Fragments from a Lover’s Quarrel

I had a lover’s quarrel with the world. ~Robert Frost

The lover’s solitude is not a solitude of person (love confides, speaks, tells itself), it is the solitude of system: I am alone in making a system out of it (perhaps because I am ceaselessly flung back on the solipsism of my discourse). A difficult paradox: I can be understood by everyone (love comes from books, its dialect is a common one), but I can be heard (received “prophetically”) only by subjects who have exactly and right now the same language I have. ~Roland Barthes

To live by poetry. Which of course I want to read in more than one sense: live robustly and fully by means of poetry; order one’s life according to values derived from poetry; live in proximity to poetry. ~H.L. Hix

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In some sense, any addressee [in a poem] is merely a trope, part of the poem’s furniture and frame. Sometimes, when I reread a poem I’ve written I feel like I’m speaking to myself in a small empty room and sometimes I feel like I’m speaking to all the round earth’s imagined corners.

I do speak to students all day long in my job as a schoolteacher, and sometimes those conversations are poems, sometimes those conversations die into poems, sometimes poems die into those conversations, but most of my students will never read the poems I write. Still, addressing my students in a poem shows that I care for them deeply—it’s a form of prayer for their wellbeing and future success. Deep attention is the highest form of love; embodying and engendering deep attention is the work of poetry and the work of teaching.

The greatest two words in all of literature are the epigraph to E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End: “only connect.”

After the birth of my daughter, it became very important to me that in the future she might read my poems and understand something about her parents that might otherwise remain hidden to her. In a very real sense, my wife and my daughter are the ones I am always speaking to in any poem I write.

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As many writers have noted, due to systemic racism, widespread misogyny, income inequality, a variety of broken social institutions (the public-school system, for example), and so on, daily life in America has been traumatic for many people for a long time. Fear, pain, and hopelessness accrue into rage and/or apathy. Any degree of safety and comfort we might experience as American citizens is underwritten by violence at home and abroad; this violence makes demands upon us all. No wonder that, in W. C. Williams famous formulation, the pure products of America go crazy, driven by a “numbed terror / under some hedge of choke-cherry / or viburnum, / which they cannot express—.” The Trump era has rendered much of this suffering, anguish, and violence far more legible to far more Americans than ever before.

In the beginning of Counterclaims, H.L. Hix notes: “Poetry offers instead a field in which transformation becomes intelligible: a metamorphic imaginary, a landscape of renewal. The new self enters the world first in and as imagination. The new self is made by making.” Huge swaths of American life run counter to a metamorphic imaginary. I feel my self being constantly unmade, as a consumer, as a citizen, as a man; the feeling of that unmaking might be where a commitment to poetry begins.

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William Blake’s visionary phenomenology inspires me. In one of his letters, Blake famously wrote: “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees.” Most of the times, I see the green things in the way, but I want the tears of joy. I want to learn to bear the beams of love. I want “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” Poetry trains me in this direction: in a poem, I hold open the palm of my hand and hope for infinity with its skylarks and lambs and caterpillars and lions and oxen and owls and, even, its poisons…

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Music and the visual arts nourish me as much as poetry; both artforms suggest a range of possibilities for what a poem can be (picture a poem as expansive and effusive as a Mingus composition, a poem as repetitive and minimalist as a Philip Glass piano etude, a poem as gesturally complex as a Jackson Pollock canvas from the drip period, a poem as Baroque and phenomenologically complex as Velázquez’s Las Meninas).

The work ethic of Jazz musicians inspires me. The romantic images of Sonny Rollins woodshedding to the wind on the Williamsburg Bridge and Charlie Parker playing for the cows in a pasture belie a daily and total commitment to their art that is common to all of the artists I most admire.

The goal for me is to be always engaged in poetry, to dwell in poems the way I might dwell in the red ochers and umbers of a Caravaggio or the blazing gestures of a Basquiat.

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In my own life, I’ve found that nothing has been more productive and more challenging than the love I share with my wife. Being in love is a choice, full of daily unromantic tasks and realities. Being in love is a political and moral act; for me, writing about love should be too. Being in love is both the most transformative and the most mundane experience a human being can undergo. To use a phrase by H.L. Hix, love offers us “a landscape of renewal” like the field offered by a poem. In a poem and in love, a new self is made by making.

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Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Coltrane are the two greatest saints in my litany. Others for Ill Angels would include: Marc Chagall, Katsushika Hokusai, Cy Twombly, Frida Kahlo, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Elizabeth Cotten, Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra, Charles Mingus, Louis Armstrong, John Fahey, Django Reinhardt, Robert Johnson, Chet Atkins, Jerry Garcia, Mississippi John Hurt, Sleepy John Estes, Hounddog Taylor, R.L. Burnside, Akira Kurasawa, John Ford, Sergio Leone, Christopher Smart, Christopher Gilbert, William Blake, Lucille Clifton, Wanda Coleman, Gwendolyn Brooks, Thérèse of Lisieux, Theresa of Avila, Augustine of Hippo, Søren Kierkegaard, Li Bai, Federico García Lorca, Kobayashi Issa, Matsuo Bashō, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jorge Luis Borges.

Some fictional spirits I’d invoke: Prince Myshkin, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, Pierre Menard, Bartleby the Scrivener, Malte Luarids Brigge, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Zebra, Helen Dewitt’s Sybilla, Tom Bouman’s Henry Farrell.

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You’re right, there is something impressionistic (or post-impressionistic) about the way the apple recurs in my poems. I love the geometry of apples. I love the sound of the word “apple” and the almost endless number of varietals and their evocative names: imagine an orchard of Empires, a bushel of Jubilees, an Autumn Glory held in the palm of your hand. I’ve always loved apples and being in an orchard. My friend owns an orchard and I helped him plant many of the trees in it. My father dreamed of owning an apple orchard. My grandmother always used to make homemade apple sauce. I don’t employ the apple out of nostalgia, but I am drawn to it; it’s a deep image for me, as it is for many other people.

