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Ep. 4. Richie Hofmann, 'Breed Me'
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In this episode, we read Richie Hofmann's poem 'Breed Me', first published in Poetry. You can buy Richie's other books from a local independent bookshop, or via Bookshop.org.
Richie Hofmann’s new book of poems, The Bronze Arms, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf. He is also the author of A Hundred Lovers and Second Empire, and his poems appear in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry.
Follow Richie on most social platforms @richiehof.
Find the transcript, the poem we discuss, and more about the episode on Substack. Follow the podcast on Instagram.
Please leave feedback here.
Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.
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Transcript
Introduction to Books Up Close Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Books Up Close, the podcast. I'm Chris Lloyd, a writer and academic, and on this show I talk to other writers about their work and their practice. We also collaborate on a close reading of their writing, looking at a particular passage or a whole poem, and talk about its meanings, resonances and the technicalities language.
00:00:21
Speaker
This is a show for book nerds, aspiring and established authors, or anyone interested in how texts get made.
Meet Richie Hoffman and His Work
00:00:29
Speaker
In this episode, I talk to Richie Hoffman about his poem, Breed Me.
00:00:36
Speaker
Richie's new book of poems, The Bronze Arms, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf. He is also the author of 100 Lovers and Second Empire, and his poems appear in The New Yorker, The Parish Review, and Poetry.
00:00:50
Speaker
Okay, well, Richie, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having
The Art of Close Reading
00:00:55
Speaker
me. So I ask everybody this question to start with. How do you feel about close reading? Like I know you're teaching, I know you're in classrooms, I know you're in workshops.
00:01:04
Speaker
How do you feel about it as an activity? And how do you feel about us reading, close reading your work now, today? Well, close reading is probably the most important thing to me.
00:01:16
Speaker
i spend part of every day doing it with my students and at home. I love it as an activity because i feel like it's endlessly rewarding.
00:01:27
Speaker
And no matter how much you can press up against a text, there's more to discover about it. um I think doing it with other people is better than doing it by yourself. Yeah.
00:01:39
Speaker
That's why I love the seminars I get to teach because even students who are encountering a poem for the very first time will show me things to know about it that I'd never discovered in years and years of reading it Close reading my own work, that's something I do less often.
00:01:57
Speaker
But I'm not opposed to it because I've had this experience many times, and I'm sure you have as well, that the text you write knows more than you do.
00:02:09
Speaker
And what I had intended to produce as an effect in the text may or may not come across at the same time other things come across. So I don't feel precious about my intentions or my possession of the text at all.
00:02:27
Speaker
I like hearing that. ah If only to show my students be like, here, look, the poet said it's yours now. Well, it's true. and you know The poem belongs to other people once it's in the world.
00:02:39
Speaker
And you know i can't go running around correcting everyone's interpretation. um The beauty is that it you know the text exfoliates and unfolds for different readers in different ways.
00:02:52
Speaker
And I feel like the meaning of the text, if there is one, is that collective accumulation. Yeah. And we're going to work through your poem today together. I'm going to tell you what I see. You're going respond. Maybe you're going like, what?
00:03:08
Speaker
No, you know, whatever. i absolutely did not intend for this reading. ah And I can just say, i don't care because I see it. Is there anything listeners might want to know before they hear you read the poem? Like, is it, do you want to tell us anything about it? Or, I mean, we'll put a link to it in the notes anyway, so people can read it along. But is there anything else you think they should know? Or do we do straight in?
Reading and Analyzing 'Breed Me' Poem
00:03:33
Speaker
No, let's dive straight in Breed me.
00:03:40
Speaker
My sweat soaked the sheets.
00:03:44
Speaker
You used to be like everyone else, but then the way you hurt me, fingers, teeth, I grew accustomed to it.
00:03:57
Speaker
Then I craved it. Then I got bored and other men tried to put death into my mouth.
00:04:07
Speaker
Angelic Richie with bite marks in such a clean room.
