The spokesman for defenceless fringe of civilization

Peter Huchel

Huchel, Peter (Berlin-Lichterfelde, 1903-81, Staufen, Baden), studied from 1923 to 1926 in Berlin, Freiburg, and Vienna, travelled extensively, and in the 1930s contributed a number of radio plays to Berlin's radio station. Called up in 1940, he became in 1945 a Russian prisoner of war, but was released to work for the Soviet-controlled radio station (Berlin), whose cultural director he became.

In 1949 he was appointed editor-in-chief of the newly founded literary periodical Sinn and Fum, which soon bore the stamp of his own cultural vision. His inadequate orthodoxy, however, led to his enforced resignation and subsequent isolation and surveillance; in 1971 he was at last allowed to move to the West.Huchel's poetry is deeply imbued with the image and spirit of the landscape of the Mark Brandenburg, in which he spent his childhood and youth; at the same time this region shaped his social consciousness, which became an integral part of his perception of nature.

The pervasive melancholy mood of his poetry with its prevalence of bleak images and shadows focuses on diverse country folk, poor despite toil and resigned to their lot. To Huchel they came to represent the defenceless fringe of civilization. As his experience of a dehumanized world deepened, he found his metaphors in the exposed marches, where nature follows its perpetual reciprocal cycle of devouring: ‘Die Natur war für mich Fressen und Gefressenwerden’ (‘Die Nachbarn’ is a late example).

With the same clear-cut departure from customary associations he integrates biblical, mythical, and literary motifs, from which his poetry derives both variety and cohesion. ‘Atmet noch schwach, / Durch die Kehle des Schilfrohrs, / Der vereiste Fluß?’ read the last three lines of ‘Winterpsalm’. At the same time such expressions of numb paralysis allude to specific spheres of experience even when these are not directly addressed.

In ‘Polybios’ the Greek chronicler of Antiquity, pointing to a fallen warrior, consigns the inexpressible to the metaphor of the thistle (‘Hier liegt einer, / Der wollte noch singen / Mit einer Distel im Mund’), which, a key to the hermetic verse of his late poetry, is resumed in ‘Unter der Wurzel der Distel’ (‘Wohnt nun die Sprache’).

The vision of death and oblivion is nowhere more immediate than in the tightly wrought verse of ‘Schnee’; but, dedicated to the memory of Hans Henny Jahnn, it is also a statement on the function of art. Special significance attaches to the recurring motif of the highroad (Chaussee), witness to the ravages of war and its refugees.After Der Knabenteich (1932), the first post-war volume, Gedichte, appeared in 1948, Chausseen Chausseen in 1963, Die Sternenreuse in 1967, Gezählte Tage in 1972, and Die neunte Stunde in 1979. Huchel was awarded a number of honours, notably the Austrian Staatspreis for European Literature (1971).

His influence as a leading contributor to modern verse is marked by the Peter Huchel Prize for Lyric Poetry, whose recipients include Sarah Krisch (1993). Correspondence with Hans Henny Jahnn, Briefwechsel 1951-1959, appeared in 1974; Gesammelte Werke (2 vols.), ed. A. Vieregg, in 1984. Huchel edited the first posthumous volume of poetry by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (Gedichte, 1975).
Life

Huchel studied literature and philosophy in Berlin, Freidburg and Vienna. Between 1927 and 1930 he travelled to France, Romania, Hungary and Turkey. In 1930, he changed his first name to Peter and befriended Ernst Bloch, Alfred Kantorowicz and Fritz Sternberg. His early poems, published from 1931 to 1936, are strongly marked by the atmosphere and landscape of Brandenburg.

In 1934, Huchel married Dora Lassel. The couple divorced in 1946 and Huchel married Monica Rosental in 1953. Between 1934 and 1940, Huchel wrote plays for German radio. During the Second World War, he served as a soldier until he was taken prisoner by the Russians in 1945.

After his release, he began working for East German radio and in 1949, he became editor of the influential poetry magazine Sinn und Form ("Sense and Form"). After the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Huchel came under attack from the East German authorities and the following year he was forced to resign the editorshop of Sinn und Form. From 1962 to 1971, he lived in isolation under Stasi (secret service) surveillance in his house in Wilhelmshorst near Berlin. In 1971, he was finally permitted to leave the German Democratic Republic and move, first to Rome, then to Staufen im Breiscau, where he later died.
Peter Huchel

Huchel, Peter (Berlin-Lichterfelde, 1903-81, Staufen, Baden), studied from 1923 to 1926 in Berlin, Freiburg, and Vienna, travelled extensively, and in the 1930s contributed a number of radio plays to Berlin's radio station. Called up in 1940, he became in 1945 a Russian prisoner of war, but was released to work for the Soviet-controlled radio station (Berlin), whose cultural director he became.

In 1949 he was appointed editor-in-chief of the newly founded literary periodical Sinn and Fum, which soon bore the stamp of his own cultural vision. His inadequate orthodoxy, however, led to his enforced resignation and subsequent isolation and surveillance; in 1971 he was at last allowed to move to the West.Huchel's poetry is deeply imbued with the image and spirit of the landscape of the Mark Brandenburg, in which he spent his childhood and youth; at the same time this region shaped his social consciousness, which became an integral part of his perception of nature.

The pervasive melancholy mood of his poetry with its prevalence of bleak images and shadows focuses on diverse country folk, poor despite toil and resigned to their lot. To Huchel they came to represent the defenceless fringe of civilization. As his experience of a dehumanized world deepened, he found his metaphors in the exposed marches, where nature follows its perpetual reciprocal cycle of devouring: ‘Die Natur war für mich Fressen und Gefressenwerden’ (‘Die Nachbarn’ is a late example).

With the same clear-cut departure from customary associations he integrates biblical, mythical, and literary motifs, from which his poetry derives both variety and cohesion. ‘Atmet noch schwach, / Durch die Kehle des Schilfrohrs, / Der vereiste Fluß?’ read the last three lines of ‘Winterpsalm’. At the same time such expressions of numb paralysis allude to specific spheres of experience even when these are not directly addressed.

In ‘Polybios’ the Greek chronicler of Antiquity, pointing to a fallen warrior, consigns the inexpressible to the metaphor of the thistle (‘Hier liegt einer, / Der wollte noch singen / Mit einer Distel im Mund’), which, a key to the hermetic verse of his late poetry, is resumed in ‘Unter der Wurzel der Distel’ (‘Wohnt nun die Sprache’).

The vision of death and oblivion is nowhere more immediate than in the tightly wrought verse of ‘Schnee’; but, dedicated to the memory of Hans Henny Jahnn, it is also a statement on the function of art. Special significance attaches to the recurring motif of the highroad (Chaussee), witness to the ravages of war and its refugees.After Der Knabenteich (1932), the first post-war volume, Gedichte, appeared in 1948, Chausseen Chausseen in 1963, Die Sternenreuse in 1967, Gezählte Tage in 1972, and Die neunte Stunde in 1979. Huchel was awarded a number of honours, notably the Austrian Staatspreis for European Literature (1971).

His influence as a leading contributor to modern verse is marked by the Peter Huchel Prize for Lyric Poetry, whose recipients include Sarah Krisch (1993). Correspondence with Hans Henny Jahnn, Briefwechsel 1951-1959, appeared in 1974; Gesammelte Werke (2 vols.), ed. A. Vieregg, in 1984. Huchel edited the first posthumous volume of poetry by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (Gedichte, 1975).
Life

Huchel studied literature and philosophy in Berlin, Freidburg and Vienna. Between 1927 and 1930 he travelled to France, Romania, Hungary and Turkey. In 1930, he changed his first name to Peter and befriended Ernst Bloch, Alfred Kantorowicz and Fritz Sternberg. His early poems, published from 1931 to 1936, are strongly marked by the atmosphere and landscape of Brandenburg.

In 1934, Huchel married Dora Lassel. The couple divorced in 1946 and Huchel married Monica Rosental in 1953. Between 1934 and 1940, Huchel wrote plays for German radio. During the Second World War, he served as a soldier until he was taken prisoner by the Russians in 1945.

After his release, he began working for East German radio and in 1949, he became editor of the influential poetry magazine Sinn und Form ("Sense and Form"). After the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Huchel came under attack from the East German authorities and the following year he was forced to resign the editorshop of Sinn und Form. From 1962 to 1971, he lived in isolation under Stasi (secret service) surveillance in his house in Wilhelmshorst near Berlin. In 1971, he was finally permitted to leave the German Democratic Republic and move, first to Rome, then to Staufen im Breiscau, where he later died.
Some poems

Eastern River by Peter Huchel

Do not look for the stones

in water above the mud,

the boat is gone.

No longer with nets and baskets

the river is dotted.

The sun wick,

the marsh marigold flickered out in rain.

Only the willow still bears witness,

in its roots

the secrets of tramps lie hidden,

their paltry treasures,

a rusty fishhook,

a bottle full of sand,

a tine with no bottom,

in which to preserve

conversations long forgotten.

On the boughs,

empty nests of the penduline titmice

,shoes light as birds.

No one slips them

over children's feet.
Answer by Peter Huchel

Between two nightsthe brief day.

The farm is there.

And in the thicket, a snare

the hunter set for us.

Noon’s desert.

It still warms the stone.

Chirping in the wind,

buzz of a guitardown the hillside.

The slow match

of withered foliage

glows against the wall.

Salt-white air.

Fall’s arrowheads,

the crane’s migration.

In bright tree limbs

the tolling hour has faded.

Upon their clockwork

spiders lay

the veils of dead brides.

Meeting by Peter Huchel
For Michael Hamburger

Barn owl

daughter of snow,

subject to the night wind,

yet taking root

with her talons

in the rotten scab of walls,

beak face

with round eyes,

heart-rigid mask

of feathers a white fire

that touches neither time nor space.

Coldly the wind blows

against the old homestead,

in the yard pale folk,

sledges, baggage, lamps covered with snow,

in the pots death,

in the pitchers poison,

the last will nailed to a post.

The hidden thing

under the rocks' claws,

the opening into night,

the terror of death thrust into flesh

like stinging salt.

Let us go down

in the language of angels

to the broken bricks of Babel.

Melpomene by Peter Huchel
The forest bitter, spiky,

no shore breeze, no foothills,

the grass grows matted, death will come

with horses' hooves, endlessly

over the steppes' mounds, we went back,

searching the sky for the fort

that could not be razed.

