War, tradition, iconoclastic talent: a conversation with Robert Mezey.

McGuire, Thomas G.

War, Literature, and the Arts is delighted to welcome Robert Mezey to its pages. Not a war poet by trade, Mezey has forged a kind of il miglior fabbro reputation as one of the finest craftsmen working in the English language. Of Mezey's exquisite craft, John Hollander has written, "In whatever formal mode he has worked, from free verse to the strictest meters, Mezey has always revealed a mastery of the relation between deep and surface rhythms of language and thought, and an unyielding poetic integrity that is like a beacon against a darkening literary horizon."

If much has been made of Mezey's achievement within the jurisdiction of form, too little has been said concerning his treatment of war. True, war poems constitute only a fraction of this poet's impressive output, but Mezey has, over the years, penned a number of provocative and hauntingly beautiful war poems, pieces that stay will stay with you long after you've closed this issue. In several evocative poems and translations reprinted here, Mezey is at the top of his game, weaving lyrics and sonnets and odes of immense beauty that derive their power from a brutally honest examination of war's effects on individual human lives and vulnerable, besieged communities.

In the handful of war poems he has written, Mezey succeeds as a war poet because he manages to lay bare the effects of unfettered power and unspeakable violence on human beings, children in particular. His visions of war are products of an imagination steeped in a profound sense of history and an awareness of humanity's dual capacity for destructiveness and transcendent creativity. As such, Mezey the conversationalist tackles with great clarity and insight the vexed subject of armed conflict, gazing steadily at war for what it is--a near constant in human experience that occurs, as he notes, "wherever there have been human beings, in fact wherever there have been primates." This is not to suggest that Mezey, like some blind votary of violence, obscures or oversimplifies the causes and cost of war. On the contrary, Mezey labors in his war poems and conversation to understand war's complexities and to put war squarely in its place. In the process, Mezey arrives at a keen understanding of the troubled, yet often productive relationship between poetry and war.

In addition to his remarks on armed conflict and the poetry it inspires, Mezey offers a rich, running commentary on the development of tastes and trends in American poetry over the past fifty years. He also has much to say about his personal role in these developments. An icon of sorts on the American poetry scene, this highly complex poet/ translator has long championed traditional poetic form even as he has played the role of iconoclast. Mezey has variously managed to challenge the aesthetic status quo in important and lasting ways.

Mezey's penchant for embracing the unconventional and heterodox is perhaps best revealed through his evolving attitudes toward poetic form and tradition. Widely recognized for two anthologies he co-edited with Stephen Berg, Naked Poetry (1969) and New Naked Poetry (1976), Mezey cemented his place in the annals of American poetry with his contributions to these collections which celebrated and encouraged a retreat from traditional form and prosodic convention. These anthologies established Mezey as a leading and outspoken proponent of open form and boosted his stock considerably. Ironically, however, Mezey soon found himself lamenting the crucial role he played in what he calls here the free-verse "tsunami." In true Mezey form, the poet retracted his support of the free verse revolution in American poetry. And over the past four decades, at a time when free verse has reigned supreme and formalism has sometimes been cast as the worst of all aesthetic anachronisms, Mezey has been a true adeptus of traditional verse forms. Long celebrated by fellow poets and friends such as Kenneth Rexroth and James Wright as one of our finest craftsmen working the Great Tradition of form and traditional meter, Mezey has perfected and championed his formal craft since the 1970s. He has also established an impressive portfolio of world-class translations, most notably from the poetry of Borges, but also the work of masters such as Horace, Catullus, and Rilke.

As the septuagenarian Mezey savors the fruit of a long and brilliant career, it is thus fitting to celebrate this most deserving of poets. His impressive list of prizes and recognitions demonstrates that Mezey has consistently been one of our most respected and influential poetic voices. Bookending his prolific career are two of the nation's most coveted poetry awards: the 1961 Lamont Poetry Prize (for The Lovemaker, his brilliant first collection) and the 2002 Poets Prize (for his Collected Poems). Mezey has also garnered, at various junctures, The Robert Frost Prize, a Stegner Fellowship, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. WLA does well, then, to give the stage to a poet of Mezey's stature and achievement. Given his understanding ofthe immense pressure war exerts on humans and their poetry, Mezey's remarks here can only serve to broaden and enrich our appreciation of the often thick imbrications of verse and war.

Interviewer: I'd like to begin by talking war poetry. What comes to mind when you hear the phrases "war poetry" and "war poet"? I'm interested in your opinion of war poetry because many critics, literature professors, and indeed poets marginalize and dismiss war poetry in many subtle and not so subtle ways. If one reads broadly across the history of poetry, however, one finds so many brilliant poems about war. How can we account for the disconnect between a massive body of great poetry about war and the generally poor reception of this literature?

