Interview with poet Richard Hoffman

Poet Richard Hoffman is chatting with me about his new book of poetry, People Once Real.

cover for people once real

Bio:
Richard Hoffman is the author of nine books, including five books of poetry: Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of The Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Book Award from The New England Poetry Club; Emblem; Noon until Night, which received the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry, and the newly published People Once Real. He is also author of the celebrated memoirs, Half the House and Love & Fury, along with the short story collection Interference, and Remembering the Alchemists & other essays. He is Emeritus Writer in Residence at Emerson College and Nonfiction Editor of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices.

Welcome Richard. What do you enjoy most about writing poems?
I enjoy writing poems less than I enjoy reading them. Poetry in English and in translation is a vast conversation across the entire planet and throughout time. I have been reading and writing poems my whole life, and the reading nourishes the writing; in fact, it nourishes me. Poetry has been my education, my aspiration, my guardian angel, all my life. Writing poems is something I do when necessary, when I find myself out on the front edge of my understanding. I suppose what I enjoy is the challenge of coming to terms with something “off” or unclear or stubbornly opaque. Then I feel that all my reading kicks in, poems by poets worldwide and across centuries offer suggestions about form, and all the colors of language, and all its shades and nuances, its rhythms and echoes, become available. But the most enjoyable part, the part you can’t depend on happening, is when the poem surprises you, when it turns out to be something other than you’d intended.

Can you give us a little insight into a few of your poems – perhaps a couple of your favorites?
I don’t know how to pick favorites because each poem is itself; I have a strong attachment to this one, “Yet” because it was first published while I was in my early twenties, half a century ago:

YET

Sounds East European, doesn’t it?
Yet.
A town in the Urals, the western
border of Asia, where everyone hurries
calmly through the narrowest of streets
to rocky fields, hard, patched by snow so dry
it hurts. Yet
every single day they make their way there;
every night come back.

Yet.
The ring of an ancient Egyptian god.
An animal, probably like a musk-ox,
slowly dragging tomorrow from over the mountains;
(can a word be a god? can anything but
a word be a god? for us, I mean)
always and never arriving.

Umbilicus: Vision: Promise: Deadlock:
(the deciding vote has not been cast
yet) I, pharoah by default, acknowledge you
most powerful of all. O lord of heads sometimes,
tails sometimes, lord of the other hand,
there is no escape from you
yet.

When I read the lines (can a word be a god? can anything but/ a word be a god? for us, I mean)/ always and never arriving, I realize that from very early on, my most abiding concern has been with language. Here’s a very recent poem, from People Once Real:

VACCINE

What is the word for the way
the starling’s sheen and the carapace
of the Japanese beetle seem alike?
And if I find it will the dying stop?

Words don’t come easily to me.
I used to think they were afraid of me,
they hid in my chest, in my belly.
Will the right ones make the dying stop?

What word is there for the way
some words unsaid erase you?
For our hope not to hurt again?
For what to say to make the dying stop?

You can see in this poem that I still believe, on some level, that if we could manage to match our language to the reality of the world, we would be reconciled and at peace. That’s poetry’s aspiration; it would be foolish to think it possible, but equally foolish, and also sad, to stop trying.

What form are you inspired to write in the most? Why?
I mostly write in free verse in a colloquial tone in diction just a little bit “off” so you’ll pay attention. I enjoy the challenges of poetic form, but that form can take many shapes, not only the ones we receive from the past. Among those, I cherish the villanelle. There are villanelles in all five of my books of poems. It’s a wonderfully adaptable form: it can be made to work as a love poem, an elegy, a philosophical exploration, a prayer, a poem of witness, praise, or outrage, even a political poem. One of my teachers, Barbara L. Greenberg, was a jubilant master of the form and I think her enthusiasm wore off on me.

What type of project are you working on next?
A New & Selected Poems will be published in early 2026. I’m trying to make my selections and the new poems come together in a coherent book.

When did you first consider yourself a writer / poet?
I knew I was a writer by age 14 or 15, but I fell in love with poetry, knew it would be a lifelong engagement, as a freshman in college at Fordham university where I took a Modern & Contemporary Poetry class.

How do you research markets for your work, perhaps as some advice for not-yet-published poets?
I am not looking for markets so much as sending my poems to magazines I like, magazines that publish poems I like. So, I guess I’m saying that reading widely is my marketing research, along with trusting my taste.

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I have kept journals for decades and often plunder them for writing ideas: lines, phrases, images, half-finished thoughts.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be the first American Pope to be elected to the Baseball Hall-of-Fame in Cooperstown, NY.

Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
“The opening of a poem is like finding a fruit on the ground, a piece of fallen fruit you have never seen before, and the poet’s task is to create the tree from which such a fruit would fall.”

— Paul Valéry

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *