A Conversation with Peter Ramos about His Book of Poetry, Lord Baltimore
Editor’s Note: Peter Ramos and Paul Nemser each have published books of poetry this year. Their conversation about those books is presented here in two linked posts. In this post, Paul Nemser interviews Peter Ramos about Peter’s book, Lord Baltimore. Peter Ramos’s interview of Paul Nemser about Paul’s book A Thousand Curves ca be accessed here.
Peter Ramos’ poems have appeared in New World Writing, Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, Indiana Review, Mississippi Review (online), elimae, Mandorla and other journals. Nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize, Peter is the author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008) and three shorter collections. Lord Baltimore (2021), his latest book-length collection of poems, was published by Ravenna Press. He is also the author of one book of literary criticism, Poetic Encounters in the Americas: Remarkable Bridge (Routledge, 2019). An associate professor of English at Buffalo State College, Peter teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature.
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Nemser: So many of your poems in Lord Baltimore are about night—for example, “Night Shift,” “ Night Gown” “Night Flight. What does night mean to you?
Ramos: Thanks for these questions, Paul. I’m happy to be doing this with you.
I’m not sure this answer will make the poems you mention any clearer, but I have long had two strong feelings about night—fear and excitement. My son is now 12, almost 13, and when I was his age, I was terrified of being awake when everyone else was asleep. But in the summer of my 14th year, I turned to reading in bed, late into the night, and that solved my fear of not being able to get to sleep with everyone else. In my mid-teens, and when I could drive, I would go out with my neighborhood friends to punk and new wave clubs in the city (Baltimore), though I lived with my family in the suburbs. That time (during my 11th and 12th grades) and those first experiences of city night-life were filled with great excitement, thrilling with new, original (to me) experiences. But I have also felt fear of the evening throughout my life. I think I turned to drinking in part because of such fear. There have also been times where I was clear-headed, present and at ease in my skin when night came on, and I felt a different kind of excitement.
Nemser: “Night Shift” is about seeing and working, sleeping and waking. Night comes, “truer than time,” with its own distances, its own light:
All day it was summer, an open melon
thrumming with insects and minutes.
Now something else jumps
bolt upright, awake. Moonlight roams
for a thousand miles.
Is “Night Shift,” in part, an ars poetica?
Ramos: Yes, I can see that, and as I implied above, it’s also tied up with my personal relationships to night, especially my sober, clear-headed ones.
Nemser: Night Gown” is unusual in your book as a poem in the third person. Why did you use the third person? You have an epigraph from Emmanuel Levinas who saw the origin of ethics in a person’s encounters with the “face” of the unknowable “Other. Levinas said, “The beyond from which a face comes is in the third person." How did you become interested in Levinas?
Ramos: I wrote that poem long before I knew about Levinas. I use Levinas in my book of academic criticism, Poetic Encounters in the Americas: Remarkable Bridge (Routledge 2019), as a lens through which to view the translation of poetry. In this poem, I saw a connection with his passage about waking up as a way of actively and responsibly making the world come to life (as opposed to not waking by hitting the snooze button, say, and thereby continuing to let the world cease to exist). The poem, for me, is thereby like his discussion of the relationship of the self to the Other, which we decide to make before reason yet out of obligation. This, too, seems like a responsible way to make the world come to life. I think I used the third person because it seemed to me like an experience that many share, one not limited to me.
Nemser: “Night Flight” closes your book with what might be a first-person experience of the Other. The Other, according to Levinas, is “infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign.” In your poem, the speaker wakes at night saying, “Do it,/ that thing, again. He goes up into the attic and encounters “a Syrofoam/ head, anonymous/ wig-stand. I knew it…. The thought of this anonymous face “prickle[s] [him],” and he thinks of a street that runs “forever. You end with these lines: “I took/ that manikin head—/ frightening white// center of all things—/ for a sign, I took/ the matter as closed. Please talk about “Night Flight. What is the “flight”? What is the sign? Is the manikin really the Other or a mock-up? What are the matters that are closed?
