The Question of Affirmation and Despair

An interview with Edward Hirsch | By Tod Marshall

From Volume XXII, Number 2, Spring 2000

Born in Chicago in 1950, Edward Hirsch was educated at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned the doctorate in 1979. He has taught at several colleges and universities, and he presently teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Houston. His previous books of poetry include For the Sleepwalkers, Wild Gratitude, The Night Parade, Earthly Measures, and, recently, On Love. His most recent book is How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. He has won many awards, including the Lavan Younger Poets Award, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award (for his collection Wild Gratitude), and, in 1998, the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature. Recently, he was honored with a MacArthur Fellowship.

Ed and I met at the Sewanee Writers Conference in the summer of 1998. Located on the top of the Cumberland plateau, the University of the South has an inspiring Gothic campus, complete with ivy, gargoyles, and bell towers. After listening to Mark Strand lecture on Andrew Marvell, Ed and I walked across the campus to the Rebel's Rest, a guest house built in 1866 where he was staying. We talked in the foyer, exchanging comments across a wide table. During the interview, Ed was both animated, gesturing passionately as he talked about poetry, and thoughtful, listening carefully to my questions and comments before offering his responses.

Tod Marshall: Many poets and critics attribute the beginning of American poetry in the twentieth century to Ezra Pound. Is this your understanding of American literary history or do you see someone else as the origin?

Edward Hirsch: I suppose that in a historical way a great deal goes back to Pound and the other Imagists. It was Pound, after all, who urged American poets to use the language of common speech with precision, to create new rhythms, to enjoy an absolute freedom of subject matter. Pound recognized that Yeats was the greatest poet writing in English at the time and that Eliot had "modernized himself on his own." Pound also opened up American poetry with a wide range of voices in Personae. I'm grateful to him for bringing the Proven"al poets into English and for the marvelous translations of Cathay, his best book. But I dislike the person he became, and for me it was never The Pound Era, to employ the title of Hugh Kenner's brilliant critical work. It was the Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane era, the William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore era, the Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost era.

TM: Describe your attraction to Stevens.

EH: Romantic poetry was somewhat derided in my education, perhaps because of Eliot's proscriptions against it. The first poets I fell in love with were the Metaphysical poets. I loved (and still love) the way that intellect and feeling come together in the work of John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and others. I love the wild ingenuity of their best conceits. George Herbert was also a poet who was important to me. So, my initial reading in high school and college was not passionately attached to the Romantic poets.

Later, when I read Stevens and then Crane I began to see the foregrounding of imagination as one of the great projects in poetry. I loved the grandeur of the poetic line in Stevens, and I intuited that the blank verse line connected Stevens to something important, to the great poetic lineage of Romantic poetry, to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats. I didn't have a language for it at the time, but I was discovering the sublime in poetry.

TM: I understand your attraction to some aspects of Stevens's work; however, Stevens's epistemological inquiries—in spite of their magnificence and beauty—have always left me feeling that he is someone uncomfortable with the physical world; I don't feel that in your work.

EH: Well, both Stevens and Moore are poets I admire, but they can be very cool. Stevens has his deep passions, but mostly they are suppressed and have to come steaming to the surface from a long way down. One of the things I saw as my task was to add the heat to whatever I learned from his work. I felt and still feel much closer—in terms of the passions of poetry—to Keats and to Shelley, who give such high priority to emotion. Intensity is all.

My reading of the modern poets was that they offered me wondrously different things, and my task would be to supply some of the things they didn't offer. I felt I had a place at the table. I thought, "What if you took some of that discursive intelligence in Stevens and gave it tremendous warmth and heat? What would happen if a Stevensian poetry was written with the same kind of passion and intensity as say, others might associate with a poet like James Wright?" I wanted to keep the intelligence without losing the emotional affect. I learned from Stevens a certain way of thinking in poetry. In terms of emotional temperature, I always felt closer to Hart Crane.

TM: In terms of the passion that I think you're talking about, Crane is probably the polar opposite of Stevens.

EH: I like the way the language moves ahead of the thought in Crane. Crane is especially important to me now, and it's interesting that when I encounter many young poets, they don't know how to read a poet like Hart Crane. He's too baroque, too rich for them. When I first fell in love with Crane, what it meant wasn't so important. It was how it sounded that mattered. I heard the great oracular notes of poetry. I heard the prophetic cadences. I still hear them.