Mezey: The first thing that comes to mind when you say "war poetry" is Homer and Virgil and Shakespeare and the Bible, all of them chock full of war. It's true, as you say, that many people nowadays, especially in academia, disparage war poetry and dismiss it, but I think that's largely the inevitable offshoot of some of their utopian left-wing notions, especially the conviction that war is an archaic and uncivilized solution to "problems" and can be prevented by debate, diplomacy etc., instead of what it is, alas, part of our very nature, however mad, however nightmarish, and something that has never been absent wherever there have been human beings, in fact wherever there have been primates. Once in a great while, I accost someone on whose car I've just seen the idiotic bumper-sticker WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER and ask if he hasn't ever thought that the ANSWER might depend on the QUESTION, and if he shows the slightest interest, I describe a possible situation--the bombing of Pearl Harbor, say--to which war could be the only answer, or a horror to which the answer of war should at least be considered, like the genocide in Rwanda or Darfur--which usually ends the conversation. How can those academics dismiss works that are the very foundation of our literature, the Iliad and the Aeneid and almost all of Shakespeare's histories and tragedies? I think of all the poets I love who wrote mostly or very often about war, Edward Thomas and Alun Lewis and Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and Gavin Ewart and Auden and Kipling--those last three maybe not all that often, but brilliantly--and dozens of individual poems, many of which I know by heart, such as "Channel Firing" and Amis' "The Last War" and that masterpiece "Soldiers Bathing." And the poems of Demetrios Capetanakis--do you know his work?

Interviewer: I do know Capetanakis, but not as well as I ought to. Can you recommend some more of his work?

Mezey: Here is his poem "Abel," one of the more oblique war poems but a war poem nevertheless, one of the great ones:

 My brother Cain, the wounded, liked to sit
 Brushing my shoulder, by the staring water
 Of life, or death, in cinemas half-lit
 By scenes of peace that always turned to slaughter.
 He liked to talk to me. His eager voice
 Whispered the puzzle of his bleeding thirst,
 Or prayed me not to make my final choice
 Unless we had a chat about it first.
 And then he chose the final pain for me.
 I do not blame his nature: he's my brother;
 Nor what you call the times: our love was free,
 Would be the same at any time; but rather
 The ageless ambiguity of things
 Which makes our life mean death, our love be hate.
 My blood that streams across the bedroom sings:
 "I am my brother opening the gate!" 

Isn't that something? No one ever wrote such good poetry in a language not his native tongue. Capetanakis learned English as a schoolboy in Greece and died in London in 1944, just 32 years old.

Interviewer: I love the sense of those lines as well as the music. For me, the greatest poetry is song, and the great war poetry is song about what Heaney in "Mycenae Lookout" calls the "huge time-wound." I admire these lines because they have a leveling quality--"I am my brother" ... we're all Cain and Abel. At this point, before we go too much further, I'd like to ask about your military service. In what capacity did you serve?

Mezey: There's not much to it. During my two years at Kenyon, I did really well in my classes, but I overslept a lot of them and even a couple of exams--I was sixteen and hanging out with older guys, most of them juniors and seniors, four or five years older than I, and some veterans, like Jim Wright, eight or ten years older, who could stay up most of the night, night after night, and still make it to class. So I lost my scholarship, twice, I think, and finally the Dean suggested I join the Army and grow up a little and then come back to school. And that's what I did, God knows why. I got through basic training at Aberdeen Proving Grounds without much trouble and then was assigned to the Army hospital at Valley Forge, working with traumatized soldiers, often wrestling them onto gurneys and holding them down for electric shock therapy, painful but often rewarding work. Then I got sent to Fort Bragg, to work in a psychological counseling and testing unit. Once, I was told to report to my C.O and when I entered his office and saluted, I saw on his desk a copy of the Kenyon Review, which had published three of my poems; he demanded to know why I had published them without seeking the Army's permission. I was dumbfounded that that journal had somehow ended up on his desk, I had no idea that I needed an official OK to publish a few poems, and I was speechless. All those months, I worried about being sent to Korea--not so much about being killed or maimed as about having enough courage. (As Borges writes in one of his wonderful ballads, "Of all the thousand things there are / And thousands of ways to behave, / There is one thing no one ever regrets / And that is having been brave."). And that was also the time that McCarthy and his fellow hysterics were accusing the Army of harboring communists, and the Army, more fearful than it ought to have been, demanded that we all sign loyalty oaths. I'd already signed one when I enlisted and thought it ridiculous to be ordered to do it again, and refused. Eventually I was court-martialed as "disloyal." Two of my "friends" testified that I was a communist of sorts--and it turned out that these two men had been secretly placed in my company to spy on me. It was all a huge farce, and even though my barracks sergeant testified that he thought me a good soldier and would not hesitate to go into combat with me, I was discharged. Luckily, I still got money for college from the GI Bill.

Interviewer: Wow, you had your own brush with the likes of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. Well, you'll be happy to know that these days, we in the Air Force are not required to obtain approval for creative work--at least if it's free of "classified" material. Let's return to war poetry. Do you have a fondness for other war-related lines of poetry, lines that resonate for you in equally powerful ways?

Mezey: Many of the lines I often bring to mind and say to myself turn out to be about war, like the heartbreaking things that Brutus says just before he ends his life, in Julius Caesar--

 Thou seest the world, Volumnius, how it goes;
 Our enemies have beat us to the pit:
 It is more worthy to leap in ourselves
 Than tarry till they push us. Good Volumnius,
 Thou know'st that we two went to school together:
 Even for that our love of old, I prithee,
 Hold thou my sword-hilts whilst I run on it. 

