CA: I love that! Also, the way they are titled ‘On … ’ (‘On Time’; ‘On Falling’; ‘On Silence’; ‘On Cursing’ and my favourite ‘On Empathy’ because no-one seems to even understand the basic difference between empathy and sympathy anymore!) Anyway, this reminds me of Anne Carson’s prose poems in ‘Short Talks on Hedonism’; ‘On Ovid’; ‘On Chromo-Luminarism’ as they are contemporary but also speak back to history. However, where Carson deflects the personal, you invite it. Can you talk a little bit about your approach and this wonderful book?
DH: ‘On Falling’ came first, followed by ‘On Conscience’ and then ‘On Weather’. In my earlier collection, Safe Suicide (2008), I’d written narrative essays that used central symbols or topics as a kind of lattice that framed emotions, such as the essay ‘On Gravity’. In ‘On Falling’, I began free-associating and riffing without any idea where I was going. I went from the season fall, to the fall of kings, to Lucifer’s fall, to Icarus’s, to Galileo’s law of falling objects. Each variation flashes by and builds until I discovered my ironic ending. The ultimate fall is death, but we can sentimentalise it by imagining miraculous rescue: ‘down will come baby . . . into Mommy’s arms’. The poet John Skoyles was my first reader and encouraged me to try more such meditations or ‘doodles’ (as I called them) on other topics, not just one or two more, but enough for a book.
CA: So, back to Shakespeare (it’s always back to Shakespeare where I’m concerned!). Can we talk about the wonderful character of Ophelia? I’ve played her in amateur theatre. She, too, has herbs but not sweet marjoram (rosemary, fennel). Gaston Bachelard and Lorca have written about the Ophelia complex, discussing sexuality, madness and water. And those incredible Pre-Raphaelite paintings of Ophelia by Millais and Waterhouse eroticise her. Even Gertrude’s brilliant speech about her death discusses her being ‘mermaid-like’ and notes her garland being made of the phallic ‘long purples’. You’ve talked about Ophelia losing her father. I wonder what you think about Ophelia and madness? Have you ever written about her?
DH: I haven’t, no. I do love the parallel in the play, though, between Hamlet’s glamorising his father, Hamlet act one, scene one, and Ophelia’s grief for her father, as if he were a hero and paragon, a wise Secretary of State, a loving family man and single parent, all of which is at odds with the audience’s (and Hamlet’s) experience of Polonius as a pompous fool and hypocrite who only spouts platitudes, is self-important, and thinks like Bottom that he can play any role. In fact, Polonius, who is willing to set spies on his son, has never suspected Claudius of murder, and this is the man that the supposedly great warrior, Hamlet act one, scene one, has elevated to his top advisor. So, I read Ophelia much the way Polonious does, as none too bright and susceptible to the self-images of patriarchy. And her ‘madness’ prefigures Hamlet’s, as a kind of lower-grade moral fuse. She lacks resilience and capacity to reconcile love, desire, lust, and conscience both in herself and in the world.
Hamlet confronts a ghost that tells him that the ‘eternal blazon’ – the truth about God, justice, morality, and afterlife – is forbidden to share with mortal ears, or else the slightest syllable of it would drive human understanding mad. Hamlet’s private vendetta against Claudius and his inexplicable murder of her father is too much for Ophelia’s mind, soul, and heart and her only response to life’s shocks is suicide. Of course, Hamlet and Laertes imagine her as all pathetic, all victim, not tragic. There are no Portias or Rosalinds or Cordelias or Paulinas in this play, unless a modern woman plays Hamlet. Two of my recent poems, ‘On Knowing’ and ‘On Meaning’ have this idea of ‘eternal blazon’ in mind.
CA: I know you discussed that when you retired you made walls of books at home and were reacquainted with many of them. When I interviewed Camille Paglia, she talked about that time before the internet when we’d make discoveries and find interesting juxtapositions in the books that were shared or were above or below the shelves around the book you were looking for. Even the books as you walked down a row looking at the Dewey Decimal number and seeing if that book was in the library led to extraordinary discoveries. Now, we often research online and go directly to what we want – students often tell me they do word searches in PDFs of books. I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon, but I love the more unexpected surprises of ‘finding’ literature. Can you talk a little bit about re-engaging with classics as you brought your books home from Emerson?
