In my previous newsletter, I included a truncated version of interviews with three poets: Brian Glaser, Brett Ortler, and Craig Santos Perez. It was shortened to leave room for the rest of the post, but I wanted to make another post with the questions and answers in their entirety, because there was a lot more than I was able to include previously.
So here is the full interview with all three of them. I’m grateful that each of them took the time to respond to my questions, and encourage you all to support their art.
1. What made you start reading poetry, and what made you start writing poetry?
Craig Santos Perez: I started reading poetry in high school because I had inspiring teachers. I started writing poetry because it was a creative and fun way to express myself.
Brett Ortler: While I’d read some poetry as a kid—especially Shel Silverstein and collections of light verse for kids—I didn’t start reading poetry more seriously until I was in high school. I remember coming across a Dover Thrift Editions of 100 Best Loved Poems and being struck by a number of the poems, but especially “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron. The sound of it was what really struck me, especially the first stanza:
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes
Of course, the rhyming structure also played into my idea of what I thought a poem (and poet) should be: formal, dramatic, important. At that point, I’d bought in, pretty heavily, to what being a poet entailed (drama! love! very important issues!)
I really started writing regularly at that point, usually poetry, but occasionally a failed attempt at a short story. My work at that time, which I regretfully still have, is essentially unreadable.
Happily, reading widely is a pretty good cure-all for hackneyed writing—as you pretty quickly figure out what’s been done to death. I kept writing, but my style/approach changed as I read more, studied and was fortunate enough to have some fine teachers.
Brian Glaser: A critic named Stephanie Burt recently published a book called Don’t Read Poetry. The idea is that readers fall in love with particular poems, not poetry in general. But my first encounter was with poets, something in the rhythms and images of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. These were books of our family library. I had an idea that their inner lives were really intense, as I felt mine was, and that they made something beautiful out of what Frost calls their inner weather. I wanted to do that too. So I would say I first read poets, not poetry or poems. Frost and Dickinson.
I think my first English teachers made me start writing poetry. They seemed so smart and to have such a reverence for the written word. I knew they couldn’t be mistaken. So their encouragement meant a lot.
2. As a writer, what does poetry offer you that prose (either fiction or nonfiction) does not or cannot?
Perez: Poetry offers me a more interesting and unique way to engage with language and all its expressive, artistic, and musical capacities.
Ortler: This is a hard question, and I don’t want to place limitations on writers (prose or poets alike). But I think it’s easier to do some things in prose than in poetry, and vice-versa. It’s easier to invent a world or immerse your reader in a character/story/setting in prose than in poetry. Poetry is best-suited for the interior and revelatory: if there’s any way to succinctly transfer the immediacy of an emotion or an experience or an epiphany, it’s poetry.
Glaser: I can’t really say. I write poems and academic criticism, not fiction or nonfiction. I do think often of something one of my teachers, Brenda Hillman, said about writing poems. Don’t lie, she said. In fiction, you have to lie, deliberately. At least that’s how I look at it. It’s hard for me to read fiction for long—I’m right there until the lying starts, and that’s where the poetry ends.
3. My feeling is that poetry isn't as widely read as novels or nonfiction, even though the brevity of poetry seems to be a better literary fit for a distracted, busy world. Why do you think this is the case? Or, if this isn't the case, what am I missing?
Perez: Fiction and nonfiction books often sell more copies than books of poetry, but there are some forms of poetry that are more widely read, including Instagram poetry, poetry memes, spoken word poetry videos, and celebrity poetry (such as Amanda Gorman, Rupi Kaur, and Maya Angelou).
Ortler: Both fiction and non-fiction certainly outsell poetry, and part of this is no doubt because of its popular reputation—difficult, esoteric, seemingly out-of-date/touch. What most folks know of poetry is also pretty technical (rhyme, sonnets, meter). I think that it’s a disservice we start out by teaching formal poetry to kids (and teachers), as it defines the genre early on and the inevitable confusion/frustration. It’s like showing someone the math behind the Uncertainty Principle as an introduction to physics. It can scare folks off, and that in turn, can lead folks to avoid reading it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a poem aloud at a reading (mine or someone else’s) and someone responded, “I didn’t know you could do that in a poem” as if the poem was breaking some hidden taboo of literature.
