By Greg Nelson

Introduction

In the fall of 1981, W.D. Snodgrass visited GMU and gave a series of poetry readings and workshops. Instead of reading from his acclaimed earlier work, he read poems from the troubling Fuhrer Bunker to a packed house in three rooms of the Student Union. Instead of critiquing student poems in workshops, he read and discussed Frost, Whitman, and Wordsworth. He was obviously more interested in orally interpreting poems than reading them aloud. Those who expected to encounter an anguished confessional poet found instead a man of humor and sanity. He was a unique presence, or as he says in one of his poems, “Snodgrass is walking through the universe.”

This interview took place in Snodgrass’ motel room in Fairfax. The mood was relaxed and open, and we laughed a lot. The interview has been edited to maintain the pace and flow of the conversation. While the laughter isn’t noted, Snodgrass’ wit remains clear, along with his intelligence, experience, and independence.

W.D. Snodgrass has been one of the most important poets in America for twenty-five years. His first book of poems, Heart’s Needle (1959), won the Pulitzer Prize and changed the course of American poetry by allowing personal statements of emotion into the poems. This was a radical departure from T.S. Eliot’s doctrine of the “objective correlative,” which buried personal experience in symbols and thus disguised emotion. In Heart’s Needle, images are direct and open, and Robert Lowell hailed the poems as “beautifully perfect and a breakthrough for modern poetry.”

Snodgrass’ career is full of ironies. He has been regarded by many, including Lowell, as the originator of confessional poetry, a genre which is intimate and emotionally intense. Snodgrass, however, has denied that confessional describes his poems, and says the term refers to a more private poetry than his. After his initial success, Snodgrass didn’t publish a second volume of poems for nine years. During that time, the confessional movement in poetry took off, and Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton became its more famous practitioners. In 1970, using the name S.S. Gardons, Snodgrass published Remains, his third book of poems. Some critics have charged he did so because he felt the poems weren’t worthy of a poet who’d won the Pulitzer, but Snodgrass has explained that he had personal reasons for doing this. More recently, he published The Fuhrer Bunker (1977), poems spoken by nazis—including Hitler—during the last days of the Third Reich. Critics blasted the poems as being sympathetic to monstrous criminals.

In addition to the books mentioned above, he published a volume of poems in 1968, After Experience, and a collection of influential essays in 1975, In Radical Pursuit. Along with the Pulitzer, his many awards and honors include the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the National Institute Arts and Letters Award, and the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets.

GN: From your poetry and lectures, we couldn’t help but be aware of things about your life: the divorces, years of analysis, the difficulties you faced after the enormous success of your first book. Yet you come across as a person who radiates health and the joy of living. Can you explain this curious phenomenon?

WDS: Eat carrots! Ah, I sure don’t radiate health. I’ve maybe once had what you would call mental health. I probably have more fun than most people do, but I also have more trouble and pain. I have been through therapies and divorces and so forth. For me the central problem is keeping one’s energy going out instead of getting bottled up inside. I suppose that’s why I was talking about that so much last night in talking about those Frost poems. As long as you can keep your psyche freed up and keep things coming out, they don’t slaughter your psyche. I went through a lot of trouble at the time of my third divorce about four years ago. The only thing you can do is do everything you can to keep those emotions in your sight, know what your feelings are, and give them some kind of expression. I play tennis a lot. That burns off a lot of rage and frustration.

The first poems that I wrote are about the loss of my daughter. You know, analysts talk a lot about bottled-up rage as a source of great trouble in the psyche, and indeed it is. Grief also can do the same thing to you, and if you don’t give it expression, you’re going to be deadened by it. With any powerful emotion, if you’re not letting it happen, pretty soon you’re not letting anything happen; you’re not giving yourself to your love, you’re not giving yourself to your work. For me, as for Freud, those are the only things that can give meaning to a life that is otherwise essentially meaningless. If you muck those things up, you’ve got no meaning left. So at the time I thought I lost that child—though as it turned out I didn’t lose her—I just howled a great deal. In a way my therapy at the time became a set of lessons in how to cry. I was also in a position where I could make choices in the academic world. I felt that I owed it to my students not to do the things that they might want right now, but the things that would keep me alive for whatever students I might have in ten years. For example, I don’t go to meetings, and I avoid grading papers.

