With this Chance this Day
by David Baker
Dear David,
Thank you for this interview.
Was there a particular set of events that motivated you to write your poem Simile? The final lines of this poem are, “A tumbler turns and clicks. The world once more/ fills with fire, and the body, like ash, is ash.” They serve as a reminder of life’s fragility and the troublesome state of affairs at any given moment, but they also help us make peace with the unpredictability of how it all ends. Is this a sort of surrender we continuously struggle with?
I wanted to write a beautiful poem and to let that beauty come up against violence. I wanted to position my own back yard, and my favorite tree, alongside an omnipresent sense of “the world” with its own beauty and real terror. I have tried for a long time to make poems of complex narratives—of more than a single story or image—and to let the friction produced by the collision of things provide the heat of the poem’s language and effect.
That tumbler is a lock, of course, drawn from the key image of the maple-tree seeds. But it is the mechanism of the bomb, too, the timer. I wanted the ash to be as light as air though it is the body. And I wanted to be culpable for the violence this poem deploys as well as for the beauty.
And mostly I wanted to examine the relation of metaphor to simile. The “likeness” of the body as ash becomes a direct becoming: an “is” rather than a “like.” Does any of that matter?
Things become other things, naturally and by human hands, violently and beautifully—but inevitably.
Simile |
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1.
Orange-and-midnight the moth on the fringe tree - first it nags a bloom; sips and chews; then shakes the big flower. Then its wings slow. Grows satiate, as in sex. Then still, as the good sleep after. Each bloom a white torch more than a tree’s flower. Each is one of ten or twelve, conic, one of many made of many green-white or white petals held out, as by a hand, from the reach of the limb. A field this morning was full of white moths. More in the side yard, in the bluebottle, lifting – fog off the dew, white wings like paper over flames and floating awry or pieces of petal torn off. Weeks now my words on paper have burned. Burned and flown, like a soul on fire, with nothing to show but ash, and the ash flies too. 2. Today, in the news – so many martyrs – an “unnamed suicide bomber” took herself into the arms of flame, and five others, “by her own hand.” Whitman means the beauty of the mind is terror. Do you think I could walk pleasantly and well-suited toward annihilation? But there is no likeness beyond her body in flames, for its moment, no mater its moment. Yet the fringe bloom burns. Yet the moth shakes and chews, as in sex. When the young maple grown covered with seeds, they are a thousand green wings, like chain upon chain of keys, each with its tiny spark, trying the black lock. A tumbler turns and clicks. The world once more fills with fire, and the body, like ash, is ash. |
How do you see the role of poetry in shaping ideas and providing platforms to voice real time concerns?
Poetry’s role is to be poetry. It shapes ideas, as you say, and more deeply it creates ideas. We don’t have ideas until we have the language—and the form/s for that language—in order to discover or invent something that we call an idea. Poetry’s deep rigor gives us the cognitive ability to have depth and rigor. That’s true of music and mathematics, too, as examples.
As a form, poetry does become a platform. I love this. Platform comes from the Middle French—“plate-forme,” which is a map, a diagram, a plat or “flat” picture of a landscape. Poetry literally is a platform of our experiences. But platform also has a political intonation, right? I tend to resist that quick association—that an artform must have direct political utility—but I also realize and appreciate its truth and value as political currency. I do sense that the phrase “real time concerns” also means political or cultural aptitude. I confess I feel real time concerns when I read a good poem. My concerns are existential and personal and communal and practical and ecological, on and on, and they are all real. Poetry provides not just a method for coping, but also a method for changing, resisting, reshaping those things.
I think it is also true that poetry becomes an even more vital form of platform—of political involvement and action—when other platforms vanish or are imperiled. Poetry insists to give us something akin to freedom of expression, freedom of thought. There may be an inverse relation here. The creepier the social epoch, the more necessary is poetry. Look how present, how popular, and how wildly diverse our poetry is today in America. What does that mean?
Do poets have any superpowers helping them deal with the mundane as well as with the constant surprises life serves?
Superpowers? Yikes. The political intonation here again is nerve-rattling. I know what a superpower looks like, and how it acts, and I automatically cringe and resist. Nor am I religious or particularly superstitious. So let me say it this way: A poet’s greatest superpower is poetry. I mean, the long wild beautiful history of individual poets, and one-poem-at-a-time, as well as the insistent history of the art in all its languages and forms and cultural varieties.
