September 8, 2025 • 21 mins
In this collection of conversations, Ben Palpant, author of Letters From The Mountain, has compiled his intimate, one-on-one interviews with seventeen powerful poets of the 21st century. These conversations cover an entire range of life experience, including grief, hope, culture, the writing craft, family life, and the imagination. Each poet speaks with remarkable candor and joy. Taken together, these interviews are a powerful reminder that poetry remains an essential expression of what it means to be human.
Franz Kafka famously said that "a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." And the words and thoughts contained here aim to wake up much that has become silent in each of us. They contain wisdom that may inspire, instruct, and strengthen, confronting us with the reality that words matter, that poetry matters, and that we matter.
You can purchase a copy of An Axe for the Frozen Sea in the Rabbit Room Store.
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S1 (00:00):
The following is brought to you in partnership with Oasis Audio.
Welcome to Rabbit Room Press Presents, a podcast series of
great audiobooks, one chapter at a time.
S2 (00:16):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Pallant. Read
for you by the author. Chapter 14 Jeanne Murray Walker,
my eldest daughter in college at the time, introduced me
to Jeanne Murray Walker. I was immediately impressed by Walker's
(00:37):
attention to the poetic craft. I wrote to see if
I could buy a signed copy of her book, Helping
the Morning, as a gift for my daughter. Walker gladly obliged.
That was the start of our correspondence. When we finally
got to enjoy a focused conversation all these years later,
it dawned on me that I had never told her
how much I appreciated her craftsmanship. I said, Jeanne, fairly
(01:00):
often I'll read a poem that strikes me as rushed,
a little too off handed. Your poems feel like the
work of a craftsman. Thank you, she replies. It probably
started with my long habit of practicing the violin. Actually,
as a child I was easily bored some days, mostly
in the summer when I wasn't in school, I would
spend 4 or 5 hours practicing exercises or working on
(01:23):
the cadenzas of the great violin concertos. I learned that
to have any hope of performing on the stage required
hundreds of hours practicing scales and arpeggios alone in a
small practice room. It might also have had something to
do with the fact that between the ages of 13
and 16, first my father and then my older brother
(01:43):
suddenly died. I did not find the comforting words of
my Baptist church helpful, and I did not find English
a useful language to discuss any of it. But I
did learn that it's possible to use a language other
than everyday transactional English to express the truths that go
on in and between us. This is the language of poetry,
(02:04):
and it is often the language of the spiritual world.
That discipline has remained an important part of your writing career,
I say. Yes, believe me, she replies. To get beyond
a beginning level, a poet needs to learn craft. When
I was teaching in Orvieto, Italy, I got to know
a wonderful poet, Hannah Armbrust Badia, who is married to
(02:25):
a cobbler. An actual cobbler. He takes measurements of people's
feet and cuts specially prepared leather and stitches it to
fashion mind bogglingly beautiful and very, very expensive shoes. He
spent years learning to do this, and has dozens of
tools in his shop to help him. He makes shoes.
(02:45):
She makes poems. They both spend their days shaping material
through hard work and discipline. I don't know whether there
is such a thing as an ideal shoe. If there is,
it's surely Italian. But I do believe that to make
a poem in some ways is not unlike making a shoe.
It requires craft and patience. I don't think young writers
(03:05):
count that cost very often, I say. I don't blame them.
It can look so easy from the outside. But craft
involves a lot of study, a lot of time, a
lot more than we think it will take. I don't
believe poetry springs from momentary and unpredictable inspiration, she says.
It arises out of solid knowledge of the fundamentals of
(03:25):
language and attentive practice. After reading poetry with careful attention
and love for many years, I believe poetry is as
much the product of hard work and skill as it
is of inspirational flash. I figure if I put in
the time and practice, eventually the muses will give me
a gift. I will write something better than I know
how to. You mentioned the loss of your brother and father.
(03:49):
I say their deaths must have had an enormous impact
on you. Those deaths did have an impact on me.