That sounds awfully self-righteous. It sounds like: well, I am this brilliant creature that I am because I decided when I was twenty-one that I would…but, let it stand, let it stand. Let it sound self-righteous.

Interview

GN: Was Heart’s Needle part of this coming to grips with yourself?

WDS: Surely, surely. As a matter of fact, one of the things that most influenced the writing was that first psychotherapy I was in, where the problem was just to restate the problem over and over and over again until I finally got it in my own language. And then it had some reality. So long as I talked about it in analytic terms, or in textbook terms, it wasn’t real. I wasn’t even admitting that it was a problem.

GN: Sounds like, to paraphrase Frost, art doesn’t put an end to pain, art elevates pain.

WDS: Yes. Or freezes and preserves it.

GN: I’d like to talk about the Fuhrer Bunker. Your reading at Mason was very dramatic and was well received. The audience was stunned and seemed to be transported. And yet I think there was a feeling that we all had—that the poems were hard to deal with. Do you ever think about the audience for the poems as being generations of the future? As if, when more time has elapsed between the events and the act of reading about them, people will be better able to deal with the poems?

WDS: I dare say they will. On the other hand, that would seem to be less valuable. That shock is exactly what I’m aiming at. It’s the shock of coming up against the poem that attacks your own self-righteousness, your own view of yourself as noble, moral, virtuous, immune to the kind of terrible actions you can see in your enemies. I dare say that later on there won’t be as much shock, but then I think that the work will be less. In this way, we pretend. We like to think that we understand Beethoven better because we aren’t shocked at the kinds of things that he writes. But that just means that we’re not hearing them, that we’ve heard so many imitations since his time that we don’t hear. He wrote those shocks and terrible discords in there, and that they have since come to be not discordant makes it really impossible for a person to hear, say, the Beethoven Third—unless one goes back and reconstructs in oneself the notion that certain of those notes were just absolutely horrifying, that the musicians themselves, when they came to play the piece, thought, no, now, wait a minute, that’s a mistake, either he made a mistake or the copyist—that can’t be intended—he couldn’t do that. But of course he did. And that was a terribly shocking note. Unless we can reconstruct that sense, we won’t really hear what he wrote. We’re hearing a palliated version of it, a prettified one. And the same thing is true with some of Picasso’s work. By now we have seen so many examples, we say, “that’s a beautiful painting.” We’ve seen enough imitations of it, in commercial art, that the shock is gone. But he surely intended that shock. The same with Van Gogh. After something becomes a kind of movement, it becomes a common thing and loses its sharp edges.

GN: I think that you took a great risk with the Fuhrer Bunker poems. Why did you write them?

WDS: Freud said something like, who would ever write a line if they didn’t want the love of beautiful women and the honor of brilliant men? But that isn’t the only reason. I know that I won’t get those things, and I go ahead and do the work anyway. I just feel better if I do some work. And this, it seems to me, is the work that I can do that isn’t around, and I do have great hopes of posterity. Why I picked this is that it seems to me no one else was doing it. Why write about the nazis? Because it’s there! Why do you try to climb Mt. Everest? There’s that great big subject that nobody is paying attention to, which suggests that it must be valuable. We have shut it out of our consciousness rigorously, we are that much afraid of it.

GN: So you feel it’s being dealt with one-dimensionally?

WDS: Surely, absolutely. People go to take courses in the holocaust or something like that, in which they put all their emphasis on the victims, and see themselves as victims, and talk about somebody else’s evil. I don’t think it’s very valuable to talk about somebody else’s evil. The only one it’s much use to talk about is your own.

GN: You read us Whitman the other night, and you talked about how the greatest possibilities now lie in free verse. Why do you think this is so?