Poetry is our source as well as our aspiration and, I guess, our faith. When I need courage, I go outside to the trees and the waters, or I read a poem. When I need company, I go outside to the birds and the fields and the woods, or I read a poem. When I need solitude, I go outside to the sky and the dirt, or I read a poem. I believe these are my deepest solace and knowledge. Is that power? I guess. It is also a desire for powerlessness, silence, a kind of unselfing that I find necessary.
Your book The Truth about Small Towns was published years ago, in 1998 to be exact. What is the most critical observation that could persuade you to rewrite the poem with the same title almost two decades later?
This is a great impossible question. Impossible, because I tend not to rewrite old poems. I work obsessively on a poem, sit with it, let it simmer, get weird, evolve, and then, when and if it finally feels world-worthy, I aspire to find a place in print for it. After that it’s not mine any more to fiddle with, nor to regret nor repair.
But if I were to re-approach some of the material in that title poem, I would probably exercise less irony and look for more complex manners of sincerity. I would probably relinquish the ghost sonnet-form behind all four parts of that sequence, too, and perhaps work toward more phrasal or fractured forms or syntax. I would probably resist saying or claiming—however ironically—something to be “the truth” about anything. But more so I would probably prefer to write a new poem rather than recapture an old one, at least one twenty years old.
Poetry’s role is to be poetry. It shapes ideas, as you say, and more deeply it creates ideas. We don’t have ideas until we have the language—and the form/s for that language—in order to discover or invent something that we call an idea. Poetry’s deep rigor gives us the cognitive ability to have depth and rigor. That’s true of music and mathematics, too, as examples.
As a form, poetry does become a platform. I love this. Platform comes from the Middle French—“plate-forme,” which is a map, a diagram, a plat or “flat” picture of a landscape. Poetry literally is a platform of our experiences. But platform also has a political intonation, right? I tend to resist that quick association—that an artform must have direct political utility—but I also realize and appreciate its truth and value as political currency. I do sense that the phrase “real time concerns” also means political or cultural aptitude. I confess I feel real time concerns when I read a good poem. My concerns are existential and personal and communal and practical and ecological, on and on, and they are all real. Poetry provides not just a method for coping, but also a method for changing, resisting, reshaping those things.
I think it is also true that poetry becomes an even more vital form of platform—of political involvement and action—when other platforms vanish or are imperiled. Poetry insists to give us something akin to freedom of expression, freedom of thought. There may be an inverse relation here. The creepier the social epoch, the more necessary is poetry. Look how present, how popular, and how wildly diverse our poetry is today in America. What does that mean?
Do poets have any superpowers helping them deal with the mundane as well as with the constant surprises life serves?
Superpowers? Yikes. The political intonation here again is nerve-rattling. I know what a superpower looks like, and how it acts, and I automatically cringe and resist. Nor am I religious or particularly superstitious. So let me say it this way: A poet’s greatest superpower is poetry. I mean, the long wild beautiful history of individual poets, and one-poem-at-a-time, as well as the insistent history of the art in all its languages and forms and cultural varieties.
Poetry is our source as well as our aspiration and, I guess, our faith. When I need courage, I go outside to the trees and the waters, or I read a poem. When I need company, I go outside to the birds and the fields and the woods, or I read a poem. When I need solitude, I go outside to the sky and the dirt, or I read a poem. I believe these are my deepest solace and knowledge. Is that power? I guess. It is also a desire for powerlessness, silence, a kind of unselfing that I find necessary.
Your book The Truth about Small Towns was published years ago, in 1998 to be exact. What is the most critical observation that could persuade you to rewrite the poem with the same title almost two decades later?
This is a great impossible question. Impossible, because I tend not to rewrite old poems. I work obsessively on a poem, sit with it, let it simmer, get weird, evolve, and then, when and if it finally feels world-worthy, I aspire to find a place in print for it. After that it’s not mine any more to fiddle with, nor to regret nor repair.
But if I were to re-approach some of the material in that title poem, I would probably exercise less irony and look for more complex manners of sincerity. I would probably relinquish the ghost sonnet-form behind all four parts of that sequence, too, and perhaps work toward more phrasal or fractured forms or syntax. I would probably resist saying or claiming—however ironically—something to be “the truth” about anything. But more so I would probably prefer to write a new poem rather than recapture an old one, at least one twenty years old.
The Truth about Small Towns |
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It never stops raining. The water tower’s tarnished
as cutlery left damp in the widower’s hutch. If you walk slow (but don’t stop), you’re not from nearby. All you can eat for a buck at the diner is cream gravy on sourdough, blood sausage, and coffee. Never lie. The preacher before this one dropped bombs in the war and walked with a limp at parade time. Until it burned, the old depot was a disco. A café. A card shoppe. A parts place for combines. Randy + Rhonda shows up each spring on the bridge. If you walk fast you did it. Nothing’s more lonesome than money. (Who says shoppe?) It never rains. |
Who are the classic and contemporary poets and writers you read time and time again?