Of course. I suspect they registered deeply. My father had
the kind of heart defect that can now be fixed
with a simple procedure, but the surgery was just being
invented when my father needed it in 1957. He knew
(04:10):
about it and flew to the Scott and White Clinic
in Texas for a workup, where he was given a
50 over 50 chance of surviving the surgery. My parents
didn't like the odds, and he didn't go back for
surgery and asked for my brother. He had been a
serious asthmatic from the day he was born. My mother,
who was a nurse, kept him alive through her skillful
care until he was 18. He wanted to go away
(04:32):
to school, and finally she who had protected him so
long permitted him to leave her. He died during his
first week away at college. My own take on this
has always been that we were fortunate to have him
as long as we did. Did you wrestle with God
after their deaths? You know, I never asked whether it
was God's fault, she replies. I'm not even sure what
(04:54):
it means to say that something is God's fault. In
any case, I don't believe it was those tragedies that
caused me to wrestle with God. Still a kind of darkness,
I say. Seamus Heaney wrote I rhyme to see myself,
to set the darkness echoing. Is that true for you
as well? If so, how? I wish I knew what
(05:19):
Heaney meant, she says. Maybe he meant that language is
actually fairly useless at connecting us to one another, or
even to our own pasts. Maybe all of us live
in a kind of linguistic darkness, but even so, at
least when the poet makes a rhyme, she is recognizing
and echoing herself from an earlier line. In that way,
rhyming offers the poet a way to be in touch,
(05:41):
at least with herself. You mention rhyming traditional forms have
been an important part of that exploration for you, I say. Yes,
she says. Form has been an enormous ally. I have
often felt that if the muse is working, the forms
of poetry can help me discover what I'm thinking. King
(06:02):
only if the muse is working, I ask. If the
muse isn't working, just forget it, she says. You'll just
have a dead sonnet on your hands. I say this
after slowly writing a book of sonnets. Pilgrim, you find
the path by walking, which came out a couple of
years ago. Writing those poems taught me a lot about
the language. Like what I ask? Well, let's stay on
(06:25):
rhyme for a moment while helping the poet find words
for a poem. Rhyme also allows a poet to see
what she thinks. That is, in Heaney's words, to see myself.
Or to put it another way, the poem, and especially
its repetitions, make the poet's own thoughts visible to her
as well as to her readers. Your work lives in
a tension between an ideal version of the world and
(06:47):
the uncomfortable, often frustrating reality. I say. Is this partly
why you write? To explore possibility and wholeness in a
fragmented world? Does that make sense? Yes, I think I
know what you're asking, she says. There are many poets
whose work lives in tension between the visionary and reality.
(07:10):
At least that's what the reader sees after the poet
writes the poem. I'm not so sure that's what the
writer was aiming for, though it may be disappointing, but
I don't have any such noble reason for writing poetry,
for example, to sustain the possibility of wholeness. When I write,
I'm not aiming to sell a point of view like
wholeness to the reader. It would be more accurate to
(07:30):
say that I am, like the reader, a seeker. I
write poetry because I'm fascinated by what the language can do,
though that isn't entirely it either. We've talked about the
discipline involved in the craft, but does this fascination lead
to playfulness too? I ask. When I first saw someone
playing a massive pipe organ with not only a keyboard,
(07:53):
but all its knobs and stops and pumping the bass pedals,
I thought, that's the way it is when someone's writing
a poem. You play the language, it's fun and you're
involving the whole complicated language. All the possibilities in English
are available to you. The only way I could understand
Wallace Stevens, I found, was to think about his poetry
that way. His work is deadly serious, but it's rooted
(08:16):
in play. Recalling some of her best poems, I say
I have always been struck by your metaphors, Jean. They
arrest my attention. I experience a kind of revelation when
I encounter them. Thank you, she replies. Several years ago,
after reading a lot of poetry, I began to wonder
whether many of the metaphors poets have used, at least
(08:36):
in the poetry that has lasted, have worked so well
because normal people just regularly think in metaphor. I don't
mean that we go around awkwardly decoding the world, thinking, oh,
I see a light stands for truth and goodness. And
if the light flashes on the shore in a dark night,
it means home. No metaphor. That kind of equivalence works
(08:58):
pretty naturally for most of us, and we don't spend
a lot of time thinking about it. In other words,
maybe it's not the poet who sets up the revelation
that one thing equals another. It's always been there. And
when the poet points it out, people grasp it and say, oh,
I see. Speaking of metaphors, I say one of my
(09:18):
favorite lines from your poem, Staying Power, is about how words,
left to their own devices, will toddle off into the
God fire. I wrote that poem about 15 years ago
for a regular Friday afternoon workshop with my friend, the
poet Deborah Burnham. Every week for over 40 years, Deb
and I have exchanged poems with one another, either on
(09:40):
paper or by email. We then spend a couple of
hours on Friday talking about our new poems. Her remarks are,
without exception, pointed and they are rarely wrong. On the
Thursday I wrote Staying Power, I had been teaching at
the University of Delaware as usual, and as I drove
an hour home, I dimly remembered that I needed to
write a poem for the next day's workshop with Deb.
