The poet Susan Howe once wrote that the captivity narrative is the only narrative form unique to North America. Across numerous collections of poetry and a memoir, the poet Shane McCrae has probed the many ways African Americans have been made the captives of violence, both historically and personally. His writing has repeatedly returned to his kidnapping as a child by his white-supremacist grandparents and to the trials of characters both real and invented, and with his book The Gilded Auction Block (2019) he introduced a new recurring theme: Hell. Further installments of “The Hell Poem” appeared in Cain Named the Animal (2022). In his book of poems released this past spring, New and Collected Hell: A Poem, McCrae not only gives captivity an epic scope but also casts his persona as the captive suffering eternal damnation. In this underworld his Virgil is Law, a dull metal bird that at one point in the journey squawks, “It’s mostly assholes who think Hell’s where justice happens Hell / Is sorrow’s Heaven where it goes to live forever with / Its god the human body.” Unlike Dante’s Inferno, the necessity of eternal punishment in McCrae’s Hell poem goes unexplained and is not sentimentalized.
McCrae lives in New York City and is a professor in Columbia University’s writing program. He is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. This spring we met with McCrae over Zoom to discuss New and Collected Hell, the challenges of writing an epic in anti-narrative times and violence as a means of self-knowledge.
—John Palattella & Julia Aizuss
●
John Palattella: You write a lot about violence in your work, not only through image, but also through syntax. Your syntax is quite inventive and remarkable, a way to keep reconsidering and combing over how it is that so many different kinds of violence are constantly erupting in American life at a social level as well as an individual level. How does a writer, as a person but also as a writer, make that into something that can be conveyed through a poem?
Shane McCrae: Violence itself?
JP: The experience of being exposed to it or its effects on yourself or other people, its effects on society.
SM: Sure. You know, I was just thinking about how I love being asked questions about my poems. I don’t know about other writers. I get the suspicion that, generally, poets don’t often think about how they do what they do, and when we give answers that reflect something like thought about how we do what we do, I also suspect that those are fairly spontaneous and that we put them out of our minds as soon as we’ve uttered them. But with regard to representing the constant sense of violence in poetry, and exposure to violence, I have been thinking about something similar recently, given the current political climate. It is almost something that one can’t really describe, because I think it’s mostly to do with the deployment of images and decisions you make as the poem progresses. Maybe it’s in the syntax, sometimes the choice of subject, so that a person living in a culture in which they aren’t often exposed to violence will write a poem about a bowl of fruit differently from a person who lives in a culture in which they are often exposed to violence. The poem will sound very, very different if everything else is otherwise the same.
So I think it’s probably pre-composition, and it has to do, ultimately, with to what extent one can maintain one’s innocence with regard to violence. What I mean by that is not that one is innocent, but rather that one can keep it out of one’s head. And if it is going to enter in a poem, the sense of dread, you don’t want it to happen dishonestly, where you’re trying to force a poem about the constant feeling of exposure to violence. You want it to be a natural component of the writing of the poem. But I think you have to look for its functioning in the poem, essentially, in atmosphere, as opposed to in content that directly addresses the subject.
Julia Aizuss: You see something similar happening sometimes in your poetry, actually. I was comparing parts of New and Collected Hell to the versions that I originally read, in The Gilded Auction Block and Cain Named the Animal, and there’s at least one moment where there’s this retroactive sense to the observation. It’s that grisly, fantastical moment where the narrator is snapped apart at the femurs and then altogether shattered. In the original version, the narrator observes how cartoonish the violence is, “like torments in a cartoon fun- // ny,” and the way that it’s so violent you have to laugh:
the more torments I suffered
The funnier the suffering
Of others got but not till after
A dozen years or so did finding
The suffering of others funny
Become so funny it became
A source of suffering to me
So that was later now I watched
My femurs rocket forward as
The rest of my bones liquefied
In the final version, it’s gone. It’s set only at the moment in time:
see
-ing them I felt no pain but like
A stranger to my body I watched
My femurs rocket forward as
The rest of my bones liquefied
I was curious whether it’s because suddenly that rude detachment felt forced, and if there were other moments in the poem where, in the process of revision, you realized that something about that attitude to violence wasn’t working.