And I don't want to drive our academic friends nuts, but some of the great war poems, some, are not even critical of war, or not at the moment of expression, but, indeed, see war as a supreme chance for spiritual exaltation--for example, Yeats' marvelous little poem, "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death."

Interviewer: You're right about Yeats and spiritual exaltation in war; in other instances, he's far too optimistic about the generative power of war and violence. Taking his cue from Nietzsche's view of tragedy, Yeats understands the creative potential of Dionysian frenzy and spargamos. In short, Yeats's attitudes toward violence are extremely complex and sometimes troubling to me. What about you, are there other poets whose vision of war surprises or confounds you?

Mezey: One thing that has sometimes struck me as odd is that some great poets who have lived through great wars and been affected by them in many ways have written comparatively little about them. Frost, for example--there are a number of poems about war, but none, except perhaps "The Gift Outright," are among his many great poems. And Emily Dickinson, who was keenly aware of the vast war and the dead multitudes everywhere around her--not one poem, out of nearly two thousand, about the Civil War.

Interviewer: I'm fascinated by evolving attitudes about the relationship between poetry and war throughout history. There's Dante's quip, for example, that "the proper subjects of poetry are love, virtue, and war." Does the Tuscan have a point?

Mezey: Of course Dante has a point. But I have my doubts about virtue as an actual subject--one may hope of course that one's poems will lead to virtuous action, but I can't think of many great poems that are about a virtue.

Interviewer: I agree that the explicit treatment of virtue has all but disappeared. Poetry no longer has much use for the subject of virtue. But I think we can make an argument for virtue being a central concern of many great poems prior to the modern era. Take Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or the Odyssey. I've recently been reading Homer and he keeps hitting me over the head with lesson after lesson about the need to eradicate the vice of mindless recklessness. Essentially, the Odyssey is concerned, as Tiresias cautions, with the need to curb one's rash, wild desires.

Mezey: Yes, you're right--and Dante himself devotes much of his great poem to dramatizing the ghastly upshot of sin and wrongdoing. Yes, love and war are two of the greatest subjects--but I wonder why Dante didn't cite death, or loss in general, which is truly "the supreme theme of art and song."

Interviewer: Excellent point; you'd think the loss and death of Beatrice would have elicited a different set of subjects for Dante. May I ask you about the potential pitfalls facing the poet who takes the risk of adopting war as his or her subject? Are there indeed dangers involved when one opens a space for war in poetry?

Mezey: Dangers? I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Interviewer: What I mean is that there are plenty of bad poems about war and atrocity, and I wonder if it's the subject matter that dooms them. Shakespeare's Sonnet 65 can be invoked to state the problem: "How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?" Sometimes when I read a poet like Wilfred Owen--a poet I admire greatly--I'll catch myself being put off by certain overwritten passages, and occasionally I may even start agreeing with Yeats's assessment that Owen's work is "all blood, and dirt, and sucked sugar stick." But then I catch myself, saying how dare I privilege style over the indisputable courage and truth of Owen's protest. Do you ever find yourself going through similar kinds of mental and moral gymnastics when it comes to your reading of certain war poets or poets working in extremis?

Mezey: I think I understand your feeling conflicted when you read a bad Owen poem, and criticizing yourself for privileging style over courage and truth. But I don't often have that experience, if I have it at all. It's not that I privilege style; rather, that I don't see style as something separate that the poet applies to the truth. I agree that Owen is a great truth-teller about war, but on some occasions, clearly, his feelings must have blunted or blurred the truth, or else his language simply failed him. His work is uneven, as almost every poet's is, and if this poem or that passage is plainly bad, then that's our response, and it shouldn't call his general honesty or courage into question. It's just a miss. Most of us would happily write a good many bad poems if in return we could make one as powerful as, say, "Dulce et Decorum Est." I can see why Yeats would not have liked his work--he lacked the richness of diction and figuration that Yeats himself had in such abundance, and his ear, though good, was not as good as Yeats' ear. Of course one could say that about all but two or three modern poets.

Interviewer: I've developed a certain fascination with the kinds of disasters or near disasters that emerge from poets who have struggled (in many cases failed) to write occasional verse in response to terrible atrocity and outrageous violence. Lots of "9/11" poems come to mind. Several Irish poems of the recent Troubles also come to mind. Do you have any disasters or near-disasters in verse that may have emerged from your own visceral response to wartime atrocity, political oppression, or human rights abuses?

Mezey: You ask about the "disasters" of various attempts to write "occasional verse in response to terrible atrocity" and of course many poems come to mind. It's extremely hard to write such poems while keeping in mind that the poet's first responsibility is to the poem, to the language. I suppose that's one reason, perhaps the primary reason, that most political poems are bad. I've certainly written my share--I must have destroyed half a dozen poems, maybe more, that I wrote during the worst days of the Vietnam War. I'm sure they sounded immortal to the audiences at this or that rally, but I realized before very long that they were ghastly and must not exist any longer.

