Interview

Gary Miranda was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. His educational background includes six years in Jesuit seminaries and graduate work at San Jose State College and the University of California at Irvine. He has taught creative writing and literature at various colleges and universities, including California State College at Northridge, Chapman College’s World Campus Afloat, and, most recently, as writer-in-residence at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He also did
a three-year stint as a Fulbright lecturer in American literature at the University of Athens, Greece. Miranda’s poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Poetry, The New Yorker, and Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of three collections of poems: Listeners at the Breathing Place, Grace Period (both from Princeton University Press), and Turning Sixty (Zoland Books). He has also published a well-received translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Breitenbush Books). He has served as poet-in-residence at the Robert Frost House in Franconia, New Hampshire, and his poetry is included in the taped collections at Harvard’s Lamont Library and the Library of Congress. Miranda has recently turned to writing screenplays. His first screenplay, Brothers, was based on his years as a Jesuit and won the 2001 Venice Arts Screenplay competition and the 2002 CineStory competition. He is represented by David Baird of Kinetic Management. He was interviewed by Stephen Frech.

Image: In the author’s note to your most recent book, Turning Sixty, you say that because of your background as a Jesuit seminarian you view poetry as a vocation or sacred calling. Is that sacred calling earthly or heavenly? In other words, do you mean to suggest that poets are chosen by God or by some other human agency?

Gary Miranda: I’ve always liked Rilke’s take on that idea. He writes, “The Spirit wants only that there be flying. As for who happens to do it, in that he has only a passing interest.” I think that’s true, and that it serves to deflate any potential swelled heads implied in the phrase “chosen by God.” I’ve never had much use for the word God. Like the word poetry, it’s gotten a bad rap. People say “I don’t like poetry” or “I don’t believe in God,” and what they’re really talking about is some construct that’s been foisted on them in school or at church. For me, what both of those statements translate to is “I haven’t had the experience you’re talking about—or, if I have, I don’t associate it with the terms you’re using.” I don’t believe in atheists, and I have my doubts about agnostics. One of the great tasks of poetry, it seems to me, is to find better names for God. In that sense, yes, I think of poetry as a sacred calling.

Image: Could you talk about “Directions into the Poems,” the first poem in Turning Sixty? That poem ends: “(Do not enter into / talk about these lines.)” Do you think poets should not talk about their habits or experiences of writing? I’m interested in your sense of what poetry and the act of writing are that “talk” (presumably discursive or self-conscious talk) might endanger.

GM: Your question reminds me of the time I was enlisted for an experiment at the Harvard graduate school of psychology called Project Zero. The good fledgling psychologists were trying to catch us artist-types in the act of creation, and so had me sit in a room and write, only to be periodically interrupted by a young woman who would come in, click on a tape recorder, and instruct me to “verbalize.”
“Directions into the Poem,” like “The Exam Committee” and some others in Turning Sixty, comes from my own days as a graduate student in lit crit at UC Irvine. I was doing my PhD dissertation on Coleridge’s theory of imagination and—shades of Coleridge himself—was having a hard time reconciling all the theorizing and talking about poetry with just reading and enjoying the stuff, let alone writing it. So I think the poem is directed more against the academic analyzing of poems (à la the “two critics” who “arrange themselves in lines, / one deep”) than it is against poets talking about their creative process. As for the latter, I don’t see that it can do much harm as long as no one starts believing or, God forbid, applying it.
As you may have noticed, “Directions” is also an experiment in strict form, which further reflects that my creative juices were not exactly aboil at the time. Specifically, it’s what I call a tetrina, a mildly masochistic form that I believe I invented and that—probably for the best—never caught on. It uses four stanzas instead of the sestina’s six, with the four end words—in this case, four, into, lines, and talk—repeated in a particular order and with slightly different meanings, then used again in the couplet, two in each line. I wrote a number of these while plotting my escape from graduate school, but this is the only one I felt was worth preserving.

Image: I wonder in what ways teaching has felt like an effort at “verbalizing” for students the slippery, elusive aspects of writing.

