my dormant rose,
it alone bears
the weight of snow.
Pensées. Thoughts no

less numerous than its many
names: Call me to
you. Hearts-ease. Kiss
me ere I rise.




“Groceries,” “Kingdom,” and “Three” originally appeared in Traveling in Time of Danger (Iris Press, 1999). “Anatomy of a Southern Kiss,” “Chamomile,” and “Pansy” originally appeared in A Book of Minutes (Iris Press, 2004). These poems are reprinted here by permission of the author.

Julie Funderburk: I’d like to ask you about narrative structure. In an essay first published in Poetry, “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment,” poet Tony Hoagland describes the current shift away from narrative, noting that “many persons think that ours is simply not a narrative age; that contemporary experience is too multitracked, too visual, too manifold and simultaneous to be confined to the linearity of narrative.” Your first two books show a dedication to story. You have written that “our major task is writing a poem is to shine a light on a moment of intensity.” How does narrative help you do this?

Cathy Smith Bowers: I believe that every moment of intensity is a moment inside some narrative. The essence of our lives is story.

JF: How do you respond, then, to the current trend toward the fragmented, the nonlinear, the disassociative poems that Hoagland is describing?

CSB: Basically, to me [the style] can feel overly intellectual, cerebral, and not from the heart.

JF: When you say “heart,” do you also mean spirit? The theme of spirituality recurs in your poetry, with speakers and characters trying on a variety of religions. Do you think it necessary that poetry speak to the spirit?

CSB: Especially now, we are in a culture deprived of spirituality. We hunger for it and are always looking for ways of having the spirit fed. In the best poetry, the spirit will be fed, and it’s the spirit that should be—not the brain. The mind is also a part of it—but [the mind] is the machine that gets the reader to the spirit of the poem. I like to think of a poem as a river of spirit, and every once in a while there comes a current of intellect. I like smart poems, but I don’t want the smartness of the poem to be the main thing. I want to not even notice the smartness of a poem until many readings later.

JF: Will you name a poet who serves as a model for you in this?

CSB: Who always comes to mind is Gerard Manley Hopkins. I don’t even have to care whether his poems are about anything. They sweep me away, touch me with language and with sound. And then, after being swept away by that, I want to know and am willing to work at it, and realize that yes, indeed, the poems are intelligent—they are brilliant. But what I was first swept away by had to do with the heart and the spirit. I’ve lent out my books and they haven’t been returned yet, but Franz Wright is doing something that is stunning to me in its quietness. You don’t know whether he’s writing a poem or praying.

JF: Do you make a distinction, then, between spirituality and religion?

CSB: Well, if you’ve ever read my poem “Learning How to Pray,” you see what my religion is like! The word “spirituality” is thrown around a lot these days and is almost becoming one of the words you’re scared to use, especially in the presence of academics.

JF: There’s plenty of words I’m afraid to use in the presence of academics.

CSB: Hell yeah, why do you think I fled?

JF: How has writing in the form you use in A Book of Minutes changed your writing? For our readers: the form is a “minute,” a stanzaic and syllabic poem, with each stanza keeping a syllabic count of 8/4/4/4, for a total of 60 syllables. How does this form help you “shine a light”?

CSB: The form is also one of rhymed couplets. My intention was to always adhere to the rhyme scheme. But when it’s a perfect rhyme or an almost-perfect rhyme, that’s the surprise, rather than the off-rhyme being a surprise. The tension occurs when I have finally somehow adhered to the [rhyme] form, rather than the traditional practice of veering away from the form.

JF: You’ve also got lyrics here—celebratory and mock-celebratory, addressed to herbs and to saints. And what happens to the narrative in this form? In poems such as “The Anatomy of a Southern Kiss”?

CSB: It forces you to really reduce the subject to its essence.

JF: A distilled narrative.

CSB: Yes. And the titles in those poems—I used them for all they were worth. Because I had only sixty syllables.

JF: In the preface to this book, you mention issues of control when dealing with such a form, both in poetry and in handling personal material. I wonder whether the decision to include such a preface is also related to this.

CSB: Absolutely. I knew this book was so different from my first two books, that people were going to wonder what the hell happened to me, and I wanted to have some say in how they read that book. I wanted my hand in it.

JF: Let’s discuss the South and its influence on language. You grew up in South Carolina, and your earlier books mention mills, and the mill worker’s life. You’ve written poems about Southern diction—in “A Southern Rhetoric” where the speaker’s Mama uses the phrases “a sight in this world” and “don’t you forget who it was / learned you to talk.” And in A Book of Minutes, “My Mother’s Lexicon.”

CSB: That’s probably been my biggest challenge. I mean, growing up in a world where . . . It was hard for me, for instance, just to get an education. We always hear people say “pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Some people don’t even have any bootstraps. And it is hard. So all my life, even after being educated, I have been judged by my accent. It’s not really more difficult for Southern poets until we speak in public, which is why I don’t travel out of the South very often. [Colleagues] used to tease me for saying “I been knowin’ him a long time.” Sounded right to me! The little neighborhood I grew up in . . . my family didn’t have a car, so I lived right by the mill, right by the railroad tracks; I did not go out of my neighborhood until I was bussed to junior high. So you don’t get rid of an accent that you have spent 14 years inadvertently perfecting. So what you do instead is you stay in safe territory, which means anywhere where you can hear this tune: [mimics the sound of a banjo].

JF: But there are so many countries to which you have traveled—France, Italy, but also Indonesia, Korea. All over the world. Has traveling mattered to your writing?

CSB: There’s my poem “Touring the Berliner Dom,” where the moment of grace was seeing a man tie his wife’s shoe . . . Traveling—Though people complain about Americans who are flag-waving patriots . . . whatever I disagree with, with our administration, what’s going on in our country . . . I feel so lucky.

JF: Here, you have the freedom to write. Does it seem that you have a separate language for speaking and a separate language for writing?

CSB: I have many separate languages. The most over-the-top it gets is when I’m with my youngest sister Rosie. It definitely depends on my audience.

JF: In A Book of Minutes, some poems showcase humor. The rhyme can almost serve as a punch-line in poems such as “How I Became an Existentialist.” And in longer narratives, the end is funny, as in “The Ascension,” where the guru-esque lover steals the truck. Other poems begin with a joke and end wistfully or full of the weary world. I’ve heard you read before, and I know you enjoy making the audience laugh. Your subjects, though, are often heavy—grief, bitterness. How do you think humor functions in your verse?

CSB: This is not exactly what you’re asking, but I will say this: I started writing in [the minute] form after my brother died, and I worked in that form for four years. And I noticed that after about three years, I started writing those funny, silly poems. And I thought: hmm, this is interesting because they say that it takes about three years to grieve a tremendous loss. So just on that level, I took it as a sign I had moved to a place where I could feel joy and even silliness again. But that little form really works for humor because jokes are short, and jokes rely on brevity and timing, which are also a big part of that form.

JF: Was writing in this form, and writing lyrics inspired by saints and herbs, was this easier, since you’ve said that the moment of intensity you’re most interested in is the one within a narrative? If you are drawing from personal experience . . .

CSB: Yes, but at the time I didn’t really realize. When I discovered that form I was so deep in my grief, I was just sort of putting one foot in front of the other. I was teaching at a conference in Oklahoma City. And a woman was reading these short poems she called “minutes,” and as she told about the form, I jotted it down. It was just to get to the next minute, the next hour. I had planned on staying out there a few extra days after the conference was over, to see if I could get back to my own writing. And so I woke up Sunday morning, and there I was, confronted with this time, and I remembered writing down that little form, and so I tried to work with some images from my brother’s illness and death. And I know now that the form kept me in both sides of my brain. Before, after I had written my early drafts, for a long time in the writing of a poem, I would make myself stay in that right brain, that intuitive, that emotional, mysterious place. But I think that the subjects of my brother’s illness and death were too heavy for me to be in that place. So this form kept me in the emotional and the rational at the same time. It kept me balanced so that I could go back to those moments of intensity and work with them . . . My idea was just to work in that form in order to get back into my writing. My plan was just to go back to free verse. But I got hooked on the form and started liking some of the little poems that came out of it, and then they started being accepted by really good places like The Atlantic Monthly and The Southern Review and Shenandoah.

JF: Maybe I should start writing minutes.

CSB: Since my book came out, people all over are writing in that form, and I have seen at least two books written in that form. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to write the preface, because people were thinking that I had invented that form. And I wanted to make sure credit went where credit was due. My publisher was the one who did some research and found out who actually invented it.

JF: Your poem “Kingdom” addresses your brother’s death from AIDS. Do you think writing about AIDS is crucial for some reason?—this is related to whether poetry has a direct political or social role.

CSB: I didn’t see it as [political]. I’m sort of too small-minded, and I’m not saying that to be disingenuous or to come across as naïve, but my scope is pretty narrow—it’s just that one of my philosophies is to write the poems that need to be written, and that’s what my family was dealing with. It was the hardest thing we had ever been confronted with, the most painful, and so those were the poems that needed to be written. I didn’t think at all that this is the subject that needs to be out there. Usually when I think, “Here’s something a poem needs to be written about,” I get as far away from pen and paper as I possibly can.

JF: Here’s a related question then. Is it important for white Southern writers, given the horrors of the past, to write about race?

CSB: I wish that people would be more honest about that. It’s hard to write about honest experience without using language which is just a fact of our history . . . this is probably dangerous to say, but I don’t know how anybody brought up in the South could not have those remnants of emotional reaction to racial issues.

JF: This seems very much a matter of generation as well as place.

CSB: I grew up with the mythology that blacks were inferior. I grew up with that mythology from the neighborhood. I always heard mixed things. On the one hand: everybody’s equal. Then I would see and hear things that made me think: well, that doesn’t sound like everybody’s equal. It was like looking at a table and being told you were looking at a chair. And when you grow up with that, it doesn’t go away, on an unconscious level. But then you become aware of it, do a double take and say, “This is not rational, this is old stuff.” You have to be aware of that mythology you grew up in, and realize that it was a false mythology.

