David Epstein : part seven

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?  

First of all, for a number of years, I’ve been writing in the middle of the night. Every night. You can read more about this here:  https://mysmallpresswritingday.blogspot.com/2020/02/david-epstein-in-closing-let-me-just-say.html. It’s mentally free space.  I rarely stagnate, rarely “require” renewal.  This is work, and I take it seriously. My writing partner calls me a fire hose.  I might write clunkers, what Lee and I call “dotp”s, for “dead on the page,” but I will keep on writing, using the tools. And I’ve also learned that, if in the context of a given week or month, life intercedes and less comes, it’s usually because a subconscious rearrangement is going on.  Counsel patience.  If I do find myself stagnating, I don’t rely on an author: I rely on forms. They’re kind of the jigsaw puzzles for the rainy day of poetry production. I’ll run to ballad measure, to Petrarchan sonnets, and to my own version of that, the Fifteener, which is a Petrarchan with an extra line, the septet end-rhymes most often going down as c,d,c,d,e,d,e.  And the more I work with slant-rhyme, the more satisfying I find it.  To the point where a dead-on end-rhyme feels like nested bowls: it’s hard to get them apart sometimes; whereas skewed end rhymes are like puns: they can be good or bad, but it’s the reader who takes delight in them, by apprehending the skew, completing a deliberate distortion. So, renewal, for me, inheres in getting back to the delight in language.  The rest follows.  

David Epstein : part six

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?  

How I think about writing is a constant evolution.  We all get a good one off every now and then, but in general, if your earlier work doesn’t horrify you, that’s a sign you’ve stopped growing, as an artist.  That’s not entirely true, and I’ve gotten to a place in my life where, for the past five years anyway, I am pleased with the increasing number of what I consider to be good poems.  This kind of evolution stems from the poets who engendered one’s jumping-off point.  In some ways I’m a reflection of my courses in college and in graduate school.  In terms of who changed my writing, how is that different from poets who inspired you? I think change is a constant, as one is a product of all one is reading and writing.  In terms of germinating texts, I do go to Dickinson the most. And I have to credit Alice Fulton’s essay on Dickinson, in her collection of essays Feeling as a Foreign Language with starting me on my latest full rereading of Dickinson (my third).  Here is someone, Dickinson, who thought, actively, about scansion and the musicality of language.  Dickinson’s work, and my work with her kinds of structures, most specifically ballad measure, has continued to inform my own explorations with rhythm, meter, and music in poetry.  It gives one an awareness of the letter-by-letter presence of one’s language on the page and in the ear. So, the more I progress in this art, the more I feel the distance between poets who are primarily narrative, and those whose ears are evolving, such as A.E. Stallings, Anna Maria Hong, and Amy Beeder, to name just a few.  Those poets have my enduring respect for the breadth of their knowledge and their tremendous sensitivity to sound and meter.   

David Epstein : part five

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?  

Publishing. There are a tremendous number of superb poets working these days, along with nearly innumerable outlets.  Venues for poetry are taxed with nearly impossible tasks: sorting from among this vast number of submissions to find the gems that will reflect the ethos of their editorial vision. Me, I’d rather just write.  My writing partner is dragging me into the arenas, but what I find most difficult is sending things out.  It’s the drudgery of the art.  And when one does succeed (I had a number of acceptances and won three prizes last year), one finds one’s work among a host of other poems that may or may not provide a useful context for one’s work: publication is a feast: of all one’s least favorite foods.  I have a number of book manuscripts, and material for perhaps eight or ten books in total, but have yet to get a single volume published.  And when I do?  I hear Frost’s Witch of Coos: “…and when I’ve done it, what good have I done?”  

David Epstein : part four

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?  

Poetry provides a reflective and reflexive awareness of a state of consciousness; preservation of persons (cf. Allen Grossman, The Sighted Singer); Think of it this way, as a kind of generalization: We’re not good at relating conceptual-level apprehensions.  We need poets to expand our vocabulary-driven and -limited thoughts. In this way, poets are the geographic explorers of the realms of human experience.  We need poets to go there and report on it: the coasts, the forests, the other beings and states of being.  I’m not a googly ghost-whisperer at all; I’m a very science-based person enthralled with things like space telescopes and subatomic particles.  But people experience the world largely through their narratives and their vocabularies, so that’s where poetry is a vanguard.  

