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Robert B. Shaw in Conversation with Timothy Steele, December 2010

 

Robert B. Shaw is a poet and professor of English at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. He has published seven books of poetry and prose, most recently, Aromatics, with Pinyon Publishing.

Timothy Steele and Robert B. Shaw are longtime friends and correspondents. Born in Vermont, Steele now lives in Los Angeles and teaches at California State University, Los Angeles. His latest collection of poems is Toward the Winter Solstice. He is also the author of a widely used book on prosody, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification. He composed the following questions after reading Aromatics as it was being readied for the press.

 

TIMOTHY STEELE: How do poems come to you? How do you decide what to write about? Are there particular topics that seem to draw you more than others?

ROBERT B. SHAW: I’m glad you said "come to you,” because for me poems seem to arrive or arise from I don’t know where, and at moments I can’t foresee. Sometimes I may have a vague idea of wanting to write about something, but until that takes shape as an image or an actual phrase or poetic line I get nowhere with it. Undoubtedly, there are topics that don’t ever seem to let go of me. I write a lot about place, especially the part of Massachusetts I live in. I write a lot about time and mutability, which may reflect my early scholarly work on Metaphysical poets. I’ve always been interested in Classical mythology, and there are a number of poems on that here. And I often write about children, which seems to draw on a Romantic tradition: Wordsworth, or Blake’s poems of innocence and experience.

 

TS:   Once you get started on a poem, do you generally write it quickly or slowly? Is revision a large part of the process? Or does the process vary from poem to poem?

RBS: Some poems are less recalcitrant than others, but in most cases a piece will go through several drafts. I think I write shorter poems more quickly than I used to, because nowadays I do a lot of work in my head before starting to put anything on paper. Longer poems get done in sections, and there one has more complicated architecture to deal with. I write several drafts by hand, revising as I go, before I type a piece, and the typescript then receives smaller changes before it’s done. I date each draft for some reason I can’t explain: maybe I need to know how many days it took to fix what was wrong.

 

TS:  Because you’re one of our very best contemporary practitioners of meters, rhymes, and stanzas, could you speak briefly about how you came to adopt these devices in an age in which most poetry is in free verse?

RBS: That’s a very complimentary description, and one that could easily apply to yourself, Tim. When I began trying to write poetry in the Sixties, there was even less cultural support for traditional versification than there is now. I tried it, I think, because at that point I wanted to try all sorts of things stylistically. My reading tastes were eclectic: I went through phases of being as interested in Eliot, Pound, and Jeffers as I was in Yeats and Frost. My first book includes a good number of poems in free verse; I could have gone either way. My teacher at Harvard, Robert Fitzgerald, gave me some important encouragement in exploring prosody. I think that what drew me more and more toward traditional form was what Yeats calls “the fascination of what’s difficult.” For me, the difficulty that was most fascinating was that of combining time-honored forms with contemporary, conversational language. I’m attracted to the sheer puzzle-or-game aspect of writing in meter and rhyme, but in solving all the small problems that arise from line to line the main challenge is still to keep the language fresh. I still struggle to do that.

 

TS:   This current collection is distinguished not only by its impressive technical skill, but also by its delightful technical variety. For instance, “Blue Period Sketch” features heroic couplets. “Butterfly at the Beach” is in triplets. A number of poems, including the title poem, are in blank verse.  “Habit” is a sonnet, “Single File” a villanelle, while “Oak Leaves in Winter,” “Old Man of the Mountain,” and “Cat’s Afternoon” are in rhymed quatrains. Your collection also offers poems, such as “Scales” with its tanka stanzas, that flow in purely syllabic measures. And whereas you appear to enjoy, as many English-language poets have, working in iambic pentameter, you’re also clearly at ease with the shorter lines like the trimester, as in your graceful dedicatory poem to Rachel Hadas and “Thirst at Midnight.” Do you usually choose a particular form for a poem, or does the poem, in its writing, choose or originate the form?

RBS: On rare occasions I begin with a form already in mind, usually one that I haven’t used before and want to try out. I had never before written a poem in triplets or a villanelle, so “Butterfly at the Beach” and “Single File” began as deliberate exercises. I hope they don’t seem too willed. Much more often the form emerges, or I discover it, after I’ve begun writing. Sometimes, as with poems in stanzas, it becomes quite clear once one has got the second stanza written. But one can be surprised even in those cases. I expected “Habit” would be a short stanzaic poem when I began, but I didn’t expect it to turn itself into a sonnet. I’m always grateful for surprises of this sort.

The syllabic poems are something new for me. I’ve been intrigued by the wider range of rhythms I can bring into a poem in writing this way, but it’s been hard going since my ear is so habituated to more traditional meters. And even after I had written several syllabic pieces I still was not able to produce one that rhymed until I came up with “One Black Squirrel.” I’m continuing with these experiments.

 

TS:   William Butler Yeats says, “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work.” Have you generally felt able to coordinate your life and your writing, or do the claims of the two sometimes conflict?

RBS: I’ve found that teaching in a liberal arts college, spending time in and out of books, is on the whole a good complement to my writing. In so far as there’s conflict, it has to do with the apportionment of time. Like a lot of academics, I write more in the summers than I do during term-time. Sometimes I wish I had the discipline of novelists I’ve known, who write a few pages every day. But I tend to do it in bursts, in between bouts of paper-grading, snow-shoveling, or whatever. And then I spend a certain amount of time in what Hawthorne somewhere calls “the sluggish ecstasy of inaction.”

In the Yeats lines you quoted, don’t you find the word “perfection” daunting? Except for a few lucky people, it’s hard to get through life without cutting an ethical corner or two, and it may be even harder for a writer to avoid esthetic lapses. It’s all too easy to fall into imaginative ruts, self-indulgent mannerisms, if one isn’t sufficiently self-aware. I doubt that I could achieve perfection even by accident. What I want is to maintain a decent level of craftsmanship and, I hope, produce poems that have some staying power.

 

TS:   Is there a poem in Aromatics that gave you particular satisfaction to complete, and if so, why?

RBS: I would pick “Blue Period Sketch,” which is one of the most recent poems that got into the manuscript. Many of my poems about people, even those that say “I,” are fictionalized, but this narrates something that really happened, when I stupidly locked myself out of my own house. What I like best about the piece is that it provided me with a frame into which I could place the childhood memory that comes near the end of the poem. I found the couplets fun to write, but the greatest satisfaction was in bringing together the present and the past.

 

TS:   What do you hope readers will bring away from this book?

RBS: I hope it will be pleasure: the intellectual interest, the engaged emotions that words, if they are well used, can communicate. The poems, even those that were most arduous to write, gave me deep pleasure and excitement as they took shape, and I hope at least some of that comes through for the readers.