A Conversation with Paul Nemser about His Book of Poetry, A Thousand Curves
Editor’s Note: Paul Nemser and Peter Ramos each have published books of poetry this year. Their conversation about those books is presented here in two linked posts. In this post, Peter Ramos interviews Paul Nemser about Paul’s book A Thousand Curves. Paul Nemser’s interview of Peter Ramos about Peter’s book Lord Baltimore. can be accessed here.
Paul Nemser’s third book of poetry, A Thousand Curves, won the Editor’s Choice Award from Red Mountain Press and appeared this past April. It is a collection from a lifetime of writing poems. He grew up in Portland, Oregon where he fell in love with poetry while reading in the storage room in back of his family’s tool store. He studied poetry with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, and many others. His book Taurus (2013) won the New American Poetry Prize. A chapbook, Tales of the Tetragrammaton, appeared from Mayapple Press in 2014. His poems appear widely in magazines. He lives with his wife Rebecca in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Harborside, Maine.
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Paul Nemser: Peter, I enjoyed answering your questions!
Peter Ramos: Let me say that I, too, enjoyed this exchange, both asking and answering questions.
I see that you studied at Harvard with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. I’d love to hear more about that. They’ve been impressive to me since I first started writing more seriously back in college. I have a funny story about Lowell.
Nemser:
Robert Lowell
I had a writing seminar with him in 1968 in my sophomore year of college. There were 10 or 15 people in the class, mainly undergraduates (e.g., Heather McHugh, James Atlas, Robert B. Shaw), with graduates such as Frank Bidart and Lloyd Schwartz often present. I wish I had taken more notes and could remember those days more clearly.
Lowell came to class quite regularly and was on time. Though he usually wore typical Harvard professor clothes, I noticed one or two times that he was wearing what seemed to be bedroom slippers. He sat at one end of the seminar table and began talking in a soft drawl. The class hung on his every word. He was seen as the great American poet of the time.
Lowell had a large head. He tucked his chin into his collar and looked down as he spoke or looked out over his glasses. He came into class, it seemed, with a plan of what he was going to discuss. He might read poems of other poets and talk about them and about history, he might talk about writing. Then he would devote the bulk of class to student work. I found his comments to be elliptical, expressed in his personal diction, hardly ever including specific editorial suggestions. He praised things he liked and was not unkind about things he didn’t like. Lowell allowed a fair amount of student discussion in the class.
Lowell taught me to embrace the idea of poems written in rough form—forms that might seem unpolished or full of conflict. It was Lowell who first introduced me to early English Renaissance poets such as Wyatt and Raleigh and who led me to study Donne’s language and form. He also talked about writing drafts in strict form, then cutting them back to tighten them, freshen them, give lines an explosive force. Another point that stuck with me was Lowell’s remark about ambition. He said that many people can be good poets; only a few can be great poets; but you can’t be a great poet unless you try. For better and worse, this encouraged me to take bigger risks in my poems and take on hard, perhaps unattainable goals.
Elizabeth Bishop
I took Bishop’s poetry writing seminar at Harvard while doing graduate work in 1975. The seminar included both undergraduates and grad students. In 1975, I had read and admired her poems, and I had heard a lot about her, so I was eager to meet her. In class, she seemed very restrained—in her dress and appearance, her polite manner, her punctuality, her unassuming ways of talking, and the conscientious precision of her words. She kept to herself. I didn’t get the sense that she enjoyed connecting with students. She warmed more, and seemed pleased, when talking about animals.
Her writing was so strong and flowed so naturally. Her poems were models of how to observe the world closely and to write well from the beginning of the poem to the end. She conveyed this by assignments that sometimes involved a particular form, but also could be to imitate or answer another poem or to write about something specific or in a defined voice. Her comments on our poems and her fuller comments on poets she admired got across that poetry could emerge from care, precision, honesty, and really attending to what was there.
In the early 2000’s, after a work trip to Rio de Janeiro, I wanted to see Samambaia—“fern”—where Bishop had lived with Lota de Macedo Soares in the mountains near Petrópolis. But when I arrived, the front gate was locked, and there was no one to let me in.
I’d like to hear your story about Lowell.
Ramos: I had a psychiatrist in Baltimore back in the 1990s, and he told me he was an intern at Bowditch Hall (in McLean Hospital near Boston) and this wild-eyed guy with tousled gray hair named Robert Lowell was admitted. Apparently, Lowell was telling everyone that he wanted to speak with the president. No one believed him (not surprising—the patients there made such requests all the time). Somehow someone relented and gave him the phone. He immediately dialed the White House and spoke with John Kennedy and Jacqueline, whom he knew, of course. I asked my psychiatrist what the doctors did after that. He told me they revoked his phone privileges.