Ramos: I’m not sure this will satisfactorily answer your questions. Like “Night Shift,” this poem runs ahead of me, in terms of its own logic, its atmospheric, uncanny plot. And I like that. I don’t want to know, completely, what my poems are about. To me, this poem seems to have its own understanding of time, an unconventional, dream-like presentation of it. I think there’s a hint that the flight is in the present moment, away from such a sense that the matter was closed. What does/ did the speaker take as closed, you ask. I think a sense that at the center of his world (especially since childhood) lies an enticing, alluring but ominous, even terrifying, and controlling fate-like power or entity. I wouldn’t call it the Other. I guess it’s fate, in the sense that I take Emerson to mean it in his essay with the title of the same term. I hope the speaker can activate more autonomy over his life.
Nemser: Themes from “Night Shift” are explored throughout your book. “Con La Mosca” describes the experience of waking suddenly and alone in a hotel in Frascati, not far from Rome. There’s a mix of dream and half-awake excitement. A stream of short, enjambed couplets, the poem flows through a current of history and free association, but events are described as if they happened almost at once. Aristocrats play “homo-erotic footsie” in marble fountains. In the hotel bar they drink to the death of Il Duce. In the ballrooms, women wear trappings of Eros—expensive heels, powdered cleavage, puckered lips. Outside there’s celebration, “corks/ & machine guns/popping off. All of this flow seems to be powered by Sambuca with a few coffee beans—a drink known as “With the fly,” “Con La Mosca. The poem ends with music, the speaker calling out a gentle crescendo as if he were a composer: “Piano,/ piano, mezzo-/ forte. How much of this poem is memory, how much history, how much imagination?
Ramos: I think your questions at the end work well—parts personal memory (I stayed in such a hotel once), history, and imagination. Like “Night Flight,” this poem to me presents a kind of haunting, a scratching of some invisible unreasonable itch. To me the speaker seems possessed for an intense moment, as you put it nicely, by “a current of history and free association, [by] events [that] are described as if they happened almost at once.”
Nemser: Your poems have many different ways of presenting time. In a number of short, present-tense, prose memoirs, you often describe events that proved indelible. These poems are full of period detail from the 1960’s or 1970’s. Many depict generational conflicts or erotic encounters. Could you tell us more about the inspiration for these poems?
Ramos: Yes, but I’m a bit uncomfortable with the term “memoirs” as a descriptor for these.
Nemser:
a. “Can’t Get There From Here” is a narrative of a teenage garage band denied access to their gig at a fair because of how they look—in an old car, in “black suits and ties, hair gelled up tall. They came to be cool, but are shunted from entrance to entrance till the car gets “hot as hell. Our eyeliner stings.
Ramos: In terms of pop-culture or period detail, this poem seems connected to the early 1980s. The poem is probably more autobiographical than others in that I was in a band in my mid-teens to early 20s and we grew up near a rural part of Maryland. I can identify with the speaker’s desire to fit into a sense of his home or place even as he clearly also wishes to register his defiance of its provincialisms. But in the poem, such defiance is also lambasted for its pretentiousness and innocence.
Nemser:
b. “Immigrant Song,” is about a musical war between the speaker and his father. Son puts on high-volume Led Zeppelin in his bedroom. Father is in his own bedroom, daydreaming back to his old life in Venezuela, but the noise from the son is too much. Father slams the door and turns on the Four Tops. Then in a moment of magic, a deeper past comes alive in the remembered time of the poem, the father’s father beating a tango rhythm on his coffin wall. For generations, the men in the family have used music to “stage our frustrated coups. What else can we do? We are not kings. These have been themes for men from time immemorial: battles between fathers and sons, old and new; the immigrant’s life—being from elsewhere but living in a strange land; how the dead speak to us and through us. Do you see your poetry as part of a musical lineage that allows you to know and overthrow the past?
Ramos: I don’t think the speakers can overthrow or escape their pasts in this poem. The father in the poem is transported to his own bedroom from the 1940s and then early ‘50s, and he enacts the same kind of Oedipal revolt as his son with his own father, and so on down the patrilineal line. The older I get the less I seem to know about my poetry. In my limited experience, I feel more calm, less antagonistic in my early 50s. My father was not violent, and he never taught me to fight, so this seemed like the closest thing to the father-son agon that I could use.
