Jonathan Farmer | September 2000

Louise Glück

Louise Glück, a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, critic, and teacher, shares events that have shaped the composition of her poetry over the past 30 years.

Louise Glück, a prize-winning poet and critic, is the author of eight books of poetry, including Ararat, Descending Figure, The Triumph of Achilles, The Wild Iris, Meadowlands, and Vita Nova, and a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry. She has received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. She teaches at Williams College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Jonathan Farmer: Your most recent book, Vita Nova, ends with the lines: "I thought my life was over and my heart was broken. / Then I moved to Cambridge." Throughout the book, there are moments in which the primary speaker is able to, at least in passing, accept events that have no purpose beyond themselves—that do not lead toward some whole. In writing this book, how conscious were you of responding to the emphasis, in your earlier work, of trying to find something coherent or true?

Louise Glück: Very conscious. There were kinds of experience I would have been deaf to if I had insisted on coherence or meaning. Everything in my previous work tended to accumulate towards a vision of a shape, and that shape stood as a metaphor for life; things were either, in a primitive way, becoming much better, more charged with meaning, or dissolving into unrelation. It was starting to occur to me that life wasn't like that—that there were worlds I could never touch.

I spent most of my life thinking I was going to die young. I was convinced, when I was seven, that I was going to die at 10 of polio. And I held that conviction—I knew the age, I knew the disease—for three years. Later, I thought I had made a little mistake in my calculation, but I saw death ahead, and I couldn't get over it. I was appalled that death had to happen to us. And, at a certain point, I realized that I had already had quite a lot of time, and that even though death was ahead, many other things were happening first. That was amazing; my gaze had been so fixed on the end that I had paid no attention to the vicissitudes.

So I wanted to write about vicissitudes. I wanted to write about the absence of an absolute, or the absolute as a series of successive convictions—the conviction that I was going to die at 10, followed by the conviction that I was going to die at 20, so that if I couldn't reach the vicissitudes, at least I could shift the absolutes. That was my aesthetic mission in Vita Nova.

Emotionally, there were other things at work. The wish to lay claim to a place was very strong. And I felt an animal impulse to do that in my writing, the way a cat would piss all around the house.

Vita Nova was an education of my temperament as well as an aesthetic project—I hate that word: project. It was an intention, a conscious one. But the intention also required certain skills. I had a mind not inclined to notice vicissitudes; I had to train myself to pay attention. Local attention. Minute attention. Which I've been trying to do, in various ways, since The Wild Iris.

Farmer: Part of what's interesting about Vita Nova is that when the absolutes are peeled back, the possibility of happiness is revealed. It seems, at times, like a very joyous book.

Glück: It was meant to be! I am constantly depressed by responses to my work. People sometimes seem so detained by subject matter that the bearing toward subject matter fails to interest them. They don't respond to tone, or hear it.

Vita Nova aspires to a kind of elderly insouciance; I wanted something of the "ancient glittering eyes." But many poems that I find quite merry, other people find quite grim. There's nothing I can do about that.

People tell me after readings that they're going to pray for me, to pray my life improves. And I think, how presumptuous! My life isn't bad. My life is, to me, often unbearably sweet.

Farmer: I've noticed lately that many poets go through a process of maturation that leads them to a point where death changes in its significance. In Vita Nova there is something important about accepting death, in several different forms, that allows for the possibility of joy.

Glück: I don't try to understand the relationship between an acceptance of death to that type of joy, because I don't think I've made any strides toward the acceptance of death. What I have noticed is a greed for the daily that is also an acknowledgement of its imperfections. Anything that was imperfect I used to find unbearable. For example, if I had a bad cold and was supposed to go out to dinner, I'd cancel—the experience of the dinner would be wasted on me, my taste buds not being sharply tuned. And then I would extrapolate from that thought—it would be foolish to eat at all, because pleasure would be wasted on me. I had to wait until I was in perfect health to eat. Everything was like that. Unless my physical being was completely honed and completely ready, the idea of another day seemed poignant, wasted, foolish; this put enormous pressure on me to be in a constant state of receptivity that depended on a wholly unrealistic conception of physical and emotional possibilities (and an astonishing blindness to what other people meant by the word fine). And because I never entered those zones, I was fairly miserable.

