The Bookshelf: Waxing Poetic with A. M. Juster

In my May Bookshelf, on short stories, I mentioned in passing that while short fiction has largely vanished from the country’s general-interest magazines, poetry still appears in many of them. (My thanks, by the way, to Patrick Brown for writing an excellent Bookshelf for June.) Then it occurred to me, rather guiltily, that I hardly ever read the poems that appear in the magazines I take. Why is that? Because my own education in appreciating poetry was so deficient, I never acquired much taste for it. In the interest of cultivating such a taste, I got in touch with A. M. Juster, a poet and translator of verse, and asked him to recommend some homework for me. Then we had an epistolary interview, exchanging emails for about a week. Here is our edited exchange, ranging over his recommendations and much else:

MJF: More than thirty years ago, in an essay in The Atlantic titled “Can Poetry Matter?”—which became the title essay in a subsequent book—Dana Gioia observed that “as American poetry’s specialist audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has declined.” Poets increasingly occupy sinecures in university creative writing programs, writing chiefly for one another and their students, while “the large audience that still exists for quality fiction hardly notices poetry.” Though a great deal more poetry winds up in print, Gioia characterized it as a “sheer mass of mediocrity.” Have matters improved at all, in your view, in the three decades since Gioia wrote this essay?

AMJ: Dana Gioia was exactly right, and my only criticism of his critique is that “mediocrity” was probably too polite.

The situation has gotten worse with the exponential increase in the number of Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs in creative writing. In order to mass-produce poets, difficult topics like traditional prosody have been dropped from curricula. Students need to write a ridiculous number of poems to graduate, so professors make it easier to write voluminously by encouraging students to write what is essentially prose arbitrarily arranged on the page. They read other poets their age who have adopted this style, but they are not reading poets who were proud of their craft, such as Richard Wilbur, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marilyn Hacker, and other great post-World War II poets, never mind Shakespeare and Milton.

What today’s readers of poetry journals see are metaphors multiplying from line to line, slack use of vocabulary, and tiresome gimmicks to “make it new” as Ezra Pound, one of the founders of modernism, commanded. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) themes have become almost obligatory too, and that combination has produced “poetry” so dreary that it continues to shrink the audience for poetry. 

MJF: Could part of the problem be the literary education—or dearth of it—that we give the young in recent decades? I’m sixty-five and even in my day, my primary and secondary English teachers did not spend any time teaching us scansion, or anything about the formal characteristics of the great poetry of our language’s history. And aside from a bit of Shakespeare, we read precious little of it anyway. Things were not much better in college. My survey course in British lit was a fast-paced tour through “greatest hits” without any attention to meter or other matters of form. Have we now brought to the classroom several generations of English teachers and professors who know little about such things themselves?

AMJ: I think it’s even more basic than that. When my bride was teaching middle-school French, she had a colleague who would occasionally refer to “the f-word.” By that she meant not what others mean, but “phonics,” which was not taught in the school. I know English teachers who have confessed to not understanding basic grammar. We are losing critically important experiences by allowing this lowering of standards.

In high school, I studied Shakespeare with Jerry Speca, who went on to teach Ben Affleck and Matt Damon at another school (they thanked him when they won their Oscar). Jerry made sure we understood the basics of iambic pentameter and I am pretty sure we got a little bit more about prosody from him as well.

When I was at Yale the English department was widely viewed as the best in the country, but it didn’t teach prosody, with one exception. I had a poetry workshop with a young adjunct professor named Robert Shaw, who went on to become the nation’s top expert on blank verse. Robert required us all to write a traditional sonnet, and we got a good crash course in prosody from him.

Our postmodern academy is never going to bring back traditional prosody on its own, so we should probably be thinking hard about how to use the Internet to bring the traditional tools of English poetry back to the people.

MJF: It would seem then that readers and poets alike have the same problem, that neither have much, if any, education in prosody (which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the theory and practice of versification”). One of the books you recommended to me, Timothy Steele’s All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification (1999), strikes me as remarkably useful for making up this deficit in one’s education. It’s a limpid but not a fast read; one wants to linger over each explanation of poetic technique until one absorbs it. But I could see it being used for a semester—or two—in a creative writing program’s poetry curriculum. And even if one has no ambition to be a poet, but just wants to be a better reader of our language’s best poetry, it’s great.

Steele is not at all polemical, but he does say at one point that a famous remark of T. S. Eliot’s had been “destructive to modern verse practice,” namely, Eliot’s claim that it was in “constantly withdrawing from” historic forms, or “taking no form at all, and constantly approximating” the simple forms of the past, that “the most interesting verse” was written. Eliot’s is certainly a name to conjure with. But was he in this sense a sapper, bringing down the sturdy edifice of English-language poetry? And if so, who then in modern poetry is a builder or a renovator of that edifice?

