Q: Many writers have different stories of when they realized they were or wanted to be writers. Would you tell us your story?

A: As a girl, I found myself reading for company, often re-reading the same books, experiencing the same pleasure as the ending approached, throwing its glamorous shadows forward. I got the idea that I would like to write, and when I got to college and into my first writing class, I began to take lots of notes—bits of description. I had a vague belief in a kind of pantheism that trees, rocks, plants, all the elements of nature, had hidden lives that could be captured in language. Patience and careful observation were required. (These are qualities I encourage in my students by asking them to read Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, with its wonderful anecdote of the student and the fish.) I set out with my dog, a bedraggled poodle, and a pad and pencil to try to put ferns and shale outcroppings and sagging barbed wire into words. I have tried ever since then to do justice to the world in whatever small ways I can.

Q: Much has been written about the relationship of the writer to his/her tradition. What are your thoughts?

A: I like to think of all writers working at once. E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, imagines everyone working together in the British Museum Reading Room, I think. Wallace Stevens calls poetry a “long conversation between poets.” One of the huge perks about making art is that it doesn’t necessarily matter whether you are dead or alive after you’ve finished—if the art is good enough it becomes a permanent part of the conversation, louder in one part of the room, softer in another, in a rhythm like that of fireflies igniting in a meadow.

Q: Great Modernist writers, including James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, famously talk about art’s need for the impersonal, about the artist’s need to stand apart from the work in a kind of glorious objectivity. What is the place of the personal in your poems?

A: Through most of the twentieth century and into the present one, the idea of a stable and constant identity has been melted into air, sectioned into cubes, and blown to smithereens. If there is such a thing as identity, I think it resides not in what has happened to us and how that makes its way into poems or stories, but in the ways in which we use words. By that I mean the range and coloration of vocabulary, directness or indirectness of phrasing, sparseness or lushness of detail—the writer’s way of maneuvering thought into speech.

Q: Regarding Quartet and objectivity, will you address the process of assuming another voice?

A: First I got to know the women from the outside. I didn’t actually think I was embarking on a manuscript at first—just an imperfect portrait sketch of Nora Joyce, whom I admired greatly for putting up with James. I read Brenda Maddox’s wonderful biography, along with everything else I could find, including a small biography (a hagiography of sorts) by a Galway priest. I visited Galway and the little house—an urban cottage—where Nora spent childhood. I saw the rough and gentle countryside and seashore. Also Finn’s Hotel in Dublin, where Nora was working as a chambermaid when she met James. Having seen things—countryside and streets—that Nora saw was important. A simple idea—we are made of perceptions, and millions of them stored together have generated and continue to generate who we are. They are to memory as flour is to bread. The central thing that I do when attempting to make a persona is to perceive something of what she perceived, to continue doing that until it becomes a kind of second nature. Most important are the little things: feathers escaping from a striped pillowcase, a pair of birds shadowing each other through the air, the repeating clunk of a lumpy wheeled wagon. Fragile incidentals.

Q: Could you speak about the theme of loss and longing throughout Quartet?

A: I think that for most writers, desire is the figurehead on the ship—a pulchritudinous woman made of beautifully grained wood, or a horse with its mouth open. It leads the way, in other words. I think the first thing to ask about someone’s life, if you are going to be acting it in a play or writing it down, is, quite simply, “What does she want?” And loss is the dark side of longing—the shadow it casts. The two can’t be separated. I wrote Quartet in early middle age, a time when I think most people become particularly cognizant of limitations—time and possibility begin to contract.

Q: Let's backtrack a bit. In your first book, Kneeling Between Parked Cars, you address the "you" throughout. Would you consider these love poems? Are they addressed to a specific "you," or are they addressing audience?