Interviewer: "To The Americans," your provocative and technically exquisite update of Horace's Sixth Ode, contains some pretty scathing social and political commentary. I understand you've taken some heat for this poem. I suspect your greatest adversarial critics take you to task for what they perceive to be your politics in the poem. Would you care to elaborate more on the intersection of politics and poetry in general, and the politics of this ode in particular?

Mezey: Some poets' reputations have been built largely on poems expressing this or that position or opinion, one that is shared by a great many people. Nowadays those are almost always left-wing opinions. And the opposite is equally true. You ask about "To the Americans," my adaptation from Horace--a poem I'm still rather proud of. Not long after I wrote it, I participated for a brief time in an online poetry group called Eratosphere (a few of whose members were gifted and knowledgeable and most run-of-the-mill or worse) and one of the gifted writers posted the Horace, calling it "one of the great poems." The response was immediate and deafening. Hundreds of people, or so it seemed, wrote to attack the poem, violent and contemptuous letters, but not one mentioned the diction, the figures, the contours of tone, my version of the Alcaic meter, or in fact anything related to the actual texture of the work--they were all angry about the "opinions" expressed, especially the praise for our soldiers in World War II and for the sorts of young men who became those soldiers. I don't recall if I responded, but if I had, I'm sure I would have insisted that one can admire a poem that expresses beliefs and attitudes one does not share. And I am convinced of that. It might not be so in one case or another, especially where the attitude is a blind and ugly prejudice--for example, I can't stomach Eliot's poems that express his contempt for "jews"--but it is, or ought to be, generally true. I am not a Christian, or even an admirer of Christianity, but when I read a great devotional poet, George Herbert, say, or Hopkins, I read as if I were a believer--indeed, while I am in the poem, I am a believer. And I can admire some of Brecht's poems, some, though I detest his Stalinist politics.

Interviewer: It's the old trap--isn't it?--of impugning a poem's integrity because the poem happens to be a refraction of some discredited or unpopular cultural or political system. By that measure we should discard the Iliad because it fosters an archaic, destructive warrior ethos and glorification of war.

Mezey: It may sound odd, but when I was around fourteen I had fallen in love with Personae and Pound was one of the gods. I wasn't ignorant of his wacky ideas about economics and politics and his anti-Semitism--in fact, I had gone to the University of Pennsylvania library and read the actual transcripts of his wartime broadcasts from Rome, obscene in their Fascist passions and bigotry--but I was somehow able to compartmentalize all that, so that it didn't interfere with my pleasure in the poems, especially the subtle cadences, and I even hitchhiked down to DC with a friend to see the old poet on the locked ward of the loony bin, and went down seven or eight times after he had the freedom of the grounds, to sit at the master's feet. As the years went by, the anti-Semitism and the stupid political notions loomed larger and I went back to the poems less and less frequently. I still admire some of them and think them among the best of the Modernist touchstones, but as I say, my old interest in Pound has faded. Similarly, I think Eliot's best poems are very good, those that aren't blackened by his Jew-hatred, and yet I detest his political ideas--even more than Pound's because his are more rational, more "sane."

Interviewer: I'd like to return to the contempt for World War II soldiers that you observed in the Eratosphere exchange. Playing off Horace's salute to Roman war vets, your version of Horace's ode does much to celebrate the World War II generation of vets, "the lean farmboys, / the hard bitten wranglers and factory stiffs

... / who waded ashore at Normandy," men who "came of better stock" than "[t]heir grandchildren, so licentious, so greedy" who "go on dancing, drinking, and snorting, / lovelessly fucking, all frantic, manic ... " Are these lines more representative of your opinions or Horace's? I'm also curious if you share Tom Brokaw's view of the

"Greatest Generation." Finally, how have your twenty-something students reacted to this poem?

Mezey: I stick fairly close to Horace's convictions and vision, although I take many liberties with the words and details--I'm not sure why that is. I adopt Horace's ideas to some extent--or most of them. I don't really believe that the soldiers of World War II "came of better stock" exactly. And though I share Horace's lament and loathing for the lewdness and shamelessness of contemporary pop culture, if I stop to compare our sexual freedom, even in its most objectionable manifestations, with, say, Islamic culture, with its deep hypocrisy and Puritanism and its fearful and lustful domination of women etc., I'd stick with ours any day of the week. I'm not sure I share Tom Brokaw's views, but I do admire and feel grateful to the many thousands of men who gave so much and suffered so much to defeat the Nazis. I wouldn't expect most of my teenage or twenty-something students to have any idea why I would feel that way.

Interviewer: From having lived for two years in Turkey and having traveled among many different Islamic communities, I must say--as you well know--that Islamic culture is far from monolithic. In Turkey, for instance, I experienced a variety of Islamic communities and versions of Islam, many proving to be rather respectful of women and their inherent dignity. But this is the stuff of another interview. Let's get back to the Eratosphere blog. What was it specifically, in your view, that inspired such a visceral response from the young bloggers?