00:04:15
Speaker
I deplore clutter but I do like flowers.
00:04:20
Speaker
A tall drinking glass filled with peonies the color of underwear. I like hard and classical. The ceiling black like Caravaggio's wine.
00:04:35
Speaker
Through the blinds obscure gods shined. making the outlines of my body a kind of emptiness.
00:04:48
Speaker
The ceiling fan pushed heat around, even though it was snowing outside.
00:04:56
Speaker
You forgave my love of surfaces.
00:05:01
Speaker
It's not a tragedy we couldn't have a child. I had a pain inside me. And I needed you to deepen it.
00:05:13
Speaker
Amazing. Thank you. Again, I've said this to every single person. Like, it's so interesting hearing the author read their work, the tone, the inflections, the speed, the pace, all of these things where I always think that's fascinating.
00:05:23
Speaker
Maybe I'll do an episode one day where I just like, i reread the poem and think the inflections differently. There's so much to say about this poem. We could talk about the title. However, this is a vaguely family friendly show. So like, you know, but we could we could talk.
00:05:38
Speaker
We could talk about the kind of intensity of that title, I think. And I think the way that certain readers would perceive it right to certain people, it means something immediately to others. Maybe it wouldn't. And I wonder how you feel about that, like whether the title of the poem is a way in for some, you know, like it's almost like a wink to certain readers, but not others. Maybe. I don't know.
00:05:59
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I think I started this poem with the title. That doesn't always happen. But I was very interested in the intensity and vulgarity of it.
00:06:12
Speaker
But I also wanted to kind of push deeper, so to speak, and think about the kind of desires um at the heart of such an utterance that I think have kind of, it's kind of become cliched or kind of meme-ified.
00:06:29
Speaker
It's just, you know, like so many erotic utterances, it's just something one says going through the motions. of some kind of encounter or, you know, fantasy or something. But I think I wanted to look deeper and and think about what it meant to to me.
00:06:48
Speaker
And you said like whether it's like an encounter or a fantasy and part of me reads the poem it like very grounded in the real and the specific. Like this is something you do in all your poems, right? They're highly grounded in textures and scents and feelings and sensations.
00:07:02
Speaker
But then they definitely drift into the realm of fantasy. And I wonder how much of it is, I'm not asking if it's real. I'm saying like, is it an imagined scenario for the speaker rather than this kind of specific? Because it does, it traffics in certain images and will come to those ah like angelic light marks, for instance.
00:07:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's a, it's filtered through memory. So, yeah you know, the poem has that additional layer of the past tense, which allows, I think, for maybe something a bit more analytical or reflective about the scene.
00:07:37
Speaker
I'm always trying in my poetry to capture intense, sensuous details as a way of of kind of... making the memories feel real, ah making them feel kind of present, even though they exist in memory.
00:07:55
Speaker
That's something i I just value in poems. I'm always looking for that in my own work. And I feel like once I have that image, um like one in this poem, for instance, was the the color of underwear of the flowers. that you know That kind of fixes the poem in a certain place for me and allows me to then kind of explore implications.
00:08:19
Speaker
Does that make sense? It does. i mean, i have many questions about that. um I don't want to get too off topic, but like that line, a tall drinking glass filled with peony is the colour of underwear. It's such the inverse of what we might expect, right? We might expect the underwear to be described as the colour of flowers, right? Like we it you're really inverting what the reader is expecting in terms of comparison connection.
00:08:43
Speaker
and I think there's something kind of nice and and exciting about that, but there's also something destabilising to me that like things aren't quite where... we expect them to be. And this poem does walk a balance between the thing that's desired and the thing that's like exceeds desire. Right.
00:08:59
Speaker
Yeah. And there's a kind of, I guess I tried to set out in this poem to kind of toggle in some way back and forth between language of ah vulgarity and refinement.
00:09:13
Speaker
So I think, you know, the destabilizing impulse of those images feels right to me. And that's, of course, how I think about desire, right?
