Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in their Own Words

INTRODUCTION

Someone once asked Robert Frost to explain one of his poems, and Frost said, ‘Oh, you want me to say it worse?!’

—Billy Collins, October 10, 2011

Robert Frost didn’t like to explain his poems—and for good reason: to explain a poem is to suck the air from its lungs. This does not mean, however, that poets shouldn’t talk about their poetry, or that one shouldn’t ask questions about it. Rather, it suggests that any discussion of poetry should celebrate its ultimate ineffability and in so doing lead one to further inquiry. I think of that wonderful scene from Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, where Mosche the Beadle of the local synagogue, in dialogue with the young, precocious author, explains: Every question possesses a power that does not lie in the answer. It is my hope that the discussions in Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in Their Own Words illuminate these poets and their poems in such a way that one may access valuable insights into the magic and mystery of their works, and be compelled to ask more questions.

Each poem is an instance of possession, Robert Glück confides. When you read someone in a deep way your thoughts and your rhythms are taken over. After six years of intense reading and serious engagement with the works of these writers, I’ve come to understand Glück’s words in ways even I could not predict. While sequencing the discussions for this book, I realized certain relationships between a number of the writers that were previously obscured by my knowledge of movements and schools. Bin Ramke and Scott Cairns may hold vastly different aesthetic notions but many of their poems are shaped by an intimate knowledge of scripture; Arthur Sze and Nathalie Handal possess very different artistic temperaments, yet they both understand the complex ways in which world and national literatures inform each other—and how, in fact, the distinctions between them are ever shifting; Glück and Carol Frost’s views on narrative may at first seem oppositional, yet some of their statements about it are surprisingly similar. These are just a few examples.

But the most conspicuous and pervasive commonality among these poets is a shared respect for and allegiance to the father of American poetry, Walt Whitman, with whom many in these pages have come to terms. Gary Young says, Whitman’s propulsive verse was one of the catalyzing agents that led me toward a notion of a ‘horizontal poetry.’ Michael Waters cites Whitman’s blab of the pave, in which colloquialisms, slang and vulgarity are accepted into poetic utterance, as an influential strategy for contemporary poets. Martín Espada credits Whitman with establishing the traditions of political poetry and radical democracy in Anglo and Latin American letters, traditions that Espada, Gary Soto, and Handal have absorbed through Pablo Neruda and others. Gerald Stern acknowledges his Whitmanlike tendency to embrace everything. Mark Doty is one of countless authors working on a book about Whitman. Kevin Killian embodies Whitman’s inclusiveness, and like Whitman, finds inspiration in the low as well as high elements of the culture. Whitman’s presence was so pervasive in these discussions that, midway through the process, I realized that through him I could tie the collection together. Not surprisingly, then, a passage from Song of Myself—alluded to by Espada in our discussion—furnishes this book’s title:

        I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,

        By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

Indeed, all the poets in Passwords Primeval speak their passwords to mysteries linked with the world’s oldest secrets. Perhaps the greatest of these involves our own mortality. Whitman certainly thought so. In Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking he calls death, The word final, superior to all. With forceful candor, Billy Collins echoes that sentiment when he says, The theme of my poetry is basically me . . . and death. Dara Wier is a bit more philosophical: We are all in the same boat when it comes to the fact that we are creatures with an expiration date. The fact that we are still able to have love in our lives and are sometimes happy is all mixed together with this knowledge of our eventual death.

Ultimate though death may be, it is not the only mystery the poets in Passwords Primeval explore. Jane Hirshfield contends, What you see in the development of poetry over the millennia is an ever-widening range of subjects being investigated in ever-widening ways . . . the thrill is not only beautiful speech, but beautiful speech that makes a discovery. Related to Hirshfield’s notion of discovery is what Soto apprehends as the search for truth beyond words: There is something symbolic groping underneath the language in a poem, he says. No matter how transparent or opaque that language may be, poets and readers of poetry must attune themselves to the deeper questions nesting beneath a poem’s surface. Some poets set out in search of large questions. Others find answers in their own familiars: I think we spend so much time looking for the huge answers right in front of us, Patricia Smith says. We think there’s an answer that comes from high up that will trickle down to us and solve everything. It doesn’t exist.