And then I realized there was no state of perfection, that there was always going to be something wrong. And it was the most gigantic transformation. It meant that daily life was available to me in a way that it had never, ever been: partial, imperfect, unspeakably dear. And I didn't know that before. I didn't know it at any level of my being. I couldn't write about it or experience it. What I experienced was the horror of imperfection; I envisioned human experience as a long series of trials and imperfections followed by complete annihilation.

Once I realized that I was never going to meet life wholly, that I was just going to meet it with what I had that day, time became different. Also, at a certain point, I realized I didn't die at 10 or 20. Then I realized I didn't even die at 50! That fact filled me with gratitude toward whatever accident had allowed such an unexpected rewriting of fate.

But death still seems difficult. I suffer it in all kinds of improbable ways. I notice that it is especially bad if I decide that I want a weekend of complete privacy, a consolation of days, two or three days of not going out. I see people very often here, which I like, but every once in a while I think, I've done too much of that. I'm going to mark off a little time and just be by myself and read trash and do the things I like to do. And I get very excited and very happy—no makeup, sweatclothes—and by the end of about a day and a half I usually have five diseases. There was one weekend in which I was going blind and had ovarian cancer and gangrene.

Farmer: Where was the gangrene?

Glück: It was on my arm! I didn't know anything about gangrene, but it came to me like the vision that I was going to die at 10. I had gangrene. And then I thought, Louise, you just can't do this. You can't have these kinds of weekends. But in any case, it's my terror of death still manifesting itself, and I suspect I will go to the grave with that terror completely intact.

It was interesting to see my father in his last year, when he knew he was dying. He knew what he was likely to die of and approximately when. I'd never seen him take as much apparent pleasure in the world. Possibly I misread this; he wasn't given to confiding—at least, not in me. But something in him that had been anxious, tensed, darkly expectant, was able to relax.

In much more modest ways, I've had those kinds of changes in my life. My life changed radically in middle age. I mean, my life changed radically every seven weeks when I was younger, but later, as an adult, I thought, certain things are in place now. I began to feel a kind of modest adventurousness that I was far too timid to have in my youth.

And I think it's also in my writing. More and more consciously, I'm trying to see how many tones I can fit into one poem, so when you think it is going this way, it goes another way. It swerves. This has to do with the way information in a piece of writing is developed logically, but it also has to do with what the expectations of certain initial tones would be. I want, as a writer (and a reader) to be outsmarted; as soon as I think that's what this will probably do, I think how can I get it not to do that and still make sense out of the poem? I can't give up on sense. Without it, a poem becomes completely plastic, malleable. But the ease of that maneuvering (in the absence of any loyalty to sense) doesn't interest me.

Farmer: You began to talk about time, and I want to go back to that, because the sense of time has changed in your past few books. In The Wild Iris there are several versions of time, but only one of them is human—that's the arc that "begins and ends." Time has become more disorderly in Vita Nova.

Glück: I find that a very attractive idea. The insights out of which Vita Nova grew have to do, I think, with the implications of recommencement. Not: now you've built the house that will always stand, but rather: now you build another house. It's a very different mind-set. I had built many other houses that would always stand. For the first time, at the age of 50, it crossed my mind that that wasn't what I was doing.

Farmer: There seemed to be, and not just in Vita Nova, but very much in Vita Nova, multiple realities. They're wildly separate from each other, even if they exist at the same time. For instance, the world of dreams and the world of material fact. There is no possibility of labeling any one vision or any one version as "true." Truth with a capital "T" isn't an option in the book.

