Rosanna Warren: An Interview*

Ma Yongbo: Your first book of poetry sets the tone for your poetry, and it seems already mature in its technique. However, any poet has a development process. Please talk about the various stages of your development and representative works.

Rosanna Warren: When I look back at my first book, Each Leaf Shines Separate (1984), I shudder at the juvenile earnestness, the portentousness, the self-importance of some of the poems. Good grief! The first poem, “Garden,” is truly embarrassing. It concludes, “It’s morning. I begin.//I begin my life.” As if that were news worth reporting. “Drowned Son” is also embarrassing, with its intoxicated sub-Yeatsian rhetoric (channeling “Byzantium”), and its inflated sense of its own vocal power: “By moss, boulders storm-tossed, driftwood, to/ air, wing-torn, gull-mourned, breathtaking in/ greatness of gray gulf space; whereat/ in the sea I seized my voice.” But I also see in this young poet the seeds from which a stronger poet will grow. These early poems were drunk on word magic, but had not yet learned how to discipline that verbal extravagance in the service of a sterner vision. But without that word magic, there would be no poetry. These early poems are learning as they go, trying out a large range of voice. They are also saturated in a sense of history, often tragic; many of the poems were inspired by my months spent living on the Greek island of Crete, steeped in a sense of layers of ancient civilizations, and the violence littering those layers. The poems register the typical encounter of youth with a tough adult world: New York City (there’s a poem about the World Trade Center when it still stood, evoking a view of “the curled, soiled fringes of the world”); there are poems of fraught erotic intimacies; and toward the end of the volume, poems of young marriage and motherhood, marked by turbulence (“…Where were /you last night, where was I? Who counts// the slashes?” from “Couple”). The most promising poems in that book face into history, and use demanding metrical forms, sonnets, couplets, and rhyming quatrains, as in the two poems to the French poet Max Jacob, and two translations from Catullus. There are also poems inspired by paintings, another way of looking outside the self.

My next book, Stained Glass (1993), won the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. I’m still proud of that book. It continues themes and techniques from Each Leaf—inspiration from history and from art works, elegies, translations—but the rhetoric has been toned down without losing sonority, and the literary allusions are less deafening, but still (I hope) intrinsic to the inner argument. Milton, for instance, haunts the first poem, “Season Due,” with an allusion to the elegy “Lycidas”, but you can feel your way into the poem without knowing that. That poem counterpoints stark prosaic statement with lush language, a blend I’ve kept exploring ever since, both in metrical forms and in free verse. The final poem in that collection, “The Twelfth Day,” is important to me. It took me months to write. It’s an oblique elegy for my father, seen through an evocation of the great poem of grief, Book 24 of Homer’s Iliad, in which Achilles, in the frenzy of his grief, keeps dragging the corpse of Hector around and around the tomb of his friend Patroclus for twelve days until finally Zeus intervenes and sends Achilles’s mother, the sea nymph, to order him to release the corpse. That image of grief as an obsessive circling felt true to me, and it became an image of the struggle of the poem itself: “This is Ancient// Poetry It’s supposed/ to repeat/ The living mangle the dead// after they mangle the living/ It’s formulaic/ That’s how we love…” Ancient Greek epic poetry is composed with many repetitions which are considered “formulaic”: an idea which struck me as a psychological state as well as a feature of poetic structure. When I finally finished that poem, I knew I had reached another stage in my own work: a mingling of urgent private experience, poetic inheritance, and experimental form. My work has continued to grow along those lines.

MY: Since you grew up in a household where your father was a well-known poet laureate and New Critic, and your mother was a famous writer, how have your childhood experiences and relationships with your parents influenced your writing, and did they provoke what Bloom calls “the anxiety of influence”?

RW: To be a writer, I had to ignore my parents’ literary reputations, or I wouldn’t have been able to write at all. From childhood through adolescence I thought I was going to be a painter, and I worked passionately at drawing and painting. But I was writing all the time, too, and eventually writing took over. Of course my parents influenced my writing; I grew up in a house where writing was a way of life. From my earliest years, I saw my parents disappear into their studies for hours, to work, and our family life was steeped in stories told, poems recited. I found my way into writing poems around age twelve, when I was in school in France and had to memorize hundreds of lines of French poetry for class, and I began to write verse in French. In high school, studying Latin, I fell in love with the poetry of Catullus, Horace, and Virgil, and was inspired to try out Latin verse forms in English. I found my own way into poetry through poetry in languages other than English: it was a way of going around my parents.

MY: Do you like Williams? What do you think are the characteristics of native American poetry that he advocated? What are the characteristics of your poetry in terms of the “American Grain”? You can use your own poetry as an example.