A: I remember Stanley Plumly saying (when I was his student) that lyric poems are made of the tension between an “I” and a “you.” At the time he was writing beautiful lyrics to his then-wife, Jamie. My colleague Frederick Barthelme has said that stories are made from the spaces between people. I think the poems in my first book are impelled by the desire to close the space between an “I” and a “you.” But they are also in love with that space—the ether inhabited by Rilke’s angelic orders—celestial embodiments of tortured and exalted longing.

Q: What writers have influenced you the most?

A: I wrote a small essay for a book called The Poet’s Bookshelf that discusses Charles Simic and Anna Akhmatova, among other writers who are patron saints of my work. For Simic, every object—a butcher’s bloody apron, a pair of shoes, a fork—becomes a microcosm—like the eternity in Blake’s grain of sand. Akhmatova’s poetry also works from small to big: history is amassed from shards of individual experience. Her great long poem, “Requiem,” is filled with the particulars of Petersburg (then Leningrad) under Stalin. A daily occurrence underlies the poem: women waiting in lines for many hours in “blue-black cold” in hopes of delivering a package to a husband or son in prison. A whispered question to Akhmatova—Can you write about this?—sparked the great poem in which one mother’s despair commemorates every mother’s despair and ends up transcending it. Meaning can’t be constructed by fiat, from the top down. That’s what dictators attempt. Meaning forms in slow or quick increments from small elements of our days.

Q: When I think of your progression of voice, I think of James Tate, his turn from his personal poems, specifically Lost Pilot, to a surreal-like quality in The Company of Fletchers. A similar progression, in my view, is evident in Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds, and The Museum of the Revolution. What prompted this shift in voice? Did the works of Andre Breton influence such?

A: Wondering what "Surrealism" actually is, I looked it up and found "a movement which started after World War I among writers and grew to include the visual arts in the 1920s” and "artistic movement that uses illogical, dreamlike images and events to suggest the unconscious." Surrealists were interested in “things not part of our conscious mind, unrelated to deliberate choice or what we intend to do." I think that earlier in my life I was highly interested in the "unconscious"—most of us were, in the seventies. We wanted to open ourselves to a universal dream life (I think of Robert Bly’s book Sleepers Joining Hands, which even we tender zealots thought might be carrying things too far). With the help of Mark Strand and Charles Simic's wonderful anthology, Another Country, I had learned of South American Surrealism. As for Andre Breton, he is an interesting figure, I think, but mostly as an apologist or proponent of an artistic stance. A front man as it were. He was also famously homophobic, alas.

If there is indeed a progression in my work it is, I think, towards matter-of-factness rather than towards the surreal. Experience—as I know it, anyway—is a series of incongruities, occasionally graced by art. My recent poems often mention dreams, but aren't themselves dreamlike, in my view. There is a bluntness that was not there previously. First this happens, then that—and they don’t seem to connect, but maybe they do, in ways perhaps disturbing, perhaps comic.

I'm flattered to be thought of in the same breath with James Tate, whose work I have loved for many years. John Ashbery speaks of Tate's work as refuting "the idea of Surrealism as something remote from daily experience," saying that for him, "Surrealism is something very like the air we breathe, the unconscious mind erupting in one-on-one engagements with the life we all live, every day." Dana Gioia has said that in The Lost Pilot, Tate had "domesticated surrealism . . .had taken this foreign style, which had almost always seemed slightly alien in English—even among its most talented practitioners like Charles Simic and Donald Justice—and had made it sound not just native but utterly down-home." I think this is spot on.

Q: At the beginning of your book Possession, you include an epigraph by Blaise Pascal, “We are full of things that impel us outwards.” And in your poem, “Flash,” you remember a mirror in the first grade bathroom, “one day I stared at it, lost, and the thought of me being inside and outside made my fists pound the sink”….Are these thoughts connected somehow?