00:09:24
Speaker
It informs every element of what we do as people and every... utterance of culture is is infused with that longing. And I'm very interested in how how language kind of takes us between real intimate everyday scenes and, and you know, culturally important texts like Caravaggio or like the beauty of flowers or or the angels in a Baroque painting or something.
00:09:55
Speaker
And you really, and I think you do this in quite a few of your poems, we begin in the very specific, my sweat soaked the sheets, full stop. We're going to talk about the the gaps between the lines in a minute because I have questions and thoughts, but that my sweat soaked the sheets, you've got the sibilance, you've got the softness,
00:10:14
Speaker
And it's very much the speaker in the present moment or like, well, we don't know. Right. We don't know where we are yet, but we're fully grounded on that bed. Is that often a way for you to kind of like get into a poem that it needs that kind of grounding moment? Like, you know, you could you could begin in a very different place. Right. But yeah, I think the the physicality grounds me.
00:10:36
Speaker
I think, you know, I hadn't thought about this in terms of this poem, but I mean, you one a writer could start it in the second line and make and foreground the address, but my impulse was to kind of stay physical.
00:10:51
Speaker
I don't know. It's like, i guess there's an awareness of the body of bodily fluids, of the kind of porousness of the body, of the way that we kind of melt into the atmosphere in you know, ah right away that I guess was important to me.
00:11:09
Speaker
I also think something that you do that you do a lot is this real hard end with the full stop right at the end of the line. And poets, you know, when we talk about poetry, we're used to thinking about the line as the the unit, right, of of measurement.
00:11:22
Speaker
And so often you end lines with those full stops. You don't do it as much later on through the poem, but you do in places that I'm like, oh, and it feels so precise and kind of like, to me, like hard, even while you're describing often very soft things.
00:11:37
Speaker
And I wonder whether is that attention you're interested in. Oh, absolutely. i' I like hard and classical. i like yeah yeah i like the intensity and completeness of a moment in a poem where the unit of the line and the unit of the sentence align and become one.
00:11:55
Speaker
And then part of the play of the poem as a piece of craft is that it then gets to kind of unravel through enchantment and come together. I mean, the lines that that come next are really unraveling, where one kind of more complex sentence just kind of tumbles over. And I'm just thinking of the kind of rumpled bedding kind of coming undone as the relationships coming undone. And Again, it's not like a reader is probably reading a poem and thinking of this exact relationship. Oh, look, the lines are unraveling while the relationship's unraveling.
00:12:33
Speaker
But I think you create ah poet's able to kind of manipulate energy in a certain way that I hope a reader experiences in some ways, even if if they might not be able to articulate it.
00:12:47
Speaker
Yeah. Do you ever worry about that hard full stop at the end of the line? Do you ever go, do I want it? Do I not want it? Do you ever deliberate? Or is it clear to you? Chris, I worry about everything.
00:12:58
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, and and the the beauty and intensity and fun of being inside a poem is that these completely inconsequential decisions feel so important and feel so, so essential. And, you know, in the kind of ecosystem of a poem, ah punctuation is massive, right?
00:13:23
Speaker
And so, no, I do worry about it. I'm always trying to create a push and pull in the poem. I want there to be some kind of seductive variation.
00:13:34
Speaker
I'm always looking in a poem that I'm close reading, you know, by a writer who's not me for a kind of established pattern. And then I'm very intrigued where it breaks. Usually that feels like a moment of great power for for me as a reader.
00:13:52
Speaker
and Because poems are such complex, interconnected documents, I find that where form changes, emotion changes. Where punctuation changes, the ideas change. Like, it's hard to parse what ah the ideas and feelings and architectures and sounds of a poem, you know, to to manipulate one element changes the whole atmosphere. Right. Yeah.
00:14:18
Speaker
And, and yeah, there is a lot of atmosphere here, right?
Structure and Dynamics of Poetry
00:14:21
Speaker
We go from that very grounded, as we say, moment of the sweat and the sheets and then new line, you used to be like everyone else, this sudden address to the you who feels in this early part, we're like, who is the you?