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For me, as for you, and for most other writers I am sure, we cannot live otherwise. I read and write because I know the truth of John Donne’s “Since I die daily, daily mourn.” I choose to live in the word because it allows me to enter more fully the greater mystery of being alive, in all its unbounded ecstasy and deep sorrow. My reading and writing lives lend me the discipline to try to move beyond the manifold vertiginous fictions of the self, to continue a turning outward, to love more, to more fully be.

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Kierkegaard said, “Faith is a process of infinite becoming.” Poetry is like that too, I think. Way leads on to way, line to line, trope to trope, draft to draft, and, if you’re lucky, book to book. I always think of that moment in Rilke’s novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, when the narrator says, “You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.” I’d settle for one good line that I earn after a lifetime of writing.

I am looking for greatness on the level of the individual line.

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Formal variegation is central to my method as a writer. Most of my prose poems begin in lineated versions, and so the cadences from the lineated versions carry over when they are translated into prose. If I decide to turn a lineated poem into a prose poem, I do so to put the poem in dialogue with the tradition of the American prose poem as I understand it, ranging from Gertrude Stein to Russell Edson to Nin Andrews and beyond. As Michael Delville points out in his exceptional book, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre, “the prose poem has often been used as a means of questioning and redefining the methods, aims, and ideological significance habitually attributed to both poetry and prose.”

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For the past twenty years, I’ve been obsessed with Gerard Manley Hopkins. He’s the poet I return to the most. His are the only poems that have appeared in my dreams. I sometimes get up in the middle of the night just to read a few lines from “The Wreck of the Deutschland” or “The Windhover.” I feel his poems in my bones, and when I haven’t read him for a day or two, I feel a physical sense of withdrawal. No other poet combines such mastery with such unbridled joy and such wild sorrow. Other constant companions include Ammons, Baraka, Blake, Dickinson, Donne, Ginsberg, Frost, Rilke, Sexton, Stevens, Smart, Williams, Whitman. Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” means a great deal to me. Among more recent poets, I’d rank as most important to me: Milton Kessler, Christopher Gilbert, Joe Salerno, and Jason Shinder. Surely, I’m also indebted to my poetry teachers, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Liz Rosenberg, and Joe Weil. It’s hard to say what poets have been most influential to me, though, because the influence shifts and realigns; as I read and write and live my relationships to various poems change.

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I don’t use social media myself, but I’m very interested in the way it marshals discourse and circumscribes our lives. Understanding poetry’s position in a twenty-first century American landscape requires some engagement with digital culture.

Just yesterday, I read an interview with James Matthew Wilson in which he outrageously compares much of contemporary American poetry to child abuse. Instagram poetry receives the brunt of his ire, but Wilson implicitly dismisses anyone not writing so-called formal verse. It’s a bizarre anachronism to hear this kind of critique. At the other end of the spectrum, I have heard several prominent young contemporary poets say that if you call a thing a poem then it is a poem. Neither Wilson’s reactionary prescriptivism nor thoughtless relativism seems the right stance to me. Samuel Johnson was right when he said, “to circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer.” Still, I agree with Clive James when he wrote, “a poem is any piece of writing that can’t be quoted from except out of context.” As a reader, I know a poem when it undoes me and calls me back to it. As a writer, I know a poem when I want to dwell in its lines always.

I think we should be beyond the old internecine squabbles about what poems are; we should be more interested in what they can be but haven’t yet been. There’s plenty of room for Instagram poetry, for spoken word, neo-formalist, conceptual, autobiographical lyric poetry, and for all the other tributaries of world poetries. I’m interested in reading and learning from as many different aesthetic and formal approaches as possible. I’m not interested in negating or devaluing any of them. Having said that, I know I will keep returning to the questions you initially asked: “What do we write? Do we need to differentiate among poems and would-be poems? If so, how?” Maybe this type of questioning is why we read and write: forever to drown and to fly in the interrogative.

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Echolalia in Script by Sam Roxas-Chua from Orison Books is one of my favorite books on my bookshelf right now. In it, a single prose poem contextualizes a series of angelic images (of asemic writings). This is the most truly Blakean book written since 1827.

Giovanni Singleton’s American Letters: Works on Paper is another book that combines poetry and the visual arts in an astounding fashion.

Divya Victor’s Kith is a hybrid text that meditates on different forms of connection and identification within the imagined community of the nation-state.

Alison C. Rollins’ Library of Small Catastrophes will probably receive a wide readership and rightly so. It’s the most impressive debut collection I’ve ever read. Rollins evokes and transforms the legacies of Amiri Baraka and Robert Hayden, while striking out in completely unexpected directions. Rollins is a librarian and an admirer of Borges, so her brilliance is not completely unexpected.

From an older generation, I return to William Bronk’s poetry quite a bit. I never hear him talked about, but along with A.R. Ammons he is one of the greatest inheritors of the transcendentalist spirit as filtered through Wallace Stevens’s ouevre.

Brilliant Corners, edited by Sascha Feinstein, is the only literary journal I consistently read from cover to cover.

I’d also recommend a short story collection titled Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and a novel by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, titled Call Me Zebra. Friday Black consists of eldritch science fiction and horror stories that weirdly harken back to Hawthorne’s tales as they examine race and consumer culture. Endlessly astonishing, achingly erudite, and downright hilarious, Call Me Zebra begins as an exilic picaresque and ends as a fraught labyrinthine 21st century manual for reading literature and the world.

H.L. Hix’s body of work is a revelation, particularly Rain Inscription, which I am working through for a second time right now. I’m looking forward to reading his new essay collection, Demonstrategy.