SM: That was a theological question. When the narrator is talking about being able to laugh at violence, there are a few theological problems. I should add here that I very much believe in God. I don’t know whether I believe in Hell. The Christian scriptures’ support for the idea is very thin on the ground, as is the case in the Hebrew scriptures. I don’t know about it, but if I’m taking the idea of Hell seriously, it cannot be a place where one ever gets used to suffering. If you do get used to suffering, if you get acclimated to it to the extent that you’re experiencing a degree of amusement, then the point of Hell has been defeated. The second theological issue is: Do I consider my narrator to be damned, or is my narrator going through Hell for some reason that I as of yet haven’t quite figured out? I thought the part where the narrator observes that suffering has become funny both meant that Hell wasn’t working, and perhaps somewhat paradoxically, that the narrator was damned, and that neither of those things were working.
But also, with regard to the idea that you want to retain your innocence to violence, you want to retain your innocence to subject matter in general, and when you’re revising a poem, ideally you shouldn’t be thinking of reasons for why you’re doing what you’re doing. Or if you are thinking of reasons, they should be very general. The ideal reason is something like “I just don’t like this. This doesn’t work for me.” I suppose if someone asked you to, you could explain it, but it’s best if you’re not explaining it to yourself. So when I was revising things, my thought primarily was, This just doesn’t sound good to me. Can I make it sound better?
JA: Is that desire to retain your innocence an ethic or strategy in your own continual reapproaching of the subject matter? Is it something you keep in mind as you reckon with subjects like your experience of kidnapping, or the place of race in the American imagination?
SM: It just depends on what you’re going to do with what you’re writing. At least with regard to the making of art, when you lose your innocence about suffering or violence, I think that you almost immediately cross over into sentimentality, or a kind of performance of suffering. Because what’s happening is you’ve made the approach of such a subject, and therefore the writing of such a subject, part of your agenda, and so you’ve imposed a degree of artificiality on it. And so to some extent—to a large extent—maintaining one’s innocence is self-delusion. It’s maybe an extended exercise of Keatsian—although is there any other kind?—negative capability, where you pretend you don’t know what you do know, because otherwise you will adulterate the thing that you make. And so it’s not difficult, but the fact that it isn’t difficult is because being able to do it at all is a result of a lot of practice, most of which was fairly unconscious. I didn’t know that was the goal, but now that I’ve been doing it for so long, it’s not especially hard to do. But I do think it is a practice that’s not talked about enough with regard to the making of poems. Although Keats talked about it in several different places.
JA: Why did you return to Hell?
SM: You know, I don’t know. I started writing the poem, I think, in 2013, and it went through a lot of different iterations. There was once a kind of book-length version that wasn’t entirely set in Hell, but it folded in a lot of what ended up being in “The Hell Poem” by itself. I think you can find it online, but it’s pretty terrible. I thought it was done when it was about thirty pages long. And for reasons that I actually don’t really understand, I wrote some more parts. Even when I was writing them, I felt: the poem’s already been published, and this is beyond the boundaries of the poem. But I couldn’t stop doing it. So it’s the same reason that I think anybody writes a poem, or at least anybody should, and maybe the same reason to make any kind of art: you can’t do anything else. And I just felt like I couldn’t not do it.
JA: Narrative is new for you, but this act of returning to poetic personae is not new. There have been these sequences that recur in your books, such as your series of poems written from the perspective of Jim Limber, a mixed-race child who briefly lived in the household of Jefferson Davis, or the “Hastily Assembled Angel,” forcibly hurled down from heaven by the other angels to monitor earth’s creatures alone. What’s the difference between those sequences of personae versus this sustained persona?
SM: There wasn’t much sense of a story, which I think has a lot to do with the 21st-century, maybe even twentieth-century or late twentieth-century, idea of not only what the lyric is but what a poem is. Each poem was an occasion for the exercise of personality, as opposed to an occasion for the continuing or development of a story. I was going to say it’s not as if personality should be secondary to story, but in certain contexts, I think it is. Poetry just generally hasn’t been that context for a long time, and I found writing narrative exciting. One gets a little tired, I suppose, of the foregrounding of personality, even when the personality is a persona.
JA: What did you discover when you were writing the new parts, the full narrative, of New and Collected Hell?
SM: What did I discover… a general sense of inadequacy and dissatisfaction? But I don’t know that I discovered that, I just figured out writing an epic or an epyllion, depending on what you want to think it is, is a new route to that. I discovered that I could surprise myself with fantastical images and ideas and, maybe in a more basic way, an inclination to write that kind of poem at all. I tend to make certain decisions as a writer in response to more or less being told that I can’t do thing X or thing Y. New and Collected Hell is to some extent a response to the idea that you can’t write a traditional epic anymore. There are a lot of ways in which it’s fairly self-consciously a traditional epic. And lately, in my lyric pieces, I’ve been really insistent on very, very hard rhymes and not deviating from the most traditional sense of how rhyme and meter work. I started doing that because I read somewhere that somebody didn’t even think it was possible for a person to do that seriously anymore. So I hadn’t known, before I responded to the idea that one couldn’t write an epic, that I was even capable of approaching such a thing. And I would have assumed that I wasn’t. So that was a bit of a discovery.
