by Thomas Reiter

from Shenandoah, Fall 2008

Brendan Galvin is the author of sixteen collections of poems. Habitat: New and Selected Poems 1965-2005 (LSU, 2005) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Ocean Effects appeared in fall, 2007. His translation of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis was published in the Penn Greek Drama Series in 1998. Whirl Is King will appear from LSU Press in 2008.

His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA fellowships, the Sotheby Prize of the Arvon Foundation (England) and Poetry’s Levinson Prize. He has also received the first O.B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum, the Iowa Poetry Prize and The Sewanee Review’s Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry.

During forty years of college teaching, he served as Wyndham Robertson Visiting Writer in Residence in the MA program at Hollins University, Coal Royalty Distinguished Writer in Residence in the MFA program at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa and Whichard chairholder in the Humanities at East Carolina University.

He lives with his wife Ellen in Truro, Massachusetts.

Thomas Reiter: Personally and creatively, what is the attraction of Cape Cod for you as someone who lives here year-round?

Brendan Galvin: It became the psychic center of my work pretty early on. As someone pointed out to me about twenty years ago, I’m genetically a Celt, and Celtic writers are often tied to their particular landscapes. I hadn’t thought of myself in that way, but I instantly recognized it as true because I’d been grounding my poems in this place for years. We’re talking about the outer Cape here, specifically these three towns of Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown, which I’ve been in and out of since 1939, and where five generations of my family have lived. This house is only a couple of miles from where my Donegal grandfather began bringing his family nearly a hundred summers ago. He was sailing down from Boston, delivering lumber and coal, and the Truro dunes reminded him of Trawbreaga Bay, which he could see from the fields in Ballyloskey when he was a boy. Having been there myself, I can see the similarities.

Readers have commented on my obsession with the natural world, but in fact I live in the midst of it out here, so it doesn’t seem unusual to me. When you’ve lived here long enough, I think you tend to follow the natural round of the year: the great horned owls courting in January, piping plovers returning to their nesting grounds in the last week of March, blacksnakes showing up from hibernation in the first week of May, the first blackbilled cuckoo calling from hiding in late spring. You could make a whole calendar of such events. I’ve kept records on bird sightings for years, and I can almost predict to the day when some species are going to show up.

TR: I understand that you majored in the natural sciences as an undergrad, but why birds as opposed to fish? Or plant life? There must be plenty of interesting fish in that water out there.

BG: I was a biology major, but I didn’t choose to write about birds initially. When I was putting my third collection together and looking for a title, I noticed
that the poems were loaded with bird imagery. Hence, Atlantic Flyway. That’s one reason for writing, isn’t it? To find out what you’re really interested in as opposed to what you think interests you. Study a few years’ worth of your poems and they reveal what’s truly on your mind. We’re smack in the middle of the spring and fall migrations here, and I wouldn’t even have to go outside to see exotic warblers and others. They land on the decks. Sometimes in winters when the lemming population crashes up north I’ve seen snowy owls on the beaches or on the moors, what they call an “irruption,” when a species comes south looking for food. Golden eagles and tundra swans come to that little river below the house occasionally. Ospreys, too. Herons fish there and various species of hawks sit in the pines around the marsh.

After running and walking on the road around the marsh for forty years, one morning I discovered a river otter down there. I had no idea they lived here, but I’ve seen one several times since. The bay dunes and flats are three-quarters of a mile away, and when the dog and I walk there it’s not unusual to see whimbrels, piping plovers and other shore birds like oystercatchers, various kinds of sandpiper, maybe a coyote or a fox and gray, harp and harbor seals in the colder months. There have been times in winter when I’ve seen whales spouting in the bay from shore there.

Given that about eighty-five percent of Americans now live in urban settings,
it probably isn’t a brilliant strategy to write about the natural world as much as I do, but it appears to have chosen me, what I see and hear daily and what attracts me. For a while I was wondering what it would feel like to stop writing poems about birds, but then I bought Ted Hughes’s Collected Poems and discovered a slew of terrific bird poems that he’d never included in earlier books. That took care of my bird problem.