AMJ: I may be a little more charitable toward Eliot than my friend Tim Steele; I put a lot more blame on the other two forces behind modernism in poetry: William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, particularly Pound. Despite Eliot’s occasional rhetoric to show he was sticking with the modernist manifestos, most of Eliot’s verse continued to use traditional prosody, sometimes in non-obvious ways. Williams’s work was always much more brutally stripped of traditional prosody except for a few early poems.

I think of W. H. Auden as the leader of mid-century resistance to modernism, flanked by Gwendolyn Brooks, Philip Larkin, and others. A little later Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, James Merrill, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Marilyn Hacker picked up the mantle, which has been largely handed off to “New Formalists” now in their seventies (e.g. Dana Gioia, Timothy Steele, Mary Jo Salter).

MJF: Those are some excellent suggestions of formal poets for our readers to enjoy. You modestly do not mention yourself, but your own work should, I expect, rank you highly among the New Formalists (even if you are not now in your seventies). How did you come to be a working poet and part of this “movement” in our literature? I would note that, like Wallace Stevens—and for a time this was true of Eliot himself—you have had a career apart from writing, and not in the academy.

AMJ: I’m sixty-seven—still “middle-aged” if you adopt my most recent definitional adjustment.

I gave up poetry after college and focused on other things—marriage at twenty-two, two children, and a regularly improvised career that was much more successful and interesting than I ever imagined possible when I was in college. I worked in all three branches of the federal government, including senior roles in four administrations—three Republican and one Democratic—and reported directly to George W. Bush and Barack Obama during my six years as Commissioner of Social Security.​ I was also a CEO who turned around a biotech company so that its stock rose from $3.80 to $37 in twenty-six months, and then lost that job in a hostile takeover.

I came back to poetry in my thirties because I read Dana Gioia’s review of Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems, and thought “I wonder if I could teach myself to write like that.” I then reached out to Dana, who has always been very supportive, and about three years later started sending out poems and translations under my pseudonym. Poetry was my side gig for twenty-five years, but after I was hit by two autoimmune diseases and took early retirement, it became my main professional focus.

MJF: You have also been a poetry editor for a couple of publications, most recently for four years at Plough magazine. How do you see an editor’s work at a general-interest magazine like that? And what advice do you have for poets getting started—young, middle-aged, whatever age—who want to see their work in print?

AMJ: Being a poetry editor was never on my bingo card, and I was pleasantly surprised both times I was asked.

One reads a lot of poetry as a poetry editor, and most of it is well-intentioned but not well-executed. I always tried to be fair and open to new voices, and I tried to send something encouraging to every high school and college poet. In fact, at First Things I did publish a poem by a Hillsdale College sophomore, Mary Caroline Whims.

I also tried to be faithful to the magazines’ aesthetics rather than my own, but in both cases, it was usually close enough that it was not a real problem.

Most poets try to publish too soon and then get discouraged, and that was true for me too. It is important for almost all poets to develop a group of friends who are good at poetry to be a sounding board. I still do that, and it is still helpful.

When poets start out, the poem-in-the-head clouds the poem-on-the-page—the reader typically is not seeing anything close to what the poet wants them to see. It takes a lot of practice to get past that problem, and it often helps to put a poem away for a few months before sending it out; time allows the editorial part of your brain to work in ways it typically can’t while most of the brain is still in the throes of creation.

MJF: As an editor, did you receive a lot of submissions of free verse—unmetrical stuff of the kind you described earlier as “essentially prose arbitrarily arranged on the page”—or was that forestalled by what you refer to as the magazines’ aesthetics? I will add that when I recently sent you a poem of my own (which I have no intention of reproducing here!) you sent me very good technical and stylistic advice. I imagine that if an editor wants to advance the cause of formal poetry, this can take a lot of time and effort, helping writers hone their craft. But is there a place for the “free verse” championed by the modern anti-formalists? Or were you, at First Things and Plough, looking for consistent publication of formal verse?

AMJ: I never kept track, but at First Things only about 20 percent of the submissions were formal poetry, and we did publish free verse if it was challenging, accessible, and written in a striking way. The poem that I mentioned by the Hillsdale College sophomore was a free verse poem drawing on Augustine. The pattern was about the same at Plough for the Rhina Espaillat Award.

Formal or free verse is not a binary choice. Many poets commonly identified as “free verse poets” are well-trained in form and their work uses formal techniques, often in non-obvious ways—Richard Hugo is a good example of that.

So many people want to express themselves with poetry, but these days they can’t do it well because they were never taught the fundamentals. Somehow we have to find a way to give that information back to people—there has to be a way to do it on the Internet (and make it fun).

Sculptors talk about their stone or wood giving them the shapes that turn it into art, and I think the same is true in poetry. For me, most subject matters seem to require an approach that is unique in some way, and occasionally free verse is the right choice. After I finished translating Petrarch’s Canzoniere—366 highly formal poems with difficult rhyme schemes to translate—I did find myself writing a few free verse poems.