(10:01):
I didn't have any ready ideas. The fact didn't trouble
me because I rarely ever get an idea for a
poem in advance. I'm more likely to find a poem
by fooling around with language. I knew I would have
a little over an hour to write after I got home,
before the hungry, thundering mob of my family would pull
up at our dining room table and demand mashed potatoes
and hamburger patties. Believe me, she says, I wasn't writing
(10:24):
as a philosopher or a theologian when I wrote those words.
They were a result of playing with language. That's an
encouraging anecdote, I say. Sometimes I'm so amazed by the
flash of insight that comes to some poets, and I
think that could never happen to me. You're saying that
I just need to keep playing with language as part
of that slow, patient craft work? Exactly. You never know
(10:47):
what will come. Did you ever consider pursuing philosophy or
theology in college? I took a course in philosophy and
eagerly wrote about big subjects like the ones you were
asking about, and several of my best teachers informed me
gently that I was better at metaphor than at abstractions.
The philosopher sent me over to the literature department, and
(11:07):
after a semester studying literature and writing poetry, I won
two Atlantic Monthly Awards, which certainly validated their assessment. I
am a poet and someone who can write essays. I'm
not a scholar of religion, philosopher, or a psychologist. Your
line about The Godfather lifts the reader into the realm
of the transcendent. How does a poet make the leap
(11:28):
from lived experience to transcendent revelation? I'm afraid I can't
talk very helpfully about how I use lived experience to
tell human truths. I can tell you that I don't
ever think about getting transcendence down on paper, she says.
There's nothing wrong with doing that. It's just not my gift.
I wonder how many good poets these days hope to
(11:49):
do that. We tend to write about ourselves, about the
way we are caught in time, about our landscape and
our houses and our lovers. And from that, sometimes the
transcendent flashes out. If you want to know William Butler
Yeats Yeats's poems. You need to learn about the town
of Sligo, for example. Even if there's a good deal
about his poems that transcends Ireland. Think of Denise Levertov,
(12:12):
a religious poet, if ever there was one. Her poetry
is entirely grounded in the particulars of her daily life,
and yet her work is shot through with the transcendent.
Even 400 years ago, poets were not writing much about
the transcendent. Even John Donne, who was so interested in
the transcendent that he later became a divine, seems to
(12:33):
have wrenched transcendent revelation out of subjects grounded in the body.
Is this transcendent revelation a byproduct rather than a casual intent,
I ask. I guess what I'm saying is, it's not
mainly writers who make the leap from lived experience to
transcendent revelation. It's readers. It seems to be a normal
move for regular people to make one thing stand for another.
(12:56):
In the case of any two given objects, the poet
may be just the first to point out the connection.
Which brings us back to metaphor, I say. Yes, she says,
metaphor is the William Carlos Williams red wheelbarrow on which
everything depends. The importance of the Red wheelbarrow is something
a writer absolutely has to learn in order to become
(13:17):
a poet. Grab an issue of poetry magazine and start reading,
and you will find metaphor on every page, using metaphor
as part of the discipline of writing poetry. A poet
has to talk in terms of objects. Your comment about
the reader experiencing the transcendent is an interesting one, I say.
I think it was Christian Wiman who said that poems
(13:39):
are mysterious intrusions, things far greater than things I knew.
Is that why the reader has that experience and not
necessarily the poet? Maybe, she replies, I'm just saying that
we probably shouldn't locate the meaning of the poem through
the experience of the poet, because we don't know what
that experience is. And sometimes the poet doesn't either. It
(14:01):
feels to me like your poetry is vulnerable without being confessional.
