This week marks the first audio appearance of eight previously unreleased and nearly unknown conversations with essential poets of our time: Robert Pinsky, Lucille Clifton, Edward Hirsch, Muriel Rukeyser, James Merrill, Eamon Grennan, William Matthews and Paul Muldoon. These recordings, which can be found on Audible.com, serve as an audio companion to Poetry in Person: Twenty-Five Years of Conversation with America's Poets, published by Knopf in 2010, and called (by the Washington Post) "one of the best books you will ever read on how poems are actually made." Here is a little history of their unusual existence.

The recordings were made during seminars at the New School in Greenwich Village, where from 1973 until her retirement in 1997 Pearl London hosted Nobel Laureates, U.S. Poets Laureate, and National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winners. She asked each poet to bring in a fresh manuscript and drafts of the very poems they were writing at the time, and she used this material as the foundation of a discussion about the making of the poem, from influence to editing--from vision to revision.

Soon after London's death in 2002, three cardboard boxes were discovered hidden in a closet in her home near Washington Square Park. The cassette tapes found inside represented nearly twenty-five years of these historic classroom visits. Their existence surprised almost everyone who'd known London and her classes. As I started editing the sessions into book form, I realized that sometimes, by necessity, part of the spontaneity and humor of the conversations had to be left on the cutting room floor. So, too, some of connective tissue between passages had been removed in favor of including as many highlights as possible.

These recordings, 30 to 60 minutes each, restore what had to be edited out and offer an even more intimate portrait of eight key poets. Constituting volume one of the series, these sessions were chosen for the poets' variety of styles, approaches and concerns. Robert Pinsky reads the "Want Bone" and discusses the effect of his upbringing on his poetry; Lucille Clifton talks about being discovered as a poet; James Merrill talks about the significance of the the autobiographic "I" in his work; Muriel Rukeyser talks in vivid detail about how recovering from eye surgery influenced her work, and on and on. My hope is that these recordings will give the listener something of the flavor of the seminars, as well as offering as-yet-unheard, and often stunningly frank and moving accounts of, the poetry of our time.

In the weeks to come, I'll be blogging a series of eight posts that highlight clips from these recordings. My focus in tomorrow's post will be on American poetry, and future posts will reveal the poets speaking about metaphor, form, abstraction, and more. I hope you enjoy.

Although involved in literary endeavors in some form throughout her life, Amy Clampitt did not publish her first poem until she was in her forties, and her first full-length book of poetry until she was 63.  She wrote prolifically after that, releasing four more volumes in the ten years before her death in 1994.  In February of 1983, she came to speak in Pearl London's seminar. Their discussion is transcribed in my book, Poetry in Person (Knopf, 2010).

She was a poet, as her New York Times obituary wrote, of "dense, ornate and allusive" lines. In this audio clip, Clampitt discusses these and other characteristics of her diction. One of the most fascinating things about this exchange is the dynamic of the back and forth between Clampitt and London; as an interviewer, London just as often disagrees with her guests as agrees with them.  Here, buffering her repartees with succinct bits from Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound, London asks Clampitt about the musicality of her poetry, and about Clampitt's view that there is today a "wholesale deafness to the sonorities of English."
[audio:https://alexanderneubauer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Clampitt-writing-by-ear-long-version-2.mp3|titles=Clampitt writing by ear long version 2]

I've added two new titles to the Fall 2010 Poetry Preview--both second books.

Dora Malech, Say So, Cleveland State University Poetry Center

Dora Malech recently received one of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships, which comes with a $15,000 scholarship. This is her second book, following a well-received debut.  Hopkins is often cited as an influence on her work, and the alliterative musicality of her poems speaks to that.  Her poetic voice, however, is not at all antiquated; a poem published with The New Yorker ends: "Always, some part / of the heart must root for the pliers, some / part for the snow’s steep slope."

Timonthy Donnelly, The Cloud Corporation, Wave Books

This is the highly anticipated second book from Columbia professor Timothy Donnelly, who is the editor of Boston Review.  In a recent interview with Publisher's Weekly (who gave his new collection a starred review), he described the process he used to compose a number of the poems in the volume. "This assignment was dreamed up by the poet Geoffrey G. O'Brien, a good friend. Basically he said to write a poem using the words in a chunk of the Patriot Act and, once per line, a word from another text. I picked Bruce Springsteen's 'Born to Run.' Two other poems mashed up Percy Shelley's A Defence of Poetry with a chapter of the 9/11 Commission Report, and Osama bin Laden's 1996 fatwa against the U.S. with the theme song of The Beverly Hillbillies." This intermingling of politics, poetry, and popular culture is characteristic of Donnelly's work as a whole, although this collection is touted as being more personal and more intimate than his last.

Eamon Grennan visited Pearl London's class in March of 1996, and did a seminar with her New School students that is transcribed in "Poetry in Person: 25 Years of Conversation with America’s Poets" (Knopf 2010). Born in Ireland, Grennan kept close ties to the country despite moving to New York for a long career as an English professor at Vassar College.

One of my favorite moments in this interview is Grennan's meditation on how he ends his poems. Grennan tells London: "I'd like to be more Ashbury or Jorie Graham, to kind of shrug or walk away with the thing kind of hanging, ringing strange cacophonic bells in the air, and yet at the same time I keep wanting this chapel bell of conclusion and closure at the end of the poem." About his own endings, he goes on to say, "the content is sometimes a shrug, but the music is a closing of the gate."

Grennan on Closure: [audio:https://alexanderneubauer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Grennan-closure-2.mp3|titles=Grennan closure 2]

"Shed," which Grennan read during the seminar, is a good illustration of this attitude towards endings. It's a quiet poem, focused around the image of a peach tree growing untended.

Grennan reading "Shed": [audio:https://alexanderneubauer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Grennan-reading-Shed-2.mp3|titles=Grennan reading Shed 2]

Here, the ending is signaled by the full rhyme of "ringing" and "springing." Coming at the beginning of the line, the rhyme shoots harmony through the lines without snapping them shut the way an end rhyme would. The short last line draws out the final word, "darkness," letting the s's hiss to a close. Compare this to, say, the end of Graham's "The Surface:" "I say iridescent and I look down. / The leaves very still as they are carried." The fragmented sentences and the total lack of rhyme seem constructed to resist closure.