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Endowment Arts & Letters Editorial Staff Learn about the MFA Program
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Writing by Ear: An
Interview with Michael Waters
By: Tony Leuzzi |
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Tony Leuzzi: You once
told me that a reviewer of The Burden Lifters (1989) observed that the book
displayed a “dizzying” variety of forms and styles. The implication here was
that you favored eclecticism over a consistent voice. But even a superficial
perusal of Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems
(2001) proves that you persist in a handful of classic stanzaic
forms--couplets, tercets, quatrains--and non-stanzaic poems that accumulate anywhere from 25-50 lines.
In most cases, your line is four- or five-feet long, and largely iambic.
While exact end rhymes are not common, slant end rhymes are, as are interior
rhymes, consonance, assonance, and alliteration. Can you speak about the
importance of form in your verse? Michael: I seem to need some sort of form to
ground my free verse, and believe that any good free verse contains formal
gestures. Robert Bly refers to his own poems as “free verse with distinct
memories of form.” Without form, poetry is often, if not always, prose. Many
hold up William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” as an example of a
good free verse poem: so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens But there’s really nothing free about this poem!
It’s broken into short-lined couplets. Each first line of the couplet has a
precise number of words: three. Each second line of the couplet has a precise
number of words: one. Each of those one-word lines consists of two syllables.
The poem has a formal shape, though it’s still considered free verse. Tony: Williams invents the poem’s shape for this
occasion. He creates a “nonce” form. Michael: Exactly. I began writing in rhyme and
meter. The first poems I published were rhymed-quatrain imitations of Richard
Wilbur, the poet I most admired when I was 19 and 20. Earlier, in high
school, I’d begun reading the Beats: Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso. But I went to college in 1967, and my first
English class was “Contemporary Literature,” taught by Gregory Fitz Gerald,
who had just come from the Tony: I have noted in those poems quite a bit of
slant rhyming and internal rhyming within lines. Michael: Yes. I learned slant rhyming from Emily
Dickinson and Shakespeare, whom I began reading seriously in college. “Ways”
and “grace,” or “God” and “cloud”—those sorts of rhymes from traditional
verse. Vernon Watkins, the English poet and critic, wrote, “Poetry rhymes all
along the lines, not only at the ends.” All along the lines: this idea stayed
with me, especially when I discovered John Logan’s poetry in 1969 or 1970. Tony: Some of the more recent poems in Parthenopi, such as “God at Forty” and “ Michael: When Brad Leithauser
reviewed Richard Howard’s Inner Voices: Selected Poems (New York Times Book
Review, November 21, 2004), he wrote, “As systems go, syllabic verse has
little to recommend it, except for one puzzling thing: It works. With some
frequency, the eccentric discipline it imposes seems to push everyday
utterance into memorability.” After my first few
books, I found myself moving toward the syllabic verse that I had noticed in
John Logan’s poetry. The syllabic system you see in “God at Forty,” for
example, became a means for me to break up the quatrain while not always
relying on a precise decasyllabic line, which occurs in some of my poems. The
alternation between thirteen- and seven-syllable lines enables me to cast out
a long line, adding three syllables to the decasyllabic line, then pull back
by three syllables in the next seven-syllable line. Tony: It creates a tension between expansiveness
and compression. Michael: Yes. The interplay between the thirteen-
and seven-syllable lines also allows me to adopt a more conversational tone.
This syllabic system enabled me to think not only vertically as the poem
moves down the page, but horizontally as the language flows across the page.