The villages hostile,

the cottages cleared out in haste,

smoked skin on the attic beams,

snare netting, bone amulets.

All over the country an evil reverence,

animals' heads in the mist, divination

by willow wands.

Later, up in the North,

stag-eyed men

rushed by on horseback.

We buried the dead.

It was hard

to break the soil with our axes,

fir had to thaw it out.

The blood of sacrificed cockerels

was not accepted.

A Corporate Poet

Katherine Lederer

Katherine "Katy" Lederer is an American poet and author of the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers.

Lederer is the daughter of bestselling non-fiction author Richard Lederer and the sister of world-class poker players Howard Lederer and Annie Duke. She graduated from St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, where her father was on the English faculty.

Lederer later attended the University of California at Berkeley,from which she received her BA in English and anthropology. After graduating in 1995, Lederer moved to Las Vegas to study poker with her siblings, and was subsequently accepted to theIowa Writer's Workshop on an Iowa Arts Fellowship.

While at Iowa, Lederer founded the zine Explosive, which was published in a limited edition of 300 with hand-printed covers by the artist and writer David Larsen. The tenth and final issue of Explosive was published in 2006. From 1998-1999, she was the editor of the Poetry Project Newsletter out of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery . Lederer continues to publish limited-edition books and chapbooks under the Spectacular Books imprint, and also serves as a Poetry Editor of Fence magazine.

After completing her studies at Iowa in 1998, Lederer moved to New York City, where she worked for psychoanalyst Arnold Cooper. After this, she worked as a coordinator of the Barnard New Women Poets program. In 1999, she signed a contract with Crown Books to write a memoir about her family’s life in gambling.

Lederer made her poetry debut in 2002 with the collection Winter Sex. Poet D.A.Powell described the poems in the collection “as leaps of faith, fibrillating in the dark world with a kinetic energy that rises out of erotic desire.” Her memoir, Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers was published in 2003. It was chosen as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was named a Best Nonfiction Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and one of eight Best Books of the Year by Esquire Magazine..

From 2002 to 2008, Lederer worked at a quantitative hedge fund in midtown Manhattan, which provided much of the inspiration for the pieces in her most recent poetry collection, The Heaven-Sent Leaf. The title of both the book and the opening poem is taken from the second half of Goethe’s Faust and describes paper money. Other poems in the collection reference the works of John Kenneth Galbraith, Nietzsche and Edith Wharton

From an excerpt

For the past six years, Lederer, who is thirty-six and holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has worked at D. E. Shaw, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, with thirty-six billion dollars under its management. The other day, in her apartment in Prospect Heights, she recalled her decision to take the job: “Everyone I knew in the poetry world was pretty confused, like maybe I had gone crazy.”

She had already published a volume of poetry and a memoir, “Poker Face,” which describes her coming-of-age in a family of gamblers (her siblings Howard Lederer and Annie Duke are two of the world’s best poker players). Still, facing her thirtieth birthday, she was bouncing between illegal sublets and living on part-time jobs and peanut-butter sandwiches. “I wanted money,” she said.

At first, Lederer’s two lives—the creative and the corporate—remained separate; she was another one of New York’s day jobbers, leaving her writing each morning to toil in “pristine white hallways,” as a line from “The Heaven-Sent Leaf” puts it. Meanwhile, her fortunes rose along with the fund’s; she became vice-president of recruiting, earning a salary that was “multiples of what many creative-writing professors I know make.”

Then, in 2004, she spent a month at Yaddo. For reading, she took along study materials for the Series 7 stockbroker’s exam, as well as books by Thorstein Veblen and John Kenneth Galbraith. “Veblen talks about poetry as being similar to Latin, useless and a waste of time,” she said. “It’s a form of conspicuous consumption.” Still, Lederer said, she was struck by the metaphors he and Galbraith used. “The language is gorgeous,” she said. “Like Edith Wharton and Dorothy Parker, Galbraith is witty and sarcastic.” She started to crib phrases like “dead-level,” “squirrel wheel,” and “immiseration of the masses” for her verse.

The results were the beginnings of “The Heaven-Sent Leaf” (BOA Editions), whose title takes its name from a passage in “Faust” describing money. The book explores not just economic bubbles but metaphysical bubbles—the highs and lows of love, religious ecstasy, and aesthetic rapture. In “The Flower of Life” (the title is from Wharton), Lederer writes:

Today, from the bridge, the East River is sparkling. The money is swirling around the tall buildings like tides or like tithes, And I wonder, does anyone swim in
this river, I wonder, does anyone pray?

The poems are tense and flinty (a review in Publishers Weekly praised their “viscous push-pull between money and Eros”). From her insider’s vantage point, Lederer said, she could see that this most recent bubble was bound to explode. “It was in the air three years ago. Like, at work everyone knew,” she recalled. “Even I could tell it was going to happen. I wondered, why would people trade if they knew the bubble would burst? That’s what the whole book is about.”
“Intimacy,” probably the first love poem to cite the nineteen-eighties junk-bond king Michael Milken, describes Milken’s “pulmonary conscience pumping darkly in his greedy heart.” Lederer said she views Milken as a “Gollum-like” figure. “He was a creative genius, the way that he packaged debt,” she said. “In finance, that makes you Mozart. Ultimately, however, that was also his downfall.”

Just before Labor Day, Lederer left the hedge fund, though she continues to do freelance recruiting for financial firms. She is now on a twenty-eight-city book tour. (She’s paying for it herself.) Still, she said, she hasn’t been writing much. “I’ve been watching my 401k go up and down.”

From an interview

Tess Vigeland: We've all witnessed a financial boom and one spectacular bust. It is the stuff of drama -- but, poetry? Katy Lederer is a poet who did indeed find inspiration in high finance. Lederer worked for six years as a hedge fund recruiter in New York. She recently left and now has a book of poems out. It's called "The Heaven-Sent Leaf." Welcome to the program.
Katy Lederer: Thanks so much for having me.
Vigeland: How did you come to write about high finance and money?
Lederer: I studied poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and I was basically just doing my poet thing until I was about 30 and I just wanted security and health insurance, and I applied to work at a hedge fund. And while I was there, you know, I obviously learned a lot about finance and ended up writing about it.
Vigeland: Your book is called "The Heaven-Sent Leaf" and we had one of our producers read a bit from the title poem. Let's take a listen.
Marketplace Producer:
The speculation of contemporary life.
The teeming green of utterance.

To feel this clean,
This dream-eclat.

There is, in the heart, the hard-rendering profit.
As if we were plucking the leaves from the trees.

Let us think of the soft verdure of this spirit of this age as now inside of us and swollen by spring rain.
To imagine oneself as a river.

To imagine oneself as a stretch of cool water,
pouring into a basin or brain.

And if one knows one is not free?
One crawls from the back of the head to the river.

And places one's pinkie oh so cautiously in.
Vigeland: So "The Heaven-Sent Leaf" -- we're talking about money, right?

Lederer: Yes. That comes from Goethe's "Faust" actually, and it's basically a description of paper money.

Vigeland: The printing of money is certainly a big topic right now as the Fed does a lot of it.

Lederer: In the Goethe, actually what happens in this scene is that an emperor is having economic problems and Mephistopheles says, 'why don't you print these contracts based on the gold that's under the ground in your kingdom that hasn't yet been discovered?' And in a way this is an interesting version of a futures contract -- an I.O.U. -- highly relevant and obviously goes to show you, as I think people have realized, these bubbles have happened throughout history and, you know, you want to hope people are going to learn from this one.

Vigeland: So, how is it that you find money poetic?

Lederer: You know, one of the answers to that question is that money is so un-poetic; it's kind of the opposite of poetry, and as opposites will do, it kind of jogged the other side of things for me. You know, in that kind of very un-poetic space, it sort of inspired me more in a way than being, let's say, in a lush garden or I don't know, a more cliche poetic space.

Vigeland: I detect a little bit of cynicism in some of your work here. Where's that coming from?

Lederer: One of the things actually I studied in college was anthropology, so I couldn't help but bring that a little bit into the hedge fund environment. So, this isn't my natural environment and certainly I had some skepticism; I'd been trained all my life to be very suspicious of that kind of environment and to feel that even if good people go into finance, you'll be corrupted, right. It's like Gollum in "Lord of the Rings" -- you could be a great person and you get that ring of power and you become a slimy, slithery preacher, and you know, you have to kind of keep that ring, that money a little bit separate from yourself or else you will be taken over by it.

Vigeland: Well Katy Lederer, it's been a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you for sharing your poetry. The book is "The Heaven-Sent Leaf." Thanks so much.

Lederer: Thank you.

Katy Lederer poems

Intimacy
These three bridges, like the brain, lit up and heading out toward Brooklyn.

I am slumped in the cab, thinking heady thoughts of heady things.
Like an ostrich. Or like an intellectual thriller.

For example, "Den of Thieves," in which the arbitrageur Michael Milken is at first

defined by a health ambition that later in the story turns to plot-driving greed.

It's as if his most natural desire to do good had over many years metastasized, crackling

over the phone lines, hiding out in the backseat of his de riguer black limousine, via

messenger across the Park, his pulmonary conscience pumping darkly in his greedy heart...

Like a toddler hiding grimly in a closet or a hamper.

Or like the king who fled the palace on the hill that's now ablaze.

Which explains, I guess, the fighter jets that circle overhead.

The surfeit of broadband, as well as this beautiful bed now bereft of our lowly ambition.

I'm lying here, there's no one else, and the flowers that you've given me are wilting in the Slurpee cup.

There is ambient noise.

Noise of jet planes,

Desire.

The Heaven-Sent Leaf

The speculation of contemporary life.
The teeming green of utterance.

To feel this clean,
This dream-eclat.

There is, in the heart, the hard-rendering profit.
As if we were plucking the leaves from the trees.
Let us think of the soft verdure of this spirit of this age as now inside of us and swollen

by spring rain.
To imagine oneself as a river.

To imagine oneself as a stretch of cool water,
pouring into a basin or brain.

And if one knows one is not free?
One crawls from the back of the head to the river.

And places one's pinkie oh so cautiously in.

Brainworker

To learn to keep distance.

To learn to keep drear managerial impulse from the animal mind.

Along the dard edge of this reason. Along the dark edge of this mind's little prison, inside


of its bars now a silky white cat.

Howling.

Crawling in its little cage.

Inside of its cage is the bright light of disease.

To learn to be an animal. To learn to be that primal.

To know who will slip you the fresh dish of milk.

