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Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve books of poems, including Names, Essays on Departure, and Desesperanto. Her ten volumes of translations from the French include Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s Nettles and Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen, which received the 2009 American PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She lives in New York and Paris. She translated Habib Tengour’s narrative poem, “This Particular Tartar,” for VQR’s Summer 2010 issue.

1. How did you choose “This Particular Tartar” to be translated? Are you working on translations of other works by Habib Tengour?
The humor combined with a certain pathos of the “Tartar” sequence appealed to me (and of course the way it’s also a satire on the situation of Maghrebin Arabs in France). I’ve now translated four quite different sequences by Habib Tengour (sections from one are in the Yale Anthology of 20th Century French Poetry), showing both his wry, demotic side often approaching social satire obliquely, and his more lyrical and—as well—surreal poetry, which is also syntactically challenging.

2. In the process of translating “This Particular Tartar,” were you in discussion with Tengour or with others who’ve translated him, such as Pierre Joris?
No—though Habib has seen all the translations I’ve done, and had run them by at least one bilingual friend—who may or may not have been Pierre, whom I know and admire as well. I tried to take care to choose poems of Habib Tengour’s that Pierre Joris had not translated.

3. “This Particular Tartar” is an epic poem with many voices and many moods. What is your routine for approaching such a large-scale work? For example, do you concentrate on the same section over a period of time, or do you work on many sections at once?
I tend to translate one section at a time, then reread it on its own, to see how it stands up as a text in English, then again beside the French—and once again when the sequence is complete, reading the entire piece in English alone and then in both languages. Read the rest of this entry »

Today is our first day back to work, after Kevin Morrissey’s death a week and a half ago. On the one hand, it’s not easy. On the other hand, it’s good to get back in a routine and back into the office, where we spent so much time with Kevin.

The immediate task at hand is finishing the fall issue. With such a small staff, the loss of our managing editor presents some very real problems for us. Kevin was our point man for coordinating with our designers and our printer, he handled author contracts and payments, he shepherded each issue from concept to finished product. If Kevin had been a normal managing editor, we’d be in a tight spot. But Kevin was not a normal managing editor. He made sure that we all knew what he did and how he did it. He met with us often—more frequently as each issue neared completion—to make sure that we all understood the status of every essay, poem, story, and illustration in the issue. And, just in case, he wrote down all of that information, logging each new edit of each story into a big spreadsheet and every contract into a database.

The result of Kevin’s careful planning is that we are, somehow, ahead of schedule for the fall issue. The issue was left nearly complete by Kevin, finishing it will require only some final copyediting passes, a few rounds of revisions with the designers, and getting it off to the printer. Although our concentration skills are admittedly a bit weak at the moment, making copyediting a challenge, but our friends at The Hedgehog Review and the University of Virginia Press have offered to come in and assist us.

As we finish the issue over the next couple of weeks, we hope you’ll bear with us. We’ll get behind on e-mail, blog less, tweet rarely, and the phones will sometimes go unanswered. Our top priority is publishing the magazine—as always—and that’s what we’ll be devoting ourselves to in the days ahead.

On Friday, July 30, VQR Managing Editor Kevin Morrissey died suddenly.

Kevin’s death has left his family, friends, and colleagues grieving deeply. As managing editor of the VQR for the past six years, Kevin was a highly valued member of our small, tightly-knit team. He was more than just an brilliant and creative editor. Kevin was family.

It is painful to lose a member of the University community, and our hearts go out to all who knew Kevin, but in particular to his father, sister, and brothers.

A memorial service to celebrate Kevin’s life and honor his memory will be held from 3 PM to 5 PM on Friday, August 6 at the University of Virginia on the third floor of Newcomb Hall.

Reporting on the oil crisis in the Amazon, Kelly Hearn contributed an essay and photographs to our summer issue. “A Jungle Tiananmen” delves into the multilayered interests that underpin a brutal protest in Bagua, Peru, in which the native community faced off with paramilitary police over land reforms. Hearn is a correspondent for National Geographic News and the Christian Science Monitor. His work has been funded by The Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and the North American Congress on Latin America.

