Today’s guest is poet Lawrence Raab and we’re chatting about his new collection of poems, April at the Ruins.
Bio:
Lawrence Raab is the author of nine books of poems, including Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (Tupelo, 2015), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the Ten Best Poetry Books of 2015 by The New York Times. An earlier collection, What We Don’t Know About Each Other (Penguin, 1993) was a winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent book of poems is The Life Beside This One (Tupelo 2017). In 2016 Tupelo published his collected essays, Why Don’t We Say What We Mean? A new collection of poems, April at the Ruins, will appear in 2022. He is the Harry C. Payne Professor of Poetry Emeritus at Williams College, where he taught for forty-two years.
What do you enjoy most about writing poems?
I don’t begin a poem with an idea but with some interesting piece of language, perhaps an overheard remark, or a sentence from a fortune cookie or a book about owls, or some odd but striking comment in an unimportant newspaper article. I try to forget context; I’m interested in the tone of voice, how it might lead me to a moment, then a person, a sensibility, a story, and finally a set of concerns that could be called “what the poem is about.” I want to surprise myself, to discover what I wouldn’t have thought of if I hadn’t followed a few words somewhere I couldn’t have predicted they would take me.
Can you give us a little insight into a few of your poems – perhaps a couple of your favorites?
To follow up on the idea of beginning with found material, one poem in the new book started with this line: “I went along with Werner’s idea because he couldn’t stop pestering me.” I liked the specificity of “Werner.” Who might he be? What idea was it? Why would the “I” be reluctant? I liked the tone of voice of “I went along with Werner’s idea…” So: what happens next? Trying to imagine that was a pleasure since anything could happen. The poem, called “The Minor Characters,” went through many, many revisions, and now begins: “I went along with the idea/because I was supposed to,/and because Werner kept insisting/we finally had the science/to change the past…” The situation became a movie, the speaker a minor character who’s aware that he has only a small part in the story, and that he, and the others who are there just to advance the plot, will eventually “fall out of the picture, our lives/that brief and incomplete…”
Another poem––“The Beautiful Afternoon of Chance”––uses a line from a fortune cookie as its epigraph: “Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else’s water lily.” I read that somewhere. It seems rather surreal to have come from an actual fortune cookie, but the poem says it does, and why not? I wanted that strangeness to get me into the poem, which begins, “The tree you are watching is someone else’s piano,” but eventually includes lines that sound more credibly like fortune cookie lines, though I made them up. Like: “A friend you had almost forgotten will soon arrive from a great distance.” Or: “Nothing is beyond repair.” I like the authority of that line. I’m behind it, of course, but it’s the fortune cookie’s message first.
What form are you inspired to write in the most? Why?
I’ve never written in strict forms, but I believe all poems are formal to the extent that they demand a poet’s attention to rhyme and meter––or call it patterns of sound, phrasing, line breaks, etc. Robert Frost famously said that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net. But you can do that. You just have to imagine where the net would be.
What type of project are you working on next?
I’ve always envied novelists because they had projects––a place to stop one day and begin the next. I work poem by poem, arranging them when I have enough to put a book together. None of my books was written with a thematic center in mind, though I’d like to have such an aim and structure. Recently I woke up with the idea of writing an opera. Maybe I’ll find a way to think about trying to do that.
When did you first consider yourself a writer / poet?
I first started writing short stories. That was in high school, maybe a few years earlier. I wanted to publish them in The Saturday Evening Post and be famous. Perhaps I wanted this because I wasn’t good at sports, that being the kind of fame available at such a period in one’s life. I don’t know exactly why I gave up fiction for poetry. It wasn’t a conscious decision. The Saturday Evening Post shut down; I switched my hopes to The New Yorker; then I learned how to play squash.
How do you research markets for your work, perhaps as some advice for not-yet-published poets?
When I started trying to get my work published in magazines, the best advice I heard was to send your poems to places that published poems you really liked. Also: be persistent. Sometimes I’d get a rejection note that said “These aren’t for us, but try us again sometime.” Of course I would, though for a while it was a sufficient thrill to get an actual hand-written note rather than a very small printed slip.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
When I was young I thought I could only write late at night. Then one day I began a poem in the afternoon. Later: in the morning. So much for the romance of darkness. I do still like to have everything on my desk and in my room neat and in its place. Maybe that’s because there’s something very messy about beginning a poem, so I want everything around me in order. But probably I’m just a neat person.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
When I was a kid I wanted to be a cowboy. That didn’t go very far. Then I wanted to be an architect until I discovered that architects had to know math, which I was no good at. Finally I became a teacher because I needed a job and because it felt right to try to show others how to do what I was trying to do. Plus I loved thinking about how to talk about a poem, and how to get others engaged in talking about it. Since I retired that’s what I miss most.
Links:
Amazon | Tupelo Press