JF: Now that you’re teaching in the Low-Residency MFA Program at Queens University of Charlotte, has teaching graduates and being involved in that program changed you? Has it altered the relationship between your teaching work and your writing work?

CSB: I think it has. In the past, and I hate to say this because I had such wonderful students when I taught undergraduates at Queens, but I felt sometimes I was too much of a cheerleader for their writing. And I’m not a cheerleader anymore. Because these students are already serious about it. They are writers, they are not people I have to convince of anything, and I don’t even have to convince them of my theories of poetry and what a poem is. I give it to them as mine, and whether they buy it or not, it’s not any of my business.

JF: There’s so many different faculty in a low-residency program, a lot of different styles.

CSB: That used to worry me about my undergraduate work, because I was the only one, I was the creative writing department, and it bothered me that the students were not presented with other styles. Nobody could be any different from me than, say, Sally Keith in the MFA Program, and it makes me more comfortable with my students because I know they’ll move on from what they’ve experienced with me to other people, and they’ll get this broad experience of styles and philosophies, which is another reason I can just relax and do what I believe in.

Christine Garren is the author of the poetry collections Afterworld and Among the Monarchs. Her latest collection is The Piercing, published in 2006 in the Southern Messenger Poets series from Louisiana State University Press. A Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist and NEA Fellowship recipient, she was born in Philadelphia and has lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, since 1979.




Message 41

this is my death chamber

the leaves—gas walls, green and thick—

the valves let in

the vapors’ chemicals—

the witnesses are

the birds—

if it is day, I hope the wind is up

if it is night, the moon’s yellow knuckle

flashes

a black callus—

this is my death chamber—the passion that brought me to it

pure




Piñata

Brief yet amaranthine,

what’s left is this

wreckage everywhere—torn valves and surgeries

broken bank accounts, whole rooms pressed

into a landfill, the churches where we went, those programs

left. And now, next door, the neighbor’s daughter

has a party every August

as her mother did. This year the strung-up animal is a donkey

being beaten

in the elms.




The Woven Message

come hide near me

I’ll count however long I need to count the insects in the web—

I like

the still living ones—that beat of wing I hear

or

the still turned-on

ignition of the firefly—I see one’s underbelly

blink

on and off—come hide near me, somewhere in this wild grove, in its umbra green

where

my mind turns down the bed




The Given Message

this is the passion of leaving—the calm, inner—

there are no goodbyes, just freedom

I do not hear music other than the wind—I do not hear

God’s owl—

my life un-draws itself

less

dumb—the ash leaf is

my skeleton—

who is there—one finds no one, not God, not relative—and yet everywhere

the door, the stain of day, the barge-like movement of a cloud




The Jeweled Message

the day is a jewel—its air is green and blue—it shimmers

a diamond broach—I feel its needle

stab me

while I talk about the mind’s heights and steep

descents—so sudden

the fall is—

elevator like—the dark glistening cables, the smell

of black grease—these cliffs are like the mind’s

walls

I navigate—

they have the birds of evening in their halls

Terry Kennedy: James Wright once said, more or less, that the writing of a poem is like constructing a giant wall and then slowly chipping away at it until you find the true poem inside you. Similarly, Cate Marvin likens the process to weaving a tapestry and then cutting away the waste at the beginning and the end. Your poems are so tightly wrought; it seems that they must have undergone a similar transformation. Is this true?

Christine Garren: Yes, it is true I reach a poem through a process that involves the dismantling of the creation. The original or early draft might be a dense-looking typed page of an event and its images, associations, or other various details. The first revisions stay loyal to the spirit of investigation. If there is a metaphor to be had, I might wait for it to appear—like a drowned figure surfacing—rather than having knowledge of it from the beginning.

TK: It’s interesting that you use that simile—the drowned figure surfacing—because, to me, many of your poems, especially in your first collection, Afterworld, have a ghostly “feel” to them. I’m thinking of “Solarization” or perhaps “Lost.”

CG: I believe that I might experience events in perceptual ways that do not rely much on the concrete. In one sense it’s a form of myopia; in another sense it’s a faith in the mystery of things. Because the inexplicable and unknowable exist in life, I see no reason to exclude them from a poem.

TK: Wendell Berry says that “the idea of standing by one’s word, of words precisely designating things, of deeds faithful to words, is probably native to our understanding.” And that “the first aim of the propriety of the old poets . . . was to make the language true to its subject—to see that it told the truth.” By design, your poems draw attention to every word on the page. In other words, no language is wasted. As a poet do you feel you have responsibility to make sure that every word in a poem “rings true”?

CG: I see truth as fluid and language as frustratingly static. I understand that language is probably bound to fail the task. I am preoccupied with what a collection of words, even a flawed collection, might equal. I enjoy considering how the words interact with each other, and I especially enjoy thinking about their tonal dependence on each other. I am constantly aware during composition and revision that language obscures as much as it reveals.

TK: When you say “tonal dependence,” I’m assuming you mean something along the lines of mood as opposed to musicality. There’s a poem in The Piercing, “The Beloved,” where the opening image is completely turned on itself by the end of line. I hope you don’t mind if I quote it here: “Flowers were in bloom. Their blossoms white like frost.” That moment, when we hit that one word, “frost,” and have to freeze before continuing down to the next line really changes the tone of the poem for me.

CG: In that instance, my aim was to define more specifically the shade of white I had imagined. I realized “frost” could also support the paradoxical nature of love. If it is possible to present the undercurrent that might run beneath a more obvious and accessible emotion, I think it is critical to allow in the more hidden force.

TK: In his essay “Improvisations on Form and Measure,” Charles Wright contends that poets should focus less on line breaks and more on “imagining the line as a whole, [as a] unit.” A large number of your poems seem to function as one, whole, line. That is, each moment in the line seems to simultaneously rely upon, and create tension for, the next moment in the poem until, finally, the reader is released at the end—that last moment singing with the emotion and meaning of the poem as a whole. Is this a concern of yours when composing or revising a poem?

CG: Lately, I have been interested in the whole impulse of the poem— or that has trumped its quieter architecture. I regard the line as a visual lead through the emotional terrain of the work. Often I ignore all the beautiful ways a line can be built because its sacrifice seems natural to me. I am drawn to a line that visually supports instability and have used it lately as simply an energy source that travels.

TK: “Polaroid,” the opening poem of The Piercing, visually seems very different from those in the preceding book, Among the Monarchs. The white space in the poem, I see now, supports a feeling of instability in the reader. We don’t know what we’re going to find. We want to, but we’re forced to take our time getting there. There’s an uneasiness created that makes for a really powerful final line.

CG: “Polaroid” initially was a long poem that moved step by step through the speaker’s discovery of the torn snapshot. It was stichic in appearance and narrative in presentation. It occurred to me at some point that my approach to the poem was all wrong. Sometime after that, I narrowed the poem down to a few details that reflected its theme of litter, transience, and disconnectedness. Once I understood the poem’s interest or thematic impulse, it felt more natural to support it with a freer, more open and interrupted line.

TK: So many books of poetry today seem more like pre-planned projects than collections of individual poems. None of your books, at least from outward appearances, do this—which isn’t to say the poems don’t work as a chorus. Do you have a method for constructing your collections?

CG: I think some writers have minds that work best once a loose frame has been lowered over the crisis or obsession that has provoked the work. I, on the other hand, tend to resist organization based on topic and chronology. Voice and attitudes of response tend to connect the pieces.

TK: I’ve always thought of syntax and line as being the great controllers of voice in a poem, in poets. “Attitudes of response” is something I’ve never really considered. Could you explain that a bit more? Perhaps mention a poem or two as examples?

CG: By “attitudes of response” I mean one’s interpretation or observation or particular way of perceiving—one’s sensibility might be a better way to say it. I suppose it would be the mind at work before the line has been formed. It is the specific and peculiar quality that distinguishes one individual from another. If the mind had a DNA, I suppose it would be that. Concerning my work, an example from The Piercing might be the way it occasionally, however unpredictably, reflects an interest in the discarded item. My guess is that my concern with detritus suggests a perceptual attitude I developed over the years that empathizes with the cast-off object. I am thinking of “Polaroid” and “Thrift”—but also “Ghost-Ship” and “Big Box.”

TK: A complaint that seems to surface from time to time is that MFA writing programs have caused/created a type of conformity within much of contemporary poetry. When I look at the current work of my MFA classmates, I see more variety than similarities. Do you feel that your classmates are doing similar things with their poetry? Or do you feel like you’re each following your own path? What about in the greater world of contemporary poetry?

CG: My teachers encouraged the individual writer to develop as he or she felt driven to develop. They also encouraged us to pursue and constantly deepen our knowledge of prosody and the poetry of generations preceding us. They reminded us of our responsibility to be educated practitioners of our art regardless of the departures we might (and with their blessing) make. The complaint to which you allude and the one with which I am most familiar— that MFA work-shop poems insidiously may have encouraged conformity in contemporary poetry—is, I think, untrue. Surely we are a more sophisticated culture than that. If anything, it seems the past couple of years have encouraged the more generous understanding that a good poem is simply good, regardless of its formal or informal container.

TK: I’m playing devil’s advocate here, because you’ve made me think of another topic that comes up in conversation a good bit—that is, the idea that some poems, despite their theoretical place in the current literary climate, just aren’t good poems. I’m speaking here of poems that seem so syntactically disconnected as to suggest a complete absence of craft, at least on first glance—which isn’t to say that no craft is involved, just that the poems give off that appearance. Do you know what I’m talking about? I’m tempted to connect this type of poetry to cutting holes in your jeans with a pair of scissors rather than actually wearing them out. Is that too harsh?

