Nearing the Origin

A Conversation with John Talbot

John Talbot holds a PhD in Ancient Greek and Latin and is Professor of English Literature at Brigham Young University. Plough Poetry Editor A.M. Juster recently spoke with John about his life and work.

John, thank you for agreeing to this chat. Can we begin with a friendly provocation? You remain relatively unknown. I’m not the first person to notice you are a sort of well-kept secret. In a review of your first book of poems, The Well-Tempered Tantrum, A. E. Stallings, now Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, called it “one of the least-heralded debuts of recent years,” and lamented that it had “largely escaped the critical attention it deserves.” Is there a reason you’re not more widely known?

Could it possibly be my poems are not widely appealing? Nobody turns to me to connect with the Zeitgeist, that’s for sure. And I write a kind of verse whose qualities are not much appreciated these days. I’m surprised and grateful for whatever attention I have received.

I’m afraid my PR instincts are those of Emily Dickinson rather than Walt Whitman. I’m at least as self-centered as he was, but too sluggish to follow his strenuous program of publicizing his own work. Worse: I’m beset by this perverse sense of entitlement that says if you carry on laboring in obscurity, other people will magically appear to champion your work for you. As happened in Emily’s case—after she was securely dead.

But you must crave a wider readership.

I may have to settle for posthumous readership. But you know what was fatal to any ambition for wide acclaim? Early praise from some of the poets and critics I most admired—people I’d grown up reading, eminences like Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, and some contemporaries such as the poet you mentioned, A. E. Stallings. Once I realized that I was writing poems they admired, and that I could place them in the top journals, I felt satisfied. The gumption you need to make a name for yourself deserted me. I have sometimes gone for years without sending out poems. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

You were at Boston University when John Silber assembled perhaps the greatest collection of writers that any American university has ever seen: three Nobel Prize winners in Derek Walcott, Elie Wiesel, and Saul Bellow, plus a Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, Geoffrey Hill, Rosanna Warren, the remarkable critic Christopher Ricks, and many others. What was that like for you? Inspiring or intimidating—or both?

It was Camelot, both in the sense of being unparalleled, and that it couldn’t last. In addition to those great writers you named, our Classics department was conspicuously literary—we had the translator and critic William Arrowsmith, and Jeffrey Henderson, general editor of the Loeb Classical Library, and the great critic D. S. Carne-Ross. The department housed not one but two journals devoted to reading the ancient Classics in light of all subsequent literature: Arion and The International Journal of the Classical Tradition. The understanding was you were expected to know your Shakespeare as well as your Sophocles. The university provost was a student of medieval Latin and took a deep interest in the scholarship and research of the humanities departments. And the president, John Silber, himself an excellent Kant scholar and polemicist and genuine lover of poetry, cultivated and celebrated all that learning while at the same time defending the university against the encroachment of the academic fads and fashionable ideologies that are killing most universities today.

Although I was nourished by that rich literary atmosphere, I was in some ways apart from it. With few exceptions, I’m not at ease in literary company.  I’m not artsy. I’m distinctly bourgeois: I wear neckties by choice, I have always liked to be tucked in by ten-thirty, and I take it as a compliment to be called “respectable.” I felt much more comfortable on the 6:07 from North Station to Lincoln surrounded by bankers and lawyers in their accustomed seats, faces buried in their Globes and their Wall Street Journals. In Boston I had a family, so I was on the train home every night. Happily so, since I’m unclubbable, a bit of a lone wolf, and although garrulous to a fault (as you’re discovering right now), at heart, I’m very reserved.

So I’m grateful that many of the people you mentioned at BU reached out and befriended me, such as Christopher Ricks, who encouraged both my poetry and my scholarship, even long after I’d left. Carne-Ross in particular made me a protégé. Silber, along with one of his vice-presidents, Peter Schweich, changed my life by going out of his way to offer me my first job when I was very young and (on paper) underqualified.

Did you come away with any anecdotes about those people?

I went to Geoffrey Hill to see if he would serve on a thesis committee for one of my students. He agreed, but surprised me by adding: “On this condition: that you not reveal to him my Sunday afternoon hobby of turning verses.” That’s very nearly verbatim. Here was the greatest poet of the last half of the twentieth century, trying to conceal the fact he was a poet. He said this with a straight face. I wanted to say, “If you don’t want people to know that you write poetry, perhaps you ought to stop writing all those books of poetry.”

What took you from Boston University to Brigham Young?

The then chair of the English department invited me to apply for a position, and I applied, without at all expecting to be hired. When, eventually, a letter arrived offering me the post, I was taken aback. Sandy and I had just built and moved into the house we thought we’d live in for the rest of our lives. I took the BYU letter to show to the university president, John Silber, half-hoping he’d discourage me from accepting the job, and maybe offer me a raise to stay at Boston. That was a delusive hope. Instead, he said, “Oh, I love BYU. Do you know Dallin Oaks? Personal friend of mine. Spent a week at BYU once. Hardest week of my life. Couldn’t drink, couldn’t smoke, couldn’t swear, but I’ll tell you something, those Mormons displace all that self-restraint on sugar, you should see the candy counter at the BYU bookstore.”