I can picture the whole thing, though I never met him. I’m envious that you got to study with such famous, great poets.
Ramos: A Thousand Curves seems neatly divided into a number of themes or topics: a section with a speaker who is growing old and still very much in love with his partner; a section that seems to deal with a speaker’s relationship to his (I’m just going to assume that the speaker in many of these poems is a man, but there are exceptions) Ashkenazic family going back through generations (another assumption, and please correct me if I’m wrong); a speaker traveling and/or entering foreign lands, etc. Given these clear distinctions, it’s tempting to think you wrote these poems with themes in mind, but I’m also stunned by your original and powerful images, phrases and language—“Tree wings furl upward higher than birds” (from “Current”); “Chitters drown the radio jazz” (from “Song Over Song for My Father”); “Wasps fly at our teeth but miss and freak the screen” (from “End of the Century”); I could go on and on—which makes me think the poems began with these (images, phrases, language). I want to ask, did you write them from an idea that you then developed, or did you write them from the inside out?
Nemser: Almost always inside out. Usually, I just start writing and see where the poem leads. A poem might launch from anything or anywhere—experience, memory, dream, something I’ve read, a film, a song, something I’m thinking about, often something I can’t explain. As a result, editing is equal parts tightening, heightening, cleaning, but also letting the subject reveal itself. This can take years. All that said, life generates topics. I’ve been married to one woman for 47 years, so I frequently write about her and our connection over time. Also, some poems begin in response to other poems of mine, and if the response works, I may be on the road to a theme.
You’re right that I’m from an Ashkenazic Jewish family—from Russia (now Ukraine) on my mother’s side and from Poland and Lithuania on my father’s. My grandmother often talked about her life in Chernobyl. They left in 1913. My parents were born in the US, and my maternal grandparents, my parents, and I lived near each other in Portland, Oregon.
Ramos: I’m impressed by the way the poems in your collection travel through time and allude to ancient or elemental or enduring things—seas, the moon, love, the natural word, as well as Aubades—and things more current and/or part of American pop culture—popular bands and songs from the last 4 or 5 decades, including songs and albums from The Ramones, U2, as well as jazz tunes. I guess that’s less of a question and more of a statement. I’m a musician, and I’m interested in your relationship (in your life and in your poems) with music.
Nemser: Those ancient things are still here, still marvelous, sometimes in reach. So it’s no surprise that seas, the moon, love, nature, and waking in the morning show up in pop music and jazz—in every kind of music. I love music. No one in my extended family had voice training, but everybody liked to sing, the older people in Yiddish. I remember listening to Burl Ives when I was quite small. At five or six, I started listening to rock and roll, especially Little Richard and Elvis, and then doo wop. My parents listened mainly to standards—Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, and on TV, Perry Como, Dinah Shore. And they loved Broadway show tunes. I played violin for about ten years—classical music and Yiddish songs. I quit early in college. My girlfriend in college and graduate school was a violist who taught me a lot about classical music. My wife loves “early music,” especially Baroque opera. My son sends me to great music—usually popular music—that I didn’t know about before.
My musical tastes have always been eclectic, but here are examples: Bob Dylan, Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, Child Ballads, Hank Williams, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Yiddish songs my grandparents sang, surf music, soul music, Chicago blues, British invasion, Leonard Cohen, Donna Summer, The Clash, U2, Buena Vista Social Club, Prince, J. Balvin. In the 1960’s, my father listened to a few Bossa Nova records over and over. Decades later, working in Brazil, I fell head over heels for classic samba, Bossa Nova, Tropicália, forró—and more.
Many of my poems were written while music was playing. I love song lyrics. Songwriters can be poets, and poets songwriters. The Child Ballads are written-down songs. Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge (among many others) wrote with song in mind. Brecht wrote songs that Weill put to music. Vinicius de Moraes who wrote the words to “The Girl From Ipanema,” was a poet who wrote and sang his own songs. And then there’s Bob Dylan.
Ramos: As I wrote, you name the poets you worked with in your bio., but I’m also interested in other poetic influences. I detect some Paul Celan, especially in the Germany poems like “Letter from Berlin”: “All April first I’ve dreamt and redreamt/ that everyone’s feet are asleep.” Are you willing to cite others?