1. What drew you to reporting in the Amazon?

I wanted to help draw attention to the fact that, as the world seeks politically cheap oil, companies are moving into the planet’s most biodiverse places. Few have reported on the oil boom that has been spreading across the western headwaters of the Amazon basin—and that is perhaps the largest development threat in the entire Amazonian region.

2. Your photographs for the article are all in black and white, with the subjects captured inside a small, square frame. How did you decide to shoot in this style?

I know very little if anything about photography and talking about it makes my head hurt. To me, good journalism is tapping into human passion and longing. So I guess you could say I try to go where the passion is.  The way cameras are today, I turn everything on automatic and try for a second to become one with that passion, with that human intensity. There is no room for shyness. Sometimes everything works. A million times more it doesn’t. But I throw enough spaghetti at the wall, so to speak, and usually something sticks.

3. There is a moment in the piece in which you question your neutrality—“we were complicit in something. We were journalists, yes, but we had prior knowledge of an unlawful meeting.” Do such moments happen often during your reporting, and how do you usually handle them?

I’ve never had an experience like that before where I felt that the authorities might scoop me up as a kind of conspirator. I’ve certainly interviewed plenty of people who are considered criminals, but I can’t offhand think of any situations where something of that magnitude was being planned.

4. It has been a year since the protests and deaths in Bagua. Do you feel like public perception or understanding of this event has changed since then?

I am somewhat out of that loop because I’ve been working on a book here in the States for several months now. But I will say that the divisions between Peru’s indigenous people and the elite are quite rigid from what I’ve seen in many trips there. Bagua certainly shows that Amazonian societies aren’t going to take things sitting down as they might have in the past when they were less informed and less connected to international backers.

5. What projects are you planning for the future?

Someone needs to do thorough reporting on the revolutionary conservation initiative in Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park, known as Yasuní-ITT. There has not been a good account in the English language press. I am talking to editors about that possibility.

Melville House is one of the better regarded indie publishers, and from my remote perch, the reasons for their industry esteem and their success seem obvious: besides a solid and satisfyingly eclectic mix of titles (e.g. a book of Ray Bradbury interviews, a Jules Verne vampire & zombie novel, B.R. Myers’ book on North Korea’s self-image), including a series of pleasingly designed novellas, the people at Melville know how to communicate. Unlike many publishers, they have a clean, easy-to-navigate website, and, in my experience, they respond quickly to e-mails asking for galley copies and author information. And then there’s their blog, Moby Lives, on which house founder Dennis Johnson and Melville employees and authors offer commentary on literary news and frequently snipe at industry behemoth Amazon—a kind of bristling honesty that rarely appears on industry blogs.

I’ve also found Moby Lives useful for offering an inside look at the world of publishing, particularly at the workings of a small independent publisher. To that end, I’ve been following an ongoing series of dispatches about the publisher’s efforts to market Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, a book that’s been a critical and commercial success both here and abroad. (For more background, check out VQR contributor Matt Shaer’s coverage of Fallada for the Los Angeles Times and Tablet magazine.) Johnson’s “Anatomy of a marketing campaign” is up to eight installments now–with more to come–covering TV and subway advertising, postcards, word of mouth, t-shirts, sheer luck, and review copies (the galleys featured a stark black cover adorned with a single quote, by Primo Levi, in large white type: “The greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis.”) It’s a revealing look at how a publisher leverages old and new media to get books into the hands of readers and critics, and you can read it all on the publisher’s blog.

Also, below is a trailer for the book, which features footage shot by Benjamin Ditzen, Fallada’s grandson.

Like all good writers, Robert Walser was an inveterate borrower, at times wearing his influences openly. Some of his pieces are casual retellings of stories he’s read, while others go a step further. For example, my essay in the Summer 2010 issue mentions that Walser loved trashy novels for their sensationalistic plots. In one case, Walser wrote a story inspired by a novel called After the Torment, and he wrote it on the very cover of the novel. In Microscripts, this piece is known simply as Microscript 54, and it’s largely a summary of this melodramatic novel. But Walser adds a few characteristic twists: he toys with syntax and language (Susan Bernofsky translates one adverb as “silhouettishly”); he finds a personal, almost emotional connection with the novel (Walser writes that he “was introduced to a woman,” the story’s protagonist, and claims that literary characters “stand out better” than “living figures, who, as they are alive and move about, tend to lack delineation”); and finally, he ends with a customary moralizing summary (“thus does one go from happiness to unhappiness and then from unhappiness back to happiness again”).