The integral unit of poetry is the line itself: the line as a unit unto
itself, that requires its own context and which, out of the context of the
rest of the poem, needs to remain interesting. Each line requires balance and
heft, and needs to express certain tactile qualities. Writing in syllabic
forms was not inhibitive in terms of my thinking; in fact, I found it
liberating. After writing this way for several years, I found myself thinking
naturally along syllabic lines. I could hear people in conversation speaking
lines of thirteen and seven syllables! Half of my next book, Darling
Vulgarity (2006), consists of poems written in this strict syllabic system or
some variation of it. Tony: A poet working in syllabics faces some
significant challenges. One of the challenges is to avoid a prosy sounding
line. Another is to create a line-ending that is at once consistent with the
syllabic pattern and aesthetically pleasing in and of itself. When you write
in syllabics are you conscious of using a variety of sound and rhythmic
patterns that will bolster the line? Michael: Very much so. Any verse is weak when it
is not attentive to sound work, to tactile qualities divorced from literal
meaning. Williams talks about this in his
Autobiography: “the words themselves beyond the mere thought expressed.” I’ve
read so many interviews with or critical articles by twentieth-century
artists who talk about the importance of composition in paintings and
photographs. Henri Cartier-Bresson takes a postcard of a painting to the
museum, then turns it upside down in front of the
painting to compare images: “You can see it more clearly this way.” The
subject is no longer emphasized. In an undated, unpub-lished
article titled “What Is the Use of Poetry?” quoted by Bram Dijkstra in Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of
William Carlos Williams (1969),
Williams mentions the pleasure of reading backward, “from somewhere
near the end back to the beginning and thus finishing. I find my own sensual
pleasure greatly increased by so doing. I am much better able to judge of the
force of the work in this way.” Tony: Reversing not word sounds but syntax. Michael: Yes. I like to do this just to hear the
sounds that exist on the page. I remain aware of the way words clamor against
each other or with each other, the musical phrasings, the chiming effects
that occur. Such sound work takes the place of the more traditional metrics
of my apprenticeship, and becomes a means of keeping the entire poem in the
foreground. Each line of poetry should bring forward all of the lines before
it, and it can do this through rhyme, through chiming devices, and through
what Norman Dubie in a recent interview called
“rhythmical contracts.” The line should be attentive to sounds that occurred
in previous lines, and should anticipate, even require, in terms of such
sounds, lines that follow. So if there is revision––and I’m constantly
revising poems while I’m writing them––it’s like the effect betting has on a
tote board. Suddenly all the numbers have flipped. “One might imagine that in
order to make a painting it’s simply a question of placing one detail next to
another,” Alberto Giacometti stated. “But that’s not it. It’s a question of
creating a complete entity all at once.” So the whole poem must be
re-examined syllable by syllable to see if other changes are required. Tony: Let’s see how some of this sound work
foregrounds language in a poem like “God at Forty.” One of the qualities I
like about this poem is the respect you have for the end of the line, which
is one of the major problems I see with syllabic poems. Lesser poets working
in this form tend to get sloppy towards the end of the line and are primarily
concerned with making sure the syllabic count is consistent. Line endings like
“the,” “of,” or “and,” for example, better be justified. But in “God at
Forty,” you are clearly aware of the important position of information at the
end of the line. This integrity is evident even when you end with a
conjunction like “but,” as you do in the following line: He never answers prayers, but That “but” is crucial to an understanding of the
line as its own unit of meaning and in terms of its relationship to other
lines. The line begins with an absolute statement,”
He [God] never answers prayers,” which gets negated or undercut in the final
word. This negation is particularly potent here because, within the line, the
negation of the absolute reveals the persona’s complicated relationship to
God and to faith. Michael: Yes. But the lack of concern for line
shape and sound that you speak of is not endemic to syllabic verse alone.
While line endings are crucial, there are many poets—Sharon Olds, for
example—who end lines with words like “of” and “the” because she is more
concerned with the vertical thrust of the poem, the progression of the
narrative, than she is with the horizontal thrust of the language. I admire
the intensity of her work and its commitment to forward movement, but I don’t
think she crafts an interesting line. She is able to write a powerful poem
while not attending to the line as carefully as she might. This is possible
for her. Louis Simpson is a master of tone and humor. But that’s not what I’m
interested in doing with my own work. “You can only get to do anything,”
Giacometti also stated, “by limiting yourself to an extremely small
field.” Ultimately, we must play to
our strengths. “God at Forty” means to be a playful poem. The line you quoted
that ends with “but”––which is an unusual line ending for me––means to be a
playful line. It does what you say it does: states an absolute that then is
immediately undercut by the “but,” which also anticipates the information on
the next line. In terms of end rhyme––and this is not a fully end-rhymed
poem, of course––”but” leads a few lines down first to “lost,” then to
“shut,” “that,” and “out.” While
poets often pay attention to how a line ends, too many poets begin a line in
weakness, as if they’re taking a breath, then struggling uphill. The more
interesting language tends to appear—if it appears at all—toward the end of
the line. At the beginning you find mostly prepositions, conjunctions, or
pronouns. In the right hands, such as Seamus Heaney’s,
you can avoid such words or integrate them into the poem, making them
absolutely essential, equal in importance to any other words; you can bring
such words into the foreground. This intrigued Williams. His compositions on
the page were meant, in part, to move all the language of the poem into the
foreground. In doing this, he was influenced by experimentation in modern
art, by those paintings in which the canvas, having traditionally featured a
foreground subject against a background, was suddenly shattered. The
distinction between foreground and background was lost. The painting was no
longer a window into the world. When you viewed such a painting, you were
stopped, made aware of the textures of the painting, its colors and shapes.