But whether the poets in Passwords Primeval consider poetry an apt medium for exploring universal themes or a means to record and transform the particulars of their environment, it is clear that these authors possess an intellectual curiosity that gives their work rigor and texture. Mark Doty explains, I’m interested in how we make our knowledge, how we map the world, constructing a sense of our relation to what it is . . . this action of meaning-making. For Doty and the rest of the poets here, this act of meaning-making, though subjective, is anything but solipsistic: it requires concentration, an understanding of the nature of reality and existence beyond one’s self. I don’t see how poems could be other than steeped in intellectual matter, Ramke insists. Poets like Ramke, Sze, and Hirshfield engage the discourses of science and philosophy on a routine basis; Glück digests the language of critical theory; Killian and Frost look with relish to the visual arts; Handal and Espada respond with mind and heart to the language of politics.

In addition to the breadth of their interests, these poets are conscious of a literary tradition that rewards formal innovation. Waters’ work with syllabics has lent strength and dignity to a process too often trivialized by poets and critics. Young’s prose poems share structural affinities with Petrarchan sonnets, a centuries-old verse form Karen Volkman celebrates and deconstructs. Likewise, Frost’s invention of conceptual forms demonstrates her ability to blend new ideas with preexisting structures. Sze and Wier use unrhymed couplets to create linguistic and visual space, and reduce syntactic clutter. Dorianne Laux and Doty build images through enumeration and lush details. Clearly poets adopt certain composition strategies that speak to individual temperament; the diversity of approaches discussed in this book demonstrates the accommodating nature of American poetry. So much is possible. All seems permitted. Whitman’s legacy persists in the twenty-first century.

The interviews in Passwords Primeval are not typical in the sense most people understand the medium. Instead of a series of quick-fire questions that call for equally quick, breezy responses, these are closer to heightened discussions—well-formed dialogues emerging through sustained development and negotiation. Thus they are also collaborations. In each instance, I tailored questions specific to individual participants based primarily on their published works. This meant months of preparation were required for each interview. It was a labor of love, for what poetry enthusiast wouldn’t want to immerse oneself in the works of poets as fine as these? It’s like you’re taking a course in each writer you interview, Laux observed at the end of one of our phone discussions—and she was right.

In positioning myself as a self-motivated student, I had to master the art of humility. Too many interviewers use the medium as a prop for their ideas. I wanted my presence in these discussions to prod the interview subject towards a greater articulation of his or her poetics. This meant allowing myself to risk occasional moments of professed ignorance, and to posit misreadings at others. In such cases, I did not edit my blunders from the discussions because the poets’ responses to them helped clarify their own views more effectively.

These discussions, conducted between 2006 and 2012, were collated and reshaped from several conversations using different mediums for communication. Face-to-face interactions were always preferred but not always possible; even when they were, almost all of the poets received my questions in advance of our meeting. In every case, an in-person encounter was followed by further edits and clarifications during ensuing e-mail exchanges.

Many poets preferred to write their answers. This initially surprised me, since doing so required of them a lot more commitment. I soon realized that poets, perhaps even more than writers of fiction, are afraid of being misunderstood and therefore welcome the chance to present themselves as they wish to be seen. While this approach was useful, I augmented each poet’s written responses with an hour-long discussion via telephone, which I then transcribed and inserted carefully into the prepared portions. In this way, I was able to ensure a healthy dose of spontaneity and surprise, and to tease from each participant certain observations that might not have surfaced if the discourse wasn’t improvised.

Cursed be the writer who first allowed a journalist to reproduce his remarks freely! Milan Kundera laments in his essay Sixty-three Words. No matter how these interviews were conducted, each poet featured in Passwords Primeval was given the opportunity to observe the finished result and make sure all elements of it met with his or her approval. This pleased me as much as it did the poets, for it now means this anthology collects official documents.

Not every interview found its way into this book. For reasons of space, BOA Publisher Peter Conners and I limited the collection to 20 writers. The writers were selected based on many factors, including aesthetic difference, thematic variety, gender identification, and, most crucially, the strength of their interviews. The result is a unique mix of the usual suspects with less-expected voices. I’m quite certain, for example, this is the first anthology to feature Laux, Ramke, and Killian alongside one another. But then any anthology must be seen as a subjective compilation of its editor: ultimately, I chose these poets because I admire their work.