DH: My library embodies my conscience, perhaps. Part I never thought I would look at again were scholarly standards from grad school, which included ‘Shakespeare’s library’. Part were texts of fiction, memoir, essays, and lit crit that I had repeatedly taught from moderns. In many cases, I didn’t really need the actual books with my underlinings and marginalia. It was enough to have access to them online. Parts were by contemporaries over forty years of editing and reviewing and included a few I never stopped rereading and many more I cherished and wanted nearby. I have my own immediacy and storage. Books that aren’t immediately in mind or called to support some idea I am working on live on long shelves in our basement. The ones I am reading or often referring to live upstairs in my writer’s study. Depending on impulse or occasion, some move upstairs, others back downstairs. They are all spines out and familiar. But all are also, more or less, corridors or cells of memory. I was writing my poem ‘Corpus’ recently in response to your questions, and I recalled Tennyson’s fears in ‘Locksley Hall’ that the English tongue might not survive, and back near the cobwebbed cellar ceiling there was my paperback of the Compete Poems of Tennyson from 1958 with underlinings of the important lines. Other times, I’ll just be browsing or trying to prune. What books can I give away to make more space? Will I ever need my mother’s mouldy copy of Plato from her college days? But more often, I’ll have a word or idea in mind, and scan the spines for relevance. Or sometimes in correspondence I’ve made a reference and want to recommend or quote a key passage to a friend. Upstairs, I also have a jumbled shelf a few floor stacks of new books I’ve bought and mean to read in order to write a blurb or review. They tend to spread out around me in ripples of urgency or relevance, most urgent near, less so behind me or in some periphery. It’s a shifting maze, but I find things usually with a dyslexic’s instinct.
CA: Poets love to hear about other’s practice. How do you go about crafting a poem? Any advice for poets?
DH: I try not to repeat myself or lapse into mannerisms. One poem leads to another. I’m challenged by ambition and difficulty. Humour and gravity are mixed. Trim Reckonings (2023) still has poems that begin with etymology and freely associate with pop culture, to Shakespeare references, to academic research, to memory and confession, and end with some concluding recognition, if not wisdom; but it also has prose poems, narrative poems, poems about family history (usually focusing on heirlooms or objects), political poems, ekphrastic poems, intertextual poems, and, yes, poems about poetry. My next book is for longer poems, meditative and narrative, and will be out from Pierian Springs Press this fall. I haven’t been able to write in traditional forms, such as the sonnet. I work in free verse (rising to challenges of wit rather than rhyme); I riff and meditate, and while keeping colloquial, also keep energetic and concise.
I just finished a poem about ‘migration’, a word heavily in the news, having to do with US border policy, and a major concern of my daughter’s life and art. But I lacked focus. I played with ‘im-migraiton’ and ‘e-migration’. I thought of my working-class suburb outside Boston and on the Charles River. Thought of Canadian geese on our playgrounds. Thought of fish ladders on the river. Thought of Cambridge for grad school and meeting my wife and moving to Watertown to settle and start a family and of Watertown itself, where displaced Europeans came for industrial jobs. Thought of pride in diversity on the one hand and of intolerance, stereotyping, and persecution on the other. Thought how wonderfully W.C. Williams captured American contradictions in his ballgame and yachts poems. But none of this worked yet until I wrote about starting Ploughshares and running it out of our second bedroom before my daughter was born, then finding a storefront in a commercial block nearby, where the journal could have public space, but where a gang of kids singled us out for ridicule and threatened vandalism. I cut the first part, except to contrast our town’s Martin Luther King Jr Day unity celebration with the xenophobia and prejudice with which locals took to having a literary magazine on their block. I left out the birds and fish. Then, suddenly, it worked, in ways that surprised me. I knew things I didn’t know I knew. It’s important to honour your impulses but follow up on play with the work of genuine discovery; condense and reorganise for power and drama; don’t be afraid to show learning, but never show off; treat every poem as a voice in a situation.