Nemser:
c. “Master Bedroom” turns these memoirs on their heads. It’s a present-tense, stanza-ed narrative of hallucination in the 1960’s. “A cleaned-up country sleeps beneath Sputnik and all the crown molding. The house has iconic features of what realtors now call “a mid-century gem”—constructed for soldiers who returned from WWII and started families. The married couple in the poem, however, live in a sci-fi horror movie combining paranoia, government experimentation, and wild sex. Characters appear and vanish as if in a masque. A field mouse in the heating ducts, crew-cutted scientists in the basement working on hallucinogenic truth serum, the couple’s grandparents, the women speeding on Dexatrim.
Ramos: Much of this poem is a meditation on the houses, fighter jets, drugs and pop-culture of that period. I grew up in the wake of the Vietnam War (I was 6 when the U.S. left Saigon), and I would see images of that war on TV as a young child; my earliest memories, which go back almost to language acquisition, are of the televised moon landing (a few years after it happened), hippies, the deaths of the Kennedys (Robert the year before I was born; John F. fresh enough that it was still in the air). As is hopefully clear, my father was an immigrant, but my mother’s family goes back generations in this country, and her father, grandfather and brother were all in the U.S. Navy, so my brother and I received all these forms of mid-century U.S. culture and institutions early. We grew up about 40 minutes from Washington, D.C., and our family frequently visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum when my brother and I were young. I don’t know why these things have such a strong hold on my psyche. Like poetry, they linger, deeply familiar but a little out of focus; they continue to haunt me. I think Rilke mentions in his Letters to a Young Poet that we spend much of our adult lives trying to distill and understand our earliest memories.
Nemser: Some of your poems are like paintings of a past that still exists in the present. “Hawaiian Tropic,” for example, is a portrait of desire, sensual and sensuous in its detail, perhaps tracing the path of the speaker’s eyes and mind as they glide over beautiful women lounging by a pool. “God did I lean/ toward them—and still do—. You emphasize these movements with changing line lengths and with line breaks.
Ramos: I like your description above: “Some of your poems are like paintings of a past that still exists in the present.” I don’t have much more to say about this poem.
Nemser: Lord Baltimore is the title of both your book and its longest poem. The title has several, mainly ironic resonances; for example, the poem conjures up the English noblemen who founded the Maryland Colony, the city of Baltimore—depicted as a rough, industrial, down-and-out, dead-end place—and the poem’s struggling speaker, who is focused on memories of one hot, “wretched,” Twentieth Century, bohemian summer in the city. Who and what is Lord Baltimore?
Ramos: For me, Lord Baltimore is the city, itself, a character in the poem, alluring, brutal, demystifying, or maybe experience, itself, which can rob us of our ideals. I just thought of Emerson’s essay of the same name (“Experience”). And in some ways, maybe the speaker sees himself as Lord Baltimore, but ironically, as you imply, cynically—a clownish drunken failure who bitterly mocks himself.
Nemser: Your long poem begins with an italicized epigraph introducing the city and the life of the speaker within it. When did you write the epigraph in relation to the rest of the poem? The epigraph made me think of the beginning of La Boheme, where the young artists in a garret in Paris in the winter are burning their books to keep warm. In “Lord Baltimore,” young artists swelter in broken-down studios with bad plumbing, bad furniture, kitchen cabinets that “pulse all night with bugs. But there’s a breeze through an open window, and a view: “The rusted, industrial blocks of Baltimore” are “all smoke and unloading, 9 to 5,” and by dusk the lights come on with an eerie, inanimate beauty. The artists indulge in “high talk, inspired. They believe their whole lives will be art and poetry. Then they realize that everything is crumbling. By day they taste the dust of idealism, and by night they have “a gathering unbearable thirst. What influences were you thinking about when you worked on “Lord Baltimore”? What is the relationship in the poem among dissolution, disillusion, craving, and beauty?
Ramos: “Lord Baltimore,” as is clear in the book, is a longer sequence poem. I had written a long sequence poem a few years earlier which appears in my first full-length collection, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVOX Books 2008), a poem called “Watching Late-Night Hitchcock.” I wrote the italicized epigraph in this collection, as well as a few others, earlier as individual poems. For me, the epigraph happens earlier in the speaker’s life and foreshadows what will come.