My interest in narrative is similar to my interest in being very strict about rhyme and meter, and that is that we’re living in an age where people don’t really do narrative poems a whole lot, at least not in a traditional sense. So I find it exciting. There’s a lot of room to explore in that.
JA: Do you think there’s something about this time that calls out for narrative poetry?
SM: Not especially. I think we live in a fairly anti-narrative time. I watch a lot of television shows, a lot of movies. I was very interested in the Oscars because there were some movies that were up for Best Picture that were narratively speaking, although they were intended to be narrative films, disastrous, and you watch them and you recognize, Oh, this person is trying to do narrative and doesn’t know how. If you’ve read Keats’s Endymion: no idea how to do a narrative at all. He eventually figures it out, but in that early long poem, he can’t write narrative. He just can’t, and he wants to. And so several of these Oscar films, I thought, Oh, they just can’t. They can’t do narrative. But we’re in this moment where narrative cohesion is replaced by instances of the spectacular. So rather than having a story that goes from A to B to C, and the steps make sense, if you have a kind of spectacle occur every so often, people will think that those spectacles are connected, so long as they involve the same characters, even if they don’t naturally lead to each other, even if they don’t even communicate with each other. And so I would say we’re definitely living in a moment where one would find oneself discouraged from making narrative. But I think that’s the reason I find myself inclined to make narrative, or one of the reasons.
JA: The invocation, which was one of the new parts of the Hell poem, is a key element of a traditional epic, but it also feels in some ways like an apotheosis of the syntactical push and pull of your work.
JP: The first two lines, they can be read word by word, or in different word combinations, in different ways, given the careful way the words are laid down next to each other: “Of death the muse is death the muse of Hell / Is death the muse of Heaven I don’t know.”
SM: I can tell you uninteresting facts about that. I think that poem was maybe the beginning of being really strict about rhyme. And it arose because—I think this is the way poets think? This is at least the way I think, and I write poems—it arose out of me thinking: Well, when am I going to get another chance to write an invocation, an invocation of the muses? Maybe I could do that. Let’s just see. Which is a completely absurd prospect, but I thought, why not do it. And it came out pretty quickly. Then there was this last line that in my head read almost as if… well, this is weird to say about one’s own work, but it read almost as if it could not be any other line: “Might make strange justice a familiar good.” I was very excited about how the thing showed up, but what excites me about it is the making of the thing, and seeing how the parts fit together or don’t. It was the thing I wrote last. And I thought, Oh, if I’m really going to do an epic, I need to do this. And then I was thinking of the beginning of the Aeneid, actually, which is maybe a bad place to start. But I thought, If I’m going to write a proper epic and I’m going to do an invocation, I should begin it with a phrase like “of whatever,” because that’s the way that such poems sound. And so: “of death the muse is death.” Okay, that’s kind of absurd, to write a poem like that, but also, that’s how an invocation in an epic should be.
JA: I had to memorize the invocation to the Aeneid in high school, and recite it in meter. It teaches you how… metal, in both senses of the term, these invocations are supposed to sound, which is the kind of ingenious combination you also have. There’s this gravity, but it also has that clang to it, in an intense but also playful way.
SM: I was hoping for the clangy sound. If I was going to write that kind of poem, I just wanted to minimize how much I embarrassed myself. Related to this idea that I wanted to do traditional rhyme and meter and I wanted to write narrative poems is… it’s sort of weird. There’s a way in which even experimentalism is kind of safe. There are various ways to write a kind of edgy poem, in the same way that there are various ways to write a kind of mainstream poem. And you can see that poets get themselves in a position where they are X kind of poet and they’re going to write Y kind of poem. I’m not really different from that. But I don’t feel obligated to not write an invocation just because the idea of such a thing has been absurd for one hundred-plus years. I still want to do it because they’re cool, and if I’ll write it, and if somebody’s willing to publish it, then perfect, you know? I don’t see why I shouldn’t. I guess for all my artistic timidity, I’m still trying to find ways to make myself a little uncomfortable, but also, even while doing so, to recognize that there’s no reason to feel uncomfortable.
