Metamorphic Imaginaries: A Conversation Between H. L. Hix and Dante Di Stefano

DD: In the introduction to The Gospel, you note: “This book is not ‘creative writing’ or ‘imaginative literature’ in the sense that applies to those works [books about the life of Jesus by Saramago and Coetzee]. I did not ‘make up’ anything here. I selected, arranged, and translated all the material, but I invented none of it: everything in The Gospel derives from ancient sources, nothing originates with me.” It strikes me that much of your work (and especially your more recent poetry collections such as American Anger and Rain Inscription or even books like Demonstrategy and Lines of Inquiry) blurs the boundaries between poetry, prose, criticism, philosophy, translation and so on; sometimes when I read one of your books, I think perhaps there are no boundaries between these modalities of engagement. You always bring me back to Benjamin: “all great literature either dissolves a genre or invents one.” Could you talk a bit about The Gospel, and your body of work, with some of these thoughts in mind?

HH: Thank you for this generous question, itself a robust modality of engagement that sees a continuity between The Gospel and my previous books.
Because the fact is so easy to forget, it’s worth occasionally reminding ourselves that genres are made up. Genres are not what philosophers call “natural kinds,” distinctions that exist in the real world independently of us, and that our categories then correspond to (or fail to correspond to). Instead, our categorizing creates and sustains genres, and they never “pull away” into an existence independent of our conceptualizing. They’re invented, not discovered, and they’re not very tidy: a novel isn’t distinguished from a short story by the same principle that distinguishes a novel from a memoir. Our genres don’t “cut literature at the joints.”
Which makes them susceptible to questioning. I would string the pearl you offer from Walter Benjamin with this pearl from Audre Lorde: “For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.” And this from Amartya Sen: “We can not only assess our decisions, given our objectives and values; we can also scrutinize the critical sustainability of these objectives and values themselves.” All three, like your question itself, point toward an urge that drives all my writing: not merely to renegotiate one particular agreement or another between us, but to reveal, and thus to make available for evaluation and revision, the “metastructure of consent” (Lauren Berlant’s term) that has been governing all our agreements.
So you’re right to pose the question of genre to The Gospel. To read for the gospel exclusively by haggling over what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote is to grant the metastructure of consent that says those four texts and only those four texts contain the gospel. But that metastructure of consent is constructed, not observed. It doesn’t describe a quality inherent in those four texts; it imposes a rule on my behavior, setting limits to what I should read and how I should read it. The Gospel is a way of asking what that rule hides from me, a way of asking what I can see if I don’t follow the rule, that I can’t see when I do follow the rule.
The fact that several poems in the Ill Angels’ first section are addressed to your students leads me to ask you a version of the same question. If you talk to students all day in class, in that modality of engagement, how important is it to talk to them also in another modality of engagement, in poems? And how important is it to you to address a particular person or group in a poem?

DD: It’s both of utmost importance and of no importance at all. In some sense, any addressee is merely a trope, part of the poem’s furniture and frame. Sometimes when I reread a poem I’ve written I feel like I’m speaking to myself in a small empty room and sometimes I feel like I’m speaking to all the round earth’s imagined corners.
I do speak to students all day long in my job as a schoolteacher, and sometimes those conversations are poems, sometimes those conversations die into poems, sometimes poems die into those conversations, but most of my students will never read the poems I write. Still, addressing my students in a poem shows that I care for them deeply—it’s a form of prayer for their wellbeing and future success. Deep attention is the highest form of love; embodying and engendering deep attention is the work of poetry and the work of teaching.
The greatest two words in all of literature are the epigraph to E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End: “only connect.”
After the birth of my daughter, it became very important to me that in the future she might read my poems and understand something about her parents that might otherwise remain hidden to her. In a very real sense, my wife and my daughter are the ones I am always speaking to in any poem I write.
Who do you see as the ideal audience for The Gospel? Who is this book for?

HH: The glib answers to this question—It’s for everyone! and I write for myself—do point toward something that I think is not at all glib. I myself experience an awe before the world and a wonder at experience that could be called “religious” because they convey a sense that in what meets the eye there is more than meets the eye. But I haven’t found (yet!) an institutional form or a heroic figure or a codified set of beliefs adequate to that awe and wonder. I wrote The Gospel for myself, then, in that the awe and wonder I feel invite continuing exploration in preference to settling on (or settling into) a received framework. And The Gospel is for everyone in that of course I’m not the only person who feels awe and wonder, or the only person intent on continuing to look toward what I can’t yet claim to be looking at.
While we’re thinking about who is speaking to whom, the first poem in Ill Angels, “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen,” ends “This is the part where I take your hand in / my hand and I tell you we are burning.” If angels are messengers, as the etymology of the word suggests, does the “I tell you” in that last line alert the reader that the speaker is one of those ill angels in the book’s title?

DD: I hadn’t thought of that possibility, but I think it’s a smart reading of those lines. The ill angels from the title are the ill angels from Poe’s “Dream-Land,” which begins: “By a route obscure and lonely, / Haunted by ill angels only.” To me, “Dream-Land” is a “fantasia of the unconscious” (to borrow a phrase from D. H. Lawrence); it’s a poem about journeying deeply into the self in order to turn outward more ardently. These ill angels are the legion woes that amass in the four chambers of our hearts as we go through this life; they are our dead, our regrets, our wounds, our arnica and eyebright, our hopes, our dear ones—they hold out the possibility of seeing ourselves the way a stranger does, unfolding in moments. In some sense, all the personae speaking through these poems, and all those spoken to, are these ill angels.
On an entirely different tack, I was reading in The Atlantic about Thomas Jefferson’s redacted New Testament, which he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Jefferson’s version expunged all the supernatural elements from the gospel. Your version adds miracle upon miracle from the ancient source material. We have, for instance, the baby Jesus taming dragons on the flight into Egypt, a trip during which he collapses distance and time. I was delighted by these stories, especially the ones from Jesus’ childhood. Has your conception of Jesus (as character, as metaphor) changed during your selection, arrangement, and translation of this material? What can we learn from the Hixian Jesus? How does this Jesus speak to our era?