RW: Williams is not one of “my” poets. His cadences don’t enchant me. My familiar spirits are Sappho, Catullus, Horace, Baudelaire, Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Hart Crane…But Williams did have a fresh way of listening to American speech, from which I’ve learned, and sometimes his down-home, precise seeing into everyday life has the force of revelation: “The pure products of America/ go crazy—” or “The rose is obsolete” (from Spring and All). The poem of mine most indebted to Williams is “Piazza Pilo,” from Departure, where I was trying to describe a modest park in Rome and the people who wander through it: “The low stone and stucco wall opens/ in gaps; you can pass// through…” But that poem ends on a note that Williams wouldn’t have sounded: “you could open your mouth to surprise, a/ gift the gods// grant with other gifts: the staggering heart,/ ashes on the tongue, long patience at slow// breakage. Prayer. The word/ ‘unhealed.’ The word ‘farewell.’” Williams helped me to cut through too much literariness, too much artifice and noise-making.

MY: You often speak from the interior of a character. Is adopting a persona a way to speak more freely about ideas?

RW: Adopting a persona isn’t the only way to speak about (or sing about) ideas, but it’s one way, and I’ve often used it. Even in my early poems, I was trying to shift the focus from a purely self-centered lyric. I even invented a French poet, Anne Verveine, so I could sing in a voice quite unlike my own: she has five poems in Departure (2003), and two more in Ghost in a Red Hat (2011). Anne Verveine could enunciate things beyond me: “…sorrow/ is a liqueur. Drink deep. We will all be consumed” (“From the Notebooks of Anne Verveine, VII”). Apostrophe, addressing another person or being, is another way to open the perspective beyond the self, as in my poems to Max Jacob, but many others as well.

MY: In contemporary American poetry, there appear to be two different extremes: confessional poetry and language poetry. What are your thoughts on them?

RW: American poetry has grown beyond the simple opposition of “Confessional” and “Language” poetry. Poets who write out of raw, personal experience (Sharon Olds would be an example) have also had to pay attention to the artful use of language; and poets writing out of the academic theories of Language Poetry (theories dating back to the 1970s) have had to find ways to “sing”—to metabolize complex emotional and spiritual experience as well as to “disrupt” capitalism by “disrupting” grammar. Rae Armantrout and Susan Howe come out of the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E school—if it is a “school”—but are full-throated poets, expressing a rich experience of life irreducible to theory.

I want to write poetry responsible to history—to the brute facts of the past as they weigh upon the present—and responsible to the full resources of the English language: 1,300 years of evolving rhythms, metrical systems, syntax, sound-play, and word-play. As Pound said in 1918 in his “Credo,” quoting Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, “thinking that alone worthy wherein the whole art is employed.” And I also try to “translate” into poetic language experience which doesn’t yet have liter- ary form. Robert Lowell meant this in his sonnet “The Nihilist as Hero,” writing that he wanted “words meat-hooked from the living steer.” The art I pursue is neither “Confessional” nor aligned with any theoretical party or dogma. I take my bearings from the deep past with its plural possibilities, and from the living present.

MY: You tell us you have studied painting, as did Elizabeth Bishop, and your training in visual arts has had a significant impact on your poetry. I have noticed that you have quite a few poems about paintings and poems dedicated to painters. Could you talk about that?

RW: My years spent drawing and painting taught me how to see, how to see “into” our experience of seeing. That is, to derive “insight” from sight, the full sense of vision. My early books are full of poems inspired by painters I revere: Turner, Renoir, Chagall, Beckmann, Bonnard, as well as painter friends like William Kienbusch, for whom there are two elegies in Each Leaf Shines Separate (“…so that I may/ learn, as you did, how// passionately to die”: “Orchard”). In time I came to distrust overtly ekphrastic poems that relied too much on responding to—or worse, “describing”—works of visual art. So I internalized acts of seeing into the fabric of the poems themselves. I hope you can “see” the ferocious snapping turtles in the poem “Thales” from So Forth: “small tanks in regulation gray/ with scimitar claws, switchblade tails,/ broad plated faces, obsidian eyes and beaks…”

MY: I strongly feel that your poetic style has similarities to Bishop’s. Do you yourself feel that you have any special connection with her?

RW: I would be honored to be thought of in connection to Bishop. Not that I ever tried to imitate her voice: it’s too singular. But I feel a kinship with her: we both emerge from the centuries-old tradition of metrical lyric in English, and we both adapted those forms to the pressures of modern life, and a modern speaking voice. Bishop sees the marvelous in the everyday, as when the commercially trademarked “Little Marvel Stove” in her masterpiece, “Sestina,” opens into the mystery of family grief: “Time to plant trees, says the almanac./ The grandmother sings to the marvellous stove/ and the child draws another inscrutable house.”

MY: What is your view of American postmodernist poetry? Has postmodern poetry become a thing of the past, or does it still have vitality?

