Making Visible the invisible

An Interview with Jay Parini

Drawing from his expansive career, Jay Parini says, “People say a poet must be crazy. But I always describe poetry as finding a language adequate to emotions and that adequacy interests me. Because poetry is really keeping us sane. It's making visible what’s invisible elsewhere.” Maybe this sanity comes, too, from the literary communities we create. His own circle has included writers like Seamus Heaney, Jorge Luis Borges, Julia Alvarez, and Gore Vidal. As he explains poetry’s core—thinking in images—Parini also shares what makes a great poem and how we can find our voices.

Your career across poetry, literature, criticism and film has been so rich, and we want to learn about its beginnings. When did you start writing poetry? What was your path?

I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and I didn't really know anything about poetry. Then, when my ninth-grade English teacher gave me some poems by Robert Frost, I was amazed. I remember reading “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” When I read the line, “The only other sound’s the sweep / of easy wind and downy flake,” I thought, Whoa, language can affect you in a visceral way. I was deeply taken with Frost. Then I started reading TS Elliot and the other usual poets, Whittier and Longfellow, Whitman and Dickinson.

By the time I got to college, I was actively writing poetry—terrible poetry. But I was writing it quite voluminously. Then, when I went to St. Andrews for my junior year abroad, I met a great professor there, Anthony Ash. He helped me to properly read Yeats and Hopkins. Then I started reading some of the more modern poets, contemporary poets. While I went back briefly to Lafayette to get my undergraduate degree, I was soon back at St. Andrews for a master’s and a PhD. During my time there, I connected with a lot of Scottish poets.

Anne Stevenson was my mentor then, a great poet. And I met Seamus Heaney who was incredibly influential to me early on. I used to go and stay with him in Dublin, and I'd sent him my poems and we’d write back and forth. He came and stayed with me a couple of times in Scotland. There was a great revival of Scottish poetry in the early seventies, and I was very lucky to be there in a circle of some major writers.

By then, I was writing poetry with a passion. I published my first book at a small Scottish press in 1972, a long time ago.

What are some of the tenets you learned that helped your poetry improve in the early stages?

To think in terms of a more concrete, physical language. I was very influenced by reading Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, even TS Elliot in certain cases. I moved towards poetry that made a real sound, a physical sound. I was also interested in poetry’s themes. Seamus Heaney’s poetry with its focus on Northern Ireland and locality, for example, influenced me. In fact, Seamus was really influenced by Frost. He and I shared that. So, we talked a lot about Frost for years. Seamus was here with me in Middlebury before he died.

I started writing poems about Scranton in Northeastern, Pennsylvania, the mines and little narrative arcs around them, always.

Speaking of biographies, what draws you to write about someone? What might you consider when deciding to write a fictional biography versus a strictly factual biography about them?

If someone really calls to me, like Tolstoy or Herman Melville or Graham Greene, who I’m currently writing a novel about, then I’ll want to get inside of them. The biographical novel allows me to explore them with freedom. In other cases like Frost, who I was deeply connected to, I didn’t feel like I wanted to stick to the straight body there. Other biographies like Steinbeck and William Faulkner were almost assignments that I took on for money. I enjoyed them, but they were mainly job.

Then I did a biography of Gore Vidal. I'd known the guy for 35, 40 years. We talked on the phone every day, every week for 40 years. Because I knew him intimately, I didn't want to waste all that material. He was a friend of mine and a difficult man. Everybody had a complicated relationship with Gore. Then I turned that book into a screenplay with a friend of mine, Michael Hoffman, the film director. We got Netflix to make the movie, though it hasn't come out yet because it was stars Kevin Spacey as Gore.

When you’re doing interdisciplinary projects like the movie, does poetry come into play?

In anything I write, I try to use the insights from poetry to keep things concrete and clear. Poetry is thinking in images. And that's what a screenplay is. It's moving pictures.

So, there's a real core correlation between poetry and screenwriting and drawing.

Could you speak about your book Why Poetry Matters and how you understand poetry’s role outside the literary sphere?

In that book, I talk about poetry, politics and psychology. People say a poet must be crazy. But I always describe poetry as finding a language adequate to emotions and that adequacy interests me. Because poetry is really keeping us sane. It's making visible what’s invisible elsewhere. I've written about poetry as a kind of incarnation. It's thinking the spirit, making it visible. Shakespeare’s theory of poetry in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is my theory of poetry: “And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” 

That sounds like the reverse of the common belief that poetry connects us to the spiritual—it's the language of magic and the language of religion, after all. But you seem to be distilling it in the other direction.

