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     A Conversation with Len Krisak   

by Rhina P. Espaillat

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LK: At the risk of being crashingly obvious, my primary influences have been J. V. Cunningham, Frost, Wilbur, Hardy, Housman, Richard Moore, and you. Along the way, dozens of other poets and poet/friends have had profound influence: Richard Moore taught me to stop trying to be a showoff and start trying to communicate clearly with an audience. You taught me a great deal about pausing and slowing down and letting a poem breathe. Tim Murphy cured me of the execrable habit of rhyming singulars with plurals, and so on. I doubt if I've absorbed any of these lessons very well, but there you are.

As for Frost, etc., I think their influence comes indirectly, simply from the reading of them. I admire epigrams, and I honor wit and elegance in verse, but then I also like passion and power. Who else but Wilbur, eh?

RPE: Quite a list; and how slyly gracious of you to slip me in there with my very-much-betters! Thank you. But on to the "sweat," which interests both of us very much. How do you resolve the conflict between respect for the rules of the craft—the expenditure of sweat on time-honored and well-defined exercises—and the poet's freedom to arrive at his own method to work out?

LK: The metaphor in your question prompts this often overly-literal poet to ask for a dummy's explanation of what you mean by work out method.

RPE: Bad pun, I guess: I meant "work out" as in what's done at the gym, or the way a poet may be said to exercise his skill to "work out" the poem from wordless impulse to words on paper. What I'm asking is this: How much deviation from traditional prosodic practice do you engage in? Clearly less than, say, Emily Dickinson, but how much and what kinds?

LK: Oh, I see. I understood "work out" as a metaphor, but it never occurred to me that you were asking about my "deviation" from traditional prosodic practice.

I'm an arch-conservative, with, as Merrill used to say, the emphasis on the "arch." I almost never slant rhyme, and never substitute an anapest for a two-syllable foot of any kind. I lie awake at night torturing myself over whether "perversity" rhymes with "diversity." When I leave the established meter in a particular line, I very very rarely go more than one foot before returning to tonic.

Richard Moore and Timothy Murphy (via Auden and Pearson) had a set-to about this a year or so ago in the pages of The Edge City Review, and all I can say is that "To a green thought/In a green shade" is a sequence common in Yeats and other poets—you'd be surprised how often this shows up in English poetry.

I seldom write blank verse, saving it almost exclusively for Alfred Dorn's yearly contest.

And with the exception of some embarrassing attempts to imitate Stevens back in 1971 (the efforts lasted about 6 months and then I trashed them), I have never written a poem that wasn't metrical and rhymed. Go figure.

RPE: Whatever you're doing is obviously working, because you keep winning prizes, including last year's Richard Wilbur Award for Even As We Speak, a collection of poems about to be published by the University of Evansville Press. A number of your other prizes, most recently from the New England Poetry Club and the British Comparative Literature Association, have been for translations. Talk about translating, please.

LK: Oh, dear, I was afraid this might come up! Truth is, the area where I work the most is Latin, and I'm afraid I'm going to shock your readers with the equivalent of some confessional poetry.

Believe it or not, translating Horace, let's say, means that I get out my trusty Lewis & Short (the world's greatest Latin dictionary), consult about 7 or 8 ponies—do we still call them that?—and work my way laboriously through the text, writing down a kind of amalgamated prose consensus of the poem.

Of course, high school (and a little college) Latin do come into play, and I don't want to suggest that I just start these efforts blind, but by and large, that's it. Given the rough prose version of the poem, which I now think of as my own personal pony, I set out to find a meter, a first line, a phrase, or something that will get me into the poem.

I do try to match total number of lines wherever possible (obviously, I do an English sonnet for a Petrarch sonnet!), and I strive mightily to maintain as much of the rhyme scheme (for Italian, Spanish, etc.) as possible, but in Latin I'm pretty much on my own. I'm certainly no scholar like Charles Martin or Alicia Stallings or Richard Moore or David Berman or Mike Juster.

What do I do if I see in a footnote that the original Latin is in glyconic strophes or galliambics? I nod my head sagely, admiring the scholarly acumen of the editor, then promptly launch off into what will probably be English iambics with a little substitution! Incidentally, I always rhyme my Latin, despite the fact that that's frowned on by true scholars. Charles Martin must think I'm crazy, but then it's fun to imagine one is doing something roughly like what Dryden or Pope does.

Was that answer long enough?

RPE: I think you should have done it in glyconics. But let's see what an avowed arch-conservative has to say about three literary developments that could be termed rather "liberal" in practice, in that they broaden the appeal of poetry, attempt to enlarge the audience and market for it, and invite enthusiastic amateurs to rise and be heard. I mean, of course, the poetry reading, the poetry workshop, and the proliferation of poetry sites on the Internet.

LK: Poetry readings I approve of because the sound of poetry is key, although Philip Larkin hated them and thought everything should be silent on the page—silent between the reader and writer. Alfred Dorn would obviously disagree, and so do I.

Workshops can be OK (what, were you expecting flaming controversy here? ), but when I teach poetry writing, I do no workshopping whatsoever. Students read, study, and imitate model poets and poems. That's it! We go straight to the heart of the matter, and by the end of the semester they are expected to come up with fairly decent imitations of "Fire and Ice" and other short classics. Told that they will not be sitting around criticizing one another's efforts, some of them blanch, but they are generally beginning students, so I see nothing wrong with a little blanching. A workshop made up of good, experienced poets is another matter altogether.

Websites and chat boards? If for chat, analysis, and so on, no problem. But a board that critiques is only as good as the people who join in. Potluck, I guess you could say.

RPE: Last night I was leafing through your two chapbooks—Midland and Fugitive Child—and enjoying their formal music and crisp, precise language, when the spirit of Walt Whitman turned up and began reading over my shoulder. Before long he was wondering aloud about your return to the prosodic constraints from which he "liberated" poetry 150 years ago. I reminded him that he was "large" and "contained multitudes, " which surely ought to mean enough room for those of us who enjoy constraint, but he ignored me and went on to claim that the human spirit moves toward freedom inexorably and will not be denied. Things got loud; he wouldn't leave until I promised him an answer from you. What shall I tell him if he shows up here again tonight?

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