RW: The category of “the postmodern” strikes me as an academic idea, not a vital or generative aesthetic force. It’s an artifact of “periodization,” the labeling of eras in an attempt to impose order on the multitudinous, evolving forms of art. It’s most useful for constructing syllabi, almost like a supermarket labelling cans of food for mass distribution. What does the idea “postmodern” tell us about poetry? It tells us that a period known as “Modernism” is over; that Eliot, Pound, Williams, and Moore are no longer providing the dominant idiom (not that they ever did dominate completely: think Frost, Auden, Larkin, Jarrell, Berryman, and any number of other powerful voices). And that allows professors to argue endlessly about whether or not Modernism was just an extension of Romanticism, or what is “post” about Postmodernism. There are too many strange and unruly kinds of poetry in any era to be slotted into such categories, which tend to reflect ideological zeal, not the inner life of the art. Where are you going to “put” great eccentrics like David Jones or W. S. Graham? And is “putting” poets into categories a helpful way of thinking about them? Catullus in his day was “modern,” one of the “neoteric,” “New Poets” of Rome. Anne Carson, today, carries DNA from the classical traditions of Greece and Rome, blended with the “classical” modernism of Gertrude Stein and Mallarmé, and from it she creates endlessly inventive new forms, at once ancient and completely of our day. Something similar could be said about Ishion Hutchinson.

But let’s think about poetic Modernism. It was a distinct, self-conscious poetic movement in the West that I would date to 1857, the publication of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil which was prosecuted in France for offense against public morals. Others will propose other dates. We are talking about a self-conscious, avant-garde movement that ruptured the poet’s easy communion with the general public and generated two revolutionary developments in prosody: free verse and the prose poem. These experiments inspired poets in the English language (Eliot and Pound, signally), and in many other languages. Poetic Modernism can be considered a bracketed, historical phenomenon arising in the mid-19th century and concluding, it’s not clear when: it seems to have petered out by World War II. Randall Jarrell famously declared in 1942, “Modernism As We Knew It—the most successful and influential body of poetry of this century—is dead.” I would distinguish historical Modernism—a particular movement of the late 19th, early 20th century with distinct, innovative aesthetic principles (directness of presentation, clarity, precision, reaction against Victorian exposition and verbosity)—from a sense of Modernism as an ongoing force and set of possibilities. Alive today. So, not “post.” But not dogmatic. Fluid and evolving.

MY: I know you’re familiar with the global issue of ecological crisis poetry, and so I thought to ask, what are the fundamental characteristics of ecological poetry, and how is it distinguished from traditional nature poetry?

RW: Here, as with the idea of the “postmodern,” we enter the terrain of the political, the terrain in which poetry tries to intervene in power relations. The poetry of “ecological crisis” takes, of course, many forms, as the poetry of American resistance to the Vietnam War did in another era. It remains a serious question to what extent poetry is a useful political instrument. There are many other ways of being politically effective, and most of them are more “effective” than poetry: voting, communicating with political leaders, making public protests, circulating petitions, inspiring one’s fellow citizens to act. “For poetry makes nothing happen,” as Auden famously wrote in his elegy for Yeats. Yet he went on in that poem to describe poetry as “a way of happening, a mouth.” “It survives,” claimed Auden. I don’t think there are any “fundamental characteristics” of “ecological poetry,” because different poets and different scholars keep claiming different “characteristics.” But we do have a great variety of serious poems agitated by the threat to life on our planet. Most of these poems, in one way or another, revise “traditional nature poetry” by focusing more on nature beyond the human, by refusing to use nature as a theater for human drama and human feelings. And many of these contemporary poems reflect a sense of urgency, dread, and mourning (which are, yes, human feelings). The poet John Shoptaw has written well about ecopoetics, and his new book Near-Earth Object is rich in spiky intelligence and attention to detail in natural life. David Baker’s Whale-Fall, Brenda Hillman’s Practical Water and Pieces of Air in the Epic, Forrest Gander’s Twice Alive, Jorie Graham’s To 2040, and John Kinsella’s Firebreaks are just a few examples of powerful poetic testimonies to the emergency of climate change.

MY: Your elegies or dirges are extremely moving. I notice that there is a descending tone in your poetry, that you are not an enthusiastic or optimistic poet. You seem to focus more on life as an art of loss, which often gives your poetry a penetrating power. To some extent, I too am an elegist, though in Chinese. And so I am very curious about what forces and experiences have made us, each in our own way, elegists for our times.