TM: I could make almost no sense of "Atlantis" the first time I read it.

EH: Neither could I, but I felt that glorious upward striving. I felt the urge toward something large and grand and transcendental. I didn't know what it was, but I heard it in the sound of the words. I felt that Crane was lifting me toward something.

TM: You've written very fondly of Robert Frost's work. How does he fit into this picture?

EH: Frost is one of the American poets who has meant the most to me. I love the dark side of Frost. I first discovered the darker Frost when I read Randall Jarrell's two essays on Frost in Poetry and the Age. "The Other Frost" and "To the Laodiceans." Those pieces were thrilling to me. I'd really thought of Frost only as the poet of walks and talks in the woods. I didn't cotton to the image Frost cultivated as a Yankee farmer. I didn't yet know about the deeper Frost that Lionel Trilling had called a "terrifying" poet. Because of Jarrell I began to discover the terrifying, the unremitting, side of Frost. I fell in love with the poem "Desert Places," which is still a poem I love very much. Those dark poems of Frost's gave me a way to think about a language that could articulate the extremes of human feeling.

The two poets who best articulated despair for me—better than I could have articulated it myself—were Hopkins and Frost. When I read Hopkins's late, so-called "terrible sonnets," and when I read "Desert Places," I felt they had articulated an anguish that I, too, had felt, but didn't know how to touch or write about. I began to think about how the formal cadences of poetry could be shaped to those feelings. The poet was a maker who had taken unwieldy feelings and shaped them into something that was, hopefully, enduring.

TM: When we think of modernity, we might think of the dissolution of metrical poetry in order to accommodate the new modern sensibility and its fragmentation, anxiety, and such. What you seem to be speaking to is the ability of the "old ways" to accommodate these changes in sensibility.

EH: I wouldn't say so much the "old ways" as the "oldest ways," the ways of archaic poetry, of Orphic poetry. I am thinking of a poetry that rises from speech toward song, that builds to a rhythm of incantation. The devices are just a way of working the magic in poetry. Look: Frost was a great modern poet and he wrote mostly iambic pentameter. Stevens wrote wonderfully as a "blank verse" poet and as a free verse poet. I don't think I would want to sacrifice either of those methods. I think that the dichotomy between so-called formal poetry and free verse is a large mistake in American poetry. Many great poets have used the full resources of the language to articulate the world. Pound is a good example, I think. We wouldn't want to lose the early Imagist free verse poems; nor would we want to throw out the strict meters and rhymes of Mauberly; nor would we want to "sacrifice" some of the incantatory cadences of The Cantos.

The story that we tell ourselves that Modernism is the breaking loose into free verse and away from traditional verse is much too simplistic. There's Marianne Moore writing both a syllabic poetry and a free verse poetry, remaking syllabics to an American idiom. There's William Carlos Williams inventing a new triadic line for American poetry. At the same time, we have Stevens and Crane writing eloquent American poems using the blank verse line. We also have the collage of The Waste Land, which does use the devices of iambic pentameter and rhyming to extraordinary effect only to rupture them. The devices of poetry are wide-ranging. There are many ways to the promised land.

It's true that we've had—since Milton began to loosen poetry from the bondage of rhyme—an increasing strain of a certain kind of freedom in the versification of poetry. We wouldn't want to lose that. Free verse has been an essential American mode since Whitman, but it's not the only American mode. The stories that we tell ourselves about the history of American poetry are greatly reduced for some poets' polemical ends. When we examine the reality of the different types of poetry that our great poets have written, then we discover that it is quite various and often ties us to the "oldest" traditions in poetry much more than one might think.

TM: That makes sense. When you think about the poets of mid-century—Lowell, Berryman, Sexton, and Plath—they, too, write in many modes.