TR: Anyone reading your poems would detect a healthy contempt for tourists, I’m sure. How large a negative are they for you?

BG: Watching tourists all my life made me not want to travel, initially, because I didn’t want to be taken for one, but I got over that. I’ve seen what tourism has done here since the 1940s, and it ain’t pretty. When I was nineteen and home from college for spring vacation, I walked the white line of Route 6, the main road, from Wellfleet center to my folks’ home in South Wellfleet, more than a mile, at 10:30 at night, without encountering a car in either direction. There’s no way anyone could do that now. People come here in summer and end up staying. We even have commuter traffic. Thank God for the National Seashore, otherwise this place would look like the Boston suburbs.

Where I walk daily I used to see bare hills, some of which now have eight-thousand square-foot McMansions hanging off the sides of them. It occurred to me recently that it’s like an American Bavaria, with trophy homes instead of castles. The architecture’s execrable, too, because it’s new money and there’s no taste. The Cape-Cod-style house was designed that way because of the wild weather we have here, and there used to be carpenters out here who could build anything, but now they just seem to tack three normal-sized houses together. Some look like nineteenth-century streetcar barns. There’s one about a mile away I can see from my windows upstairs. I’d estimate it has about twelve rooms, and I’ve only ever seen lights on in one of them, and one car outside. The richest, loneliest man in America, maybe?

These people only show up for July and August, though, and it’s an ego theme park around here then. Some of them do ridiculous things — that they’d never do at home — at the post office and the dump to get attention. At one beach the psychiatrists frequent in August, they have an exercise group, all these shrinks standing in a circle and doing calisthenics together. One of our friends claims the tourists arrive with skits they’ve worked on all winter, ready to perform them anywhere they might get an audience. One elderly man from Connecticut dresses like Roy Rogers all summer. The rest of the year it’s a fairly quiet place, a good place for a writer to work, and it’s manageable because there’s not a lot to do or to avoid, but you have to make your own fun. That can be a problem for people without a plan, and the turnover rate in the year-round population is pretty high.

TR: I understand you’re an active gardener, too. Could you talk about the relation between that and the process of making a poem?

BG: Well, making a poem can be compared with creating compost, it seems to me. In a notebook or on the pile you take a shred of this, dump a bunch of that, stir it up, come back in a week and add something else. They both grow by accretion, at least at the poem’s brainstorming phase when I’m trying to get everything I can possibly use down on the page. Tendrils begin appearing here and there. Things grow out of the heap of language that you weren’t expecting. Volunteers.

Vegetables and fruit provide imagery for poems as well as food for the table. In the last few years I’ve been growing wonderful Asian pears, and apples, potatoes,
asparagus, squash and lettuce have all put in appearances in my work. I’ve used potatoes and mushrooms as speaking personae.

TR: Yes, as you say in “The Potatoes Have a Word to Say,” “You are tired of living when you’re tired of us.”

BG: Right, and the mushrooms saying, “On Mars we would have been the debutantes.” Gardens attract creatures, too. Toads, for instance, and sometimes
when I’m standing among the Emperor pole beans, their red blossoms draw a hummingbird to them. It may start yo-yoing a couple of feet away if it can’t decide what I am. Makes me glad I wear glasses. The garden’s a source of wonder. What’s more miraculous than a twelve-foot runner of squash that started out from a seed the size of a penny?

TR: Is there any particular place or time of day you find most conducive to writing? Does that place or time fit into a pattern of activities that prepares you for composition? Do you work from journals and notebooks?

BG: I write in a cluttered room off the kitchen and living room, where I can hear the household noises. I’ve been using this room for forty years. They’re a great comfort to me, the sounds of pots and pans, etc., and I’ve never understood why someone has to go off to a writers’ colony to work. I write in the morning, since after about three p.m. my brain seems to shut down for the day, though I’ll go all day if something’s at me to be done before I lose momentum. In the warmer months I walk the beach with my dog — we’ve had border collies for the past thirty years, and if you don’t exercise them well and regularly they’ll eat your furniture. Then I finish the walk alone by the marsh, a total of three miles, and usually I’m at the desk by about nine. In the colder months the walks happen after lunch, so I hit the desk immediately after breakfast.