RW: Ever since I was an adolescent, I thought of myself as writing “in the light of death.” I don’t know what “has made us elegists,” but awareness of death also brings a radiant awareness of life. The ancient Greeks called humans “mortals,” as opposed to the immortals, the gods: and as mortals, we have to take life seriously, and we shine in our few moments of supreme effort. But elegy and praise don’t have to be opposed: after all, most poems of mourning praise what is lost. And as I grow older—I am about to turn seventy-one—I am more and more conscious that my days are numbered, as are the days of my friends, so the impulse to cherish intensifies. The last poem in my most recent book of poems, “Glaucoma,” recalls the death of a close friend, and meditates on my own afflicted vision: “The stream keeps lisping the only story it knows,/ and a loosened cobweb veils the moon’s eye.” And to return to the theme of ecopoetics, on a much larger scale we are mourning the losses of forms of life on earth.

MY: Do you care more about your short poems or your longer ones? You have several long poems in the form of large sequences. I would like to know what you make of the modern long poem.

RW: I care equally for my short and my long poems! But I don’t regard my longer poems, like the poem for the composer Robert Schumann, “Water Damage,” or the poem for the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, “Earthworks” (both in Ghost in a Red Hat, 2011), as examples of “the modern long poem.” I would reserve that name for more monumental works like Eliot’s The Waste Land and Four Quartets, Pound’s Cantos, Crane’s The Bridge, Williams’ Paterson. My longer poems reflect my curiosity about lives, situations, and eras far beyond my own, stories in which we can find our bearings, and come to recognitions, precisely because these are realities outside our immediate lives. I believe that true poems are instruments of inquiry: they help us in a search for difficult knowledge. In my longer poems, I incorporate prose passages, what we might call documents, into the larger sonic structure, and the poems expand beyond the genre of lyric to meditate on the very nature of poetry. In my poem about the Czech composer Leos Janácek, “Intimate Letters,” from Departure (2003), I asked, “What can be assimilated into song?” That is for me a fundamental question, and a matter of extending boundaries.

MY: You are, of course, a scholar as well as a poet, and so I thought to ask how your scholarly work has shaped or affected your poetry. Could you tell us the secrets?

RW: Oh, dear! I do not trade in secrets. Nor do I know any. But for me the life of learning—the life of scholarship—has always gone hand in hand with the life of making poems. I learned to make poems by reading poems, and especially by reading poems written in languages other than English. This was important, to understand that there are many different aesthetic conventions for composing poems, many different systems of prosody, so one isn’t trapped in one parochial method and set of assumptions. My collection of essays, Fables of the Self, charts years of my devotions: to the poetry of Sappho, Alcaeus, Vergil, as well as to modern poets inspired by classics (Auden, Strand, Bidart, Glück); to the French tradition which nurtured me (Nerval, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Jacob, Apollinaire); to the British and American poetry which is also my birthright (Melville, Hardy, Hill). And I spent thirty-five years working on a biography of the French poet and mystic Max Jacob. That was an act of mad devotion: I had encountered his work in my youth, and identified with his religious longings, his other life as a painter, his visions, his erotic confusions. He took me over. Studying these different poets from such different eras and poetic cultures gave me the freedom and the courage to try many different forms in my own poetry.

MY: What languages are you proficient in? I know you are an accomplished translator. Could you talk about the relationship between translation and your own writing?

RW: I used to be able to read Ancient Greek fairly well, enough so that I co-translated a play by Euripides for Oxford University Press, years ago, and translated short Greek lyrics by Sappho, Alcman, and Alcaeus. I haven’t worked on my Greek in years and I’ve forgotten a lot, though I can still recite some lines. I studied Latin poetry passionately in high school, and it remains a source for me. The foreign languages I use more regularly are French and Italian. I agree with you about the importance of the cultural perspective brought by translation, and of course you, as a distinguished poet-translator, know about that intimately.

MY: Are you familiar with Chinese poetry? If so, besides the influence of classical Chinese poetry on Western poetry, are you aware of the situation of contemporary Chinese poetry?

RW: I would not claim to be “familiar” with Chinese poetry. I can read it only in translation, and I have relied on David Hinton a great deal, because his translations “feel” like poetry to me: Hsieh Ling-yün, Meng Hao-jan, Li Po, T’ao Ch’ien, Men Chiao, Wang Wei. Recently I was excited by Nicholas Morrow Williams’ translation of Elegies of Chu. My students occasionally show me contemporary Chinese poets like Bai Hua, Yu Jian, Zhai Yongming, and Yang Lian. But this is a very scattershot exposure. I always look forward to learning more.

MY: I’ve left the last question for you. You can talk about any topic I haven’t thought of. If you think of something, feel free to tell me. I am interested, and I believe our Chinese readers will be too.

RW: You have already covered a great deal of ground! Maybe I’ll conclude by presenting a few of my metaphors for poetry. I think poetry is: a mind-altering drug; a knife-fight; a quest. We can leave it at that, yes?