Contemporary American Poetry is a vast, evolving entity that does not cohere in some neat, manageable form. Although Passwords Primeval does not pretend to fully represent the diversity of poetry written by Americans in the last 40 years, a front-to-back reading of the book will demonstrate an astonishing interconnectedness, as if each voice echoes another from opposite ends of the same canyon.

Kundera, Milan. Sixty-Three Words. The Art of the Novel. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Grove, 1986.

Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself. Leaves of Grass: 150th Anniversary Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2005.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.

WRITING BY EAR: AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL WATERS

In his autobiographical essay, The Bicycle and the Soul, Michael Waters recalls his memorable encounters with Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell, two Post-War poets of very different temperament whom Waters has understood and absorbed. Like Ginsberg, Waters writes bold, fiery poems that challenge oppression and celebrate one’s right to sexual and political freedoms. Like Lowell, Waters can be intensely personal yet formally strict. In his earlier poems, he used traditional procedures to achieve remarkably subtle, individual rhythms, an approach he later exchanged for the equally demanding rigors of syllabic verse. In this second phase, Waters has achieved his greatest distinction, for poems like Black Olives (from Darling Vulgarity) and Mrs. Snow White (from Gospel Night) rank among the best examples of syllabic verse in English. A consummate craftsman, Waters also edits the widely used anthology Contemporary American Poetry. A passionate teacher and mentor to countless emerging writers, he demonstrates time and time again that the best poets embrace their influences and transcend them. He has received many prizes and honors, including three Puschart Prizes and a fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently teaches at Monmouth and Drew Universities.

You once told me that a reviewer of The Burden Lifters (1989) observed that the book displayed a dizzying variety of forms and styles. The implication here was that you favored eclecticism over a consistency; but even a superficial perusal of Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001) proves that you persist in a handful of classic stanzaic forms—couplets, tercets, quatrains—and syllabic, non-stanzaic poems that accumulate anywhere from 25–50 lines. Can you speak about the importance of form in your verse?

I seem to need some sort of form to ground my free verse, and believe that any good free verse contains formal gestures. Robert Bly refers to his own poems as free verse with distinct memories of form. Without form, poetry is often, if not always, prose. Many hold up William Carlos Williams’s The Red Wheelbarrow as an example of a good free verse poem. But there’s really nothing free about this poem. It’s broken into short-lined couplets. Each first line of the couplet has a precise number of words: three. Each second line of the couplet has a precise number of words: one. Each of those one-word lines consists of two syllables. The poem has a formal shape, though it’s still considered free verse.

Williams invents the poem’s shape for this occasion using nonce form.

Yes. I began writing in rhyme and meter. The first poems I published were rhymed-quatrain imitations of Richard Wilbur, the poet I most admired when I was 19 and 20. Earlier, in high school, I’d begun reading the Beats: Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso. But I went to college in 1967, and my first English class was Contemporary Literature, taught by Gregory FitzGerald, who had just come from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. He used Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry as well as Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry. Hall’s anthology opened me to poets like Wilbur and W. D. Snodgrass. I was fascinated by the way they were able to give shape to their poetic narratives. So I began writing in form, mainly to give shape to my own narratives, otherwise my poems were just sprawling all over the place; all the word-spewing I had taken from Ginsberg needed to be reined in. Wilbur, for example, showed me to do that. Despite his influence, despite my early use of rhyming quatrains, the poems included in my first book, Fish Light (1975), still seem to me to be rather shapeless. I was aware of this. I was so concentrated on the image as the central element of the poem, and believed that the poem could stand on images alone. But I remember sending some poems to a journal, and the editor responding, These poems have many wonderful images, perhaps too many. I thought, "What does that mean?" I thought of the editor’s remark later when I watched the film Amadeus. Do you remember when the emperor tells Mozart that his compositions are filled with too many notes, and Mozart replies, Which notes? Still, I was struck by the editor’s remarks. He was complementary of my verse, but he was responding to something I hadn’t spent enough time considering. That first book was not as crafted or attentive to language as my others. When I moved toward forms in my second book, Not Just Any Death (1979), I slowed down, and began working more consciously with quatrains, often unrhymed or loosely rhymed.