HH: Jefferson was very concerned with the operation of things. How did things happen? How do thing happen? How will things happen? That concern invites historical and scientific accounts, which are especially good at answering those questions. An answer to how things happened should leave out miracles. There are no miracles in the domain of cause and effect.
I value historical and scientific accounts, and I am interested in how things happen, but I am even more interested in what things mean. I share Jefferson’s sense that the answers to those questions should be coordinated as far as possible, but I don’t share his strategy of coordinating them by only asking how things happen. I share Jefferson’s assessment that how things happen is an important concern; I choose not to follow him in making it so exclusive a concern.
A person who wants to know how things happened (what actually took place in the Middle East 2,000 years ago?) or how things happen (how do political institutions and religious institutions shape one another?) should get rid of supernatural elements in the narratives. A person who wants to understand what things mean might decide to attend to those supernatural elements, with the possibility in mind that they have more to do with significance than with cause and effect. Historical narratives are really good at answering how things happened, and scientific narratives are really good at answering how things happen. Literary narratives are really good at answering (or, I would say, at addressing) what things mean.
I don’t for a second think that a real goddess named Athena really appeared in the guise of Deiphobus to trick Hector into squaring off with Achilles, but I don’t take that or any of the other supernatural elements out of The Iliad, because I’m not reading The Iliad to find out how things happened; I’m reading it to find out what things mean. For me, it’s the same with reading a Gospel. I don’t believe, as an historical record of actual events that really occurred between physical entities, that baby Jesus tamed dragons, any more than I believe, in that way, that Beowulf slew a fen-dwelling monster named Grendel. I don’t think the writer who recounted the baby-Jesus-taming-dragons story in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew is offering me, and I’m not reading that particular story for, an historical record of actual events that really occurred between physical entities. I do think the writer of that story is signaling me that Jesus is exceptionally attuned to what today we might call the more-than-human world. I’m not any more worried about whether baby Jesus really tamed actual dragons than I am whether Gregor Samsa really turned into an actual giant beetle. So, I’m happy to stock The Gospel with lots of miracle stories: bring ’em on!
Miracle stories or not, literature remains connected to real events and real people. We’re engaged in this conversation as a deeply contentious election looms, and I’ve written one book called American Anger and another called Counterclaims. I just want to hear anything and everything you have to say in relation to your lines “Here in America, trauma and rage / dovetail, become birthright, counterclaim us.”

DD: The poem that those lines come from (“National Anthem with Elegy and Talon”) is about the intergenerational impacts of mental illness and domestic abuse, as much as it is about notions of national belonging and the experience of living in the United States in the early twenty-first century.
As many writers have noted, due to systemic racism, widespread misogyny, income inequality, a variety of broken social institutions (the public-school system, for example), and so on, daily life in America has been traumatic for many people for a long time. Fear, pain, and hopelessness accrue into rage and/or apathy (American Anger charts some of these tributaries). Any degree of safety and comfort we might experience as American citizens is underwritten by violence at home and abroad; this violence makes demands upon us all. No wonder that, in W. C. Williams famous formulation, the pure products of America go crazy, driven by a “numbed terror / under some hedge of choke-cherry / or viburnum, / which they cannot express—.” The Trump era has rendered much of this suffering, anguish, and violence far more legible to far more Americans than ever before.
In the beginning of Counterclaims, you note: “Poetry offers instead a field in which transformation becomes intelligible: a metamorphic imaginary, a landscape of renewal. The new self enters the world first in and as imagination. The new self is made by making.” Huge swaths of American life run counter to a metamorphic imaginary. I feel my self being constantly unmade, as a consumer, as a citizen, as a man; the feeling of that unmaking might be where a commitment to poetry begins.
Thinking of this kind of unmaking calls to mind the claims that the canonical gospels make on western readers. Reading The Gospel was a profoundly moving and unsettling experience for me, mainly I think, because of the way that you redress the deficits caused by translation inertia and gender tilt. You speak about this at length in your introduction to the book, but I was wondering, if, for the purposes of this conversation, you could discuss those aspects of the text?

HH: Thank you for drawing attention to these two concerns, which were very important motivations for my undertaking The Gospel. The concern I call “translation inertia” is that a great many word choices in existing English translations of the canonical Gospels have become fixed by convention, even though the English language is continually changing (as are human societies in which English is spoken). Those word choices have become static, even though the relationship between the Greek word being translated and the English word used to translate it is dynamic. 
I give a few examples in the introduction, but the list could be expanded. To follow up on one example that is only mentioned in the introduction, every previous English translation I’m aware of translates the Greek word christos as Christ, an obvious enough choice since the English word is a transliteration of the Greek word. But that “obvious” translation distorts something very important. The Greek word does not only refer, it also describes. In this it resembles, for instance, the English word president. “The President” refers to an office or to the person who holds that office, but it also describes the office or person as one who presides. The noun president relates to the verb preside, and the noun christos relates to the verb chrio, to rub a body with oil or dye or ointment. The English word “Christ,” though, doesn’t have a correlative verb form; it only refers, without describing. To capture that missing descriptive element, in The Gospel I translate christos as “salve,” which does function as both noun and verb: I can salve a wound or apply a salve to a wound. So “salve” describes as it refers, the way the Greek christos does, but the English “Christ” doesn’t.
The impulse to contest gender tilt is slightly different. Insofar as The Gospel is at all successful in resisting translation inertia, it is to that extent closer to, truer to, the original language of the sources; insofar as The Gospel succeeds in resisting gender tilt, to that extent it compensates for a limitation of both source and target language.
We recognize a problem with, say, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, a limitation in its depicting God as a thickly-muscled, light-skinned, heavily-bearded male, and we recognize a similar problem in referring to God as a male, and assigning God masculine roles such as father. The Gospel is an experiment in not doing so. I didn’t figure out a way to get The Gospel to pass the Bechdel Test, quite, but I hope its approach to degendering references to God and Jesus at least helps it not flout the Bechdel Test!
On a lighter note, I nominate you for President of National Poetry Month, and for “emotion recollected in tranquility” I substitute “a world less rickety, ricocheted with uncompromised shining.”

DD: Then, I’d recommend replacing “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” with your lines “…it is our work to send you careening / from consciousness to consciousness like tumbling down a hill.”
One of the stories from early in The Gospel stayed with me:

Walking once with xer mother across the city square, Jesus saw a teacher teaching some children. Twelve sparrows flurried down from the wall, bickering, and tumbled into the teacher’s lap. Seeing this, Jesus laughed. The teacher, noticing xer laugh, was filled with anger, and said, What’s so funny? Jesus replied, Listen, a widow is on her way here carrying what little wheat she can afford, but when she gets here she’ll stumble and spill the wheat. These sparrows are fighting over how many grains each will get. Jesus didn’t leave until what xe’d predicted had occurred. The teacher, seeing Jesus’ words become accomplished deeds, wanted to have xer run out of town, along with xer mother.

There’s so much to note and wonder about in this passage. We glimpse Jesus’ sense of humor, but its architecture remains a mystery. We see a link between Jesus’ clairvoyance and the clairvoyance of the sparrows. And I am left with many questions. Why is he laughing at the sparrows? Why does Jesus wait to see his prediction come true? Why doesn’t he help the widow? And so on. I will think of this anecdote every time I think of Jesus; it has subtly altered my perception of the metaphysics of the world presented in the Christian scriptures. What moments from The Gospel stay with you? What moments have altered your perception of the world presented in the Christian scriptures? And, out of personal curiosity, what’s your take on the passage I quoted?