EH: There's a similar dynamic connected to the so-called confessionalism of the poets of the Middle Generation. Not many people have thought about the fact that, for instance, the poets of the Middle Generation were masters of the dramatic monologue. Berryman, Lowell, Schwartz, Jarrell, Bishop"–all wrote wonderful dramatic monologues. The story of American poetry moving from the forties and fifties and the mode of high artifice to the more confessional one of the late fifties and sixties, written supposedly from a more authentic self, that story is simply not borne out by the nature of the work. For example, I think you have to read The Mills of the Kavanaughs as one of the important books in Lowell's development in which he adopts a whole series of fictive voices, voices that were not his own. Those voices help teach him how to take on the voice of a supposed person, "Robert Lowell" in Life Studies. My sense of it is that the range of American poetry continues to outstrip the narratives that we create about the historical development of that poetry.

TM: So many manifestos and polemics revolve around those narratives.

EH: A greatly flawed essay in this regard that's had much too much of an effect is Olson's essay on projective verse. It's part genius, part mumbo jumbo, and it has been badly misused. Olson divides radically between "open" and "closed" poetry. That's a story that poets and critics have gone on telling each other ever since—that there's a closed or academic poetry and an open or nonacademic poetry. This doesn't fit the facts at all. It doesn't fit the facts of Romantic poetry; it doesn't fit the facts of Modernism; and it doesn't fit the facts of what poets have done since the fifties. Yet we go on in a sort of exhausted way, reiterating these old conflicts. Wars are renewed over these tired polemics. Friendships are made and destroyed around this absolutely artificial designation. The notion of an avant garde in the academy holds absolutely no water at all. I refuse to think in those terms. Consider those sonnets of dark love by Garcia Lorca, which are wonderful, openly homoerotic poems that he wrote before he died. Are we to understand those homoerotic sonnets as traditional or avant garde? Or take one of the great last poems by C"sar Vallejo, "Black Stone Lying on a White Stone." Are we to think of that as a traditional poem and not an avant garde poem because it's a sonnet? Or are we to think it's an avant garde poem because of the startling things that Vallejo does with verb tense and language? Vallejo creates a wild disturbance within the prescribed form. To me, the terms of description that we often use, these categories, are fairly useless, and yet we keep on repeating them. They're unhealthy for American poetry, or what I could call American poetries, something which is rich, vital, and diverse. I don't approve of any restriction that would limit American poetries, especially when it involves throwing out other aesthetics.

One terrific example in this regard: the female lyricists of the 1920s. If you look at most literary histories, you'll read about Eliot and Pound and Moore and Williams and Stevens, but you won't hear much about Louise Bogan or Edna St. Vincent Millay or Eleanor Wylie. These poets didn't write free verse; they didn't get with the Poundian program. They continued to write sonnets, and they were widely popular and widely read, but they, in effect, have been written out of literary history. What they were doing is very striking to me; they were remaking the love poem, and they were rethinking it from a female perspective, where the female speaker is not the beloved but the ravenous lover. They engender the sonnet in radically different ways than the sonnet had been previously engendered. If you look at most of our literary histories, you won't find them treated in any detail because the primary narrative that we tell is about Ezra Pound and the success of free verse. The Poundian strain was crucial, but it shouldn't be used to exclude everything else that was written.

TM: Of course, what you're speaking to isn't just part of the narrative about modernity. Today we have LANGUAGE poets, New Formalists . . .

EH: In 1926 Marina Tsvetayeva said in her essay "The Poet on the Critic" that "Poetic schools (a sign of the age!) are a vulgarization of poetry." I think the divisions—Neonarrative, Neoformalist, etc.—are not helpful. Our country is so fragmented that these "schools" help give people identities and help them find a way in the world, but to me they are divisive. The loneliness of poets (remember that Richard Howard called his splendidly wide-ranging critical book, Alone with America) is a sociological phenomenon. I don't like ways of dividing the pie that exclude people, and I think that the ethos of American poetry should be an inclusive one. It should be open to all kinds of poetry. It's as if poetry is a piano and most poets know how to play only the same two notes. Most of the resources of poetry are lost because of this two-note ethic.

TM: Your work certainly avoids such reduction—all the different voices and forms and allusions is astonishing. The poetry is very wide-ranging.