Does the raw, confessional poet do us a disservice by
being so openly naked about her experiences? If a reader
thinks she's reading a poet who's doing her a disservice
by being too confessional, she should put the book down
and find another to read. Far be it for me
to set up a rule for what experiences can be
(14:22):
talked about in poetry, because different readers probably have different
tolerances for that kind of intimate detail. But sometimes a
poet who is openly naked about experience can make the
image of her raw experience work as a metaphor which
invites the reader into the poem. Think of Theodore Rytka,
who wrote, I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
(14:43):
I learn by going where I have to go. Those
lines seem confessional to me, but not raw because they
are so resonant as a metaphor. That's a helpful distinction,
I say. When I was younger, she adds, I read
and admired the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne
Sexton and other women American poets who wrote in the
(15:04):
mid-20th century. They were talking about cultural issues. I understood, perhaps,
because I've always hung on to my faith. I've never
experienced the catastrophic despair those poets seem to have felt.
But I must say, in both of those poets, what
comes through most powerfully, at least to me, is not
their own biographies, interestingly enough. Then there's Emily Dickinson, who
(15:28):
intentionally omitted most of the details of her life. Now
her biography is being excavated for those very facts. Who
has given you a helping hand over the years, I ask?
I owe my writing life to some very wise and
generous teachers. I met Helen Devitt when I signed up
for her creative writing course at Wheaton College in 1962.
(15:50):
She submitted my work to the Atlantic Monthly Competition, which
I won. The prize was a summer at Bread Loaf
School of English in Vermont, where I met John Frederick Nims,
who became my lifelong mentor. Later, he became the editor
of poetry magazine. He meant the world to me, opening
many doors. My greatest help, though, continues to be my
(16:11):
gifted workshop buddy, the poet Deborah Burnham. The two of
us met as PhD students at the University of Pennsylvania,
and have been workshopping every Friday afternoon for 45 years.
Could you talk about your hopes for the next generation
of poets, I ask? I think the hope is that
they will get down on paper the fleeting and astonishing
(16:31):
truths of their own generation, she says. Not that truth
is different for every generation. It isn't. But truth manifests
itself in different ways, and I hold my breath, waiting
for the way the next generation will use form to
tell us. What pitfalls would you encourage them to avoid?
The greatest pitfall, I think, is this to imagine you
(16:53):
can write poetry without reading it, she says. A lot
of people think that way. After all, poetry is short.
It sometimes seems effortless, and most poets, like most craftsmen,
don't talk a lot about the hard work it takes
to make a poem. But imagine a baseball player who
hadn't even seen many games and doesn't really grasp why
he should. Just imagine he gets on the field. He's
(17:15):
playing shortstop. An easy grounder rolls his way and it
bounces through his legs. The fans who don't immediately want
to kill him want to get up and leave the game.
You need to know the game. You need practice. Is
poetry any different in that way than baseball or the
practice of law or becoming a singer? It's work, she says.
(17:36):
What are the personal habits you would encourage them to adopt,
I ask? If you want to be a poet, she replies.
Read every scrap of great poetry you can find in English,
going back to before Geoffrey Chaucer. Take your time. When
I realized that I needed to do that, I just
signed up for graduate English courses, which laid out the
(17:57):
great poetry. But you can get hold of an inexpensive
history of poetry in a used bookshop, or sign up
for a History of Literature course at your local college.
As an important side note, if you want to study
English at a college or university, you need to dodge
literary theory. It has spread like weeds in English departments.
Just read the poetry itself and find some friends who
(18:19):
are doing the same thing. Get together and talk about it.
A shoemaker can't make shoes without learning how they're constructed,
so learn how to make poems by studying how they're made.
Here's one of my favorite poems by Jeanne Murray Walker.
Staying Power in appreciation of a maxim Gorky at the
(18:39):
International Convention of Atheists, 1929. Like Gorky, I sometimes follow
my doubts outside to the yard and question the sky.
Longing to have the fights settled. Thinking I can't go
on like this. And finally I say, all right, it
is improbable. All right. There is no God. And then,
(19:04):
as if I'm focusing a magnifying glass on dry leaves,
God blazes up. It's the attention, maybe to what isn't
there that makes the emptiness flare like a forest fire.
Until I have to spend the afternoon dragging the hose
to put the smoldering thing out. Even on an ordinary
day when a friend calls, tells me they've found melanoma,
(19:29):
complains that the hospital is cold, I say, God, God.
I say as my heart turns inside out, pick up
any language by the scruff of its neck, wipe its face,
set it down on the lawn, and I bet it
will toddle right into the God fire again. Which, though
(19:51):
they say it doesn't exist, can send you straight to
the burn unit. Oh, we have only so many words
to think with. Say God's not fire. Say anything. Say
God's a phone. Maybe. You know you didn't order a phone,
but there it is. It rings. You don't know who
(20:13):
it could be. You don't want to talk. So you
pull out the plug, it rings. You smash it with
a hammer till it bleeds. Springs and coils and clobbering
metal bits. It rings again. You pick it up and
a voice you love whispers. Hello.