HH: There are a lot of reasons to love that story, I’m sure. A couple of resonances are particularly strong for me.
One is by connection with Kierkegaard’s take, in Fear and Trembling, on the Abraham and Isaac story. Against the reassuring moralistic reading of the story that highlights God’s substitution of the ram for Isaac, and takes the point of the story to be something like Never fear: no matter how bad things look, God will rescue you, Kierkegaard foregrounds God’s command and Abraham’s obedience to it. The takeaway Kierkegaard registers is more like God is not bound by your judgments of value; God does not have to act the way you think God should. I hear something similar in this story, a reminder not to get too lazy or too cocky in thinking that Jesus just performs my vision of what’s right. Maybe Jesus is a rounder character than that, and maybe my vision of what’s right isn’t finished and perfect yet, but needs continuing adjustment and refinement.
Another resonance for me is with contemporary events. In the story, the teacher, confronted with truth, does not respond with self-correction and grateful embrace of truth: he responds with rage, and an impulse toward violence against truth and the bearer of truth. The teacher in the story seems to me to share a temperament with Trumpist America, the rage and violence being acted out against the truth of racial injustice, and against the bearers of that truth.
We live in an era where “facts” and “truth” are being constantly called into question in public discourse. For a collection that feels securely “grounded” in “real life,” Ill Angels also seems ready without warning to venture into surreal or dream worlds (“Because all the animals are kings and queens, / I wait for the rain to paint me”). How do those worlds connect for you? How do you want them to connect in the poems?

DD: William Blake’s visionary phenomenology inspires me. In one of his letters, Blake famously wrote: “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees.” Most of the times, I see the green things in the way, but I want the tears of joy. I want to learn to bear the beams of love. I want “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” Poetry trains me in this direction: in a poem, I hold open the palm of my hand and hope for infinity with its skylarks and lambs and caterpillars and lions and oxen and owls and, even, its poisons…
I think Blake would have loved your translation of the Sermon on the Mount as much as I do; this sermon forms the heart of any version of Jesus’ teaching. You translate, for example, the famous “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” as “Graceful, the unassuming: they will inherit the whole earth.” Could you discuss your translation choices for the beatitudes? Also, how does the additional material you included change the sermon itself?

HH: I’ve been dissatisfied for a long time with “blessed” as the translation of the Greek word makárioi in the beatitudes. It has been the obligatory translation ever since the King James: everyone translates it that way. But there’s something deeply misleading in that choice. Blessing comes to me from outside. I’m not blessed in myself, but blessed by something. Which allows for blessing to be transactional, part of a system of reward and punishment. It sets up “for” as the translation of the Greek hóti, to suggest that the blessedness derives from what comes after the hóti: the meek are blessed because they will inherit the earth, their blessedness consists in their inheritance.
But that’s not the flavor of the Greek at all. Makárioi is the collateral form of mákar, the primary meaning of which is the disposition, the well-being, of the gods, by contrast with that of humans. Its other uses are extensions of that primary meaning. Mákar is a godlikeness. It inheres in me, arises from within rather than being bestowed from without. It’s not a change of state imposed on me by something other than myself, it’s who I am. In the usual English translation it’s a transaction: if you are meek then you will be rewarded for that meekness by inheriting the earth, by which reward you will become blessed. But in the Greek the quality of being mákar is attended by inheritance of the earth. In the usual English translation, the value of being meek is utilitarian, teleological: it’s good to be meek because of the good results it brings. The value is in inheriting the earth. The usual English translation makes being meek a sound investment, and makes the rationale that runs through the beatitudes “rational self-interest,” the profit motive. In the Greek, though, the value of being meek is intrinsic, deontological. 
I’ve tried other approaches. In a previous version of the beatitudes, the one in the sequence called “Synopsis” (in Legible Heavens and then First Fire, Then Birds), I used “replete” for makárioi. In The Gospel, I chose “graceful.” Maybe better, maybe not, but what I was aiming for was restoring the implications of the original that makárioi inheres in the person and has value in itself.
The beatitudes work by repetition. The intense repetition in your “Solo” feels like the intense repetition in A Love Supreme, which “Solo” cites (and there are numerous other jazz/music references throughout the book). But “I am beyond professing music now,” one of your speakers says in a later poem. How do experiences of music and other art forms relate to your work as a poet?

DD: Music and the visual arts nourish me as much as poetry; both artforms suggest a range of possibilities for what a poem can be (picture a poem as expansive and effusive as a Mingus composition, a poem as repetitive and minimalist as a Philip Glass piano etude, a poem as gesturally complex as a Jackson Pollock canvas from the drip period, a poem as Baroque and phenomenologically complex as Velázquez’s Las Meninas).
The work ethic of Jazz musicians inspires me. The romantic images of Sonny Rollins woodshedding to the wind on the Williamsburg Bridge and Charlie Parker playing for the cows in a pasture belie a daily and total commitment to their art that is common to all of the artists I most admire.
The goal for me is to be always engaged in poetry, to dwell in poems the way I might dwell in the red ochers and umbers of a Caravaggio or the blazing hues of a Basquiat.
Another moment in The Gospel that moved me occurs after Jesus goes to the Mount of Olives and then returns to the temple to teach; the scribes and pharisees bring before Jesus a woman caught in the act of adultery for whom Mosaic Law mandates death by stoning. The scribes and pharisees ask Jesus what they should do with this woman. Jesus’ lengthy response turns into a Whitmanesque (and Blakean) view of divinity and humanity—the godhead in the biosphere: “This is wholeness of life, to know oneself in and of the whole.” I am thinking of the section that runs from “I am the first and the last” to “I am xe who cries out and xe who hears the cry” (104-106). What do you make of Jesus’ discourse at this moment?

HH: I share your attraction to that passage, which comes from an amazing text called Thunder, Perfect Mind, part of the Nag Hammadi find, that gives a first-person address by a female deity. It does have that quality you point out, that is familiar to us from Whitman and Blake. I think what I am drawn to is the contrast with our more usual epistemology. That dominant epistemology (whose champions would include Descartes) posits that everything is in principle explicable to the human mind, everything is subject to human reason. But what if that’s just not true? What if nothing is subject to human reason? Who am I then? How do I stand in relation to the world? This passage seems to me to take those questions seriously.
That passage doesn’t fulfill the usual preconception, the norm that has come to be associated with gospel writing. “Brief Instructions for Drawing…” is not a “My love is like a red, red rose”-type love poem. (Nor are the love poems that follow it.) What impels the veering away from that “normal” approach?

DD: Because of the misogyny embedded in the courtly love poem, the English and American poetic tradition has always invited a subversion of the power and clichés associated with erotic and romantic themes; Shakespeare’s sonnets are, of course, a huge pivot in the tradition.
In my own life, I’ve found that nothing has been more productive and more challenging than the love I share with my wife. Being in love is a choice, full of daily unromantic tasks and realities. Being in love is a political and moral act; for me, writing about love should be too. Being in love is both the most transformative and the most mundane experience a human being can undergo. To return a phrase of yours I quoted earlier, love offers us “a landscape of renewal” like the field offered by a poem. In a poem and in love, a new self is made by making.