In another piece, Walser borrowed both from another writer and from himself. That is, he twice rewrote Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son. In the first, written in 1917 and collected in the volume Speaking to the Rose, the responsible son who didn’t leave home visits Walser’s narrator. This son resents being connected with the story, and the narrator sides with him, saying, in plain language, that the story of the prodigal son is the “opposite” of “pleasant and edifying.”

The second version, written in 1927, published in a newspaper in 1928, and included in Microscripts, is more in line with Walser’s later style. Rambling—even unhinged—but biting, full of irreverent wordplay (in Bernofsky’s translation, two representative phrases: “factitious ludicrosity,” “canny uncanniness”), the story bounces between a number of topics—the narrator amusingly remarks that the biblical David didn’t “protect himself from hurled-spear eventualities”—and indicts the prodigal son as a “Glünggi,” a Swiss-German epithet similar to “idiot.” But the story absolves the prodigal son because his family received him with understanding and happiness, “which surmounts and surpasses all frailty and strength.” The story ends, like many others, with a tender axiom: “happiness is the most shaky and yet also the most solid of things.”

To ape the thief himself: thus does one writer scour works of the past, finding new life and new satisfactions.

The summer issue of VQR contains my essay about Robert Walser, focusing on the Swiss author’s microscripts—peculiar short stories written in a minuscule script on business cards, receipts, torn-off novel covers, and other forms of scrap paper. Before entering the Herisau asylum in 1933, for a putative diagnosis of schizophrenia, Walser had written and published widely, including in many of Central Europe’s German-language newspapers. But by the time he died in 1956, he was, like many writers of his type, nearly friendless and forgotten, and he likely hadn’t written anything in years. He was, in many respects, alone and insubstantial.

On December 25, 1956, a group of children in Herisau found Walser’s body in the snow, his right hand on his chest, his left arm outstretched, a black hat lying nearby. Seventy-eight years old, he had died while on one of his customary long walks. The police came and took photographs, one of which has since become something of an iconic image of the solitary, perambulating writer. (Another photograph shows a set of footprints ominously leading to the body.)

There may be something mordant about the dissemination of this death-bed image, which has since been interpreted many times over by various artists, amateur and professional alike. J.M. Coetzee has called the photo’s frequent reproduction in Walser-related materials “shameless,” and many Walser fans—most notably, his late-in-life friend and walking companion, Carl Seelig—seem to exhibit a protectiveness towards the man, as if he somehow needs to be shielded from a leering public. This attitude may be a response to the side of Walser that displayed an exuberant, childlike innocence—a facet of the man that I discussed in my piece—or it may be a reflection on his sad life story, marked by recurrent insecurities, poverty, an inability to find satisfying companionship of the amorous or intellectual kind, and a quiet death that meant that he, too, like the rest of his siblings, would die childless. Whatever the impetus of this attitude, I think it is time to shed it. The photograph of Walser’s body is no more shameless than the daily snapshots of war casualties in our newspapers or James Joyce’s death mask. However low Walser’s reputation may have dipped (some Europeans say he never went out of fashion, that his resurgence is overemphasized to burnish a legend), he is no more threatened to be overshadowed by this photograph than he is by the glib caricature of having been a mad genius—when he was, of course, far more complex and far less mad. The wealth of new translations of Walser works, as well as the frequent appearance of new critical pieces, has only cemented his status as an important representative of early twentieth-century European literature. His tangled microscripts, published in German but most not yet translated into English, ensure that his posthumous life will be a long one.

All of this is a preamble justifying my linking to the photograph and some of the artistic responses to it, many of them by the English painter Billy Childish. Here they are.

