Burnside Soleil

This interview was really fun. Thanks both to Tiana and NER.

Author’s notes? Often, the poems, I believe, would be improved, richer, if the lyric wrestled with the context appended in the book. Also, these poems are sometimes so slight, a few clever rhetorical maneuvers, but emotionally distant. Instead, incorporate the notes. Let us read the burden.

Susan Stewart’s THE FOREST

These are landscapes—are they landscapes? An extraordinary collection of interiors.

His final lines really fascinate me. They’re wry; other times, mysterious. Never opaque. But even as he “completes” the poem, the irony pushes back against the very idea of completion. He must end the lyric. He mistrusts ending anything.

Truly, poem after poem, the best. Adventurous. Funny as hell. Raw yet such beautiful music. If he’s considered a regionalist, in a way to contain or diminish, then the critic’s attitude is provincial, not the poems.

Donald Hall said you judge a poet only by their best works. If that’s true, then Rodney Jones is one of the finest American poets. I don’t think the man has written a dull line, each collection and each poem charged, funny, and expansive in its imagination and tenderness.

And I like readings of a poem that are unafraid to be inconclusive, ending with a gesture to keep thinking and feeling with a lyric.

I like that one old etymology of “understand”: “to stand in the midst of.”

A poem asks for attention, not complete knowledge, from a reader.

Not a critique of him. But I’m also fascinated by different endings—fascinated by poems that open rather than close. You don’t sense the boundary. You have to reread the same poem after the final lines, which create a new poem. Each time, a new poem.

This observation is too niche, useless, but in Donkey Gospel, Hoagland’s poems have the most interesting thinking in the second third. He prefers the neat, witty closing that he pulls off incredibly well. But the second third—compelled by the wondering and speculations there.

Also, traditional forms and free verse are interdependent, a tension that gives each meaning, music, and legibility in our culture. I think some of the most interesting poems enact this tension, working in multiple registers and traditions.

From Hass, I’ve learned that you can cultivate an overdetermined deep image, surrealistic and surprising, but if the rhythm of the line is just iambic, then are you really pushing the language forward?

I see many poems scattering lines across the page, space between one phrase or clause, which isn’t good or bad, or preferable or gauche, but when the syntax and the image don’t evoke striking musicality, the poem lacks tension, seems airy. Not that the form needs conflict. But maybe tension.

Rather than vivid depictions of beauty and the internal life, River depicts obsolescence.

The poems are light, lean at times, unencumbered by overwrought syntax. The Branch Will Not Break is epiphanic—you can feel the poems open. But in River, it’s almost like a single undifferentiated bleak poem that never transforms.

James Wright’s Shall We Gather at the River’s desolate atmosphere and dispossessed archetypal characters can seem like sentimentalized squalor, but the lines aren’t pathetic, even as the subjects are full of pathos.