Nemser: I first read Celan in college years, and he’s been a significant influence since then, though he’s inimitable. The Bible has been a constant influence because I read it often. Beyond that, here’s an incomplete list: Homer, Greek tragedy, Sappho, Catullus; ancient Chinese poetry; Hafez; Dante; Shakespeare; Renaissance ballads and early Renaissance sonnets; Spenser, Marlowe, Donne, Marvell, Milton; Goethe, Schiller, Büchner: Edo period poetry in Japan; Ghalib; Blake and all the other Romantics; Dickinson; Whitman; Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova; Lorca, Borges, Neruda, Vallejo, Drummond; Yeats, Eliot; Langston Hughes, Ted Hughes; Brecht, Ginsberg, Amichai, Heaney, Walcott, Milosz, Hayden, Rich, Zbigniew Herbert, Clifton, Szymborska. I’ve left out a lot; notably my teachers and my friends, who have been a huge influence on me. And I admire many many poets writing now whose work gets into my head, my heart, and my poems.
Ramos: I see your collection’s title appears in a poem called “Mil Cumbres.” Did you have in mind other explanations for this title, more metaphoric ones? I read it this way, especially given the way the poems in your collection cycle through separate but related topics and then curve around, toward the end, to the speaker and his beloved who continue to grow, spiritually and in love.
Nemser: Yes, I intended the title metaphorically. We have to deal with all kinds of curves. Often the curve brings a surprise. You think you’re going one direction, and suddenly you’re going another. There are the steeps and hairpins and revelations of a road like California Route 1. Who knows what’s coming or who’s going “around the bend”? The batter expects a fastball, the pitcher throws him a slow curve.
Curves are also pleasurable. We like to look at them, to run hands over them, to touch the curves in a beloved face. The natural world is made of curves—genes, flower petals, rolling hills, river bends. And, as you suggest, curves can return you to where you started.
Ramos: I really enjoy the way the future seems terrifying, hopeful, uncertain, and potentially dangerous in your poems. In “The Origin of Yet,” the speaker notes, “For moments/ we’re out of danger, afraid of nothing—when/ a rain that had never rained begins to rain.” Yet in other poems, there’s a promise of delight yet to come. Your poem, “Aubade,” ends with this lovely image of dawn: “Dockworkers pull the morning moon up by her arms/ to watch her slither on carts, or dive to sea and swim away.” Is this also related to the uncertainty of what is to come that your title seems to connote? In fact, I’d be interested in any of your thoughts on the way the future presents itself in your poems.
Nemser: As I’ve grown older, I’ve felt that I know less and less about the world. The fragility of the present and even the past adds to my sense of the fragility of the future. It can go in every imaginable and unimaginable direction—in a line, in a circle, in curves. And when a rain that had never rained begins to rain, it could bring pain and death or beauty and delight. As I suggest in “Felicidade,” we could end up on “a small, unspeakable/ shoal of chances of drowning// in joy.”
I do believe in mathematical and scientific truth, and in the ability of math and science to say useful things about the future. In fifth grade, I read a book about wonders of math, which had a picture of Pascal’s triangle. I’ve been thinking about probabilities ever since. As a lawyer, for example, I know that evaluating likelihood becomes a habit of mind. Weighing evidence and assessing credibility are all about likelihood, and many legal issues entail prediction. I suspect that these habits of mind influence my poems and what they say about the future.
Ramos: Your “In the Alley of Perpetual Industry” nicely combines elements of the sacred and profane
Our lips and eyelids burn away,
leaving all we crack open for holy,
all we mistake for decay.”
I always associate such combinations with T. S. Eliot and Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Are there other poets you are influenced by who make such combinations?
Nemser: By the 1970’s, I was deep under the influence of Neruda. His essay “Toward an Impure Poetry” made a big impression: “Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of the lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it. A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.” My poem “In the Alley of Perpetual Industry” seeks this kind of impurity.
Mixture of sacred and profane is in much of the literature I love. Once when I reread The Iliad, I was also going to action films like “The Terminator.” The carnage in both was immense, unthinkable, yet The Iliad explored dimensions of the sacred that the action films never dreamed of. The Inferno also is a mix; for example, the predatory scenes of falsifiers and betrayers near the center of Hell might fit in a horror movie, but The Divine Comedy is undeniably an evocation of the sacred. The profane and sacred appear together in everything from Shakespeare to Goethe’s Faust to Kafka to García Márquez.
Ramos: I’m ashamed that I have never written a good love poem, but you have many in this collection, poems that present an enviable partnership between a couple that enjoy ever-increasing love over the years. Have such poems come easily (as if poems come easily!) or have you had to learn how to write love poems.