GM: When I taught literature courses, I spent a good part of each class just reading poems aloud, and when I taught creative-writing workshops, the only rule was that the writer of a poem was not allowed to talk about it. So I guess I have to admit to a certain bias against talking about poems. But only, I think, as a substitute for experiencing them. I see the value of talking about poems to be figuring out how they work, much as you might want to figure out how a magic trick works. It’s no coincidence that I have at least three poems about magicians, the least successful of which, “The Basic Two-handed Shift,” is a pretty accurate description of a card sleight; I spent a lot of time practicing sleight-of-hand card tricks as a kid, and I tend to think of rhyme and other sound devices in poems as sleight-of-hand—something you’re doing that helps the thing work but that you don’t want the audience to be aware of.
But this natural instinct to want to know how the trick works presupposes that the trick has worked. I think far too much time is spent in the classroom talking about poems that haven’t worked for the students, so that the talk becomes a substitute for what the poem should be doing. The ideal—totally impractical—would be to start with a poem that has worked for a given student and help that student figure out how and why it had the effect it did. And it makes no difference how good or bad the poem is. I could, by means of textual analysis, convince a student that Frost’s “Birches” is a much better poem than Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” but if “Trees” has worked for that student and “Birches” hasn’t, all I’m teaching the student is not to trust his own judgment. Now, that strikes me as cruel under any circumstances, but especially if the student aspires to be a poet, since an almost exaggerated sense of confidence in one’s own judgment seems to me a prerequisite for persevering as a poet. When I started writing poems as a morose teenager, my poems were awful, but my taste was equally awful, so I always thought my poems were wonderful. My taste and my ability grew up together like loving but competitive siblings, which seems to me how it should be. I think we sometimes forget that the ability to experience a poem hinges on the breadth of one’s own experience, poetic and otherwise.

Image: Can you talk about Coleridge a bit in this context? He was able to do both: to write about imagination in compelling ways as theory and to write the rarest of poems. I particularly like “This Lime-tree Bower My Prison,” a poem in which imagination and meditation on imagination become layered.

GM: Coleridge remains one of my favorites, both as a thinker and a poet, and even more so as a wonderfully flawed human being. Just an aside: if you haven’t read Richard Holmes’s two-volume Coleridge you’ve missed one of the truly great literary biographies. As a thinker, he’s one of those writers you won’t understand if you don’t already know what he’s talking about. I think of a statement of his that I cite in one of my poems—“What the tree is by an act not its own...that thou must make thyself to become”—an exquisitely concise definition of morality. His best poems, on the other hand, spin worlds that you couldn’t possibly know about beforehand because those worlds didn’t exist until he created them.
But there’s no doubt that his passion for abstract thought and his passion for poetry tore him apart, and that he was temperamentally incapable of either choosing between them or reconciling them. His solution, if you can call it that, was to become a past master of the elaborate excuse. How can you not love such a man?

Image: This idea of being “wonderfully flawed” interests me. One of your magic poems, “Magician” in Grace Period, describes the viewer as complicit in the magic trick. Our wish to be fooled and our oversight become our “undoing” and allow the trick to work:

What matters more than practice
is the fact that you, my audience,
are pulling for me, want me to pull
it off—this next sleight. Now
you see it. Something more than
whether I succeed’s at stake.

This talk is called patter. This
is misdirection—how my left
hand shows you nothing’s in it.
Nothing is. I count on your mistake
of caring. In my right hand your
undoing blooms like cancer.

But I’ve shown you that already—
empty. Most tricks are done
before you think they’ve started—you
who value space more than time.
The balls, the cards, the coins—they go
into the past, not into my pocket.

If I give you anything, be sure
it’s not important. What I keep
keeps me alive—a truth on which
your interest hinges. We are like
lovers, if you will. Sometimes even
if you don’t will. Now you don’t.

You characterize the relationship between magician and audience as a love affair that has to work in company with error and “mistake.” I want to read this, as I read so many of your other poems, as a tenderness for, and understanding of, human flaw.

