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     A Conversation with Len Krisak   

by Rhina P. Espaillat

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LK: Tell him he should have gotten—and stayed with—a day job. Nursing wounded civil war soldiers, for example, or reviewing opera (he was a big buff—if not one of the "big roughs").

Human freedom—cultural, poetic, political, all KINDS of freedom—expands and contracts depending on what we do about it. But to confuse having freedom with writing longer and longer lines of "verse" that only drive typographers, editors, book designers, and other semi-skilled practitioners in the chattering classes crazy is to exhibit dementia. We are all ( and, I hasten to add, SHOULD be) free to stand on our heads in agricultural product for hours on end. It's not a practice I recommend, however.

RPE: Well, I'll pass on your retrospective advice. But I have a feeling we haven't seen or heard the last of Walt, even if he lands a day job. I'm glad that's the case, too; I would miss him if he didn't visit me occasionally from the Great Beyond.

But closer to home—in Lawrence, specifically—there is a bilingual reading series in which you have participated, reading original poems as well as your translations of the work of contemporary Spanish-language poets. What made such a venture appeal to you?

LK: Again I fear I'm going to disappoint Able Muse's audience—and probably disillusion them as well. The project appealed to me mostly because of the people involved: you, Juan Matos, Cesar Sanchez Beras. All of you were so kind and friendly. That got me hooked. Only then, with the poems "Gitana" by Juan and "The Brim of My Father's Hat, " by Cesar, did I think of the literary aspect of the project. But I must admit, it's a fairly daunting prospect, trying to read in English a translation from a language my audience understands but I don't. Talk about chutzpah!

The experience has been rewarding, though, and I feel I've made a number of friends who dwell in the same house of poetry I hope I inhabit. It's just that they mostly live on the third floor and I rent a studio in the basement!

By the way: I don't believe anything I ever do will equal what you've accomplished, for example, in translating some of Robert Frost's most famous poems into Spanish. Now THAT'S an accomplishment.

RPE: That must be some "studio in the basement" to provide your poems the kind of large view of life and the world conveyed in them! No, I suspect this response is much more modest than accurate.

As for chutzpah, thank goodness for it! Who could write a word without it?

I want to say that what "hooked you, " as you say—"the people involved"—strikes me as the most natural and legitimate of all motives, much more likely to move the poet than, say, a sense of obligation or some faceless cause. Whatever else we may come to later, I think it's the face, the person, real or vividly imagined, that draws us in first, into deeds and into poems. I'm thinking now of poems in which you've imagined Dr. Johnson, for instance, or a character from myth, or "reconstructed" people from your childhood, or observed little children in the street, in words that then go on to suggest something else about a larger theme.

LK: I'm not sure if that was a question or an affirmation, but in either case, I'll venture a "yes."

RPE: We've had a dash of Yiddish and a reference to Spanish—how Walt would approve!—but I want to close this conversation with American English: specifically with a poem that's been a favorite of mine ever since the friend who wrote it read it aloud to me over coffee, in...what year was that?

         WHY I AM A "FORMALIST"

                  (Houdini often escaped from handcuffs by
                   hiding a skeleton key-a bit of razor blade—flat
                   between his cheek and gum.)

         The room's on fire. Handcuffed, and your feet
         In chains (but just enough to move), no belt
         Or shoes, you watch the flames inch higher. You've felt
         Your eyebrows start to singe from so much heat.
         The shackles brand your ankles, sear your hands.
         One window high above your only chance,
         The razor blade against your gum your key,
         You tongue it to your teeth and spit. You're free
         Just long enough to throw your chains around
         The window's crank and pull with what had bound
         You, hoisting yourself one hot foot at a time.
         Those manacles you've carried on the climb
         And smashed the glass with land outside. Once more,
         You jump—and run toward rooms you'll need them for.

Thanks, Len. I wish you many more "rooms."

LK: I think that must have been about 1994—seven years ago! For some reason, I thought at the time that Houdini's story made a good metaphor for an ars poetica. Perhaps.

Perhaps it only hinted at a "case"—an argument—for imaginative activity in general—what Auden calls secondary worlds. Or to be less pretentious, perhaps painters and musicians and basketball players (Frost's tennis players?) all gain freedom from the restrictions they willingly impose on themselves. What fun to be told one must rhyme, and rhyme exactly, but still say something worth saying. And you'll notice I'm perfectly willing to pontificate about that in a poem with a number of less-than-exact rhymes.

So perhaps that's as good a place as any to stop.

Now I, too, thank a friend, Rhina.

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