Mezey: I think one of the main reasons that all those young poets on the Eratosphere site were so infuriated was that they were young, a generation at least younger than I, many of them nearly two generations younger, and the young tend to be quite ignorant of history. I'm sure that few if any knew how crucial the Second World War was, how imperative, or how it might have gone either way-- our victory was not ordained--nor did they have the vaguest idea what sort of world they would be living in if Hitler and Tojo had won. All they knew was how much they hated war, the very idea of war--those bumper-sticker ideas: War is not the Answer. But it wasn't wholly a matter of youth and ignorance. My oldest and dearest friend, Peter Everwine, who has often expressed love and admiration for my work, hates "To the Americans" and I have never asked him why exactly. It's politics, I'm sure, but I can only guess what in particular he objects to, or why. I know he must be aware of the poem's virtues, but this or that idea clearly overwhelms them for him. I know I don't want to get into an impassioned argument with him. And aside from my admiration and gratitude for the young men who fought and died for our freedom, for the utter destruction of Nazi Germany, I'm not sure how much I subscribe to the other convictions of the poem, all of them taken from Horace even as I took great liberties with his actual lines and images. I have mixed feelings about the way he sees his world, but I certainly can't dismiss him and his way of seeing. In any case, what matters most to me is the poem itself, how alive it is, how vivid and true the language, how the lines move, and so on. A reader should be able to consider the beliefs, the emotions, however provocative and disagreeable, and acknowledge that a poet could express them without being a monster or a nut. Whenever this kind of conflict comes up among students, I like to quote Auden: "Good writing is part of truth. If you take a true proposition and state it in a sentimental way, in a sectarian way, in a vulgar way, you damage the truth of it." And then Wallace Stevens: "I might be expected to speak of the social, that is to say sociological or political obligations of the poet. He has none."

Interviewer: I hear you on that score and understand perfectly, but then I'm reminded of Milosz's question: What is poetry that does not save nations and peoples? I suppose it depends on how we define "save," but Milosz speaks with some degree of authority. So you're sticking to your guns, the poet has no social or political obligations?

Mezey: Needless to say, Stevens' sweeping denial is sure to stun and outrage quite a lot of poets. Those poets are misguided, though very likely a few of them have some talent. But there it is. And aside from the burning need of so many young poets to straighten us readers out, there is the realization, often not quite conscious, that feeding and caressing the political biases of most readers, inevitably leftist biases, is probably a smooth way to celebrity. I won't name names, but there are quite a few poets who have made rewarding careers out of "uplifting" the downtrodden, damning America, damning cops, soldiers etc., etc., and among them, two or three who have wasted real talent in doing so. Those disasters or near-disasters in verse that you spoke of, they spring up like weeds. Like Sam Hamill, who turned down Laura Bush's invitation to the White House and instead published a big book of ghastly poems attacking Bush, the war, the country and so on. Or like an anthology I saw at a friend's house last year, a large book full of poems about the conflict between the Israelis and the Muslim world--and not one poem defending Israel! Which reminds me: I have written almost no political poems over the last thirty or forty years, but I did write one last year, which might be a disaster though I think it's rather good--a bitingly satiric villanelle, and in its way a war poem, which quietly celebrates the fact that the Jews, for the first time in nearly two thousand years, have their own country, their own army and air force, and can at last defend themselves. About a dozen editors sent it back, saying that they liked it, even loved it, but feared that many of their readers would not pick up on the irony; and perhaps they were right, for one editor wrote back accusing me of having written an anti-Semitic poem. I might add that I like some of Milosz's work very much, but I would disagree that he speaks with authority about the duty of poets to save nations and peoples. I deeply admired his honesty and modesty when he said, after winning the Nobel, that if any poet in the world truly deserved that prize, it was Zbigniew Herbert--but even Herbert's great poems did not save anyone, as he well knew. Auden is rather closer to the truth when he says that poetry makes nothing happen. By which he did not mean that poems are not valuable, even essential.

Interviewer: You have written some very fine poems about war and its aftermath. Are there any war poems of your own for which you have a particular fondness?

Mezey: Well, I've not written very many that have been allowed to survive, maybe half a dozen, and I think "How Much Longer" and "Terezin" are good--at least they still hold up for me. And I think "To the Americans" is very good (with thanks to Horace). Any others? Well, there's a Borges in my Collected Poems, a rather free translation, which I think is one of his best poems, and one of my best, and also that relative rarity, a poem that praises war--"Einar Tambarskelver"--the story taken from one of the sagas. The third section of "The Wandering Jew" is largely about war, or a large part of World War II, the German war against the Jews, and although I don't much care for most of my early poems, I still like this one quite a lot. In any case, it's pretty damned good for a twenty-two-year-old.

Interviewer: All of "The Wandering Jew" is quite impressive, coming as it did from the hand of a twenty-two-year-old. What about your favorites among your political poems, do you have any?

Mezey: I'm not sure I do. If I had to choose, I might say that the third section of "The Wandering Jew" and "To the Americans" move me a little more than the others. But I might not feel the same way next week or next year.

Interviewer: "How Much Longer," one of my favorite war poems, evokes a powerful sense of wartime helplessness and despair. What inspired this poem?

Mezey: As for what inspires this or that poem, it's usually impossible to say. In the case of "How Much Longer," I actually saw a photograph of a little Vietnamese girl who had been killed by napalm or shrapnel and whose naked torso and legs reminded me instantly of my own daughter. But I'm not sure if that inspired the whole poem or just the ending.