Williams attempted this with language. In any poem I write, syllabic or
otherwise, I’m conscious of trying to balance the line by giving it a
beginning, a middle, and an end. In “God at Forty,”
words such as “into,” “to,” or “of” begin a few of the lines, but more often
words such as “noodle,” slabbed,” “late,”
“predict,” “traditional,” and “postmodernists” start each line. Tony: Or the wonderful line: Rain quickens the white dwarf pines. The first word, “Rain,” determines the
heavily-stressed rhythm for the rest of the line. Michael: That leads me to something that I try to
teach. If we choose two symbols––not the ictus or breve that signify
stressed or unstressed syllables––one to denote a word that seems crucial and
the other a word that somehow seems less crucial, I would like a line of
poetry to contain more of the former. So when I consider the line you just
quoted, five of those six words––”Rain,” “quickens,” “white,” “dwarf,”
“pines”––seem necessary and interesting. Tony: But even in the context of rhythm, the “the”
is crucial. The line is heavily stressed with sprung rhythms. The article is
unstressed or, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ terminology, a riding syllable that
with the latter half of “quickens” sweeps the line from two heavily stressed
and slow syllables (“Rain” and “quick-”) into three more
heavily stressed syllables (“white,” “dwarf,” and “pines”). You need the
“the” there. Michael: We can’t write without those articles.
Otherwise our English will sound like the phony Indian language in old
Westerns! Here’s another line from the same poem: Rain spatters the cabin roof. Four of the five words in the line are crucial. I
want my students—those beginning writers—to think, “I’m winning this ballgame
four-to-one.” Not only are four of the five words in the line essential in
terms of content, they’re crucial in terms of sound: the alliteration of
“rain” and “roof”; the slant-rhyme of “rain” and the last syllable of
“cabin.” I’m conscious of the way the line sounds. Here’s one more: One hushed breeze freshens the crab apple blossoms
upstate Again, there are thirteen syllables and twelve of
them seem to me to be crucial. I’m not taking anything away from the article.
The idea of democracy in language is important. Democracy was the great
subject of Walt Whitman. For William Carlos Williams, who was influenced by
Whitman and who was, by the way, his contemporary for nine years, democracy
was an essential idea in terms of form. I think of the craft that he brings
to the poem. All words are created equal has been important to me. What I see
happening in contemporary poetry is that the subject matter is often more
important than the language used to express that subject. Such poems lack
balance. There are poets who lean in the other direction, who give themselves
over fully to matters of craft while not having much to say. Tony: The poem is a piece of music. Those writers
who foreground content over form are treating the poem the way one might
treat a newspaper article or a piece of expository prose. A poem may, for
example, communicate through its sound work elements that cannot be
effectively represented by ordinary means of explanation. Michael: One of the things I learned from poets
such as John Logan, Isabella Gardner, Seamus Heaney, and Robert Lowell is
that there’s a way of writing by ear rather than writing solely by image or
idea. I let the sounds of words suggest other words. I move forward in the
poem not simply by rational thinking, but by allowing sounds to suggest other
sounds, to suggest words that will make use of those sounds. In this way, I’m
constantly surprising myself in terms of direction. So many of my poems have
narratives imbedded in them, yet when I begin to write I don’t have that
narrative in mind. In the process of writing the poem, I find out what will
happen. I’m always surprised and pleased when people talk to me about the
personal element in my work and how this element has managed to touch them.