I’ve found a source for artists’ spiral-bound sketchbooks that open to a two-page 14-inch-tall by 22-wide white space on which I can get down everything that might work with whatever I’m thinking about for this particular poem. I can see it all in front of me. When I start to put it into a first draft, I switch to a yellow legal pad, black ink always, and the next step is the computer screen. Once it’s in typeface on white paper, drafts go back and forth from the hard copy to the screen. The notebooks can be handy when I’ve got time to work but nothing particular in mind as a subject. I can flip back through them and look over some earlier jottings and maybe see them in a new light that will start a direction for a poem.

TR: Do words like “theme” or “idea” still register in the 21st century?

BG: “Idea” certainly does. Or “subject.” I very seldom work from an isolated line, though I write them regularly and may find places for them in poems. Usually it’s an idea or a memory or something I see as it happens that triggers the impulse to get it on paper. That’s not to say that it will turn out in the final draft as it began. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that when I’m working well I tend to draw on information from different areas. Something I read twenty years ago might combine with something I saw last week and a couple of stray lines out of the notebook. I might even read up on the subject, do some research, if I think the poem calls for it. An early poem like “The Bats,” for instance, never happened in any way remotely like it’s presented on the page. It’s an accretion made from an old National Geographic, encyclopedias, childhood memories, anything that works for that particular poem.

TR: It’s almost a reflex that commentators on poetry point out how poems tend to be about their own coming into being, ars poetica. Have you found yourself writing poems that do that, though maybe not overtly?

BG: “The Mockingbird” was deliberately an ars poetica. “You must bring it all back / alive as the repertoire / of your inner ear, / past fences and over stones, / through one face of leaves / and another // to someone awake on the outskirts....” “The Apple Trees” is about what it says it is, but I later concluded that it’s about how a new poem after awhile doesn’t look as successful as it did at first, and the poet has to begin again: “Don’t those / tears in the heart of each apple / resolve to try it again, / over and over?” You wouldn’t want to make the perfect poem even if you could, since that would be the last poem you’d write.

TR: Would you comment on early influences that led you toward poetry, even though you might not have picked up stylistic traits from them?

BG: The Boston Sunday Globe used to run contemporary poems on its book pages every week when I was a kid. Of course nowadays they won’t even review a book of poems unless it’s by someone who lives thirty seconds from Harvard Square. When I was an undergrad at Boston College, Frost came to read every year and was reading around Boston a lot in those years. It got so I followed him around, believing in that myth of the foxy, white-haired New England sage like everyone else. I worked on liquid asphalt trucks, oiling roads, in those summers and was all over New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, so I was very familiar with the landscapes and places he wrote about. When I read a poem like “The Most of It” I can still visualize that buck deer swimming across a lake I saw once somewhere in northern New Hampshire.

As it happened, I ended up once with about a dozen other people sitting on the stage behind Frost in Jordan Hall. The place was sold out, and my girlfriend, who was the last through the door, talked a Boston cop into letting me in. Frost was ancient, and stopped in the middle of his long Columbus poem and switched to a shorter one. That was his last reading. A month later he was dead.

After Frost, I picked up on Robert Lowell, probably because he wrote about Boston and I could locate his poems. Hell, I’d spent “Christmas Eve under Hooker’s Statue” and could see where “For the Union Dead” was taking place. I got the multiple meanings of “Beached on these fishy flats of real estate,” too, which has always seemed to me a consummately Boston line. Around the same time I heard Richard Wilbur read in the Public Garden at the summer arts festival and liked what I heard, and I discovered Roethke’s “North American Sequence” in The New Yorker. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Roethke because I figured he could teach me a lot. Oddly, I was thinking of Auden as a model when I began writing, though I was also reading James Dickey on the recommendation of my teacher, Samuel French Morse. And Ted Hughes — those early Faber paperbacks of The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal and Wodwo. Thomas Merton and Brother Antoninus, too. Antoninus’s “Canticle to the Waterbirds” still knocks me out. I read Neruda, Maxine Kumin, James Wright and Elizabeth Bishop, especially “The Fish,” which for me is still magical, though apparently she got tired of seeing it in anthologies. Wish I had that problem.