I’m not sure I can identify the influences for that poem. I’m sorry. I wish I could. I think all of the terms you use are present in the poem. I hope I wrote myself out of that poem. It was painful to live some of it, and it was difficult to write it.
Nemser: After the epigraph, the body of “Lord Baltimore” begins with an ironic line that has the feel of epic quest: “Here begins the journey to bread. You launch into a description of hellish jobs done in the toxic heat of that Baltimore summer. It reminded me of summer jobs I had in my teens—janitor in a crematorium, washing down the walls of an airless, ten-storey staircase in a newspaper plant, scouring huge I-beams in vats of hydrochloric acid and boiling lye at a plating company. Later, when I read about journeys to hell or knights crossing a wasteland, those jobs would come back to me—the stink and sweat and the sense of unreality. Is there an element of spiritual journey in “Lord Baltimore”?
Ramos: I think so. I think the following section alludes to a kind of spiritual journey:
I got out.
Walked for years, the flames
eating my skin
less and less, dumb and dazed,
afraid but steadying, toward no place
I’d ever known.
Nemser: In your section “Wisdom Teeth.” a grueling time with family and work and drinking merges into the surgeon’s gruesome extraction of in-grown teeth. The speaker woke up in a Percocet daze in an air-conditioned room belonging to a girlfriend’s parents, and now he asks, “Why go there now, why hold on to those bloody molars, your ingrown and bone-aching twenty-something teeth?” What do those teeth represent in your poem?
Ramos: I think that, as with the rest of the poem, the speaker feels compelled (for some reason) to go back to that period of his life, despite or even because it was painful. To me, there’s a desire to hang on to it and a self-command to let it go, the latter the healthier option but maybe requiring the former first.
Nemser: Your book often refers to music. The long poem uses lines from the Neil/ Nilsson song, “Everybody’s Talking At Me. The singer feels blind and deaf to the people around him—“I don’t hear a word they’re saying. “I can’t see their faces. He seems alien, out of place, dislocated, but he dreams of finding his place. It’s an escape into weather, into turbulence, and a mastery of them. “I’m going where the Sun keeps shining through the pouring rain. He’ll be riding winds and “skipping over the ocean like a stone. Many of the poems in your book Lord Baltimore begin with alienation, displacement, dislocation. How do the poems drive toward a place like the one where the song-singer longs to go?
Ramos: I always associated Baltimore, and especially my life in my 20s in that city, with the film, Midnight Cowboy, and that song recurs throughout the movie. The “green” cowboy goes to a huge, alienating city and loses his innocence (not that I think of myself as a cowboy). It’s such a devastating and beautiful movie, and to me, the song sounds very much like something a junkie would fantasize about, a longing to escape through his powerful pain medicine (I think I once heard Harry Dean Stanton say the song was about heroin). I’ve never done that drug, thank God. But the sense of womb-like comfort and escape seems like (to me) what the speaker is longing for throughout that poem. Does he get there? The poet isn’t there yet, but he hopes to.
Nemser: The final section of “Lord Baltimore” zeroes in on “the only thing/ you remember now” from all the drinking. Hung over, the speaker went out, and the street was lined with people evicted from their apartments. “By their own cheap sofas, gold shoes and negligee, spilled boxes of glass jewelry in the gutter—the Call-Girls,/transvestites, tall and elegant still but without their wigs, in ratty bathrobes/ out without time to put on makeup, suddenly/forced to wander the streets in broken pumps—/a few in slippers—breasting the cold bright/ morning, all of them, moving on/chin-high and stiff-lipped. This is the image that stays with the speaker—a community of people cast-out, performers only partially costumed, neither who they were, nor who they were not, but “tall and elegant still. What do these people mean to you?
Ramos: To me, they are the strongest, bravest people in the book. As such, the speaker simply cannot understand them. How did they do it, he asks, amid such desolation, loss, humiliation, poverty. I think the speaker wishes he had that kind of courage and fortitude.