HH: A related question arises for me in relation to your “Epithalamion with References to Philip K. Dick, Paul Klee, and Gene Roddenberry.” Your titles seem to equal parts orientation for the reader and disorientation. What is the relation for you between a poem and its title? What do titles do for you?

DD: Sometimes a title is like a light switch in a darkened room; it’s the first place you go to illuminate a text. Sometimes it’s a dimmer switch. Sometimes it’s a circuit breaker. Sometimes it’s a live wire, exposed and sparking. Sometimes it’s not wired into the structure of the poem at all. Sometimes it’s a satellite, a dose, an antidote.
My titles tend to be expository, subversive, allusive, and metapoetic. I’d like any title to orient and disorient simultaneously.
The Gospel constantly reoriented me as I read it. The passage I mentioned (about the discussion between Jesus and the scribes and pharisees) also recalled the ways in which The Gospel nuances (challenges, confirms, reorients) my understanding of gender and misogyny in the Christian scriptures. Is The Gospel a feminist text? Did your synthesis of the source material reorient your understanding of gender and misogyny in the Christian scriptures?

HH: Readers will have the final say on whether The Gospel is a feminist text, but my intention was to compose it as a feminist text, and my hope is that it may prove to be so. I take this as a criterion: if there is gospel—good news—that any given Gospel (Matthew’s or Thomas’s or mine) tries to give an account of, that good news is equally available to all persons. If it’s good news for white persons but not for persons of color, then it’s not good news at all. If it’s good news for men but not for women, then it’s not good news at all. I don’t claim success, but I did attempt to incline my Gospel in the direction of that feature of the gospel. It’s the impulse behind the gender-neutral pronouns for God and Jesus, and the coinages such as fother and xon.
An impulse behind a work is susceptible to personification as a muse or spirit. Asked who has been appointed in heaven as presiding spirits over this book, I would guess John Coltrane and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Who have you requested as presiding spirits?

DD: Those are the two greatest saints in my litany. Others for Ill Angels would include: Marc Chagall, Katsushika Hokusai, Cy Twombly, Frida Kahlo, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Elizabeth Cotten, Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra, Charles Mingus, Louis Armstrong, John Fahey, Django Reinhardt, Robert Johnson, Chet Atkins, Jerry Garcia, Mississippi John Hurt, Sleepy John Estes, Hounddog Taylor, R.L. Burnside, Akira Kurasawa, John Ford, Sergio Leone, Christopher Smart, Christopher Gilbert, William Blake, Lucille Clifton, Wanda Coleman, Gwendolyn Brooks, Thérèse of Lisieux, Theresa of Avila, Augustine of Hippo, Søren Kierkegaard, Li Bai, Federico García Lorca, Kobayashi Issa, Matsuo Bashō, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jorge Luis Borges.
Some fictional spirits I’d invoke: Prince Myshkin, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, Pierre Menard, Bartleby the Scrivener, Malte Luarids Brigge, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Zebra, Helen Dewitt’s Sybilla, Tom Bouman’s Henry Farrell.
In your author note at the end of the book, you mention your retelling of the Book of Job in First Fire, Then Birds and your redaction and translation of a sayings-gospel in Rain Inscription. How did writing those poems prepare you for writing The Gospel? Why do you consider those texts as poems, but you don’t consider The Gospel a poem? How would you compare your book God Bless with your project in The Gospel? Aren’t both projects conceptual poetry? What makes a poem a poem? Where do selection, translation, and arrangement end and invention, imagination, creation begin? (Note: I’m also thinking of some of the things you say in Demonstrategy and As Easy as Lying here.)

HH: Just to reiterate: thank you for this level of engagement, putting The Gospel into a context that includes my previous work. It is an act of intellectual/spiritual generosity, and I am grateful.
For me, this relates to the question we broached above, about genre: maybe my sense that genres are not tidy boxes only reveals how bad I am at keeping my writing in those boxes! But it also has to do with how much of my life experience is mediated experience. I spend a far larger portion of my waking day reading books and scanning screens than I do gazing at where two roads diverge in a yellow wood or listening to gathering swallows twitter in the skies. Consequently, as an attempt to come to terms with my life experience, my writing is more curatorial than diaristic, more about selection and arrangement than about production, more to do with composition than with invention.
We love magical origin stories for our works, according to which the poet or evangelist is the vehicle of a Higher Power—the Muses, or God—who speaks through the writer. But even pop-culture bromides such as “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” work at debunking the magical origin stories. As a poet, I find it liberating to eschew such origin stories: I perceive myself as having more agency if I’m working, not only hanging out, waiting for a visit from the Muse. And the texts themselves of the canonical Gospels indicate that their writers selected and arranged material from sources: in that regard, my Gospel is simply following precedent.
In addition to “mediated” cultural presences animating your poems, there are “immediate” physical presences. Apples, for instance, recur throughout. But it doesn’t feel to me like apple-as-mythic-symbol; it feels more Cezanne-ian or something…

DD: You’re right, there is something impressionistic (or post-impressionistic) about the way the apple recurs in my poems. I love the geometry of apples. I love the sound of the word “apple” and the almost endless number of varietals and their evocative names: imagine an orchard of Empires, a bushel of Jubilees, an Autumn Glory held in the palm of your hand. I’ve always loved apples and being in an orchard. My friend owns an orchard and I helped him plant many of the trees in it. My father dreamed of owning an apple orchard. My grandmother always used to make homemade apple sauce. I don’t employ the apple out of nostalgia, but I am drawn to it; it’s a deep image for me, as it is for many other people. 
Last month, I was reading As Easy as Lying, your collection of essays on poetry published by Etruscan Press in 2002. At one moment in that book, you mention that nobody reads your first book anymore, Perfect Hell (Gibbs Smith, 1996). Of course, I immediately bought a copy. I was struck by the way Perfect Hell contains all the wilding seeds that would orchard your oeuvre…Even The Gospel is there, and yet, in many respects, it’s a very traditional debut featuring short lyric poems. This assessment isn’t meant in a derogatory sense; it’s an amazing book, for the dialogue opened through your titles alone. And the poems! (I love “Another Winter, Farther Away” and “Reasons” and “1 Is the Point, 2 the Line, 3 the Triangle, 4 the Pyramid”). The point is, I would never guess that the poet behind Perfect Hell would one day write Chromatic or Rain Inscription or, indeed, The Gospel. Could you talk about your journey from Perfect Hell to The Gospel? How has poetry changed for you? How has poetry changed you? How has the poetry world changed?

