Peter Vertacnik : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

Very. For me it’s one of the three most important impersonal elements in my poems—the other two being metaphor and the line. Other poets I know are often obsessed with the look of their poems on a page; I’m far more concerned with how my poems sound. There’s a danger in relying on sound too much, of course. Occasionally I’ve been accused by a mentor or an editor of overemphasizing the music of a poem, to the point of facileness or opacity, but that’s a risk I’m always ready to take. Also, it’s not as if verbal music in poems only exists as a kind of sonic ornament (I’m not trying to rewrite “Jabberwocky”); as A.E. Stallings and others have pointed out, rhyme creates its own intelligence akin to that of metaphor, in that the pairing of rhymes can create connections that the poet would not have arrived at in any other way. 

Peter Vertacnik : part four

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

When this happens, I most often turn to the writings of William H. Gass, especially to his short stories, novellas, and essays. His work is filled with inventiveness, playfulness, and a keen music; spending time with it usually gets me excited about my own work again. I should add, however, that the most effective form of renewal for me is simply taking a long walk. When my legs are moving, when my eyes are scanning foreground and distance, my mind is more active as well. 

Peter Vertacnik : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Three very new books (all published in 2021) by poets whose previous work I enjoyed immensely: Popular Longing, by Natalie Shapero; Prometeo, by C. Dale Young; and Caki Wilkinson’s The Survival Expo.

I’ve also been revisiting older books that I’ve only ever read as part of a poet’s collected poems, except now (with the help of an excellent university library system) I’m encountering these books as they were first published, in individual collections. Some recent examples would be Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel, Theodore Roethke’s The Lost Son, Louise Bogan’s Dark Summer and Robert Francis’ Like Ghosts of Eagles. Seeing these poems surrounded by more space (aren’t collecteds and selecteds always filled with crowded pages?) often helps me see them differently, more fully. There’s also surprises, such as realizing Bishop included her story, “In the Village” at the beginning of the ‘Elsewhere’ section in QoT.

And, of course, I’m always dipping into old favorites, one poem or sequence at time: Auden, Brooks, Frost, Hardy, Hecht, Merrill.

Peter Vertacnik : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I don’t. I know when I’m finished though: when I’ve exhausted the components essential to the continuing composition of the poem—ideas, rhymes, metaphors, time, the suggestions of others etc. Once those resources are consumed, I have the best version of the poem I can currently muster, and I either accept what’s there and try to get it published or I shake my head and keep it to myself. I don’t throw it away; I just store it with my other odds and ends and see what’s next. 

Peter Vertacnik : part one

Peter Vertacnik's poems and translations have appeared in The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Poet Lore, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Water~Stone Review, among others. A finalist for the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, he currently splits his time between Idaho and Florida.

Photo Credit: Yifan Zhang 

What are you working on?

A few things. I’m revising what I hope, sooner or later, will be my first collection of poems, sending it out to contests and publishers. I’m also working, very slowly, on a complete translation of Rilke’s The Book of Pictures (Das Buch der Bilder)—a book that I think often gets neglected by readers, falling as it does between two of Rilke’s major early works, The Book of Hours (Das Studenbuch) and New Poems (Neue Gedichte). I’m also engaged in a co-translation project with a friend of mine, Yifan Zhang, which involves translating various essays and poems of the brilliant Taiwanese writer, Yu Kwang-chung (余光中), who died in 2017. All this is in addition to teaching and my work as a graduate student, which includes furiously composing and revising more poems towards a second manuscript.