I have noticed in those poems quite a bit of slant and internal rhyming.

Exactly. I learned slant rhyming from Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare, whom I, now in college, began reading seriously. Ways and grace, or God and cloud—those sorts of rhymes from traditional verse. Vernon Watkins, the English poet and critic, wrote, Poetry rhymes all along the lines, not only at the ends. All along the lines: this idea stayed with me, especially when I discovered John Logan’s poetry in 1969 or 1970. Logan was doing precisely what Watkins required. So, for me, working with quatrains became a way of organizing not only the narrative materials, but also the sounds of the poems. I continued to use tight stanzaic structures—quatrains, couplets, and tercets—through successive books, especially Anniversary of the Air (1985) and The Burden Lifters (1989), becoming comfortable with that structure so that, eventually, I again needed to break away.

Some of the newer poems in Parthenopi, such as God at Forty and Cognac, and the title poem in Darling Vulgarity, are written in syllabic verse. More precisely, you adapt a variation of decasyllabic meter, where your lines alternate between thirteen and seven syllables each. What are some of your reasons for working in this form?

When Brad Leithauser reviewed Richard Howard’s Inner Voices: Selected Poems (New York Times Book Review, November 21, 2004), he wrote, As systems go, syllabic verse has little to recommend it, except for one puzzling thing: It works. With some frequency, the eccentric discipline it imposes seems to push everyday utterance into memorability. After my first few books, I found myself moving toward the syllabic verse that I had noticed in John Logan’s poetry. The syllabic system you see in God at Forty, for example, became a means for me to break up the quatrain while not always relying on a precise decasyllabic line, which occurs in some of my poems. The alternation between thirteen- and seven-syllable lines enables me to cast out a long line, adding three syllables to the decasyllabic line, and then pull back by three syllables in the next seven-syllable line.

It creates a tension between expansiveness and compression.

The interplay between the thirteen- and seven-syllable lines allows me to adopt a more conversational tone. This syllabic system enabled me to think not only vertically as the poem moves down the page, but horizontally as the language flows across the page. The integral unit of poetry is the line itself: the line as a unit unto itself, that requires its own context and which, out of the context of the rest of the poem, needs to remain interesting. Each line requires balance and heft, and needs to express certain tactile qualities. Writing in syllabic forms was not inhibitive in terms of my thinking; in fact, I found it liberating. After writing this way for several years, I found myself thinking naturally along syllabic lines. I could hear people in conversation speaking lines of thirteen and seven syllables! Half of my next book, Darling Vulgarity (2006), consists of poems written in this strict syllabic system or some variation of it.

A poet working in syllabics faces some significant challenges. One of the challenges is to avoid a prosy sounding line. Another is to create a line-ending that is both consistent with the syllabic pattern and aesthetically pleasing in itself. When you write in syllabics are you conscious of using a variety of sound and rhythmic patterns that will bolster the line?

Very much so. Any verse is weak when it is not attentive to sound work, to tactile qualities divorced from literal meaning. Williams talks about this in his Autobiography: the words themselves beyond the mere thought expressed. I’ve read so many interviews with or critical articles by twentieth-century artists who talk about the importance of composition in paintings and photographs. Henri Cartier-Bresson takes a postcard of a painting to the museum, then turns it upside down in front of the painting to compare images: You can see it more clearly this way. The subject is no longer emphasized. In an undated, unpublished article titled What Is the Use of Poetry? Williams mentions the pleasure of reading backward, from somewhere near the end back to the beginning and thus finishing. I find my own sensual pleasure greatly increased by so doing. I am much better able to judge the force of the work in this way.

Reversing not word sounds but syntax?

