Participating in art, history, and our selves

An Interview with Richie Hofmann

The desire to belong, both in time and our present bodies, reminds poet Richie Hofmann of the sea. “There’s a desire for the sea to be an expressionistic extension of the speaker’s emotional landscape. But ultimately, that's not how the ocean works. It refuses us just as much our bodies can refuse us. We want it to reflect us, to be aligned with us, to be an extension of our inner life. And there are moments when it feels like it is, but ultimately it's not something we can quite control,” he says. Author of two poetry collections and a lecturer at Stanford University, Hofmann talks about the disconnects between people, places, and history: distances between lovers and their bodies, their bodies and time, and the selves who inhabit those bodies.

His poetic process, like his poetry, embraces disunity as inevitable. Instead of working beneath the pressure of whole collections, he suggests it might be better to go “groping [our] way forward, poem by poem,” filling our cups with travel, the erotic, and art.

Reading your collection Second Empire, we felt like we were waking up, slowly, in a new world. “As if yoked in a wooden beam, our bodies cross into the thrall / of the river, /whose name means red—hooves and sandals / with iron hobnails hammered / into the soles, one after the other / into the muddy water. We move at first like light on brass...” (“Imperium”). Can you tell us more about the inspiration behind this collection?

I wrote the poems that became Second Empire over several years, beginning around 2010. I was in graduate school—not for poetry writing, but to be a literary critic. I was a scholar of poetry before I ever wrote my own. Once I started writing poems, that part of my life started to take over. I was writing more and more. I was writing what I wasn't supposed to be writing. In graduate seminars and during lectures, I would be scribbling away. Back in those days, I had no conception that what I was writing would become a book. I was groping my way forward, poem by poem. And I have to say, that's the best feeling. 

Now, at this stage in my life, I’m trying to recreate that feeling because I feel like sometimes the idea of having a book can dictate the maneuvers of the poems, which can be oppressive or difficult to achieve. A lot of the poems were about my anxieties about the relationship I was in, about navigating distance with this lover, about experiencing the first sense of betrayal or loss or recovery in a relationship. 

It wasn't until we had a rare snow storm in Atlanta (I was at Emory at the time) that I began to consider my poems as a series. Snow is a real emergency in Atlanta, and we had six days off of school. We were truly trapped indoors, and I was filled with such longing for summer and for the ocean. So that week, I wrote the sea interludes—those poems inspired by Benjamin Britten's opera, Peter Grimes. It was then that I started to see the contours of a book. As a series, those poems suggested the rise and fall of love within relationship. That's when it clicked for me that, in addition to moving poem by poem, I might also be working toward a book project, as well. 

I think a lot of my students come into class not even aware that poets write collections of poems. Most people learn through reading anthologies and you'll maybe see a poem or two by one person from their whole career. So, there's a way when you begin poetry you get to prolong your avoidance of that book pressure, which was very important for me in those early years. 

While it is comprised of a series of self-contained vignettes, your collection also has the sense of a mythic narrative with recurring characters—the soul-searching “I” and the beloved “you.” Did you compose the collection with a storyline in mind or did it form later in the process?

I always feel pulled between two tensions. Should the book show variety, should the book show unity? Of course the answer is somewhere in between, but I ultimately favor a kind of unity of theme and of voice. I’ve only written two books at this stage and that's consistent in both of them. While narrative was a backbone, you have shifts in mood between the sections. In a collection, I really think that the strongest relationship is between a poem and the one that comes before it and the one that comes after it; linking poems in a local way. Poets have grandiose visions of, oh, “the second-to-last poem recalls a symmetry with the second poem.” I don't think any reader explicitly experiences that, at least not in their waking reading. It's more about how we go from the end of one poem to the beginning of the next: where are we emotionally, where are we imagistically, where are we in tone? That mindset became my predominant organizer more so than narrative. 