S1 (20:38):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audio book is published by Oasis Audio.
Copyright by Ben Pallant. 2024 by Chris Badeker.
The following is brought to you in partnership with Oasis Audio.
Welcome to Rabbit Room Press Presents, a podcast series of
great audiobooks, one chapter at a time.
S2 (00:16):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Pallant. Read
for you by the author. Chapter 14 Jeanne Murray Walker,
my eldest daughter in college at the time, introduced me
to Jeanne Murray Walker. I was immediately impressed by Walker's
(00:37):
attention to the poetic craft. I wrote to see if
I could buy a signed copy of her book, Helping
the Morning, as a gift for my daughter. Walker gladly obliged.
That was the start of our correspondence. When we finally
got to enjoy a focused conversation all these years later,
it dawned on me that I had never told her
how much I appreciated her craftsmanship. I said, Jeanne, fairly
(01:00):
often I'll read a poem that strikes me as rushed,
a little too off handed. Your poems feel like the
work of a craftsman. Thank you, she replies. It probably
started with my long habit of practicing the violin. Actually,
as a child I was easily bored some days, mostly
in the summer when I wasn't in school, I would
spend 4 or 5 hours practicing exercises or working on
(01:23):
the cadenzas of the great violin concertos. I learned that
to have any hope of performing on the stage required
hundreds of hours practicing scales and arpeggios alone in a
small practice room. It might also have had something to
do with the fact that between the ages of 13
and 16, first my father and then my older brother
(01:43):
suddenly died. I did not find the comforting words of
my Baptist church helpful, and I did not find English
a useful language to discuss any of it. But I
did learn that it's possible to use a language other
than everyday transactional English to express the truths that go
on in and between us. This is the language of poetry,
(02:04):
and it is often the language of the spiritual world.
That discipline has remained an important part of your writing career,
I say. Yes, believe me, she replies. To get beyond
a beginning level, a poet needs to learn craft. When
I was teaching in Orvieto, Italy, I got to know
a wonderful poet, Hannah Armbrust Badia, who is married to
(02:25):
a cobbler. An actual cobbler. He takes measurements of people's
feet and cuts specially prepared leather and stitches it to
fashion mind bogglingly beautiful and very, very expensive shoes. He
spent years learning to do this, and has dozens of
tools in his shop to help him. He makes shoes.
(02:45):
She makes poems. They both spend their days shaping material
through hard work and discipline. I don't know whether there
is such a thing as an ideal shoe. If there is,
it's surely Italian. But I do believe that to make
a poem in some ways is not unlike making a shoe.
It requires craft and patience. I don't think young writers
(03:05):
count that cost very often, I say. I don't blame them.
It can look so easy from the outside. But craft
involves a lot of study, a lot of time, a
lot more than we think it will take. I don't
believe poetry springs from momentary and unpredictable inspiration, she says.
It arises out of solid knowledge of the fundamentals of
(03:25):
language and attentive practice. After reading poetry with careful attention
and love for many years, I believe poetry is as
much the product of hard work and skill as it
is of inspirational flash. I figure if I put in
the time and practice, eventually the muses will give me
a gift. I will write something better than I know
how to. You mentioned the loss of your brother and father.
(03:49):
I say their deaths must have had an enormous impact
on you. Those deaths did have an impact on me.