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I grew up in a strictly observant Roman Catholic family, so these places and symbols hold tremendous power for me still, embodying as they do the mystery of spiritual experience, and, also, the failures of The Church—or any strand of dogmatic Christianity—as a guiding orthodoxy. Although I’m not a practicing Catholic, I love churches (the physicality of a church building, whether it’s a cathedral, a storefront in a strip mall, or a country parish); I have a profound respect for all manner of religious practice, and I pray daily, so I regard the religious conventions and symbols in the poem with affection, awe, nostalgia, and fear. These symbols also remind me of the central symbol of Christianity: the broken body of Christ. The great truth of Christianity (and of poetry too, I think) is that we are all broken, but that our very brokenness constitutes an “earned communion” (to borrow a phrase from Seamus Heaney). It is the earned communion made manifest in our poems that makes the struggles of daily living and the ugliness of human hate a little bit more bearable.

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In my poem “Burning Churches,” I hope the intralineal spacing in the poem reenacts the historical record and the gaps within it; these spaces also represent the silent, the silenced, and those who do the silencing. Narratives and counternarratives populate around the blanks—clustering, clipping off, and resuming—just as they do in everyday conversation, in textual and oral histories, and in national politics and journalism.

I’ve been noticing this type of spacing proliferating in work by many of the talented millennial poets who’ve risen to prominence in the past several years. In some ways, this is a typographical fad in contemporary poetry, but the spacing does hearken back to the midline breaks of Anglo-Saxon poetry, as Stephanie Burt has recently noted. And, at its best, this strategy for organizing music and motion in a poem can be really arresting (see, for example, Kaveh Akbar’s incredible “Portrait of the Alcoholic Floating in Space with Severed Umbilicus”).

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In my career as a high school English teacher, I’ve seen up-close the impact of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and classism on students for whom I care deeply. My daily work in the broken public-school system constantly directs me to reexamine the ways in which my life experiences (as a White middle-class male) have been misshaped and supported by White supremacy, male chauvinism, and American jingoism.

Like many White suburban people who came of age at the end of Generation X, my consciousness about racism in America was shaped by acts of violence against Anita Hill, Rodney King, Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, James Byrd Jr., and the prisoners at Abu Ghraib; their traumas informed my understanding of American empire.

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In Poetry and Commitment, Adrienne Rich said: “For now, poetry has the capacity—in its own ways and by its own means—to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still-uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, torture and bribes, outcast and tribe, but on the continual redefining of freedom.” I share Rich’s belief in poetry’s ability to reveal this hidden future.

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Vievee Francis can riff with equal brilliance on lines from Iceberg Slim and Hans Christian Andersen. Her collection Forest Primeval puts her in the top tier of American poets. She’s someone whose work elicits a visceral emotional response from me, but whose technique is also exquisite. I’d like to dwell in the music of a poem like her “Happiness?” forever. I admire the formal risks she takes in poems like “A Flight of Swiftlets Made Their Way In” and “A Song on the Ridge.” I can feel a poem like “Taking It” in my knuckles. In short, Vievee Francis’s hard earned duende, her great imagistic intelligence, her love of literature and life, and her bigheartedness drip from every word she writes; she’s the kind of poet I aspire to be.

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My greatest joy in life comes from my wife, Christina, my children, Luciana and Dante Jr., and my goldendoodle, Sunny (named after Alabama’s own, Sun Ra). I enjoy spending time with family and friends. I love all types of music, especially jazz and blues (Coltrane and Monk are my greatest heroes). Nineteenth century Russian novels shaped my consciousness as a teenager, and I love returning to them. I love crime novels, the prose of Borges, and the paintings of Marc Chagall. Don Quixote is my favorite book. I try to get outside in nature as much as possible. I love good food. I love living in upstate New York and visiting Vermont. I love to travel when I can. I spend a good deal of time reading and writing literary criticism. My work as an editor and teacher keeps me busy and energizes me. My wife is the executive director of a small nonprofit arts council, so I volunteer for that organization. Lastly, I love my students, past, present, and future.

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Becoming a father changed me and changed my life in innumerable subtle and immense ways; inevitably, then, parenthood changed my poetry. Parenthood, like poetry, reorients, intensifies, and recalibrates one’s attention. Parenthood turns you toward another, in much the same way that poetry does, or ideally, should. For me, poetry has always involved an interiority turned to face the world, an act of opening up, which involves a shedding of ego (breaking the mind forged manacles of Blake’s Urizen, echoing E.M. Forster’s injunction: “Only Connect”). Poetry and parenthood both involve what Seamus Heaney called a kind of “earned communion.” Both involve attention directed outward. There’s the shared duende of poetry and parenthood too: the knowledge of our own mortality in every diaper change and volta and skinned knee and spondee and snuggle and heroic couplet rocking you from blue hour to blue hour.

On a more practical level, parenthood changed the way my life was organized. My life now revolves around the schedules, needs, and wants of our little ones. I’ve had to dial back some of the poetry-related things I love doing like writing book reviews, but I still find time to read and to write and to engage with other poets living and dead.

My daughter and I have begun writing poetry together and my wife and I read the children poetry in addition to books like The Runaway Bunny and The Giving Tree and Dragons Love Tacos. My wife and I also collaborate on community poetry projects through the Tioga Arts Council in upstate New York, which she runs. We have curated ekphrastic and reverse ekphrastic exhibits. I run a reading series. We are developing community workshops and we’re working on a poetry trail (a series of signposts with poetry displayed on them throughout the county). My children are a part of all these endeavors from planning stages to execution; they’ve both attended many local poetry-related events since the time they were in utero.

For me, the goal is that poetry be a constant part of my daily, ordinary, unromantic, middle class, suburban life, and that that life be a constant part of my poetry. The older I get, the less difference I feel between the poems I read and reread and memorize and dwell in, and my actual, seemingly boring, quotidian life.

Also, on a practical level, parenthood gave me a new set of experiences to write about. You don’t really know what fatherhood is until you live it yourself, what it’s like to be in the room when your child is born, what you feel when you hold your son or daughter for the first time, what it’s like to see them take their first steps, how they acquire language and relate to the world, what it’s like to be sleep-deprived and wakened in the middle of the night to clean up vomit off a beanbag chair and yet to feel happy about it, what it’s like to live daily in close proximity to the mind of a toddler. These are such intense, piquant, inestimably valuable experiences. And these experiences connect you, more deeply, to the great round of the human condition as it has unfolded for millennia.