CG: I tend to be open. That is not to say that I don’t grow impatient and exasperated with poems that completely elude me. Still, I do believe in allowing for whatever might confuse, irritate, or repel. I have found such declarations of tolerance are easy to announce, but difficult to practice. I remind myself that it’s through failed investigations and experiments that something lasting may surface. Even the analogy you make charms the rebellious spirit in me—the violence of the scissors—the unearned display of rebellion—the disfigured jeans.

TK: Many young poets, those in their early twenties—and I should be clear that I’m talking about graduate students or prospective graduate students—seem to be more interested in their careers as poets than they are in poetry. They don’t want to know how to write better poems so much as how to get their poems (and books) published. It seems to me that the poets who focus on the work first (although they may publish their first books a little later), tend to have longer careers. In other words, there really is something to be said for sweat and perseverance. What’s your take?

CG: Yes, commitment, perseverance, and relentless practice are qualities to be valued. In the end I think most poets, whether they catch a publishing break or not, are writing because they must—because the poem’s creation answers an emotional or spiritual need that they associate with survival.

TK: I suppose this reaches back to the question of writing for a private or public audience. In his essay “The Book as Bridge,” Carl Phillips talks about how, for him, the question of audience always enters his mind later. The first concern is to reach himself. Or as Stuart Dischell once told me, your duty is to the poems. The rest, the publishing, will take care of itself.

CG: Again, it is easy to say all of this—but practicing it is another matter. I can only speak of my own experience. When I care less about what an audience may think, I am able, it seems, to write a stronger poem. I made a decision some years ago to write the poems I felt were in my possession to write. I made this decision after years of study, after acquiring formally and informally what I think is a fairly deep understanding of poetry, its history and its forms. I began to write the poems I wished to write when the audience left.

TK: Thank you for taking the time to talk about poetry with me. It’s been very enlightening and inspiring. I have one last question, which isn’t really a fair one giving that The Piercing was just released by Louisiana State University Press last September—when is the new book going to be ready?

CG: Thank you for interviewing me; it has been a privilege to have this conversation and I have enjoyed thinking about the questions. I am in the process of arranging a manuscript now; I don’t know how long that will take me. But it is so nice to have you ask about it. I appreciate it all.

Barbara Hamby is the author of Delirium (University of North Texas Press, 1995), The Alphabet of Desire (New York University Press, 1999), and Babel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). She won the Kate Tufts Award for Delirium, and the New York Public Library named The Alphabet of Desire one of the twenty-five best books of 1999. Babel was the winner of the 2003 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Hamby teaches creative writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where she lives with her husband, poet David Kirby.


Venus and Dogberry,
A Match Made in New Jersey

Venus, you are a major babe, your hair way big, and wow,
x-ray glasses are not needed with that see-though foxy
zebra print chiffon bra and matching thong. Fucking-A,
beautiful, I am not like that pansy Adonis. I want a bionic
diva in my king-size vibrating bed. Come on over here,
fair maid. Ain’t that the way youse guys talk? Thanksgiving,
Halloween, Christmas—everyday’s a holiday with you. I
just can’t believe I could get a goddess in the sack.
Let’s toot a few lines tonight, my little summer plum,
nip out for a juicy steak in my new candy-flake Eldorado,
play footsie under the table. No Miller High Life and bar-b-q
ribs for you, baby. Only the best. Put on your high heel sneakers,
toots. I’m a Sherman tank with guns blazing for you.




Waltz, Swing, Cha-cha-cha

I’m like Carrie Nation at a whiskey bar when it comes to sex scenes
in movies. Who needs to see Michael Douglas’s flat ass again? I, for one,
do not. I just sat through the new Bertolucci—The Dreamers—God, what
a snooze. And he used to be God. Was there ever a sexier part
in a movie than Sanda and Sandrelli glued together in that last tango
in Paris? Or Sandrelli’s rumba with herself—in both scenes fully clothed, I

might add. In The Dreamers the girl’s breasts were unrelenting. I
wanted to scream, “Put on a shirt.” When did the human body become obscene?
In The Postman Always Rings Twice, when Lana Turner and John Garfield go
around the living room in each other’s arms, you know no one
will come out of that room alive. And what about the giddy dance in Bande à part—
erupting in the middle of so much black-and-white Godard-a-rama. What

kind of magic was that? Once skin seemed so recherché, but what’s
dished up today is like stale saltines with water soup. Ginger Rogers said, “I
did everything Fred did, but backwards and in heels.” Ginger, that was only part
of it. Remember The Gay Divorcee? You loathed Astaire until the scene
when he waltzed with you—the black totem of his tux, your swirling skirt—one
dance and bingo! You saw stars. In Pulp Fiction—Uma and John go

dancing, but they might as well have had sex. Think of those girls in white go-go
boots in cages—was that a sixties’ male bondage fantasy or what?
Hollywood directors, I implore you, yours and the porn industry are not one
and the same—the breasts, the pecs, the suction cup mouths—Argghhh. I
love documentaries these days because there’s no bump and grind, only scenes
of spelling bees, Robert McNamara explaining, Rio de Janerio blown apart

by a city bus taken hostage, Louis Kahn’s son trying to figure out his part
in his father’s life. My skin crawls like a rattlesnake when Bolero or Mood Indigo
slithers out in full-metal Dolby, and the camera starts its obscene
caress of the body doubles. Oh, give me Audrey Hepburn with her 100-watt
smile, dancing with over-the-hill Astaire, or even The King and I—
chrome dome Yul Brynner and tight-ass Deborah Kerr don’t even sneak one

little kiss, but their waltz is more romantic than Mickey Rouark’s one-on-one
with Kim Basinger in 9-1/2 Weeks. When the camera parts
Joseph Cotton dancing with his first love in The Magnificent Ambersons, I
know I’m in the hands of a master, Orson Welles’s vertigo
like the natives’ wild dance to keep King Kong at bay. And what
moviegoer doesn’t dream of a hoedown the likes of which was last seen

in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or Sally Porter’s lone quest in The Tango
Lesson or scarf-clad Salome’s dance that parted John the Baptist’s
body from his head. Oh, Cecil B. DeMille, now that’s what I call a sex scene.




Mr. Pillow

I’m watching a space invasion movie in which a wife
tells her pilot husband that she hugs his pillow

when he is away. Well, sure, every girl does that,
takes comfort in Mr. Pillow when her boyfriend is gone,

but not when Bela Lugosi is breaking the lock
on your prefab fifties bungalow. You fight him off,

but he still knows where you are, and the police don’t care,
or they’re bumbling incompetents, and your husband is big

but not too bright; let’s face it, he’s not even a pilot,
he’s an actor and not a very good one at that,

and what Mr. Pillow lacks in facial definition,
he more than makes up for in his cuddle quotient,

although there is the genital dilemma. Poor Mr. Pillow
is sadly lacking in that area. I hate staying in hotels

because of the king-size beds. I did not get married
not to sleep with my husband. If I had, Mr. Pillow

would do just as well, because he’s certainly never sarcastic
and he’d let me run my credit cards up as high as I want

and never make me save for retirement, so I have to admit
that I have, on occasion, used Mr. Pillow to make my husband

jealous, as when he’s sitting on his side of an enormous
hotel bed, way over in a far island of dull yellow

lamplight, reading a fascinating article on flyfishing
in Antarctica or the destruction of life as we know it

on Planet Earth, and I turn to Mr. Pillow, hold him tight
and say, “Oh, Mr. Pillow, you know what a woman needs

from a man.” Getting no response from the outer reaches
of Patagonia, I whisper, “Oh, Mr. Pillow, you make me blush.”

“Would you shut up about Mr. Pillow?” “Oh, Mr. Pillow!”
I say as he flies across the room, and I get just what I want

and maybe what I deserve. Sometimes it’s so difficult
to make these distinctions. Puritanism dies hard,

and if there are ghouls lurking in the yard, who’s to say
they have any less right to be here than we do in our cozy

little beds all the while looking at the closet door, thinking,
Where are the cannibals, where do those zombies live?




Ode on My Wasted Youth

Is there anything so ridiculous as being twenty
       and carrying around a copy of Being and Nothingness,
so boys will think you have a fine mind
       when really your brain is a whirling miasma,
a rat’s nest erected by Jehovah, Rousseau, Dante,
       George Eliot, and Bozo the Clown?
I might as well have been in costume and on stage,
       I was so silly, but with no appreciation
of my predicament, like a dim-bulb ingenue
       with a fluffy wig being bamboozled by a cad
whose insincerity oozes from every orifice,
       but she thinks he’s spiritual, only I was playing
both roles, hoodwinking myself with ideas
       that couldn’t and wouldn’t do me much good, buying berets,
dreaming of Paris and utter degradation,
       like Anaïs Nin under Henry Miller or vice versa.
Other people were getting married and buying cars,
       but not me, and I wasn’t even looking for Truth,
just some kind of minor grip on the whole enchilada,
       and I could see why so many went for eastern cults,
because of all religions Hinduism is the only one
       that seems to recognize the universal mess
and attack it with a set of ideas even wackier
       than said cosmos, and I think of all
my mistaken notions, like believing “firmament”
       meant “earth” and then finding out it meant “sky,”
which is not firm at all, though come to find out the substance
       under our feet is rather lacking in solidity as well.
Oh, words, my very dear friends,
       whether in single perfection—mordant, mellifluous,
multilingual—or crammed together
       in a gold-foil-wrapped chocolate valentine
like Middlemarch, how could I have survived without you,
       the bread, the meat, the absolute confection,
like the oracles at Delphi drinking their mad honey,
       opening my box of darkness with your tiny, insistent light.