EH: Thank you for saying so. I've gotten so much from so many different types of poetry that I've wanted to respond in kind, to give something back. In many ways, I feel as if the poet is a vehicle, a vehicle of responses to different feelings and voices and people and characters. Keats's idea of negative capability has been very important to me. I take seriously the notion that the poet gives up a personal identity and is saturated by something else. Whitman is wonderfully helpful in this regard because he moves up and down the ladder of being so fluently. I remember the passage:

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform'd, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

Whitman understands that the poet is a vehicle to everything alive. The world is permeable. The voices of the enslaved and the voices of beetles and the voices of thieves and dwarfs and the voices of birds are as important to him as the dominant voices of history, the voices of the victors. His Orphic calling is a way of speaking back to power.

It seems to me that as a poet I want to be as open and receptive to the world as possible, to see the world alive in all its parts. Whitman loved archaic poetry and he loved ballads and he loved folk songs and opera and he didn't see any conflict between making poetry new and returning poetry to the origins of all poetry. He is a great model for us as American poets because he is so inclusive, because he fuses traditions, because he takes poetry forward into the future even as he returns it to its archaic roots. Whitman understood that chants and charms and spells and incantations all have various functions in the world.

TM: In On Love you have many poems that aren't quite dramatic monologues and aren't quite persona poems. How do you understand the voices in those poems as functioning?

EH: I think that the notions of dramatic monologue and the notions of persona are too narrow and confining as people usually think of them. This is true even of poets receptive to their use. Of course, there are some poets who are opposed to this sort of poem on principle because they are under the mistaken notion that they want to speak only in their own so-called "authentic" voice. In writing programs, students are frequently given the assignment of writing persona poems, where you take on the voice of another. To me, that doesn't have anything like the kind of emotional authority and weight that I think you feel when you believe you are the vehicle of another voice, where another voice seems to be speaking through you. Where it's both your own voice and another voice speaking at the same time. I believe that in these twenty-five poems with different speakers (from Diderot to Colette) there is also a lone questing speaker, a lover seeking and desiring the absent beloved. There's a dialectic in the poems between separation and fusion, between autonomy and blur, between the lover and the beloved. The voices of the speakers in the poems are ways to think about love. Each one represents some aspect of love. The speaker is at the same time Marina Tsvetayeva or Guillaume Apollinaire or Tristan Tzara and also me. I don't think they are exactly dramatic monologues because I don't think you are meant to believe that the previous historical voices are really speaking. I think you see the poet peeking through the mask, speaking through the voice. It's a little like a drag show where you put on different voices and costumes and they allow you to get at certain feelings and emotions. At the same time, each one tries to be as true as possible to the voice that the poet is inhabiting. The poem tries to get as close as possible to the facts of, say, Tsvetayeva's life. It tries to bring us as close as possible to her poetry, her great rapturous feelings in poetry. I don't know if we have a language for what it means to be both yourself and another in a poem. To see yourself as the vehicle for some other voice that is also your own.

All twenty-five voices together, then, would offer some kind of encyclopedic portrait of modern love. In this regard, for example, it was important for me to have a radically political thinker, such as Bertolt Brecht, in the series. It was important to represent a wildly Dionysian ethic, such as you get in D. H. Lawrence. It was important to try to articulate an incredibly witty lesbian ethic, as in Gertrude Stein. A mythical perspective, as in D. H. Lawrence. A powerfully homoerotic one with the dastardly clever Oscar Wilde. You have a strong feminist argument with the Margaret Fuller poem. A figure who's terrifically important to me in this regard is Emerson because he is such a deep devourer. Emerson believed in the transformational power of love. He was so receptive, so open to all kinds of voices and powers.

TM: I should mention that experimentation of this sort is not, in the body of your work, a new thing.

EH: Yes, this has always been part of my work. I value it. There have been people who have been comfortable with one aspect of my work and uncomfortable with another dimension of it. Both parts of it have always been crucial and integrated. At least they were meant to be integrated. For instance, in my first book, For the Sleepwalkers, it was important for me to have waitresses and factory workers and shopkeepers and sweatshop workers and people that I hadn't seen appear in poetry often enough. I wanted to be the vehicle of those voices. I also wanted to be true to my experience of falling in love with art itself. I didn't see any split or difficulty moving between being a waitress in Stonefalls, Arkansas, in one poem and being Paul Klee in another. It was exciting. Baudelaire speaks to this when he says that "the poet enjoys the incomparable privilege that he can, at will, be either himself or another. Like those wandering spirits that seek a body, he enters, when he likes, into the person of any man. For him alone all is vacant . . . ."