Interviewer: One aspect of "How Much Longer" that especially attracts me is the way the poem successfully oscillates between the kind of distanced, almost stoic, reflection one often encounters in Polish poets such as Herbert and Symborska ("cities billow and plunge / like horses in their smoke, the tall buildings / open hysterical burning eyes at night, / the leafy suburbs look up at the clouds and tremble") and the presence of incredibly precise and evocative detail--here, for example, your catalogue of used-up objects comes to mind: "knives that are too dull to cut bread with," "cats smashed on the highway," "slivers of soap, hair, gristle." This oscillation makes me feel like I'm in the presence of epic one moment and haiku the next. Were you aiming for such an effect?

Mezey: I'm very pleased, of course, by your suggesting that the poem has both an epic sweep and the precision of image one finds in haiku; but if I was working toward a particular effect, it was not an effect that I could have named or defined. Once in a while I've had an idea for a poem and then written a poem, but almost always a poem begins with a phrase or a line, even a cadence, something that summons me without letting me know quite what I'm being summoned for, and it's only when the poem is in midstream, so to speak, that I begin to have a graspable idea of where I'm going, or where we're going, I should say--the poem and I. And there have even been times when I didn't know what I had until I reread what I'd written, as if the happy word or phrase were a subconscious finesse or even a lucky accident. For example, that sonnet about Hardy's birth was the rare poem that seemed almost to write itself; I wrote it on an airplane in about twenty minutes, and never changed a word of the first 12 lines; I wasn't happy with the final couplet and must have worked at it off and on for another five or six months; at last it felt and sounded right, but it wasn't till I reread it a day or so later that I realized that the word "headed" was just perfect, seeming to open out into the image of the infant heading down the birth canal.

Interviewer: "Terezin" is another powerful and arresting poem from The Door Standing Open, the superb collection in which "How Much Longer" appears. I've read somewhere that ninety percent of all war casualties in the twentieth century were civilian. In The Door Standing Open you seem committed to detailing the cost of war in terms of civilian suffering. In "How Much Longer," for example, you conclude a series of reflections on the brutal cost of war through the culminating image of the burned girl, an innocent child. Similarly in "Terezin" you return to the subject of an innocent child as ultimate victim of human cruelty and violence. Did a certain concern with the child as victim draw you to the figure of thirteen-year-old Nely Silvinova?

Mezey: What started me on "Terezin" was coming across a book of drawings and paintings by the children of Terezin, a garrison town next to the Theresienstadt concentration camp where thousands of Jewish kids were held until they could be shipped off to the death camps. And there were some adult Jews, a few of whom organized classes to keep the children busy and so less likely to be terror-stricken by what they were hearing or imagining. All of the drawings and paintings were alluring, but Nely's moved me to tears and seemed to symbolize the whole unspeakable nightmare.

Interviewer: You are a masterly and inveterate translator/adaptor of the masters--Horace, Borges, Catullus, Rilke, to name a few. What's behind your fascination with and sustained commitment to translation?

Mezey: Let me begin answering your question by reading the brief passage in my foreword to my Collected Poems:

 I believe that thefirst verse I ever wrote was a translation at age
 thirteen of a passage from Ovid, and since then I have spent a large
 part of my literary life on this way of writing poetry, one way of
 many. I call it gloss or variation for the sake of greater
 accuracy; translation is a mirage, if not misprision. Long
 experience has convinced me that any poem put into English must be,
 first and last, a poem in English. Whether my poem has rung changes
 on or taken liberties with another writer's poem, or tried to
carry
 over as much of its argument and figuration as formal commitments
 would allow, I value it as I would any poem I made, for whatever
 pleasure it gave me in the making and may give a reader. In the end
 they are all, for better or worse, my words. 

Everyone has heard Frost's famous definition of poetry as that which is lost in translation, and to some extent certainly he is right. Obviously some of the virtues of the original poem can be imitated, or let's say approximated--one can carry over an insight, a stroke of wit, an image, etc.; but as Frost also said, poetry is sound before it is anything, and in translation almost all of the sound is lost. You can, and must, write in a corresponding meter, and imitate the rhyme scheme as closely as possible, but even that obvious fidelity will entail considerable straying from the original. And the very meanings of words are not exactly equivalent. The reason English has adopted so many French and Yiddish and other foreign words is that we don't have words that mean the same things. So, the best you can do is to imagine the poem that your Roman or Spanish or Hebrew poet might have written, had English been his tongue, and try to write that poem. It is only in recent times that strict fidelity (which is a phantasm) has been called for or thought important.

Interviewer: So in terms of the age-old question about freedom versus fidelity in translation, you fall out on the side of those who reject strict fidelity?

Mezey: The ancients knew better. Chapman's beautiful version of Homer is obviously not trying for slavish accuracy; Pope certainly knew that Homer's line is not much like the English heroic couplet, but that was his form and he was wise to stay with it; Fitzgerald's great Rubiyat is very different from Khayyam's poem--in fact, there's good reason to believe that only a small part of what he was "translating" was actually written by Khayyam. It would be useful and illuminating to show what a translator actually does, but there are so many different kinds of imitation or re-presenting or paraphrase that I would need twenty or thirty pages to do it. Let me give one example, to stand for all the others. The following commentary is from the Foreword to my little book of Selected Translations, and I'm talking about my version of the last six lines of Miguel Hernandez' marvelous "Final Sonnet":

 Towards the cruel attention of the thorn
 as towards the fatal weakness of the rose,
 towards the corrosive action of death itself
 I see myself hurled headlong, and all this ruin
 is not for any crime, or anything
 but loving you, only for loving you.