Glück: I think that you're correct, though I find I still admire those poems whose intensity presumes a word like "truth." Perhaps there is no such term as "truth." Perhaps, rather, the great art of this type (like T.S. Eliot's) somehow infuses the inertia of truth with the desperate wildness of human hope. Frank Bidart's work is animated by this intensity; he is writing about the human need for such unquestioned truth in the context of a world that will never allow it.

I'm trying to layer all of these ideas through the poems I'm writing now. They suggest a more fiery book than Vita Nova. The poems seem fierce, challenging, combative. Like: "Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair!" A little bit like some of the older Yeats. A little bit like D.H. Lawrence when he throws the poem in your face and says "You're wrong. You understand nothing."

The new book is about aging, very overtly. And it is about the whole span of a life, but not as a narrative. Instead, it makes a collage of the simultaneous images that become available to us as we age, in the happy parenthesis before the mind goes. There is a period in which we can see a good deal of time and see it with what seems to be great clarity. That's what these poems try to accomplish.

Farmer: During that period, does the past become every bit as surprising as the future?

Glück: The past becomes most curious, because you look at your life and think, I didn't understand it at all. Then you try to make a poem that embodies the notion that your conclusions about your life were false. To do that, you have to recollect images and the events that produced them, reexamining them as malleable, as shifting, as unstable.

As a young poet, I wrote in freeze-frames. I wrote gestures that were meant to stand for many things. It was immensely hard for me to write any kind of drama or action into a poem. If there was a hand raised, I couldn't make it lower. If you look at the poems, you can see what kind of trouble I had. Little poems—at their best, resonant—but I couldn't make anything change once it had achieved its representative state.

Farmer: Wouldn't drama or action change the form of the poem? Once the gestures were lodged in the poem, they became part of a structure and had a fixed place in that structure.

Glück: What you say is absolutely true. Any shift within the poem dismantled all of its metaphorical resonances. The poems would have become completely different poems—and at that time, I wasn't compelled to write that way. But I also knew that I had to figure out how to give my work some mobility.

It's strange: things go backward and forward between art and life. Once I taught myself how to manage mobility on the page, I learned to see that mobility in my life. The changes began to resonate throughout my daily experience.

Farmer: Is that common for you?

Glück: Yes. I can see something clearly on the page, which follows the psychoanalytical paradigm. I could always examine my sentences with detachment. I could gradually recognize in my language evasions and deceptions, a whole constellation of psychological problems that I couldn't see in my actions or in my thoughts until they were objectified. The same applies to dreams. You recognize the dream, you know yourself to be responsible for the dream, and you study it in that spirit, to discover what is otherwise veiled or hidden. Why does a particular dream have such curious lacunae or transformations? I could study that, and as soon as I had seen it in the dream, I would see it in my life. Once I'd seen it in my life, I could see it very regularly in the dream. From there, I could approach things I was still blind to.

Farmer: When you began to move beyond Vita Nova, what were you blind to?

Glück: It didn't seem like that at all. I didn't think I was going to write anything after Vita Nova for two or three years. I had written that book very quickly. I didn't know where it came from. When you write quickly, you have no sense of agency; its absence is experienced in a number of terrifying ways. You don't think the muse wrote the poems—you think you've stolen them. You give them to your friends to see if they recognize anything. And then if a number of your friends don't recognize anything, you start to think, What if I've stolen this work from my students? And you think, I can't send the manuscript to all of the poets whose poems I've ever read. It's worrisome. If you haven't labored over the poems, if you don't have the narrative of false starts and stumblings, you don't have a narrative of making. How does a piece of language make itself available so quickly with so little intervention on your part? It is an eerie aspect of art, that, in its own way, is very difficult to handle.