To long for your manager's written approval.

So soon am I up for my year-end review?

The moon above settles into its shadow.

I am howling at you.


That Everything's Inevitable

That everything's inevitable.

That fate is whatever has already happened.

The brain, which is as elemental, as sane, as the rest of the processing universe is.

In this world, I am the surest thing.

Scrunched-up arms, folded legs, lovely destitute eyes.

Please insert your spare coins.

I am filling them up.

Please insert your spare vision, your vigor, your vim.

But yet, I am a vatic one.

As vatic as the Vatican.

In the temper and the tantrum, in the well-kept arboretum

I am waiting, like an animal,

For poetry.

Good Natured Poet

Debra Nystrom

Debra Nystrom who is teaching as Associate Professor, Poetry Writing has the following degrees
MFA, Goddard/Warren Wilson, 1980B.A., University of South Dakota, 1976 ; The books following have earned a reputation for her

Bad River Road (forthcoming, Sarabande Books, 2009)
Torn Sky, Sarabande Books, 2003
A Quarter Turn , Sheep Meadow Press, 1991

Her poems were published In
Agni Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review, Lyric, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, Seneca Review, Slate, Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere.

And her works were anthologized in

Best American Poetry 2008, Scribner, 2008
When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poems by American Women, Autumn House Press, 2008
Red, White and Blues: Poetic Vistas on the Promise of America, University of Iowa Press, 2004
Strongly Spent: Fifty Years of Shenandoah, Shenandoah, 2004
Common Wealth, University of Virginia Press, 2003
Birthday Poems, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002
Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America, University of Iowa Press, 2002
Acquainted With the Night, Columbia University Press, 1999
The Sheep Meadow Anthology, Sheep Meadow Press, 1999
More Light, National Writer’s Voice Project, Harcourt Brace Publishers, 1994

Current Projects

On the Bluff: Land, Family, Race and Law (memoir)
The Capacity to be Alone: the Lyric Poem (essays)

Honors and Awards

Virginia Commonwealth University, Cabell Memorial Reading and Panel, 2008
James Dickey Prize in Poetry, Five Points Magazine, 2007
University of Virginia Arts Research Grant, 2006
“American Life in Poetry” feature, Poetry Foundation, October 2005
Library of Virginia Poetry Prize, 2004
Writers’ Almanac feature, A Prairie Home Companion, September 2004; May 2004
PoetryNet Poet of the Month, April 2004
Shepard Memorial Visiting Writer, University of Wyoming Conference on Social Justice, 2004
Heart/Borders Poetry Prize, 2002
Lantern Society Award for Women’s Education, 2002
James Boatwright Prize for Poetry, Shenandoah Magazine: 2000 and 1994
Pushcart Prize nominations: 2004, 2003, 1990, 1988, 1985, 1984
Virginia Commission for the Arts Individual Fellowships in Poetry: 1997 and 1987
Balch Prize for Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, 1991
Debra Nystrom was born in Pierre, South Dakota. She is the author of Torn Sky, published in 2003 by Sarabande Books, and an earlier volume, A Quarter Turn, from Sheep Meadow Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Ploughshares, Slate and The Threepenny Review. She has received the James Boatwright prize from Shenandoah, the Balch Prize from The Virginia Quarterly Review, and has been awarded two individual artist’s grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, as well as the HeArt/Borders Books Prize for Poetry. She teaches in the University of Virginia Creative Writing Program, and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband and daughter.

Statement of Poetics

I grew up in South Dakota, among reserved farming and ranching people. The sense of the unspoken was always palpable there, amid the homesteaders’ descendants, the native Lakota, and in the landscape itself.

I think that my curiosity about what language can do comes from a wish to grasp— through patternings of sound, rhythm, syntax and image— the kind of meaning that is experienced physically: that can't be easily paraphrased, but attests to the inner self which hasn't many opportunities for expression in our culture.

Yeats said that "we believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body." When a poem communicates to us in that way, it's possible to feel for a moment less essentially alone. A poem like Robert Frost's "Mowing" or Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" touches that most isolated, inarticulate part of me that had despaired of intimacy.

I write in an effort to bring forward into clarity and drama (though not into explanation) that part of life which is usually kept back.

Window

by

Debra Nystrom

The window of her last room,

in the subacute ward, building

next door to death,

was lovely in the evenings, after visitors

had come and gone, after Dad

had taken Brad back to the farm

and made his last stop in, and

all the machines and tile faded

as snow outside grew violet, then

white against the dark, a steady

glow beneath us. I could leave

the curtains apart while she slept

more heavily with the bigger night

dose of morphine, and I gave up

reading my Chekhov story.

After the first days she hardly

opened her eyes, and the sky

had clouded over, so I left it there

all the time, that square of world

we seemed to have known before,

though we'd never been there.

Now I picture snow, stark, definite

against the trees, then realize, no:

it was just September; even in

South Dakota an early snow

wouldn't stay on the ground

that long. Maybe there wasn't

any snow, only the pale light,

and her window altering

the way light passed through it.


Floater

by Debra Nystrom

—to Dan

Maddening shadow across your line of vision—

what might be there, then isn't, making it

hard to be on the lookout, concentrate, even

hear—well, enough of the story I've

given you, at least—you've had your fill,

never asked for this, though you were the one

to put a hand out, catch hold, not about to let me

vanish the way of the two you lost already

to grief's lure. I'm here; close your eyes,

listen to our daughter practicing, going over and over

the Bach, getting the mordents right, to make the lovely

Invention definite. What does mordent mean,

her piano teacher asked—I was waiting in the kitchen

and overheard—I don't know, something about dying?

No; morire means to die, mordere means to take

a bite out of something—good mistake, she said.

Not to die, to take a bite—what you asked

of me—and then pleasure

in the taking. Close your eyes now,

listen. No one is leaving.

More on novel

Kim Addonizio

Kim Addonizio is the author of four poetry collections including Tell Me, A National Book Award Finalist. Her fifth collection, Lucifer at the Starlite, will be published by W.W. Norton in October 2009.

Addonizio has also authored two instructional books on writing poetry: The Poet's Companion (with Dorianne Laux), and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, both from W.W. Norton.

Her first novel, Little Beauties, was published by Simon & Schuster in August 2005 and came out in paperback inJuly 06. Little Beauties was chosen as "Best Book of the Month" by Book of the Month Club. My Dreams Out in the Street, her second novel, was released by Simon & Schuster in 2007.

She also has a word/music CD with poet Susan Browne, "Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing," available fromc cdbaby; a book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure (FC2); and the anthology Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos, coedited with Cheryl Dumesnil.

Addonizio's awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship,a Pushcart Prize, a Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award.Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared widely in anthologies, literary journals, and textbooks, including Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Bad Girls, Chick-Lit, Dick for a Day, Gettysburg Review, Paris Review, Penthouse, Poetry, and Threepenny Review. She teaches private workshops in Oakland, CA, and online.

Fame blessed Kim Addonizio’s family in triple corners .Her mother Paulinen Betz Addie (b.1919), four-time U.S. singles champion in the 1940's, was renowned for her peerless backhand and 'killer instinct.' When international play resumed after World War II, Betz became one of a handful of champions to win on her first try at Wimbledon in 1946.

Raised in Los Angeles, Betz learned tennis on public courts. She was offered a scholarship by Rollins College where she played Np.4 on the men's team and graduated as the top economics student in 1943. Letz later earned an M.A. in economics from Columbia University.

As an undergraduate in 1942, Betz won her first U.S. singles title. She repeated her victory in 1943 and 1944 and triumphed at both Wimbledon and Forest Hills in 1946. That year she also played a key role on the U.S. Wightman Cup team, dubbed the 'Betz Club.'

Betz turned professional in 1947, enjoying a 13-year undefeated career on tour with such notables as Don Budge and Bobby Riggs. In 1949 she married Washington Post sportswriter Bob Addie. After retiring as a player she remained an active teaching professional while raising her five children. In 1990 she received the USTA's Sarah Palfrey Danzig Award for her contributions to tennis.

Kim Addonizio’s father Robert Addie (February 6, 1910 - January 18, 1982) was an American

Sportswriterwho covered baseball for The Washington Post and Washington Times-Herald. Addie was known for his clean style, hilarious anecdotes, unabashed sentiment, red socks and dark glasses.

Bob covered the PGA after baseball moved from Washington. Bob wrote many articles for the Post after his retirement from the paper in 1977.

He wrote a book about his sports writing career entitled Sportswriter which was published in 1980. They have five children, a daughter and four sons.

Previous occupations: waitress, fry cook, tennis instructor, Kelly Girl (deadening temporary office work), attendant for the disabled, auto parts store bookkeeper.

Kim Addonizio’s daughter, Aya Cash, born on 1983, San Francisco, California, graduated from

the Guthrie BFA acting program at the University of Minnesotam, a New York Stage actress; performed three seasons with The Great River Shakespeare Festival, won three California Governor's awards for acting and is a two time California Regional Shakespeare Champion, and a graduate of San Francisco School of the Arts.

She is an amazing actor who lives Brooklyn. She'll be appearing as a guest star on "Law and Order" in early 2009.

Kim Addonizio has four brothers; her SIGN Leo, FAVORITE COLOR Teal blue
FAVORITE POETS John Keats Walt Whitman Elizabeth Bishop all the ancient Chinese & Japanese Jack Gilbert C.K.Williams Ovid Antonio Machado Emily Dickinson William Blake Dean Young
FAVORITE SINGER/SONGWRITERS Adam Duritz Patty Griffin Sarah McLachlan Ani Di Franco Tom Waits Steve Earle
SHE CONSIDERS HER PREVIOUS INCARNATION IS Edna St. Vincent Millay
WHO SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE Old black man sitting on the porch playing blues harmonica all day long

HOW SHE SPENDS HER TIME WHEN SHE IS NOT WRITING Weightlifting, tennis, ice skating, yoga, teaching, reading, listening to blues, playing my Mississippi Saxophone, drinking wine, spending too much money on eating out, watching TV & DVDs, feeling fucked up, feeling happy, feeling important, feeling stupid and inconsequential, obsessing over Iraq & other corporate imperialist misadventures

Adam Goldwyn inteviewed Kim Addonizio, author of My Dreams out in the Street
Kim Addonizio’s new novel, My Dreams out in the Street, tells the story of Rita, a drug addict and prostitute, and her boyfriend, Jimmy, a petty crook.