JA: Who are the poets you’re returning to right now for guidance or as a challenge?
SM: Anthony Hecht I read and think about a lot. I feel a little lonely in doing so. There are certain problems with his worldview, I would say, but he’s a much better poet than people give him credit for. I think he’s occupying a Robert Herrick-esque space. What I mean is Robert Herrick is a kind of minor poet, but he wrote a lot of perfect poems. The only other poet I can think of who wrote so many perfect poems, or had such a proportion of perfect poems, is George Herbert. Anthony Hecht is a supremely skillful poet, and he can rise to levels of linguistic excitement that few of his contemporaries could match. Linguistically exciting in the way that has this almost Shakespearean sound—Hecht’s kind of alone in that.
I’m diving back into Elizabeth Bishop, again. Patricia Smith is really exciting to me. I think about her a lot, and Geoffrey Hill, although my feelings about him have become a little more complicated lately. Alvin Feinman is on my mind plenty. I just took a trip to Bennington, and one of the things that I was begging to do, and I got to do it, is to go past Alvin Feinman’s house. There’s a certain way of thinking about poetry that begins with Mallarmé and ends with Feinman in his best poems. I think that he describes an outer limit in some of his truly great work. I suspect he recognized this, which is why he only wrote the one book, even though he kept writing…
JA: This is such a veer away, but there’s this moment in “In a Dream the Robot Bird Tells Me How It Is I Am in Hell” where the robot bird is relating the relationship between Cain and Abel, and says:
God told you where
their hearts were Adam never missed
A shot you think that sounds like bullshit
But he was using a gift God
Had given him so killing was
Like prayer for him but Cain he looked
Abel in the eyes and saw himself
Not in his brother’s heart but in
His head and crushed his head and yeah
Where else do humans start Cain named
The animal in Abel’s head
Here the bird, Law, situates the start of humanity in this foundational act of violence. Of course, this isn’t the way a poet thinks necessarily, but it does, for me, raise this question of whether violence is where humans start. At the same time, violence is associated heavily with animality in these lines. And it raises all these other questions: Can violence be a means of self-knowledge? Should it be? I suspect, based on the conversation we’ve been having, that this is not the right question to ask, but it is one that lurks here.
SM: No, I like that. I was going to say my favorite line in that poem is what used to be the first line: “My name is Law I do the work.” But I think that relates to what we’re talking about. Law is a kind of atmosphere of violence, but a kind of atmosphere of violence that human beings generally, I think, can’t do without. Law is talking about what happens after the expulsion from the garden, and were human beings still in Paradise, I realized as you were saying this, I think that there would still be violence. It’s simply that the violence in Paradise would not be a kind of violence for which people would feel guilt. Like, eating an apple is a kind of violence. Farming is a kind of violence. Even if you’re only farming wheat or whatever, there’s still violence required to make it happen. Violence is a part of how things exist, and so the way that we understand violence generally, if you think of things in these terms, could be seen as another punishment related to the fall. You could have violence and would have violence, but it wouldn’t have the same negative associations that it has now. And so I do think that when I’m talking about human beings beginning with this murder, this beginning act of violence, it’s not the violence itself that is the start of humanity. It’s what violence is being used for. It’s violence as an expression of jealousy, violence that is not productive in the way that reaping a field of grain is a productive kind of violence. It’s violence that is simply meant to assuage personal feelings—which it can’t. It just makes things worse, this kind of violence. And so it’s really this postlapsarian [question]: What are the ends of violence? So that’s where the beginning is, what Cain is using violence for. He does so out of a lack of recognition, and through this violence that’s born out of feeling like he’s not recognized, perhaps in the way that he ought to be, he recognizes himself in the only way that you can in a postlapsarian state. But I don’t know whether I believe in the fall that way anyway.
JA: Prior to this moment, prior to the expulsion, Adam is given the gift to shoot through the heart. And yeah, it is an act of violence, but it’s not figured as violent in quite the same way. There are so many of these kind of tenuous gifts in your poetry.
SM: There are certain conceptions of life in the garden where, supposedly, one of the punishments of the fall is that human beings have to hunt and kill. But you know, there are some conceptions in which, essentially, the lamb lies down to be eaten, and it’s not the same kind of suffering and pain associated with hunting and killing. This idea that by having Adam name the animals God is also conveying a degree of power over the life of the animals, I think lines up with that.
Art credit: Eduard Wiiralt, Hell, 1930. Etching and copper engraving on Lana paper.