WDS: I’m partly coming from the example of Whitman. He seems to me our best poet. And the use of free verse was absolutely necessary to the kind of creation he made. I’m inclined to believe that will be the case when the really greatest poet comes along. On the other hand, you can’t be like Whitman by imitating him. That’s clear. Most people who’ve tried to imitate him have only been able to imitate his faults, or his ideas, which are almost the same thing. His ideas are not very interesting in themselves, they’re just about the same things that everyone else believes. And of course many people thought they were imitating Whitman because they were trumpeting his ideas. As a matter of fact, when he trumpets those ideas, it gets pretty annoying. They just aren’t that interesting. When he’s handling them most tactfully, he’s most successful. That’s even more the case in his followers. Most of them haven’t had the capacity for rhythmic invention needed for free verse. Creating the kind of thing he did, which involves above all the creation of new sounds, means a new quality of sound and creation on a lot of sub-rational levels, on subconscious levels. To create that new quality of sound, you’re probably going to have to go into free verse. Going into the conventional metrics will not leave you that much leeway to create new, vital sounds. On the other hand, most of the people who have tried to do it haven’t done anything of the sort. They’ve just gone sloppy and haven’t created anything worth hearing.

GN: Do you feel that history contributes to the value of poetry, that many of the young poets aren’t studying the old masters and classics and that this is a vacancy, a flaw in the new poetry?

WDS: The trouble is that instead of studying the old masters, they study the new ones, who aren’t really such masters, who aren’t really so very great. To be a second-rate Whitman would still be pretty good. To be a second-rate…I don’t want to say that. Leave a blank there and take the person off the cover of the American Poetry Review last week. Would you really want to be a second-rate them? That’s pretty puny. You’d do better to stay away from other poets altogether than to study too much what’s fashionable these days.

But I don’t read enough young poets to know what’s happening with them. I don’t see any particular vital school happening at the moment, but then I don’t care about schools anyway. As a friend of mine said, “That’s the trouble with movements, they pass.” Whatever the latest one is, the consonant movement or the vowel movement, will pass.

GN: Which reminds me of the confessional movement.

WDS: Yeah, good to have that pass.

GN: Your relationship with Lowell is fascinating. You were his student and yet the relationship seemed to reverse itself. The teacher became the student. Is that fair to say?

WDS: In part I think that’s true. I had admired his work much more than anyone else’s. I didn’t have any idea what it was about, but I loved it. Those early poems of his that are just so shaking with passion, like one of those washing machines that’s just throbbing with power. Coming on the heels of T.S. Eliot and the dry talk you get in Eliot’s poems, this absolutely all-out, shakingly passionate stuff was very wonderful. I worshipped it. And then he came to Iowa to teach, and he was very wonderful. Before he got there, I was already writing like him, and one of my friends was writing like Hart Crane, and someone else was writing like someone else. Well, I was writing like Lowell, and I had to get away from that, and partly to get away from that, I had to stop reading him altogether. Later, he did write and say to me when he was doing the Life Studies poems, “I am taking you as my model.”

That shook me up terribly and frightened me very badly. Lowell was the one who got some of my first poems published. I’d had a great deal of trouble getting them published. He was very generous to me. But at the same time you can imagine having admired someone that much—I mean, my God! All of a sudden he’s saying things like, “I am taking you as my model.” My God, are you in trouble!

We later became great friends again. I just had to stay away from him for a while just to keep from writing like him, because I admired him so much. Those early poems are just incredibly wonderful. I still don’t know what they mean.

GN: You were also a student of John Berryman’s. Did he influence your work as well?

WDS: I think much less. I could show you individual lines where he made suggestions, and I took them, but as to influencing the overall texture of my work, I think not nearly as much. Perhaps later on, he might have had an influence from the Dream Songs. Although I don’t think I write like the Dream Songs, I admire them very, very much. I admire the way they jam one tone of voice against another constantly. You get the voice of Shakespeare jamming up against Winnie the Pooh, coming up against a new announcer, coming up against a stage negro dialect, and all these things smashing into each other. I admire that, but I don’t think I ever try to do it.