As we follow their story, we also get a chance to see late ‘90s San Francisco at its worst: drug addiction, prostitution, alcoholism, homelessness, dirty cops and, worst of all, the indifferent masses of the well-to-do who pretend not to see a thing.

My Dreams out in the Street is, however, a story about people: their (often overwhelming) faults and weaknesses, but also about their eternal optimism and sheer will to live. Above all, it is a love story, reminding us that love can blossom and endure even under the harshest of conditions.

(Kim and I discussed a number of different topics: her choice of setting, her views on beauty, the purpose of literature, the role of literary prizes and the difficulties even two people in love can have in maintaining their relationship. – AG)

Adam Goldwyn: First, let me ask you about the setting of the novel. My Dreams out in the Street is deeply imbued with the sights, sounds and spirit of San Francisco, a city famous for its counter-cultural fervor. Your characters often hang out in the city's legendary counter-culture hot spots, like the Haight-Ashbury, but also the city's seedier areas, such as the Tenderloin and Mission districts, and other famous landmarks like Golden Gate Park. In terms of time, the novel is not set in the '60s and '70s, the hey-day of San Francisco rebellion, but in the '90s, when San Francisco was just becoming famous again, but for an entirely different reason: its new wealth as the center of Silicon Valley. Indeed, the famed corner of Haight-Ashbury now boasts a Ben and Jerry's, the epitome of bourgeois respectability. Perhaps you could talk a little about the relationship of the setting, in terms of time and place, to the novel: why did you decide to set the novel in San Francisco just as the dot-com boom was beginning? Could this novel have taken place in another time or location? Could its characters have survived anywhere else, or is theirs a uniquely a San Franciscan story?

Kim Addonizio: In the time the novel is set, the dot-com money was flooding San Francisco, driving up prices, and displacing a lot of poorer people. In 1997, the year the novel occurs, there were particularly heavy rains (winter is the rainy season there), and the homeless died in record numbers. Reagan, when he was governor of CA, closed mental institutions in the sixties, thereby kicking out a lot of mentally ill people into the streets, and the facilities to care for them never really materialized after that. So it's a particularly San Francisco story in that way, but these characters can be found in almost any major urban area. San Francisco is the city I know well, since I moved there in the late seventies. I moved across the Bay to Oakland in 2001. So I used what I knew and what I observed-big encampments of the homeless in Golden Gate Park, for example, or the Goodwill store where Rita goes to dig through bins for cheap clothing.

AG: That's interesting, because, though I hadn't thought of it as a novel about social consciousness, now that you point that out, it seems to me that it is one of the novel's major themes.

To go to the obvious question: do you see this book as in any way political, or as a call to some sort of action?

Are you trying to make a statement about public health or government policy? Were you trying to make people aware of the living conditions of the urban poor?

KA: I think this book has a social conscience, but I don’t think it’s particularly political, and it’s not a call to action; it’s a novel. I guess Upton Sinclair would have a different idea, but I don’t think novels are meant to work on that level; non-fiction or a documentary can generally accomplish a lot more in that direction. I’m just trying to write about characters I find interesting, but if this novel had the effect of making someone slightly readjust their preconceptions I’d be happy.

AG: San Francisco's famed counter-culture stems in large part from its unique literary history: it was home to Kerouac, Ginsberg and several other authors of the Beat movement, which was the first literary movement to depict the counter-culture of easy sex and easy drugs. Your characters are for the most part drug addicts, prostitutes and petty criminals: the types of characters the Beats championed.

There seems to be a pretty strong literary genealogy for My Dreams out in the Street with the Beats, and other authors like William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson, and again, there seems to be this San Francisco connection. What influence did the Beats and the San Francisco literary scene have on My Dreams out in the Street? What other works influenced your writing? As a novel, it necessarily draws from previous literature, but it also seems to be a novel about experience, by which I mean lived experience from the real world, not experience drawn from reading. In your writing process, or in the finished work, what is the relationship between lived experience and literary experience?

KA: Of course the tradition goes back farther than the Beats, if you hop over to Europe-back, I imagine, to the beginnings of literature. Some writers I read early on were people like Baudelaire, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille. And Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn was huge, for me. I liked the Beats, but I was never more interested in them than, say, Keats. I read Kerouac and Brautigan and Ginsberg and Burroughs, but I can't say I ever felt some big Beat influence.

Everyone was reading them then. In high school I was a big Philip Roth fan. And then there was Aldous Huxley and Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann, some Dostoyevsky in there. Kafka. The Beats were just a part of that list. As for lived experience, imaginative experience is a part of life, so I don't separate them so much. There are autobiographical elements in all my work, but you wouldn't be able to know what they were, what's been transformed, what's been completely invented.

At least, I hope not. I'm not interested in writing my story but in writing my characters' story. They're all some all some piece of me, though I've never been a homeless junkie prostitute, or a former child pageant star with OCD, or a pregnant teenager, or a criminal investigator. Personally I don't care if an author has lived through something physically or not.

I want to know that she can write really well, create characters I feel for. And I want to undergo some sort of transformative experience through reading the book. I want to know the author has felt something deeply and thought about it and can convey some mysteries and discoveries.

AG: It's true that the Beat genealogy, and drug use for artistic purposes does go back a lot further than twentieth century America. I suppose this touches on a larger question about the interplay between literature and life. In one part of the book, two petty thieves and drug addicts, Jimmy and Stan, are at Stan's apartment, and you write: "Jimmy sat on a couch and picked up a few of [the books]. They all had little prize announcements on them– finalists or winners for the Pulitzer or National Book Award.

Stan and his self-improvement bullshit. Jimmy opened one and flipped through the pages, looking at the lines of type, not seeing the words." You are obviously a well-read author, but all of your characters are decidedly uninterested in literature. Also, I couldn't help but notice that on the cover of the novel, just under your name, is written: "National Book Award Finalist." Are you having a little fun at your own expense?

I think this might be the only mention of literature in the book itself. What is the role of literature in their world?

Who is your intended audience?

Is it the real life Stans and Jimmys, or the middle and upper classes, which are almost entirely invisible in this novel?

KA: Well, Stan is buying these books. He is in fact part of the audience for prizewinning books. How else would someone like him choose a book? He relies on the sticker. Jimmy is indifferent to literature, but Stan is actually interested, even if he doesn’t really get all of the content. And I can assure you that’s absolutely true to life. I didn’t know my publisher was going to put the NBA thing on my book, so no, I wasn’t really thinking about myself, just commenting on how books find their way mysteriously into all kinds of people’s hands.

As for my intended audience, that includes people like Stan and anyone else the story might speak to. In the past, I’ve gotten correspondence about my work from prisoners and kids in juvey and high school girls in Japan and freshman creative writing students. My intended audience is anyone who wants to listen. Or rather, anyone who hears something interesting, even if it isn’t exactly what I tried to say.

AG: There is a moment when the PI Gary Shepard looks at his wife Annie's photographs and thinks to himself: "Black-and-white studies of poppies and lilies. Kids splashing in fountain spray or running across wide lawns. It's not that they were bad photographs. It was just her idea of beauty; it contained no difficulty, no darkness. He couldn't explain to her the kind of beauty he saw in people who were being pushed down, not allowed to bloom. Just that they survived was astonishing to him."

When I read this line, I thought to myself that this could as easily be the aesthetic manifesto of My Dreams out in the Street: the novel is beautiful, not in Annie's way, but in Gary's.

Am I right in thinking that there is some authorial confession coming through here, or is it purely for the sake of characterizing Gary Shepard? What is it you find beautiful about these types of characters and situations? What attracts you to writing their stories?

What aesthetic principles do you adhere to?

KA: You mean, why would I want to write about these kinds of people rather than a soccer mom at the mall?

If she's sleeping with her husband's brother and addicted to pills, I might be interested in writing about her. I guess I'm feeling for the edges of things, where more is overtly at risk. Maybe it's as simple as what Janet Burroway says-the first rule of fiction is: "Only trouble is interesting." Or Tolstoy's lines about happy families are alike, but all unhappy families being unhappy in their own way.

If you're trying to write anything accurate about life, you have to include the fact that there is incredible suffering and evil in the world. You don't necessarily have to dwell in it, but you have to acknowledge it.AG: So Rita is a sort of twentieth century American Anna Karenina? I like that. Rita and Jimmy are a family, as are Gary and Annie Shephard, and they are all definitely unhappy in their own way. There is incredible suffering and evil both in the world and also in your novel, yet nevertheless, the novel, to me at any rate, is a happy one.

There does seem to me something heartening in Rita's optimism and fortitude. Am I reading it totally wrong? Where do you, as an author, draw the line between "acknowledging" and "dwelling" in unhappiness? And why is "writing accurately about life" a desirable goal? What is it that draws you towards that?KA: Every writer worth reading wants to write accurately about life. Actually, the writers worth reading are the ones who succeed. But that has to be a starting point.

AG: At its core, My Dreams out in the Street is a novel about the relationships between people, particularly, it seems to me, the impossible distance between them. There seems to be a pattern in the novel, wherein the people who are physically the closest are the most emotionally distant, and those who are the most physically distant are the most emotionally intimate.

Rita certainly has no emotional attachment to any of her johns, though she obviously has sex with them, and Gary and Annie's marriage is fraught with distance and tension that there is almost no emotional connection at all. Indeed, the relationship at the core of the novel, and the only one in which both people actually love each other, is the one between Rita and Jimmy, two people who have completely lost contact with each other and spend the whole novel trying to find one another.

What interested you about the relationship between Rita and Jimmy?

Why is physical intimacy so often tied up with emotional distance, and what is the connection between the two?

What about relationships were you hoping to explore in the novel?

Why is having a decent relationship so difficult in the world of My Dreams out in the Street?

KA: I find having a decent relationship difficult in the real world. When I started the novel I was yearning for someone, so I suppose that was one thing that drove the emotional dynamic of the book. Rita and Jimmy do love each other, but Rita hasn't developed enough of a sense of self to feel that she can survive without him, and Jimmy has kind of opted out of the difficulties of struggling with those issues that come out of real commitment.

And everyone in the book is dealing with childhood shit. I know we should all get past it, but the stuff that happens to you when you're young-if it's difficult in some way-just forms the core of you, because you're not yet able to integrate it into something larger. And it's a kind of chicken-and-egg thing, to me. Poverty and the general ugliness of impoverished circumstances breed violence and ignorance, and it's hard as an individual to get above that.