This is a good question. Mine is a fluid answer. I mean my answer today is likely different from tomorrow’s. But I probably return to these pre-20th century poets more than any others: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Issa, Edward Taylor. And as often, these from the 20th century: Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, Theodore Roethke, Paul Celan. And among contemporary poets, W. S. Merwin may be the single most important poet in my life, as well as Stanley Plumly, Arthur Sze, Charles Wright, Carl Phillips, Linda Gregerson, Jack Gilbert. These over and over. And there are zillions more.
For prose I read Joan Didion, Thoreau, Montaigne, William Bartram, Eudora Welty, Mary Hood. I read very much environmental writing, science and physics and botany and biology; very much poetic theory and poetic studies. This week I’m rereading Hyperobjects by Timothy Morton, a mind-blowing paradigm shift for environmental and social thinking; and am reading Ann Patchett’s new novel, Commonwealth, just finished Reputations by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, and am halfway through the galleys of Louise Gluck’s American Originality. Gluck’s book is downright thrilling, as unrelenting and human as her poems. I confess I read few biographies, fewer autobiographies or memoirs.
I should footnote this by saying that very much of my ongoing reading is made of submissions of poetry and poetry criticism to The Kenyon Review, where I’ve been Poetry Editor for years. Thousands upon thousands of poems in each submission period, tens of thousands. It is an onslaught and a privilege.
What literary and nonliterary publications do you recommend for the insightful works they feature?
I currently subscribe to Poetry, New Yorker, The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Boston Review, Quarterly West, Spoon River Poetry Journal, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Five Points, and four or five more. Several of these are permanent, many years of subscription; and I rotate in and out of another five or ten magazines each year. I read Boston Review for its social thinking as well as its literary taste; it’s so fully good. I have just read, this week, Slate, Pank, Threepenny Review, Waxwing, The Progressive. I read dozens and dozens and dozens of magazines—both in print and online—over the course of a year.
After reading your poem Fall Back we were wondering when was the last time you muttered, “What have we done?” and why?
You mean literally? I have been saying it, literally, since the election. The horrible, shameful, disastrous election. Every day I wonder what we have done; and more so what we are going to do to remedy the harm and resist the potential disasters. The past tenseness of your question also calls for me to speak about what we have done to the green world, to nature, to the environment, our home. I think this every day, too, many times. What the hell have we done?
In “Fall Back,” my poem you refer to, the speaker is feeling the inevitable regret of having lost something dear on the night of the autumn solstice, when we actually “gain” an hour. Though he gains an hour, he knows he has wasted his life, as James Wright says. He has “slept through” the opportunity of something—love, tenderness, growth.
The story of our lives is the story of this paradox: hope and squander, chance and sorrow, possession and regret.
This is a good question. Mine is a fluid answer. I mean my answer today is likely different from tomorrow’s. But I probably return to these pre-20th century poets more than any others: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Issa, Edward Taylor. And as often, these from the 20th century: Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, Theodore Roethke, Paul Celan. And among contemporary poets, W. S. Merwin may be the single most important poet in my life, as well as Stanley Plumly, Arthur Sze, Charles Wright, Carl Phillips, Linda Gregerson, Jack Gilbert. These over and over. And there are zillions more.
For prose I read Joan Didion, Thoreau, Montaigne, William Bartram, Eudora Welty, Mary Hood. I read very much environmental writing, science and physics and botany and biology; very much poetic theory and poetic studies. This week I’m rereading Hyperobjects by Timothy Morton, a mind-blowing paradigm shift for environmental and social thinking; and am reading Ann Patchett’s new novel, Commonwealth, just finished Reputations by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, and am halfway through the galleys of Louise Gluck’s American Originality. Gluck’s book is downright thrilling, as unrelenting and human as her poems. I confess I read few biographies, fewer autobiographies or memoirs.
I should footnote this by saying that very much of my ongoing reading is made of submissions of poetry and poetry criticism to The Kenyon Review, where I’ve been Poetry Editor for years. Thousands upon thousands of poems in each submission period, tens of thousands. It is an onslaught and a privilege.
What literary and nonliterary publications do you recommend for the insightful works they feature?