GN: Let’s talk about oral interpretation. When you read “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” the other night, I felt a kinship between you and Whitman. What is going on inside you when you read?

WDS: Heavens, I don’t know. For one thing, you’re trying to concentrate very hard on the words and the meaning of each line and each phrase as you come to it. Since I hadn’t read that poem in a while, every once in a while I would come to a line and go, oh, God! I just sloughed it off, and I didn’t really get the sense out of that line because I wasn’t quite as prepared or quite as sharp as I would like to be.

In general, you warm up to the poem and try to attack it any goddamn way you can, trying to understand it as much as you can, and feel your way into what it’s feeling. Also, try to keep your voice alive at all times, full of the inflections of real speech, so that it doesn’t become mechanical and bookish. If you’ve been reading the same piece a good deal, you have to keep changing it. I mean, not even changing it necessarily to make it better. Just to keep doing things that you didn’t do last night. Even if this makes a worse reading for a particular line, it’s at least alive and will force you to do something unexpected with the next line. At least it is alive and has a sense of the fluidity of real life about it, as opposed to that over-memorized…

GN: The way you read suggests that you see a poem not just as something which should exist on the page.

WDS: Absolutely, absolutely. No, to me the poem is not the pattern of words on the page, it is the pattern of sounds in the ear. A poem that somebody can’t read out loud isn’t a poem, as far as I’m concerned. Some of Cummings’s poems, for instance, are like this. Some of them I’ve found ways to read out loud, but if I can’t find a way to read one out loud, to me it may be a kind of inspired doodling or inspired drawing, and it may be quite valuable for that, but it just isn’t a poem.

GN: What about the relationship between “music” and imagery in poetry?

WDS: You have to talk about the individual poem to talk about that. Often it’s not a one-to-one relationship. Very often they are in conflict with each other. The poem might be about something horrifying, whereas the sounds will be glossy and polished and very pleasant. And the reverse is possible. Like any of the factors in a work of art, you don’t try to get them all lined up in the same direction if they are to imitate the great complexity of life and the human mind.

GN: Did you use this principle in writing the Fuhrer Bunker poems in order to create tension?

WDS: There are places where I was conscious of a conflict of that sort. But mostly you’re not conscious of that. You just ask yourself, Does this feel rich enough? Does this feel good? Very often, just as in day-to-day life, you don’t ask yourself about this or that technique, you just do it. If it doesn’t sound right, you keep changing it until it sounds good.

GN: When Goebbel’s wife is murdering their children, the voice has such a soft quality to it, and the horror of the words…

WDS: Yes. And I did think about that. I deliberately set up the poem like a nursery rhyme. If you try to line all those things up in the direction of horror, you drain life of its great richness. When ladies murder their children, they don’t kick them first. They say, here darling, let me comfort you.

And certainly there’s a horror in the Himmler poems. I hope it comes from the fact that this man who did incredibly horrible things never talked about anything but high ideals and self-sacrifice and morality. He’s using those terms to do the most evil.

GN: In the Fuhrer Bunker poems, you use the dramatic monologue format. Other contemporary poets have also been reviving the dramatic monologue. Can you conjecture as to the reasons behind the reemergence of this format?

WDS: It surely has something to do with the fact that the confessional lyric has shot its wad. It’s time for something different. By now everybody is sick and tired of everybody’s bedroom memoirs and lists of things in the medicine cabinet. There is not much to be discovered there. What can be done in that direction has been done. So everyone is looking for something different and probably quite different. So we’ve moved into the very long poem, for one thing. For thirty-five years, everyone’s been saying, you can’t write long poems. Now everybody who’s got up their nerve is trying to do just that. You always try to do what nobody else has done lately and what everybody thinks is impossible. If it isn’t impossible, it isn’t worth trying.

GN: I would like to ask you just two more questions. Who do you think is the best living American poet, or the best one or two, excluding yourself?

