BOSTONIA
XJ Kennedy won the Lamont Poetry Award in 1961 for his beloved and acclaimed collection of poems, Nude Descending a Staircase. Since then he has been a teacher of writing, the author of best-selling writing handbooks, the founder of a poetry magazine, a father, and a great public wit. We are lucky and very, very pleased to have him with us as this issue's Bostonia interview. We've also reprinted 4 poems from the poet, "Cross Ties", "September Twelfth, 2001", "In a Secret Field", and "Emily Dickinson Leaves a Message for the World Now That Her Homestead in Amhearst has an Answering Machine" all right HERE.
Hub: I'll begin with the same question I begin every Bostonian interview, How and why did you come to live around Boston?
XJ: Boston is a highly livable town, as I have thought ever since, as a sailor in the Navy, I sat in the front row of the Old Howard in Scollay Square while the dancers shook tits in my face. Later, in 1962, I was imported by Tufts University to teach modern poetry and a poetry workshop, and we lived in Somerville and Bedford and had a bunch of kids and put down roots.
Hub: You won the Lamont Award from the American Academy of Poets in 1961 for your collection Nude Descending a Staircase, whose title poem is (correct me if this is wrong) based on the well-known painting by Marcel Duchamp, "Nude Descending a Staircase No 2." Duchamp was attempting to represent, or really capture, the visual content of motion in his landmark 1912 work; should readers of your book use this concept – the attempt to capture motion – as a key to the approach you took to the poems in that collection? If not, was there an over-arching aesthetic approach to that collection?
XJ: If there was any, I can't imagine what it was. Over-arching aesthetic approaches don't especially wow me. Who should care? All I was trying to do in that first book was to score a few decent poems.
Hub: When I read poems from throughout your career, I feel an immediate influence of Yeats and Auden in the rhyme structures and your use of traditional forms such as ballads, folk songs, sonnets. You even seem to echo Yeats with "come away" in your poem "Summer Children." I was surprised, after reading through your retrospective collection "In a Prominent Bar at Secaucus," at your elegy of Allen Ginsberg. He was one poet whose influence, at least in form and structure, I had not observed. Which poets do you feel have influenced your poetry? Is it primarily a structural influence, an aesthetic influence, or one of tone and content as well?
XJ: That I wrote a small elegy for Allen Ginsberg doesn't mean he influenced me. Although our notions of poetry had little in common, I felt a kind of kinship to him in that we both grew up in industrial towns in New Jersey, both loved Blake's songs, both had Lionel Trilling for a teacher, and both had fathers who wrote lousy sentimental verse. But Yeats, now – he was a big thing for me. I carried his Collected Poems around in my seabag in the Navy. I studied his use of forms and rhythms, sat down and tried to write imitations of him, then realized how crappy mine were when placed beside his. But you learn from aping a great master, even though you can't equal him. Nobody is better than Yeats at varying set rhythms for meaningful effect. I guess you learn whatever you can from whomever you admire – in my case, especially Herrick, Marvell, Pope, Blake (in the songs), FitzGerald's gloriously mistranslated Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the early Eliot before he went Christian on us, the anonymous authors of the English & Scottish popular ballads, Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, many more. They all rhyme and scan, and I knelt at their feet as a student of prosody, whatever other elements I may have got out of 'em. Well, maybe Eliot, in "Prufrock" and the Sweeney poems and that wonderful little poem "The Boston Evening Transcript", showed me that you could strike a comic tone and still be serious.
Hub: How important are the structure of your poems to your content, which is very often humorous, sarcastic, or ironic? Do you feel that rhymed, metrical structures are more well-suited to achieving these affects in verse?
XJ: Rhymed metrical structures are probably what I love best and am best at, that's all. You can, to be sure, write good funny, nasty, and ironic poems in free verse. I don't know why it is, but to my ear comic verse is funnier when it rhymes.
Hub: You seem to return again and again to the quatrain – not an uncommon form in English – but what about the quatrain stanza makes it work so well for you, and why do you think it is so well-worn by so many poets?
XJ: I guess I fall into the quatrain a lot of the time because it's easier to write than trickier things. Maybe that's why the medieval folk ballads usually fall into quatrains, so that any boob of a peasant could churn one out. In folk ballads, as a rule, the rhymes go a-b-c-b. When poets write quatrains that go a-b-a-b, that's often a sign that they're more art-conscious and literary. A two-rhyme quatrain takes a little more skill, because you have fewer rhyme sounds to work with, and have to rewrite more. It's a great form. It's like slam / BANG / slam / BANG, you know?
Hub: In your "Slim Volumes" you seem to have experimented more with free verse and irregular forms, especially in the poem "In a Secret Field," which seems to be an imitation of Williams' famous red wheelbarrow poem. Was there a feeling at that time that you needed to break out of traditional verse forms? Is it an effect of what you were reading then?