TR: As an undergraduate I had a creative writing teacher who insisted that poets to encourage their growth need to read at least a hundred poems for every one they write. There might be some hyperbole in that ratio, but could you say something about the principle?

BG: Since I taught courses in Modern American and Modern British Poetry for a long time, as well as poetry-in-translation courses, my reading was pretty broad. I still read poems every day, try to read new ones regularly and have a very thick accordion file of individual favorites by different poets I’ve cut out of magazines and xeroxed over the years, and which I go back to for a push in the right direction from time to time. It’s been my experience that if I love a poem, sooner or later I’ll try to write it myself in my own terms, and when I know that’s happening I have to check the earlier poem’s language to make sure I’m not swiping anything.

TR: Has your work been much affected by the other arts — music, cinema, architecture, painting? Can you say that your poems have, say, a painter’s or architect’s eye?

BG: It’s been said that I have a painter’s eye, though I’m not conscious of that when I make poems, but my imagery is probably colorful. It’s highly visual, I guess. Certainly a number of painters have interested me greatly. This part of the Cape had some first-rate painters like Edwin Dickinson, Ross Moffet and, of course, Hopper working here. “The Old Trip by Dream Train” was based on some of Hopper’s paintings. I can take you to a bunch of houses that appear in his work. I’ve written one poem about Walter Anderson, the Mississippi naturalist painter, and one in memory of my friend Harry Cowell, who obsessively painted wave motions in water. He always claimed I had a painter’s eye. George Yater, a local painter who lived just down the road for decades, captured some of the small town intersections around here in uncanny ways that catch the feeling that something is about to happen, and he’s also great on the work of commercial trap boat fishermen. That’s history, now. I’m aware of painters in general because I think they must have an even tougher time than poets getting their work around, since there’s only one copy of a painting hanging in one place, unlike, say, a thousand magazine copies of a poem.

TR: It’s now 30 years since you published your essay “The Mumbling of Young Werther: Angst by Blueprint in Contemporary Poetry” in Ploughshares, and I’m wondering if you’ve been stashing somewhere observations about the poetry scene since that publication. If you were to update “Mumbling” in light of current poetics, how would you proceed?

BG: I’d call it something like “Grokking the Higher Gibberish,” probably. Remember the student who showed up in almost every beginning poetry class who wrote things none of the other members could decipher? It now seems like the poems written by the most solipsistic of those students are appearing regularly in print. They read like private board games. There’s no sense of the poem as an argument that needs proving to a reader via patterns of imagery, music or even subject-verb-object, but the workshop attitude is that it’s a poem because its creator says it is and says he’s a poet, so it must be taken seriously. Art is not school, though. Poets are free to do what they want, but whether readers will be willing to expend their time on such claustrophobic stuff outside of a workshop is another question, because readers are also free to do what they want. Outside of class, nobody has to read that stuff. Of course, once you become engrossed in your own work, these things no longer bother you much. It’s a free country, and if writing that way’s someone’s pursuit of happiness, who’s to quibble? I think you tend to see the publication of that kind of stuff as belonging more to the realm of literary politics than to poetry.

TR: I recall reading an essay in Poetry in which the author asserts that the truths of poetry take the reader not to the life outside of — prior to — the poem, but are referential only to the created life within the poem.

BG: That would be great if the poet were in the room with you. Otherwise, every poem will have to appear with a reader’s guide attached, right? How do you verify what the poem says if you can’t take it out of itself? What good is it if it can’t be examined in relation to how it feels to live in the world instead of in the mind of an utter stranger. “The daily necessity of getting the world right,” as Stevens put it. We go through this kind of thing in cycles, every other generation or so. It’s a bit like all that neo-surrealist stuff that appeared back in the 1970’s. Every poem seemed to end with lines like “like an invisible duck / who has a stranger / for a friend.” In the parody tabloid Poultry, A Magazine of Voice, which George Garrett, Jack Flavin and I published for years, one of the Pandora’s boxes we opened was a huge backlash against these hermetically sealed poems we’ve been talking about. It turned out that all over America people were writing parodies of them. I think if you go back and read some of that ’70s stuff you’ll find it hasn’t improved with age, either.

