THE TASTE OF LIGHT

An interview with rosanna warren | By Joseph Campana

Rosanna Warren is the author of Departure, Stained Glass, which was named the Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets, Each Leaf Shines Separate , and Snow Day. She has published a translation of Euripides's Suppliant Women and has edited several books, including The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field. Her awards include the Pushcart Prize, awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Academy of American Poets, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the ACLS. She is Emma McLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities at Boston University and has been elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. The following interview with Warren took place at Kenyon College in February 2005.

The obligatory catalog of awards customary in the introduction of a poet of Rosanna Warren’s stature may entirely fail to capture the character of the poetry. But perhaps we begin to sense a characteristic of both her poetry and her life, lived as it is in the tireless advocacy of poetry. There is a quality of reverence for poetic insight, which is something, as Warren’s Cassandra tells us, “to spark or char the mind.” This reverence extends from the landscapes within Warren’s poems to the landscapes of contemporary American poetry, both of which are infused with a drive to maintain, as history living on into the present, the insights of the classical world and the legacy of poetic endeavor that was to follow. Indeed, Warren is as comfortable in Cambridge as in Crete and the capacity to move seamlessly between the two is her trademark.

There is an infectious radiance characteristic of Warren’s poetry, a poetry full of, as she puts it, “the taste of light,” which is also “liquor distilled / new, pure, tongue-slicing.” The vicissitudes of the everyday appear as the glittering, the epiphanic appearance of divinity; indeed, each life shines separate illumined by this inner radiance the Greeks surely would have recognized. As in “Arrival,” Poseidon appears not to demonstrate Warren’s learnedness, which is prodigious, but to reveal the most intimate and ordinary aspects of landscape and longing in a state of constant transformation: “That’s how a god arrives, how grief will come / Any day, any ordinary hour, when all we see / Is a peculiar shivering brilliance in the air.”

Joseph Campana: I want to start by asking about the education of poets—first about your education as a poet. Of course, it must have helped to have two notable writers (Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark) as parents, but could you talk about how you came to be a writer?

Rosanna Warren: Well, it was important to grow up in a household where literature, storytelling, and songs and poems were always in the air. My primary discipline and instinct as a child and as an adolescent were for the visual arts. I was always painting and drawing and I was also writing, too. My father gave me a little, old, battered-up typewriter at the age of seven and I immediately learned how to use it and began producing a family newspaper called The Family Racket. So I guess as a child I didn't draw a great distinction between writing and painting. Both involved the hand—whether it was handwriting or typing—and translating seeing into some sort of form.

But more specifically with poetry I have a very distinct memory of, you might say, the first poem I took down and absorbed with ecstasy for myself. I don't remember how old I was, maybe nine or ten. I had been out at a friend's house for supper. Her father had driven me home and my parents were not at home, and it was very unusual for my parents not to be home. So I was alone at home—I don’t know where my brother was—for a few hours and I went to the library, which was a cozy room with a fireplace and bookshelves all over, and I remember reaching up almost at random and taking down a book which ended up being a copy of the poems of Poe, and I remember lying on the rug and reading “Annabel Lee.” I also remember distinctly being a little giddy because I think that my friend’s family had given us children about a half of a glass of wine at dinner, which was an unusual experience for me. The combination, which seems to have a mystic appropriateness, of being a little intoxicated and reading Poe and being carried away by this mesmerizing spell, opened up a world to me. And then followed schooling in France, where we had to memorize thousands of lines of French poetry. I used to write poems in French at the age of twelve or thirteen because I was so excited about the poems I was reading. And then great Latin teachers in high school—so memorizing Catullus and Virgil and Horace, my great loves. And a strong sense of poetic form coming through them.

JC: Before we talk more about education, we can’t avoid the Kenyon question. Your father, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom traveled in many of the same literary circles. Did you ever have the opportunity to meet Ransom?

RW: Yes, once. I was four years old, and he came to visit our house in Fairfield, Connecticut. I remember an elegant, white-haired gentleman with piercing blue eyes and great dignity and suavity of manner. I had a red perambulator for dolls, and somehow I persuaded him to sit on this contraption which I wheeled around and around our long dining room table, while he sat in a regal benignity.

JC: Did you study writing at the college level or graduate level? What was that landscape like when you were coming of age as a writer?