He clearly didn’t know that I was a faithful LDS and knew Dallin Oaks as more than a former BYU president. Anyway he finished by saying: “I have a good feeling about you at BYU: you write back and tell them you’ll take the job.” He may have been pushing me out the door, or he may have been trying to encourage my career. In any case after a year’s deferral (which I’d requested) we headed to BYU, where I’ve been treated much better than I deserve. I’m also struck and humbled by the excellence of my three fellow poets here: Lance Larsen, Kimberley Johnson, and Michael Lavers.

Your first book, The Well-Tempered Tantrum, opens with a poem called “Kindling”:

You gone, I thought to look
For warmth in the pith of trees.
So I went to the chopping-block,
Taught axe’s edge to kiss
Soft, knotty-hearted pine
Whose sinews might warm mine.

Matchstick’s rasp, blue chuff:
The fine-shaved kindling caught,
Curled into twenty fists
That cupped their fingers shut
Till fire fastened to the wood
And wooed it close and hot
And soon the room was warm enough
But I was not

The first stanza seems like the start of a Robert Frost narrative, and then takes a twist in the same way many Frost poems do. The erotic undertone of the verb “wooed” is unexpected when describing a fire, and then the closing lines play on high and low meanings of “hot”. There’s no tidy conclusion, only an invitation to the reader to ponder the passions of being stifled. Is that fair?

Perfectly fair, and you’re right to trace the lineage to Frost, as the poem wants you to do. The biographical occasion, though, is perhaps more innocent than a reader may suppose. It’s just the loneliness I felt the first time my wife, Sandy, and I spent any length of time apart, when she spent most of one December in France with her parents, while work kept me stuck back home in Boston until the semester ended and I could at last rejoin her.

For this reason, Sandy rightly considers this “her own” love poem, and in tribute to her it’s always the first poem I recite whenever I’m doing a reading. When it was accepted for Poetry magazine, the then editor, Joseph Parisi, kindly held it for the February issue, so I could present the published poem as a valentine to Sandy. The issue came with a pink cover, which completed the valentine effect. (Subsequent Valentine’s Day gifts have been less complicated affairs.)

Recently, Sandy has claimed another poem as “her own,” since it mentions her and—coincidentally—also involves an axe, though this time the axe is in her hand, not mine:

The Pando

Seizing her axe, she brought it down in blows
One altered morning, when the same sun rose
Differently on her than him, which meant
He knew the backyard aspen’s lease was spent.
It fell to him to prise the stump’s grudge out.
And yet how intergrown he was with doubt
About it all, as whether a given tree
Were ever uprooted really, or ought to be;
Whether the nettedness in everything
Meant that to strike at one root could only bring
Stress to the covenants of knotted love
Beneath our feet we’ve no conception of.

I’d always wanted to write a poem that snuffs itself out with the most inconspicuous of prepositions. It rhymes with “love” but it’s a huffing sigh.

Let’s turn now to a gorgeous poem of place called “First Freeze.” It starts in Concord, Massachusetts at the legendary Walden Pond made famous by Henry David Thoreau. Here are the first two stanzas:

When shirts stick to burnt backs, our family totes
Summer’s beachbag burden to a pond Thoreau
Deemed “earth’s eye.” In its winking undertow
We bob like happy unplucked beams and motes.

By October, Walden casts a cold eye, but feels
The touch of stern Concord elders, who limp or crawl
Down to the shore like snails, ooze through the marl,
And lasso through the shoals like ropy eels.

Clearly this landscape stimulated your imagination, along with the history and literature associated with it. Do you feel any of the notorious “anxiety of influence,” and if so, how do you deal with it?

Absolutely no anxiety about influence. Just the opposite. My poetry is totally derivative and uncompromisingly conventional by design. If there’s anything original in my poems, that’s accidental.

The secondary location of the poem is Sudbury, an idyllic seventeenth-century town that until recently was on the border of Boston’s suburbs and its countryside. It understandably got into your psyche, as we can see from many poems in your second book, Rough Translation—and in particular this passage from “Middlesex Eclogues: June,” where you are on the brink of moving to Utah:

       Utah that lies in wait for me—
Pinnacles and cirques, rose alpenglow
Along her crevices—can wait.

So how did your imagination react when you moved to the more dramatic landscapes of Utah?

Utah hasn’t consciously entered my imagination. For some reason, I just can’t quite see Utah, and I couldn’t do it justice, though some of my BYU colleagues have done.

I love both Massachusetts and Utah, and have deep roots in both places. But New England is far more dramatic to me, even its apparently less spectacular landscapes. I am interested not in nature qua nature but in landscapes as dwelling places. Both New England and Utah, as we now call them, have been dwelt in since time out of mind, but for some reason I need to see a minimum of three hundred years of continuous historical—not only prehistoric—human settlement in order for my impoverished imagination to work at all. In addition to various sacred places in England, the “place” out of which my poetry grows is a wedge of country between two diverging commuter rail lines just west of Boston, roughly from Weston eastwards to Marlborough and from Framingham northwards to Concord, with Sudbury as the ompholos at their center.  It’s roughly to me what Shropshire was to A. E. Housman, except that I actually lived there and with Sandy raised a family there, whereas Housman’s Shropshire was chiefly an imagined one.  