TR: In a related vein, what is your response to the emphasis on theory in so many creative writing classrooms?

BG: All I can say is what I do myself, and that is that I don’t think about theory at all. I have no theory of poetry. If something works for a particular poem, it works. I don’t scrutinize every move I make to be sure it conforms with a preconception. I don’t worry about whether language is adequate enough to signify. What else do we have? This stance has worked for me over the course of almost seventeen books, and if it ain’t broken I ain’t going to fix it. Fairly early on I ran into people who said things like, “The simile is dead. It’s a technique of the past and you shouldn’t use it.” During the Vietnam War I heard someone say that anybody who wrote a poem about a tree in those terrible days should be shot. Of course, these guys didn’t have any poems, because if you slap on enough business like that, you’ll find you’ve painted yourself into a corner you can’t get out of. It’s all over for you as a poet. I’m with X.J. Kennedy in his Ars Poetica: “The goose that laid the golden egg / Died looking up its crotch / To find out how its sphincter worked. / Would you lay well? Don’t watch.” It’s hardly a post-modern approach, I know, but it works for me.

TR: Were workshops helpful to you in your growth as a poet? And how about those you conducted during your long teaching career?

BG: It was good to start with encouragement, and among other people who were trying to write poetry. I didn’t know anyone my age who was writing seriously until I was twenty-seven. Ultimately, though, I saw that egos could get in the way of honest critiques and that the sooner you stand on your own two feet, go off on your own and wrestle things out for yourself, the better. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a couple of poets to exchange work with who’ll give you honest feedback if you’ll do the same for them. After awhile workshops and writing groups can reinforce a kind of groupthink that’s ruinous for poets. Same with writers’ conferences. When I taught in those I’d run into wannabe poets who left one conference, grabbed a bus to the next, then the next, cross-country for the whole summer. Enormous sadness! I wanted to say, “Go home and write, for God’s sake. Why do you want to spend your free time showing the same three poems to half the poets in America?”

I think you have to be straightforward with your students once they get to the level where they’re trying to publish. Tell them how on any given day the chances of writing your own “Prufrock” can look impossible, so you have to take the long view and refuse to give up. If you’re driven to be a poet, nothing can make you quit anyway. “Never face the facts,” as the late, wonderfully crazy actress Ruth Gordon used to say. Talk to them about rejection, what it means and doesn’t mean, and the truth that some editors are lazy or stupid. Or power hungry. Above all, make them aware of how important it is to read more and to understand poetry’s history and prosody. When you begin to write a poem, there’s a way in which every poem you’ve ever read is leaning over your shoulder, so the more you’ve read, the better off you are.

I used to say that probably you won’t get the publisher you want or appear in the magazines you admire as often as you like, if at all, but if you work hard and regularly you have a reasonable chance of becoming a poet. Find a job you can stand or even enjoy that will leave you time for writing. Don’t end up telling lies in a blue suit for a living. Don’t become a poetry bureaucrat. And forget about prizes, since the best ones are the ones you didn’t campaign for and didn’t expect. Let the finished poem be its own reward — there’s a crucial difference
between wanting to make poems and wanting to be known as a poet.

I’d tell them that the quickest way to lose your soul is to become a po-biz ward-heeler. I’ve seen a lot of those over the past five decades, and a lot of them ended up with nothing to show for all the snuffying-up and sycophancy. There seem to be thousands of them out there looking for movements to join. Just write your best. Some will respect you for it, others will hate your guts, but that’s a form of respect, too. And don’t create crises with people you love in order to have things to write about. Booze and drugs are the enemies of steady work habits, and you have to be there writing. Day in, day out you have to be sitting there doing it on schedule. Nobody but you cares if you continue, but it’s enough that you care. You have to take care of your own work. Keep the beast alive, keep at the page and your readers will find you. Poetry still travels by word of mouth despite a civilization that operates via hype.