TM: In these two distinctions, you're speaking to different voices than you're working with or from. But I can also think of several poems that are personal in a different way, for instance, the elegy "Fast Break" or the sexual epiphany poem, "The Skokie Theater."

EH: I always felt that the "voice" poems were deceptively personal. I think the point of speaking through another voice is useful and passionate if it allows you to say things you might not otherwise get at. The virtue of this other kind of poem—where the dramatic speaker is clearly someone other than yourself—is that it allows you to get at material that you couldn't otherwise get at. It liberates you. But do you remember that Emily Dickinson said that the speaker in her poems was a supposed speaker, a supposed person? The supposed person was "me" in other poems. But I always thought that there was much heat in the poems spoken through voices as in those poems. It's true that, especially in the move from For the Sleepwalkers to Wild Gratitude, there is a change. In the later book I started to use a voice more often that was much closer to my own. I started to mine my own experience more directly. Instead of, say, speaking from the point of view of a poet that's meant a great deal to me, such as John Clare, I wrote "about" John Clare from my own perspective.

I tried in a poem called "Three Journeys" to bring together two diverse elements in my work because I felt they were getting a little schizophrenic—there were the poems that were elegiac and personal, like the memorial poem for my dear and beloved friend Dennis Turner, or the poem about a girlfriend and our first erotic encounter in "The Skokie Theater"—and these other cultural and literary interests. I wanted to unite them, as I felt they were united in me. So in the poem "Three Journeys," a speaker some version of myself, follows a bag lady through the streets of Detroit and then associates her with John Clare. The poem parallels two journeys—the journey of John Clare when he escaped from a mental hospital and walked home across England, and the journey of a homeless woman as she walked around the streets of Detroit. In the process of writing the poem, I began to feel that in some terrible way I was using the homeless woman in order to say something about the suffering of John Clare, and I began to make that also my subject, to give the homeless woman and John Clare exactly equal weight. One's sympathy needed to go out to them. One needed to approach each of them with one's full range of human response. That was the discovery. The third journey was my own. After that, I realized that it was always crucial to me to bring as much as possible to whomever one is writing about. I don't want to split off the world between those who are literary and those who are not.

Since Wild Gratitude, I've written many extremely personal poems, poems that are revealing and try to turn the knife against the self. There are also a lot of family poems in The Night Parade, and I tried to place those poems in a larger social and historical context. I wanted them to reverberate outward. I suppose I'd like my poetry to be equally personal and impersonal. There is something intimate and literary in the poems about artists; there is something objective and implacable in the family poems. Joseph Brodsky has a wonderful piece about Cavafy where he describes the two main modes of Cavafy's poetry: one, where he writes poems about fleeting, homoerotic encounters of, say, forty years ago, and two, poems about various minor historical figures some of whom he has made up, some of whom really existed. Brodsky says that the remarkable thing about Cavafy is that there is something cold and impersonal in the rapturous love poems, and something intimate and personal in the poems about minor historical figures. They have a kind of counterweight. Cavafy is a splendid model in this regard.

TM: In For the Sleepwalkers, you have a short poem called "Little Political Poem" after Nazim Hikmet. It reads,

Tonight I saw so many windows
blazing alone, almost blazing together
under a single sky, under so many
different skies all weaving together through so many different countries . . .

This poem's "politics" are so much more subtle and ambiguous than, perhaps, the political poetry of other writers. And yet it certainly has a didactic element. What is your understanding of the relationship between poetry and politics?

EH: The poet wants justice. And the poet wants art. In poetry we can't have one without the other. I love Nazim Hikmet, the great Turkish poet. My poem borrows and adapts one of his images. I picture a single window blazing alone—an emblem of solitary consciousness—and imagine it somehow blazing in communion with all the other singular windows. It's a daydream of unity, a poem about identity and difference, about the underlying connection, or near connection, between people. So close together, so far apart. I love the passionate openheartedness of Hikmet's work, but his communist loyalties seem terribly simplistic at this late date. We can understand how he came to them after all; he spent all those horrible years in jail.

TM: His poem about the life of the pencil . . .