I currently subscribe to Poetry, New Yorker, The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Boston Review, Quarterly West, Spoon River Poetry Journal, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Five Points, and four or five more. Several of these are permanent, many years of subscription; and I rotate in and out of another five or ten magazines each year. I read Boston Review for its social thinking as well as its literary taste; it’s so fully good. I have just read, this week, Slate, Pank, Threepenny Review, Waxwing, The Progressive. I read dozens and dozens and dozens of magazines—both in print and online—over the course of a year.
After reading your poem Fall Back we were wondering when was the last time you muttered, “What have we done?” and why?
You mean literally? I have been saying it, literally, since the election. The horrible, shameful, disastrous election. Every day I wonder what we have done; and more so what we are going to do to remedy the harm and resist the potential disasters. The past tenseness of your question also calls for me to speak about what we have done to the green world, to nature, to the environment, our home. I think this every day, too, many times. What the hell have we done?
In “Fall Back,” my poem you refer to, the speaker is feeling the inevitable regret of having lost something dear on the night of the autumn solstice, when we actually “gain” an hour. Though he gains an hour, he knows he has wasted his life, as James Wright says. He has “slept through” the opportunity of something—love, tenderness, growth.
The story of our lives is the story of this paradox: hope and squander, chance and sorrow, possession and regret.
Fall Back |
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A golden rainfall
there is no rain and it blushing side- long and windless three sugar maples turning their leaves out in a shower of sun and the dew that all this night settled heavy there blazing off so quickly the lightening leaves quiver like mirrors over the miniature crab apple its thousand fruits the birds don’t touch and late season green tomatoes shining in a hoar of frost- what have we done with this chance this day but turn our backs as leaves turn to light over two blue chairs we painted years ago, nails working out of those weathered arms what we have done but slept through it- |
What is a poet’s position On Arrogance and the best literary works that might help in finding a cure of sorts for it?
It takes a fair degree of arrogance to make a work of art—to presume some kind of competence or confidence or, more, proficiency or excellence. It also takes concomitant degrees of humiliation, shame, frustration, bafflement. The self is, within a matter of instants, powerfully felt and inevitably lost, back and forth and back again, a vapor.
All fine literary works are a cure for arrogance, as you say. I lose myself in Carl Phillips’s poems or Sappho’s fragments. I find a self, and find myself changing, in them, too.
Literature is not medicine, nor scripture, nor self-help therapy—though we certainly hear otherwise, don’t we? It doesn’t cure a damn thing. It shapes. It doesn’t heal. It articulates. It’s greatest two achievements may be articulation and empathy.
As a poet and busy intellectual, what do you make of the term coined as ‘post-truth’ and how that might affect the creative circles?
Isn’t that an icky term? Yes, we live in a global period when it is possible to make something “true” by saying it is so. The world is 5500 years old. Poof! Donald Trump has a coherent vision to aid the working class. Brand X toothpaste will make your teeth whiter, healthier, and in the process you will have much more sex. The collateral damage of the recent bombing will facilitate the peace process. Poof! And thus the conflation of advertising, religion, and the sleight-of-hand rhetoric of politics and the military-industrial monster has produced a fearful result. Truth is irrelevant, and all its related forms are irrelevant—science, experiment, experience, common sense, learning. Poof.
But poetry itself has had a vexed relationship with the truth for a long time, we should recall. A poet’s temptation to say something other than state-sanctioned truth was why Plato banished us from The Republic! Thus we have Keats rebutting Plato by arguing that beauty is truth, truth is beauty, and that’s “all you need to know.” And we have Poe arguing that the heart of poetry is music and beauty: “Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth.” I think the very act of making a poem is a political act. It insists on something important, though something of little economic value. It insists to include the beautiful and the artful among the useful, the meaningful, the social, and the true.
What is the most recent story you heard that restores your faith in humanity due to the growing sensitivity toward language which is based on your own words, “I want to continue to believe that a growing sensitivity toward language nurtures a growing sensitivity toward the user of language—the human being.”?
I wish I had a great apocryphal story to finish with, answering your question. It presumes I have a faith in humanity or that such as been restored. I have a great deal of skepticism and sorrow toward humanity, to be honest. We are a childish, destructive, hateful, meager species. And we are capable of generosity, love, custody, bravery, forgiveness. What a mess we are!
In my sentence from your question, I don’t think “sensitivity” necessarily means hope. It means awareness, and that awareness may be directed toward destruction and violence as much as toward the better things. It is hard to look beyond the mind-blowing idiocy and selfish greed of the incoming administration and all its minions, and hard to look beyond the inexorable ruination of the green natural world. I do believe, though, that poetry’s gift to us is to create and enhance this sensitivity, and I do believe, still, that we have the means to enact our sensitivities more humanely and with hope. With healing? That remains to be seen.