I like to do this just to hear the sounds that exist on the page. I remain aware of the way words clamor against each other or with each other, the musical phrasings, the chiming effects that occur. Such sound work takes the place of the more traditional metrics of my apprenticeship, and becomes a means of keeping the entire poem in the foreground. Each line of poetry should bring forward all of the lines before it, and it can do this through rhyme, through chiming devices, and through what Norman Dubie in a recent interview called rhythmical contracts. The line should be attentive to sounds that occurred in previous lines, and should anticipate, even require, in terms of such sounds, lines that follow. So if there is revision—and I’m constantly revising poems while I’m writing them—it’s like the effect betting has on a tote board. Suddenly all the numbers have flipped. One might imagine that in order to make a painting it’s simply a question of placing one detail next to another, Alberto Giacometti stated. But that’s not it. It’s a question of creating a complete entity all at once. The whole poem must be reexamined syllable by syllable to see if other changes are required.

Let’s see how some of this sound work can be evinced in a poem like God at Forty. One of the qualities I like about this poem is the respect you have for the end of the line, which is one of the major problems I see with syllabic poems. Lesser poets working in this form tend to get sloppy towards the end of the line and are primarily concerned with making sure the syllabic count is consistent. Line endings like the, of, or and, for example, better be justified. But in God at Forty, you are clearly aware of the important position of information at the end of the line. This integrity is evident even when you end with a conjunction like but, as you do in the following line:

He never answers prayers, but

That but is crucial to an understanding of the line as its own unit of meaning and in terms of its relationship to other lines. The line begins with an absolute statement, He [God] never answers prayers, which gets negated or undercut in the final word. This negation is particularly potent here because, within the line, the negation of the absolute reveals the persona’s complicated relationship to God and to faith.

And yet the lack of concern for line shape and sound that you speak of is not endemic to syllabic verse alone. While line endings are crucial, there are many poets—Sharon Olds, for example—who end lines with words like of and the because they are more concerned with the vertical thrust of the poem, the progression of the narrative, than with the horizontal thrust of the language. I admire the intensity of Olds’s work and its commitment to forward movement, but I don’t think she crafts an interesting line. She is able to write a powerful poem while not attending to the line as carefully as she might. This is possible for her. Louis Simpson is a master of tone and humor. But that’s not what I’m interested in doing with my own work. You can only get to do anything, Giacometti also stated, by limiting yourself to an extremely small field. Ultimately, we must play to our strengths.

God at Forty means to be a playful poem. The line you quoted that ends with but—which is an unusual line ending for me—means to be a playful line. It does what you say it does: states an absolute that then is immediately undercut by the but, which also anticipates the information on the next line. In terms of end rhyme—and this is not a fully end-rhymed poem, of course—but leads a few lines down first to lost, then to shut, that, and out.

While poets often pay attention to how a line ends, too many poets begin a line in weakness, as if they’re taking a breath, then struggling uphill. The more interesting language tends to appear—if it appears at all—toward the end of the line. At the beginning you find mostly prepositions, conjunctions, or pronouns. In the right hands, such as Seamus Heaney’s, you can avoid such words or integrate them into the poem, making them absolutely essential, equal in importance to any other words; you can bring such words into the foreground. This intrigued Williams. His compositions on the page were meant, in part, to move all the language of the poem into the foreground. In doing this, he was influenced by modern art, by those paintings in which the canvas, having traditionally featured a foreground subject against a background, was suddenly shattered. The distinction between foreground and background was lost. The painting was no longer a window into the world. When you viewed such a painting, you were stopped, made aware of the textures of the painting, its colors and shapes. Williams attempted this with language. In any poem I write, syllabic or otherwise, I’m conscious of trying to balance the line by giving it a beginning, a middle, and an end. In God at Forty, words such as into, to, or of begin a few of the lines, but more often words such as noodle, slabbed, late, predict, traditional, and postmodernists start each line.

Or the wonderful line:

Rain quickens the white dwarf pines.

The first word, Rain, determines the heavily-stressed rhythm for the rest of the line.

That observation leads me to something that I try to teach. If we choose two symbols—not the ictus or breve to signify stressed or unstressed syllables—one to denote a word that seems crucial and the other a word that somehow seems less crucial, I would like a line of poetry to contain more of the former. So when I consider the line you just quoted, five of those six words—Rain, quickens, white, dwarf, pines—seem necessary and interesting.

But even in the context of rhythm, the the is crucial. In Rain quickens the white dwarf pines, the line is heavily stressed with sprung rhythms. The article the is an unstressed or, in Hopkins’s terminology, a riding syllable that sweeps the latter half of quickens and itself from two heavily stressed and slower syllables (Rain and quick) into three more heavily stressed syllables (white, dwarf, and pines). You need the the there.