 Perhaps it would be interesting to show just how odd and oblique a
 compromise one can make. In my attempt to english Miguel Hernandez
 astonishing sonnet, wanting to come as close as possible to its
 intricate metaphorical logic, Ifelt I must settle for an
 occasionally loose meter with only the faintest suggestion of
 rhyme. Even perfect rhymes would have been mute to convey the
 stunningforce of the rhyme in Spanish, "muerte" (death) and
 "quererte" (lovingyou); there was nothing to be done there.
But I
 notice that in my twelfth line ("I see myself hurled headlong
&c")
 I summon up certain echoes and resonances of English poetry that
 are nowhere present in the Spanish but are nevertheless appropriate
 and strong. I kept the effect because it seemed to me goodfor the
 poem and because it pleased me to think of it as a small offering,
 a private apology to Hernandez for my tongue's helplessness in
the
 face of his tragic rhyme. 

Interviewer: What do you say to those who call translation of a second-rate mode of writing and how did you get started in the art of translation?

Mezey: Back in the good old days when I was in elementary school, we read some poetry and had to learn some by heart, and even got a little elementary prosody. All of which I took to like a fish to water, and I'm sure I must have concocted a few childish ditties, but it was in my second Latin class in high school when I was thirteen that I first began to be obsessed with writing verse. We had to translate twenty or thirty lines of Virgil or Ovid almost every night, and young as I was, I assumed that if you were translating verse, you should translate it into verse. I was apparently the only student who made that assumption, which no doubt added an hour or so to the assignment, but I loved the work. I already knew how to make an iambic pentameter, an accomplishment by no means unusual back in 1948, and I learned more every night of the intricacies and subtleties of verse composition, so that when I began to write my own poems in earnest, I had an unusually good ear for a young kid. And I still have one, one of the best, owing a great deal of it to all that early work translating Virgil.

A large part of the pleasure in working on a poem is that I am not there--even if the poem seems to be about some actual personal experience--I being the self, the ego I'm saddled with, day in and day out. I am so deeply attentive to the sound of each line, each word and syllable, to the connotations, to the contours of tone etc. that the rest of me disappears, as it were. And that pleasure can be even larger in the labor of translation, since I'm also trying to inhabit the mind and language of a stranger, very likely a stranger who lived a century ago or two thousand years ago. But there's at least as much labor as pleasure, for I'm usually struggling to bring into English as much as possible of the sense, tone, feelings, cadences of the original while subjecting myself to the demands of the form, a sonnet, say, or a rhymed quatrain. It's all too common nowadays to see a French or Italian or Spanish sonnet rendered into free verse, a gross infidelity--a lack of knowledge or a refusal to recognize that the form itself is a substantial part of the poem's meaning.

Interviewer: In the two famous anthologies you co-edited with Stephen Berg, Naked Poetry and New Naked Poetry, you cemented your place in the annals of American poetry by celebrating and encouraging a retreat from traditional form and prosodic conventions (i.e., you championed poems stripped of traditional literary forms and devices, especially rhyme and meter). Can you speak to the evolution of your thinking on matters such as form and meter and your later migration back to closed form in your own work?

Mezey: As I've said, all the poetry I read before high school was in traditional forms and so was whatever poetry I wrote, and the translations, and I went on writing in meter all through high school, and then at Kenyon where Ransom, one of the great prosodists as well as a marvelous poet, and his colleagues immersed us in poetry, almost all of it in meter--Whitman was not worshipped there; the poets most admired and talked about and read were Hardy and Robinson. And all of the young men in Ransom's classes wrote in meter. So, by the late '60s, when I had been writing traditional verse and been praised for it for twenty years, I was more than ready to try some new things. There was plenty of free verse around, and I loved many poets who usually wrote in that mode, at least a lot of the time--Williams, Stevens, Patchen, Roethke, Kees and so on--and I tried my hand, first in syllabics, which in English is mostly a kind of measured free verse. As for the anthology I co-edited then, Naked Poetry, it was far and away the most commercially successful book I've ever had anything to do with, used in high school and college classrooms all over the country and making thousands of dollars for its co-editors, but whatever its virtues, and it did have a few, I deeply regretted it and would give a great deal not to have played any part in it. I didn't then imagine that, before long, free verse would be not just another mode a poet could make use of, but the norm: the good, easy, democratic way to write poetry, as opposed to the age-old difficult, reactionary, and jingley way, and that poets who employed that bumpety-bump, aristocratic form would begin to find it more difficult to publish and be read, so potent and widespread was the prejudice against it. I dislike the realization that I had so large a part in the free verse revolution, or should I call it a tsunami? The very name is absurd, which is why we called it "open form," which isn't much better. I think it was Eliot who said no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job. And there's that witty and withering remark of Chesterton's, "Free verse is, like free love, a contradiction in terms." I suspect that a kind of atonement for the guilt I felt for Naked Poetry was one of the things that steered me back to metrical verse. That, and the recognition that although I'd written a number of free verse poems that move rather well, none approach the unalterable perfection of the truly magical poems in that mode, "The Snow Man," say, or "Dedication for a Plot of Ground" or "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota." And naked poetry is almost always bad poetry. I've often longed to do an anthology called Poetry Redressed.