The poet Susan Howe once wrote that the captivity narrative is the only narrative form unique to North America. Across numerous collections of poetry and a memoir, the poet Shane McCrae has probed the many ways African Americans have been made the captives of violence, both historically and personally. His writing has repeatedly returned to his kidnapping as a child by his white-supremacist grandparents and to the trials of characters both real and invented, and with his book The Gilded Auction Block (2019) he introduced a new recurring theme: Hell. Further installments of “The Hell Poem” appeared in Cain Named the Animal (2022). In his book of poems released this past spring, New and Collected Hell: A Poem, McCrae not only gives captivity an epic scope but also casts his persona as the captive suffering eternal damnation. In this underworld his Virgil is Law, a dull metal bird that at one point in the journey squawks, “It’s mostly assholes who think Hell’s where justice happens Hell / Is sorrow’s Heaven where it goes to live forever with / Its god the human body.” Unlike Dante’s Inferno, the necessity of eternal punishment in McCrae’s Hell poem goes unexplained and is not sentimentalized.
McCrae lives in New York City and is a professor in Columbia University’s writing program. He is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. This spring we met with McCrae over Zoom to discuss New and Collected Hell, the challenges of writing an epic in anti-narrative times and violence as a means of self-knowledge.
—John Palattella & Julia Aizuss
●
John Palattella: You write a lot about violence in your work, not only through image, but also through syntax. Your syntax is quite inventive and remarkable, a way to keep reconsidering and combing over how it is that so many different kinds of violence are constantly erupting in American life at a social level as well as an individual level. How does a writer, as a person but also as a writer, make that into something that can be conveyed through a poem?
Shane McCrae: Violence itself?
JP: The experience of being exposed to it or its effects on yourself or other people, its effects on society.
SM: Sure. You know, I was just thinking about how I love being asked questions about my poems. I don’t know about other writers. I get the suspicion that, generally, poets don’t often think about how they do what they do, and when we give answers that reflect something like thought about how we do what we do, I also suspect that those are fairly spontaneous and that we put them out of our minds as soon as we’ve uttered them. But with regard to representing the constant sense of violence in poetry, and exposure to violence, I have been thinking about something similar recently, given the current political climate. It is almost something that one can’t really describe, because I think it’s mostly to do with the deployment of images and decisions you make as the poem progresses. Maybe it’s in the syntax, sometimes the choice of subject, so that a person living in a culture in which they aren’t often exposed to violence will write a poem about a bowl of fruit differently from a person who lives in a culture in which they are often exposed to violence. The poem will sound very, very different if everything else is otherwise the same.
So I think it’s probably pre-composition, and it has to do, ultimately, with to what extent one can maintain one’s innocence with regard to violence. What I mean by that is not that one is innocent, but rather that one can keep it out of one’s head. And if it is going to enter in a poem, the sense of dread, you don’t want it to happen dishonestly, where you’re trying to force a poem about the constant feeling of exposure to violence. You want it to be a natural component of the writing of the poem. But I think you have to look for its functioning in the poem, essentially, in atmosphere, as opposed to in content that directly addresses the subject.
Julia Aizuss: You see something similar happening sometimes in your poetry, actually. I was comparing parts of New and Collected Hell to the versions that I originally read, in The Gilded Auction Block and Cain Named the Animal, and there’s at least one moment where there’s this retroactive sense to the observation. It’s that grisly, fantastical moment where the narrator is snapped apart at the femurs and then altogether shattered. In the original version, the narrator observes how cartoonish the violence is, “like torments in a cartoon fun- // ny,” and the way that it’s so violent you have to laugh:
the more torments I suffered
The funnier the suffering
Of others got but not till after
A dozen years or so did finding
The suffering of others funny
Become so funny it became
A source of suffering to me
So that was later now I watched
My femurs rocket forward as
The rest of my bones liquefied
In the final version, it’s gone. It’s set only at the moment in time:
see
-ing them I felt no pain but like
A stranger to my body I watched
My femurs rocket forward as
The rest of my bones liquefied
I was curious whether it’s because suddenly that rude detachment felt forced, and if there were other moments in the poem where, in the process of revision, you realized that something about that attitude to violence wasn’t working.