• “Robert Walsa,” by Billy Childish
• “Robert Walser Dead in the Snow 2,” by Billy Childish
• “Robert Walser Lying Dead in the Snow (In Yellow Suit),” by Billy Childish
• “Robert Walser Lying Dead in the Snow with Footprints,” by Billy Childish
• “Robert Walser Lying Dead in the Snow (Detail),” by Billy Childish
• “Here is the man,” by Maira Kalman

A controlled burn of oil from the Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill sends towers of fire hundreds of feet into the air over the Gulf of Mexico June 9. (Credit: US Coast Guard/Petty Officer First Class John Masson)

I’m not writing to offer an apologia, but I have to say, life in the oilfield was wonderful. How much of that wonder was due to my youth—as well as the specific joy of youthfulness in the 1980s—and how much of the wonder was due to the nature of the work—the joy of the hunt—I cannot be sure. I think it must have been mostly the joy of the hunt, for there were old guys (there were almost never any women) who pursued the oil and gas with just as much fervor as the younger geologists.

We never called it crude, or black gold, or Texas tea. There were no clever nicknames, there was only the pure thing itself—oil if in the liquid state, or gas, if gaseous—that, and our pure and steady fever, our burning. If we ever referred to it as anything other than oil or gas, we called it pay. Four feet of pay, twenty feet of pay, thirty feet of pay. Sixty feet of pay was a lot, enough to change your life.

I worked for a small independent oil and gas company, which was owned by a wealthy individual who drilled his wells with the aid of a group of a dozen or so investors, rich people who believed in him and in us, but who were also entirely willing to stop believing if we one day ceased to be successful.

Speaking only for myself, I didn’t ever worry about that. I never mapped a prospect, never drilled a well that I didn’t believe was going to find pay. Success rates were somewhere in the neighborhood of baseball batting averages—between ten and thirty percent—but the baseball metaphor does not carry much further than that, other than perhaps the ability to salvage a game—or a career—with one certain swing, a key strike at the most critical time.

Read the rest of this entry »

World Cup quarterfinals, Ghana vs. Uruguay, Soccer City Stadium, Johannesburg. (Steve Evans / CC)

I was eating traditional African cuisine with a group of South Africans at a Melrose Arch, Jozi restaurant during the Ghana-Uruguay quarterfinals. The South Africans were pulling hard for Ghana’s Black Stars to advance to the semifinals since that would be a first for an African team. A week ago, Ghana had handily knocked out Team USA at Rustenburg’s Royal Bafokeng Stadium to make it to the quarters, so I decided to support “Baghana Baghana,” too.

After the match began, we waved our miniature Ghanan flags in between rich little bites of springbok, caramelized biltong and mielie-meal pap. “Ghana, make Africa proud!” one fan shouted at a table next to us. During additional time at the end of the first half, Ghana did just that. Its 25-year-old midfielder, Sulley Muntari, caught Uruguay’s keeper on the wrong foot and curled the ball into the right side of the net. “Beautiful goal,” mused an attractive woman with dreadlocks down to her waist. “Unstoppable,” our table agreed, as Muntari’s goal was replayed again and again on TV.

Then, at the beginning of the second half, Uruguay scored, making it 1-1. We took the goal in stride, and gulped our drinks while the opposing team’s blue-and-white striped fans chanted “olé olé olé!” at the stadium. Before we knew it, the match had moved into an extra half hour of time. Suddenly, Ghana’s striker, Dominic Adiyiah, headed a ball towards the goal just moments before overtime was up. Uruguay’s striker, Luis Suárez, who was standing on the goal line, countered by blocking Adiyiah’s header with his arm. The ref gave Suárez a red card for the handball and tossed him out of the match. “Boo!” someone shouted. The restaurant came alive as Ghana’s #3, Asamoah Gyan, prepared to take the free kick. The stakes were high; if the team’s top scorer made the goal, the Black Stars could advance to the semifinals. If not, the teams would have to settle the tie in a dangerous penalty shoot-out. Much to our dismay, Gyan’s shot missed, bouncing off the bar at the top of the goal. Uruguay subsequently proved better than Ghana in the penalty kicks that followed, and won the shoot-off, 4-2. The West African team—and Africa—was out of the World Cup.

Our table was devastated at the match’s outcome. “One scotch on the rocks,” called out a crushed fan. “Shame that Ghana lost. This was for Africa!” a Jozi filmmaker at the table added. “But Ghana is the better team though, isn’t it?” another insisted. The next day, we tried to come up with reasons why the Black Stars had missed not one, but three penalty kicks during the match. Nerves? Inexperience? A lack of resources at the professional level?