RW: Well, I grew up among my parents' friends who were writers and who thought that the idea of "creative writing" was very bizarre. They grew into themselves as writers by reading and by hanging out with other writers. So, my initial vision of what it was to be a writer was about solitude and then finding friendships. Of course, now I realize that the United States has just institutionalized that process in writing programs, which allow such friendships to happen in a largely capitalist culture flung across a vast continent. Writing programs respond to a more general problem of how we can have an artistic culture under such conditions of a mass culture, so that now I see writing programs as more refuges for artists.

My own experience was going to Yale as an undergraduate and having the great luck there not to take courses with, but to meet, Mark Strand, John Hollander, and Richard Howard, who were there and very powerful presences. I think Mark Strand wasn't teaching there but he came to give readings and it was electrifying to hear him read. I did sit in on a course Richard Howard was giving. It wasn't so much a writing course as a poetry course I sat in on and, again, was electrified. John Hollander became a powerful influence actually more after college. I showed him some poems and he became an extraordinary artistic guide, an intellectual guide. All this time I was trying to be a painter. I was spending many hours a day in the studio working hard at drawing and painting. Writing for me was almost a private, almost a secret world. It wasn't until two years out of college that I spent trying and trying to paint and also to write, that I got a fellowship at Johns Hopkins, in the writing program, really as a way to escape from New York. Institutional constraints of time, of being in graduate school, took me farther and farther from painting. So in graduate school I was among young aspiring poets and fiction writers in that structure that we now know well as a writing program.

JC: What do you think is important for the education of young poets right now especially given the changing cultures of writing and given your own teaching at Boston University?

RW: In a way, I have a deeply old-fashioned view that the artist in any art needs to absorb the traditions of that art and absorb them intensely. How you do it is your own business. My sense of it is that you draw from nature and that you draw from the works of the past. And that as a writer you imitate and translate from as many languages as you can so you absorb the expressive possibilities of our literatures in English, which is so various and hybrid. And only through this immersion does one enlarge the possibilities of how we can refashion inherited forms. For me, there's no interesting art that doesn't have a potent formal sense and also a powerful disruptive sense. I look for that in art—I look for some ratio of resistance between powerful form and powerful disruption.

JC: And by form, especially considering your own poetry, you mean something more expansive than just traditional forms?

RW: Indeed, I think there's a great misunderstanding (well, even to go back even twenty-five years in this country) between so-called open forms (and the ideological claims being made for them, even politically, which seems to be an amazingly crude way of thinking) and the traditional metrical forms. Free verse itself is now a tradition of over a hundred years old. My coordinates are a little French so I would date it to July or August of 1886, which was when the magazine La Vogue in Paris published one of the first translations of Whitman in French and (these were an incredible set of issues) Rimbaud's first free-verse poems which came out of the prose poetry in Illuminations. Of course, Rimbaud had long since gone off to Africa and he didn't know they were being published. So we see the double-barreled assault on the French alexandrine line in 1886 with Whitman and Rimbaud. By now that's well over a century ago. So my sense of form is any organic set of constraints, of structural constraints that the poem sets up for itself, which should engender a powerful form of resistance, internal resistance. A poem that doesn’t have these two elements, I find, lacks life.

I think young poets need to study the complexities of the past, and not little potted histories of the past, but to go back and look at the actual documents. This is why I love the sixteenth century. I adore sixteenth-century poetry between Wyatt and Surrey at the beginning, and Sidney at the end, in order to study that incredibly experimental century when Renaissance humanism was making so much possible. The Sidney psalms—Mary Herbert and her brother Philip—is a great experimental work of poetry. It has more prosodic forms in it than (I think) any other volume in English. I try to encourage my students to think that the past is revolutionary and more interesting than most of us are—more intelligently questioning, more grave about busting things open, about exploring what the world can be.

JC: So that's something you do bring into the classroom?

RW: I do. My students think I'm a raving nut. I mean, the sixteenth century, what's that?

JC: I was reading some of your essays and I'm very interested in what you've written about Sappho and Catullus—that poetry is, inherently, both elegy and translation. Could you speak more about that?