How do you see yourself fitting into the tradition of American poetry?

I don’t think of it as American poetry. I’m an American, and not just because my passport tells me so. A poet’s nationality is not trivial. In my case, though, I don’t see it as decisive. Instead I see my poems as fitting squarely into the tradition of “English poetry,” by which I mean poetry written in the English language from Anglo-Saxon poetry right down to the present, in any of the places where English is spoken. I don’t think of “English” and “American” as separate literatures, or of English writers as “foreign”. I’d go farther along this unfashionable path and trace my line of continuity from America to England to Europe broadly and (though this kind of claim has got me laughed at more than once) back to Greco-Roman antiquity.       

Speaking of Greco-Roman antiquity: you have a group of sixteen poems in Rough Translation that echo the content and form of Horace’s Odes. What drew you to Horace?

Horace is the best lyric poet I have any knowledge of. His themes are wonderfully commonplace and served as occasions for all those poems you mention. But the real draw is formal: Horace’s intricate lyric meters. What moves me to write poems is almost never the need to say anything but the desire to create shapes, to make quasi-musical forms that cut a figure both in the ear and on the page. “Sometimes something wants to be said; sometimes a way of saying wants to be used.” I resonate with the second part of that statement of Paul Valéry. I’m more interested in the way something’s said, which nine times out of ten is what makes a poem decisive. Horace is the master at this, as everybody once knew, but almost nobody now, since you can only experience his lyrics in Latin. Half my poetry is a futile attempt to recover in English some rhythm or form or syntactical arrangement that can only be achieved in Latin or Greek. (It’s beginning to dawn on me why my poetry has such a limited appeal.)

I have noticed that you also have several poems that channel Virgil.

Virgil’s first eclogue involves the plight of a poor shepherd displaced from his land; the historical subtext is that his land has been confiscated and handed over to veterans of a Roman general as a reward for their service. Indifferent newcomers force out the deep-rooted old-timers. I thought of Virgil’s eclogue as a kind of template for Rough Translation, which depicts long-time residents of Sudbury forced to leave because of rising property taxes precipitated by wealthy (and usually transient) newcomers, and the village is subsumed into the expanding Boston metro area. So the book is always jumping between ancient and modern planes. I’ve been told it’s a good thing that my preferred title for the book—The Property Tax Eclogues—was overruled.

I am grateful that you sent me your best uncollected poems, and it looks to me you must be getting close to another book.

Pretty close. The working title is How Has Love Gone Dogma?

These recent poems seem to focus more on loving and aging—and even loving and aging, as in “Love’s Symmetry”:

Here an old woman, and old man there,
At bus-stop or till would gore me through
With a look that said, “You do not care
I once held hope as high as you.”
It left a fine and private scar.
I kept it hid, as mothers can
Whose afterbirth of yesteryear
Would never grow to boy or man.

Love’s symmetry now gives me leave
To gore some boy-and-girlfriend through
With looks that say, “You can’t conceive
I once was sweet and strong as you.”
I leave a fine and private bruise
My victims, in old age, may flash
At strivers over-smooth and brash
Who still have everything to lose.

Age interests me more than youth—it always has. I’ve always felt a strong inclination to look backwards for the truth. In my naïve worldview, old people, old books, old languages are closer to the origin of things, where the truth of things, including love, is most likely to be encountered. I feel myself on the brink of a gulf that separates me from friends for whom all answers lie in the future, and who feel things getting better and better in proportion as we jettison the encumbrances of the past. My imagination inclines to tradition, restoration, and innovation rather than rupture and novelty.

Is there a poem you’d like to finish this interview with?

How about this one. It’s called “To Speak of Joy That is In Marriage.”

Crabapples strewn. I knew that lure
				would draw our blackbirds round the trunk.
What do they care the fruit is sour?
I like their pluck. Let’s us devour
					each acrid chunk
of windfall, too, before our hour

lapses. I mean the fruit that’s grown
				to globes of rude maturity
on no such tree a bird has known,
that sinks its roots and spreads its crown
					through you to me
and shakes its hard tart offspring down.

John Talbot holds a PhD in Ancient Greek and Latin and is Professor of English Literature at Brigham Young University. His verse has appeared in Poetry, The Yale Review, The New Criterion and many other leading journals, as well as in anthologies from W. W. Norton and Yale University Press. He has published two volumes of original poetry: The Well-Tempered Tantrum and Rough Translation. His other books include a study of the influence of classical meters in English verse and a volume on the poet C. H. Sisson (with the classical scholar and poet Victoria Moul). He has published widely on Greek, Latin, and English poetry.

A. M. Juster is the poetry editor of Plough and the author of eleven books of original poetry and translated poetry. Next year, Paul Dry Books will publish Juster’s first children’s book, Girlatee, and W. W. Norton will publish his translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere.

Art by Charles Curtis Allen.