I'd had enough experience with writing in this fashion to feel that it would be a very long time before I wrote anything again. I'm used to stages of silence—I've gone through them so many times—and knowing the stages doesn't help the process along. I was waiting for those stages after Vita Nova. I hadn't even entered into the period of desolate anxiety, which is usually the last stage, though that can go on for a year or so. I was certain that when I did write, if I did write, I would work as a craftsman, and I was looking forward to that. I thought, that will be very pleasant, puttering around on the page, trying to chip at it a little here and build it up a little there. It would be wonderful to do that again, even though it didn't answer to my description of inspiration. I figured I had about one to two more years to reach the new poems, and if I was lucky, I'd write some prose. I did have a few lines in my head, which is also typical. They'll sit in my head for years, murmuring themselves.

Only this time it didn't happen that way. I wasn't anxious. I wasn't even thinking, I'm not a writer. I started to write. I wrote one poem. I liked it. I immediately wrote another. Before long I had four or five. Tonally, they are not of a piece with Vita Nova. But, in the structural issues I was beginning to try to explore in Vita Nova—I saw new applications for those strategies. The new poems seem not so much a correction as an outgrowth.

I'm not quite sure where this work came from. It's not reactive in the way my other books have been; it's not deliberately curative.

Farmer: What were its circumstances?

Glück: At my house in Cambridge, I put in a garden. The people who own the building with me didn't want to put any money into it, and we had no collective funds as a condo group. The backyard was a rubble pile, and I thought, we have to look at something bearable. The deal was that I could plant the garden, but I would also pay the bills. It was as close to having my own garden as the circumstances allowed.

I asked around for some estimates and I heard quotes in the vicinity of $20,000. I didn't have anything like $20,000. But then I thought, I have plants in Vermont. If I could figure out how to transport the plants from Vermont to here. but I didn't know if they could survive the move.

So I called Jane Werley, my gardner from Vermont. She and I are friends, and we're used to working together; she's an experienced horticulturalist and I'm just a groupie. She said she was game to move the plants, to dig them up, and she was willing to do it for much less than $20,000. Whatever the result, it would be better than the rubble pile.

She drove down that fall with a truckload of immense perennials. There they were, my old friends—and we planted them. Though we had very carefully walked through my Vermont gardens and tagged and labeled the plants, by the time they arrived, it was difficult to tell what they actually were. I mean, we knew—she knew—what species they were, but not always what color they were. We cut a bed, put in the plants, covered everything up with leaves, and that was that: twigs sticking out of the dirt.

In the spring, the plants began to manifest themselves. I was elated. I have always loved the moment when the flat earth begins to burgeon, especially when the plants are familiar to you. It doesn't always thrill me to see leaves come out—well, yes, it does. This was different, though; Jane had assured me that the plants would be all right, but I hadn't been convinced. I didn't know what to expect.

The plants started to grow, and I became obsessed with them. I also became furtive. Even though my neighbors had said to go ahead and plant the garden, I was sure that once they saw what I had cultivated, they would want a part of it. I didn't want to share it. It's true—I didn't. I would wait until every one of them had gone to work. Then I'd sneak out and just walk through every inch of the garden.

I found myself reading garden catalogs, which I hadn't done with any kind of ardor since the early '90s. When I was living in my Vermont house alone, I couldn't maintain those gardens. It was too much work for one person and I didn't have any money to pay for someone to come and help. My Cambridge garden was of a scale that I could manage in its entirety.

I started reading catalogs and ordering plants, spending every spare moment going to nurseries and buying more plants, even planting things that I couldn't grow in Vermont—except they needed light. They don't find any light here. But at least I could put them in and know that they were supposed to survive.

First thing in the morning, all I wanted to do was go outside. I remembered that from Vermont, when I was passionate about my garden there. I had started to write again around that time, and there was a relationship between that gardening obsession and my writing. It was almost happening behind my back. All I thought about was gardening, but every once in a while, I would write a poem.

That's what it was like with the new poems—except that when I started to write in Cambridge, I was so grateful. I had forgotten how much fun it is to just have an idea. I didn't care if it was good. I figured if it was bad, I could make it better. I became really excited, and my friends were very excited, the ones who saw the work. That was encouraging.