RW: These are not original ideas, certainly, and you can find them beautifully expressed in one way in Mark Strand's mysterious little book The Monument, which is a book I love and which is neither poetry nor prose, or it's both, and it's neither original nor plagiarized. It is full of quotations taken out of context from other poems in other languages and made a collaborative monument to the imagination. Anyway, my own experience of poetry is highly vocal, many-voiced. And so, about elegy: I think of poetry as being lyric in the deep and archaic Greek sense, as song and dance. By the time it is translated to the drawing on the page that we call writing, the markers of dance and song are no longer present. Writing tries to conjure the presence. In that sense, I think of poetry as a kind of elegy for that transient intensity of experience. And translation, more specifically, sacrificial and elegiac in that it takes you to the heart of the mystery of what is poetry, which nobody can define, but we keep dancing around it. It’s an essence, which is not just engineering, which you can't just get by riveting together choriambs or dactyls, and yet which involves the engineering at some level. The image of the human body is a good one since most of us have the illusion, at least, that who we are is not merely the engineering of our bones and flesh and nervous system, though we wouldn't be here without them. So translating means teleporting a body, teleporting Sappho into another body. Inevitably in that passage, the molecules, the cells are damaged and yet we reconstitute it in something like a good translation which gives us the illusion of another dance being made, another breath being breathed, another nervous system pulsing.

JC: Can you say more about that sacrificial quality you refer to here and in that essay?

RW: I wrote that essay over twenty years ago, so I can’t repeat it verbatim, but that essay was built partly on studying Catullus' translation of Sappho, of that famous poem “Phainetai Moi” ("He seems to me like a God, that man") an erotic poem that became Catullus’ "Ille me par esse deo videtur." And so it's partly a study of two powerful poets separated by five centuries, and the violence done to Sappho's poetics by Catullus, since he wrenches the poem into shape for his own erotic needs and for his own culture. He takes her delicate choriambic music and turns it into massive Roman, very equilibrated alliterations—marvelous but totally different. By studying that transition and what we might call a Sapphic inheritance through Baudelaire and Swinburne and Hardy, we find a sense of brothers and sisters and a sense of mourning this ur-parent, Sappho, and that in order to enter that family, the lyric family, we accept death, we accept the death even of our own egos in moments of ecstatic vision. We are transfigured—this is the idealizing vision, like Yeats' Byzantium.

JC: Is it the search for Sappho as this parent figure that explains the fascination those poems have for later poets and translations?

RW: For me, it's not the personality of Sappho. It's the fabric of the poem. Rare poets like Sappho have given their names to a metrical shape. That Sapphic stanza with its three eleven-syllable lines and its fourth Adonic five-syllable line has become a shape in the imagination and of course ever since in Western culture, and it’s a shape that then Horace uses and the German Romantics use and that English poets have used fairly well. It carries with it, like the sonnet, a powerful erotic charge, which can then be used as a sort of fund of energy by poets who might write against it. So when William Cowper writes his poems of psychic despair and drowning, “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity,” in a Sapphic stanza, in a way he's playing against the erotic tradition of a lost lover, but in this case God is the lost lover.

JC: Given your thinking about poetry as translation and elegy, and given my own students' interest in your "translations" of Anne Verveine, can you speak about this project of translating an imaginary poet whose life you've imagined in wonderful detail that doesn’t even appear, as yet, in the poems.

RW: In a way I suppose it’s just an intensification of what art is, because art is a fiction. We make shapes from whatever private motivations we have, but what is happening is a kind of alchemy where whatever raw material we bring to the fictions we make—whether they're prose or poetic fictions—we bring the raw material of our psyches, our lives, our experiences and they're transmuted by the alembic shape of whatever form we put on the page. The advent in my imagination of another persona is another alembic for me. It allowed me access to material I was cut off from. I had too many New England puritanical censoring mechanisms to allow myself to write a kind of erotic poetry under my own name, but some Gallic reach of the mind would make this possible.

I'm leaving the door open to see if I translate any more. She didn’t start as a willed exercise. I wasn't trying to be Pessoa and I wasn't trying to be Geoffrey Hill, though I think Pessoa is a great, great model, and Geoffrey Hill's Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz is to me among the supreme writings of the twentieth century. It was really quite involuntary. Yesterday when I was thrown off a Delta Airlines plane, the word the officials kept using in referring to me was, "I have an invol here," and I realized that "invol" meant “involuntary,” that I was not happy about being removed from the plane. To me, Anne Verveine is an "invol." And there's a French pun there, since "vol" means flight as well as theft, which has just occurred to me. She appeared to me as a kind of epiphany. I suddenly knew what she looked like—nothing like me: a petite, dark-haired, dark-eyed, southern French woman, younger than me. And she was born in the south of France in 1965 near Grasse where I was in lycée as a child. What in me was French was in some sense born there in those childhood experiences. She came into being as another life, another self—unmarried, without children, solitary, working with the visual arts in a way I did not, have not in my adult life.