Lastly, I’ve come to see my writing as a bequest for my children. I hope that my poetry means something to them when they grow up: that they have this series of artifacts from my time on earth, that they might see my work as a chronicle of the joys, pains, enthusiasms, struggles, desires, and perplexities of a lifetime. Ultimately, I pray that having access to these records of my interior life will help them through their own difficulties. If nothing else, I hope they see repeated over and over and over again, in every line, how much I love them and their mother, and how grateful I am for this life.

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My three-year-old daughter often pretends the floor is an ocean full of jellyfish and crabs. My wife and I devote a portion of each day trying to avoid getting stung and pinched. My daughter loves rivers, seas, the rain, mermaids, baby sharks, and all kinds of submarine life.

I’ve always loved books about the ocean, especially Melville’s seafaring novels and stories. One of my prized books is Richard Ellis’s Encyclopedia of the Sea. I also love Ellis’ book about giant squids. My mind contains multitudes of algae and driftwood and underwater volcanoes and angelfish and plesiosaurs and all manner of cephalopods.

Also, any parent who has put a fussy child to bed or has woken in the night to soothe a crying infant, knows that a certain peacefulness sometimes descends upon a room, a feeling of immensity and serenity that feels oceanic, in the moments just before and just after the little one goes to sleep.

And it occurs to me that when my little girl sees a hardwood floor as a coral reef, she’s inside a poem better than any I could ever compose.

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It’s such a magic thing to be in that space of composition and to move intuitively and fluidly through a first draft. I never really know the source of a poem’s music, voice, and content. Composing a poem is kind of like what I imagine deep-sea diving might be like—suspended in the depths—as exhilarating, as terrifying, as dependent upon one’s training, experience, acuity, and athleticism.

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Editorial work does several things for me.

1) It keeps me from being too self-involved, shifting my focus from my own poetry to the poems of others. Solipsism is one of the great enemies of poetry. Editorial work shreds what Blake called the “mind-forged manacles” of self-interest.

2) It reminds me to remain protean in my approach to poetry. I see so many different styles of poetry, so many different aesthetics. The endless variegation of poetry never ceases to amaze me. I never want to be an adherent to any type of orthodoxy.

3) It enriches my reading life. I always want my writing life to remain subordinate to a rich, challenging, and wild reading life. As an editor, you get to be one of the first readers, sometimes the first reader of a poem. What an honor that is!

4) It connects me to other writers. Even if I don’t develop friendships with the poets I publish, I feel connected to their work. I feel blessed to be a small part of someone else’s life in poetry. I’ll again invoke E.M. Forster’s epigraph to Howard’s End as the golden rule for writers: “Only Connect.”

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I feel like I fall in love with every book I read. I’m reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time for the first time. I’m almost done with the second volume. Proust’s anfractuous sentences, his dramatization of obsessional, lacerating, crazy young love, and his phenomenological insights overwhelm and undo me. I’m finally learning why so many people love Proust.

I can’t not mention a book of poetry, so I also just finished an advance copy of a book called Trio: Planet Parable, Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull, and Endless Body. This is a collection of three poetry books in one by the poets Karen Donovan, Diane Raptosh, and Daneen Wardrop.

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When a poet dies there is a vast caesura, a field of lilacs interrupted by wing beats and heartbeats and aches and aches and: snugly in the ampersand at the end of a life, they shine there, an em dash, a last ellipsis, a lovely lock of gray hair on the wrist of a daughter—…&

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I love the idea of poetry as a provisional stay against reduction. This returns us again to a Rilkean notion of the poem as an experience itself (not merely as a reflection or as documentary of what happened), poem as experiential nexus, poem as dwelling place, as a Now (forever is composed of). A poem as a moment both capacious and fleeting, one pinprick in the infinite constellation of such pinpricks that make up a life. And, like any other moment, a poem is fraught, fully mysterious, brimming with nuance that is simultaneously imperative, indicative, subjunctive, interrogative, and optative.

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More and more now, my poetry addresses my loved ones directly. It’s the only conversation I can carry on now. I’m saying over and over: I love you and one day I will die. And what a miracle that is. The awe at what it is to be, the wonder of love, the terrible beauty of the nothingness that most likely bookends this consciousness writing to you. And something else amazing: our interconnectedness, the yearning for camaraderie, the attainment of simple friendship unfolding under the journeywork of the stars.

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It’s an honor to have my book joined to the books of Harvey Hix and William Heyen. I hope that more publishers follow this tripartite publishing model. Heyen and Hix are poets I deeply admire, both for their bodies of work and for how they have constructed their lives in poetry. Both men embody a poetic stance I aspire to emulate: engaged, attentive, protean, ambitious, empathetic, and endlessly curious.

Harvey’s book How It Is that We continues his interrogation and deconstruction of the sonnet form, while nimbly moving among the detritus of 21st century discourses, texts, and personae. Reading it is like looking at starlight through a field of orbiting wreckage. I feel adrift and then suddenly I’m jolted into a new way of seeing.

Bill Heyen’s The Nazi Patrol continues his project of bearing witness to the Shoah through the poison orchards of the present. Here, he employs his single-line couplets to great effect. There’s something so compulsively readable in this collection, a raw velocity that feels like a kind of falling.

Harvey and Bill have written enough for five or six lifetimes between the two of them. The amazing thing to me about the prodigious output of both men is the exceedingly high quality of the work.

If you are reading this conversation and you haven’t read Hix, I’d suggest my favorite books by him: Rain Inscription (Etuscan Press, 2017) and Perfect Hell (Gibbs Smith, 1996). I’d also suggest his remarkable translation of the Gospels and Christian apocrypha, The Gospel according to H.L. Hix (Broadstone Books, 2020).