HH: One way to respond to this would be to connect it to our earlier discussion of the beatitudes. Perfect Hell tries to perform (its poiesis is) ergon, the root of such English words as work and urge and orgy. The Gospel values mákar more, and seeks to do/be makários. That long-lost me wanted to secure a place in the world, and apparently thought he could. These days, the perplexity more present to the present me is how to let go the world.
When I was writing Perfect Hell, the metaphor of building would have seemed apt to what I thought I was doing; nowadays, the metaphor of mushroom-hunting seems more applicable.
There’s a moment in the Investigations when Wittgenstein says “The real discovery is the one that makes us capable of stopping doing philosophy when we want to.” In my Perfect Hell days, I wanted to be capable of doing. In my Gospel days I want to be capable of stopping doing.
Both books, Perfect Hell and The Gospel, aspire to the attention-to-everything that gives your poems such precision! (“… filigreed like the grip / of a cavalry officer’s pistol / in a black and white western…”) How does one sustain such precise attention?

DD: In As Easy As Lying, you mention that we might think of the training of a poet in the same way that we think of the training of an Olympic athlete (as an ongoing everyday process). You mentioned Fear and Trembling earlier and Kierkegaard’s insight from that book comes to mind: “faith is a process of infinite becoming.” The ongoing training, the infinite becoming, that manifests sporadically as poetry demands this kind of attention. Paradoxically, attaining this type of attention, if not sustaining it, drives such training and becoming forward.
Put more simply: to invoke the awe and wonder you also mentioned earlier, there is so much to love and to uplift and to be stupefied by in this world, there is so much strangeness and grotesquery and astonishment to be undone by in this world, how can a poem not recognize such richness (and such lack)  in all its intricate particularity?
In your excellent book on W. S. Merwin, you mention Merwin’s notion that one should find a poet or two to read exhaustively and repeatedly.  Besides Merwin, who have been those poets for you? Also, I know we share a love of G. M. Hopkins. I was wondering if you could share some thoughts about him?

HH: I’m sure we all have our lists of those poets whose work has had an especially transformative effect on us, and/or whose work has been an especially lasting presence for us. Hopkins is definitely one of those poets for me. I’ve tried periodically, though so far unsuccessfully, to write an essay about why Hopkins was transformative for me and remains a lasting presence. 
At least one element of my response to Hopkins, though, has direct connection with The Gospel. I was raised in a religious tradition committed to the doctrine that divine inspiration has ceased. God spoke through the writers of the books of the (Protestant Christian) Bible, I was taught, but then, once those books were written down, stopped speaking. (I take the point to be, not that God is capricious or has withdrawn from involvement with humans, but that the Bible is complete and sufficient.) But when (in second-semester British Lit, sophomore year, sitting at the plywood desk in my dorm room) I read “The Windhover,” I felt that it was not so. This was the first clear moment of my departure from received religion, the sense “The Windhover” secured to me, that I could not have put into words at that time but did experience viscerally: that inspiration had not ceased, and that if any words were the words of God, those words were. 
My religious beliefs are quite different now from how they were at that time, but Hopkins still exemplifies for me the principle that if I want to address what is “higher” than myself, I need to “elevate” my language. If I want to be in touch with what exceeds me, I’d better “language up.”
I hear in your work that same impulse to be in touch with what exceeds you. It’s hard not to take your question addressed to your daughter as a question any poet might ask, so I ask it back to you: “… these lines might not survive / their own inception, but so what?”

DD: For me, as for you, and for most other writers I am sure, we cannot live otherwise. I read and write because I know the truth of John Donne’s “Since I die daily, daily mourn.” I choose to live in the word because it allows me to enter more fully the greater mystery of being alive, in all its unbounded ecstasy and deep sorrow. My reading and writing lives lend me the discipline to try to move beyond the manifold vertiginous fictions of the self, to continue a turning outward, to love more, to more fully be.
What impact has translating, selecting, and arranging The Gospel had on your poetry? What project are you working on now/next?

HH: I hope they have informed one another, been integrated and reciprocal in their mutual influence.
By received distinctions (such as the genres we discussed earlier in this conversation, or disciplinary divisions as they are codified in university departments) my work is a discombobulated mess. And maybe that assessment is accurate! But I experience as unified and coherent the life commitment that received distinctions identify here as poetry, there as translation.
It all feels of a piece to me.

In the End, There’s Only Love: A Conversation between Dante Di Stefano and J.G. McClure

Dante Di Stefano: The Fire Lit & Nearing includes several self-portrait poems. I was wondering if you could begin with some thoughts on this type of poem. Why write a self-portrait poem? How are your approaches different in each self-portrait poem? How is the gesture toward self-portraiture different in poetry, art, and life (in the era of the selfie)?

J.G. McClure: I like the “Self Portrait as ____” format for its ability to efficiently establish and contextualize an otherwise absurd conceit. If in the title we get that piece of information to orient us—read this as a self-portrait—we’ll be able to immediately start making sense of what follows. Once you’ve given the reader that firm ground to stand on, you’re free to go where the poem takes you, zany as it may be. So the format allows a lot of freedom to explore different angles on the self: I have a “Self Portrait as B Movie Script” where I get to riff on my affection for campy 80s action movies, I have a “Self Portrait as Ego and Vehicle” where my ego is a tiny man driving me around like a motorcycle, another where I’m the reluctant keeper of an unruly dog named Sadness, and so on. The “Self Portrait” mode lets these otherwise very different metaphors work together in the same collection.

Besides, I suspect that any poem is a self-portrait to some degree. Borges has a lovely little parable tucked away in one of his books’ epilogues:

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

Whatever you write, no matter how different the subject or style or point of view, the one common factor is always you. Since you can’t escape it, you might as well have fun with it.

Your latest collection, Ill Angels, starts with two back-to-back epigraphs—one from Edgar Allan Poe, the other from the Beastie Boys—and many of your poems are presented as reactions to specific encounters with art or music or literature at specific times: “Reading Dostoevsky at Seventeen,” or “Reading Rilke in Early Autumn,” or “Love Poem Written While Listening to ‘Alligator Crawl’ Repeatedly and Misremembering Lines from Kobayashi Issa.” Could you discuss the ways in which you join allusions to specific times and places? Why situate your poems in this way? How about your blending of cultural references traditionally characterized as “high” (like Rilke or Issa) with the so-called “low” (like the Beastie Boys)?

DD: Don Quixote is as real to me as any friend I’ve had in the past forty years. A Love Supreme is as inhabitable in my memory as the first time I met my wife. The paintings of Marc Chagall appear as warmly in my mind’s eye as the face of my long dead great grandmother. Writing a highly allusive poetry allows me to celebrate all the lives fountaining through my own; those lives include the lives of loved ones and friends, and, also, the lives of the artists, musicians, and writers I love. I don’t like to make distinctions between high and low culture (although, of course, I know what you mean). Who’s to say that The Low End Theory or Paul’s Boutique isn’t as valuable a cultural artifact as Sketches of Spain or Philip Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts? To answer your question more directly, though, I just write about things and people I love, and experiences that compel me (most of which are bound up in some way with art, music, and literature.)