We can’t write without those articles. Otherwise our English will sound like the phony Indian language in old Westerns! Here’s another line from the same poem:

Rain spatters the cabin roof.

Four of the five words in the line are crucial. I want my students—those beginning writers—to think, I’m winning this ballgame four-to-one. Not only are four of the five words in the line essential in terms of content, they’re crucial in terms of sound: the alliteration of rain and roof; the slant-rhyme of rain and the last syllable of cabin. I’m conscious of the way the line sounds. Here’s one more:

One hushed breeze freshens the crab apple blossoms upstate

Again, there are thirteen syllables and twelve of them seem to me to be crucial. I’m not taking anything away from the article. The idea of democracy in language is important. Democracy was the great subject of Walt Whitman; for William Carlos Williams, who was influenced by Whitman and who was, by the way, his contemporary for nine years, democracy was an essential idea in terms of form. I think of the craft that he brings to the poem. All words are created equal has been important to me. What I see happening in contemporary poetry is that the subject matter is often more important than the language used to express that subject. Such poems lack balance. There are poets who lean in the other direction, who give themselves over fully to matters of craft while not having much to say.

The poem is a piece of music. Those writers who place content over form—as if the two can be separated—are treating the poem the way one might treat a newspaper article or a piece of expository prose. A poem may, for example, communicate through its sound-work elements that cannot be effectively represented by ordinary means of explanation.

One of the things I learned from poets such as John Logan, Isabella Gardner, Seamus Heaney, and Robert Lowell is that there’s a way of writing by ear rather than writing solely by image or idea. I let the sounds of words suggest other words. I move forward in the poem not simply by rational thinking, but by allowing sounds to suggest other sounds, to suggest words that will make use of those sounds. In this way, I’m constantly surprising myself in terms of direction. So many of my poems have narratives imbedded in them, yet when I begin to write I don’t have that narrative in mind. It’s in the process of writing the poem where I find out what will happen. I’m always surprised and pleased when people talk to me about the personal element in my work and how this element has managed to touch them. It surprises me because I didn’t set out to talk about a particular aspect of emotional life, but, in the poem’s process of becoming, this personal element announced itself.

For some, the idea of writing by ear is frightening because it forces them to surrender any preconceived notions of how a poem will look or develop. Many poets deliberately set out to transcribe personal experiences, for example, and if their primary aim is to get the experience on the page, they are not as attuned to discovering through auditory associations the real poem underneath the surface poem.

This is unfortunately true. And yet, while writing by ear can suggest the direction the work will take, this process is not a restriction. There is an expansiveness that can occur within strict form. Our American-English language is endlessly inventive, especially when writers use what Whitman called the blab of the pave, bringing into poems our colloquialisms, slang, vulgarities—those words we wouldn’t ordinarily consider as poetic language. The publication of Ginsberg’s Howl and Lowell’s Life Studies in the 1950s opened up the possibilities for such words. Before these books, there was merely lip service given to opening up the language; a certain self-censorship persisted. Poetry was associated with higher education. In the latter half of the twentieth century, though, an elasticity of language asserted itself. I don’t think of working by ear as limited. If anything, it opens up a whole other set of options, allows you to develop a different palette with which to work.

You mention how self-censorship or the refusal to embrace the blab of the pave could be limiting. One of the more interesting elements of one of my favorite poems of yours, Horse, is your decision not to name the horse’s genitalia. You signify it with a long dash. What led to this narrative decision?

Robert Bly read that poem in manuscript and said, "Ah, you’re just afraid to say cock." I replied, Robert, that’s only one word. Other words also come to mind if I don’t state it. We have so many slang words for penis, many of them with that harsh consonantal sound. Part of the humor of the poem is in it’s being spoken by someone remembering who he was as a young boy, and recalling that moment when the word and the object it signified became distinct. Suddenly word and object were separate. The word that signifies the world is not the world itself; the world itself can offer so much more in terms of sensory experience. The boy he’s remembering might place his hand over his mouth the moment he realizes what he’s seeing. He might think: I know this word, but I’m not supposed to say it.