There’s also the issue of plain-old competition for attention, and it’s absolutely fierce: we live in an era where there are more books being published than ever before, in all genres, and that doesn’t even mention the competition from streaming TV, movies, video games (which are an art unto themselves at this point), and every other outlet available online.
Even so, I think poetry is doing pretty well, all things considered. We’ve got a host of vibrant, diverse voices, and while the field, like any other, has lots of problems, (institutional, economic, and otherwise) a lack of good writing and writers isn’t one of them.
Glaser: You’re not missing anything. It’s absolutely true what you say and I have no idea why. Poetry has a passionate and brilliant subculture but almost no place in the mainstream. One possibility is that making poetry doesn’t square with our culture’s imperative to maximize our human capital. I think of something Seamus Heaney said in his Nobel Prize lecture. What “always will be to poetry's credit,” he wrote, is “the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it.” But the same can be said for novels or essays, I think, so it remains a mystery to me.
4. What do you say to someone who is hesitant to read poetry because they fear they won't/don't "get it?" Is there more to a poem than unlocking the mysteries of its meaning? Are there other aspects that can be enjoyed even if a precise meaning is elusive?
Perez: I would say to read poetry about topics you are interested in and seek out poets from a similar age group, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc, that you can relate to.
Ortler: I blame T.S. Eliot for this question. Don’t get me wrong, I love his work, but I trace the notion of poetry “as a puzzle or a riddle” to the modernists, and especially Eliot. “The Waste Land” is effectively a spider’s web of allusions and references, and an unprepared reader (or even a prepared one!) can quickly find themselves lost in it. That fear—of interpreting a poem incorrectly—runs deep, I think, like the fear of getting a bad grade on a test. This may be in part why poet William Carlos Williams lamented that Eliot’s “genius” had given “the poem back to the academics.”
To the hesitant reader, I’d say this: The writer sets the table, but the reader brings the meaning/interpretation. Don’t be ashamed for your interpretation of a poem, or if it differs from those of others, and especially for your own taste in poetry. If you don’t like something, try something else. Happily, there are so many wonderful poets writing today—and with so many different styles/approaches—that there certainly is work around that most folks would enjoy, not simply endure.
Glaser: One of the great inventions of the twentieth century was Sigmund Freud’s idea of free association. It’s the opposite of mindfulness—instead of detaching from your thoughts, pay hyper close attention to them and how they lead from one to another. When you hear a poem, free associate to it. Let your mind roam in response to the language.
5. I've always thought of poetry as an art defined by constraints, but a lot of contemporary poetry I come across doesn't have any obvious constraints: rhyme, meter, other traditional constraints that we tend to encounter earliest. To your knowledge, is there a backstory to why contemporary poetry resembles prose? Or am I misguided for thinking that it does?
Perez: Yes, poetry has historically been written in various forms (such as sonnets) or patterns (such as iambic pentameter), but a majority of poetry today is written in "free verse," which sometimes resembles a rhythmic and torqued prose. The backstory to this movement is often described as a liberation or freedom from tradition and constraint to express a modern and "new" sensibility.
Ortler: My answer to this question comes down to the structure/components of each genre. The basic unit of a story is the sentence, and for an essay, perhaps the paragraph, or if we’re talking segmented essays, the section. Poetry is predicated on the line.
In a formal (traditional) poem, there are basic constraints on the cadence of the line, and often, on the words that end various lines. In a free verse poem, there are no such hard-and-fast rules, and this makes line breaks, and especially the last words of each line—and how the adjoining lines connect and “read through”—really important. It also can enable a poet to essentially stack meanings and play with sound in a different way than in a formal poem. (Anaphora, assonance and the like become really important.)
The best proof of this is to take a free verse poem, remove the breaks and turn it into prose. It becomes something else, as the line breaks serve as scaffolding, and in a good poem, they hold it up. Without those, the poem collapses, and a lot of the sound/meaning can be lost. I think the opposite holds too—I don’t think you can necessarily take a good paragraph, even a great one, and easily turn it into poem. The end result is simply a different thing.