TR: I want to pick up on something you just mentioned — the importance of understanding prosody in poetic composition. Do you find yourself increasingly
concerned with a poem’s sound stream as you work through revisions? Does the ear at least partially determine your sense of how long a given line should be, its syntax?

BG: That the lines don’t go all the way to the right-hand margin is probably why I’m primarily a poet and not a prose writer. The unfolding of the poem down the page is an object of both pleasure and concern to me. The free verse line breaks are part of the music of the poem, and they have to be done so it won’t sound like prose. I have no hard and fast rules — line breaks are largely intuitive — but I always check the left and right margins to make sure I’m not beginning too many lines with prepositions and ending the lines with them or with conjunctions or anything other than nouns and verbs. That will screw up the rhythm. I read aloud, looking for too much repetition of a particular sound, or to hear if the sounds are fighting the sense. I look at the end of the poem to see if it shouldn’t end sooner, and at the beginning to see if it’s necessary or not. Sometimes a lot of piano tuning occurs before the poem actually gets under way, and I have to cut that. I look at the adjectives to make sure I’m not using too many one-adjective/one-noun combinations too close together. Nothing will turn a passage into prose — or even cement — faster than that.

TR: John Haines has said that he believes “the arts are ruthless, and there is nothing democratic about them.” Your take on that?

BG: Yes and no. When I started I believed in the brotherhood of the craft, but I learned pretty quickly not to be so foolish. I still think that any poet who does upstanding work will be discovered. A few young poets get free tickets because of their literary connections, but when they don’t prove out and still continue to be rewarded the snickering behind their backs must be deafening to them. Ironically, it’s possible to be an utter hack and still have one of the classiest publishers in America bring out your work.

There’s no doubt in my mind that a lot of editors select work by brand name — this poet’s got a reputation, so we’ll publish this poem, even though it’s not so hot, but who’s this other guy? I’ve never heard of him. There are also editors who go out of their way to be vicious in their rejections. Incompetence is rampant, too. It’s interesting to go back through the last twenty years of Poetry and count the number of wooden sonnets. There hasn’t been an editor with an ear there since John Frederick Nims. As far as I can see, the Muse isn’t falling for the fat wallet, either.

That said, I could make a long list of editors who are dedicated, generous people out to find and publish the best work they can. The others are just some of the interesting challenges to overcome and get around and thwart, if you’re going to be writing poems anyway. Sycophants abound, and even henchmen. So what? Is it any better in, say, the business world? It sure isn’t in academe. If you’re going to let these things stop you, you weren’t meant to write poems anyway.

TR: You have a fiction writer’s insight into human nature and the human condition, as we see in your book-length narrative poems Wampanoag Traveler and Saints in Their Ox-hide Boat, as well as in shorter persona poems in many of your collections. How have you nurtured what is obviously original equipment, a gift for characterization?

BG: In part by writing about five-and-a-half unpublished novels. I read a lot of fiction, too, and taught it for forty years. After doing so many lyrics in what seems to be my own voice I think I’ve wanted relief from it at various times, so creeping into someone else’s invented skin is deeply pleasurable to me. Inventing the world of sixth century Irish monks in Saints and colonial America in Wampanoag Traveler was fun, too. A lot of reading went into them, of course, but in the case of monastic Ireland nobody really knows what they were up to for sure, so it gave me a lot of room to run. The mix of “science” and folklore in colonial times is fascinating, too. We tend to think of Ben Franklin and his kite, but all kinds of strange, even hilarious experiments were going on.

In researching you discover new patterns of speech and vocabularies. A touch of that can make your speakers sound authentic. My version of St. Brendan in Saints is speaking in a way similar to the twentieth century Irish speakers on the Great Blasket off the coast of Kerry. Brendan came from Kerry, and I theorized that an isolated, agrarian, island society like that may not have changed its language much from the sixth to the twentieth century. Reading the Rhode Island founder Roger Williams’s letters gave me clues to the way he’d put things when I wrote “Around Master Williams.”

TR: I notice that you’re saying “fun” and “pleasurable” a lot here. What about “sweat equity?” Does any hand-wringing and imploring of the Muse enter into it?