It surprises me because I didn’t set out to talk about a particular aspect of
emotional life; in the poem’s process of becoming, this personal element
announced itself. Tony: I think, for many poets, the idea of writing
by ear is frightening because it forces them to surrender any preconceived
notions of how a poem will look or develop. Many poets deliberately set out
to transcribe personal experiences, for example, and if their primary aim is
to get the experience on the page, they are not as attuned to discovering
through auditory associations the real poem underneath the surface poem. Michael: Yes. And while writing by ear can suggest
the direction the work will take, this process is not a restriction. There is
an expansiveness that can occur within strict form. Our American language is
endlessly inventive, especially when writers use what Whitman called the
“blab of the pave,” bringing into poems our colloquialisms, slang,
vulgarities—those words we wouldn’t ordinarily consider as poetic language.
The publication of Ginsberg’s Howl and Tony: You mention how self-censorship or the
refusal to embrace the “blab of the pave” could be limiting. One of the more
interesting elements of one of my favorite poems of yours, “Horse,” is your
decision not to name the horse’s genitalia. You signify it with a long dash.
What led to this narrative decision? Michael: Robert Bly read that poem in manuscript
and said, “Ah, you’re just afraid to say cock.” I replied, “Robert, that’s
only one word. Other words also come to mind if I don’t state it.” We have so
many slang words for “penis,” many of them with that harsh percussive sound.
Part of the humor of the poem is in its being spoken by someone remembering
who he was as a young boy, and recalling that moment when the word and the
object it signified became distinct. Suddenly word and object were separate.
The word that signifies the world is not the world itself; the world itself
can offer so much more in terms of sensory experience. The boy he’s
remembering might place his hand over his mouth the moment he realizes what
he’s seeing. He might think: “I know this word, but I’m not supposed to say
it.” Tony: He also may think the word he knows is not
elastic enough to articulate what he’s feeling at the moment. Michael: Exactly. Tony: What I like about “Horse” is that, though
there is an absence in the decision not to name, the unnamed object is
everywhere. The horse’s penis, cock, dick, or whatever, is no longer merely a
body part, but a phallus. For example, you write, “Under the enormous belly,
his ––––– “ followed immediately in the next stanza with four lines of ample
description: swung like the policeman’s nightstick, a dowsing
rod, longer than my arm–– even
the Catholic girls could see it hung there like a
rubber spigot. Michael: Yes. I set up the reader in a number of
ways. The poem opens with that off- rhyme of “saw” and “furniture,” then
moves to “flies” and “eyes,” and “noon” and “fume.” The word that’s not there
may rhyme or off-rhyme with “stick.” That was meant to be slyly humorous as
well. “Horse,” like so many of the poems in the first section of Parthenopi, is about becoming a writer. The boy’s sudden
awareness of the distinction between word and object is part of this process.
Tony: Towards the end of the poem, the persona
says, “Horse, I remember thinking.” He understands now what the word is. He
knew the word before, but did not know the enormity of what it signified. Michael: Right. Now, and for ever after, that word
will convey scent, will convey eroticism, and so
many more things. There’s a deepening of the language. Tony: The boy comes to this awareness through
first-hand observation, but the reader is also aware that “horse” is an
archetypal symbol of eroticism. So there are two paths of knowing here: the
boy’s coming to knowledge through observation; and, perhaps, the adult
voice’s sophisticated conjuring of an erotic symbol he knows his audience
will already understand. There is the autobiographical component and the
mythological one. Michael: I was pleased some years ago when Ted Kooser reviewed one of my chapbooks in The Georgia
Review. He mentioned the deceptive simplicity of my work. Tony: Many of your poems flaunt a deceptive
simplicity. “Horse,” for example, can be enjoyed as a coming-of-age narrative,
where a boy discovers the complex relationship between an object in the world
and the language we use to designate it. But so many other elements are at
work within it. This leads me to another observation about this same poem.