Speaking of compelling experiences, I admire the prose poems scattered throughout TheFire Lit & Nearing, particularly “The Cat,” which like a Russell Edson poem takes an absurd premise to its logical conclusion but does so with a straight face. Whose prose poems do you most admire? Why choose to write a poem in prose rather than in lineation?

JGM: I’m flattered that you thought of Russell Edson; I admire his work a great deal. Another favorite is James Tate’s “Distance from Loved Ones,” from the collection of the same name.

As I think about it, the Tate poem follows a similar trajectory: we start with a plausible premise, and then see Murphy’s Law going further and further as the speaker’s mother recounts the litany of escalating misfortunes that befall Zita. It’s so over-the-top in its tragedy that we can’t help but chuckle uncomfortably. Then we get what could be a mean-spirited joke about the elderly mother’s babbling: “My mother tells me all this on the phone, and I say: Mother, who is Zita?” Again we chuckle—all this, and the speaker doesn’t even know who his mom is going on about.

But then Tate springs his trap: “And my mother says, I am Zita. All my life I have been Zita, bald and crying. And you, my son, who should have known me best, thought I was nothing but your mother.” All that escalating misery, and our increasingly callous response to it, suddenly hits home, and we, like the speaker, have to recognize our failure of empathy.

If the poem ended there, it would be okay: a bit preachy, but fine. Instead, it follows this argument, too, to its logical conclusion: “But, Mother, I say, I am dying. . .” Now we understand that the failure of empathy cuts both ways: the son fails to recognize the mother’s crisis, the mother fails to recognize the son’s, and the distance from loved one to loved one remains uncrossable.

In Tate’s poem, as in Edson’s poems, the focus is on the story that’s being told. I think we tend to see prose as transparent, while poems call attention to themselves as made things. Of course in reality the form of prose mediates our experience of its content too, but we don’t really think about that–we’re used to reading prose all the time for information, without thinking about its form. So I think the prose poem is able to tap into that idea, to keep the reader’s focus on the narrative. For that reason I think it’s well suited to pieces like “The Cat,” or “Parable,” where the narrative is primary.

You’re the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America (NYQ Books, 2018), and many of your own poems directly engage with political issues. For instance, “Words for My Twelfth Grade English Class, After Reading Malcolm X’s ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’ on Inauguration Day 2017” ends with this urgent call to action:

Still, the masts of the Niña, the Pinta,
and the Santamaria are burning
down our dreams as we pledge allegiance to
the flag inside a hood at Abu Ghraib.
Scalpel us out of apathy; take sides
with freedom, with fire, with freedom again.

Do you see yourself as a “political poet”? Is there a meaningful distinction between “political” and “non-political” poems, or is all writing political in some way? What is your view of the role of the poet in today’s social/political landscape?

DD: I don’t see myself as a political poet (or as any other type of poet, for that matter). It’s probably true that all writing is political in some way. From the time I first started reading poetry seriously in the late 90s, I’ve been interested in poetry of the political imagination; Carolyn Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting, was an important early introduction to a global poetry of witness. Some of my favorite poets write directly political poems: Amiri Baraka, William Blake, Martín Espada, Miguel Hernández, Federico García Lorca, and Patricia Smith (to name a few). I do like to keep in mind John Ashbery’s caveat about political poetry: “there is not much ‘political’ poetry that I like for the reason that the political sentiments reiterated in it are usually the exact ones I harbor, and I would rather learn something new.” As far as the role of the poet in the social landscape goes, I believe that depends on the poet. There are as many different roles for poets as there are poets themselves. One role that most poets share is (to paraphrase Roethke) to create art that undoes the damage of haste.

One poem you’ve written that undoes the damage of haste is “The Cat.” In that poem you end with a wonderful sentence as the world skitters on the brink of apocalypse: “In the end, there’s only love.” Stanley Kunitz said, “All poems are love poems.” Do you agree with that?

JGM: Maybe? On one hand, it’s hard to read something like Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,”  with its comically extreme misanthropy, as a love poem. But on the other hand, maybe in some ways it is. To complain “the world shouldn’t be this way” is to suggest “there’s another way I want it to be.” So maybe in that sense, even the bitterest poems about this world are love poems to a possible alternative. Even in Larkin, I think we can see that. Take a poem like “High Windows.”  Cynical as the voice may be throughout, it ends in a place of almost unbearable longing for the things it no longer can believe in—a longing that feels, to me, a lot like love.

Resignation is as boring as contentment. Fiction writers know this: you can’t have a story where your characters just stand around talking about how great everything is. Likewise, you can’t have everybody standing around saying “Life sure is unpleasant. Oh well, let’s have lunch.” Whatever that is, it’s not a story. What’s interesting is yearning, the hunger for things to be other than they are. Or, when things are good, the tension that comes from the awareness that nothing lasts forever. Love poems dramatize yearning especially clearly. The lover’s complaint dramatizes the yearning for things to be otherwise (for the distant lover to be near). The “happy” love poem shows the joy of things as they are, but in the background is always the awareness that it can’t last (the near lover will eventually be made distant by changes in, or the end of, life).

But other poems can and do engage with yearning in similar ways, and in this way I can see how “all poems are love poems.” For instance, Alan Shapiro has a wonderful poem, “Old Joke,” which argues that the gods’ perfection, their “easy excellence, with nothing to overcome,” renders them incapable of the kinds of meaningful experience that we in our ridiculous, everyday miseries are able to attain. The poem isn’t about a lover, but in the broader sense, it’s very much a love poem to our human imperfectability.

Returning to Misrepresented People, I wonder if you could say more about the process of co-editing that anthology. Any anthology will necessarily accept some poems and reject others: there’s only so much page space to work with. Beyond that, part of the point of an anthology is that the work in it has been preselected: readers pick up an anthology partly so they don’t have to track down and read the mountains of relevant work themselves, but rather can skip straight to the “best” pieces. But on the flipside, this selection process—especially in an anthology specifically focused on questions of (mis)representation—brings up difficult questions about whose work does and doesn’t get amplified and why. How do you go about making these tough choices? How do you see the role of the editor in today’s world, where technology has made it easier than ever to disseminate one’s own work?

DD: Working on Misrepresented People was a learning process. Hopefully, I will have the chance to edit an anthology again with the knowledge I gained from the editorial process on this book. Misrepresented People began the day after Trump became president. I sent out a mass email to every poet I knew asking for work for an anti-Trump anthology. As the project developed the book became a way to explore the historical arcs of injustice and inequity of which the Trump administration is a mere symptom. I also wanted to create a book that would embody a concrete form of activism (the proceeds from the book are being donated to The National Immigration Law Center).