I’d recommend Heyen’s Shoah Train (Etruscan Press, 2003) and The Cabin: Journal 1968-1984 (H_NGM_N BKS, 2012). Heyen’s journals are an incredible document. I think Phil Brady described them as the work of a 20th century Samuel Pepys. In one entry, Heyen will be having a martini with Anne Sexton. In the next, he’ll be wondering if the garbagemen took his golfclubs. He chronicles all the important events of his family life, and of his life in poetry, against the backdrop of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the moon landing, the Vietnam War, and on and on.

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Five poets I deeply admire: Adam J. Gellings, Faisal Mohyuddin, Abby E. Murray, Nicole Santalucia, and Leah Umansky. I admire these poets because of their work, but also because they are warm, empathetic, kind, and genuine on the page and off.

Adam J. Gellings doesn’t write poems so much as he partitions arrondissements of feeling on the page. Reading his work feels to me like being inside a Jim Jarmusch movie or a René Char poem.

There’s a gentle ferocity at the heart of Faisal Mohyuddin’s poetry, wildly spiritual, but grounded in the quotidian. The poem, “Allah Castles” is one of the great contemporary examples of a father-son poem; it’s also ecstatically mystical in the manner of John Donne and Rumi.

Abby E. Murray’s poetry continually seeks to define the self against the messiness of everyday life. Murray’s is a poetry of paradox and provocation, brilliantly imaginative, and exquisite in its use of language and in its intuitive movements.

Nicole Santalucia’s vocation as a poet is to astonish. She’s the only contemporary American poet whose work makes me laugh out loud consistently. She’s also working on a series of poems that engage John Ashbery’s ouevre with the seriousness and the playfulness it deserves.

Like John Ashbery, Leah Umansky doesn’t write about experiences. She writes out of them. Her poems shock me with their strange familiarity, their rhetorical acrobatics, their ability to resist the intelligence almost successfully. Hers is the contemporary poetry that embodies most for me the lines of Emily Dickinson: “Inebriate of air — am I — / And Debauchee of Dew —.”

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Alison C. Rollins’s debut collection, Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), is one of the most spectacular first books I have ever read. The first poem I read from her, “Why Is We Americans,” was published in Poetry magazine several years ago.

Alison C. Rollins’ “Why Is We Americans” begins as a riff on a line (and title) from the late work of Amiri Baraka; Rollins extrapolates the Baraka line into an anaphora-patterned meditation on notions of national belonging particular to the African American experience. The poet interweaves images from canonical western literature (“Walden pond,” “Jesus,” “Whitman,” “Orpheus,” “Darwin”) with images from the African American church (“the Pastor’s chattering chicklets,” “Psalm 23,” “mouths / washed out with the blood of the lamb”), and allusions to jazz music (“Roach and Mingus at Birdland,” Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamned,” and the concluding couplet, which references Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and raises the specter of lynching in a powerful way). The poem is as triumphant as it is incantatory, elevating sometimes mundane and sometimes extraordinary tropes into a profound celebration of Blackness. The vibrant surprising diction and the regular deployment of AAVE syntax imbue the poem with an astonishing energy at every turn: “We is clubbin’ woolly mammoths/ upside the head, jammin’ fingers in / Darwin’s white beard”; lines like these drive the poem forward with their sonic textures while continuing a critique of the exploitative and oppressive practices that vertebrae American life and American history. I love this poem. I feel like I could live in it forever—the explosive musicality of it, the joy of it, the strangeness of it. It is everything I look for in a poem: it is canny and subversive in its metapoetic view of American literature and culture, and it is infused with a hard earned duende that renders it unforgettable.

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Being a high school teacher keeps you humble. You’ve got to be tough and a little bit stupid to continue teaching in such a broken system. Teachers aren’t respected in our culture, no matter what anyone tells you, and even in a good public school like the one where I work, you are witness to systemic failures that are crushing. I teach students with learning disabilities, students from extreme poverty and abusive households, and students from great wealth. I teach unmotivated students and wonderful, striving, bright children who want to succeed. I witness deep pain and failure daily. It’s a heartbreaking job with little rewards, but I do my best to help all my students. I’ve always thought of the classroom as a poem I was composing period by period. Frost said: “a poem should begin in delight and end in wisdom.” I don’t believe that to be true for all poems, but I strive for that in each class I teach.

The job has provided me with a decent middle-class life, which has afforded me the leisure to write around my workday. It’s also kept me grounded; no matter how good of a teacher you are, on any given day an angry teenager might tell you to go fuck yourself. Teaching teenagers puts everything else in perspective. You can’t take yourself too seriously if you want to survive in the job. A sense of humor helps.

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I’m not sure how I stumbled onto Dostoyevsky, but during my senior year in high school I read Crime and Punishment, Demons (in a version titled The Possessed), The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. I read them in homeroom, I read them in remedial math class and AP English, I read them in the lunchroom, I read them in the food pantry where I volunteered each Friday after school, I read them on the bus rides home from soccer games and track meets, I read them at Mass on Sundays, and, every evening, I read them with a flashlight in bed the way seventeen-year-olds today binge-watch Netflix and scroll through TikTok. Reading those novels was the most significant experience of my adolescence, and the defining moment in my education. Dostoyevsky satisfied a hunger for experiences that were unavailable to me in the ramshackle one-horse towns of Upstate New York. Although I didn’t write in high school, my understanding of poetry owes everything to the complex psychological, spiritual, and philosophical architecture of Dostoyevsky’s (translated) prose.

My poem “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen” is itself an exercise in translation. When I reread this poem, I see it as an attempt to convey the atmosphere of those novels and that particular time in my life: the strange bewildering amalgam of desire, wonder, isolation, foolishness, brilliance, holiness, impetuosity, and tempestuousness that one only truly apprehends either in the pages of a Russian novel or in the throes of young adulthood. I’ve taught high school for many years now, and I try to keep in mind that the loneliness and vulnerability I felt as a teenager are an almost universal condition at that stage of life. My students, many of whom are learning disabled, rarely read more than 140 characters for pleasure, but they are, in their own ways, as voracious for narrative and as fragile as I was at their age. At seventeen, I burned for the fate of Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Myshkin, Alyosha, Ivan, and, of course, Dmitri. I burned for an impossible sanctified glistening St. Petersburg. Now in my forties, with a beautiful wife and two beautiful children, I burn less like I did at seventeen and more the way G. M. Hopkins’s “fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls.” What I wanted then, but didn’t know it, is what I have now, and is also what lit Dostoyevsky’s pen: (simple, lambent, clarifying) love.