Of course. I suspect they registered deeply. My father had
the kind of heart defect that can now be fixed
with a simple procedure, but the surgery was just being
invented when my father needed it in 1957. He knew
(04:10):
about it and flew to the Scott and White Clinic
in Texas for a workup, where he was given a
50 over 50 chance of surviving the surgery. My parents
didn't like the odds, and he didn't go back for
surgery and asked for my brother. He had been a
serious asthmatic from the day he was born. My mother,
who was a nurse, kept him alive through her skillful
care until he was 18. He wanted to go away
(04:32):
to school, and finally she who had protected him so
long permitted him to leave her. He died during his
first week away at college. My own take on this
has always been that we were fortunate to have him
as long as we did. Did you wrestle with God
after their deaths? You know, I never asked whether it
was God's fault, she replies. I'm not even sure what
(04:54):
it means to say that something is God's fault. In
any case, I don't believe it was those tragedies that
caused me to wrestle with God. Still a kind of darkness,
I say. Seamus Heaney wrote I rhyme to see myself,
to set the darkness echoing. Is that true for you
as well? If so, how? I wish I knew what
(05:19):
Heaney meant, she says. Maybe he meant that language is
actually fairly useless at connecting us to one another, or
even to our own pasts. Maybe all of us live
in a kind of linguistic darkness, but even so, at
least when the poet makes a rhyme, she is recognizing
and echoing herself from an earlier line. In that way,
rhyming offers the poet a way to be in touch,
(05:41):
at least with herself. You mention rhyming traditional forms have
been an important part of that exploration for you, I say. Yes,
she says. Form has been an enormous ally. I have
often felt that if the muse is working, the forms
of poetry can help me discover what I'm thinking. King
(06:02):
only if the muse is working, I ask. If the
muse isn't working, just forget it, she says. You'll just
have a dead sonnet on your hands. I say this
after slowly writing a book of sonnets. Pilgrim, you find
the path by walking, which came out a couple of
years ago. Writing those poems taught me a lot about
the language. Like what I ask? Well, let's stay on
(06:25):
rhyme for a moment while helping the poet find words
for a poem. Rhyme also allows a poet to see
what she thinks. That is, in Heaney's words, to see myself.
Or to put it another way, the poem, and especially
its repetitions, make the poet's own thoughts visible to her
as well as to her readers. Your work lives in
a tension between an ideal version of the world and
(06:47):
the uncomfortable, often frustrating reality. I say. Is this partly
why you write? To explore possibility and wholeness in a
fragmented world? Does that make sense? Yes, I think I
know what you're asking, she says. There are many poets
whose work lives in tension between the visionary and reality.
(07:10):
At least that's what the reader sees after the poet
writes the poem. I'm not so sure that's what the
writer was aiming for, though it may be disappointing, but
I don't have any such noble reason for writing poetry,
for example, to sustain the possibility of wholeness. When I write,
I'm not aiming to sell a point of view like
wholeness to the reader. It would be more accurate to
(07:30):
say that I am, like the reader, a seeker. I
write poetry because I'm fascinated by what the language can do,
though that isn't entirely it either. We've talked about the
discipline involved in the craft, but does this fascination lead
to playfulness too? I ask. When I first saw someone
playing a massive pipe organ with not only a keyboard,
(07:53):
but all its knobs and stops and pumping the bass pedals,
I thought, that's the way it is when someone's writing
a poem. You play the language, it's fun and you're
involving the whole complicated language. All the possibilities in English
are available to you. The only way I could understand
Wallace Stevens, I found, was to think about his poetry
that way. His work is deadly serious, but it's rooted
(08:16):
in play. Recalling some of her best poems, I say
I have always been struck by your metaphors, Jean. They
arrest my attention. I experience a kind of revelation when
I encounter them. Thank you, she replies. Several years ago,
after reading a lot of poetry, I began to wonder
whether many of the metaphors poets have used, at least
(08:36):
in the poetry that has lasted, have worked so well
because normal people just regularly think in metaphor. I don't
mean that we go around awkwardly decoding the world, thinking, oh,
I see a light stands for truth and goodness. And
if the light flashes on the shore in a dark night,
it means home. No metaphor. That kind of equivalence works
(08:58):
pretty naturally for most of us, and we don't spend
a lot of time thinking about it. In other words,
maybe it's not the poet who sets up the revelation
that one thing equals another. It's always been there. And
when the poet points it out, people grasp it and say, oh,
I see. Speaking of metaphors, I say one of my
(09:18):
favorite lines from your poem, Staying Power, is about how words,
left to their own devices, will toddle off into the
God fire. I wrote that poem about 15 years ago
for a regular Friday afternoon workshop with my friend, the
poet Deborah Burnham. Every week for over 40 years, Deb
and I have exchanged poems with one another, either on
(09:40):
paper or by email. We then spend a couple of
hours on Friday talking about our new poems. Her remarks are,
without exception, pointed and they are rarely wrong. On the
Thursday I wrote Staying Power, I had been teaching at
the University of Delaware as usual, and as I drove
an hour home, I dimly remembered that I needed to
write a poem for the next day's workshop with Deb.