BG: I don’t hold with the Hollywood, Youngblood Hawke business where the writer suffers wastebaskets full of crumpled pages, if that’s what you’re asking. Once you realize that writing is a process and nobody out there is waiting with bated breath for what you’ll do next, you can relax a bit. It becomes a habit of being. Seeing a poem grow from my hand onto the page feels good to me, and I’m not in a race to finish it. It isn’t piecework. That film image of the suffering artist is a bourgeois American joke as far as I’m concerned, but it’s interesting how many poets feel they have to buy into it. Almost as if that alleged suffering is a justification for what they do, and the public will have more regard for them if they claim to sweat and toil. You’re lucky if you manage to get the time to go along with your inclination to write. It’s not a curse; it’s a chance to give yourself an authentic life instead of an excuse.

Everything I write that isn’t poetry seems less worthwhile. Fiction, essays, reviews, documentary film narrative. Usually as I’m doing those I find myself thinking, “Hey, this might make a nice poem.” It shows me how deeply involved I am in making poems. When I’ve finished a poem I’m pretty sure works, it feels like a physical weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Gravity has been revoked for a few minutes.

Shortly after I turned fifty I walked into my workroom on a fall afternoon, and my notebook was open on the desk, with a pen on it. This golden October sunlight was falling through the skylight on the scene — it was that corny — but the first thought that went through my head was, “That’s the most beautiful sight in the world.” Afterwards I wondered how many workers in whatever field would feel that way about their tools after more than a quarter century. It was like a sign that I had made the right decision in becoming a poet.

TR: I recall reading somewhere — could it have been 25 years ago? — that you like “grudging poems.” Is that a phrase that applies to the narrative and dramatic poems you’ve written in the past two decades?

BG: Well, I like characters who have a lot of splinters. It makes their voices interesting, and gives them a propensity for getting in trouble. My version of St. Brendan, for instance, is part abbot, part sailor and in charge of monks he has trouble managing. He also has doubts about this world as opposed to the next, worries about his brothers backsliding into paganism and doesn’t want the scribe who’s taking down his story to turn it into a public relations stunt. In Ocean Effects, Roger Williams in “Around Master Williams” believes in liberty of conscience, but that brings all kinds of theological wingnuts to Providence. Williams hated the Quakers and was shamed by land scams the English colonists tried to work on the Narragansetts. The cops in “These Little Town Blues” in Ocean Effects are exasperated by the smalltown criminal masterminds they deal with on a daily basis.

TR: There have been recent examples of inflamed passions and sensibilities
having to do with public policy. I’m thinking of the responses to Laura Bush’s planned poetry “festival” at the Library of Congress and also the NEA-funded anthology by veterans of the Gulf Wars. What is your take on politics in poetry?

BG: I think political poems have to say things you can’t find elsewhere, just as a poem about a painting should add something to one’s contemplation of the painting, not just borrow from it. A line like Auden’s “Faces along the bar / Cling to their average day...” in “September 1, 1939,” is high art; it contains in that verb the astonishingly apt comparison of a grim face with a fist. That’s stress. We still read Wilfred Owen and Ivor Gurney because of the way they said things, not just because they wrote against war. If you can see it on TV or read it in a newspaper, why say it that way in a poem? Likewise, a poem about poverty doesn’t put a spoonful of anything in any poor child’s mouth. Write a check, not a poem, if you really want to help. Poetry ought to be the opposite of TV — that’s almost a definition as far as I’m concerned. It should combat most of what is found there.

TR: And that would be its social value?

BG: Part of it. Besides assuring the reader he isn’t alone in the universe, poetry should matter to brains that are more than fourteen years old, for starters. It should protect and defend the language rather than debasing it. No sentimentality,
no propaganda, no vacuous rhetoric, no clichés, no redundancies. This country is drowning in sentimentality. What other conclusion can you draw when George Bush is vetoing a health insurance bill for children and the TV networks are at the same time showing us pictures of his dogs running around the White House Christmas decorations? Tell us something we don’t know and don’t treat us like children. The media in America want to keep us children, and they pitch life at us at that level when they’re not trying to convince us we’re ill and need to buy the drugs they’re selling. Why shouldn’t a poet feel alienated from a society that manipulates people this way? Where else but in despised poems will one find heart-made, honest utterance?