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I write because I love. To write is to love. I write because I love to read, and writing leads me into a deeper critical engagement with the art, music, and literature I love. It also leads me into a deeper emotional engagement with the quotidian, with the people and places I love, and with the experiences that are always washing over me, and I wish I could keep forever. I write because I love the world and I don’t want it to end. I don’t strive to immortalize a gesture, per se. I just want to be a small part of a conversation that is way bigger than me.

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I suppose all poetry is infused with an erotic energy at every turn. I wouldn’t know where to start with a list of erotically charged poems (although Dickinson, Whitman, and Hopkins come to mind as being electrically sensual in their use of language). I was listening to a podcast with some of Carolyn Kizer’s erotic poetry yesterday. I also think immediately of Sharon Olds and Adrienne Rich. My old friend, Robert Frost, has some surprisingly sexual poems (“Putting in the Seed” and “The Subverted Flower” are shocking and sexy in the way that other more explicit poems could never be).

I also admire Galway Kinnell’s “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” a poem whose poignancy increases when read against the whole body of work (especially when read against the poems written after his wife had died). This is a poem that is more in line with the way sex figures in my own work. Relatively speaking, however, there is hardly any sex in my poetry. (Maybe there should be more.)

I write love poems. All my poems are love poems to my wife. If I had to think of an audience, my audience is my wife and children. Or maybe myaudience is myself. If you read my book, you are overhearing a conversation I am having with myself and with my wife and children, part of the endless nocturnal conversation of a marriage, part of the squabbles and celebrations of a family gathering.

If a nipple pokes through the cashmere of one of my poems, it’s only to privilege the amative, adhesive, and intimate over the historical and the broadly social. It’s only to say to my darling bride, we are human and our bodies will betray us, but they are also our glory in the ever unfolding present of this poem we find ourselves in right now called matrimony.

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Kenneth Koch, adding to the famous adage by Wallace Stevens, said: “Not only is all poetry experimental, but all that is truly experimental is poetry.”

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William Stafford wrote: “We may be surrounded by a system of talking and writing that falsifies event after event, decision after decision, relation after relation. Tangled in this system, we perpetuate it. Like porpoises in a drift net, the harder we try, the more we are entangled…When a writer works, he is like someone who sets himself in a closed room and then invents new exits.”

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James Longenbach has written: “Wonder is the reinvention of humility, the means by which we fall in love with the world.”

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Last year, I reread Moby Dick. The first time I read the novel I was sixteen, so most of it went over my head. Rereading it as an adult I was most surprised by Melville’s humor. I see that same humor in his letters. For instance, Melville threatens to call the constable on Hawthorne if he doesn’t come for a visit; Melville also says that employing “a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the Deity” betrays “a slight dash of flunkeyism.” In reading these words, I thought of that poem by Hafiz where he says that he and God are like two giant fat people in a tiny boat.

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First, of course, I was named after a poet. The Divine Comedy played an important role in my family history. My great grandfather brought a copy of it with him when he came to America from Sicily. Poetry was a constant, if muted, presence throughout my childhood. My grandmother loved Frost and Sandberg and Millay. She would occasionally recite for us the poems she’d memorized in grade school (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fog,” “First Fig”). My father, who was a postal worker, loved Emily Dickinson, so her books were always around, and I read her at an early age. We also had The Iliad, The Odyssey, Don Quixote (I remember reading the poems in the preface to the novel at an early age), The Aeneid, El Cid. I think my father had taken a course on classic literature at the community college and those were the books on the syllabus. My mother, who was a stay-at-home mom and then a secretary when I was growing up, was a great reader too. Both of my parents were extremely religious Roman Catholics (my mother converted from Baptist to Catholic), so there was the poetry of the Bible as well, especially The Book of Job, The Psalms, The Book of Proverbs, The Song of Songs.

I’ve always loved reading, and from grade school on I kept a journal. When I was eighteen, I read Allen Ginsberg, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Gerard Manley Hopkins for the first time. That trio of poets made me want to write poetry. I continued to write because I fell so in love with poetry in all its varied forms, and writing it helped me (continues to help me) to be a better reader of it. My writing life will always be subordinate to my reading life.

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Don Quixote is as real to me as any friend I’ve had in the past forty years. A Love Supreme is as inhabitable in my memory as the first time I met my wife. The paintings of Marc Chagall appear as warmly in my mind’s eye as the face of my long dead great grandmother. Writing a highly allusive poetry allows me to celebrate all the lives fountaining through my own; those lives include the lives of loved ones and friends, and, also, the lives of the artists, musicians, and writers I love. I don’t like to make distinctions between high and low culture. Who’s to say that The Low End Theory or Paul’s Boutique isn’t as valuable a cultural artifact as Sketches of Spain or Philip Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts? I just write about things and people I love, and experiences that compel me (most of which are bound up in some way with art, music, and literature.)

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I don’t see myself as a political poet (or as any other type of poet, for that matter). It’s probably true that all writing is political in some way. From the time I first started reading poetry seriously in the late 90s, I’ve been interested in poetry of the political imagination; Carolyn Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting, was an important early introduction to a global poetry of witness. Some of my favorite poets write directly political poems: Amiri Baraka, William Blake, Martín Espada, Miguel Hernández, Federico García Lorca, and Patricia Smith (to name a few). I do like to keep in mind John Ashbery’s caveat about political poetry: “there is not much ‘political’ poetry that I like for the reason that the political sentiments reiterated in it are usually the exact ones I harbor, and I would rather learn something new.” As far as the role of the poet in the social landscape goes, I believe that depends on the poet. There are as many different roles for poets as there are poets themselves. One role that most poets share is (to paraphrase Roethke) to create art that undoes the damage of haste.