The Mockingbird on the Buddha

The mockingbird on the Buddha says, Where’s my seed,
       you Jezebel, where’s the sunshine in my blue sky,
where’s the Hittite princess, Pharaoh’s temple, where’s the rain
       for the misery I love so much? The mockingbird
on the Buddha scolds the tree for trying to stay straight
       in the hurricane of words blowing out of the cold north,
wind like screams, night like brandy on the dark cut of my heart.
       The mockingbird on the Buddha, music is his life,
he hears the tunes of the universe, cacophony of calypso,
       hacking cough in the black lung of desire; he’s ruddy
with lust, that sweet stepping puffed-up old grey bird o’ mine.
       The mockingbird on the Buddha says, Eat up
while the night is young. Have some peach cobbler, girl,
       have some fried oysters, have some Pouligny
Montrachet, ma chère, for the night is coming, and you need meat
       on your bones to ride that wild horse. The mockingbird
on the Buddha says, It’s time for a change, little missy. You’ve
       been in charge too long. It’s time for the bird
to take over, because he stays up late, knows what night can be,
       past 12, past two, when trouble’s dark and beautiful.
You never knew what hit you, and that’s the best feeling
       in the whole wide world. The mockingbird
on the Buddha makes his nest inside my brain: he looks good
       in grey, gets fat on thought, he’s my enemy,
my Einstein, my ever-loving monkey boy, every monkey thought
       I blame on him, every night so sweet my body breaks
apart like a Spanish galleon raining gold on the ocean floor.




Six, Sex, Say

Do you think they wanted sex? asks the naive girl
       in the film about a femme fatale who betrays
just about everyone stupid enough to get involved
       with her, but since they are in New Zealand
it sounds like, Do you think they wanted six?
       which is another question altogether,
and I know if I were doing drugs I would think
       this was possibly a key to unraveling
the mysteries of the universe, because six in French
       is cease, which could mean stop
to one of another linguistic persuasion,
       as in cease and desist, though it could mean six
and desist, and you don’t have to study the Kabbala
       to know numbers are powerful, or how to explain
a system invented by Phoenician traders to keep track
       of inventory being used by Einstein,
Dirac, Bohr to describe the mechanics of the universe,
       and even the Marquis de Sade in his long exile
in the Bastille and other dungeons invented
       a numerical code to hide his hideous imagination
from the thought police in that particular patch
       of hell. Six, he might cry, but what would he mean,
especially if addressing his pregnant Italian
       mistress, because six is s-e-i in Italian,
pronounced say. Say what? you might say. Girlfriend,
       you don’t need drugs, and you’re absolutely right,
a conclusion I myself came to rather quickly,
       because I’m crossing the Alps now like Psyche
on Cupid’s wings, and in German it’s s-e-c-h-s or sex again,
       in other words, sex of one, half a dozen of another,
which for not-so-unfathomable reasons recalls
       Rembrandt’s etching of his friend Jan Six
who later became mayor of Amsterdam, a bustling port
       in those days, and visited by one of the last ships
to leave Japan before it closed itself to the outside
       world, and Rembrandt buying the final shipment
of Japanese paper in the west for 200 years. I see
       him in his studio, counting each lovely sheet,
Jan Six perhaps in the next room smoking a pipe,
       and I don’t know what six is in Dutch,
but it’s taking its place in the circle of sixes
       girdling the globe, the Satanic triple six,
the two sixes in my college telephone number, the hidden
       sixes in every deck of cards. Two plus four,
three plus three, chant the six-year-olds of the world,
       all their sixes adding up to something, or why
would the psychic have told my friend
       he would never have any money until his address
added up to six, because six is the money number,
       the mysterious key to regeneration,
if not the alpha then the omega, and I who am living
       at 15 quai de Bourbon know that one and five are six,
cease, sex, say, I’m in the money, if the money
       is Paris and I’m a fool walking her golden streets.




Ode on Satan’s Power

At a local bistro’s Christmas sing-along, the new
       age pianist leads us in a pan-cultural brew
of seasonal songs, the Ramadan chant being my
       personal favorite, though the Kwanza lullaby
and Hanukkah round are very interesting. Let’s
       face it, most of us are there for the carols we set
to memory in childhood though some lyrics have been
       changed, so when we sing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,”
we’re transformed into a roomful of slightly tipsy
       middle-class gentlepeople who are longing to be
saved from hopelessness instead of Satan’s power when
       we were gone astray, but I, for one, sing out Satan’s
power as do most of the gentlepeople, women

and men, something I find myself pondering a few
       days later, while my profoundly worried nephew,
Henry, and I embark on our annual blitzkrieg
       of baking, punctuated by Henry’s high speed
philosophical questioning, such as, Where do we
       go when we die? Pressing my collection of cookie
cutters—trees, snowflakes, Santas—into fragrant ginger
       dough, I want to say, Who cares? Carpe diem, buster,
though, of course, I’m way too scarred by pop psychology
       to utter half the nutty things that pop up like weeds
in the 18th-century garden of my brain. Eight-
       year-olds need their questions answered, I suppose, but not
by me. “Let’s watch some TV,” I say, an instrument

of Satan if ever there was one. Bullitt’s on—Steve
       McQueen in his prime. I love this movie—equal waves
of sorrow and carnage washed up on a hokey late-
       sixties beach of masculine cool. McQueen is Bullitt,
and Jacqueline Bisset’s his girl. Henry and I start
       watching during the scene where she is driving Bullitt
around because, if I remember correctly, he’s
       totaled not just one but several cars, in at least
as many now-famous chases. Jackie drops Bullitt
       at a hotel, where he finds a girl, newly dead, throat
circled with purple fingerprints like grape jam stains. “What
       happened to her?” Henry asks, frowning. I think, Oh, shit,
this is not an officially approved nephew-aunt

Christmas activity. If I don’t make a big deal
       of it, maybe he won’t tell his mother. “Someone strangled
her,” I say. “What’s strangled?” he asks, and I see my sister
       has chosen not to threaten her child as our own dear
mother routinely threatened us. Driven crazy, she
       browbeat us with strangulation, being slapped silly,
public humiliation, murder, and eternal
       damnation. Perhaps because Henry’s her only child,
my sister can afford to be gentler with her son,
       or maybe it’s because two months before he was born
she almost lost him, ending up in the hospital,
       hooked to machines, ordered to bed for the final
wrenching weeks. Maybe that’s why the story of the Christ child

speaks to us. All parents wonder how the world will treat
       their tender babes. Like Lorca, will he become a great
poet, then end up in a mass grave? Only German
       philosophers think more about death than Henry Gwynn.
“Why did he strangle her?” he asks, face formidable
       as Hegel’s. Satan’s power, I want to scream, but mumble
“It’s just a movie; it’s not real.” Steve McQueen’s dodging
       a plane, and I remember reading he did his own
stunts, which I tell Henry, but he’s still in that hotel
       room. “If she was alive, how’d she get her eyes to roll
back into her head?” I’m thinking of pornography,
       snuff movies, all the things I never want him to see
or even know about in this tawdry world. “Honey,

it’s a major motion picture. Even in a small part
       an actress has to be great.” He nods and takes a bite
off Santa’s head. “She was a pretty good actress.” You
       bet your booty, and I realize out of the blue
Santa is an anagram for Satan. No way am
       I going to explain anagrams or Herr Satan,
though how wonderful to have such a nemesis —
       a fallen archangel, one of high heaven’s brightest stars—
in a battle with Jehovah for our souls, rather
       than the calendar’s increasing speed like a roller
coaster run amok through a fun park of lost dreams, lost
       landscapes, and children, growing up faster than we thought
possible in the last terrible days before their birth.




“Mr. Pillow” and “Ode on My Wasted Youth” originally appeared in The Alphabet of Desire (New York UP, 1999). “The Mockingbird on the Buddha,” “Six, Sex, Say,” and “Ode on Satan’s Power” originally appeared in Babel (Pittsburgh, 2004). These poems are reprinted here by permission from the author.

Dan Albergotti: When I read your poems, I often find that the linguistic and the erotic intersect. I’m thinking of poems like “The Alphabet of Desire” and “Six, Sex, Say.” And I can almost detect a purely sensual enjoyment of the sounds and textures of language in your work. Is that fair to say? Is language a sensual pleasure for you, and if so, has it always been?

Barbara Hamby: I grew up in a big talking family, so words have always been important to me. Both my mother and father were quick with a quip, and my mother, especially, used a lot of Biblical language. For instance, when I’d be fuming about how I wanted to kill my brother, she’d often say, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.” I can remember having half a dozen minor aneurysms when she’d come up with that or “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” She was an Old Testament gal and really dug Jehovah, because he kicked some serious ass. As a woman in the fifties and a Christian to boot, she was always sublimating a fierce will to power. She loved quoting Job and Isaiah. I also grew up with the King James Bible, which is like growing with Shakespeare in the sense that they are both masterpieces of Renaissance English. Shakespeare and 19th century American literature were duck soup for me after going to church every Sunday for 18 years and hearing the pastor read from what is perhaps one of the most beautiful books of poetry ever written though, of course, it wasn’t presented in that way. However, no amount of hellfire and brimstone can cover up the utter beauty of the language, until the mid-sixties when they came out with all those modern translations. What a bad idea.

My dad was also an influence. When he was a young man he memorized reams of poetry, and he’d recite it all the time. I was so embarrassed when he’d start spouting “Gunga Din” or “The Killing of Dan McGrew” in front of my friends. Later, though, I realized what a fabulous linguistic stew I was privy to from the very beginning. My parents weren’t readers, so we didn’t have many books around the house, but we did have this snappy, weird give-and-take that could turn venomous at the drop of a hat. My brothers and sisters are all quick witted, which means that I had to watch what I said. Never give the opposition ammunition. Irony was mother’s milk.