I'm not exactly sure why that relationship between gardening and writing exists. I do know that it doesn't always work. After I wrote The Wild Iris, the garden in Vermont was of no use to me for a time. The idea of repeating that experience in Cambridge seemed very unlikely, especially on a plot of land that was aesthetically inferior to Vermont.

Farmer: How do flowers figure into the new book? Or your garden?

Glück: There is some flower footage in this book, but different from that in The Wild Iris: they don't open their mouths. Instead, in the garden I felt surrounded by an intense beauty that had change as its major attribute. It was so exciting to wake up and go downstairs and see what kind of change had occurred overnight. It's very easy to see how that mind-set can sweeten a life.

Farmer: Flowers aside, did anything else help you in composing the book?

Glück: Murder mysteries. I don't know why exactly, but there is something that the form does for me. It soaks up anxiety. Serious reading obligates you to form a judgment, to respond. Your mind is disturbed, not appeased. Crime fiction, however, fills your gaze with words, releasing your mind to larger speculative acts. It is, too, a literature of questions.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but I think there is an enormous place in writing for seemingly soporific activity—that's definitely the wrong word, because, in fact, you're passionately engaged. I think of Frank Bidart's video watching, which he does obsessively, and Robert Pinsky's saxophone playing.

Farmer: And for all of them, it seems to emerge at some point in their writing.

Glück: I haven't figured out how to do that yet.

Farmer: But you have.

Glück: Just one piece though. I haven't written about cooking, though I am passionate about it. I don't go around thinking, I have to cook another dinner, I just have to, the same way that I go to the public library and come away with armloads of crime fiction, thinking It's a good night! I've got five of these! But when I arrive at home, I read the mysteries very slowly. I keep renewing them and renewing them. The idea of an infinity of problems that will be solved is so utterly intoxicating.

When I finally found a wonderful British publisher, Michael Schmidt, one of the first things I asked of him was that he send copies of all my books to Ruth Rendell, Colin Dexter, and P.D. James. Ruth Rendell responded.

Farmer: What did she say?

Glück: She liked the work. The others didn't reply.

Farmer: I saw something in a newspaper recently. They asked several popular writers what books they would give for the holidays, and Dean Koontz recommended any book written by you.

Glück: A friend of one of my best friends was listening to one of his books on tape, and my name was mentioned twice, along with quotes from some poems. She gave the name of the book to my friend, who passed it on to me, and I immediately put it on request at the public library. I was so excited. I wrote him a letter immediately to thank him, and he wrote back a marvelous, elegant letter, a terrific, lucid, funny, smart letter. That was thrilling.

Farmer: I'd like to shift gears and ask you an absurdly large question, one that might be relevant. We were talking earlier about the role of truth with a capital "T." That idea has shown up at several points in your critical writing. If Truth stops being an objective in your own writing, does that change what your writing is for? Or was Truth only a means to achieve something else?

Glück: The latter.

Farmer: What is it a means toward?

Glück: What it claims not to be concerned with. You want to arrive at something immutable, something that will last, something. all of this is presuming the continuity of Earth and human intelligence.

Farmer: And the English language.

Glück: What has changed for me is my notion of what constitutes something memorable. And yet I still have the same heroes. That's odd, because you would think that if your aesthetic ideals had changed, your models would also have changed. And your writing.

Farmer: Do you read those models in the same way you used to, though?

Glück: I'm not sure. Besides, you don't always learn the most from the poets you admire. Have you noticed that? In fact, the truth is—the truth is!—I don't read much poetry. I tend to be irritated by most of it. I love teaching it in workshops, because I love teaching something that is still changing. Have you ever found that?

Farmer: Often I learn more from a poem that seems incomplete. I can sometimes discover more about what happens in a poem by looking through those fissures, those places where the poem seems to fail.