A: The time when a child differentiates herself from others has been much examined, but never so eloquently as Elizabeth Bishop does in “In the Waiting Room”: "But I felt: you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth, / you are one of them. / Why should you be one, too? I think the sink-pounding ("true" story) is my version of Bishop's italicized urgency. I think you're right to connect the epigraph with the poem—both suggest a negotiation between absence and presence—of identity as forever attempting to complete itself. It's a struggle that gives rise to a lot of foolish behavior, but also, I think, to art.

Q: I fear I may be that woman in your poem “Out of Context” who’s told “You have no sense of context,” when I lift two lines, from separate poems, for discussion:

Is this a discussion of the self as a larger self?

A: I think both of these thoughts are part of an on-going response to William Carlos Williams’s urgency for the "pure products of America." Of course, we went crazy long ago. Unmoored by history and emboldened by notions we could start the world over, only better, we've made a hash of things. But it's more complicated than that—each little town's desire to be the center of the world is silly and chauvinistic, but also healthy. It's how our towns have made their energy—faith in "progress" replacing, in large part, religious faith or other forms of connection with a communal past. A continual problem in this country has been how to sustain community—groups of people who care about one another's well-being, who support one another in making a living and even making art, that essential luxury. That's why we so much enjoy thinking about the height of the New York School, when poets and painters fed one another's work daily, as a normal and ordinary part of city life. And San Francisco, with Ferlinghetti holding a rotating court at City Lights. And Black Mountain College, with dancing and poetry and music tangling complicatedly. I think that graduate creative writing programs, said by some to be a force for a deadening conformity, can be and often are communities where life sustains art and vice versa. Making, in your words, "a larger self."

Q: What do you look for in poems?

A: My favorite poets' work has at least two things in common. 1) it is not dead certain about anything—least of all, what it is "about." 2) It is both clear and mysterious. The clarity has something to do with what Flannery O'Connor called "manners" and the mystery with what she called "mystery"—a delightful opacity which holds ripples upon ripples of suggestion, which holds both the levity of magic and the profundity of a religion. A good poem resembles an interesting friend—someone whose companionship takes infinite forms and variations. It is a presence you never want to leave.

Q: In your recent book, Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds, which received the Donald Hall Prize, you create a metaphorical hotel. The reader is a witness to those checked in, and is given the opportunity to enter closed doors and rummage through their closets, their literary luggage, so to speak. Is this a room of your own?

A: Your question is enjoyable to hear—a festive description. Philip Larkin famously said, when offered the Oxford professorship of poetry, that it would be like 'a cow being the head of the Institute of Dairying'. I feel I'm singularly unqualified to talk about my work. Mainly, that what I have to say about it might work to diminish rather than increase its interest. I'm comforted that John Ashbery, one of the conscripted guests at my somewhat dubious hotel, feels the same way, saying so during the Oxford professorship he did accept—which produced his wonderful book of commentary on mostly under-recognized poets, Other Traditions. And what he has to say about other poets illuminates, of course, his own practice. What we say is often what we are.

Q: Helen Vendler, in After the Death of Poetry, writes, “What is disturbing and novel about the situation of poetry today is that it has lost the attention not merely of common readers but of intellectuals, even of many intellectuals whose chief interests are literary.” What are your thoughts?

A: I think one thing that has changed is the proportion of the poetry audience who are also practitioners—in large part due to the many excellent writing programs that have sprung to life since WWII. Why should this be a bad thing? I have sometimes felt particularly complimented when a lay reader (especially a non-academic one) expresses pleasure in my work. Why should that be so? Are such readers more "pure"? Those who know the pursuit and its difficulties are always the true best readers, as Dylan Thomas knew when he wrote about those lovers who would never heed his "craft or art." Another thing that has happened is a disintegration of cultural consensus, which in part has to do with the post-modern coming together of high and low art. It used to be rather clear which poets had been admitted to the temple: T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, John Crowe Ransom, Alan Tate, Robert Lowell, and others universally judged both elegant and intelligent. The arena is now much more spacious and the pleasures of reading much more diverse. We do miss having a counter-culture—which is why the Beats are still glamorous, still exciting. Sometimes they even get their own nameplate, "Avant-Garde," at the bookstore. Their mid-century run-in with the then-dominant culture provided drama now sorely absent. It's very hard to shock the bourgeoisie. You have to find them first then force them to be offended. Meanwhile, the language survives all, playing the field, as it so loves to do. As for literary intellectuals, how is fiction faring with them? Sociology in some form or other dominates literary study right now. "Relevance," like the Fountain of Youth, is one of those things that can't be successfully sought out. The spot on the map evaporates as it is approached.