EH: That's "Since I Was Thrown Inside," a wonderful poem. So is "Some Advice to Those Who Will Spend Time in Prison" and "On Living." He's a heartbreaking Whitmanian poet. I associate him in my mind with Miguel Hernandez, the splendid poet who ripened to full maturity during the Spanish Civil War. But Hikmet's politics also seem naive. He still believed in communism at a time when it was, perhaps, still possible to believe in it. But we all know now that he was mistaken in his faith in communism. He moved to Russia when he was released from Turkish prison and never renounced communism. His communism, like Neruda's, seems terribly misguided to me. I love the sense of brotherhood in Hikmet, and I love that same sense of brotherhood in Neruda, but I also think they should have brought a little more skepticism to political realities. I have a democratic ethos, but I'm skeptical when it comes to didactic political programs. We don't have a great political poetry in America, perhaps because American poetry is so ahistorical. We have a poor sense of history as Americans, and so we have had to look to other traditions that do have more integrated political poetries. Is it possible to have a poetry that is humanly involved, politically engaged, politically skeptical, and quests for justice?

TM: What of Eastern European poets, particularly the Polish?

EH: I love Polish poetry. I also love much Hungarian and Czech poetry. I hear tonalities in that poetry I don't hear in American poetry. When you read Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, you begin to feel that political engagement in American poetry is often naive. These are poets who have truly reckoned with what it means to live in the twentieth century. It seems to me that if there is any task or goal for the relationship between poetry and politics, then it's for that poetry to be engaged with what it means to live in this century. I'm thinking of a poetry that doesn't turn away from the suffering, the historical calamities, of our century. I'm struck by the fact that the great Polish poets are, in my opinion, historical poets who wanted to become metaphysical ones. They don't want to be mere "witnesses." They don't write the poetry of political "engagement" per se. Yet they can't ignore a little thing like the destruction and the occupation of their country. They're really interested in getting at the truth behind the facts. They are skeptical of all "isms." They want to investigate the nature of reality. I see a dialectic in Polish poetry between history and metaphysics, between living inside of time and outside of time. These poets are simultaneously pulled in two directions—toward the historical world and toward the transcendental one. They're compelled to register the fluctuations of change, they're interested in the stability of truth.

TM: The dialectic that you're speaking of made me think of Milosz's series of poems "The World," written during a period of historical extremity yet focused on something beyond that horror.

EH: Exactly. "The World" is a perverse poem. Milosz got a lot of criticism for it at the time because other poets couldn't understand how he could write about such things while the world was being destroyed. That was the point. I love the Hungarian poet, Miklos Radnoti, who came to such a terrible end. In the 1930s Radnoti published a book called In the Footsteps of Orpheus. It consists of his translations of European poetry—from Horace and Ovid to Goethe and Heine to Apollinaire. What was Radnoti doing translating this poetry while the Germans were getting ready to march into Hungary? I think he was trying to keep alive an idea of Europe at a time when Europe was becoming a site of barbarism. He was asserting the ideal of Europe as a place of civility, and he was doing so against an encroaching darkness. Sometimes translating poetry can be a brave and humane act.

TM: It seems to me that some of the interest in the work of poets and writers like Radnoti who were, literally, martyred for the word comes out of an homage to the extremity from which these writers wrote. Writers in America won't experience anything on a similar scale . . .

EH: Let's hope not.

TM: . . . so they lament the lack of "depth" in their own work and try to assuage this anxiety by praising poets who have died for the word.

EH: We have to watch that. I remember Milosz saying "You American poets would envy the hunchback his hump." We don't want to go so far as say George Steiner has gone and say that poetry flourishes under totalitarianism. I think for example of all those poets—and potential poets—who died at the hands of the Germans. I remember a debate between George Steiner and Joseph Brodsky on television. Steiner said that totalitarianism is good for poetry because poets have to find ways to circumvent it, and they rise to the occasion. But Brodsky would have none of it. He said that freedom is the most beautiful thing of all. We shouldn't forget the beauty of freedom. And we don't have to envy the hunchback his hump. There's plenty of suffering around us. We live in this century, too.

TM: In your work of the last several years, I've seen a turn toward pursuit of the ineffable; how do you understand the relationship between poetry and religiosity, poetry and the spiritual?