Glück: Also, you see things that haven't been taken far enough or that suggest other applications. I love reading D.H. Lawrence's prose for that reason. Do I think it's the greatest prose ever written? No. Henry James's sentences are more ravishing. Still, James's sentences don't have the same effect. Everything Lawrence wrote is generative, almost giddy with suggestions and the most brazen blundering, which has, in its bravado, real grandeur. The genius of James is that he seems to have played out every nuance. You develop a more refined analytical vocabulary to talk about James's work. You aren't offered a series of unexplored possibilities; there isn't any room to extrapolate. Lawrence free associates in his work, and dogmatically obsesses. His prose is a festival of brilliant discards.

Farmer: Even if you don't read a lot of poetry, you do read and write about poetry. Your critical writing insists that the art of poetry is important; is it that because it evokes passion?

Glück: It isn't passion. Nothing is more crucial or more exciting than exactness. To be able to say fully and exactly what a thing is—a state of mind, a kind of experience, the significance of two things in a certain kind of relationship—that is getting to the bottom of something. It's analogous to the murder mysteries; it's problem solving.

Do you know what drives me crazy? The kind of writing that contents itself with a sort of glib notation of an obvious truth or an obvious discrepancy in the world. The world should be taken seriously—especially if you only have one life, which I believe is likely. I want to squeeze every iota of meaning out of this life. I'm interested in the kind of thought that's like a prism—multifaceted—and not like a Baptist preacher.

Farmer: By passion, I meant attachment, the kind of understanding which brings you into a fuller relation with the world. Is that a part of it—the desire to connect with the world, or an aspect of the world, in a way that is real?

Glück: It's about wrenching from experience everything that it contains, with the knowledge that you can't possibly achieve that goal. You're constantly rescued by the impossibility of the task, which allows you to try it again. The essence of this labor, this "wrenching from experience," is its presumption of—or insistence on—meaning, which may be, I suppose, its own blindness. I crave the state in which something is being uncovered, laid bare in its complexity. That makes me feel alive. There are other states, like happiness, which make me feel good, or satiated. But I feel truly alive when my mind interacts with the world as it is experienced. To me, that's why poetry is crucial; it's the only form that can uncover the aspects of our world with sufficient intensity. It isn't the only form that can achieve that effect, but it's the only form that I'm equipped to use.

You've posed a funny question. Every once in a while, it seems enormously strange to care so much about certain words placed in a certain order—and to be so outraged by certain kinds of indifference to that imperative.

Farmer: I'd like to look at the last four books you've published. Many of the changes in your poetry that we've discussed were made possible by having a single narrative running through the entire book. And also, with Ararat, the relationship between the reader and the outside world changes considerably, because the people in the poems become characters; they have an existence independent of the speaker's psychology or the speaker's figuration of them.

Glück: I remember when I was working on "The Garden," which was a long time ago. I was 30. I wrote a piece of it, and normally, that would have been a poem. But I realized very quickly that I wasn't done with the subject, which previously would have suggested that there was something wrong with the poem, that I would have to open it up again and formally change it. But in this case, I had a poem that I thought was really remarkable. I didn't want to change it. So the mechanics of writing poetry grew and expanded. The form of individual pieces didn't change so much as the ways in which the poems could constellate themselves as mosaic or dialogue. That seemed very promising to me. I found that I was thinking in those expansive terms more and more often.

When I wrote the first poem that became part of Ararat, I remember thinking as I wrote it—it was "Paradise," and "Celestial Music" came second—this is only going to be interesting if it's a whole book. It can't be done any other way, or it's going to be a boring little poem about a very local and limited childhood, "My Childhood by Me." That appalled me.

When I wrote "Paradise" and "Celestial Music," I hadn't written anything, meaning not a word, for a few years. I thought I had done what I could with Delphic distance; I had to somehow inhabit the vernacular. It was very clear to me that I never sounded on the page the way that I sounded in my life. I thought that was curious. And I wanted to know what had happened to my everyday voice, and why I couldn't use it on the page. If I spent most of my time using it, then surely there must be something I could do with it.

