CA: You do lots of drafting and redrafting of your poems and often get feedback from poet friends and academics. How do you know when a poem is finished? Is a poem ever really finished? When do you decide to let it go or send it out for publication?
DH: About revision … the poem in progress is molten, malleable … on my own I give it time, once it has found its ending. I rough-draft. Then I tighten and delete sometimes or rearrange patterns, so there is a more focused journey. Then I try readers I trust (I will name names: John Skoyles, Joyce Peseroff, Richard Hoffman, Bruce Bennett, and YOU). Then I reread and it sets, is solid, right, stands alone. I feel relief and gratitude. I try it on the open mic on Lit Balm. I send it out simultaneously and spread my bets. Each poem, no matter how different from the ones before, will be rejected twenty or more times before it is taken. Whatever I think I do well is not obvious to screeners conditioned by schooled poetry and its outward forms.
CA: You’re a wonderful reader of your poetry and prose. Some of the features of your writing, such as its playfulness, erudition and poignancy lend themselves to oral/aural connections with an audience. (You’ve brought me to tears on Zoom watching you read one of your lyric essays at Grollier). What’s the art of reading your own work to an audience? Why is it important to hear the writer read their own writing? I’m thinking of that recording of Sylvia Plath (not my favourite poet!) reading ‘Daddy’ and its ‘theatre’ as a reading. Who do you think is also a great reader of their own work (historical or contemporary).
DH: Reading aloud matters. My layering of meanings is in voice and tone. And I love to emphasise that layering when I perform out loud. But the art of a poem, I think, is to include words, breaks, and stresses on the page that force strangers to perform and do it full justice. Stresses mark emphasis, often layered with irony. Voice is character in situation. In recorded readings, the actual poet’s voice can become indelible once you hear it, and you can never read the poem again without following or attempting to copy the performance – think of Dylan Thomas or Frost or Eliot or Maryanne Moore. But when their readings make up for the failures or cues on the page that seems to me a distortion. Is the music there in the script or is added by performance? I actually had a teacher once, Anne Ferry, who read so beautifully that she could make a phonebook sound like poetry.
CA: Anything I’ve failed to ask you?
DH: Maybe about sentimentality, which I seem to fear and ridicule in fiction, essays, and poems. Think of my essay ‘On Falling’, where I end (surprisingly) with ‘Rock-a-bye, Baby’. The original lyric – a lullaby – is grimly about severe injury or death of the baby, ‘down will come baby, cradle and all’. But my wife Connie characteristically substitutes, ‘down will come baby, into mommy’s arms’. If I seem to mock her wilful optimism, I do. But I am grateful for and admire it, too. Here, is a new, found poem version of ‘On Falling’.
Well, back to Shakespeare again. He always worried about ‘offending’, (or pretended to). And sought to please everyone (see As They Liked It by Alfred Harbage). While he can convince cynics of the possibility of miracles in the romances, he also leaves us crushed and mystified by Cordelia’s death in the truest of tragedies. As I say in my recent poem, ‘On Generosity’, the artist is cruel to be kind. ‘Gentle Shakespeare’ is truer to our being than Nahum Tate. We have to learn the heights of wonder through nightmares of loss, greed, villainy, and the indifferences of nature. Think of Thoreau’s experiment to determine whether life is mean or sublime. In any case, many of my poems worry about this dilemma and balance, yes.
CA: Yes, that’s a beautiful cyclic moment where you discuss falling earlier and free association – and you incorporate your wife’s words. Let me ask you one last question. I’m keen to know your answer to the question that is often posed to poets: ‘what is poetry for?’ – I guess ‘why is it important’?
DH: Poetry, at best, taps a clarity that we didn’t know we knew (to echo Frost). It offers entertainment and illumination, as Sir Philip Sidney argues. It offers a bonding experience and intimacy; gets under our skins. Think of Cleopatra’s suckling an asp. Or Keats’s ‘gathering swallows twitter in the skies’ or Stevens’s ‘downward towards darkness on extended wings’. Wow. The rest is silence.