WDS: Anthony Hecht and Donald Hall. Jim Wright, when he was alive. Richard Wilbur, who has sort of been ignored lately.

GN: This is going to be a really original question. Everybody in my position has asked it. What’s your advice to young poets?

WDS: Don’t do it if you can help it. Do anything else. The pay’s better, it doesn’t cost you so much, it won’t wreck your life half so bad. Go into handling rattlesnakes. It isn’t near as dangerous. But if you can’t be happy doing something else, then you’re a life termer.

GN: I heard Robert Hayden talk about this once in a workshop. He indicated that it’s a very special fate that leads one into poetry, into a life as an artist.

WDS: It would take something that cruel and nasty. I must say, though, that I always knew I wanted to do something in the arts. That may be rare, but once you discover that your interest in poetry is long term, more than for a week or a month, something that involves a lifetime, pretty soon you’ll discover your talents.

GN: Can you be more specific about choices you made in the academic world?

WDS: There were things that one could do that would get one promotion and so forth—like finishing the Ph.D., which I didn’t do. At a certain point I just decided I could only do that by killing my brain. I didn’t want to do that. There are other people who do that without damage to themselves, but I didn’t think I could.

GN: Is this when you wrote “The Examination”?

WDS: Oh, yes, sure.

GN: It is clear as to your feelings about the academic world.

WDS: Yes. I had a boss at one of the places I taught who wanted desperately to be kept there and to get a kind of power, and in order to do that, he was taking up the study of Italian Renaissance Criticism. He was reading all these Italian Renaissance critics in order to write a book about them, which would get him tenure and would get him some influence in the school. But he was like a dead man. They may have been quite wonderful critics, but he was reading them for the wrong reasons. He just hated them. He wasn’t reading them with any love for them, and there was such an air of death around him all the time. I don’t want to be kept any place that badly.

GN: Can you describe how you see your role as a teacher?

WDS: Yeah, sure. Teaching’s a lot more fun if you don’t hold back your energies. It recharges your batteries just to discharge them. I could say, I don’t want to put any energy into this class, because then I won’t have enough for my writing. That way lies death because you’re going to hate the teaching and you’re going to be in the habit of holding back. Then you hold back from whatever else you’re doing. Whereas, if you go in and throw some energy into it, and if you treat the students as if they are bright, then they will be bright. They will say things that will excite you, and you’ll come out of the class feeling better, instead of feeling worse. If one does that, it’s for very selfish reasons.

As to how I see my role, my business is to go in and to project to the students a sense that I feel they are very bright and that I want high level performance. And to give examples of that. In other words, I will start out by saying, we want performance at this level. Give it to me. And the students do. They sure did here. I loved those final seminar meetings when everyone was getting into the thing. People felt that they could disagree and come out and say what they thought. It was marvelous. There was never a dead section there. There was always someone who wanted to say something.

GN: How would you describe “Decomposition,” the unique teaching method you have?

WDS: I’ve just taken some of the best poems in English, the ones we always talk about when we talk about how excellent this word is, or that phrase, and how anything else there would be worse. Since we never actually put something else there to see, I just started putting different things in to see what would happen. If you take Lucy’s name out of Wordsworth’s poem “When Lucy Ceases to Be” and put in “Agnes,” or “Debbie,” what happens to the poem? No doubt I’m doing this partly because when you work a lot with certain works, you get irritated with them, and you feel like kicking them around some. So you take it out that way, but it proves to be a good teaching device. You’re taking your own destructive urges and turning them toward a constructive end.

 

W.D. Snodgrass (January 5, 1926 – January 13, 2009) was the author of more than 20 books of poetry, including Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (2006); Each in His Season (1993); The Führer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress (1977), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and produced by Wynn Handman for The American Place Theatre; and Heart’s Needle (1959), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry (2002), After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches (1999) and six volumes of translation, including Selected Translations (1998), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. His honors include an Ingram Merrill Foundation award and a special citation from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the National Endowment for the Arts.