So words were always important, for themselves and as a vehicle of survival. Then I learned to read. That was the most miraculous thing that ever happened to me. There I was in a rowdy, lower middle class religious free-for-all, and by opening a book I could go anywhere and be anyone: Joan of Arc, Napoleon, Lady Brett Ashley, Elizabeth Bennet, Dorothea Brooke, Jane Eyre. I loved biographies as a child, and I still do. There was a series of biographies for children in my elementary school library. The illustrations were silhouettes. I read the whole series from the founding fathers to Jane Addams of Hull House and George Washington Carver. When I was in the fourth grade there was a special deal in my school, Francis Asbury Elementary in Buckroe Beach, Virginia. You could buy a children’s dictionary for a couple of dollars—A Dictionary for Boys and Girls: Webster’s Elementary Dictionary. When I unwrapped my copy, I felt so rich—all these words and all of them mine. I would read through it randomly, sure I would never know all those words but hoping to one day. And I’ve never stopped collecting words. I love to find new caches of lingo, such as hardware or jazz or dance or noir films. Other cultures are a fabulous trove of language, especially for an English speaker, because our language can take in anything and make it our own. I tell my students that it is a privilege to write in English because of the huge vocabulary, because of its suppleness, its weird rhythms, its gorgeous array of sounds, and that very inclusiveness that I just mentioned. Sometimes I’m just beside myself with the sheer thrill of putting all the thousands of Englishes together. It’s like juggling and walking a tightrope at the same time.

DA: That early experience with the richness of language is certainly evident in your poems, but your adult experience with foreign languages and cultures has also exerted a profound influence. International travel seems to provide you with a very fertile source for poems. The Alphabet of Desire has an entire section titled “Italian Odes,” and Babel has one titled “13 Ways of Looking at Paris.” And there are many other poems in which your travels in France and Italy figure prominently. How has your travel abroad influenced the development of your poetry? And what would your poems be like if you spent all your time in Tallahassee?

BH: My dad was in the Air Force, so travel has always been a part of my life. I was born in New Orleans, then we lived in France for three years, and finally we ended up in Hawaii, where my mother still lives. Hawaiian pidgin was one of my first immersions into a different and highly expressive variation on English. David and I are lucky, because Florida State University has one of the largest study abroad programs in the country. There are campuses in London, Florence, Valencia, and Panama and six-week courses in Paris, Prague, Munich, Costa Rica, and Ho Chi Min City. Actually I was lucky to marry someone who likes to travel as much as I do and who has an incredible facility with other languages. I am a dunce when it comes to foreign languages. I can buy shoes in four languages, but that’s about it. I think we both find travel stimulating. We always come home with a huge fund of images to draw on for our work.

When I was in my twenties, I did a lot of Buddhist meditation. One of tenets of Buddhism that I love is beginner’s mind, to see the world continually through fresh eyes as if for the first time. Travel does something like that for me. In this country, I know my way around, but in Paris I’m a beginner. I speak an idiot’s French, and I understand so little. I find it a very beneficial place to be in for a poet. When you are an expert, you aren’t prone to make the mistakes and have the same kind of goof-ball adventures that you have when you don’t know anything. And the misunderstandings—what a cornucopia for a poet. I can’t imagine living in Tallahassee and not being able to travel, not just to Europe but to New York, New Orleans, Honolulu, Los Angeles, and all the Podunk places in between. I have this big fantasy of going to India, which I’m hoping to be able to do in the next few years. I also want to make a couple of cross country trips. I want to see Mount Rushmore and that Cadillac Stonehenge in Texas.

DA: I could see those trips feeding a very distinctly American section of a future book, one that might mirror the Paris and Italy sections of your earlier volumes. And I don’t mean something like the “American Odes” of Babel, but more of a “looking at the native land as a traveler” sort of thing. What do you think?

BH: The poetry store is always open. I never do anything or have anything happen to me that the thought does not cross my mind—how could I use this in a poem?

DA: I’d like to ask about the organization of your collections. Each of your three books has three very distinct, thematically (or formally) cohesive sections. Do you conceive of your books this way from the outset—that is, before you begin writing the poems? Or do you simply begin writing poems without a larger structure in mind and then see that distinct themes begin to emerge, themes that can be grouped into book sections?

BH: I joke that as a former born-again Christian, the trinity dies hard. Actually I write the poems in these sections. I came up with this process after floundering around for years, waiting for inspiration and then working one poem at a time. I had a book-length manuscript, but it wasn’t very interesting. Then I picked up a book in the British Museum bookstore on the archeology of beekeeping. Don’t ask me why. It looked interesting, and it was. I got a bee in my bonnet about beekeeping. I read everything I could get my hands on. I had no desire to become a beekeeper, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that bees could be a powerful metaphor. They certainly worked for Virgil and Plath. I took pages of notes, and finally I came up with the beginnings of about twenty poems, finally ending up with about ten. It was the most wonderful process. For months I was tied to my desk. I was in the zone, and when I finished the poems, for the first time I felt as if I had written something authentic. And it was easy for me to let the unsuccessful poems go, because I had others that were doing my bidding. I knew I had a section of a book, and I had found a way to work.

The next group of poems was a series of persona poems in the voices of the people associated with Keats during his last four months. Again I started with around twenty ideas and ended up with ten or twelve poems. The third group came from the first time we lived in Italy. When I sent these poems to magazines, editors that I respected wrote me and called me and took everything I sent them. I had never experienced that level of interest in my work. I felt as if I had turned a corner.

One thing I realized rather quickly was that the organizing principle didn’t matter much. Whether I used a metaphor, an experience, or a form—they were a conduit to that deep unconscious mind where all art is made. I like to use the analogy of a car. Diction, syntax, imagery, line, subject—all the elements of poetic craft—are like the chassis, steering wheel, windshield, tires, seats of a car. When you see them together, you say “car.” But without the engine, that car is going nowhere. The deep self is the engine of a poem. Some will say that the self is a construct, and I would tend to agree with them. Some poets make a big deal out of the fragmented self. As we used to say in high school—no duh. However you approach it, the self is a powerful construct and one that allows us to navigate the world. And that self is looking for its place in time. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ gorgeous language would be nothing if he weren’t grappling with these deep issues. The same goes for Whitman, Dickinson, Lorca, Neruda, Keats, Donne, all my favorite poets. What does it mean to be a human being in the world and caught in time? All my poems are about the same thing, understanding my place in the world. So I think that is the central organizing element; the metaphors, subjects, and form are secondary.

DA: You mentioned form as an “organizing principle,” and that’s evident in the number of poems you’ve written in particular forms. For instance, you have worked extensively in the abecedarian and the ode. The titular section of The Alphabet of Desire consists of 26 abecedarians (each titled sequentially with a word beginning with a letter of the alphabet—one of the most ambitious formal projects I’ve encountered in recent years), and you have a section of “Italian Odes” in the same book and a section of “American Odes” in Babel. Can you speak a bit about the appeal of these forms to you, about when you first started writing in them, and about what form in general means to your poetry?

BH: I wrote an abecedarian poem that I included in Delirium, and I loved writing it. It was so much fun, and the poem took me to places that surprised me. I loved that feeling. I have a pretty obsessive personality. I count everything. I alphabetize everything I can. I’m a collector, so the idea of writing a series of abecedarian poems was exciting. I love having a project. I wrote most of them over a summer, and it was one of the hardest and most thrilling things I’ve ever done. They say we only use 20 percent of our brain’s capacity. That summer I felt as if I was pushing 27 percent. I loved everything about it—the weird subjects that emerged, the gorgeous words I found, the mix of highfaluting language with slang and dialect. I made wonderful lists of words, especially for the difficult letters of our language—j, q, x, and z. Sometimes a word would open up the poem for me. For example, “zugzwang,” which is a German word meaning “move compulsion.” It’s a chess term—you have to move but whatever you do will hurt you. I almost went mad with joy. If that couldn’t be translated to most of my misbegotten romantic involvements as a young woman, I wasn’t the poet I thought I was. And it went on and on. The form forced me to make wild associations that I wouldn’t have made if I hadn’t been using the form. And the abecedarian form is like a high speed elevator to the deep self, at least for me. I’ve tried to write metered poetry, but everything I write sounds so boring and stilted. The abecedarian was a form that was meant for me. I especially loved the language that it allowed me to use.

In Babel, sometimes I used the form to get a draft, and then I pulled it apart and reconfigured it as a free verse poem. “Ode to American English” had its beginnings as an abecedarian poem. The title poem of Babel entwines two alphabets at the beginning of the lines. In my new book, I’ve come up with two different variations on the form. I’m working with the beginning and end of the line in both poems. The first I call a double-helix abecedarian because I entwine two alphabets at the beginning of the line and two at the end. I’ve only written four poems, because there are so few words that end in “j” or “q.” The second form I call an abecedarian sonnet though it is only 13 lines. If only our alphabet had 28 letters then I could be more traditional. However, I love the number 13, so I’m not complaining. The first one I wrote began with an “a” and the line ended with a word that ended in “b.” The second line started with a “c” and ended with a “d” and so on. It didn’t take me long to start thinking about another sequence, but there was that “j” and “q” problem. So I came up with the idea of 26 poems, each starting with a different letter of the alphabet, so I’d only have to come up with 13 words that ended in “j” and “q” and not 26. Again, it was an all-absorbing process. I finished the first drafts in about a month, though I’ve been tinkering with them for two years. Next year Verse is going to publish 13 of them in an issue on poetic sequences.

As for the odes, I came to them through Keats and Neruda. I love the music of Keats’s line and Neruda’s elevation of simple things. My first odes were written from this place, but after my first odes were published, I began to read Pindar and Horace, both of whom I came to love. “Ode to W. E. Diemer, the Inventor of Bubblegum” in Babel is my attempt to write an ode in the manner of Pindar. One of my abecedarian sonnets is based on my favorite ode by Horace—IV.1. It begins “So it’s war again Venus after all these years.” It is the most marvelous poem and utterly modern. In Babel I tried a more formal approach to the ode—a thirteen-syllable line, a thirteen-line stanza with end rhymes, often in rhymed couplets and a rhymed tercet at the end of the stanza. Most of them ended up being free verse poems because I wasn’t skilled enough to pull off the syllabics, though two worked—“Ode on Satan’s Power” and “Ode to the Bride of Frankenstein.” I’m working on a new sequence that I’m calling “Lingo Odes” because they all investigate language in some way. So far I have drafts of four poems and they are in the 13-syllable lines, 13-line stanzas. We’ll see if I can do it.*

DA: I have no doubt you’ll be able to. So many of your previous formal projects have seemed dauntingly difficult in their design, and yet you’ve pulled them all off with complete success. I’ll look forward to these new sequences. But to turn the conversation from form back to content, and perhaps to philosophy, let me ask you about a particular poem from your second book. In “The Dream of the Red Drink” (The Alphabet of Desire, pp. 29-32), your speaker, having consumed a fair amount of grain alcohol and Kool-Aid, says,

                            Is this a revelation? Maybe.
                            Not only do I see God, but I see through him
                             to the other side, though probably it’s a vision
                             of cerebral matter being sloughed off,
                            and I have a tête-à-tête with my most persistent epiphany,
                             that is, life is nothing, rien, nada, niente.
                            I find it incredibly comforting to know
                             the world is transparent,
                             insubstantial, without meaning.