A poet echoing Colonial America

Teresa Cader

Teresa Cader is the author of two collections of poetry. Guests, 1991, won the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award and The Journal Award in Poetry from the Ohio State University Press. The third section of her next book (The Paper Wasp, TriQuarterly Press, 1999) won the Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award. She is on the core poetry faculty of the Lesley University Graduate Program in Creative Writing. She has just completed a third collection of poems.

An excerpt from her interview

I’ve been influenced by Emerson in my approach to history; that is, that history is inseparable from the individual. We are made up in part of accretions of history, of the lives lived before us. The green tea on the Japanese American restaurant table is loaded with history by its very placement. All beginnings are a consequence, as Valery would say. There are no mysterious historical forces wandering around the planet like robot-piloted bombers. Look around you at your friends and neighbors and family. Look at yourself. I imagine historical characters—those not related to me by bloodlines—very vividly. I feel their presences; they’re in my head.


They’re not cardboard props for ideas. I think poetry has always been a vessel for memory, collective and universal. A safe storage for the human and perishable life of a specific place or people, first, then a meeting place for communities and individuals across time. History is different inside that vessel; it’s not a collection of dates and –isms, but voices, many voices that bear individual witness to what happened as they experienced it. And the voices have breath; they live.

I don’t research anything in order to write about it. If I am drawn to something—even a word—I try to be alert to levels of meaning and associations that will extend the resonance or the dissonance of the word and the poem. While writing the poem “History of Hurricanes,” I became curious about what meanings the word “hurricane” might have, other than the obvious. I discovered a slightly bizarre definition in the O.E.D. that fit into a section of the poem I’d already drafted: “ a large, crowded assembly of fashionable people at a private party.”


In a poem dealing partly with memory, I had just written about the ninth graders in Lexington who had never experienced a serious hurricane, for whom terms like velocity were abstractions. The O.E.D. definition of hurricane fit them well. I often suggest that my students do the same kind of exploration to see if they can make their poems speak outside the ordinary parameters of association and to discover connections the poets didn’t know existed.

In my second book, I have a section that examines birth from many perspectives. I had started a sequence of sonnets about it when I was a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliff College. I was aware that not a lot of quality poetry had been written about birth and that most of it looked at birth from a physical, rather than metaphysical or phenomenological viewpoint. I stumbled on the odd fact that many terms related to birth also related to grammar (“contraction” is a case in point).

That sent me straight to a grammar book, which in turn helped me form an argument in a subsequent poem.


In that same book, I have many poems about the invention of paper and printing and about language as an invention. All of that came from a seminal experience when I had an artist’s studio in the Munroe Center in Lexington where I was the only writer. I was wildly jealous of the other artists who always seemed to have something to do—stretch canvases, mix paints, fire pottery, dye cloth, scavenge in the woods for bird feathers, whatever—while all I had was a piece of paper, a pen, and some books. And often, no ideas for poems.

One day I held the paper up to the window, turned it in all directions and realized I didn’t really know what it was, where it had come from. And this was my medium! I stared at a few words that had somehow plummeted onto the page and the letters of the alphabet looked like camels struggling against a sandstorm. What were these? Where had they come from? How could it be that I was using 26 abstract shapes to say everything I wanted to say? I felt submerged in mystery and intellectual passion.


For me, that’s always visceral—my spine undulates or something—and I knew I had embarked on a very personal artistic journey. Of course I had to do research—since I really was quite ignorant—but I’m lucky that the things I learned turned me on emotionally, as well. I looked for just the amount of detail and fact I needed. I wasn’t writing an academic paper. I found one paragraph on the inventor, T’sai Lun, but I loved him and imagined him onto a terrace in ancient China.


I still feel very close to him (or the him I imagined, based on the few facts I had). His status as an outsider, his idiosyncratic vision, his persecution and the maliciousness of the petty neighbors and villagers still stir enormous compassion and caring in me. And he seems all too contemporary. The key to using research, from my view, is to inhabit it imaginatively.


I feel very deadened at times in other people’s poems if I sense that the poem exists to explicate the history. Why not write an historical essay and be done with it? I feel the same way when people try to show off a kind of learning that is fresh from Scientific American. For me, a poem has to be an experience that moves me through its use of multiple angles, sensibilities and devices. I think research can be useful to bring something alive, to uncover what hasn’t been seen or understood.


Robert Pinsky is a poet who uses history and obviously does research here and there, but both are in service of something much larger and, paradoxically, much more intimate and language-driven. I guess one of the worst traps of research is that it can make people feel superior—like on the playground, “I know something you don’t” and then they start strutting on the page. To be contrary, I’d also say that we wouldn’t have Eliot or Pound without their hunger for knowledge, traditional and esoteric, and their willingness to study.

The line you quoted is from a poem called “Poetics of Birth,” a sestina that argues for a metaphysics of birth, displays abundant frustration about not being able to establish that without a diatribe, and finally parodies the enterprise, in the process arriving at the deeper connections between art, birth and death. The poem struggles, and I hope succeeds, at finding a way through the morass of received ideas and language about birth.

In Guests, especially, personal history and story are very much at the center of many of the poems. I think it’s a tricky thing – this question I would like to ask. There is much talk in interviewing about the personal history as it relates to the writing. I would like to ask you about Poland – and where that writing started for you. I suppose that skirts dangerously close to assuming that the author and the speaker are the same in your poetry – but I feel that Guests is really grounded in this space of personal history, Could you illuminate the connection between your life, the work and the history.

Guests is the only book of mine in which this figures, but it is not surprising that it was a series of obsessions with exile, immigration, lost identity, the making of an artistic self, and the massive suffering of both World Wars that laid the bedrock for these poems. In the first lengthy review of this book in The Journal, which had awarded it its annual first book prize in 1991, the reviewer noted that many poems take the stock characters in much contemporary poetry—“mother,” “father,” “grandmother,” “grandfather,” and the “self-absorbed, ubiquitous “I,” and drive “beyond their concrete and emotional immediacy into the world of ideas.” This reviewer also noted that the poems “drive us into confronting history, into confronting its ramifications on our present moment and into what it has made us become.”


But let me put it in my own words. I do not see any individual as separate from history. Biography and history are completely entwined. In that sense, I have a very Emersonian view.

If you are asking about my personal history in relation to Poland, I’m happy to answer that, but it’s complicated. I feel that I am a product of two cultures, Central European and American and that I don’t belong to the same shared cultural experiences that many of my peers have. I don’t write about American pop culture because I grew up in a house that didn’t allow it. We didn’t have TV, went only to classic foreign films, lived in a working class neighborhood and had books like Leaves of Grass and Poems from the Chinese. And yet, we were fairly poor and ethnic.


My father was born in Poland in 1913, my grandfather escaped in order not to fight for the Austrians in WWI (Poland didn’t exist; their section “belonged to Austria), and after a lengthy stay during the period of independence, my grandmother and some relatives escaped just as the Nazis were invading.

Polish is a language in my blood. Part of the family didn’t speak English. I grew up with history as a personal companion, not an abstract idea.

I won’t recount the losses and horrors. It was a complicated history, too. We became Protestants, my brother later converted to Judaism. When his cantor greets me, it’s in Polish with an admonition—“Why aren’t you speaking Polish to me?!” He was saved by a Polish family. When the realities of WWII all became more universally discussed, I had questions for history, arguments with history, and confusion about identity.

I don’t discuss Poland at all in The Paper Wasp and I never intended to write about ancestry, per se. When Guests won The Norma Farber First Book Award, Mary Oliver talked about the book’s concern with loss of country, consequences of war and the disassociation of people from people. My mother’s side of the family is Irish—my great aunt looks like Seamus Heaney in a black funeral dress—but I don’t write about them because I can’t feel the larger consequences of their history.

I know about that, of course, but the suffering wasn’t present-day enough for me to incorporate it into my identity. I do have a set of very odd stories to tell but no interest in telling them in poetry. I’m beginning a project to translate Polish poems—because Polish poetry is among the best in the world, not because I called my grandmother babci.

I’m suspicious of trends because I’m afraid of mass thinking and proscribed ways of being an artist. I don’t think it’s a question of age, although younger poets do seem to write more familial poems. Later, most of those people are dead.

I think I explained earlier how The Paper Wasp came to be written. Obsession. Being turned on to things I don’t understand. Wanting to feel a mastery over birth, as opposed to being made to feel out of control. Weird—but ideas turn me on, too. Not as good as sex but somewhere along the continuum.

I didn’t see the book as personal history. It was criticized once for not being intimate enough. Before the birth sonnets, I was writing a long sequence on the Russian poet and historian Eugenia Ginzburg who spent 18 years in the gulag and lost her son. Being pregnant, I found that the material depressed me. I had read her journals, which are marvelous, and I was obsessed with finding out how she managed to survive.

I had to put that sequence down. After the birth of my daughter and the taming of my fears about whether she was choking or suffocating or having SIDS, I returned to Ginzburg and saw that Eugenia had survived because she had memorized so much Russian poetry. It’s something I think about all the time: poems as saviors, literally. Poetry about what you might have when almost everything else has been taken away from you.

The newly finished collection, History of Hurricanes, has a poem about the link between the civil rights movement in the U.S. and the Solidarity movement in Poland which was prompted by my visit to a club in Krakow playing James Brown and by listening to my Polish friends sing every verse of “We Shall Overcome.”

But there is history in this book: I live one block from where the American Revolution started. I imagined a Minuteman losing his child to a hurricane, having no idea that such a storm was coming. I imagined a couple in contemporary Japan, etc. Those people are very real to me. I imagine that’s the way a playwright experiences life.

I do find that I am obsessed with capturing certain movements of my mind and my language. This book also deals more directly with personal suffering, but got at through various, non-linear angles of vision, not straightforward narrative. I am interested in the way fragments can unleash new language; I explore different kinds of leaps that can be made when I refuse the proven. I am a poet of connections, so while I am not interested in arriving at a unified thought or non-conflicting reality, I am fascinated by finding connections that arise from disunity, multiplicity, previously unidentified coherence and dissonance.

I like the multiplicity I find inside myself. I like to be traveling on several different wavelengths simultaneously. I’m interested in spare multiplicity, too, that is, allowing contradictions to form new meanings, but in the terse, breakneck speed of an insight.

Time is not linear, nor is history, nor is your life nor mine. Now you’ve got me wondering how I came to think this way, aside from the traumas of history I witnessed in the daily lives of my father and relatives. And I think I have one clue: I grew up obsessed with Colonial America and early American history. I read volumes and volumes of biography and was really thrilled by it.