(10:01):
I didn't have any ready ideas. The fact didn't trouble
me because I rarely ever get an idea for a
poem in advance. I'm more likely to find a poem
by fooling around with language. I knew I would have
a little over an hour to write after I got home,
before the hungry, thundering mob of my family would pull
up at our dining room table and demand mashed potatoes
and hamburger patties. Believe me, she says, I wasn't writing
(10:24):
as a philosopher or a theologian when I wrote those words.
They were a result of playing with language. That's an
encouraging anecdote, I say. Sometimes I'm so amazed by the
flash of insight that comes to some poets, and I
think that could never happen to me. You're saying that
I just need to keep playing with language as part
of that slow, patient craft work? Exactly. You never know
(10:47):
what will come. Did you ever consider pursuing philosophy or
theology in college? I took a course in philosophy and
eagerly wrote about big subjects like the ones you were
asking about, and several of my best teachers informed me
gently that I was better at metaphor than at abstractions.
The philosopher sent me over to the literature department, and
(11:07):
after a semester studying literature and writing poetry, I won
two Atlantic Monthly Awards, which certainly validated their assessment. I
am a poet and someone who can write essays. I'm
not a scholar of religion, philosopher, or a psychologist. Your
line about The Godfather lifts the reader into the realm
of the transcendent. How does a poet make the leap
(11:28):
from lived experience to transcendent revelation? I'm afraid I can't
talk very helpfully about how I use lived experience to
tell human truths. I can tell you that I don't
ever think about getting transcendence down on paper, she says.
There's nothing wrong with doing that. It's just not my gift.
I wonder how many good poets these days hope to
(11:49):
do that. We tend to write about ourselves, about the
way we are caught in time, about our landscape and
our houses and our lovers. And from that, sometimes the
transcendent flashes out. If you want to know William Butler
Yeats Yeats's poems. You need to learn about the town
of Sligo, for example. Even if there's a good deal
about his poems that transcends Ireland. Think of Denise Levertov,
(12:12):
a religious poet, if ever there was one. Her poetry
is entirely grounded in the particulars of her daily life,
and yet her work is shot through with the transcendent.
Even 400 years ago, poets were not writing much about
the transcendent. Even John Donne, who was so interested in
the transcendent that he later became a divine, seems to
(12:33):
have wrenched transcendent revelation out of subjects grounded in the body.
Is this transcendent revelation a byproduct rather than a casual intent,
I ask. I guess what I'm saying is, it's not
mainly writers who make the leap from lived experience to
transcendent revelation. It's readers. It seems to be a normal
move for regular people to make one thing stand for another.
(12:56):
In the case of any two given objects, the poet
may be just the first to point out the connection.
Which brings us back to metaphor, I say. Yes, she says,
metaphor is the William Carlos Williams red wheelbarrow on which
everything depends. The importance of the Red wheelbarrow is something
a writer absolutely has to learn in order to become
(13:17):
a poet. Grab an issue of poetry magazine and start reading,
and you will find metaphor on every page, using metaphor
as part of the discipline of writing poetry. A poet
has to talk in terms of objects. Your comment about
the reader experiencing the transcendent is an interesting one, I say.
I think it was Christian Wiman who said that poems
(13:39):
are mysterious intrusions, things far greater than things I knew.
Is that why the reader has that experience and not
necessarily the poet? Maybe, she replies, I'm just saying that
we probably shouldn't locate the meaning of the poem through
the experience of the poet, because we don't know what
that experience is. And sometimes the poet doesn't either. It
(14:01):
feels to me like your poetry is vulnerable without being confessional.
Does the raw, confessional poet do us a disservice by
being so openly naked about her experiences? If a reader
thinks she's reading a poet who's doing her a disservice
by being too confessional, she should put the book down
and find another to read. Far be it for me
to set up a rule for what experiences can be
(14:22):
talked about in poetry, because different readers probably have different
tolerances for that kind of intimate detail. But sometimes a
poet who is openly naked about experience can make the
image of her raw experience work as a metaphor which
invites the reader into the poem. Think of Theodore Rytka,
who wrote, I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
(14:43):
I learn by going where I have to go. Those
lines seem confessional to me, but not raw because they
are so resonant as a metaphor. That's a helpful distinction,
I say. When I was younger, she adds, I read
and admired the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne
Sexton and other women American poets who wrote in the
(15:04):
mid-20th century. They were talking about cultural issues. I understood, perhaps,
because I've always hung on to my faith. I've never
experienced the catastrophic despair those poets seem to have felt.
