Have you ever gotten into trouble for reading a book?
I got into trouble several times at my all-male Jesuit college for engaging in the nefarious act of reading after lights out. In a dorm room whose window and door had been light-proofed with newspapers and tin foil, I would climb up into a luggage closet and shut the little door behind me. With a pillow for comfort and a flashlight taped to a heating pipe, the scene was made for reading. After closing Camus’s “The Stranger,” I descended a changed young man.
What books are on your night stand?
Maeve Brennan, “The Long-Winded Lady,” a collection of her Talk of the Town pieces; James Wood, “How Fiction Works”; “The Letters of Seamus Heaney”; Richard Panek’s “The Trouble With Gravity” and “Pillars of Creation”; John Avlon, “Lincoln and the Fight for Peace”; Lily Brooks-Dalton, “The Light Pirate”; Rowan Ricardo Phillips, “Living Weapon”; and, as always, Emerson: “Essays and Lectures.”
What books would people be surprised to find on your shelves?
Andrew Beyer’s “The Winning Horseplayer” and Thomas Eakins’s “A Drawing Manual.”
What’s the last great book you read?
The last great book I read was Joyce’s “Ulysses,” and the last great book I reread was also Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
Life has become too short for “Middlemarch,” “A Dance to the Music of Time,” “The Alexandria Quartet” and lots of others I’m too ashamed even to mention.
What’s the last book you recommended to a member of your family?
Niall Williams’s “This Is Happiness” may sound like self-help, but it’s a beautifully humorous novel-memoir about life in an imagined village in the west of Ireland. The language is a joyride; even Williams’s sentence structures can be amusing.
How has the internet changed your writing?
The internet asks us to speed up. Poetry invites us to slow down. I write with pencil and paper, then use the computer only as a fancy typewriter. So no change really, except in its role as the most persistent distraction in human history.
How do you know when a poem is finished?
A poem is finished when I discover its ending, where I don’t want to say any more and you don’t want to hear any more. A sad truth is the real ending of any poem occurs where the reader stops reading it. I always try not to let that happen.
“Longing” and “invoking the heart” have fallen out of fashion in poetry, you write. Do you miss them?
After the Romantic Movement, yearning and longing retreated from their high-water mark of popularity. They went the way of the exclamation point. And exclamation itself. These days, instead of envying the skylark or the nightingale because it can fly and sing, the poet can just leap from the title, take wing and break into song. And instead of crying out to the heart (“Oh heart!” or “Yo, heart!”), poets are mostly talking to themselves.
In a 2014 interview you said you’d stopped reading poems. Still true?
Did I really say that? I must have been having a moment. I read poems every day, but I often don’t finish them for reasons it would require a workshop to explain. We all have our deal-breakers. John Ciardi, then poetry editor of The Saturday Review, balked at any name from classical mythology. I find that family members can burden a poem, especially if they happen to be dead. So if I come across “Dad” or “Mommy,” I’m out. “Grandma” gets a pass.
What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
From a book on primates, I recently learned that chimps, monkeys and gorillas all peel bananas from the opposite end from us and use the stem as a handle. I even wrote a poem about how I made the switch.
How do you sign books for your fans?
Quickly, with a smile, because I never know what to write. Paul Durcan is the only poet whose line I’ve stood on to get a signature. He paused for a moment, then wrote, “O, the many nights she pierced my heart.” That’s well beyond my reach.
What subjects do you wish more authors wrote about?
I have never recommended a subject to a fiction writer. I prefer novels where very little happens, except everything seems to be getting worse. José Saramago’s “Blindness,” for example. Emma Donoghue’s “Room.” Or almost anything by Thomas Bernhard.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Meeting an author whom you admire is one of life’s most reliably disappointing experiences, starting with what they are wearing. But I would like to test that truism by inviting Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor and Melville. Plus Ann Patchett, who, while I’m busy cooking, would explain the 21st century to the others.
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