Halfway through the editorial process, which also involved securing a publisher, María Isabel Álvarez came on board as a co-editor and she did a tremendous job helping me make some of the hard decisions you asked about. We weren’t necessarily looking for “best” poems in this anthology. From its inception, I conceived of this project as timebound. So, we looked for poems that drew out different aspects of the current political moment, but also ones that spoke to systemic and historical forms of misrepresentation. Most of the poems were solicited directly from the poets included. There were a few open calls for submissions, but we ended up passing on a vast majority of the work that came in over the transom. We tried to take work from as diverse a group of poets as possible. Of course, not all our choices were perfect, and we passed on several great poems and poets. Having said that I’m happy with the choices we made, and I am tremendously proud of the anthology. I mean this anthology has sam sax, Fatimah Asghar, Kaveh Akbar, Natalie Diaz, Gregory Pardlo, Alberto Ríos, Alison Rollins, Dana Levin, Patricia Smith, Maggie Smith, Martín Espada…and the list goes on! I should add that I didn’t know most of these poets beforehand, but they were all incredibly supportive of the endeavor.

The role of the editor in the digital era is the same as it has always been: to create opportunities for other writers and to provide a platform where their work can be put into productive dialogue with the work of others. Although the internet and social media have allowed work to be more widely distributed than ever before, the digital ether tends to atomize some of the connections that a traditional print anthology or journal fosters and strengthens. As an editor for DIALOGIST and as an anthologist, I see it as my role to take seriously, and on its own merits, every poem that comes my way. I am particularly interested in publishing work that is far afield of my own, aesthetically and thematically. I don’t want to push a single approach to poetry; I believe in a descriptivist editorial stance.

On a widely different note, one element that binds the poems in your book together is the figure of Ellie, an ex-girlfriend, and the breakup that the speaker in many of these poems is working through. The book ends with “The inked blossom of poppies / and rue on her back.” This is such a beautiful and sad image to end the book on. Is this breakup autobiographical? If so, could you discuss writing through heartbreak? How much fidelity do you think a poet should have toward autobiographical detail? Does it depend on the poet? If so, why? How does the trope of loss and the figure of Ellie nuance other thematic and structural elements of the book?

JGM: Yes and no. I did go through an especially painful, seemingly never-ending breakup that acted as a catalyst for many of the poems, and “Ellie” is primarily based on one person (though there’s a bit of compositing). She really did have that tattoo. But names have been changed to protect the innocent, and facts have been changed or made up or left out as needed to make better poems.

I don’t think you need to have any fidelity to autobiographical detail as long as you’re not claiming to. Nobody has a problem with fiction writers making things up; there’s no reason to expect otherwise from poets. (Now if you’re saying “everything in here is true” and then making things up, that’s a different matter. But that’s an ethical issue, not an aesthetic one.) The job of the poet is to make good poems. That’s all. If the way to do that is through fictionalization, then fictionalize away.

Writing through heartbreak can be therapeutic, certainly. In the act of writing, you transform your pain into an aesthetic problem to be confronted on the controlled environment of the page. You take control of it, make something from it, and there’s a joy in that; Yeats called it “the gaiety transfiguring all that dread.”

But at the end of the day, my breakup is only interesting to me. If anybody else is going to care about the poems I write about it, those poems have to show readers something important in their own lives. Otherwise, I’m just indulging in the kind of solipsistic writing Addonizio and Laux parody so well in The Poet’s Companion: “Here I stand / looking out my window / and I am important.”

In this case, I think the breakup with Ellie is a microcosm for a more fundamental aloneness and a more fundamental absurdity that comes with being human. What made this particular breakup so devastating to me was that we were so close in so many ways, but still hopelessly separated in others. Our fights were about stupid, trivial things, as I suspect most lovers’ fights are. They meant nothing and they were inescapable. And no amount of love or good intentions could bridge that gap in the end. It’s a variation of Tate’s Zita problem: you, who should have known me best, didn’t. Couldn’t.

That fundamental separation is, I think, what the book is concerned with. The Ellie poems are about that, but so are poems like “The Astronaut,” which have no connection to her. In a way, I suppose the very act of writing poems is an attempt to bridge that unbridgeable distance—to connect with the reader even though you know it’s always only a partial connection.

In addition to “Words for My Twelfth Grade…,” Ill Angels includes several other poems about your experiences teaching high school. Your poem “Prompts (for High School Teachers Who Write Poetry)” was recently featured on Poets.org, and you are the winner of the 2019 On Teaching Poem Prize. How do you see the relationship between your work as a teacher and your work as a poet?

DD: Being a high school teacher keeps you humble. You’ve got to be tough and a little bit stupid to continue teaching in such a broken system. Teachers aren’t respected in our culture, no matter what anyone tells you, and even in a good public school like the one where I work, you are witness to systemic failures that are crushing. I teach students with learning disabilities, students from extreme poverty and abusive households, and students from great wealth. I teach unmotivated students and wonderful, striving, bright children who want to succeed. I witness deep pain and failure daily. It’s a heartbreaking job with little rewards, but I do my best to help all my students. I’ve always thought of the classroom as a poem I was composing period by period. Frost said: “a poem should begin in delight and end in wisdom.” I don’t believe that to be true for all poems, but I strive for that in each class I teach.

The job has provided me with a decent middle-class life, which has afforded me the leisure to write around my workday. It’s also kept me grounded; no matter how good of a teacher you are, on any given day an angry teenager might tell you to go fuck yourself. Teaching teenagers puts everything else in perspective. You can’t take yourself too seriously if you want to survive in the job. A sense of humor helps.

You use humor and a colloquial phrasing in a manner reminiscent of poets like David Kirby, Billy Collins, and Jeffrey McDaniel. Could you discuss the uses of humor in poetry?

JGM: I think it’s a vital and overlooked tool in the poet’s kit. When I first started writing, I got this idea in my head that in order to be a “serious” poet I had to write “serious” poems, where “serious” meant something like “joylessly clubbing the reader over the head with my very poetic despair.” But somewhere along the line I realized those weren’t the poems I wanted to read or the poems I wanted to write.

Remember the TV show Scrubs? I loved that show for the way that no situation was ever just one thing. The show was very funny, but it took place in a hospital, where sickness and death were constantly present. Characters you cared about died. Characters who deserved happy endings didn’t get them. Characters tried to do the right thing and it all went wrong and the fallout nearly broke them. But the show was very funny at the same time, and that’s what made it so poignant. The show, like real life, was full of humor and full of pain and you couldn’t disentangle them. When it’s done well, humor in poetry can work similarly, letting the comedy and the pain enrich and complicate each other to produce something more than the sum of its parts.

Ill Angels features a kwansaba suite. (The kwansaba, invented by Eugene B. Redmond, is a praise poem that formally represents the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa: seven lines per poem, seven words per line, and no more than seven letters per word). What appeals to you about writing in this form? What challenges does it bring?

DD: I love the fact that the kwansaba is a newer form. There are fewer models for what a kwansaba can be than, say, a sonnet. The only kwansabas I’ve read have been by Eugene Redmond, his daughter, Treasure Shields Redmond, Tara Betts, and Saeed Jones.