Glaser: There are a few different backstories. Some start with Walt Whitman, some start with Baudelaire—mostly in the nineteenth century. I’ve studied the question some, and I credit Romanticism for the freedom poets writing in English had in the twentieth century from rhyme and meter.
But it’s a fascinating time to be thinking about poetry in the terms of your question, because the digitization of our culture is launching new forms and genres that are adjacent to poetry.
When I was writing my first book I saw a tearful, eloquent cry for help from one of the Standing Rock water protectors on social media. She was doing everything poetry can do, but without the page or even the written word. And frankly at the time it terrified me a little, to think that poetry as I knew it could become obsolete. Amanda Gorman’s brilliant performance would have been unimaginable without digital culture, even though in other respects her poem is a revitalization of a long poetic tradition.
5b. The most obvious constraint I see is line breaks/enjambment, though sometimes if you remove the line breaks and put the poem in a regular paragraph it reads like prose. Sometimes I get the impression that this is a somewhat corner-cutting way to turn a nice-sounding paragraph into a poem. Am I wrong for feeling that way, or am I missing something?
Perez: Line breaks and enjambments are more techniques than constraints. This particular technique creates rhythm, pause, meter, etc--which to say, it structures the musicality of the poem (so you can think of poetry as a more musically/rhythmically torqued prose.
Ortler: I don’t think this is right. While there is definitely a healthy amount of overlap between a good paragraph and a good poem (they’re both good writing overall), they aren’t equivalent, and one doesn’t necessarily port into the other format, or vice versa.
Glaser: It’s interesting how sometimes we want a writer to earn something from us. I think of a recent book by the critic Sianne Ngai about what she calls “the gimmick” in the world of art. And her argument is that when we call something a gimmick we mean that it is working too hard and that it is not working hard enough. What kind of work do we want writers to do for us, and why?
As for my approach to form and formalism, my aesthetic was transformed shortly after I met my wife. She is a choreographer, really influenced by the Judson Church movement of postmodern dance in the sixties. They democratized space and movement—one performance was people stacking mattresses. Once I started looking for it, I could find lots of reasons to write in conversational, everyday language, such as the experience of my European and Latin American students when I was teaching advanced courses in English language—why not write for them too?
5c. How do you define poetry? What makes writing a poem as opposed to being poetic?
Perez: Poetry is a language art form that foregrounds the rhythm and musicality of words, syntax, grammar, narrative, etc, as well as the figurative properties of language (metaphor, symbol, etc). Humans are poetic every day when they speak or sing, so writing a poem can be as simple as writing down those heightened moments of language.
Ortler: I’d define a poetry as a succinct form that’s driven by sound and line and geared toward an epiphany or revelation. It can be funny, it can be profound, it can be tragic, there’s not much of a limit there. I don’t think it’s a happenstance that poetry’s siblings—songs and psalms and prayers—are aimed at many of the same experiences.
I’d define being “poetic” as an affectation. I was poetic once, and I tried to write about things: grand topics: love, politics, and so on. Once you get past that stage, you learn the real secret of writing: you write and see what shows up. It’s both an act of faith and an act of effort. You can’t do without trying, sitting down, and getting words on the page. Where they take you, you never really know.
Glaser: I don’t know. I do know that I am interested in the margins of aesthetic experience—when does a poem start to be art?
Here’s a poem on the subject that I promise you will never forget.
6. If someone is interested in reading more poetry but doesn't know where to start, what are your recommendations? Could be collections, individual poems or poets, anthologies, anything.
Perez: I would start by subscribing to the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series because then you receive a free poem everyday from a diverse range of poets.
Ortler: Read as widely as you can. I mean that in terms of styles/movements, and so on. Be aware that a lot of the older anthologies—the ones I grew up on—are mostly lily-white and consist of male writers. So absolutely diversify your reading lists. One of my favorite things to do is to head to the library or a bookstore and simply browse. Pull off a handful of books/authors and dig in; that’ll help you get your bearings, and it’s a great way to find some new favorite authors.
Glaser: Read poetry in translation. There is a journal called Modern Poetry in Translation and for less than a hundred dollars you can access an archive that can sustain you for months. And there are at least two international anthologies still in print: The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry and The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry.
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