JC: At your reading, you spoke about poetry not only in its relationship to elegy but in relation to the heroic tradition or more properly in relation to war. I'm thinking of your poem "The Twelfth Day" from Stained Glass, which recounts Achilles dragging the body of Hector about the walls of Troy: "The living mangle the dead // after they mangle the living. / It's formulaic / That's how we love. It’s called / compulsion." Do we get a different sense of a compulsion here than we do in elegy? Is poetry a violent compulsion?

RW: The idea of violence is, to me, intrinsic to reality. I think human nature is violent and I think civilized forms of manners, in the profound sense of manners, are like achievements of poetic form. They're dearly won and they should be cherished, but I'm always aware of poetic forms of being on the edge of chaotic disintegration, and kindness in human beings and courtesy being on the edge of our potential destructive, murderous, selfish instincts. Whether it’s a battlefield in Homer, or Virgil, or World War I, or more recently in America's imperial, international adventures, or whether it’s in the intimate violence between mother and child, husband and wife, lover and lover, I think of the poems as little theaters, little symbolic theaters, where you can take experimental soundings about structure and explosion and try to make them ethical soundings. That's why I'm driven to write poems. I can't help it, in a way. I've spent my life trying not to write poems. I really wanted to be a painter, yet something in me could only do what I wanted to do, to make these laboratory experiments, in words—in shaped words.

I don't think I can easily put together the notion of the heroic here except perhaps to say that I find I'm interested in the antiheroic, which is of course the modernist stance. Achilles dragging the corpse of Hector around Troy is not a heroic Achilles. He's obsessed, he's at the mercy of his own rage and desire. The poems I've written about The Aeneid do not show the heroic Aeneas. I'm fascinated particularly by Book Eleven, and the character of Aeneas as wearily trudging out to kill yet some more Latins, having to fulfill his destiny as being a character out of Homer. He's trying to be Achilles, as if The Aeneid has to rewrite The Illiad for its last six books and poor Aeneas is having wearily to don the armor of Achilles, but it's a different poem, it's a different ruler. He's a sad, overworked character full of noble aspirations. I have used my poems, I hope, as ways to examine these conflicts and I feel my poems as acts of violence. I try to make them acts of contained violence. I sometimes think of them as the internal combustion engine, which only works because it's a tight chamber and yet there's a tremendous ignition and release of propulsive power. I can't work in a form that's too open or free-floating because I need a closed chamber of some kind to make an ignition happen.

JC: We see in the landscape of contemporary America not only an attempt to deal with the aftermath of September 11th and the war in Iraq but also to understand what it means for poets to write about war or to oppose war. Is there anything that these poetic traditions dating back to Homer can teach us?

RW: I think there's a lot to teach us. On the whole, artists absorb current events deeply but slowly. I think artists in all the arts (dance, theater, painting, writing)—we've all, in the United States especially, been challenged about how our arts can respond to a whole sequence of political events since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and then our own government's response to those events. A complex—I don't mean to speak for people—searching for voice and shape and form by a lot of artists, some of it in the first rush of adrenaline and despair, can have a kind of expressive forcefulness, but I don't think we'll see yet for some years what the true shapings, the moral shapings in our arts, will look like. We're all in this battlefield, in the confusion of battle. One thinks of Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma or the famous War and Peace battle scenes where you can't tell in the clouds of shock what exactly is happening though you're trying to see. Therefore, say, the work of the Irish poet Michael Longley and his rewritings of small scenes from Homer in his last few books strike me as enormously important. Longley has found a searching, crystalline way, without moralizing, without exposition, to place before our imaginations these tragic scenes. Tragedy means not that it's sad. Tragedy in a deep, classical sense, or pre-classical sense with Homer, means that there are irreconcilable imperatives. I guess I'm looking for an art that has that strength of mind, that does not say "Oh, boo-hoo-hoo" but that can shock us to the core by putting us face-to-face with what is irreconcilable, and it can include great pathos, like Achilles' horses weeping for the death of Patroclus.

JC: Can you say more about the ways in which poetry and painting are similar for you?

