Talking Poetry with Lloyd Schwartz
Issue date: 10/31/07 Section: Culture
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Lloyd Schwartz is the author of three collections of poetry: These People; Goodnight, Gracie; and Cairo Traffic. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and The Best American Poetry. He is also the classical music critic for the Boston Phoenix, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1994.
Can you tell me a bit about the process through which you became a poet?
I think for most poets there are two stages. In the first stage you fall in love with poetry. For me that happened as a senior in high school, when I had a great English teacher who helped me see that poems could be about something - that they meant something, had a sense of urgency, were exciting and challenging and not just pretty language.
In the second stage you fall in love with writing poetry - and this is just like falling in love with a person. You know, in every relationship love is not just love, it's also argument and contending with something. And that happened for me in college.
And how about your early career?
I had always been in love with acting. I remember as a freshman in college I at first wanted to join the drama club, and I went there, and found myself incredibly turned off by the membership. It seemed like a club full of prima donnas… so I went to a meeting of the Literary Magazine, and the people there seemed much nicer and smarter.
In any case, after I finished my PhD here at Harvard, I returned to acting, in local productions of Aristophanes, Sophocles, Brecht… So I taught during the day and acted at night. And what happened was that I lost my day job, and suddenly found that the only other job I could get was teaching nights. Of course an actor needs his nights free, and this created a real crisis for me - what would I choose, academia or acting? In the end I chose academia… and something very interesting happened to my poetry. I didn't notice it at the time, although it seems obvious now, but I began to write poems that were monologues, in the voices of different characters. So the impulse to act got redirected into my poetry.
Those monologue poems eventually became my first book, although it took me awhile to have it published. I remember entering one poetry contest and getting back a rejection letter that read "You were a finalist for the prize. Unfortunately, what grabs some people about your work repels others."
Several of the poems in your most recent collection describe or incorporate dreams. Could you talk about that?
So much of my poetry is explicitly about a kind of everyday life, and it seems to me that that isn't all there is to the world. So dreams open a window into another aspect of the imagination, one that's strange, and less inhibited.
What about your poem entitled "Pornography"? That also seems to explore a somehow less inhibited area.
It is very related to the dream poems. For one thing, so many dreams are sexual dreams…But the way this particular poem came about is, a good friend of mine, now deceased, but a screenwriter - actually he wrote Beetlejuice - had a variety of interesting hobbies. For example he was obsessed with gravestone inscriptions. And he also had a very large collection of antique porn that he had bought at antique fairs and auctions. One day, visiting him, I asked to see some his collection. And he showed me some pieces, some old erotic postcards. I thought that they were very interesting, and the most interesting thing about them was that I found some of the images very moving. I started to imagine "Who were these people? Why were they posing for these images? What did it say about their lives? Did they know that someone 100 years later might be touched by them?"
So I wrote the poem to explore those questions, and then it was selected for the Best American Poetry anthology, which was great, because it showed that people recognized that I had a serious purpose
in writing it.
Do you get any inspiration from TV shows? Or watch TV at all?
I enjoy and am appalled by Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's a comedy about how the little things you do lead to consequences more horrible than you can imagine.
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