Okay, let’s face it—in your poems it seems almost impossible to separate the first-person speaker from Barbara Hamby. So I’m going to be so bold as to read this as an honest statement of your own philosophical belief. And I want to say that I concur, not only in the belief in nothingness, but in the comfort such a view can provide. But I’ve often encountered people who argue that such an absurdist worldview is antithetical to the poetic imagination, that one needs to believe in something beyond this life to believe in art. I have the opposite notion—that such a belief fuels the power of art. Would you agree with that? And could you speak in general about how you feel that a belief in nothingness is “incredibly comforting”?

BH: Actually I found out later that there was LSD in that punch. I should have known. When you see God, transcend natural laws, and see into the future, something besides grain alcohol has to be involved.

I sometimes think that I believe in everything and nothing at the same time. I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian house, and though I couldn’t wait to leave that fear mongering downer environment behind, it did leave me with a muscle of belief. I want to believe in something and what better than the world I can see, smell, touch, hear, and feel? For your average true believer this world is nothing, but for me it is everything, a constant source of fascination. In essence it is nothing, because we are moving through time, growing older. Though the world seems solid, it is ephemeral, always changing. The Buddhists say old age, sickness and death get everyone, so it is essential to live in the moment, which is easier said than done.

I’ve come to be grateful for my religious background for many reasons, not the least being the immersion in the King James Bible. But if you believe that “all time is eternally present” as Eliot says, then I carry that believer inside me. So I can believe in God and not believe at the same time. I feel sorry for people who are raised by godless atheists and feel that they have to convert and become believers as adults because organized religion is so incredibly tedious. I’m glad that I have that in my past, so I know what I am missing, which is absolutely nothing. I do believe in electricity, in art, in beauty, in good food. In a sense, poetry has taken the place of religion in my life. I live it and breathe it in a way that I never did with religion. I’m rereading The Iliad right now, and it tells me how to write a line in my own work. I have just finished a sequence of sonnets each beginning with a phrase from the Psalms. I’m working on a sequence in which each poem begins with a phrase from Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, but the poems are elegies for my best friend in high school who died about ten years ago, much too young. Poetry is everything and nothing. And, of course, it is easy for me to say that life is nothing, but I am saying that from a place of relative happiness and prosperity. Blow up my little world and then see what happens.

DA: So much of what you say there resonates with me. I’m also grateful for having been raised in a church-going Methodist family, even as I reject every tenet of belief associated with it today, because it complicated my experience of the world in a strange, but positive way. It ultimately made me see poetry as a necessity. And it made me read the Bible, which as you said before is one of the great works of Renaissance English poetry. I find that my poems are often God-obsessed despite the fact that I am, in a sense, “godless,” and I think your idea of a Psalm-started sonnet sequence is quite fascinating. Do you think such poems might be evidence of a larger phenomenon—the contemporary Southern poet living in a land of ultra-conservative beliefs and tent revivals during an era of extreme intellectual skepticism, somehow looking for a way to bring together the two?

BH: Sure it is, and it’s a way to use that fabulous Southern Christian lingo, both black and white—as God is my witness, come hell or high water.

DA: Well, I’ll be damned, hell or high water indeed! Thank you very much for your time and for sharing your perspectives and new poems with our storySouth readers.




*Afterword: I finished the ode sequence, but the poems didn’t want to use the 13-syllable line, 13-line stanza form. David had a sabbatical, so we spent last fall in Paris. Our apartment was near the Luxembourg gardens. On one of our first days in the city, we went to the garden, and sat near a statue of Mary, Queen of Scots, which had inspired Joseph Brodsky to write one of my favorite poetic sequences, “Twenty Poems to Mary, Queen of Scots.” It is, among other things, an absolutely brilliant example of end rhymes. He starts out doing the usual things but by sonnet eleven he’s using only a couple of different rhymes. Just before we left I’d read Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” which is written in rhymed couplets. These two poems collided in my mind, the odes I began working on were either in rhymed couplets or used the same rhyme for the whole poem. I started with lists of words and just let it fly.              —Barbara Hamby

Selected by Patrick Phillips and Billy Reynolds, who offer an interview with the poet.

THE WORK OF POETS

Willie Cooper, what are you doing here, this early in your death?

To show us what we are, who live by twisting words—
Heaven is finished. A poet is anachronistic as a blacksmith.

You planted a long row and followed it. Signed your name X
       for seventy years.
Poverty is not hell. Fingers cracked by frost
And lacerated by Johnson grass are not hell.

Hell is what others think we are.

You told me once, “Never worry.”
Your share of worry was as small as your share of the profits,

Mornings-after of lightning and radiator shine,
The beater Dodge you bought in late October—
By February, its engine would hang from a rafter like a ham.

You had a free place to stay, a wife
Who bore you fourteen children. Nine live still.

You live in the stripped skeleton of a shovelbill cat.

Up here in the unforgivable amnesia of libraries,
Where many poems lie dying of first-person omniscience,
The footnotes are doing their effete dance, as always.

But only one of your grandsons will sleep tonight in Kilby Prison.
The hackberry in the sand field will be there long objectifying.

Once I was embarrassed to have to read for you
A letter from Shields, your brother in Detroit,
A hick-grammared, epic lie of northern women and money.

All I want is to get one grain of the dust to remember.

I think it was your advice I followed across the oceans.
What can I do for you now?

ON THE BEARING OF WAITRESSES

Always I thought they suffered, the way they huffed
through the Benzedrine light of waffle houses,
hustling trays of omelets, gossiping by the grill,
or pruning passes like the too prodigal buds of roses,
and I imagined each come home to a trailer court,
the yard of bricked-in violets, the younger sister
pregnant and petulant at her manicure, the mother
with her white Bible, the father sullen in his corner.
Wasn’t that the code they telegraphed in smirks?
And wasn’t this disgrace, to be public and obliged,
observed like germs or despots about to be debunked?
Unlikely brides, apostles in the gospel of stereotypes,
their future was out there beyond the parked trucks,
between the beer joints and the sexless church,
the images we’d learned from hayseed troubadours—
perfume, grease, and the rending of polarizing loves.
But here in this men’s place, they preserved a faint
decorum of women and, when they had shuffled past us,
settled in that realm where the brain approximates
names and rounds off the figures under uniforms.
Not to be honored or despised, but to walk as spies would,
with almost alien poise in the imperium of our disregard,
to go on steadily, even on the night of the miscarriage,
to glide, quick smile, at the periphery of appetite.
And always I had seen them listening, as time brought
and sent them, hovering and pivoting as the late
orders turned strange, blue garden, brown wave. Spit
in the salad, wet sucks wrung into soup, and this happened.
One Sunday morning in a truckstop in Bristol, Virginia,
a rouged and pancaked half-Filipino waitress
with hair dyed the color of puffed wheat and mulberries
singled me out of the crowd of would-be bikers
and drunken husbands guzzling coffee to sober up
in time to cart their disgusted wives and children
down the long street to the First Methodist Church.
Because I had a face she trusted, she had me wait
that last tatter of unlawful night that hung there
and hung there like some cast-off underthing
caught on the spikes of a cemetery’s wrought-iron fence.
And what I had waited for was no charm of flesh,
not the hard seasoning of luck, or work, or desire,
but all morning, in the sericea by the filthy city lake,
I suffered her frightened lie, how she was wanted
in Washington by the CIA, in Vegas by the FBI—
while time shook us like locks that would not break.
And I did not speak, though she kept pausing to look
back across one shoulder, as though she were needed
in the trees, but waxing her slow paragraphs into
chapters, filling the air with her glamour and her shame.

THE BRIDGE

These fulsome nouns, these abbreviations of air,
Are not real, but two of them may fit a small man
I knew in high school who, seeing an accident,
Stopped one day, leapt over a mangled guardrail,
Took a mother and two children from a flooded creek,
And lifted them back to the world. In the dark,
I do not know, there is a saying, but he pulled
Them each up a tree, which was not the tree of life
But a stooped Alabama willow, flew three times
From the edge of that narrow bridge as though
From the selfless shore of a miracle, and came back
To the false name of a real man, Arthur Peavahouse.
He could sink a set shot from thirty feet. One night
I watched him field a punt and scat behind a wall
Of blockers like a butterfly hovering an outhouse.
He did not love the crashing of bodies. He
Did not know that mother and her three children
But went down one huge breath to their darkness.
There is no name for that place, you cannot
Find them following a white chain of bubbles
Down the muddy water of these words. But I saw
Where the rail sheared from the bridge—which is
Not real since it was replaced by a wider bridge.
Arthur Peavahouse weighed a hundred and twenty pounds.
Because he ran well in the broken field, men
Said he was afraid. I remember him best
At a laboratory table, holding a test tube
Up to the light, arranging equations like facts,
But the school is air over a parking lot. You
Are too far from that valley for it to come
All the way true, although it is not real.
Not two miles from that bridge, one afternoon
In March, in 1967, one of my great-uncles,
Clyde Maples, a farmer and a commissioner of roads,
And his neighbor, whose name I have forgotten,
Pulled more than a hundred crappies off three
Stickups in that creek—though the creek is not
Real and the valley is a valley of words. You
Would need Clyde Maples to find Arthur Peavahouse,
And you would need Clyde Maples’ side yard
Of roadgraders and bulldozers to get even part
Of Clyde Maples, need him like the crappies
Needed those stickups in the creek to tell them
Where they were. Every spring that creek
Darkens with the runoff of hog lots and barns,
Spreading sloughs, obscuring sorghum and corn.
On blind backwater full schoolbuses roll
Down buried roads. Arthur Peavahouse was smart
To run from the huge tackles and unthinking
To throw himself into that roiling water
And test the reality of his arms and lungs.
Many times I have thought everything I said
Or thought was a lie, moving some blame or credit
By changing a name, even the color of a lip or bush,
But whenever I think of the lie that stands for truth,
I think of Arthur Peavahouse, and not his good name,
But his deciding, as that car settled to the bottom,
To break free and live for at least one more moment
Upward toward light and the country of words
While the other child, the one he could not save,
Shrugged behind him in the unbreakable harness.