As for the structure itself, it mostly came later. I had the inkling that the collection would be divided in four parts using these interludes coming from Benjamin Britten. With a friend who’s also a poet, Kara van de Graaf, I gathered the group of poems I had written and shaped them in and around those interludes based on mood. I feel like poets are obsessed with putting together books. It is all we want to talk about. It's all we want to do. But I'm not sure how readers respond to all of that effort.

Across the collection’s four sections, the speaker seeks to reconcile with his body: sometimes wrestling against it, finally absorbing it as shame dissipates (“That was shame / leaving the body,” you write in “After”). Given its incessant impact on the speaker, would you consider the body its own character or a theme? 

I love that reading of the body as a character. I’d never thought of it that way, but it makes a lot of sense to me. I do think the speaker is disconnected from the body he is to live in through a time and a place. And I do feel that the speaker is constantly disjointed from both experiences. What does it mean to be in this body? What does it mean to be in this time period, which I think the speaker is really interested in—how he does he fit into the history of a place, into the history of art? How do we come to terms with what it means to be a body that desires—I'm thinking of the poem “After,” which was a revelation for me when writing. There was this sense of a storm having passed and shame leaving the body. 

Some unity with the body is possible but I think ultimately, discomfort prevails. There’s “Egyptian Cotton,” in which the speaker's lover is a body that runs along the ocean, that gets sweaty, that belongs to and doesn't belong to the speaker. That poem ends on the conclusion that distance will always be there. Not just narratively between the lovers, but in how observing something doesn't mean you possess it. The speaker is constantly looking to the sea, which is the other bodily character in the book. He looks to the sea as a reflector of human emotions. I'm sad, the sea is rough; while I'm tranquil, the sea is smooth; I'm dreamy, and the sea reflects the moonlight. There’s a desire for the sea to be an expressionistic extension of the speaker’s emotional landscape. But ultimately, that's not how the ocean works. It refuses us just as much our bodies can refuse us. We want it to reflect us, to be aligned with us, to be an extension of our inner life. And there are moments when it feels like it is, but ultimately it's not something we can control. 

In poems such as “Scene from Caravaggio,” we see allusions to arts outside poetry. Can you tell us more about your experience in other art forms such as visual art, theatre, and music? Has exploring different mediums affected your poetry?

As I mentioned before, the collection’s interludes were inspired by Benjamin Britten. I can't think of a Britten origin story in my life, but I will say that I’ve been drawn not only to his beautiful music but also his treatment of literature: he's a great song-setter of English poems and poems in other languages. I love composers who work with text and words. I'm much more interested in opera and art song than in instrumental music, in general. Britten, in particular, also interests me because he is this out-of-time exemplar of gay marriage. His collaborator and partner was Peter Pears, the British tenor, and the two of them lived and worked together for decades. It wasn't a conscious design to be thinking about them this way in the book. But the book is asking questions about what might a gay marriage might look like. How queerness is an historical phenomenon. I think it's interesting that both Benjamin Britten and James Merrill, who's also in the book a lot, provide two very unique and extraordinary examples of gay marriages in 20th century history. Their presences also contribute to that line of questioning in the book. They had very deep and long lasting, more or less public relationships with men, with the same man for a very long time. 

I also love experiencing art, being in museums. I love music and theater. I write about them as subjects often, but they also give me new ways into poems. As an explicit example, they gave me a new way of thinking formally about interlude structure in Second Empire. 

I love to be immersed in the arts. That's just how I want to live my life, which is another thing that the pandemic has really made difficult. Given my inspirations, it's been a very dry year for my writing, I'm going to be honest. But I'm hopeful too that I'll have those experiences again soon, and they'll teach me something new. 

When we think of erotic, one understanding we have comes from Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power,” a resource “firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” What does the term “erotic” mean in your poetry?
In my poems, I’m constantly questioning the bond between the I and the you. How does the you inform the self? How does one's catalog of lovers become part of the making of a shifting and unstable, but ultimately complete, engagement with the world? 