EH: The sacred is a great subject in poetry. For poetry. I am deeply interested in what you might call unauthorized testimony. It's true that in my work there has been an increasing interest in the divine, in poetry as a quest for the divine. I always loved metaphysical poetry, but as a young poet the ineffable didn't seem like my subject. I saw spiritual matters as crucial to poetry, but I didn't see the quest for transcendence as part of my own poetic project. That changed when I began to write the poems that became Earthly Measures. The figures in Earthly Measures become vehicles of an argument about transcendence. I think that Earthly Measures, as a book, is that argument about transcendence—whether this world is enough or whether we need some other world. There's a tremendous longing for some other world operating in the poems. There's also a critique of that longing. I think of the book as a kind of pilgrimage, a search for the divine. At the very end of that book it turns away from the other world toward this one. The philosophical and religious thinker who has meant a great deal to me is Simone Weil. She thinks so hard about transcendence and the quest for it. She links the quest for transcendence to the suffering of people around her. There's a tremendous social consciousness and sympathy running through her work. I was moved to poetry by two particular elements in her life and work. One is the year she worked in a factory. The other is her three mystical contacts with Christianity.

TM: She was driven to her knees.

EH: A thrilling experience. She had such a deep spiritual hunger. It was matched only by her formidable intellect. I wanted to see if I could dramatize those three experiences in a poem. Simone Weil's mystical contacts are the far end—one end point—of Earthly Measures. The thing that troubles me most about Weil is her hatred of the body, her turning away from earthly concerns. I don't critique that element of her in my book of poems, but I critique it insofar as it is present in myself. I love Weil's notion that unmixed attention is prayer. In the last poem of Earthly Measures, "Earthly Light," the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century are held up as a model of an art that turns not to the otherworld, but to this one.

Because this world, too, needs our unmixed
attention, because it is not heaven
but earth that needs us, because
it is only earth—limited, sensuous
earth that is so fleeting, so real.

The argument in my other books has much more to do with affirmation and despair. Each book raises the question of whether or not it is still possible to affirm in spite of all the evidence. I love the statement of Roethke's that "despite the dark and drek, the muck and mire of these poems, I want to be one of the happy poets." In Wild Gratitude I make it pretty clear that I, too, want to be one of the joyous poets; I want to affirm. But I don't want to do it naively, by turning away from the sufferings of the world. The argument about affirmation and despair continues to run through The Night Parade. I see these books as journeys, as undergoings, as my own dark nights of the soul. The question of affirmation and despair takes on a religious dimension in Earthly Measures. The end of "Earthly Light" turns to earthly love, to eros. It led me to the poems of On Love.

TM: Here we are at the end of the twentieth century; do you think that the affirmation you were pursuing is possible? Are you a "happy poet"?

EH: Well, praise and lamentation are two of the deepest impulses in lyric poetry. The earliest poems we have—the Egyptian pyramid texts, the ancient Hebrew poems, or the earliest Greek poems—all include poems of lamentation and poems of praise. To me, the two elements go hand in hand. I wouldn't want a poetry of praise that doesn't take up the countertruth of lamentation, and I wouldn't want a poetry of lamentation that doesn't remember the gifts, to praise. Rilke says something like this in The Duino Elegies—praise walks in the land of lamentation.

TM: Simone Weil's "gravity" and "grace."

EH: That's a glorious way of putting it: the descent of gravity, the ascent of grace. Both things live in us. I find the impulse to praise in the earliest poems, in the great archaic poems of people everywhere, in Christopher Smart and Walt Whitman and Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's one of the deepest and strongest impulses in poetry. I'd love to be a poet of praise. So, too, the poetry of grief and lamentation is one of the deepest and most long-standing elements in poetry. The elegy is one of our necessary forms as we try to come to terms with the fact that people around us die, that we, too, will die. We need the ritual occasion, ritual making of the elegy. That dimension of poetry is fundamental. I would very much like to see myself as part of both traditions. To me, the two greatest impulses in poetry are elegy and praise. I would love to write a poetry that brings those two impulses together.

Tod Marshall teaches at Gonzaga University. Other interviews, poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Northwest Review, and Boston Review. His interview with Li-Young Lee appeared in the Winter 2000 issue of The Kenyon Review.