I’m drawn to forms because of the limitations they impose upon language, and because of the possibilities those limitations generate. By choosing a form you are also opening up a dialogue with the tradition from which the form springs, and that dialogue necessarily nuances the meaning of the poem you are composing. My kwansaba suite disregards the seven letter per word stricture of the original form. So these are really nonce kwansabas.

You have some interesting approaches to form throughout your book, but I was also struck by the wild ideas behind some of your poems. Two of the poems I enjoyed the most in this collection, “Reverse” and “Chaos Is Seattle in a Spaniel,” propel themselves forward through the momentum of their imaginative premises. In “Reverse” a relationship is imagined as if watching a VHS tape rewinding. In “Chaos…” a misfire from Siri leads the speaker to imagining a life on the molecular level. To write poems like these I imagine you spend a good deal of time daydreaming. What is the role of imagination and leisure in your writing process?

JGM: I’ve never thought of myself as much of a daydreamer, actually. “Chaos” came from a response Siri really did have when I was bored and playing with my phone. If I were better at daydreaming, I probably wouldn’t have needed to play with the phone in the first place. But lucky for me I did, and “she” misunderstood, and the rest came from following that premise where it led me.

“Reverse” came primarily from reading, I think. There’s a haunting image in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five in which his time-traveling narrator notes that when you watch an air raid in reverse, you see planes above a ruined city putting hurt people back together, reconstructing buildings, sucking the bombs up into the sky, and finally carrying them away where they won’t be able to hurt anyone again. Martin Amis has a novel in reverse which explores a similar idea to Vonnegut’s. Matt Rasmussen has a stunning poem in Black Aperture where we see a suicide in reverse. I can’t think of specific examples, but I’m positive I’ve seen the time-rewind device in various sci-fi movies and shows too. So what I did in “Reverse” was take that pre-existing device, apply it to a new situation, and see where it went. I think that’s largely what “imagination” is: not coming up with never-before-thought ideas ex nihilo, but rather combining bits and pieces of old ideas in new ways.

Ill Angels is your second collection. How did the process of writing your second book compare to your first?

DD: Like many first books, Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight collects poems written over the long period of my apprenticeship to poetry. The book spans about fifteen years, and there are many different textures, tones, and formal approaches on display in it. The second book was composed over a much shorter period (about two years). It was also accepted for publication immediately after I finished it and then I had almost two years to work on editing it before it was published. As a result, the second book is tighter, more organic, and more of a piece than the first one. I can’t say enough how impressed I am by the staff of Etruscan Press. It’s been a dream come true to work with them on Ill Angels.

Figures from antiquity and from the world of art recur in The Fire Lit & Nearing: Virgil, Homer, Catullus, Munch, Magritte, and so on. Could you riff on the allusive and ekphrastic gestures in your poems? Why include them? How do they nuance your examination of the contemporary and the quotidian, of sadness and longing?

JGM: However you feel about T.S. Elliot as a critic (and there’s plenty there to criticize), he sure has some zippy one-liners. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he writes:

Someone said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.

I didn’t really understand that I was feeling the particular loneliness I explore through the lens of a Magritte painting in “Nothing Will Be Alright, But Thank You Anyway” until I explored it through the lens of that particular Magritte painting. And I didn’t really understand the painful banality of friends’ genuine attempts to comfort one another until I thought about the poem through the lens of that title, itself an allusion to a pop song.

Or in another poem, “Raleigh-Durham International,” the central drama of the poem comes from the speaker’s awareness that his little miseries aren’t worthy of the epic mode. He’s no Aeneas, and he knows it, but he can’t stop thinking about his experience in those terms, and the uneasiness about his own interpretive framework becomes part of the experience that he can’t stop thinking about.

In other words, I include the allusions because, to me, they’re an essential part of the experience. I include them because there’s no way not to include them.

That said, I think it’s essential to give the reader enough to go on. In “Nothing Will Be Alright,” I give enough description of the painting so that even if you’ve never seen it, you get the gist. Plus I give the name of the artist and of the painting, so that the reader can google it if they want to. In “Raleigh-Durham International,” I give the relevant narrative context from the Aeneid within the first lines of the poem.

I never want to do what Elliot so blithely does in “The Waste Land,” assuming that the reader has a detailed knowledge of Italian, German, and Sanskrit, not to mention literary sources including but not limited to Homer, Sophocles, Petronius, Virgil, Ovid, Saint Augustine of Hippo, Dante, Shakespeare, Spenser, Gérard de Nerval… (Credit to Wikipedia for that list; I certainly couldn’t have pulled it out of thin air).

First off, it’s a silly assumption to make; probably only Elliot is familiar with everything Elliot talks about. Second, it takes an attitude toward the reader that I find rather troubling. The assumption seems to be “anyone who is worthy of my genius must know these things, and if they don’t, then the hell with them.” It’s a stance that assumes the poet is entitled to the reader’s time, which just isn’t true. If I want you to give up your limited time to read my work, I need to make it worth your while, and I need to approach you with a generosity that acknowledges the gift of time and attention you’re giving me.

The final poem in Ill Angels, “Words for My Unborn Daughter Written After Removing a Briar Patch from My Front Yard and Beginning with a Misremembered Line from a David Ignatow Poem,” wrestles with the question of why we write when we know that our poems, like ourselves, will likely one day be forgotten:

We’ll be buried under the births and deaths
to come, in one hundred years from now, flung,
as the thistles I just plucked from my shirt,
onto the ground and forgotten instead
like these lines. Why strive to immortalize
a gesture? Why not spin this transience
into a gift of crushed wildflower stems
pressed between the pages of Genesis?
Little root and seed, these lines might not survive
their own inception, but so what? …

There’s hope here, a refusal to quit creating despite the real possibility of futility. At the same time, though, the poem enacts exactly that process of forgetting: the Ignatow poem that inspired it is already misremembered before this poem even begins. Could you talk about why you write? Why do you choose to “strive to immortalize / a gesture”? Why through poetry specifically?

DD: I write because I love to read, and writing leads me into a deeper critical engagement with the art, music, and literature I love. It also leads me into a deeper emotional engagement with the quotidian, with the people and places I love, and with the experiences that are always washing over me, and I wish I could keep forever. I write because I love the world and I don’t want it to end. I don’t strive to immortalize a gesture, per se. I just want to be a small part of a conversation that is way bigger than me. Writing also allows me to meet and talk to interesting people like you, Jonathan, and that’s one of the great blessings of our shared vocation.

After my daughter was born, I came to see my poetry as something I could pass on to her, a chronicle of my enthusiasms and griefs. I don’t care if my work endures. The planet is headed for ecological disaster soon, and none of our literature may endure much longer anyway. I would like to leave my daughter something that might show her how much I love her and her mother, a record of who I’ve been at various times in my too swiftly fleeting life.