SM: That was a theological question. When the narrator is talking about being able to laugh at violence, there are a few theological problems. I should add here that I very much believe in God. I don’t know whether I believe in Hell. The Christian scriptures’ support for the idea is very thin on the ground, as is the case in the Hebrew scriptures. I don’t know about it, but if I’m taking the idea of Hell seriously, it cannot be a place where one ever gets used to suffering. If you do get used to suffering, if you get acclimated to it to the extent that you’re experiencing a degree of amusement, then the point of Hell has been defeated. The second theological issue is: Do I consider my narrator to be damned, or is my narrator going through Hell for some reason that I as of yet haven’t quite figured out? I thought the part where the narrator observes that suffering has become funny both meant that Hell wasn’t working, and perhaps somewhat paradoxically, that the narrator was damned, and that neither of those things were working.
But also, with regard to the idea that you want to retain your innocence to violence, you want to retain your innocence to subject matter in general, and when you’re revising a poem, ideally you shouldn’t be thinking of reasons for why you’re doing what you’re doing. Or if you are thinking of reasons, they should be very general. The ideal reason is something like “I just don’t like this. This doesn’t work for me.” I suppose if someone asked you to, you could explain it, but it’s best if you’re not explaining it to yourself. So when I was revising things, my thought primarily was, This just doesn’t sound good to me. Can I make it sound better?
JA: Is that desire to retain your innocence an ethic or strategy in your own continual reapproaching of the subject matter? Is it something you keep in mind as you reckon with subjects like your experience of kidnapping, or the place of race in the American imagination?
SM: It just depends on what you’re going to do with what you’re writing. At least with regard to the making of art, when you lose your innocence about suffering or violence, I think that you almost immediately cross over into sentimentality, or a kind of performance of suffering. Because what’s happening is you’ve made the approach of such a subject, and therefore the writing of such a subject, part of your agenda, and so you’ve imposed a degree of artificiality on it. And so to some extent—to a large extent—maintaining one’s innocence is self-delusion. It’s maybe an extended exercise of Keatsian—although is there any other kind?—negative capability, where you pretend you don’t know what you do know, because otherwise you will adulterate the thing that you make. And so it’s not difficult, but the fact that it isn’t difficult is because being able to do it at all is a result of a lot of practice, most of which was fairly unconscious. I didn’t know that was the goal, but now that I’ve been doing it for so long, it’s not especially hard to do. But I do think it is a practice that’s not talked about enough with regard to the making of poems. Although Keats talked about it in several different places.
JA: Why did you return to Hell?
SM: You know, I don’t know. I started writing the poem, I think, in 2013, and it went through a lot of different iterations. There was once a kind of book-length version that wasn’t entirely set in Hell, but it folded in a lot of what ended up being in “The Hell Poem” by itself. I think you can find it online, but it’s pretty terrible. I thought it was done when it was about thirty pages long. And for reasons that I actually don’t really understand, I wrote some more parts. Even when I was writing them, I felt: the poem’s already been published, and this is beyond the boundaries of the poem. But I couldn’t stop doing it. So it’s the same reason that I think anybody writes a poem, or at least anybody should, and maybe the same reason to make any kind of art: you can’t do anything else. And I just felt like I couldn’t not do it.
JA: Narrative is new for you, but this act of returning to poetic personae is not new. There have been these sequences that recur in your books, such as your series of poems written from the perspective of Jim Limber, a mixed-race child who briefly lived in the household of Jefferson Davis, or the “Hastily Assembled Angel,” forcibly hurled down from heaven by the other angels to monitor earth’s creatures alone. What’s the difference between those sequences of personae versus this sustained persona?
SM: There wasn’t much sense of a story, which I think has a lot to do with the 21st-century, maybe even twentieth-century or late twentieth-century, idea of not only what the lyric is but what a poem is. Each poem was an occasion for the exercise of personality, as opposed to an occasion for the continuing or development of a story. I was going to say it’s not as if personality should be secondary to story, but in certain contexts, I think it is. Poetry just generally hasn’t been that context for a long time, and I found writing narrative exciting. One gets a little tired, I suppose, of the foregrounding of personality, even when the personality is a persona.
JA: What did you discover when you were writing the new parts, the full narrative, of New and Collected Hell?
SM: What did I discover… a general sense of inadequacy and dissatisfaction? But I don’t know that I discovered that, I just figured out writing an epic or an epyllion, depending on what you want to think it is, is a new route to that. I discovered that I could surprise myself with fantastical images and ideas and, maybe in a more basic way, an inclination to write that kind of poem at all. I tend to make certain decisions as a writer in response to more or less being told that I can’t do thing X or thing Y. New and Collected Hell is to some extent a response to the idea that you can’t write a traditional epic anymore. There are a lot of ways in which it’s fairly self-consciously a traditional epic. And lately, in my lyric pieces, I’ve been really insistent on very, very hard rhymes and not deviating from the most traditional sense of how rhyme and meter work. I started doing that because I read somewhere that somebody didn’t even think it was possible for a person to do that seriously anymore. So I hadn’t known, before I responded to the idea that one couldn’t write an epic, that I was even capable of approaching such a thing. And I would have assumed that I wasn’t. So that was a bit of a discovery.