Those figures were the mainstay of my imaginary play: they were people I felt close to, whose clothes, habits, ideas, candlesticks I knew deeply. Of course, it was romanticized. I had no idea about slavery in the colonies. I think this obsession helped me to separate from my working class, impoverished life (again, if going to Ingmar Bergman movies equates in any sensical way in American culture to being working class). Neither of my parents went to high school.

But I found a world of high-principled ideals and risk-taking that suited my personality, my deeply instilled ideas about justice, fairness and democracy in the new world. I never connected this before with the colonial characters weaving through my third collection.

I do like braiding strands of things. Juxtaposition creates new and unexpected meanings. I love the effects of tapestry. Very little is certain in a vacuum. Tapestry is a way to access complexity, ambiguity and multiple interpretation and response. It can also be revisited, each time yielding new entry and exit points, new paths through it.

Myths are crucial as a way of getting at the truth but truth is multiple, not singular, as well as evolutionary, and cannot be contained in any vessel. I mentioned the Minuteman who doesn’t know a hurricane is coming. I think about those people when I watch Weather 5 and Dickie Albert showing me a radar image of a hurricane that is headed toward Boston. They’re buried all around me. Apparently Native Americans could read the storm signs better. But then where are their graves? I experience a sense of their loss every time I cross the town Green.

There are also the ignorant teens who don’t comprehend history repeating itself. And that is both a life cycle issue and a cultural one. In “Anywhere,” a Zen Scholar and Master are having the same conversation in the past that the speaker is having with her daughter in the present. Emily Dickinson’s solitude stands for a wonderful ability to preserve one’s work, but for me the peace in her room was transcendent.

The Asian artist, poet and fishermen represent a Taoist way of approaching nature and the mutability of our lives. I don’t choose characters so they can represent things—I’m too engaged with them for that—but I do often see the link afterwards. I had to have Eugenia Ginzburg give me her survival skills.


It was fun to put that quote in a section focusing on Erasmus’ treatise on children’s manners. I like language that moves through multiple registers—I love opera and street talk, Shakespeare and Bobby McFerrin, Kiri Te Kanawa and Latin—and I like the way they make themselves present in a poem. I hear an echo and it’s right—that phrase seems right for this poem because one of the subjects is class manners, wanting a little mobility based on a wide range of class-distinguishing manners. I like to be many people when I write a poem, to notice how my sensibility processes different kinds of language. I enjoy unexpected juxtapositions that create wit or genuine surprise. Finally I like to mix up the sense of where the poem is coming from, to defeat predictability.

I felt that I didn’t fit into popular American culture and that had a silencing effect. At home, there was a dividing line of sorts; my father and I shared a number of intellectual passions that my mother and brother did not. My early writing, poems and short stories, seemed to exaggerate the gap. At least I thought they did, so I learned a second level of being mute. It seemed safer—and I was protecting myself as a writer.

Recently, I read about how Emily Dickinson’s father encouraged her intellectual genius but was horrified when she wanted to publish poems, he didn’t consider it proper for a woman. It wasn’t that way in my house, but the culture on the shelves and elsewhere was one of famous men doing anything for the sake of their art—a sort of divinity denied women.

Class issues do not totally go away, either. It’s a long leap from parents who didn’t go to high school to applying for college oneself. Now try vocalizing the fact that one wants to be a writer. But the only real way I can get at what I think is to write it. Only a fraction makes it into speech—an exaggeration, of course, but I often worry nothing is going to come out of my mouth.

I don’t know how specific to be. I was showing a fellow poet a group of poems I was considering trashing and he not only liked “Aria” a lot, he suggested sending it to Peter Davison at the Atlantic. Peter accepted it and said it reminded him of Thomas Hardy. All poets benefit from other eyes. I distrusted the poem because I wrote it in a few swoops of the pen, but also because I thought it might be too easy or simple. Actually it seemed to write itself without any conscious direction from my brain, so my brain was not pleased.


I do trust my own voice. I like the multiplicity I find inside myself. I like to be traveling on several different wavelengths simultaneously. I’m interested in spare multiplicity, too, that is, allowing contradictions to form new meanings, but in the terse, breakneck speed of an insight.

One night I opened a hand-stitched notebook I found on a shelf near my bed and decided to write in it. I had no plan. I usually write on the computer. I loved the feel of the pen again. After a throwaway page, I begin to write in the book each night.

Right away, the writing became a response to the notebook itself. I read on the flap that the binding was Coptic. That reminded me of a lovely Coptic Christian woman from Egypt I’d met at a party years ago. I let my mind associate. The work arrived in couplets. I was moved by the simple painting of Ma Lin on the cover, the short lyric by Wang Wei, the notion of the Tao in brushstrokes.

My poems began to take in more of the notebook, its own separate integrity. I was in dialogue with it, listening and responding. I planned no encounter in advance. It took about ten days to write. In many places the book turns intimate and self-revelatory but always as part of the dialogue, with Wang Wei and Ma Lin, and the poem and painting as presences I felt keenly. Of course, I did a lot of editing, of moving sections around and changing titles. I dropped two sections. I wrote the sequence in bed, just before sleep, so that my sleepiness would make it easier to ride an alpha train of images and associations.

Good writing is about being alert, to yourself, to what lies just beyond your comprehension. Hopefully, in a given book or collection of books, you’ve mastered what puzzled and prompted you, what wouldn’t give you a break. And then, quietly one day, there you are. The buzz saw is resting on the log. You’re leaning back and noticing the quality of the air. Something is done (for now).

Writing beyond your last work means not intentionally hanging onto the work that now seems right—in order to keep reproducing it—but rather opening oneself again to the unknown with its obsessions, experimentations, discoveries, and journeys of the self. It should be an organic process, a matter of living as a poet, not simply a higher rock course on the poetry wall.

. I use a lot of imagery. I like to blend sensual and intellectual matters, to create feeling-infused thought. I think of place as intimate. If I can’t treat it that way, it’s decoration, a stage prop. Each of my three books is quite different, however, and some of my earlier narrative poems evolve in a way that the poem’s discoveries are more embedded or bottom-heavy in terms of where they occur in the poem.

In my recently finished collection, History of Hurricanes, many poems are, for example, elliptical and begin at odd angles, already deep inside the work yet to be written. In my poem “For years,” my title is followed by the opening line, “I kept the secret hidden from myself.” That seems to be the poem’s power center. My strategies and language are often metaphysical. It’s the way things come together in my head and on the page.

Lately, my speakers just start talking, but their speech is loaded with mundane and esoteric, traditional and eccentric phrases and questions. I am a poet of context, however, a poet of history. My temporal and spatial planes intersect all the time, sometimes wildly.
I would like to ask some questions about motherhood. Being a poet and a mother can be a very tricky combination.


The first is a career question – I know that you are in a sort of second phase of your career now. I wonder if you could talk about the career as it has developed through your time as a mother of young children. Your first book came out just after your first child was born. There are so many added constraints on women as they maneuver careers and raising a family.


Actually, I’ve had two careers. My first poem in a major publication, TriQuarterly, was published when I was a Master’s degree student in public administration at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. (I was also a research assistant at MIT in new communication technologies, taking courses in things like telecommunications technology and public policy.) I had gone to the Kennedy School after a Master’s degree in English and after many years working in anti-poverty programs.

I served as associate director of the Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Program. By then, I was writing seriously and looking for a way to do consulting part-time to support my writing. I honestly believed the cable companies’ lies that arts and community programming would become serious venue on cable. After working as a consultant in an international firm assessing new communication technologies, I became associate director of the Kennedy School’s new multi-million dollar national awards program on innovation in government. After three years, I was publishing regularly and I wanted to stop administrative work. I was lucky: I received my first fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a fellowship from the Bunting Institute at Radcliff. While at the Bunting, I wrote major parts of my first book and gave birth to my first daughter in 1987. My book came out in 1991. After that I did consulting for the Ford Foundation and Harvard and taught at MIT and Emerson. I have a complicated view of the poetry/motherhood issue. I partly resent the fact that we have to ask the question—obviously there’s divorce, financial struggle, social and emotional crisis, health issues, etc. that can entrap a mother—but I think women and society keep leaving the partners off the hook and keep demanding that only women bear the brunt of the burden of care. France has wonderful, cheap, government-subsidized childcare. Some men really do try to equalize home responsibilities. Women writers, though, have to treat their writing like a career when they have kids: the work, as well as the artist really suffers otherwise. I was no model of what I’m espousing: we moved from Cambridge to Lexington and yes, I published an award-winning book, but I was also losing ground in an insidious way. fter the birth of my second daughter, I realized I didn’t have the solitude I needed. I published my second book, but within five months, I got a serious and mysterious neuromuscular illness after contracting Lyme. I lost some years in there, when I didn’t have the supports to take care of myself, my writing and my family. The short answer is that I absolutely need to write. I adore my children, but I think I could have fought back against those constraints and been more creative about circumventing them. I could have gotten much more help than I did. I would offer the suggestion that women with children treat their writing as a job they have to show up for, making it a two-career household right away, if two adults are there. Bill Matthews singled parented for many years; he got up at five, or started working at ten, or whatever, but he kept writing –and teaching. Now if you think about that, isn’t it absurd that a female writer with children who has a partner isn’t getting or demanding time to work. My children have read my first two books. They’re also savvy about the way poems speak. I don’t think I have written anything to worry about. On the other hand, I feel a natural sense of boundaries around them—their private life, their foibles and successes, their hurt and anger are off limits. I would never write anything that would shame them. Of course, everything I do embarrasses them, but that’s different.

Some poems

by Teresa Cader

History of Hurricanes

Because we cannot know— we plant crops, make love in the light of our not-knowing

A Minuteman prods cows from the Green with his musket,

his waxed paper windows snapping in the wind,

stiletto stalks in the herb garden upright—Now

blown sideways—Now weighted down in genuflection,

not toward,

And a frail man holding an Imari teacup paces at daybreak in his courtyard in Kyoto

a cherry tree petaling the stones pink and slippery

in the weeks he lay feverish

waiting for word from the doctor, checking for signs—Now

in the season of earthenware sturdiness and dependency

it must begin, the season of his recovery

No whirling dervish on the radar, no radar, no brackets

no voices warning—no Voice—fugue of trees, lightning

Because we cannot know, we imagine

What will happen to me without you?