The whole thing got me thinking about a conversation I had in Cape Town earlier that week with Coaching for Hope, an NGO building Africa’s soccer squad from the ground up.

“We train coaches from marginalized communities. . .who can’t afford to access South African training,” one of the group’s coordinators, Norman Brook, told me.

Charlotte United Under 16 Football Club, at the end of a game against a local football team at the Chris Carter Soccer Field in Khayelitsha. The North Carolina team was on a tour organized by AMsportstours.

Coaching for Hope, which was created by UK charity Skillshare International, sends football pros like David Beckham, the famous English footballer married to Victoria “Posh Spice” Adams, to townships to teach basic coaching skills to ordinary players. Then the NGO helps the new coaches set up their own youth soccer teams in West and Southern Africa. Roma Traaore, a native of Burkina Faso, says he has benefited from the program. “I will teach them [children] to love the game, to play with joy and to learn fair play,” reads one of Traaore’s quotes on Coaching for Hope’s website. “My passion is to help children in my country play football.”

But even though it’s investing big in Africa’s soccer players, Coaching for Hope says it’s not focused on making the continent’s national teams the best in the world. “No doubt talent will amount from that, but we don’t view that as our job. We’re enabling them to coach and empowering them to address social issues like HIV/AIDS.” Brook says they’re doing that by combining lessons about substance abuse, women’s empowerment and HIV/AIDS prevention with soccer practice on the field. There are more than 22 million people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. That’s two thirds of the total HIV/AIDS population worldwide.

Although Coaching for Hope says there’s still plenty of work to do, it reports it has been able to get 700 coaches and 30,000 African children trained and playing football on the pitch. That’s something to watch out for at the 2014 World Cup.

Temple Cone, an associate professor of English at the United States Naval Academy, has published a book of poems and five chapbooks. He is now finishing a book of ghazals, from which five poems appear in our summer issue. His poetry has appeared in publications such as the Christian Science Monitor, storySouth, and the Beloit Poetry Journal. Here, he meditates on music, haiku, scholarship, and the natural world.

1. Your poems in this issue are full of classical musicians and references to music. How does music interact with your writing?
Well, music and poetic form are rather close: in both cases, you’re dealing with abstractions that nevertheless have sensuous effects. So it doesn’t surprise me that Dante and Olivier Messiaen appear together in one of my poems; they both create complex yet utterly efficient structures that are themselves expressive and meaningful. Perhaps the surprise is that more musicians don’t show up! I happen to have been interested in classical music from an early age, but I’m fairly ecumenical in my taste; Vic Chesnutt and Henry Purcell share equal time on my iPod.

Or were you wondering about the practical matter of writing to music? I can say that I find it difficult to write with much noise at all, let alone music. That’s not the case when I’m revising, though the music usually can’t be vocal (unless it’s a language I don’t understand). Counterpoint and complex structures really draw me, so Bach is all over my iPod, but I also like the rhythms of 20th century composers like Peter Warlock, Messiaen, John Tavener, Meredith Monk, and Arvo Part. One of my favorite recent pieces is Eleni Karaindrou’s Ulysses’ Gaze, which is very somber and haunting, but reassuring, too.

2. All five of the poems have the same form—a special three-line ghazal. The poems also share an easy familiarity with the range of Western artistic tradition, from Mozart to Messiaen, King Proteus to Kierkegaard. Did the form and content of these poems appear organically in the first draft, or did they come about in later revisions?
The form was there from the beginning, but something about it gave me permission to deal with the content. I’ve always been attracted to the classical ghazal’s incantatory and phantasmagoric properties (they appeal to my inner Coleridge, I suppose), but the form seemed unnecessarily tidy and tight, even prissy. These modified ghazals lengthen the traditional couplets to tercets and fix the number of stanzas at six, sometimes with, sometimes without, the refrain word at the end of each stanza that tethers the poem’s associative leaps of the imagination. They feel bigger and shaggier, with more room for wild associations than the classical ghazal, and as soon as I started writing them, I felt free to slip the lyric mode of my earlier poems, with their sense of a stable self and their attention to image and emotional experience. What’s ironic is that these poems ‘sound’ a lot more like what’s going on in my head much of the time. That may be the ‘easy familiarity with the range of Western artistic tradition’ you’re talking about, though your phrase is entirely too generous and makes me sound far savvier than I am. Hemingway had his “grace under pressure”; these poems may be “dabbling under pressure.”