Nemser: I first wrote love poems around the time I married my wife in 1974. We’ve always had a lot to talk about, so our love has always been involved with language, and it has evolved with language. We’re both only children, and our son is an only child. It’s a tiny family, and we look to each other. There are hard times and happier times. Both can generate poems. Poems about love are no harder or easier than my other writing, but given how my life has gone, writing love poems has been inevitable.
Ramos: These are poems of beginnings and endings, mornings, evenings, and travels that lead the speaker back to a beginning: “Here I am” (from “What I knew and What I Had to say”), or “There was no way down” (from “Mil Cumbres,” as if one cannot return from such a height without being changed, as if the truly new transforms us, the old way hidden forever): or, “the squawk circles back like a crack in vinyl” (from “Field Guide to Mercy”); or “the god of endings hangs on his hinges” from “Janus”). Are these departures and arrivals themes you have consciously meditated on in your poems, here and in the previous collections?
Nemser: I am interested in beginnings and endings. I don’t remember not being interested in them. And I’m interested in appearances, vanishings, recurrences, periodicity. I don’t consciously meditate on arrival and departure themes in my poems. My mind just goes there, as it goes to themes of transformation. I feel all those themes in my body as it ages, and I’m attracted to writings about those themes: e.g., Genesis, the Book of Job, Lao Tzu, Heraclitus.
My two earlier books do explore similar themes, but both are crazy, myth-influenced narratives. Taurus is a wild retelling of the Europa story: A bull-gargoyle in St. Petersburg, Russia is possessed by a god, comes down off of his building, roams and works in the city, and falls in love with a mysterious woman named Europa. In Tales of the Tetragrammaton, set in Portland, Oregon from the 1950’s to the 1980’s, a woman whose life resembles my mother’s is visited constantly and bewilderingly by the unpronounceable name of God.
Ramos: I’m so impressed by the unobtrusive rhyme and poetic forms you employ in many of these poems. Is there a moment in the composition of your poems when you decide to use such forms?
Nemser: Thanks. It all depends on whether I am trying to write in a strict, traditional form—e.g., with meter and end-rhyme or with required repetition. If so, I have to make that decision at the beginning and then try to stick to the rules, nearly all of which I first learned from Robert Fitzgerald’s wonderful prosody class in college. If I’m not writing in a strict traditional form, the effects just happen, usually by process of discovery in the editing.
Ramos: In your poems that allude to Japan, do you feel like you’re channeling or speaking back to Basho and others? I’m particularly fond of “May” and “Garden with No Boundaries.”
Nemser: Yes, I first read Bashō when my high school sold little haiku books in a bookstore in an alcove between classrooms. I read Narrow Road to the Deep North and other of Bashō ‘s haibuns when I was in college. In those years I also realized that the landscapes around Portland, Oregon and landscapes in Japanese poems and woodblock prints had strong similarities—fogs, torrents, fish, frogs, big solitary mountains, bridges, blue-gray seas.
My poem “Garden With No Boundaries” is a response both to Bashō and to Musō Soseki, the 13th Century poet, calligrapher and Zen monk who was the foremost garden designer of his time. While in Kyoto, I got to visit the Zen temple called Tenryūji, of which Musō Soseki was the first abbot and also the designer of the magnificent garden discussed in my poem. It was a joy to see how harmoniously the garden’s plantings, trees and water related to the temple, the mountains, and the famous bamboo forest not far away. Only later did I learn that the animating spirit of this place was Musō Soseki, whose poems, translated by Merwin, had long been on my bookshelves. The signs at Tenryūji had called him Musō Kokushi, another of his names.
Ramos: Does your location, i.e where you happen to be living, strongly affect your poems? I understand you live in two different places, depending on the season, I imagine.
Nemser: The particular landscape and atmosphere of a place enter the images in my poems and often take them over. Oregon, where I grew up, became imprinted on my brain when I was small, and it emerges when I write about childhood. My wife and I have gone to Maine for 47 years—first on our honeymoon—and it’s a beautiful, sometimes bleak, place with amazing views—ocean, forests, fast-changing weather, encounters with animals. Love, life and death reside there. Many of the poems in A Thousand Curves are set in Maine. Finally, I’m excited by travel. It’s about the unexpected. Wandering in a foreign place, trying to speak the language, jolts me out of the world I’ve known. I feel a new propulsion—I see, feel, remember more. Some experiences are written in fire.