RW: Well, I've written about a variety of painters. Some of them (in no particular order) are: Turner, Renoir, Max Beckmann, John Walker, Dorothea Tanning, Bernard Chaet. Some of them are friends of mine. But from my very early childhood, I remember at the age of three holding pencils and trying to make shapes, trying to translate onto the page what I was seeing. Drawing and then painting are meditational exercises to work at the strangeness of the world. And that's why I was always a figurative painter, because I could stare for hours (maybe it's a little autistic) at tree bark, or the pattern branches make against the sky, or at the shape of an orange on a table—and look at the weirdness of anything. If you look at it hard it turns revelatory in its estrangement from what we expect it to look like. That's a nonverbal training or positioning toward reality, and poetry, in my experience, is an exhilarating, at times heartbreaking, attempt to translate into the verbal realm those distinctly nonverbal experiences or apprehensions of the real. I guess the way I'm speaking sounds a little bit like Giacometti; that's the way Giacometti drew, by looking at the real until it dissolved. He was thinking a lot about Cézanne, and I think about Cézanne probably every day of my life. It is a discipline of looking for the revelation in the strangeness of the truth.

JC: This seems quite striking in your poem "Through the East Door," which is about the painter Theora Hamblett and which has such an interesting shape. Do your poems about painters amplify these principles?

RW: My sense of shapeliness in poetry has always been what I like to think of in a Coleridgian way as organic and generated by the material, the needs of the material. There [in "Through the East Door"] the needs were partly narrative. But a poem is not a short story or a novel, so I was struggling with something that I've been struggling with more recently in the long poem about Janácek and the woman he was in love with. I think of the Anne Verveine poems as having a kind of narrative. For many years I've been trying to tell stories in poems without telling a story. The formal attempt in that poem, I suppose, was to integrate something timeless—because she was a visionary primitive painter and she saw things with auras around them as if they were in the mind of God—with a linear story about a woman's life, a very isolated farm woman. I was trying to figure out a form that would intersect linear narrative with Blakean moments of transfiguring timeless vision. The shape of the poem on the page is a way to integrate those two forces.

JC: To what extent are the visual shapes of poems, perhaps looking back to concrete poems or thinking about a more painterly vision of poetry as you look at the page?

RW: I think of it as an iconography, whether it's quatrains that look like bricks stacked or a nice chunky sonnet or a wandering, long, dispersed, French modernist poem—yes. I think there's an iconic aspect to the way the poem performs itself on the page. Maybe one of the fascinations of poetry for me is something John Hollander captured in the title and the substance of his enduring and wonderful book Vision and Resonance, which is a book that examines music in poetry back to the early Greeks and up through the Renaissance, with a particularly wonderful chapter on [Thomas] Campion, the Renaissance poet and lute player, and on into modernity. How have different poet cultures played out this ratio between the visual and the acoustic or oral? Both are intense experiences and the poem is a fantastic hybrid form because it captures the elegy for the lost song and it also captures a monumentalizing visual desire to have a timeless shape on the page. It's in time and it's out of time, it's in the ear and in the eye. Finally, in some Mallarmean sense, it's in the soul, beyond voice, beyond vision.

JC: Knowing your interests in painting and the classical world, it isn't surprising to find references to either in your poetry. We also see a wonderful play of light, especially as light illuminates places and landscapes, we see both geographic and mythic spaces in the poems. What is it your poems are trying to illuminate?

RW: In a way, I feel my poems know more than I do, and what I can say about them is potentially misleading. But, in my limited perspective, I'm very aware of the limitations of our bodies—we have boundaries—and the limitations of our little selfhoods. We are a bundle of memories and desires and particular experiences that have stamped us, and our limited brain power—"the dull brain perplexes and retards," which mine does persistently. We work with limitations and that's who we are; we're mortals, finite. But we have infinite dreams, and I think of poetry as an art of containment which points to something like the infinite in its various ways. And one place we are contained is the place we are, on earth in a certain place looking at a particular tree or building. It's part of the givenness of our limited being. It's where we start from—we're not angels, we're not angelic intelligences. We do not have x-ray vision. When I was drawing and painting—and I still draw a little as a practice of vision—I thought I had to draw what I could see and that's where I would find my lesson. As a poet, I have to start with what I can see—the people around me, a particular look of the sky. There's a line I adore in John Ashbery in Three Poems; toward the end (I think of it as a Dantesque phantasmagoria)—a voice says "we are saved by what we cannot imagine." That's a powerful teaching instrument and that's what looking is about. We start in the body, looking, and then the imagination, looking. That's my experience—I know other people look in different ways.