My first book was so obsessed with those questions. It’s interested in shame and coming out. I'm a millennial person, so it's not the coming out narrative of my parents' generation. But it was interested in staking a claim on history, on the history of art, about being a kind of body and an artist in that space. By the time I was working on A Hundred Lovers, a lot of those questions felt much more settled. This upcoming book is much more brash and direct and, I don't want to say reckless, but certainly less thoughtful. The pursuit of pleasure is different in this book. 

Isn't that part of the curse of being an artist? You're always experiencing the world doubly. As a kind of living entity. And then at the same time, you’re a kind of greedy curator, gatherer, collector of moments of feelings and sensations and images. I think that part of ourselves has to be kept in check somehow. I think that's a dangerous way to live. I'm not saying I've always navigated that well. But it's something I'm anxious about in my own life where you recognize yourself experiencing the world as a poem, romanticizing yourself, romanticizing others in the environment. 

I haven't written much recently because my methods have not been suited to the pandemic lifestyle. I really do write out of experience—my poems often come out of erotic turmoil. It’s not that I’m lonely either because I'm lucky to live with my husband and I have a million students I adore. But still, I've not been living the life that produces poetry as I’ve produced it so far: through newness that changes me and absolutely stirs me to make something new. 

As a teacher at Stanford, do you feel that teaching Creative Writing has influenced your craft? 

Teaching is the most important task for me: it gives me energy. I worship my students. They are so much more sophisticated than I am, and I love the way they hold me accountable for my ideas. I love the way that they teach me new things. I sound sentimental, but I really do love teaching and it's been somewhat diminished in the online form. Teaching, like everything else, is a bodily experience.

And—I don’t want to sound non-environmentalist—I miss paper. For teaching poetry, I love being able to record my thoughts in a pen for students. The minute you track changes or type an email with notes, they become too official, too directive, too prescriptive. I prefer the pen’s immediacy in time. I've been trying to recreate it verbally with them during the online teaching, but I'm really excited to get back to that shuffle of papers in a classroom. There, they can engage with their peers’ poems on paper, scribble their notes and then pass them back. Even if their words aren't legible, you feel something of the energy, of the passion. Where people were confused, where people were delighted. It gives you a collective energy that you can bring into the revisiting of the poem.

The classroom is a space where art is prioritized, where it's not about the acquisition of knowledge per se or the acquiring of professional skills. It’s just a place where we can read a poem from 200 years ago, respond to it, and everyone's interiority gets expression and rigorous attention. 

I tell my students: I’ll always offer what I can, but at the end of the day, the poem is yours. I care about you as a person and as an artist, but I don't care what you do with the poem, because I have my own to worry about and to look after. One of the skills people learn from a workshop in addition to the humility of having to submit brand new work for scrutiny is independence: a sense that you are the sole adjudicator of 10 or 15 peer opinions, 10 or 15 observations that you can choose to use or not.

We’re excited for your newest book A Hundred Lovers, forthcoming in 2022. What was the transition like from your first collection to your second? Are there any lessons you took with you from the first publication? 

Oh, absolutely. I wrote it on the other side of being married, and the anxieties are so different. I look back at Second Empire and I recognize some of the same craft and interest, but what I was terrified about, what I desired, what I hoped for were all very different. Monogamy is absolutely a question in A Hundred Lovers as it was in Second Empire. Still, there are many kinds of lovers in the book like erotic friendships, different forms of erotic and emotional connections inside and outside of marriage. 

The structure is different, too. The first book is a highly architectural, four-part opera, but A Hundred Lovers is just a diary. The poems are less artificial, less fully formed. I wanted them to feel kind of dashed off, very honest and confessional, so there are no sections, no arcs, no movements. It's a diary. It's a day book. It's a catalog of erotic encounters and erotic anxieties. 

In the first book, I was obsessed with questions of permanence and participating in the history of art. But for this book, I wanted it to feel scribbled, scrawled. I want it to feel like you're ripping pages out of the notebook as you're reading it.