I began writing these ghazals a few years ago, and have completed a book-length manuscript since, though I continue to write new poems in the form. They’re weird and wild to write; I won’t claim to be taking dictation from angels as Blake did, but sometimes they seem to arise quite of their accord. I think the way I write them speaks to the way they range and rove. I rise early—a little before 4 AM—and do as little as possible to rouse myself—no newspaper, no computer, no coffee (not always!). Sitting on the couch, I write whatever came to mind, be that an abstraction, an image, a mangled quotation, whatever, no matter how strange or disconnected from my waking thoughts. Usually I’m too tired to judge what I’ve written, and that makes it easier to start asking questions—about where the line is going; about what other images, phrases, or words could cohabit with it; how I might top it rhetorically; etc. The drafts are varied, copious, and always surprising, since I often can’t quite remember writing them. Sometimes I draft two or three poems in a couple of hours and revise them over the next couple of weeks; sometimes I end up with drafts of stanzas that develop into new poems a few days later; sometimes I write a poem with scarcely an edit.

3. These poems are very interested in the natural world, in mayflies and hummingbirds. At the same time, there is an implicit criticism of such naturalistic poetry, with the line “[t]here is no end to the rabble of poets who write about butterflies.” What do you consider to be your relationship with the natural world?
At home, and not at home. I know what it’s like to be inspired by the natural world, to want to capture that moment of awe or wonder in a poem, but I’m wary of all that happens between the initial encounter and the final revision. It’s too easy to make nature a proxy for the self. There’s an early poem by Robert Hass, “On the Coast Near Sausalito,” where he writes that “it’s strange to kill / for the sudden feel of life. / The danger is / to moralize / that strangeness.” That captures it for me: an experience of nature that is at once intuitive yet highly self-conscious and guarded about its intentions. I guess you could call it a scientific attitude, one that is appreciative, admiring, inquisitive, analytical, and skeptical all at once. I politely disagree with Wordsworth that “we murder to dissect”; I think scientific knowledge intensifies reverence and de-sentimentalizes our attitudes towards nature, which are really just attitudes about ourselves. My wife is a botanist, and several of our friends are ecologists, and simply by being in their company I have learned many things about the flora and fauna of the regions where I’ve lived. That education has made me intimate with my surroundings, and such intimacy has fostered greater reverence and respect than if I’d simply kept an Emersonian view of nature as a temple of the heart. Once you understand what deer overpopulation can do to woodland orchid populations, for instance, you stop being soft-hearted about hunting, especially in the absence of large predators.

I shouldn’t cast stones, though, for my own poems have often treated nature as a place of spiritual instruction and rejuvenation, and I don’t believe it’s inherently wrong to engage the world this way. Indeed, such poetry can move people learn to care about nature in the first place; here I agree with what Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude, that the things of this world “through the turnings intricate of verse, / Present themselves as objects recognized, / In flashes, and with glory not their own.” But I think a dangerous complacency sets in if we regard nature too long as a spiritual text, if we look out at woods, rivers, plains, and whatnot, and come to see only our own values manifest.

4. You write a column for Daily Haiku and refer to Kobayashi Issa in “The Rest of Silence.” How does haiku affect your style?
I’ve been reading haiku for years, ever since I found a copy of Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North at summer camp when I was thirteen (I still have it, along with my guilt about its theft). But I didn’t begin writing haiku seriously until a few years ago, and when I say seriously, I mean with a full commitment to the traditions of that mode. Too often, the haiku that I wrote early on were simply three-line versions of what I was already doing in my longer lyric poems. But haiku isn’t really a form into which you can squeeze any subject, emotion, or experience. It’s a stance, really, a bit like zazen, the Zen sitting meditation in which attention to form is, in a sense, the spiritual content of the practice. And when I started writing them in earnest, I realized that a lot of the poems I thought were haiku were in fact senryu, another three-line mode in which the subject isn’t nature but human nature. That discovery was a bit of egg on the face for the college English professor, let me tell you. But I’m grateful to haiku for making me a beginner again: for all the publications I might claim, I’m still the person I was when I started writing poems fifteen years ago, can still fail wretchedly, can still exhilarate at the least moment of grace. I think Issa would laugh at me, and then with me, on that count.