Q: I’d like to end the interview with two of your poems, “New Country” and “Power,” in Night Clerk in the Hotel of Both Worlds, which eerily addresses our country and future. I’m reminded of W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” specifically the line, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Your poems may not be overtly political, but the meta-narrative seems to be. What are your thoughts regarding political poems? Why is it that political poems in the U.S., in the past, were often met with contempt, cast aside as trivial and easy, when poets and readers in other countries embrace such direction? Do political poems still carry that stigma?

A: Is good poetry that engages political themes really disrespected? I don't think so. Robert Hass, Adrienne Rich, C.K. Williams, and Yusef Komunyakaa all write terrific poems that intersect the personal and the political. And they are just the beginning of a very long list. I think the idea that politics and poetry are antithetical is outdated. Maybe it came from misguided efforts that were all simple-minded idea, with no language interest. I don't know.

Yeats lived in an heroic world. A world, that is, fully conscious both of its origins and its guiding myths. So much so that Yeats had to invent a mythology in order to renew his vision. The world is always tumbling down about our ears. But why, and with what possible meanings (containing possible rebirths)? Interesting political poems always engage these questions. Middle-class white Americans tend to be naive about power. I know that I have been. For ten years or so, I've been learning about the life and poems of Anna Akhmatova, a woman whose luck it was to live in Russia during Stalin's brutal age. Stalin had a grand design, and individuals were necessarily his enemies. He had to keep enough people around to execute his plans, but he could imprison and/or kill millions without (he seemed to think) too many ill effects. (If five percent of the people arrested were guilty, he once said, that was a fine return for effort.) Akhmatova's poetry, though conventional in form, was from the beginning profoundly individual, at first embodying female love and desire in unprecedented ways; then, in her great long poem, “Requiem,” extending her private suffering (her first husband's execution, her son's arrest, her best friend's arrest and death) to articulate the suffering of a nation of the bereaved. The poem had to live underground for many years, which only increased its power. At the same time, there were many people in prison camps who never stopped believing in Stalin as their great father. They struggled to overcome their so-called "ruined biographies" and be re-integrated into the marvelous Soviet state. We find survival, in other words, where it is available to us. That we are anything but immune to the perversions of the powerful is very much worth remembering.

The utopian impulse takes many forms, of course. Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, products of his gonzo utopian imagination, have never functioned very well. They tend to leak and are hard to repair. But also beautiful, resembling the eyes of fantastic insects. And who can resist Fourier's sea of lemonade? Both Fuller and Fourier believed their schemes would work. My small "New Country" has the opposite premise. I think that most of life is hopelessly mixed up, and we wish for clarity. Sometimes this wish is benign and even productive of beauty. Sometimes it produces horrible absurdities and untold ruin.

As for "Power," I grew up in Southeastern Ohio, where it was easy to see the visual and mental clash between helplessness and agency. There were all these marginal, struggling farms extending down to the Ohio, which was bustling with chemical plants and power plants—unreal cities of concrete and smoke. There were also the coal mines. My father's father farmed in the summer and mined in winter, as if enacting some untold Greek myth. There was even less concern for safety then than now, of course. People have forever found themselves giving their lives to the creation of wealth and voltage. This activity comes from necessity, but also sometimes from a desire to somehow associate with grandeur and big plans. I tried to find a way to write that would take some of these things into account.