Interviewer: You've written some powerful sonnets of your own and you've also done some gorgeous translations of others' sonnets--really breathtaking translations. What's the story behind your translations of the two sonnets called "To The Likeness of a Captain in Cromwell's Armies" and "A Rose and Milton" (both of which are based Borges's source texts and reprinted at the end of this conversation)?

Mezey: Needless to say, there have been many good reasons for doing translations. It is perhaps the best way of getting to know a poet who writes in another language. And it's not uncommon to glimpse the power and distinctiveness of an unknown poet in a mediocre or even bad translation, to which my response is almost always to do my own, even if the original is in a language I don't know--in which case I need to find a native speaker who knows and loves poetry, and who I hope loves the poet I want to english. I don't altogether approve of that way of working, but with patience and humility and lots of midnight oil, one can do a good job. And of course there is the passion to make available a great poet who hasn't been well-served by most previous translators. For instance, Dick Barnes and I tried our hands at half a dozen Borges poems, to please one of Dick's former students who was editing a literary mag in England and had asked us to do a few. Both of us then thought, like almost every other reader in the world, that Borges was essentially a master of the short story and the essay; we hadn't much care for the few poems we had seen and didn't yet know that Borges considered himself a poet first and last. We hadn't done very many before we began to realize that Borges was a poet first, and not many more before we both knew that we had stumbled on one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Reading through the available translations, we agreed that a handful of them were distinguished, a fair number decent, and a great many ranged from so-so to downright bad. We decided to work on a book of his selected poems. And we worked: we worked for the next six or seven years--for me, the happiest of my working life.

Interviewer: We're seeing a return to rhyme and meter in a good deal of contemporary poetry. I think this is true at least on the American poetry scene; many British and Irish poets seem to have never lost touch with traditional forms. What do you see as a reason for this trend in American poetry?

Mezey: You say you see quite a lot of younger poets returning to traditional verse. There certainly are a few very good ones--Charles Martin, Rhina Espaillat, Joseph Harrison come to mind, among others, though they're not all that young--but they seem to me to be a small minority. Whenever I look through a literary mag, I often find that every poem in the issue is in free verse, or free something--it's very rarely verse. I was just sent sheaves of poems by students who want to take my advanced verse-writing course at Kenyon this spring--a school where the name of Ransom is still very prominent--yet not one of the dozens and dozens of poems was in meter. As far as I can see, most beginning poets have no interest in learning their craft, and nobody has suggested they should, although it's virtually impossible to write good free verse without having learned to write good metrical verse. Even Dr. Williams, though he didn't really understand the meters and wrote some very dumb things about them, started out by writing a hundred or so sonnets, not very good poems but competent verse. Almost all of those aspiring poets subscribe to the dominant and ignorant current prejudices against rhyme and meter, that besides being aristocratic or even Fascist, they are an obstacle to what you want to say, that they may have been okay for the simple and orderly cultures of the past but can't express the unprecedented complexity and confusion of the modern era, and that they are just too regular! And so on, and on and on. And I'm pretty sure that the metastasizing MFA programs don't tell their budding poets how foolish and wrongheaded and ridiculous those prejudices are.

Where are the teachers, the old poets, who will show the young ones that the opposites of all those assumptions and preconceptions are much closer to the truth? There's nothing easy or democratic about free verse--it's the most difficult kind to do well, and if you haven't first mastered the old craft, you don't stand a chance. Nor are the meters imposed on us by aristocrats and elitists--you'll find them everywhere in folk song and folk poems, in Mother Goose, and in the poems of preliterate tribes. And no, metrical verse is not mechanical and monotonous and predictable--if it sounds that way to you, then you simply don't know how to hear it. Good verse is almost infinitely various; anyone with a good ear can hear immediately how different Frost's pentameters sound from Stevens' or Stevens' from Lowell's--or Shakespeare's from Milton's or Wordworth's. Yes, meter and rhyme do get in the way of what you first thought you were going to say, or wanted to say, but they are not obstacles, rather they are opportunities--they induce changes that are often transformations, unforeseen riches. "First thought best thought" was surely the most idiotic of Ginsberg's aphorisms; for a writer, that is rarely the case. Let me leave you with two assertions that are real wisdom, not a Zen cliche. The first is by Andre Gide (in my English): "Art is born of constraint and dies of too much freedom." And then this, from one of Auden's late poems:

 Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses,
 force us to have second thoughts, free from the fetters of Self. 

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas G. McGuire, a Professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy, is a contributing editor for WLA. During the Fall 2008 semester, he lectured and researched at the University of Limerick, Ireland, as a Fulbright Scholar. He is a poet/translator and a Seamus Heaney scholar.