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Growing up in a strictly observant Roman Catholic household, literature and faith were bound together in my earliest memories. The first stories I knew were from the Bible and from the lives of the saints. Jonah, Noah, Ruth, Job, Samson, Saint Francis of Assisi, and, of course, Jesus, were the first literary figures to capture my imagination. As I grew older, I continued to read the Bible and the Church Fathers, especially Augustine and Irenaeus. I also became interested in mystical writers like Saint Theresa of Avila, Saint John of the Cross, and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. As I entered my college years, I discovered my favorite writer, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and read widely in the work of Thomas Merton. Merton led me to explore Eastern religions and philosophies. Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling was a revelation to me: the notion that “faith is a process of infinite becoming” still resonates with me and challenges me today. As a young adult, I seriously considered becoming a priest, inspired by Dostoyevsky’s novels, and driven by my orthodox upbringing. I have since become a husband and father. I have long since given up practicing an organized religion, but I have profound admiration and respect for those who continue to constitute their faith in communities of worship. Poetry and my reading life have assumed all the characteristics of my former prayer life. I believe that the truths derived from literature are the same as the truths derived from scripture. I believe that we are all broken and that our brokenness constitutes our communion—this is the central truth behind every religion and every sacred text, the unsaid truth that underwrites every great poem, novel, essay, and story.

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My process varies from poem to poem, but for the most part now, I come up with an idea, a phrase, a title for a poem and when I have time, I sit down and write a draft. For most poems, a draft will take about two hours to write and I’m reading aloud and revising as I write. Sometimes, I might begin a poem during my lunch break (I work as a high school English teacher) and then finish it after the last bell rings and before I pick up my daughter from daycare. Then, I might go back to it after the children are asleep or in the morning before work. Usually, I take a poem as far as I can within a few days, reading it aloud and revising it as necessary. Then, I set it aside, and either send it out to magazines or just let it breathe in a word document (I mostly write on the computer).

Sometimes, there might be minor revisions from that point until it is published in a book. And even after that, there are lingering questions. For example, in the poem that starts this interview, I’m not happy with the rhythm of the line: “my dear little one. Teach me what the fire.” I think it might be better to change the sentence structure of the poem so that the line reads: “Teach me, my dear little one, what the fire…” If I’m ever lucky enough to have a Selected or Collected poems, I might make that change, but I’m also aware of many poets (Auden comes to mind) who tinkered too much with old poems. I’m no Auden, of course, but I understand the impulse toward endless refinement, and how corrosive that impulse can be.

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Like many contemporary American poets, I write countless sonnets. I’ve written much of my poetry in ten-syllable lines, sometimes in a kind of Miltonic blank verse, but often just letting the rhythms ride (and writhe) against the syllabic constraints. I’ve written prose poetry consistently throughout the years, inspired by David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, which has been one of the most important, and most often revisited, anthologies in my reading life. Nin Andrews, I’d argue, is the greatest living practitioner of the American prose poem. It’s a form I love to read and think about. For about a year, I’ve been writing in a stanzaic nonce pattern I’m calling “stepped septasyllabic cinquains.”

It’s a fancy way of describing seven syllable per line, five-line stanzas, written in a recurring zigzag pattern. Here’s a few stanzas from Midwhistle, where I’m invoking William Heyen and ruminating on his Whitmanian and Dickinsonian pedigree:

Sing for us, the dragonfly
in the arc of an anthem,
the bumblebee zigzagging
the sidelines of an empire.
I praise your Lord Dragonfly,

Bill, & praise the ambition
it must take to un-Amherst
a clover & a bee from
the funerals in a brain,
from the prairie and its yawp.

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Ha! I don’t think I’ve mastered any forms, but I have certainly tried to (with varying degrees of success). I’ve written hundreds of failed villanelles, thousands of botched haiku, fifty or so unremarkable sestinas, and a rusty old red wheelbarrow full of ballads, triolets, rondeaus, bops, kwansabas, pantoums, haibun, ghazals, abecedarians, and so on. I have one sestina in Lullaby, and one kwansaba suite and an abecedarian in my second book, but I haven’t mastered any of those forms. Nevertheless, I enjoy working in those forms, especially when I’m thinking about a poem that I love written in that form. It’s so impressive to me when a contemporary poet writes in one of these inherited forms in a way that expands the structure and strengthens the tradition. I think with wonder and admiration of how a poem like Tim Seibles’s “All the Time Blues Villanelle” can go toe to toe with “The Waking” and “One Art” and “Mad Girl’s Love Song” and “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night.”

Sometimes, I choose the form before writing the poem. That approach doesn’t often result in a poem I’m willing to send out into the world. I’ll write a sestina, but it will feel forced or academic or less immediately resonant than I want it to be, or it’s just not making sense in the way I’d like it to make sense, so I’ll set it aside and never think of it again. Most often though, the form will suggest itself organically as I’m writing. At some point, maybe even within the first few words, I’ll see that this poem wants to effloresce into a sonnet, or this is a prose poem, or this demands quatrains. Then, I will work toward the form by accretion and improvisation and revision-in-the-moment.

Since you can’t really understand a form until you’ve performed in it, my experimentation with inherited forms is another adjunct to my reading life. When I write a sonnet, I become more intimate with every sonnet I’ve ever read or will read in the future.

My first three books of poetry also use form as an organizing principle. Sonnets thread through the books as do prose poems and other poetic structures in much the same way that themes and tropes thread the collections, providing order amid a species of repetition.

Lastly, as H.L. Hix notes in Lines of Inquiry, all poetry is formal poetry. Every choice a poet makes in a poem is a matter of form. The term “formal poetry” is as redundant as “free jazz.”

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For me, keeping the poem turned outward helps. If I imagine that I’m talking to my children and my wife and my brother and my mother and my friends on the page, then right away I avoid the pitfalls of self-indulgence. Even when a self speaks, the lyric decenters and atomizes it as it’s searching for communion.