My interest in narrative is similar to my interest in being very strict about rhyme and meter, and that is that we’re living in an age where people don’t really do narrative poems a whole lot, at least not in a traditional sense. So I find it exciting. There’s a lot of room to explore in that.
JA: Do you think there’s something about this time that calls out for narrative poetry?
SM: Not especially. I think we live in a fairly anti-narrative time. I watch a lot of television shows, a lot of movies. I was very interested in the Oscars because there were some movies that were up for Best Picture that were narratively speaking, although they were intended to be narrative films, disastrous, and you watch them and you recognize, Oh, this person is trying to do narrative and doesn’t know how. If you’ve read Keats’s Endymion: no idea how to do a narrative at all. He eventually figures it out, but in that early long poem, he can’t write narrative. He just can’t, and he wants to. And so several of these Oscar films, I thought, Oh, they just can’t. They can’t do narrative. But we’re in this moment where narrative cohesion is replaced by instances of the spectacular. So rather than having a story that goes from A to B to C, and the steps make sense, if you have a kind of spectacle occur every so often, people will think that those spectacles are connected, so long as they involve the same characters, even if they don’t naturally lead to each other, even if they don’t even communicate with each other. And so I would say we’re definitely living in a moment where one would find oneself discouraged from making narrative. But I think that’s the reason I find myself inclined to make narrative, or one of the reasons.
JA: The invocation, which was one of the new parts of the Hell poem, is a key element of a traditional epic, but it also feels in some ways like an apotheosis of the syntactical push and pull of your work.
JP: The first two lines, they can be read word by word, or in different word combinations, in different ways, given the careful way the words are laid down next to each other: “Of death the muse is death the muse of Hell / Is death the muse of Heaven I don’t know.”
SM: I can tell you uninteresting facts about that. I think that poem was maybe the beginning of being really strict about rhyme. And it arose because—I think this is the way poets think? This is at least the way I think, and I write poems—it arose out of me thinking: Well, when am I going to get another chance to write an invocation, an invocation of the muses? Maybe I could do that. Let’s just see. Which is a completely absurd prospect, but I thought, why not do it. And it came out pretty quickly. Then there was this last line that in my head read almost as if… well, this is weird to say about one’s own work, but it read almost as if it could not be any other line: “Might make strange justice a familiar good.” I was very excited about how the thing showed up, but what excites me about it is the making of the thing, and seeing how the parts fit together or don’t. It was the thing I wrote last. And I thought, Oh, if I’m really going to do an epic, I need to do this. And then I was thinking of the beginning of the Aeneid, actually, which is maybe a bad place to start. But I thought, If I’m going to write a proper epic and I’m going to do an invocation, I should begin it with a phrase like “of whatever,” because that’s the way that such poems sound. And so: “of death the muse is death.” Okay, that’s kind of absurd, to write a poem like that, but also, that’s how an invocation in an epic should be.
JA: I had to memorize the invocation to the Aeneid in high school, and recite it in meter. It teaches you how… metal, in both senses of the term, these invocations are supposed to sound, which is the kind of ingenious combination you also have. There’s this gravity, but it also has that clang to it, in an intense but also playful way.
SM: I was hoping for the clangy sound. If I was going to write that kind of poem, I just wanted to minimize how much I embarrassed myself. Related to this idea that I wanted to do traditional rhyme and meter and I wanted to write narrative poems is… it’s sort of weird. There’s a way in which even experimentalism is kind of safe. There are various ways to write a kind of edgy poem, in the same way that there are various ways to write a kind of mainstream poem. And you can see that poets get themselves in a position where they are X kind of poet and they’re going to write Y kind of poem. I’m not really different from that. But I don’t feel obligated to not write an invocation just because the idea of such a thing has been absurd for one hundred-plus years. I still want to do it because they’re cool, and if I’ll write it, and if somebody’s willing to publish it, then perfect, you know? I don’t see why I shouldn’t. I guess for all my artistic timidity, I’m still trying to find ways to make myself a little uncomfortable, but also, even while doing so, to recognize that there’s no reason to feel uncomfortable.