I know some things I remember—

the Delaware River two stories high inside the brick houses

cars floating past Trenton like a regiment on display

brown water climbing our basement stairs two at a time

Like months of remission—

the eye shifts

the waxed paper windows

burst behind the flapping shutters—

and how could he save his child after that calm,

a man who'd never seen a roof sheared off?

Across town the ninth graders in their cutoffs:

Science sucks, they grouse. Stupid history of hurricanes.

No one can remember one;

velocity, storm surge—

abstractions the earth churns as Isabel rips through Buzzard's Bay

A hurricane, as one meaning has it:

a large crowded assembly of fashionable people at a private house

The river cannot remember its flooding—

I worry you will forget to check

the watermarks in time

An echo of feet on stone is all the neighbors

knew of their neighbor,

a lover of cherry trees

and of his wife who prayed for him at the shrine,

her hair swept up in his favorite onyx comb

Petrified Light
I studied the tiny insect trapped in amber at the Museum of Science.
Seventy-million-year-old pine resin from the once tropical Baltics,
Petrified into a sarcophagus of honey light. There you are, I said.
To the bug, my alter ego. To the amber, my weight of captivity
And stasis. No one heard me mouthing off to the exhibit case.
My daughter watched a series of balls bong their obstacle course,
Plinging bells and tilting pulleys. My husband studied the underbelly
Of a fake lightning bug in the next exhibit. Amazing,
He complimented the frog whose belly glowed with glow worms,
And the syncopated sex rhythms of tropical lightning bugs who flash
In unison. So much cellular insight for a Sunday afternoon. Awe
Was the thing I didn't have: hard floors and sore instep, maybe. Awe
Is what the exhibits design for. The three foot Black Widow caught my
Peripheral. Whoa, I said to my ordinary. To my stubborn. To fear's
Onion smell welling up in my armpits. What we have here is a bodyCreated for me. A creature of wild and deadly desire. Bad.
The New Creation
And then there was the nothing that is something else.
We saw what was created and could not be entirely
Displeased. It was good in its way, the morphine drip
Unhooked, the blood bags and oxygen removed.
In the beginning, we had not wanted this night.
Earth was enough, lichen clinging to its rock,
Worm snug in its wormhole. We loved our image,
Our dominion over every creeping thing.
Were we misled? Did we misunderstand the gift?
Who said we should just let her go, let her drift down
An uncharted river and call it good, a blessing
From God. This much at first, absence of pain.
And then, day returning to day, night to night,
A fitful peace descending on the plains as the storm
Edged across the mountain clefts, hurling
Its lightning elsewhere, and we were alone.

Six Entries on the Invention of Paper
1
It begins with a wasp on a terrace in ancient China:a man invents paper after watching the waspspin its white nest from mulberry bark.
2
Perhaps he has found bamboo too unevenfor letters in black wax.Perhaps he is weary of verticality.Perhaps he is ashamed of his private longings.
3
When his neighbor calls to him, “Ts’ai Lun,what are you boiling in that large pot?”he does not show him linen rags found in a basket,old fish nets hauled off the docks,mulberry bark stripped from the neighbor’s tree.
4
His neighbor sees thin sheets of pulp strewnacross the terrace, drying in the sun. He does not perceive them as treasures.He is annouyed with the clutter. His children are forbidden to set foot on the terrace.He whispers about Ts’ai Lun in the tea shop.
5
One evening after an inquisition at court—The inventor has been implicated in palace unrest—Ts’ai Lun comes home, drinks poison, and goes to bed.
6
On a table lie stacks of the white sheets.The mulberry tree looks seamless in the moonlight.The wasp is poised to devour some workers at dawn.

The ultimate French intellectual

Paul Valéry

French poet, essayist, and critic, who ceased writing verse for twenty years to pursue scientific experiments. Valéry was a member of the 19th-century poetic school of Symbolism, and its last great representative. Throughout his life Valéry filled his private notebooks with observations on creative process and his own methods of inquiry.

He insisted that the mental process of creation was alone important - the poems were a by-product of the effort. "Enthusiasm is not an artist's state of mind", stated Valéry. T.S. Eliot has compared Valéry's analytical attitude to a scientist who works in a laboratory "weighing out or testing the drugs of which is compounded some medicine with an impressive name."

The ultimate French intellectual

T. S. Eliot hailed Paul Valéry as the representative poet of the first half of the twentieth century (“not Rilke, not Yeats, nor anyone else”). This new biography broadens the specification: the most distinguished, versatile and best-connected mind of his time; the ultimate French intellectual; le contemporain capital, whose life (from 1871 to 1945) forms the most searching prism held up to a world-changing epoch of European history.


Such large claims belong implicitly to this doorstopper of a book, over 1,300 pages in length, richly illustrated and with scholarly notes for specialist readers, as well as a serviceable index (helpful to the far greater number who will consult it as a reference work).

The thoroughness of Michel Jarrety’s research produces a plethora of evidence: private letters made available by copyright-holders, memoirs of contemporaries, recently published diaries of key figures in Valéry’s personal life, newspaper articles and reviews; the proceedings of the organizations in which he held high office, personal papers of all kinds (love poems, draft letters, invitations, bank statements, stock exchange reports – Valéry threw nothing away).


Scaling the paper mountain, his biographer has resolved to tell the whole story, and does so with chronological deliberateness, at the rate of roughly a chapter per adult year. Jarrety’s very readable narrative marshals a teeming cast of characters in an elegant and quietly dramatic life history which recounts his intellectual hero’s obscure early career as minor Symbolist poet, then as withdawn and solitary thinker, emerging to a late and paradoxical fame in 1917 with the publication of La Jeune Parque; and thence to international stardom as a roving ambassador for the Third Republic and the League of Nations.

Valéry’s circle of contacts remains dazzling. He was intimate with leading poets and writers (Mallarmé, Gide, Rilke); he worked alongside Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann, Gabriele d’Annunzio, John Galsworthy and Stefan Zweig; he exchanged ideas with André Malraux, Jean Giraudoux, Colette and Paul Claudel (but also with George Meredith, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley); his lectures at the Collège de France were an influence on Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Tournier, Yves Bonnefoy and Paul de Man.

Who else with such a profile could also have had Einstein as trusted interlocutor and colleague, discussed atoms with Niels Bohr, or the crisis of representation in sciences with the likes of Paul Langevin and Émile Borel; compared notes with Ravel and Stravinsky, Degas and Picasso; collaborated with Bergson and Sir James Frazer; interacted with both Pétain and de Gaulle; interviewed Mussolini and crossed paths with an entire gallery of Europe’s interwar power-brokers?

To say nothing of the cast list of princesses, duchesses, countesses and other denizens of the cosmopolitan, high-society Paris salons who provided the writer with dinners, contacts, funding, entertainment, country-seat vacationing, confidantes and lovers.


As well as offering ample witness to the spell of Valéry’s oral “thought performances” – his rapid, illuminating, wide-ranging pertinence, masterful but graced with fantasy, humour and self-deprecating charm – the book also brings this “angelic” intelligence down to earth, warts and all, and reinserts it expertly into its various contexts of incarnation. The expanding circles of his family and friends, and his various collegialities, are expertly plotted; as is the Parisian literary scene.


The dynamics of the ascent to fame are acutely observed and wryly told. Jarrety highlights Valéry’s passivity: he owed to the initiative of friends every significant step in his social existence (his marriage, his job at the Ministry of War, his post as private secretary to the paralysed Director of the Havas News Agency, his accession to the Académie française); and he is perpetually driven by the anxiety to make ends meet.

Valéry was mortgaged to the salons: for contacts and support, stimulus and income. His regret at “missing” the Nobel Prize concerned the prize money of 70,000 francs: the price of the squadrons of secretaries he never had and the car he never owned. His health paid a predictable price. His success generated incomprehension and envy (Cocteau spoke of him maliciously as a chevalier d’industrie, “swindling the pants off publishers and society ladies”).

All of which throws light on the myth of a Valéry cast in the image of his programmatic hero of the pure mind, Monsieur Teste: a myth conceived by the youthful idealist who launched the “System”, later re-essentialized and popularized by Breton, to whom the icon of a reserved and self-enfolding intellectual potency was singularly fascinating.

We learn here, too, that Teste’s creator himself often “mythifies” the recurrent crises that punctuated his career, in proportion as they are dynamic or foundational (the famous “secular conversion” of the “Nuit de Gênes” is a case in point). Such glimpses of the mythic dimension of the poet’s rationality will further undermine the cliché of Valéry’s “intellectualism”.

The splendid account given of his subject’s interaction with the public events of his time illustrates what is perhaps the most significant achievement of the book: its ability to generate fruitful continuities. Valéry did military training as a reservist in the post-1870 “Army of Revenge” and was a clerk at the French War Ministry, working in artillery procurement at the time of the Dreyfus Affair.

He had previously worked in London as a translator for Cecil Rhodes’s Chartered Company, whose coolly audacious appropriation of vast chunks of Africa fascinated and appalled him; and he meditated publicly on the Spanish–American and Sino–Japanese wars.


“La Jeune Parque” was written to the thunder of the big guns of the Great War; its author talked military strategy with Marshal Pétain, whose reception address to the Académie française Valéry composed with trepidation. His elder son was ministerial aide in Edouard Daladier’s Cabinet as the slide towards a new war became critical.


Having glimpsed Hitler at Brownshirt rallies at Munich in 1938, Valéry followed the news of the invasion of the Sudetenland in 1939 as vice-president of the Franco-Czech Friendship Association.


He dined once with his fellow Academician Pétain in Vichy, while dissuading the Academy itself from all collaborationism, and edging the Vichy government towards acknowledging the greatness of Henri Bergson at the time of the French Jewish philosopher’s death in 1943. (He also managed to get Walter Benjamin released from internment, but could not prevent Robert Brasillach from being executed at the Liberation.)


Referred to their time and place, obscure or sensitive episodes receive decisive illumination: the case of Valéry’s anti-Dreyfus stance at the turn of the century; or the logic of his navigation between collaboration and resistance after 1940. The modulation of his early right-leaning patriotic and nationalist fervour into ardent commitment to a value-led, “cultural” or “civilizational” concept of “Europe” becomes transparent: at once a response to the shipwreck of nation-state nationalism, a reaction to the ethical shock of the First World War, an expression of his missionary commitment to a saving Idea, and a practical attempt to give Europe the “politics of its [artistic and scientific] thought”.