GROUND SENSE

Because I have known many women
Who are dead, I try to think of fields
As holy places. Whether we plow them

Or let them to weeds and sunlight,
Those are the best places for grief,
If only that they perform the peace

We come to, the feeling without fingers,
The hearing without ears, the seeing
Without eyes. Isn’t heaven just this

Unbearable presence under leaves?
I had thought so. I had believed
At times in a meadow and at other

Times in a wood where we’d emerge
No longer ourselves, but reduced
To many small things that we could

Not presume to know, except as my
Friend’s wife begins to disappear,
He feels no solvent in all the earth,

And me, far off, still amateur at grief.
Walking the creek behind the house,
I cross to the old homeplace, find

A scattering of chimney rocks, the
Seeds my grandmother watered, the
Human lifetime of middle-aged trees.

A DEFENSE OF POETRY

If abstract identity, philosophy’s silhouette, authorless, quoted,
and italicized, governs by committee the moments
of a mutinying, multitudinous self, then I’m lost.

But let a semi loaded with bridge girders come barreling
down on me, I’m in a nanosecond propelled
into the singular, fleet and unequivocal as a deer’s thought.

As to the relevance of poetry in our time, I delay and listen
to the distances: John Fahey’s “West Coast Blues,” a truck
backing up, hammers, crows in their perennial discussion of moles.

My rage began at forty. The unstirred person, the third-person
void, the you of accusations and reprisals, visited me.
Many nights we sang together; you don’t even exist.

In print, a little later is the closest we come to now: the turn
in the line ahead and behind; the voice, slower than the brain;
and the brain, slower than the black chanterelle.

The first time I left the South I thought I sighted
in an Indiana truckstop both Anne Sexton
and John Frederick Nims, but poetry makes a little dent like a dart.

It’s the solo most hold inside the breath as indigestible truth.
For backup singers, there’s the mumbling of the absolutes.
Du-bop of rain and kinking heat. La-la of oblivion.

Sheep-bleat and stone-shift and pack-choir.
There is a sense beyond words that runs through them:
animal evidence like fur in a fence, especially valuable now,

self-visited as we are, self-celebrated, self-ameliorated,
and self-sustained, with the very kit of our inner weathers,
with migraine, our pain du jour, our bread of suffering.

If poetry is no good to you, why pretend it can enlighten you?
Why trouble the things you have heard or seen written
when you can look at the mandrone tree?

Rodney Jones from Salvation Blues (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), reprinted by permission from author.

Rodney Jones, born in Alabama, is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He has published eight books of poetry, including Salvation Blues (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Among his many honors, Jones was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Southeast Booksellers Association Award, and a Harper Lee Award.

Billy Reynolds: Your poetry is often associated with a southern narrative vernacular tradition, with the likes of Robert Penn Warren and Dave Smith (never bad company), but, to my mind, you have never been, strictly speaking, a narrative poet. There is an emphasis on the “spoken word” in your poetry, but many of your poems work associatively and in many of them you assemble seemingly disparate narratives.


Rodney Jones: In truth, it doesn’t bother me, being compared to Warren and Smith. They’re poets that I admire. I read Warren a good deal in the seventies when I was living in East Tennessee and Virginia, and Smith has always embodied an ideal of language that has proved instructive. But neither, to my mind, has been more of an influence on me than Ashbery or Stern or James Wright or Bishop or C.K. Williams or Robinson Jeffers or Levine or Lowell or Bishop or Levis or Justice or (fill in the blank) or Neruda or Rilke or Transtromer or Milosz, etc. Doubtless, I’m a subprecinct of many pre-existing poetic templates, but I’ve tried to get involved with each instance, with the idea of writing the only poem that I could write. I’ve felt contempt for myself if a poem has seemed too indebted to another poet.


BR: In many of your poems, the blues is both a source of inspiration, a companion if you will, and even an analogue for your poetry. How did you come up with the idea for the book Salvation Blues?


RJ: Salvation Blues came into my head after I had finished the poem with that title, not a great poem, but one that accurately represented a long thought that happens to be the foundation for many of my poems. Harold Bloom once said that “we know a poet by the poet’s complaint.” As for themes, I don’t hold to them, but when they occur, I do not doubt their hold over me, and when they crop up a number of times, I recognize an obsession and sometimes a complaint. Salvation, where I grew up, was not an idea, but a way of life, and it goes on to this day. For me, it is woven deeply in the fabric of my seeing and speaking, and I suppose that it does not matter that I philosophically question “salvation,” or, for that matter, any meaning that takes the form of social convention. After all, the structure of opposition is confined by what is opposes. I share a religion with Wallace Stevens, the most articulate spokesman for an imaginative vision that opposes American puritanism, and with James Wright. I am all for life, not death, and I trust that my poems suggest that. The blues form is natural to me, a kind of American Zen, a yang to the gospel’s yin. I chose the title because it seemed right for the work. Then I googled it and discovered that it had been used many times, most notably by a band in St. Paul, Minnesota, The Front Porch Swinging Liquor Pigs.


BR: Looking back at my copies of your books, I was surprised at the number of incredible poems not included in Salvation Blues (“The Weepers,” “The Privacy of Women,” “Second Nature,” “A Story of the South Pacific, “Waking Up,” just to name five) How difficult was it for you to decide which poems to include and which to omit? Was there a criteria for selection, either by you or your editor at Houghton Mifflin?


RJ: The choices were my own, though Michael Collier, my editor and a fine poet in his own right, made several suggestions that struck me as right on the mark and I took them. The choices were difficult. In general, I have not been a hit or miss kind of poet. I’ve meant to hit the target every time, and I’ve worked hard to acquire the necessary art to do that and to practice it and then to dispose with it and find other ways of writing. Assembling the book presented a number of problems. If many poems struck me as powerful, putting them all together sometimes seemed like fielding a backfield of all fullbacks. My chief concern was to make a book that would be better than any of the individual books from which it was chosen. “Two Girls at the Hartselle, Alabama, Municipal Swimming Pool,” for instance, obviously lacks the dimension of “The Privacy of Women,” but I have other poems with that dimension that I prefer. In truth, I suspect that I might have chosen another one hundred poems that would represent me nearly as well as the selection I made. And, of course, poets are not definitive judges of their own work. David Lehman chose “My Manhood,” another poem that I omitted, for The Oxford Book of American Poetry. That does not suggest either that I should have included it in Salvation Blues or that Lehman should have chosen another poem. All of us with choices must believe, at least for the moment, that we married well.


BR: “No human just language grinding against the shackle of quotation.” This comment is from the last section of your “Elegy for a Southern Drawl,” in which you suggest a tension between the spoken word and the written (in this case, a recording of Faulkner’s famous 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature speech, in which he famously declares that man will not only endure but prevail) is something you have been preoccupied for quite some time. Another way to say this is that you distrust eloquence—that you more than accept the “botch on the surface” because it is all you have to affirm the deep fluency below, as you wrote in “On Pickiness.” Could you talk about the connection between the botch on the surface and fluency?


RJ: A number of one-liners. Robert Hass says in one of his gorgeous fluent poems, “When you’re smooth, you’re dead.” I read numerous poems every year that work as soporifics, if not as embalming fluids, and I write a few myself. The poet’s fluency is much like the guitarist’s speed. It is a very desirable quality, but there needs to be a cop on that beat, someone to rough it up a bit, or it may not seem to tell the truth.


When I began attempting to write poems, Everette Maddox, my first mentor, suggested humility. It would be good, he advised, to attempt one good line at a time, to revise that line many times before going to the next, and to continue until I had made a poem of all good lines. He also suggested that I might discover great poems with no lines that were either particularly memorable or remarkable for their prosody or overt originality.


A poem is language, but it also evokes the character of an animal that cannot speak. In many ways, the unspeaking animal must come out of the poem; else the poem seems all surface, all fluency: no temperament, no drama. This seems obvious. A poem is behavior or nothing. “A poem,” as Archibald MacLeish says, “must be palpable and mute...”


Patrick Phillips: This question is related to Billy’s idea about fluency. You have written a lot about the role of the poet, and the act of writing poems. I am thinking, for example, of “The Work of Poets,” “A Defense of Poetry,” and “A History of Speech,” in which you write:

                                                    ... Listen:
        whenever I hurt, the words turned their heads;
        whenever I loved too much, they croaked and hopped away.
        At my luckiest, I’m only saying the grace
        the hungry endure because they’re polite.

It would be more polite for us to extol the power and relevance of poetry, but there are many moments in Salvation Blues that confront the inadequacy of the art itself. Do you ever lose faith in poetry? If not, what sustains you, and if so, how do you find your way back to writing?


RJ: Questioning the place of the art in contemporary culture differs from questioning the art itself. The environment in which poetry thrives often feels like trompe l’oeil to me. The classroom, which prizes difficulty, and the barroom, which demands humor and raunchiness, are faux. The individual reader, on the other hand, who relishes or needs poetry, remains.