00:14:34
Speaker
and they very And they very quickly become manifest, right? Like the way you hurt me, I grew accustomed to it. And you're like, okay, we're we're in a very real kind of you address. There are some poems that do that the you and it's kind of abstracted, right?
00:14:46
Speaker
But here we're like, oh, this is a very specific person. This is, the poem is to them. But what I like about the line is that you used to be like everyone else. So the specificity of the you is actually your generalizability.
00:14:58
Speaker
Yeah. which at Which I think is a really already, I'm like, okay, we're in a weird territory. Well, and it's, I mean, it's one of the things that draws me to love poetry by others. It's just that...
00:15:09
Speaker
they can feel so present and so intimate as if we're being spoken to, even though we we are not the specific you. and I'm always thinking through this question as a reader, right? As a reader, am I the I of the poem? Am I the you of the poem?
00:15:24
Speaker
How am I both? How does it change throughout? And what a kind of intoxicating experience to be the I and the you at the same time. Poems allow that kind of cohabitational fantasy that that Eros doesn't yeah and the kind of thing I don't know whether you're a Leo Bassani fan but like I had him in my mind like reading this poem especially given it's you know breed me you put try to put death into my mouth and now you're talking about the I and the you and this kind of shattering right of like the self and the eye
00:16:00
Speaker
Yeah, and the kind of Baroque, the high contrast Baroque chiaroscuro kind of element. I don't think, I don't know if, I mean, i don't think I was intentionally and invoking Versani, but I think that those kinds of inquiries are all over world.
00:16:17
Speaker
um this poem and so much of my work too. I want to think about the kind of gaps between the lines. And I don't know if it's me or whether I'm seeing it more in contemporary poetry or I'm just noticing it more. I don't know if it's like which, where where that's coming from and where that, you don't have to say where that decision-making came from, but for me that it really allows space into the lines, right? It makes me think about each line, as we were saying about its own individual unit, but also there's something kind of coming apart in a way that makes me feel...
00:16:46
Speaker
uncomfortable Yeah, i I love what you're saying. i think for me, like so many other decisions, it started as a craft problem. You know, I really do think of myself as a craftsperson. And it's fun to talk about Bersani, but i just I think of every problem I have in the poem as a technical problem to solve.
00:17:07
Speaker
And I think as I was starting to write the poems that'll be in, you know, this poem will be in my next book, The Bronze Arms, that comes out next year. I wanted to transition away from the poems in A Hundred Lovers, which I had conceived as kind of dashed off diary entries.
00:17:26
Speaker
I was reading Guybert. I was thinking about the kind of fun play between permanence and and kind of disposability of the poems.
00:17:37
Speaker
And I think I wanted to feel from a craft perspective that I was doing something completely different. And so I thought I wanted ah kind of poetry that really reinstated the primacy of the line here that like feel as little like prose as possible, because even a lineated poem that has no stanzification you know, looks architecturally more or less like a prose paragraph. I wanted something that felt very alien, alienating.
00:18:04
Speaker
I don't know. I was thinking of so the stacked marble columns, you know, and the way that when you're looking at these kind of tumbled columns from antiquity, you know, they're made of these drums that are like perfectly lined up, but also one can kind of see the seams.
00:18:23
Speaker
That was kind of important. In the book, too, I started doing something I've never done before. i have capitalized the first word of every line well, which I thought made it kind of seductively traditional, but it also kind of underscores the kind of alienating experience of lineated poem.
00:18:45
Speaker
And I like the way that they feel... they They take up more space than they would if they had been spaced properly, but also that they they do feel like somewhat more fragile or somewhat more broken. i i don't know. I was kind of thinking of monumentality and ruin and fragility kind of all at once.