But I must say, in both of those poets, what
comes through most powerfully, at least to me, is not
their own biographies, interestingly enough. Then there's Emily Dickinson, who
(15:28):
intentionally omitted most of the details of her life. Now
her biography is being excavated for those very facts. Who
has given you a helping hand over the years, I ask?
I owe my writing life to some very wise and
generous teachers. I met Helen Devitt when I signed up
for her creative writing course at Wheaton College in 1962.
(15:50):
She submitted my work to the Atlantic Monthly Competition, which
I won. The prize was a summer at Bread Loaf
School of English in Vermont, where I met John Frederick Nims,
who became my lifelong mentor. Later, he became the editor
of poetry magazine. He meant the world to me, opening
many doors. My greatest help, though, continues to be my
(16:11):
gifted workshop buddy, the poet Deborah Burnham. The two of
us met as PhD students at the University of Pennsylvania,
and have been workshopping every Friday afternoon for 45 years.
Could you talk about your hopes for the next generation
of poets, I ask? I think the hope is that
they will get down on paper the fleeting and astonishing
(16:31):
truths of their own generation, she says. Not that truth
is different for every generation. It isn't. But truth manifests
itself in different ways, and I hold my breath, waiting
for the way the next generation will use form to
tell us. What pitfalls would you encourage them to avoid?
The greatest pitfall, I think, is this to imagine you
(16:53):
can write poetry without reading it, she says. A lot
of people think that way. After all, poetry is short.
It sometimes seems effortless, and most poets, like most craftsmen,
don't talk a lot about the hard work it takes
to make a poem. But imagine a baseball player who
hadn't even seen many games and doesn't really grasp why
he should. Just imagine he gets on the field. He's
(17:15):
playing shortstop. An easy grounder rolls his way and it
bounces through his legs. The fans who don't immediately want
to kill him want to get up and leave the game.
You need to know the game. You need practice. Is
poetry any different in that way than baseball or the
practice of law or becoming a singer? It's work, she says.
(17:36):
What are the personal habits you would encourage them to adopt,
I ask? If you want to be a poet, she replies.
Read every scrap of great poetry you can find in English,
going back to before Geoffrey Chaucer. Take your time. When
I realized that I needed to do that, I just
signed up for graduate English courses, which laid out the
(17:57):
great poetry. But you can get hold of an inexpensive
history of poetry in a used bookshop, or sign up
for a History of Literature course at your local college.
As an important side note, if you want to study
English at a college or university, you need to dodge
literary theory. It has spread like weeds in English departments.
Just read the poetry itself and find some friends who
(18:19):
are doing the same thing. Get together and talk about it.
A shoemaker can't make shoes without learning how they're constructed,
so learn how to make poems by studying how they're made.
Here's one of my favorite poems by Jeanne Murray Walker.
Staying Power in appreciation of a maxim Gorky at the
(18:39):
International Convention of Atheists, 1929. Like Gorky, I sometimes follow
my doubts outside to the yard and question the sky.
Longing to have the fights settled. Thinking I can't go
on like this. And finally I say, all right, it
is improbable. All right. There is no God. And then,
(19:04):
as if I'm focusing a magnifying glass on dry leaves,
God blazes up. It's the attention, maybe to what isn't
there that makes the emptiness flare like a forest fire.
Until I have to spend the afternoon dragging the hose
to put the smoldering thing out. Even on an ordinary
day when a friend calls, tells me they've found melanoma,
(19:29):
complains that the hospital is cold, I say, God, God.
I say as my heart turns inside out, pick up
any language by the scruff of its neck, wipe its face,
set it down on the lawn, and I bet it
will toddle right into the God fire again. Which, though
(19:51):
they say it doesn't exist, can send you straight to
the burn unit. Oh, we have only so many words
to think with. Say God's not fire. Say anything. Say
God's a phone. Maybe. You know you didn't order a phone,
but there it is. It rings. You don't know who
(20:13):
it could be. You don't want to talk. So you
pull out the plug, it rings. You smash it with
a hammer till it bleeds. Springs and coils and clobbering
metal bits. It rings again. You pick it up and
a voice you love whispers. Hello.
S1 (20:38):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audio book is published by Oasis Audio.
Copyright by Ben Pallant. 2024 by Chris Badeker.
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