GM: I wouldn’t have thought of putting it that way, but it feels accurate in several ways. As a reader, certainly, I’m partial to poetry that you have to forgive for something before it’s going to work. Whitman would be the most obvious example. Wordsworth would be another, though his particular flaws as a human being make it a bit harder for me to forgive him. In other words, I like poems that allow me to participate, that leave something for me to do. Most of all, I like poems that give me a chance to be generous.
This, I think, is one of the main dangers of poetry workshops. So much energy goes into finding flaws and fixing things that don’t work. There’s value in this, of course, but students can come away with the notion that a good poem is one that no one can find anything wrong with. This is in contrast to a poet like James Wright, who gets away with something in one part of a poem by showing you in another part of the poem that he could have avoided the objectionable part if he’d wanted to. So then the issue becomes courage—the willingness to take risks—rather than competency. I think too many young poets learn how to be competent too soon.
As for “Magician,” it’s a poem I’m very fond of and that I love to read to a live audience. Between “Now you see it” and “Now you don’t,” the poem manages to create the experience it’s talking about. I pull the trick off, but only because the people in the audience are pulling for me. In a way, they succeed in being tricked, which is, of course, what they’re there for; they want to be children again. So this is yet another sense in which a good poem is a victory for everyone.
But to return to character flaws, you’re right: I like human frailty and would sorely lament its absence—not that there’s much danger of that. We are, by and large, an endearing species, bumbling along doing the best we can and still managing to muck things up. About the only human flaw I’m unsympathetic to (which accounts for my problems with Wordsworth) is self-righteousness. As I said once in a poem called “Hungers,” “Like everyone, you are partly wrong.” Or as I saw recently on a bumper-sticker, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

Image: And yet your sense of poetry appealing to or satisfying our wish to be children again would seem very much in accord with Wordsworth, the great poet of childhood and the dangers of growing up.

GM: Wordsworth may be the great poet of childhood, but it’s hard to imagine a less childlike personality. I suspect that in this, as in much else, Wordsworth took a page or two from Coleridge, who defined a poet as one who could keep alive the child in the man. Coleridge derived this notion in part from the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, whom he re-discovered and cited on more than one occasion. For Vico the idea was historical and collective, but for Coleridge it was personal, almost biological.

Image: Your poem “The Spider-web Suns: Reflections on a Child’s Drawing” sees in children’s drawings and in children’s logic a wisdom that comes to adults almost too late: “when your courage fails, or your marriage, and / knowing, announce: ‘Oh. That sun. That spider.’”

GM: Some variation on this theme is definitely at the heart of “The Spiderweb Suns,” which is based on my experience with a precocious kindergartner named Tom Moskovich. Tom did a whole series of spider/sun drawings that his teacher—who later became my wife—collected into book form. What fascinated me about Tom’s drawings was that after a while you couldn’t tell the spiders from the suns. This isn’t surprising, given the way a child draws those two objects—a circle with rays or legs coming out. But it’s amazing when you think of the symbolic weight of the two objects. The sun is a large, bright ball that, as the source of all light, we associate with vision (what Coleridge would call imagination). A spider is a small, black insect that, as a spinner of webs, we associate with industry and craft (what Coleridge would call fancy).
I interviewed Tom about his drawings and used part of what he said as an epigraph for Grace Period: “The sun doesn’t like, um—doesn’t like anything on it...especially a spider. And the spider would...um, I just know when the spider’s on the sun he has enough thread to wrap around the sun so it won’t shine any more. And I don’t know about that, but I know it happens.”
It’s really too good to comment on, but I’m convinced that at some level Tom saw school as a potential threat (“And I don’t know about that, but I know it happens”) to an innate power that shaped the way he viewed the world. Anyway, that’s what my poem is about—not so much that adults learn these things too late, but that they realize too late that they’ve lost something they once had. I see that theme in several of my poems—“Like Snow,” for example—and suspect it’s one source of my affection for Coleridge.

Image: Would you say then that the industry of writing poems mirrors that of childhood: imagination, an innate power to shape the world?

GM: I’d be the last person to downplay the importance of mastering one’s craft, but yes, I do think that there is an innate component to being a poet, one that we all possess to some degree as young children. I suspect, in fact, that the shared nature of this innate component accounts in part for the power of poetry to communicate—though one might reasonably make the counterargument that the relatively narrow audience for poetry belies this.