MJF: You mention your translation work. You’ve told me previously that Richard Wilbur is an inspiration to you as a (largely) formal poet.  But Wilbur also was a translator, most notably of Molière, ten of whose plays he translated in faithfully metrical rhymed couplets. In his prose collection The Catbird’s Song, he wrote: “There is a thoroughly crazy recent idea, sometimes held by bright people, that we have put meter and rhyme forever behind us, and that non-English literature embodied in traditional means must speak to us, if at all, through some ‘free’ or prosaic period style.” Wilbur’s painstaking work on Molière is all the more interesting because he said he first came to the work with “basic” French skills improved a bit by having served as a soldier in France in World War II—and with no feeling at the beginning for the demands of staging a play. But he was not only acclaimed for this work, he later translated verse from several other languages—Russian, Spanish, Hungarian—that he didn’t really know at all before he began, relying on “informants” who did know the languages to be his sounding boards. I think this is remarkable.

You have published quite a lot of translation work yourself, mostly from Latin, but also Greek and Italian (your forthcoming Petrarch), and you have done a few poems from French, Chinese, and the African language Oromo. Is your experience like Wilbur’s—that the practices of a poet are equally if not more important than linguistic fluency—that with the latter one might get some help? And do you subscribe to his view that the translator owes the original poet the tribute of the most faithful form that English can offer? Finally, how does translating affect your own original work? (Wilbur said that each time he finished a play of Molière’s he was “doomed for some months thereafter to cast my thoughts in couplets.”)

AMJ: I think Richard Wilbur was the greatest translator ever of poetry into English, and I buy pretty much everything he had to say. Some translators even quietly joke that Wilbur’s Molière translations are better than the originals.

I try to match the form of the original to the equivalent form in English while recognizing there is often no completely happy solution. I too believe that a translator has a duty of loyalty to the poet being translated—one should try to get as much of the music and meaning as possible into the translation while never inserting anything that isn’t at least arguably in the original text.

I have a mediocre-to-rudimentary understanding of a number of languages, and I think it helps enormously to be able to access the original language of the text you’re translating, but you can compensate for your shortcomings by working very hard and using new tools of the Internet. For instance, medieval Latin poetry regularly echoes the lines of earlier poets to a degree that most people don’t realize. There are tools on the Internet now where you can input a word and see all its uses in previous literature. That laborious process, which I used heavily in my Aldhelm and Maximianus translations, can make a translator appear to be way ahead of the most erudite scholars of fifty years ago.

If you are plunging into an unfamiliar language, I think two things are important: 1) you should read the secondary literature on the poetry as intensely as possible; and 2) you need a partner (or preferably partners) who are fluent in the language and can help you fix your drafts.

I know that Wilbur and other poet-translators often feel that translation disrupts their own work, but I find the opposite is true: intense time expressing ideas not my own—with approaches not my own—gives me ideas for my own work. I wrote very little original poetry in the two and a half years I spent translating Petrarch, but the eighteen months after that were probably the most prolific of my life.

MJF: Two questions to close:

Whether one is translating or composing one’s own new poems, it seems that attention to the traditional forms of English poetry is in order, even if one goes on to produce free verse. This makes me circle back to Timothy Steele’s book, which is so helpful to me as a reader. Understanding form in detail—inverted feet, enjambment, anapests, caesuras, feminine endings, rhyme schemes—helps me see what poets are doing on the page, and what they depart from. I recall a fencing instructor I had as a teenager saying that only after one had mastered the standard moves by the book—stance, thrust, parry, lunge—could one improvise freestyle moves with any hope of success. His advice seems sound here as well. I’d guess you agree.

Most of our readers will not become poets, but many do read poetry, and (like me!) more of them should. What are you reading these days?

AMJ: Yes, poetry is like fencing in that way, and it took me a long time to get comfortable with being creative with form. I think now that a lot of my first book, The Secret Language of Women (which will probably be reissued next year with a new publisher) was an effort to show others I could handle the received forms. The next book of original poetry, Wonder and Wrath, was considerably more inventive when it came to form, and the next one will probably be even a little more inventive. You can blame Kay Ryan for that—a former U.S. poet laureate who writes quirky formal poetry; often her poems look like free verse at first glance.​

Right now I am in the middle of a translation of the love elegies of Sextus Propertius. Classicists are like the Roman poets themselves, who considered epic poetry to be poetry’s highest form. I disagree with that and revel in all kinds of Latin poetry—love poems, riddles, epigrams, satires, even travel poems.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s three hundred or so French poems have thwarted my efforts to translate them yet again. And I have been reading​ Richard Wilbur again, sometimes in draft form, as I have been searching for a lost manuscript of his.

MJF: For myself, and for our readers, thanks so much for your reading recommendations, and for having this conversation.

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