Poetic license

A conversation between two writers on the art of verse.

By: Hank Kalet
   I’ve been writing poetry since I was 18, since that first moment when the muse hit me.
   It was the spring of 1981 and I was finishing my freshman year at Pennsylvania State University, failing my classes and bumming around. And while I wasn’t focused on class work, I was reading a lot and learning a lot more than I realized.
   I had discovered the Beat poets — Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and others — and began my first crude attempts at putting pen to paper. Those poems and notebooks were juvenile and remain buried at the bottom of a trunk in my office,
   But writing poetry has been a lifelong vocation, as important to me as almost anything in my life.
   I’ve had probably two dozen poems published in an array of small-press magazines, most recently in The Writer’s Gallery, a Lambertville-based magazine tied to a small arts collective in Hunterdon and Bucks (Pa.) counties. And I have edited a new magazine called The Other Half that is being distributed with a compact disc — the proceeds from the project will go to Elijah’s Promise soup kitchen in New Brunswick, the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen and the HomeFront homeless shelter in Lawrence.
   Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to become friends with an array of writers, including Joyce Greenberg Lott, an English teacher at South Brunswick High School. Ms. Lott, who is retiring at the end of the school year after 25 years in the district (during which she taught my brother, Mark), recently published her first book, "Dear Mrs. Dalloway" and has been published in numerous journals. She is reading Saturday at the Wetherill Historic Site at 2 p.m. as part of a National Poetry Month celebration.
   When I heard about the reading, I contacted Joyce about conducting an "e-mail conversation" about the art both of us love. What follows is that conversation (edited for style and length.):
   