XJ: Gosh, I never thought I was imitating Doc Williams's wheelbarrow. Like nearly all my poems, "In a Secret Field" wasn't a deliberate attempt to do anything, it just turned out that way. I've never felt constrained by form – that is, it has never seemed a straitjacket. Once in a while a poem wants to do something else, that's all, so I have always felt that it knows what it's doing better than I do and so I let it have its head. I tried the little poem "September Twelfth, 2001" in rhyme at first, but it didn't want to go that way.
Hub: Your poem "September Twelfth, 2001" is one of the more human and touching literary works written on the occasion of the attacks that I've read. Do you often feel compelled as a poet to deal with major political and cultural events in your work?
XJ: Nope.
Hub: Many of your poems are from, after, based on, or violations of various non-English language poets, such as Apollinaire, Dante, Rimbaud, Ts'ui Hao, von Hofmannsthal etc. Do you read or translate in many foreign languages? Do you feel that working in languages other than English informs your poetry overall? If so, how?
XJ: French is the only furrin tongue I have any competence in. My one Chinese translation and my one German one were done from cribs. I was commissioned to translate Aristophanes' "Lysistrata" for the Penn Complete Greek Drama series, and happily did the job – by comparing a dozen or fourteen other English versions, just to get a sense of the sense. That experience was a revelation. Aristophanes goes in for topical gags, like a late night TV comedian, and in many cases nobody knows anymore what he's referring to. I asked the editor of the Penn series, David Slavitt, what to do about that, and he suggested, "Where he's got a joke, you put a joke." But that seemed to me cheating, so I studied up on the playwright's times, and consulted heavily footnoted editions like the Loeb Classics one, and then stuck my neck out and took a guess at what each joke was all about. One scholar had the fruitful advice, "When translating Aristophanes, keep your mind in the gutter." That really helped. I immodestly think my "Lysistrata" the funniest version. And it's been staged only once, in Iowa City. But please forgive me – I digress.
Certainly one learns from translating poetry. It's a humbling experience, and if you're trying to preserve something of the form of the original (as I always do), you have to work a hell of a lot harder than if you're writing something yourself. From 1955 when I was living in Paris on the GI Bill until 1992 when I gave up and included it in the collection Dark Horses, I wrestled with a version of Apollinaire's great and ultimately untranslatable "Le Pont Mirabeau." That experience probably informed all my own work, although God knows how, exactly. Maybe you learn from aspiring to do the impossible.
Hub: Translation is a hot topic right now, with published translations in the US at an all-time low and the competing new translations of War & Peace getting a lot of press; how important do you feel translation of "world literature" is to a healthy literary culture in America?
XJ: Sure, it's important that Americans stay aware of whatever excellent writing transpires beyond New York and Los Angeles. Keeps us from getting blindered. And it's healthy that some of the elder classics are translated anew for our own times – for instance, Edith Grossman's wonderful recent translation of Don Quixote, which makes that immense book far more readable and accessible than it had been before. In poetry, it's healthy that we have had some of our best poets these days working on the Divine Comedy, though most stop short of rendering the whole thing. I think of Michael Palma's splendid new version of the Inferno, in which he even preserves Dante's terza rima. Such translators are doing us a colossal favor – enlarging our world.
Hub: Young poets seem to be important to you, obvious by your work as a teacher and a writer of textbooks, and more so by your poem "Celebrations after the Death of John Brennan," who was a promising young poet and close friend. Are there any young poets that you read today? Can you tell us a little about why you enjoy them?
XJ: Golly, compared to me, most poets are young! Among the younger, I've lately been hugely impressed by Erica Dawson, who has a terrific first book coming out from Way Wiser Press. She has passion and energy – the main elements of good poetry, I think – and an amazing command of rhyme and meter. Some of her poems are both controlled and wild. There's a young man now in California, Ed Skoog, who's done interesting things; and in Seattle, there's Eric McHenry, whose first book Potscrubber Lullabies hits me as both moving and hilarious. Chelsea Rathburn did another fine debut volume. A. E. (Alicia) Stallings can't be too old yet, and she's still up and coming fast. Jennifer Reeser of Louisiana has a couple of solidly impressive books. In Cambridge, Mass., there's the astounding man-wife team of Philip Nikolayev and Katia Kapovich, who write poems separately, and whose native language is Russian but who know how to make the English language jump through hoops. And up in Newburyport, Mass., nowadays the Byzantium of rhyme and meter, the Powow Poets group includes relative youngsters like Robert Crawford, Midge Goldberg, Bill Coyle, Alfred Nichol, all with books out, among 'em some prizewinners. Newburyporters Deborah Warren and A. M. (Mike) Juster, whose books have also copped prizes, certainly deserve mention, though they're past their virgin blooms. Well, I could go on and on. Poetry isn't dead, fortunately, as long as such people still care for it.