Absolutely. It's taking the abstract and making it concrete, not the other way around.

Turning back to poetry and politics, do you feel like poetry has a role in our political culture and vice versa?

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But nevertheless, he was deeply involved in politics. You look at his great poem, “Spain, 1937.” Like many other poets, he was passionately political. Even Whitman was a political poet in a sense, speaking up for the common working person. Very rarely is poetry apolitical. And I think poetry can summon us to the better angles of our idea. Poets themselves often play a role as well. Their role might not be in the poem itself, but during the Iraq War, for example, I was involved in both writing poetry and protesting the Iraq War. Julia Alvarez was deeply involved in protesting that war too. You go back to the Vietnam War and see Adrienne Rich who wrote spectacular poems about war and feminism. She was an amazingly active woman in politics. Look at the work she did not only in poetry, but in feminism.

Shifting gears, what does poetic voice mean to you? How can someone find their poetic voice?

People need to get closer and closer to their own natural voice, which I think is as idiosyncratic as your thumbprint. Everybody has a voice print. It's there in the syntax, the way you hang words together. If your mother calls you and you can't even hear the tone of her voice, just the way she puts words together, you’d know it was your mother in two minutes because people put words together in certain ways, they think in certain patterns.

Finding your voice is simply digging in and making your language pull closer and closer to that natural way of talking and seeing the world. There's nobody that doesn't have a voice, and their poetry will get better the closer it gets to their natural way of speaking which is distinct from anyone else’s.

When you're teaching poetry, are there any pieces of advice that you give to help students start or structure a poem?

I always share that line from Roethke’s notebooks, that a poem should begin somewhere in space and corkscrew its way to somewhere else in space. So, it has to go somewhere. There has to be a little bit of a narrative arc. Even if a poem is a static image, there has to be some sense of why it's there, why that image is relevant.

We’d love to learn more about your recent book, Borges and Me.

Borges was a walking encyclopedia. He was an incredibly voluble man who carried all of literature, not just Western literature, in his brain. And he was deeply concerned with where poems come from. I have one little anecdote in the book about when I was coming back from my tour of the Highlands with Borges. He said, Jay, you told me you're a poet, but I haven't even heard any of your poetry. Read something. So I opened my notebook and I read this love poem to this young woman. He listened then said, Oh, it was very good, very good. He said, You know, I wrote the same poem. I said, A similar poem? He said, No, no word for word. I said, You can't be serious. He said, Yes, well it's in Spanish. He said, I stole from somebody else. And that person stole from somebody else and the literature simply replicates itself over and over again. We all write just the same poems over and over again. It's like in his famous story about “Pierre Menard, Author of the Don Quixote.” He didn’t believe in originality.

He told me to never try to be original. That's the death of anybody who wants to be someone because there’s no such thing.

Language is the mother, we're all coming out of it. We're all speaking the same language. We're all speaking the same emotions with tinges of difference. When poets try to be original, they really can sink.

Do you have any poetry projects that you’re working on?

I have a whole little book of poems that I'm fiddling with. I've got my own new directions, which I'm working with. And I'm enjoying it. I'm working in a more spiritual vein these days. I just got back from a week of meditation. Eight days of complete silence. That was good for my poetry.

What do you think that meditation has brought to your poetry, if anything?

“Looking,” as Elliot says in The Wasteland, “into the heart of light, the silence.” I think poetry is to some degree an exploration of silence. All my poetry is trying to find the edge of the silence and play with it. You make silence visible and real by finding the right words, in the right order. Music is very similar in that way. It's an arrangement of silence.

The silence is the basic thing. In many ways, pure silence is the goal. When you read a poem that's absolutely perfect, it disappears and you're left with a blessed emptiness.

Also, the great thing about a poem is it's constantly there, you can reread it and reread it. You can sit with it. You could read “Sunday Morning” over and over and over again. It's always going to be there for you. It's never going to get boring. Just like you can listen to Bob Dylan infinitely because he's a real poet.

Poetry is a form scripture, you know? The spirit is active. It's working in language.

Since we’re in Middlebury, Vermont right now, what does nature poetry mean to you?

I’m an Emersonian kind of guy and one of my touchstones is nature. “All language is fossil pleasure,” said Emerson. Every word was once a bright, original picture. Nature is a great book around us that we read and we make good contact with. I'm interested in the spirit in nature. I think that's a very Emersonian vein, which is a very American vein too from Dickinson, Whitman, and Frost.