Obviously, poetry is sufficiently limited in its popular or cultural appeal that it need not be defended. The people at West Point told me that they insisted that freshman cadets read poetry books because they wanted them to understand ambiguity. Well, poetry persists, keeping its secrets, doing its lovely ambiguous thing, and I happen to love it, but I have had questions since my first involvement in poetry. A big one would be, “Why are you doing this when almost no one reads it.” Why should that question be limited to our mothers? The year that I won the National Book Critics Circle Award, a nameless stranger at the party before the presentation asked me what I did. “I’m a writer,” I answered. “What do you write?” she asked. “Poetry,” I said. She replied, “How sad for you.”


But poetry still seems to me nearly impossible, the greatest of arts. When I lose faith in that notion, as I do periodically, I do not write.


PP: There is a religious undercurrent in many of your poems. I can hear the music of the King James Bible in so many lines, and sense a kind of vestigial yearning for grace—for what Flannery O’Connor called “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.” Country churches, radio preachers, and sacraments appear in these poems, and yet the speaker makes it clear that his is a “post-religious” view of the world. Could you talk about the role of poetry in the wake of belief?


RJ: Stevens writes somewhere in Opus Posthumous that poetry created the gods and now, when we do not believe in the gods, poetry must find a new project. Well, obviously, some of us are not at the end of belief. The mischief continues. As for ecclesiastical religion, I had the complete installation: Sunday morning and night services and Wednesday night bible study or prayer meetings in addition to numerous singings. My paternal grandfather wrote gospel songs, and my paternal grandmother, my great champion, was a devout fundamentalist. She told me that, given the state of my soul, I was going to spend eternity in hell. On the other hand, my mother was not a conventional believer. She made it clear that my object as an adult would be to determine the nature of my own belief. I came to it in time. I believe in the natural world and that the social value of any belief system that emphasizes the supernatural is harmful. On the other hand, once inculcated, that dream proves a canny foe. I have attempted looking at the world uninstructed and untutored, cross-examining every thought about the cosmos, especially those that I have believed to be my own, but I do not find that my belief or absence of belief is necessarily relevant to the quality of poetry of individual humans. I appreciate deeply the poetry of Les Murray and Franz Wright, poets of unabashed religious faith. Language being what it is, the resident gods may not hear a distinction between announcements of belief or disbelief, but surely they must hear the heart in the language, and the creature behind it, and appreciate language’s music at least a little more than its meaning or meaninglessness. To have been given the language of the King James Bible was a great privilege. For all the tedious sermons and scripture reading that W.S. Merwin endured as a child, we have those poems.


BR: I have to admit that in reading parts of “Elegy for a Southern Drawl” to a group of first-generation college students enrolled in Basic English that I felt, for the first time since I was a struggling college student, the tremendous conflicts the poem enacts, in particular the tension between the language of the country and the language of the educated. I guess I clearly understood for the first time perhaps the ways we all juggle various discourses and the ways we tend to value one discourse over another. But in the ending of the poem, you seem to suggest that you never lose the language of the country and in fact you shouldn’t because it suggests the ways in which we are everything at once:

        I feel odd hearing a tape of my own voice
        That marks wherever I go, the sound

        Of lynchings, the letters of misspellings
        Crooked and jumbled to dupe the teacher,
        Slow ink, slow fluid of my tribe, meaning

        What words mean when they are given
        From so many voices, I do not know myself
        Who is speaking and who is listening.

RJ: Voice need not seem complex for some, and they do fine. For others, and I am one of them, to call on one register instead of another may be play, but it marks betrayal or loyalty. The large fabric of a voice includes each voice that a writer has heard or read that has made an impression. I spent a lot of time as a kid playing in a British accent, a lot of time in tongue-tied redneck. Almost everyone that I have heard or read has left some track, from Alastair Cooke and John Cage to Richard Pryor and Richard Nixon. No claim on the language is exclusive. Americans are free to sound British and vice-versa, but the community implicit in each sentence must be beholding to a tone that characterizes a single speaker and behavior. That seems the essential thing for a poet.


PP: In “The Poetry Reading” you wonder if “perhaps the university is not the place for poetry,” and dwell on the hope that after a typical college reading “someone still unheard from / May actually go into a room alone and read it.” At a time when it is fashionable to lament the influence of the M.F.A. programs, you are upfront about working in “the academy”—a place you refer to as “My Monastery.” Could you talk about the risks and rewards of being a poet and a professor?


RJ: Contemporary poetry in the college or university, or, for that matter, in high schools, is often studied as something other than poetry. As a means, for instance, of exhibiting our plurality, or of articulating a political ideal, or of encouraging self-expression. It takes up a very small portion of a bewildering curriculum, and it has, of course, provided many of us with a livelihood. At one end of the spectrum, poetry’s sponsor is a democratic ideal, and, at the other end, we find a poetry of such difficulty that it requires a seminar with a trained guide, a search party. Poetry can be written to fit any of these templates, just as it can be written as a wedding toast, eulogy, or antiquated form of courtship.


Older poetry tends to be treated a little differently, the idea being that Paradise Lost or King Lear should be preserved. Older poetry is like a patient in a nursing home. Older poetry needs the breathing machine and feeding tubes of the university. In contemporary American culture, it obviously has a little less economic value than Apocalypse Now or Chinatown and much less value than the video game, which the market can depend upon to make a living for many.


Are human beings better for studying poetry becomes the main issue, and if we are improved, how? The poem in the institution and the poet in the institution are different issues. Tom Disch told me fifteen years ago that he almost wished that I could continue to work in factories, on farms, or on construction crews, so that I could stay in touch with the sources. While I’m glad to be relieved of that work, I understand the point. Universities and colleges, so full of admirable, learned people, tend to be insular, rife with guarded remarks and anecdotes of European travel, and the teacher of creative writing has trouble getting away from poetry. People hand you manuscripts when you’re walking in the woods. I find it essential to get away from the atmosphere of the university, and of poetry, for that matter. In general, my best friends are not poets or academicians. Last week my wife and I had dinner at Crazy Joe’s Catfish House with a wise beautician and her husband, who sells John Deere tractors. Such moments give me hope.


PP: I first loved your work because it is so often funny. Deeply, seriously funny, in poems like “Pussy,” “Elegy for the Southern Drawl,” and “Sacrament for My Penis,” which begins:

        How do I approach it, bald as it is, dangling
        Over the urinal to some golden expression
        Of lemony bitterness, an old Trappist,
        Blind in one eye, kneeling to his paternosters?

What do you think is the relationship between the joke and the poem? My question is, as they say, how come you write so funny?


RJ: I would hope that poets do not have a choice about being funny. Certainly, many great poets are not funny: Whitman is never funny; Eliot is occasionally funny; Rilke does not seem to have a funny bone in all the body of his work; Rich is not funny; Robert Bly is rarely intentionally funny; C.K. Williams is nearly always serious; Neruda is not consciously funny, but his great faith in the alchemy of the unconscious mind produces humor as a byproduct. I’m very drawn to the humor of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, who wrote “Sometimes I think that seals must live as long as the scholar gypsy.” And I’m also fond of the outrageously funny poets like James Tate, Russell Edson, Albert Goldbarth, David Kirby, and Denise Duhamel or the more darkly funny poets like Louise Glück, Charles Simic, Sylvia Plath, Alan Dugan, and John Berryman. For the connoisseur, there’s John Ashbery. Billy Collins, of course, cans fun like peaches. My funny poet is James Wright. His comedy derives from Mark Twain.


The joke, as Charles Simic reminds us, is no joke.


I do not generally set out to be funny or sad when I write a poem, but I have pledged allegiance to honoring the natural eventfulness of the mind. Of course, it can get crazy. There’s the ironic take, and there’s the ironic take on the ironic take. I’m not fond of glibness, or poetry that’s merely entertaining, but I am in one of those bodies that wants to laugh, sometimes at funerals, often inappropriately. So be it.


PP: Billy has already mentioned Robert Penn Warren, a poet with whom it is natural to associate your work. Who are your other influences and heroes? Are there things you tried to learn from particular poets? Poets against whom you rebelled?


RJ: Poets dodge talking influence. No wonder. I asked William Stafford about influences once, and his answer suggested that I was conducting a tax audit. I’ve fallen under so many spells, many of them contrasting, that it’s hard to single out the primary influences, but early obvious influences would be Dickey, Warren, Frost, Wright, and Faulkner. They inhabited a country and a language that I knew, and they showed me how rural experience might be appropriate for poetry. Other early influences would be Eliot, Crane, Snodgrass, James Tate. I attempted surrealism for many years before I published a book. I read Sylvia Plath always, and Philip Levine, and Adrienne Rich, and Hugo and Roethke and Neruda. In my late twenties, I discovered two poets whose work energized me: Gerald Stern, who still seems the most open American poet, and C.K. Williams, a great narrator of consciousness, who has such a pure and undiluted habitation of language. They were my muses when I was writing the poems in The Unborn. After that, I began to read Milosz, and he stopped me dead. He was so unromantic, so transcendently practical in his political vision. He and Robinson Jeffers were the sparks for Transparent Gestures. After that, it gets more complicated. Ashbery was always with me. Merwin and Kinnell buoyed me when I was writing Things That Happen Once. Olds, Graham, Ammons, Wilbur, Koch, Gallagher, Tranströmer, Dennis Johnson, Louise Glück, Frank Bidart, Robert Hass. Always Kunitz, always Jarrell, and Bishop. Always Whitman and Dickinson. Shakespeare. Marlowe and Chapman. Eliot. Rilke. Always Heaney. Lately Ann Carson. The American poet that I love most and return to most often is James Wright, not because I consider him the best, but because he is a very smart guy who values the heart more than the brain, a very funny guy who values seriousness, and a very articulate guy who values expression.


I have often loved the work of other poets more than my own. When I write poems, I have, in some part of my mind, an ideal, not my own poem, but some version of a poem that might have been written by someone else. I