David Epstein : part three

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Absolutely.  As a younger person, I used it primarily as a mode of self-expression, to have something that was about myself.  As it is now, I’ve noticed that the public life of Poetry, with its political declarations and its sense if itself as an offshoot of justice, is something I’m not very suited for.  I rarely write overtly political poems, or if I do, I keep them to myself.  I grew up in a home where it was dangerous to be the youngest child and have an opinion: I was always wrong, or naïve, and so I learned to just be quiet. I’m like that with politics.  As for everything else in the realm, it’s all there for me: nature, people, the cosmos; and, of course, a whole subgenre of what I call “AM Radio,” which consists, basically, of love poems.  I figure that if musicians can do that as much as they want, so can I.  Poets have people they love, and there’s a close cross-over to muse-figures, and it’s delicious to surrender to that affection and make declarative poems that try to capture what it’s like to be a person expressing closeness toward another person. 

David Epstein : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished? 

Being finished is the question of “closure” which means that one has to balance the opening, the reason for the poem’s conditions and the work the poem attempted.  One can have openings where the closing is in an entirely different mode. This is very hard to respond to abstractly.  At the simplest level, closure is accessible in rhymed couplets.  Frost: 

Whose woods these are I think I know,
His house is in the village--    

And if one stops there, anyone can fill in the end-rhyme: though.  

At the conceptual level of an entire poem, there are any number of methods of closure, and what closure means or how it is enacted changes, across time, across cultures.  What we get for ancient Chinese poems is usually highly eidetic; ditto Haiku.  We are left with an image, and our own emotions and associations are the closural aspect of such image-based evocations.  

What I am looking for in terms of finishing a poem is a point where a circle of textual mirrors reinforces the tropes of meaning within the poem.  That is highly abstract, and I don’t want to punt and use the cliché of knowing it when one sees it.  This is craft, at its highest level, and being able to finish, a poem should combine insight, homily, image, all in such a way that we feel satisfied, even if we’re finished off by a rhetorical interrogative.  The best questions reveal the conditions of the world. In terms of the poem being completed, I’m looking for a poem that has both open and closed doors.  If the ends are all tied up and there are no open questions, that’s no good.  Leave me pondering and exploring, not putting on my coat and going home.  

Here’s an example of a poem that I find fulfilling in all these aspects, by Angela Shaw.  It’s called “Children in a Field,” a poem of seventeen lines (from The Beginning of the Fields, Tupelo Press: 2009).

The opening line is so good: “They don’t wade in so much as they are taken.”  And the poem describes the grasses in animation, how the field draws in the children.  And about a third in, the poem, which, by drawing the reader in, positions us like the wading children, the poem declares: “It is the way of girls. It is the sway/ of their dresses in the summer trance-/ light…”  And we’re in the realm of youth, of generativeness of both fields and of women.  Then the poem questions: “What songs will they follow?”  The poem answers, but I won’t spoil it for you.  And then the poem admonishes: “Let them go. Let them go traceless…”  into this realm of beyond the field, beyond what we can know, “…to the long dark bodies/ of the conifers, and over the welcoming/ threshold of nightfall.”

Reading this poem at the level of metaphor, the field is time, and the threshold of nightfall is the end of our apprehension.  It is a poem of imagery, of generations, and what it means to be a member of one, and not a member of another.   It is evocative, moving, instructional without pedantry.  Closure, in this poem, allows us to grasp the possibility of accepting one’s place in a scheme of mortality.  It is ineluctably sad in a most luscious way. 

David Epstein : part one

David Epstein holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature.  He is on the Board of the Greater Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens, and has taught creative writing at the University of Hartford.  He has three children, and lives in West Hartford, Connecticut. He has reviewed for Harvard Review and Shofar, as well as recent reviews for Tupelo Press appearing in Heavy Feather and elsewhere; his poems have appeared in such venues as The Bellingham Review (where he was a Featured Poet), Authora Australis, Marsh Hawk Review, Arc Magazine, CV2, New Square, and Coastal Shelf. He won three poetry prizes in 2021.

What are you working on?

I’m doing a number of things at the same time: I’m a first-time Grinder, the invitation-only groupings where, along with about eight or nine others, you commit to sharing a new draft, every 24 hours, for a month.  No critiquing, just production.  I happened to have lucked into a terrific and talented group.  It’s very inspiring. Overall, I tend of write in the middle of the night anyway, so the Grind was almost tailor-made for me, although having the in-place group to share with, and who send you theirs, that’s new.   Next, I have an ongoing collaboration with the writer and editor Lee Parpart.  We agree on an opening line or phrase, then go off and write our own poems from it.  We get back together over them and edit and polish them.  The idea is to produce a volume of paired poems from the same starting point.  This too is tremendously energizing. You want to make something good for your writing partner, to give and receive the same kind of quality drafts and feedback.  I am also on the Board of the Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens, so we’re often designing events and other things related to poetry, Stevens, and the City of Hartford, Connecticut. I have a backlog of books to review for Tupelo Press, which I was doing better on earlier in the pandemic, but not so well of late, having gotten back to business lately.