Image: Whitman claims that “nothing for instance is greater than to conceive children and bring them up well...that to be is just as great as to perceive or tell.” You stopped writing poems (which you consider a vocation, a sacred calling) because “the muse simply couldn’t compete with my two-year-old son.” Do you consider fatherhood, your role in your son’s childhood, its own sacred calling?

GM: I do tend to agree with Whitman’s point that there’s a connection between poetry and parenthood—if that is indeed the point he’s making. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that creating poems is a substitute for creating children, though I can imagine someone making a case for that based on the number of female poets who have been childless and the number of male poets who have been homosexual. In my case, certainly, the need to write poetry diminished when I became a father. I think there’s no question that both poems and children are gifts, but then I think of almost everything as a gift. Or as I say in one of my poems, “No one deserves anything.” I try not to be glib about this, and am aware that my view is less likely to be shared by others who haven’t been as ridiculously fortunate as I have. Also, as Peter Parker reminded us in Spider-man 2, gifts imply obligations, and I’m definitely bigger on obligations than I am on rights, an attitude that puts me at odds with many of my fellow Americans. In the end, my basic stance toward experience is one of gratitude, and I like to think that some of this is reflected in my poetry.

Image: Could you expand on that briefly—the relationship between gifts, obligations, and rights?

GM: Along with any gift—life, talent, children—comes the obligation to honor it, to do right by it. And that would make no sense unless you also have the means at your disposal to fulfill that obligation. So you could say that you have the right to those means, although rights are more properly your obligations as viewed by others, who can’t in justice deprive you of what you need to fulfill whatever obligation we’re talking about. This notion is implicit in the Catholic doctrine of “actual grace”—that God, being just, can’t require something of you without giving you the corresponding means to meet the requirement. It’s one of Catholicism’s more comforting notions. But the point is that gifts are the source, the headwaters from which all these other concepts flow.

Image: Is there anything we do—wishing, lobbying—to invite these gifts, to participate in their arriving?

GM: I think I can say definitively that I did something to invite the gift of my son. And I suppose some might interpret prayer as a form of lobbying. My own view on that subject is that prayer falls into two categories, “Yes” and “Thank you,” and that we need the former category only because, even positing a firm belief that the universe gives you what you need, there are certain gifts for which it is next to humanly impossible to muster a thank you. But again, I don’t mean to sound glib in the name of conciseness. There is a kind of abiding attention—what I referred to earlier as a basic stance toward experience—that amounts to prayer and that is a prerequisite, I think, for writing poetry. It corresponds roughly to what Rilke meant by praise when he says in the Ninth Elegy that “Between the hammerblows our hearts survive—just as the tongue, even between the teeth, still manages to praise.” Those hammerblows are among the things it’s hard to say thank you for.
That said, I must admit that I often engage in a more traditional form of prayer—lobbying, if you will—on my son’s behalf. I pray that he be given what he needs, even though, in light of what I said about the universe giving you what you need, such a prayer would logically seem superfluous. But then parental love is almost by definition superfluous. It overflows.

Image: Lewis Hyde, in The Gift, recognizes the mastery of craft as part of the labor, the process of art that in the end is an exchange of gifts: “A work of art is a gift. The gifted artist contains the vitality of his gift within the work and thereby makes it available to others. Furthermore, works we come to treasure are those which transmit that vitality and revive the soul. Such works circulate among us as reservoirs of available life, what Whitman calls ‘the tasteless water of souls.’” In another sense, art isn’t fully experienced until gratitude prompts us to pass that gift on to others.

GM: I’m glad you know Lewis Hyde’s wonderful book. I have no idea how widely read it is, but it deserves all the readers it can get. Aside from the gift economy that Lewis describes so accurately, I’m struck by his phrase “reservoirs of available life,” which seems to me exactly right. One measure of a poem is not whether it’s good or bad, but whether it’s animate or inanimate. This has nothing to do with size or ambition, but merely with the presence of a life force captured in the words. Leigh Hunt’s “Jenny Kissed Me” is a small, animate thing; Milton’s Paradise Lost is a large, inanimate thing. This is not to deny that Paradise Lost is the greater achievement. The point, rather, is that it is an achievement; it was earned rather than given.
I’m trusting that this distinction between given and earned poems will be obvious to anyone who writes them. I’d guess, in fact, that most poets value their own poems largely on this basis—that is, on how the poems came into being. For me, at least, the greater the element of gift in a poem, the more I value it; others, even recognizing the distinction, may feel the reverse. “Arrowhead,” the first of my poems in Listeners, is an earned poem; I worked on it far longer than on any other poem in the book. A small, inanimate thing, it represents the best I could do working from sheer craft. But I’m detached from it in a way that I am not from other poems in that collection. This may be another way of saying that I trust my poetic self more than I trust my critical self, but I also think it has to do with this issue of gifts and gratitude. To the degree that any poem is a separate gift—separate, that is, from the overriding gifts of life, talent, and vocation—to that degree I’m inclined to treasure it, be grateful for it, and, as you note, to feel that tug to pass the gift on to others.