Kalet: I was reading an essay in the New York Review of Books on the poet Richard Wilbur that I think offers a starting point for this conversation. The writer, Charles Simic, a remarkable poet in his own right, says "there are two impulses in poetry, according to Wilbur, the impulse to name our reality and the impulse to discover and project the self." Then he quotes Wilbur (from an essay called "Poetry and Happiness"): "All poets are moved by both, but every poet inclines more to one than the other."
   I was struck by this, because I think it an essential truth. Walt Whitman was a great public poet who attempted to capture the soul of a growing democracy; Emily Dickinson was an internalist, focused on a kind of personal consciousness that she connected to a greater mind. My favorite poets — Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, the Cuban Roque Dalton and current writers like Martin Espada and Carolyn Forche — tend more toward the naming impulse, as do I, though each of these poets has produced amazing work that focuses on the self, proving that these are not exclusive categories.
   Where do you see yourself fitting in within this paradigm?
   Lott: I have been thinking of Wilbur lately, though. Just this past month I spent five days writing at a workshop in Key West, Fla. On one of my walks past the Key West library, I decided to go inside. There, posted proudly for everyone to see, was a list of writers living in Key West. Richard Wilbur was among them. For a moment, I thought I might contact him. He was a professor at Wellesley when I was a student there, and I have an autographed copy of his first book. But I didn’t. Instead, I marveled for a moment at the way readers think they know writers, even if they don’t know them in a personal sense.
   But back to your paradigm. I love the poets you’ve named, although I must admit that I don’t know as much about Roque Dalton and Martin Espada as I probably should. My list would include Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, two women who spoke for me at a time before I could form my own words; and more recently, Marie Howe and Mary Oliver. I don’t see myself "fitting in" this famous circle, though, in that I don’t see myself as a great poet. Every once in awhile I write a good poem — which is enough to make me happy.
   I’m not evading your question; I’m just trying to get there. One of the reasons I write poetry, not intellectual essays, is that poetry is the way my mind works: an image, a feeling, and then a poem. But here goes, I’ll try.
   How can the "impulse to name our reality" be different from "the impulse to discover the self"? (Let’s forget the "impulse to project the self." I know poets like Robert Bly, for example, make a fetish of projecting themselves on others: "I have the secret of manhood," that kind of stuff. I don’t like it.) In fact, a big part of me dislikes giving readings, because I no longer feel like myself but like a poet with a capital P, or in the worst scenario, like a performer.
   I do write to "name my reality," but in the course of naming that reality, I discover it. Let me explain. Since my reality and my self are not separate, I am also discovering myself in the way that I see and interpret my reality. I always tell my students that abstract observations don’t mean diddly-squat without specific examples or concrete details, so I’ll try to illustrate what I’ve just said.
   In my poem "Returning from Sloan-Kettering by Train," which is in my book "Dear Mrs. Dalloway," I literally describe what I see out the window of the NJ Transit train I am riding on with my late-husband, Gary. We are returning from Sloan-Kettering, where we have just been informed that Gary’s cancer had metastasized. "Starlings peck at smoke,/egrets fish in the Meadowlands" — I name my reality, and I suspect the reality of any other passenger on the train that afternoon looking out the window. Yet, as our journey and my poem progresses, I see "cars lined in parking lots / like a thousand gurneys" and "an auto shop (that) advertises Repairs." The reality outside my window starts to transform, because I am viewing it with eyes clouded by Gary’s terrible illness. Finally, at the end of the poem, I see "Other passengers / step down to the platform / laden with possessions / going somewhere." That’s the a-ha moment for me, the part of the poem that writes itself without my mind telling it what to do, the moment when I discover that the couplets that I am literally creating will cease and that Gary and I will no longer, at some time in the future, be a couple.
   Kalet: I agree with what you’re saying about the outward helping to define the inward — if I’m reading you correctly — that the world outside helps the poet construct the images that make sense of inner feelings. And I agree that the two tendencies that Wilbur mentions exist in every poem. What I think he was getting at, though, is a sense that some poets focus on their inner lives and others — I would include myself in this category — focus on the world outside. This is not a value judgment, by any means, only an observation. For me, the mission I have set for myself given the way I view the world — I see my poems as giving voice to others, many of whom would not have voice. My poems are minifictions or sketches of life — my poem "Last Decade" is really a long sequence of smaller poems focusing on the economy, downsizing, etc. It is an attempt to capture in imagery the way the changing economy was affecting the region. The same goes for "New Brunswick Suite," which I think you’ve read. Many of my shorter poems function the same way — "On a Photo in The New York Times" is an imagined life of a man pictured amongst the rubble of Grozny in Chechnya. It is all atmosphere and destruction — "Eyes lined like / the jagged edges of busted concrete / smoldering with the heat of despair," it opens — staying with the image, though slowly giving way to speculation, to questioning — "eyes fixed and old / like hatred spanning too many generations, / unguarded in a lack of optimism or hope." It is all imagined, of course — I have never been to Grozny — so perhaps it does shine a light on my own world, perhaps my focus on the plight of others allows me to stamp the world with my political convictions, my philosophical beliefs, ultimately giving me a way to define my own interior world.
   Lott: We may be talking about the masculine and feminine, how men see the world outside themselves, women inside. I have read that this originates with our bodies. Who knows? But Mars and Venus differ, as anyone who has been married or in a close relationship with someone of the opposite sex learns.
   I admire the poems you mentioned and your compassion for those in the world beyond yourself. To me, these poems are also the result of your profession, the way, as a newspaper person, you have trained yourself to focus on what is happening to others. I began to think of myself as poet in the early ’70s, during the time that feminism changed so many of our lives. One of my earliest mentors was Adrienne Rich, whom I studied with at Douglass College. At that time, she taught us that "the personal is political." I still believe that if I can take the risk of writing what’s really true for me, my words, in some small way, can help change the lives of others.
   Kalet: You may be right about this split, though I hate to think in those terms. It is interesting because it kind of connects to something that Laurie Sheck once told me — I had Laurie, who has several books out, as a creative writing professor at Rutgers. She once told me that editors read her work and think she is a male poet because of her approach. I liked the story because it said a lot to me about the falsity of those kind of expectations. At the same time, we cannot get away from our acculturation. We write what we know and with the voice we’ve earned. For me, that voice is tied to my job as a newspaper reporter and editor, a political columnist and music critic — it’s a voice I have earned via 15 years in this business.
   When I first started writing — which kind of brings me back to my original question — I focused on the internal a lot more. I was trying to understand myself as an 18-year-old disaffected rock-and-roll fan, someone trying to determine his place in the world, exploring politics and an array of voices borrowed from what I was reading (the Beats, mostly, and Dylan Thomas) and what I was listening to (The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, punk rock). They were immature poems from an immature mind. My explorations over the last 24-plus years have taken me to a completely different place — though I sometimes wonder if I am any more mature than I was all those years ago. I have read and internalized history and philosophy and poetry and fiction of which I never could have dreamed. I have talked to farmers facing the prospect of losing their farms, to women empowered by bad circumstances to fight back, to average people living average lives with a quiet dignity. All of this has been internalized and, ultimately, regurgitated, reformed, remade. Williams — I think it was Williams — was very committed to the idea of poet as maker, who takes the outside world and creates something new via the dint of his or her own imagination.
   In any case, I think we are talking about the same thing — the need to put truth to paper. I think Wilbur, ultimately, was just attempting to describe two approaches that are not really all that different. Poetry as an art thrives on these differences.
   Lott:Yes, I agree. We are talking about the same thing. I find your description of your evolution interesting; and even more interesting, your question: if you are any more mature than you were all those years ago.
   I have a story about this. There’s a wonderful exhibition right now at the Trenton State Museum, a collaboration between members of the Princeton Arts Alliance and poets called "Voice and Vision." Joanne Augustine, an artist whom I admire, asked me to collaborate with her. Many years ago, before I really thought of myself as a poet, I wandered into an exhibition of Joanne’s work at the Coryell Gallery in Lambertville. It spoke to me, so loudly, that I sat down on a bench, pulled out a scrap of paper, and wrote a poem, "Summer Survivors," borrowing the title from Joanne’s painting of September sunflowers, past their prime. They reminded me of women like myself. I sent the poem to Joanne, who kept it all these years. She called to ask me if she could use my poem in the exhibit, next to her painting. (I didn’t even have a copy on my computer; I had probably gone through several computers since then.)
   When Joanne showed me the poem, I cringed. Valiantly, I tried to rewrite it, with all the skill and knowledge I’d like to think I’ve since acquired. "No, no," Joanne insisted. "It’s not the same poem. You can’t change it."
   Nervously, I attended the opening of the exhibit earlier this month. Joanne was right. There was an integrity to this early poem. And, I am no longer the person who could write it.
   So much for our "mature" selves.