JC: What are your habits when you sit down to write?

RW: Well, it depends on whether you're in the middle of an intense school year—correcting papers and looking at application folders and all the other nonsense you have to do. It's not nonsense, by the way. I have almost a Franciscan sense of service as part of our being on the earth, and I'm not snooty about correcting papers and reading application folders. On the other hand, the little anarchist or artist part of you starts screaming for time and doesn't care. It's complicated.

When I have my own free time, that's when I'm in a process. I love to start slowly in the morning by reading the TLS while I'm sipping my tea and cranking up the slow wheels of my brain, and so slide into my study. From there I move to, sort of, initiatory reading. I like to read, I think of it as vitamins—read a letter by Flaubert or Henry James or somebody very intelligent to wake me up—and from there things start clicking a little bit. I'm a very magpie sort of writer. I depend a lot on my intense love for other writing. I often have a stack of poetry books near my desk, books that are for right now and are a source of electric current for me.

On any particular day, I might be looking at something older, like George Herbert, or it might be I absolutely need Lowell that day or Louise Glück or Geoffrey Hill. Then at a certain moment—it could be after just a half an hour of this predatory reading—I put the other books away and I'm alone with my papers. What I'm describing is a really oblique approach back to the core of my struggle, which was with whatever vision I was trying to wrest into shape on the page. I get there by way of other voices. The big question for me is about hearing voices, it's almost a form of schizophrenia, and by that I may no longer mean I'm hearing Herbert or Lowell. I'm listening for another voice—that's the voice in me. In times of depression, in times of exhaustion, in times when I’m too given over to external needs, the anguish is that I can no longer hear the other voice. If I can't hear that voice, I think I'll go mad. These are all exercises that I'm describing to you that allow me to hear my own voices. Without them, I truly cannot work.

JC: With Departure out now, what's next?

RW: This last book had the long narrative sequence of the Janácek poem, then there was the long sequence of Anne Verveine poems. I didn't will them but they came into being. Now I find I'm writing two sequences that seem to be growing. One is called "Runes" and one is called "Mistral." They're exploratory. I really can't say much about them. But, they're not narratives exactly. They're flexible shapes that allow the concentration of the short lyric, which I love, and yet they allow expansion into occult, metaphysical patterns that are growing, so I'm letting them happen. I also have a distinct vision of four other long poems in this new book, which I think will be based on the classical elements. I know that the water poem, if I can bring it off, will be a kind of elegy for my colleague at Boston University, John Daverio, a musicologist who drowned in the Charles River last year. It's also a poem about Schumann because John loved and wrote wonderfully about Schumann. It comes partly from meditating on the Charles River, which flows right outside my office window. I've looked at the river for twenty-three years in every kind of light. And the earth poem I'm very excited about, if I can make that work. It's about Frederic Law Olmsted, and the parks he designed. Olmsted was a depressive and so it's a poem, I hope, about the inner space of depression and what you can rescue from that. I love the way his parks wander.

JC: If you have one piece of advice for young poets, what would it be?

RW: Find the resistance that you need. Find your proper resistance. Art without resistance is weak.

JC: Is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we end?

RW: Well, we've talked about so much, but there is one thing that obsesses me, and that is the idea of the line of poetry as, in my mind, a metaphysical unity. I don’t mean that it's necessarily defined by meter, though many poetic cultures have defined it by meter. The alexandrine line written and used as an instrument by Racine, for example—the twelve-syllable line with the caesura in the center. Or the Sapphic line with the choriamb in the middle. Or Shakespeare's blank verse. These lines are infinitely subtle and powerful instruments of unity and yet expansion beyond themselves. I try to have students think harder and hear more, both the internal balances and imbalances in the lines they're writing. When contemporary poems in English are weak it has partly to do with not taking line seriously. A metrical grid is not necessarily the way to do it. A metrical grid can be just as bad as a weak free-verse line. It can be like a laundry line that's gone slack. Meter won't do it alone. Meter is just a training for the ear. I have a mystical sense; the line should be a metaphysical unity and have that coherence, and then it needs to be related to the lines before and after it with dynamic momentum. If you can get that ratio right between momentum across the lines and unity within the lines, then you've got a poem starting.

Joseph Campana has published poems in Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, New England Review, and Poetry. His first collection, The Book of Faces, will be published by Graywolf Press in November 2005. Campana teaches Renaissance poetry and creative writing at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

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