Image: And so, would you say that readers and writers inevitably experience the same poem differently, the poet unable, from any distance of sensibility or time, to experience his own poem without the pains of labor echoing in his ears?

GM: No one experiences a child the same way a parent does—that’s a given. But in a broader sense it’s also a given that everyone experiences the same poem differently. I don’t want to get bogged down in the quagmire of objective versus subjective reading—terms that our friend Coleridge foisted on the language and that John Ruskin later referred to as a combination of German dullness and English affectation—but I’ve always been mildly intrigued by the question of where a poem exists. The words on the page don’t change, but they hardly constitute a poem without a reader, and they are inevitably modified by the sensibility and experiences that each reader brings to them.
This becomes more than an academic brainteaser when one sets out to translate a poem, as I did Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Whatever else it is, a translation is an attempt to recreate an experience. But whose experience? Rilke’s German would have sounded very different to one of his contemporaries than it does to a modern German’s ear, just as we recognize Keats’s language as being from an earlier period. Do you try to make Rilke sound slightly archaic to reproduce the experience that a modern German might have of the original, or do you try to find an equivalent for the experience that a German-speaking contemporary of Rilke might have had? Or again, given the effect that Rilke was trying to achieve, do you make adjustments for the collective temperament of the intended audience for the translation so that the effect is retained at the expense of “fidelity” to the text?
A simple but illustrative example in the Elegies is the use of “O.” This would seem to be easy enough to translate, since the word is the same in German and English. On the other hand, a modern American reader has far less tolerance for “O” than a German reader of Rilke’s day, and one has to assume that Rilke would have been sensitive to that fact had he been writing for a modern American audience. So if you’re aiming to recreate the original experience, you’re going to have to jettison some of those O’s.
This is just one reason that it’s always seemed silly to me to talk about a definitive translation. Definitive for whom? Given a work as complex as the Elegies, the idea seems even sillier.

Image: Did your relationship with Rilke’s poems change as a result of translating them? You use quotations from Rilke to introduce the three sections of Listeners at the Breathing Place, your first book, so reading Rilke and setting your own poems in the context of his would seem an early tendency, before the publication of your Duino Elegies translation. Are you able to read them now, in German or English, and not experience those poems as a translator?

GM: Actually, I finished the Rilke translation about five years before the publication of Listeners, though it didn’t appear until two years after Listeners. I’d never intended to publish the translation and ended up doing so only because a friend of mine at Breitenbush Books heard about it, asked if he could take a look, and ultimately asked to publish it. The use of the quotes in my first book is an acknowledgement of the debt I owed Rilke for what I learned from translating the Elegies, especially what I learned about sustaining a longer poem such as “The Small Owl of Complaint.”
But you’re right—it’s hard for me to read the poems in the original anymore without hearing my translation—sort of like watching a foreign movie with the English dubbed in.

Image: Perhaps this is a question for much of twentieth-century poetry since narrative has moved primarily to fiction: what exactly are those ways for sustaining longer poems, particularly for lyric poets like you and Rilke?