JA: Who are the poets you’re returning to right now for guidance or as a challenge?
SM: Anthony Hecht I read and think about a lot. I feel a little lonely in doing so. There are certain problems with his worldview, I would say, but he’s a much better poet than people give him credit for. I think he’s occupying a Robert Herrick-esque space. What I mean is Robert Herrick is a kind of minor poet, but he wrote a lot of perfect poems. The only other poet I can think of who wrote so many perfect poems, or had such a proportion of perfect poems, is George Herbert. Anthony Hecht is a supremely skillful poet, and he can rise to levels of linguistic excitement that few of his contemporaries could match. Linguistically exciting in the way that has this almost Shakespearean sound—Hecht’s kind of alone in that.
I’m diving back into Elizabeth Bishop, again. Patricia Smith is really exciting to me. I think about her a lot, and Geoffrey Hill, although my feelings about him have become a little more complicated lately. Alvin Feinman is on my mind plenty. I just took a trip to Bennington, and one of the things that I was begging to do, and I got to do it, is to go past Alvin Feinman’s house. There’s a certain way of thinking about poetry that begins with Mallarmé and ends with Feinman in his best poems. I think that he describes an outer limit in some of his truly great work. I suspect he recognized this, which is why he only wrote the one book, even though he kept writing…
JA: This is such a veer away, but there’s this moment in “In a Dream the Robot Bird Tells Me How It Is I Am in Hell” where the robot bird is relating the relationship between Cain and Abel, and says:
God told you where
their hearts were Adam never missed
A shot you think that sounds like bullshit
But he was using a gift God
Had given him so killing was
Like prayer for him but Cain he looked
Abel in the eyes and saw himself
Not in his brother’s heart but in
His head and crushed his head and yeah
Where else do humans start Cain named
The animal in Abel’s head
Here the bird, Law, situates the start of humanity in this foundational act of violence. Of course, this isn’t the way a poet thinks necessarily, but it does, for me, raise this question of whether violence is where humans start. At the same time, violence is associated heavily with animality in these lines. And it raises all these other questions: Can violence be a means of self-knowledge? Should it be? I suspect, based on the conversation we’ve been having, that this is not the right question to ask, but it is one that lurks here.
SM: No, I like that. I was going to say my favorite line in that poem is what used to be the first line: “My name is Law I do the work.” But I think that relates to what we’re talking about. Law is a kind of atmosphere of violence, but a kind of atmosphere of violence that human beings generally, I think, can’t do without. Law is talking about what happens after the expulsion from the garden, and were human beings still in Paradise, I realized as you were saying this, I think that there would still be violence. It’s simply that the violence in Paradise would not be a kind of violence for which people would feel guilt. Like, eating an apple is a kind of violence. Farming is a kind of violence. Even if you’re only farming wheat or whatever, there’s still violence required to make it happen. Violence is a part of how things exist, and so the way that we understand violence generally, if you think of things in these terms, could be seen as another punishment related to the fall. You could have violence and would have violence, but it wouldn’t have the same negative associations that it has now. And so I do think that when I’m talking about human beings beginning with this murder, this beginning act of violence, it’s not the violence itself that is the start of humanity. It’s what violence is being used for. It’s violence as an expression of jealousy, violence that is not productive in the way that reaping a field of grain is a productive kind of violence. It’s violence that is simply meant to assuage personal feelings—which it can’t. It just makes things worse, this kind of violence. And so it’s really this postlapsarian [question]: What are the ends of violence? So that’s where the beginning is, what Cain is using violence for. He does so out of a lack of recognition, and through this violence that’s born out of feeling like he’s not recognized, perhaps in the way that he ought to be, he recognizes himself in the only way that you can in a postlapsarian state. But I don’t know whether I believe in the fall that way anyway.
JA: Prior to this moment, prior to the expulsion, Adam is given the gift to shoot through the heart. And yeah, it is an act of violence, but it’s not figured as violent in quite the same way. There are so many of these kind of tenuous gifts in your poetry.
SM: There are certain conceptions of life in the garden where, supposedly, one of the punishments of the fall is that human beings have to hunt and kill. But you know, there are some conceptions in which, essentially, the lamb lies down to be eaten, and it’s not the same kind of suffering and pain associated with hunting and killing. This idea that by having Adam name the animals God is also conveying a degree of power over the life of the animals, I think lines up with that.
Art credit: Eduard Wiiralt, Hell, 1930. Etching and copper engraving on Lana paper.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.