I once heard Zadie Smith say that her best self gets put on the page. I tend to feel that way too. The fact is I do have a deep sympathy and affection for the world and the things and people and animals in it, and I want to say it over and over and over again before I die. I’m willing to risk sentimentality and self-indulgence to do that.

I want you to feel my poems in your knuckles, as I do. I want them to tap your clavicle and say we are the same even though we are different. The first-person gets me there.

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I have 2010 Toyota Corolla with a CD player in it. So, on my way to and from work or running errands, I always listen to poetry CDs. Usually, it’s Hopkins, Frost, Ginsberg, or Ruth Stone, but last year I had an 18 CD version of Paradise Lost and I listened to it for months and months. I would replay each CD several times before moving on to the next one, and eventually I finished, but I still don’t feel like I know John Milton well enough.

When Louise Glück won the Nobel, I realized I hadn’t read much of her work. I’d read part of an essay collection she wrote and a few stray poems, but nothing else. I realized my understanding of the world and poetry is vertebraed by all the writing I haven’t read as much as it is by what I have. I bought Glück’s collected poems, but I still don’t know her as well as I should.

I’m also curious about contemporary Italian poetry. I wish I could read Italian, and I wish more contemporary Italian poets were translated into English. My friend Marella Feltrin-Morris did some amazing translations of a contemporary Italian poet named Francesco Targhetta, and her translations left me hungry for more.

Several recently read books still idling on my nightstand: What Monsters You Make of Them by Christian Teresi, Red Studio by Murray Silverstein, Elswhere: An Elegy by Faisal Mohyuddin, Of Tyrant by Leah Umansky, and Marie Howe’s New and Selected.

I recently reorganized by bookshelves and put all of William Heyen’s books and all of H.L. Hix’s books on one bookcase next to my easy chair in my bedroom. In the last five years, I have really dug into Heyen and Hix and I am always learning new things from those two; they are somehow always new to me.

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All the things I’ve done for other poets, I am also doing for myself because it’s fun and because I love poetry and poets so much. I have learned that I always have time, even when I don’t. I am always learning how, again and again to persevere in the face of rejection. I don’t take things personally and I don’t view my relationships with other writers and editors as transactional. When I do something for someone, I don’t expect anything in return. I try to do the things for other writers that I wish someone would do for me (and to do things that have been done for me along the way). I’ve learned that I don’t care about promoting my own writing as much as I care about promoting the writing of others. I’m not desperate for attention when it comes to my poetry. If my wife and kids read it, and a handful of friends like you, I feel lucky.

I’ve learned again and again to be humble even as I remain ambitious, and to look at everything related to poetry as an adventure. I’ve also learned that sometimes I must dial back and reprioritize.

Lastly, I learned that small gestures of support matter: going to readings for other poets, sending someone a one-line emails praising a poem of theirs you read, buying their books directly from small presses and sharing them with friends. We should all be doing these things more often.

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To stay authentic: stay vulnerable. Move outside your circle of friends. The provincialism of the cosmopolitan and the closed loop of university and college life has created some unfortunate Cul de sacs in contemporary American poetry. At the same time, one of the most pernicious aspects of daily life in America is the ingrained anti-intellectualism that appears to be the default setting for many of our fellow citizens.

Do things for other people. Volunteer. Teach in a high school. Work for a nonprofit. Have children. I realize not everyone can or should do those things, but I mean to suggest that you are going to remain authentic to yourself and to your art if you spend more time deeply engaging with, and busily singing through, the world, and less time turned inward.

The great thing about poetry is that there is no audience. As Tim Green has pointed out, a handful of poetry “bestsellers” are assigned in syllabi across the nation. A handful of poets are on the lips of the poetry cognoscenti for a few years and then are replaced by a handful more. The poetry middle class, those of us lucky enough to publish at small university presses, prop up the poetry luminaries of the moment and put money in the pockets of literary institutions.

For every Rupi Kaur and Billy Collins and Mary Oliver and Amanda Gorman who breaks through to a wider audience, there are a hundred Dante Di Stefanos. I don’t find this situation lamentable. I don’t want to be a pop star. It would be nice if thousands of people read my poems, but for me, especially now, as I said earlier in this exchange, I’m only writing for my wife and children, and for all the writers I love, living and dead.

Contradictorily, I do believe in unfettered quixotic ambition. I do aspire to write a poem as durable and infinite as “The Wreck of the Deutschland” or “Sonnet 18,” or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” or “Goblin Market,” or “Lady Lazarus,” or “won’t you celebrate with me,” or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

I have interacted with many people at all levels in the poetry world who feel like they haven’t received the accolades and attention they deserve. While I can understand this feeling, I also think it’s ridiculous. When you focus too narrowly on audience and recognition, you are missing the point of our shared art, which is to dwell inside poems and to live by poetry, which is a great way to move through the brief instant of a life bookended by darkness.

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I find inspiration from my daily life, from my family, from my friends, from my memories, from things that I see when I’m walking the dog, from my job, from music, from movies and television, from art, and, most of all, from my reading life.

I’ve spent many years writing and reading poetry daily. Now, I write when the mood strikes me and when circumstances permit. Like most poets, I have left years and years and thousands and thousands of bad poems in my wake. I think of all the marble composition notebooks, floppy disks, and old laptops full of my embarrassingly bad poems gone to rest in some landfill somewhere. I am grateful for all those years of woodshedding that brought me to where I am today. Still, I go through periods where nothing that I write works out the way I’d hoped, but I never feel frustrated. Writing is always a joy and a pleasure and a privilege that I don’t take for granted. I am ambitious with my poetry. I want to write great poetry, but for me it’s not so much about striking gold. It’s more about living a life of poetry. At the end of the preface for Generations, Phil Brady quotes a letter from Harvey Hix that reads: “To live by poetry. Which of course I want to read in more than one sense: live robustly and fully by means of poetry; order one’s life according to values derived from poetry; live in proximity to poetry.” To live by poetry. That’s all I want.