GM: The great enemy of the lyric mode is self-consciousness, becoming aware that you’re doing something that’s really not possible. It’s sort of like Peter walking on the storm-tossed Sea of Galilee until he looks down and thinks, “Jesus! What the hell am I doing?” So the lyric is by necessity relatively short, and the Elegies strike me as pretty close to the outside limit of what’s humanly doable. The Fifth Elegy, which was written after the rest and inserted in place of a different poem, is the only one that feels to me like shorter lyrics patched together.
Anyway, to translate the Elegies I memorized the poems in German and then went around reciting them in the car or in the shower until they felt shorter than they actually were. I think that’s partly what helped me to sustain longer lyrics of my own—that and the device of mounting a roll of paper above my typewriter so I wouldn’t have to keep inserting new sheets.

Image: Is there a translation of the Duino Elegies, other than your own, that you particularly admire?

GM: At the time I did my translation, in the mid-seventies, there were certainly no other translations that I liked. Several versions published since then—Poulin’s, Young’s, Mitchell’s—are all admirable in their own ways, and had they existed at the time, I would probably have felt little need to attempt my own. What mainly bothered me about the translations I knew was that, while they may have been faithful in some literal sense, they seemed to lack the sense of urgency that characterizes much of Rilke’s work, including his letters. When Rilke writes in the first person, there is almost always the sense of a man trying to tell you something that he considers very important, and I missed that in the existing translations.
Also, when Rilke talks about the Elegies in his letters, you get the impression that he considers this his greatest work, an opinion shared by most critics. Reading the translations that existed at the time I was forced to conclude either that Rilke and the critics were wrong, or that the translations were not very good. Liking Rilke as I did—and I had come to him originally by way of his prose rather than his poetry—I was unwilling to accept the first conclusion, so I set out to see if I could produce a version that I felt was a good poem in English and that I could read simply for my own pleasure. It was a labor of love, really. Some reviewers have noted that the voice in my translation bears a striking resemblance to the voice in my own poems. Probably so, though I’m hardly the best judge. On the whole, I’m just happy they perceive that my version has a voice. Similarly, William Gass, in his book Reading Rilke, doesn’t mention my version often and isn’t particularly impressed by it when he does—but having William Gass write about your work at all is pretty damn exciting.

Image: You don’t write poems or translate them any longer, is that correct?

GM: That’s right. I stopped writing poetry shortly after I became a father. I found I just couldn’t sustain two passions of that intensity. I kept writing, mostly nonfiction—I’ve never entertained any illusions about being a fiction writer. But for the past six years or so I’ve been writing screenplays. I’ve completed four, have acquired a wonderful manager, and am currently working on a fifth—a supernatural thriller about a young woman who gets evidence that her twin sister, who she thinks has been dead for twenty-five years, is actually alive and living in Cuba. The screenplay, without neglecting the primary demand of being an engaging story, explores the theme that God, pretty much like the rest of us, has to do the best with the hand he’s dealt.

Image: What common thread maintains itself, either in the making or in the finished work itself, through the poetry and the screenplays?

GM: On the face of it, poetry and screenwriting would seem to be at opposite ends of the creative spectrum, the former depending so heavily on language and the latter on structure. There’s a standing joke in the film business about the screenwriter who tells his agent: “The script’s almost done. I just have to put in the words.”
But I’ve found this not to be the case. The common thread, besides a mutual reliance on imagery, is the need for economy. As in a lyric poem, there’s no room in a 120-page script for anything that isn’t working with every other part. What’s totally different, however, is the collaborative nature of making films. That and the tug-of-war between the writer’s vision and the box office. Overall, this strikes me as a healthy tension, though an excessive concern about what the audience
wants can be just as deadly to art as no concern at all.

Image: On that note, is there any final word you’d like to say to the audience for your poems?

GM: I’m constantly amazed when people write or call to tell me that my poems have meant something to them. A couple of years ago, on the annual poetry show of A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor asked people in the audience to stand up and recite poems they knew from memory. Someone recited Frost’s“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and someone else did Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” and then a young woman stood up and said she wanted to recite a poem by Gary Miranda called “Like Snow,” which she proceeded to do. I remember thinking, “Forget the reviews and the prizes. This is what it’s all about, when someone cares enough about a poem of yours not only to memorize it but to stand up and recite it on National Public Radio.” I tried to find out the name of that young woman to thank her, but was never able to. Still, whether you’re a poet or a parent, few things are more heartening than this—to know that your children are out there in the world, living their own lives, making friends, getting along fine without you.

Image #46 • Summer 2005