Jarrety offers a rich account of this leitmotif running through Valéry’s endless colloquia, conferences and encounters in the framework of the League’s Committee for Intellectual Co-Operation, as well as at the Centre méditérranéen (a university institute created for him in Nice, and which its director conceived as a teaching and research tool in the service of the European Idea).


He chronicles the nobility and promise of this commitment in the 1920s, its crisis in the 30s and the delivery of its “bitter fruits” in the chaos and cruelty of defeat and occupation. “That civilization which was our raison d’être is struck down in the heart of the country which, as well as might be, kept it alive”.

One cannot read Valéry’s epitaph on pre-war French rationalist idealism about politics, Europe and human nature without seeing why the post-war world had to begin again.


At the private end of the spectrum, we get a sober, authoritative and near-complete account of Valéry’s love life – the first to be published. The “two or three capital Events of my secret life” have, of course, been coming to light progressively over the past twenty years: the adolescent obsession with Mme de R(ovira) in the early 1890s, reactively generating the “System”; the mid-life cataclysm of his affair in the 1920s with Catherine Pozzi; the final erotico-mystical drama of “tenderness”, projected by the septuagenarian poet on to the worldly Jeanne Loviton, who left him for a rich, collaborationist publisher in May 1945, thus providing the “axeblow” which killed him later that year.


Jarrety retraces and extends this series: the Duchesse Edmée de la Rochefoucauld and the academic Émilie Noulet; but also the sculptress Renée Vauthier, and, platonically, the nun Jeanne Deléon (“there is no doubt she loves me in eternity”). Each relationship is analysed in its own context.


Valéry is rooted in nineteenth-century dualisms (sex and marriage; flesh and spirit). His semi- “arranged” marriage from 1900 to Jeannie Gobillard, though deeply affectionate and even faithful – he refused in 1924 to leave her for Catherine Pozzi – generated a deficit of intellectual companionship, of sexual and affective intensity, of unsatisfied spiritual longing.


Jeannie belonged to the circle of painters around Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas, and had Stéphane Mallarmé as an unofficial guardian. (It was the wish of “le Maître” to see the couple united that first brought them together.) Then there were Jeannie’s illnesses; but also the birth of three children (Valéry was a fine father to the first two, neglecting the third, born just as his fame set in). Most seriously perhaps, there was the tension between mobile, free-thinking intellectual stardom and a domesticity ordered by a strictly orthodox feminine piety.


One clue to contextual understanding, and one major dimension of empathy with his subject, is perhaps missing. Jarrety downplays the “vertical” axis of Valéry’s own parallel and rival construct of spirituality, powerfully stirred and illustrated (as he himself notes parenthetically) by these amorous excursions.


The celebrated “mysticism without God”, the very form of his subject’s awareness and writing on Desire, gets scant mention: its origin in the prose poem of 1888 entitled “Enterrement de Dieu” remains undisclosed; the encounter of 1909–10 with St John of the Cross, whose imagery powerfully imprints


La Jeune Parque, is passed over in silence. Yet Valéry himself tells us in 1942 that he came across the Spanish poet and mystic by chance, in a library, in the seventeenth-century French translation of Fr Cyprien de la Nativité, and was fascinated by the interplay between the apparently artless lyricism of the poetry and the hidden subtlety explicated in the treatises of mystical theology. Jarrety’s Valéry is bounded, albeit with scruples of equity, by a mimetically conventional account of Third Republic “religion”.


More generally, one can regret that the interface between the man and his creative work is generally little explored, beyond pointers to genetic context useful to specialists, and a summary helpful to non-specialists. This is particularly true in relation to the “System”, but true also of the most beautiful and profound poem that made Valéry’s reputation.

We are not “signposted” towards the creative achievement of the thinker or the poet, i.e. towards what won the celebrity which merits a biography of this size. By default, the life itself becomes the main point.


There is, of course, a sizeable paradox about the mere fact of a biography of Valéry, let alone the Balzacian scale of this monument. In terms of literary theory, Paul Valéry represents the complete opposite of the type of criticism predicated on the supposedly explanatory association of “l’homme et l’oeuvre”.


Nor is this paradox without resonance. Professor Jarrety, who is a disciple of Barthes and Blanchot, shows us in Valéry the major, if appropriated, precursor of French formalist thinking about writing and literary language. There is no contradiction here; just an under-negotiated “conversion” of viewpoint, and an unresolved existential tension – which Valéry’s greatest poem, precisely, explores.


In real life, Monsieur Teste’s creator, unlike his hero, had visibility thrust upon him; and he espoused this paradox in a conscious dialectic of surfaces and depths, as the fruitful form of himself (“sociable on the surface, singularist and separatist in my depths”).


The poet of 1917, representing in the poem his own inner modulation in time, spoke of an “autobiography in the form”. This is a good paradox, posing key questions to all biographers, and, up to a point, justifying this one. All theory, as Valéry knew, is, in the end, “a carefully dressed-up fragment of some autobiography”.


"Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation." (from Littérature, 1929)


Paul Valéry was born in Cette (now Sète), the son of a Corsican customs officer, Barthelmy Valéry, and Fanny Grassi, who was the daughter of the Genoese Italian consul and descended from Venetian nobility.


Valéry spent his childhood in the port town of his birth, and remained through his life close to his Mediterranean origins. He was educated in Sette and at the lycée in Montpellier. He studied law at the University of Montpellier, and obtained his licence in 1892.

Mathematics fascinated Valéry, but before his voluntary service in the infantry he had been prevented from becoming a candidate for the Naval School due to his weakness in this subject. After moving to Paris he became a regular attendant at Stéphane Mallarmé's literary 'Tuesday evenings' and the older poet's favorite disciple.


Valéry's other early idols were Edgar Allan Poe, whose poems he also translated, and J-K.Huysman. Mallarmé's influence is seen in Valéry's masterpiece LA JEUNE PARQUE (1917). Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci, Valéry started to write in notebooks, which were published posthumously in 1957-60 in CAHIERS (Notebooks).


After a passionate attraction for a young Spanish girl, Valéry went through a personal crisis. During a violent thunderstorm, as he later reported, he decided to free himself "at no matter what cost, from those falsehoods: literature and sentiment." In 1896 Valéry was employed in London by the press bureau of the British South Africa Company.


He then worked for three years in the artillery munition bureau of the French Army. In 1900 he married Jeannie Gobillard, a niece of the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot. In the same year he joined the Havas news agency to became the private secretary of Edouard Lebey, a key executive of the company, who was afflicted with paralysis agitans. Valéry held this position until 1922.


In 1892 Valéry experienced the "revolution of the mind" during a stormy night in Genoa. He turned his back on writing poetry and dedicated himself to gaining "maximum knowledge and control of his intellect." The very act of writing, he decided, was one of vanity. During these silent years as a poet he published two prose works.


In INTRODUCTION DE LA MÉTHODE DE LÉONARD DA VINCI (1894) he stated that "all criticism is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects." LA SOIRÉE AVEC MONSIEUR TESTE (1896) was the first of. the numerous pieces of the Teste cycle.


The painter Edgar Degas, who called him 'Monseur Angel', refused the dedication of the book. M. Teste (Mr. Head) is an intellectual monster, whose whole existence is given up to the examination of his own intellectual process. The work was published in Le Centaure, and reprinted by Paul Fort, in his periodical Vers et prose.


Valéry's mathematical and philosophical speculations were interrupted in 1912 by André Gide' and the publisher Gaston Gallimard, who persuaded Valéry to collect and revise the poetry he had written in the 1890s. "A poem is never finished, only abandoned," had Valéry himself once said. Valéry's original plan was to produce a poem of some forty lines, but he finished with one of his major works, La Jeune Pataque, which brought him immediate fame.

Une esclave aux longs yeux chargés de molles chainesChange l'eau de mes fleurs, plonge aux glaces prochaines,Au lit mystérieux prodigue ses doigts purs;Elle met une femme au milieu de ces mursQui, dans ma réverie errante avec décence,Passe entre mes regards sans briser leur absence,Comme passe le verre au travers du soleil,Et de la raison pure épargne l'appareil. (from 'Intérieur')

A slave with the long eyes charged with soft chains
Change l' water of my flowers, plunges to the nearest ices,
the mysterious bed lavishes its pure fingers;
She puts a woman in the middle of these walls
Who, in my revery wandering with decency,
Passes between my glances without breaking their absence,
As glass through the sun passes,
And of the pure reason l' saves; apparatus. (Translation)


With the CHARMES OU POÉMES (1922) Valéry attained the status of most significant contemporary French poet. In his most famous poem, 'Le Cimetière marin', the poet meditates as he looks at the cemetery by the sea at Sette where his parents - and he himself ultimately - are buried. He initially feels that he loves and envies the stillness of death, but comes then to the famous lines: 'The wind rises!... We must try to live!'

Lebey's death left Valéry without employment, and he had to earn his living by publishing his writings. He lectured, wrote prefaces to ancient and modern works, and contributed to periodicals. However, Valéry was horrified to find out, that his letters to Pierre Louÿs were sold without his own consent on the rare-book market.

The letters were retrieved by Julien-Pierre Monod, the grandfather of the director Jean-Luc Godard, and published in 1925 with the title QUINZE LETTRES DE PAUL VALÉRY À PIERRE LOUŸS ÉCRITES ENTRE 1915 ET 1917 RECUEILLIES ET PUBLIÉES. Eventually Monod began to manage the poets money, organized his lecture tours, and served as his secretary. Valéry referred to him as his "minister".

Valéry's 'mélodrames' Amphion and Sémiramis, with music by Arthur Honegger, played at the Paris Opera in 1931 and 1934. Valéry was elected to the Académie Française in 1925 and in 1933 he was made administrative head of the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen at Nice. On Anatole France's death Valéry was admitted to the Academy, but instead of composing an 'éloge' about France he broke the precedent by unconventionally criticizing the author. Whereas France had occupied himself with politics and finally declared himself a Communist,

Valéry was not a political thinker. Also France represented to many French literary people all that was outmoded. Valéry was appointed in 1937 professor of poetry at the Collège de France. In 1939 he wrote the libretto for Germaine Taillefer's Cantate du Narcisse. He died in Paris on July 20, 1945.

His last principal work was the Faust fragments on which he began to work in 1940. Between the years 1957 and 1961 the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique published a facsimile reprint of his Cahiers. Selections from the Cahiers appeared in 1973 in two large volumes.