As for how haiku affects my style: I could offer any number of familiar observations about the importance of image, compression, or diction in haiku, and they’d all be true, but the unexpected benefit is how haiku demands that one work with grammatical incompleteness. There’s just not a lot of room in three lines and seventeen or fewer syllables, so all sorts of grammatical connections have to be jettisoned. In a way, the associative leaps of the long-lined ghazals dispense with connections, too (logical, if not grammatical), by stretching the bonds between images, lines, or stanzas beyond easily explicable limits (how’d I get from Shakespeare to Wile E. Coyote?). I actually began writing these haiku at the same time that I started writing the long-lined ghazals, and it’s interesting to go back over my journals and see tiny haiku paired with sprawling, messy, eighteen-line poems that run from margin to margin. It’s a real Mutt and Jeff relationship.

5. As a holder of both an MFA in creative writing and PhD in English literature, how do you balance your scholarly work with your creative work? Does synergy occur?
Creative writing and scholarship have not always been cooperative practices for me. The kind of openness I need to create images, play with words, and make associative connections below or beyond my rational mind is often at odds with the logical analysis, rhetorical clarity, and balancing of others’ arguments that scholarship demands. Yet poetry and scholarship are both ways for me to engage with literature and with the world at large. Sometimes I feel like an ambidextrous pitcher who can change pitching hands between games but not between innings. I can say that poets I’ve written articles about—Robinson Jeffers, Ted Hughes, Les Murray, Denise Levertov, Ciaran Carson—engaged me first as a fellow poet, one drawn to image and rhythm and voice, so deeply, perhaps, that my research was simply an extension of my excitement about their work. Scholarship, in turn, exposes me to writers, moments of history, bodies of thought, and odd sorts of information I’m not sure I’d have encountered or sought out otherwise (like that bit about Hamlet’s O-moans that I mention in “The Rest of Silence”).

6. What projects are you planning for the future?
Well, I just learned that my second book, The Broken Meadow, received the 2010 Old Seventy Creek Poetry Prize, so I’ll be (enthusiastically!) involved with that for a while. Meanwhile, I’m trying to find a publisher for the book of ghazals, which is tentatively titled Tangofugue, though I’m also still writing poems in that mode. I’ve also been experimenting with formal(ish) poems that make use of this weird voice that sounds really familiar to me—downhome, educated, embittered, and enraptured. These new poems are all about eros, faith, dialect, and the rural landscape of the South. They ask what it means to be devoted: to a spouse, to a child, to an upbringing, to a locale, to a life of poetry, to the divine. I’ve written a bunch of them, and though I’ve got a sense of a broader sequence in which they fit together, I’m more interested in writing the next one, and the next one after that. It’s like what Creeley wrote: “drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going.”

7. What have you been reading lately?
Summer is the time to soak up all the books I don’t get to read during the year, when I’m more narrowly focused on the books I teach in class and on recent poetry. The books currently scattered around my house are themselves a bit scattered in content: Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; George Eliot’s Middlemarch; James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599; Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations; and Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. I’m also eagerly awaiting the release of Alan Furst’s new spy novel. As far as scholarship goes, I’m doing some research on a fine play by John Patrick Shanley, Defiance (so I’m reading a number of Vietnam Era histories) and finishing a reference book on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which is so miserable (though beautiful) a book that I can only take solace in the lightest confections of all: P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels. As for recent poetry, I’ve really enjoyed Kevin McFadden’s Hardscrabble, Sandra Beasley’s Theories of Falling, and Jehanne Dubrow’s Stateside, and I’m rereading a beautiful, heartening, and savagely funny book by a friend and former classmate of mine, Deborah Slicer’s The White Calf Kicks.