I had this piece of material that seemed to be using the domestic world in which I grew up. It didn't matter to me at all what I used; I just wanted to figure out how to talk the way that I talked in real life. I thought, Long Island. Get rid of that Delphic distance. Go straight to Woodmere.

It was a real lark, that book. People kept saying, It's so sad. And I thought, No. It was so much fun. Unfortunately, I didn't know what to do with that language after Ararat. It was a long time before I wrote The Wild Iris, and the silence was really desolate, because so few people liked Ararat. I don't mean just the critical establishment. People I trusted didn't like it. Stanley Kunitz hated it. The usual terrors of silence—that one has lost the vocation—were amplified by these judgments.

Farmer: One last question. You've written many poems that incorporate personal experience. Have any ethical questions come up when including that material? I think of, the extreme example for me, Robert Lowell's The Dolphin—that book seems to clearly cross the line, that point at which you don't have the right to use other people's lives in your work. But where is that point? Is that something you end up having to struggle with?

Glück: Yes. There have been poems, and whole enterprises, to which that question was pivotal.

Anything that concerns me solely is mine to use. Once another person is involved and recognizable, that person has to be consulted. When that situation has occurred, I have asked for a response very early in the process.

I showed my mother early poems from Ararat, and she told me to go ahead. Ultimately, there were two poems in that book to which she objected. Those two poems concerned her grandchildren, and she felt that they perpetuated into another generation the feud between me and my sister—a feud that has now been, more or less, put to rest.

Then she said, "What do your friends think of those poems?" "They like them," I said. And I told her I thought they were important, tonally, to the book. In fact, there was no feud between Abigail and Noah. My mother was persuaded (the correct term) to withdraw her objection, though she stipulated that I shouldn't read those poems in New York.

Many years later she has confided to me that she hates Ararat, though at the time she claimed to love it. I don't know what I would have done if she had said, "No, you can't write these poems." I still would have written them. I wouldn't have published them, I guess. I would have tried to intimidate her, I suppose, into changing her position.

The only other instance was Meadowlands. John and I were still married when I started writing that book, and he was very encouraging. He loved the material. We had a similar understanding of the aesthetic problems within the book. It was clear to me that if the book looked like a vendetta against him, it would be terrible, which meant that there couldn't be a bad guy. If it read like that, it wasn't going to work. He said, "You can't make me out to be evil," and I said, "I can't aesthetically."

Part of my problem when we split up was that I felt I couldn't write the book because I was too wounded. It was conceived of as a comedy. I was, for a time, immensely impatient, furious with my sorrow—which was detaining me—though it seems true that the amplitude and worldliness to which I aspired needed to be infused with sadness. In any case, the book took time to write, and I don't know how John ultimately felt about it. My son likes it, though.

A third, curious example springs to mind. When Noah was very little—he might have been four, five—I was leaving to do a reading, and he said, "Where are you going?" I told him, and he said, "Are you going to read any poems about me?" I said, "I was going to." He said, "I'd rather you didn't. In fact, I'd rather you didn't write them anymore." And I thought, that is very smart. He didn't want his life preempted. I said I wouldn't, and I never wrote another until he was 14. I was leaving to do a reading, and he said, "Where are you going?" I told him, and he said, "Are you going to read poems about me?" I said, "No. You told me not to write them." He said, "I changed my mind." Ararat came after that conversation. But I honored his taboo when it was in place. Though, to be candid, I had doubts about poems revolving around children.

Using someone else's life, someone else's language, is a very complicated moral act. And some of my favorite poets do it. Frank Bidart makes great poetry from this act; it's very clear when he's quoting actual speech. He means the reader to know. And I think it has to be clear in our work, because I think that formulated thought and speech is sacred—the idea of taking anyone else's speech, and the corollary implication that someone could take mine—I have nothing except that speech. That's my idea of selfhood. And I don't want it to be taken over.

AWP

Jonathan Farmer is a graduate student at the University of California at Irvine, where he is working toward an MFA in poetry writing.