What I like about Horse is that, though there is an absence in the decision not to name, the unnamed object is everywhere. The horse’s penis, cock, dick, or whatever, is no longer merely a body part, but a phallus. For example, you write, Under the enormous belly, his —— followed immediately in the next stanza with four lines of ample description:

swung like the policeman’s nightstick,

a dowsing rod, longer than my arm—

even the Catholic girls could see it

hung there like a rubber spigot.

Yes. I set up the reader in a number of ways. The poem opens with that off-rhyme of saw and furniture, then moves to flies and eyes, and noon and fume. The word that’s not there may rhyme or off-rhyme with stick. That was meant to be slyly humorous as well. Horse, like so many of the poems in the first section of Parthenopi, is about becoming a writer. The boy’s sudden awareness of the distinction between word and object is part of this process.

Towards the end of the poem, the persona says, Horse, I remember thinking. He understands now what the word is. He knew the word before, but did not know the enormity of what it signifies.

Right. Now, and forever after, that word will convey scent, will convey eroticism, and so many more things. There’s a deepening of the language.

The boy comes to this awareness through first-hand observation, but the reader is also aware that horse is an archetypal symbol of eroticism. So there are two paths of knowing here: the boy’s coming to knowledge through observation; and, perhaps, the adult voice’s sophisticated conjuring of an erotic symbol he knows his audience will already understand. There is the autobiographical component and the mythological one.

The poet Jack Myers once told me, with affection, that the titles of my poems were boring. I objected. Here’s a poem simply called Horse. By the time you work through the poem, you can go back and see that the title has expanded and deepened in many ways. In an odd way, the entire poem becomes an extended definition.

That’s funny because, when I was looking at the table of contents, I saw the title Horse and went to the poem right away. I thought, This poem will define horse for me in an unexpected way. I knew something essential was going to be clarified through it.

I was pleased some years ago when Ted Kooser reviewed one of my chapbooks in The Georgia Review. He mentioned the deceptive simplicity of my work.

Many of your poems flaunt a deceptive simplicity. Horse, for example, can be enjoyed as a coming-of-age narrative, where a boy discovers the complex relationship between an object in the world and the language we use to designate it. But so many other elements are at work within it. This leads me to another observation about this same poem. The end rhymes you pointed out earlier often cut across stanzas: noon and fume, bed and head, hair and there, and even the very slant feminine end-rhyme of urine and junkman." These across-stanza end-rhymes, as well as the sentences that are carried from one stanza to the next, suggest that the poem might have been organized in another way. In Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, Paul Fussell insists, for example, upon the autonomy of the stanza, that each stanza should be justified as its own logical unit within the larger structure of the poem. He often illustrates this concept by citing those poems where sentences and end-rhymes are contained within the stanza. However, if we look at the first two stanzas of Horse, we see a far less restrictive sense of organization at work:

The first horse I ever saw

was hauling a wagon stacked with furniture

past storefronts along Knickerbocker Avenue.

He was taller than a car, blue-black with flies,

and bits of green ribbon tied to his mane

bounced near his caked and rheumy eyes.

I had seen horses in books before, but

this horse shimmered in the Brooklyn noon.

The first sentence is three lines long. The second stanza, introduced in the fourth line of the first stanza, is then carried over into the next two lines of the second stanza. You could have chosen tercets to demonstrate autonomy between stanzas here. Why did you work with quatrains?

I didn’t want to stop the reader at the end of the first stanza with a period. I organized the lines and stanzas for their flow, weaving lines together so that the language remains in the foreground.

And yet I can see that you want the quatrain to stand as independent as well.

I do.

I can see this because, in terms of sense, the first stanza does communicate an autonomous truth. Though the second sentence continues into the next stanza, the juxtaposition of the fourth line with the previous three is, on one level, complete and self-contained. You are at once pushing the reader forward beyond the stanza and asking the reader to consider the stanza in itself.

In The Pound Era, if memory serves me well, Hugh Kenner was trying to make sense of Williams’s notion of the variable foot and the triadic line. He was, I guess, trying to understand the theory behind the form. Williams himself wrote a good deal about his reasons for developing what he thought of as forms,