I have to confess in full disclosure, though, that I wrote a poem about 9/11, or rather how I learned about 9/11, and it turned up in a small press anthology of 9/11 poems, and from there ended up in the seventh edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature with a few other 9/11 poems. It’s not the top of my line or even second tier. I never thought to include it in one of my collections, and now I’m worried that it may end up as my signature poem, my “Bolero.” Or “The Fish.” And the cheap bastards didn’t even send me a contributor’s copy.

TR: Is some sort of religious or spiritual perspective elemental in creativity? You’ve written considerably about your Irish ancestors, for instance.

BG: I began taking poetry seriously as I lost faith in organized religion. There’s a Mind behind the Creation as opposed to a bunch of colossal accidents: I’ve never doubted that. As for my Irish ancestors, that was a kind of spiritual quest for me. Although I grew up among my mother’s relatives, I had no idea where in County Donegal they came from, or my father’s Cork family, either. No place names were ever mentioned, and apparently my parents never discussed it with their parents. Too painful, maybe? Nobody else in the family, including my siblings, seems interested. I don’t understand this.

Eventually I worked it out from various clues. The Galvins started out near Kinsale and the McLaughlins on the Inishowen Peninsula, in the far north of the country. I’ve been both places — in fact up in the fields where my mother’s father grew up — and met relatives, particularly a third cousin who had mapped out the whole maternal side back to the 1700s. It turns out that most of the Irish-Americans I knew in the Boston suburb where we lived as kids all came from families in that part of Ireland, though you never heard anyone say that. It makes sense, though, because family members followed family who were already getting established in greater Boston. They’re still intermarrying, too, on this side of the Atlantic. I was trying to understand myself and my family, and looking into all that helped. Brian Friel’s plays, with all those strange Donegal aunts, helped me make sense of it as well. Friel lives about twenty miles from my maternal family’s homestead.

TR: The folklore in a poem like “My Grandmother Steals Her Last Trout” certainly partakes of the spiritual.

BG: Yes, those three saucers with the clay, water and ring in them. Fate. I love things like that. The Irish have a delicious hoard of folklore, as you know, and borrowing from it can add texture to a poem. Irish proverbs, too. “When death comes it will not go away empty,” or “It is better to exist unknown to the law.” There are the ghosts of a million stories in statements like those. Someone has described the Irish psyche as two cats fighting in a bag, and the Cork side of my family — the southern side — is much more prone to randiness, divorce, drink and trouble than the puritanical Ulster Donegal side. As a group the Galvins can’t stand authority and hate to fill out official forms, while the McLaughlins — whom I suspect of having Scots and Viking blood, given the location of Inishowen between Loughs Foyle and Swilly — tend to be a chilly group. Anyway, hunting this down was dramatic for me, and seemed made for use in poems.

TR: Would you comment on your new work, where it may be heading, what currents are carrying it?

BG: My wife Ellen has been seriously ill for a couple of years now, and I’m her primary caregiver, so I’m invoking William Carlos Williams as my patron saint. He used to run up to the attic between house calls, jot down a few words, then leave to see another patient. I find myself hurrying out first drafts these days, knowing that if I can get that down I’ll be able to hang around it afterwards and try to build on it. But I’m OK with that. It’s a different approach for me and may lead me to a new place. LSU Press will bring out a selection of my bird poems, Whirl Is King, in the fall of 2008, and I’m toying with the idea of gathering a collection of new stuff, maybe to be called Wild Guesses.

About the Author
Thomas Reiter's most recent book of poems, Powers and Boundaries, was published in 2004 by LSU, which will also publish Catchment in 2009. He has received an Academy of American Poets Prize and fellowships from the NEA and the New Jersey Council on the Arts. He is Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Monmouth University and lives in Neptune, New Jersey.

Shenandoah
Washington and Lee University

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