The end rhymes you pointed out earlier often cut across stanzas: “noon” and
“fume,” “bed” and head,” “hair” and “there,” and even the very slant feminine
end-rhyme of “urine” and “junkman.” These across-stanza end-rhymes, as well
as the sentences that are carried from one stanza to the next, suggest that
the poem might have been organized in another way. In Poetic Meter and Poetic
Form, Paul Fussell insists, for example, upon the
autonomy of the stanza, that each stanza should be justified as its own
logical unit within the larger structure of the poem. He often illustrates
this concept by citing those poems where sentences and end-rhymes are
contained within the stanza. However, if we look at the first two stanzas of
“Horse,” we see a far-less restrictive sense of organization at work: The first horse I ever saw was
hauling a wagon stacked with furniture past storefronts along He was taller than a car, blue-black with flies, and bits of green ribbon tied to his mane bounced near his caked and rheumy eyes. I had
seen horses in books before, but this horse
shimmered in the The first sentence is three lines long. The second
stanza, introduced in the fourth line of the first stanza, is then carried
over into the next two lines of the second stanza. You could have chosen tercets to demonstrate autonomy between stanzas here. Why
did you work with quatrains? Michael: I didn’t want to stop the reader at the
end of the first stanza with a period. I organized the lines and stanzas for
their flow, weaving lines together so that the language remains in the
foreground. Tony: And yet I can see that you want the quatrain
to stand as independent as well… Michael: I do. Tony: Because, in terms of sense, the first stanza
does communicate an autonomous truth. Though the second sentence continues
into the next stanza, the juxtaposition of the fourth line with the previous
three is, on one level, complete and self-contained. You are at once pushing
the reader forward beyond the stanza and asking the reader to consider the
stanza in itself. Michael: In The Pound Era, if memory serves me
well, Hugh Kenner was trying to make sense of Williams’ notion of the
variable foot and the triadic line. He was, I guess, trying to understand the
theory behind the form. Williams himself wrote a good deal about his reasons
for developing what he thought of as forms, but I’ve never been able to make
sense of those essays. My
early work, based on idea or image, paid less attention to tactile language.
To my ear, those poems now sound a bit cluttered-- a lot of language to make
the image, let’s say. What I found later was that rather than creating a
clump of poem, which did not allow a sense of control, I moved in the second
book towards simple stanzaic structures––quatrains,
tercets, couplets. I was teaching myself to
organize materials; in order to see those materials clearly, it was necessary
to divide them into two-, three-, or four-line stanzas, then bear down fully,
and sustain concentration on each stanza as a unit in order to do away with
extraneous verbiage. Tony: And in working with precise stanza lengths,
you must consider how much detail is necessary, too. You don’t want to
overload the form. You can’t put too much in the quatrains, for example. Michael: I want every word to count. Working with stanzaic forms, I was forced to think first of the entire
poem as a unit, then of each stanza as a unit unto itself, and then, finally,
of each line as a unit unto itself. This helped me not only to organize
materials, but to select language that would best convey the subject
matter—the best words, syntax, and sounds. It interests me now to read aloud
some of my early poems. I sometimes hear a different word press forward. A
good example of this occurs at the end of “Shadow Boxes,” which I published
first in a journal (The Missouri Review), then, with slight revisions, in The
Burden Lifters (1989). Later I included it in Parthenopi:
New and Selected Poems (2001). I made small changes with each new
publication. The poem is spoken by a boy who visits Joseph Cornell in his
workshop on in a world where nothing would be lost, where
everything was given purpose, if only it could remain patient. I wanted the end of the poem to have a precise
focus; words such as “nothing,” “everything,” “someone,” and “anyone” drive
me nuts because they’re too easy to plug in and they remain imprecise. Too
many poets use them, perhaps thinking, “I’ll find the precise word and revise
later.” This doesn’t happen. When I’m reading a poem, even by a poet whose
work I admire, I begin to anticipate that imprecise language toward the end
of the poem because I see it occurring so often. I’m afraid that the poem is
going to be ruined. So, for me to write a concluding stanza containing the
word “nothing”––and that word seems to me to be the right word in that
line––means I shouldn’t follow it in the next line with “everything.” That
language is too general. I think, “What am I talking about here?” Tony: And in the final line the all-too-general
“it.” Michael: Yes, an impersonal pronoun. To what does
“it” refer? Is it “everything?” That language is unsatisfying. So, I’ve once
again revised the poem: in a world where nothing would be lost, where
each button was given purpose, if only it could remain patient. I love ending the poem with a single button, which
in a Joseph Cornell shadow box would be given significance and would connect
in some odd compositional way with the other objects included in that box. I
want that ordinary button to become extraordinary in the context of the poem.
Graham
Greene says in his novel Our Man in |
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