00:19:07
Speaker
And in a very kind of basic way, I also wanted to challenge myself to make poems that were longer. to how How can I sustain a kind of scene across more space of the page? And I think in some ways, spaced out poems, they helped me participate in a fiction of poem that I was writing poems of greater length that I think was also allowing me to play with transition, with juxtaposition, with, you know, so I'm i'm rambling now, but it's I think it starts out as a kind of personal craft challenge. And so much of my writing kind of comes from that.
00:19:45
Speaker
Okay, I feel like I've done this one thing and I feel like I've done it well and now I need to change. Hmm. No, this is not rambling at all. I love this.
00:19:57
Speaker
Yeah, it gives me joy in so many ways. I want to be experimental. and And I like, yeah, I like coming to an author's work and they give you something that's like, looks like what they've given you before, but then you start reading it like, is this the same? Is it different?
00:20:13
Speaker
And the turn of the, but like within two lines, you used to be like everyone else, but then... break you're like oh god oh god what like already where i feel more uncomfortable the way you hurt me parentheses fingers comma teeth and parentheses colon i don't know you're not big on this kind of punctuation in your writing and and i think in any poem you're like wait is this a is this a change in tone is this a change in register like you know the way you hurt me You could describe that, right?
00:20:45
Speaker
But instead in in brackets, you just put these like body parts that stand in for, i don't know, they're like metonymic, right? Of so much. But that bracket, I was like, wait, what?
00:20:57
Speaker
Oh, and they're both in there. Yeah, yeah, like really crammed in. Like you feel the the compression of that. Then colon. And you think maybe more of the violence is going to be explained, but it isn't.
00:21:10
Speaker
Instead, you explain something else. I grew accustomed to it. Break, then I craved it. Break, then I got bored. That anaphora is delightful. And other men tried to put death into my mouth. he Like, okay, now we're in a new territory again.
00:21:23
Speaker
Like, I think every line is making us take ah like a breath, right? As as you... as or as the speaker moves us around this emotional dynamic that at first seems, I don't know,
Surprise and Precision in Poetry
00:21:37
Speaker
is it desired? Is it not desired?
00:21:39
Speaker
And then actually you're pulling in these other people and other men tried to put death into my mouth. I think there I gasped when I first read it. This is a this is exactly the impression I'm you know i'm hoping for.
00:21:53
Speaker
disorientation, fear, trepidation, surprise. i think as a writer, I'm trying to create that for myself in some sense. mean, not in an indulgent way, but like, how do i how do I keep the interest going?
00:22:08
Speaker
You know, and I think about, will I be writing poems in the years to come? Like I want to keep, I want to keep finding new ways of, surprising myself, being more vulnerable, being more precise.
00:22:22
Speaker
Yeah. And I think the precision here, like try to put death into my mouth that is both like metaphor, but also not right. Isn't that line that I then start thinking, is this a poem?
00:22:33
Speaker
Not about, I hate the word about, that is invoking like HIV and AIDS, right? To me, like this firmly situates itself in a kind of queer poetic lineage, right? About if it's called Breed Me, like what you know, like what what kind of world are we in here about like barebacking? It made me think about Tim Dean's work. It made me think about like the potency of what, of like the pleasures of death.
00:22:56
Speaker
And then you get Angelic. you're like, okay, we're definitely in this other world now. But instead you get Angelic Ritchie with bite marks, which if you ever write your memoir, that's the title, right? Angelic Ritchie with bite marks. Well, i know you know I had never invoked like kind of invoked my own name in the poem. Something I wanted again, it was a way of being kind of experimental.
00:23:18
Speaker
And i wanted to, you know, we're kind of in the afterlife now. It felt kind epitaphic. It felt kind of Baroque, but also a little playful because I am so angelic as a person.
00:23:32
Speaker
and again I, again, like in this kind of sacred, profane, cauldron here. I wanted it all to to make to mix together. Right. and And it is a move from like, trying to put death into my mouth, which is so hard a line, right, to Angelic Ritchie. It kind of did make me smile.
00:23:50
Speaker
it like ah it's like It's like a moment of levity, even while it's quite serious. In such a clean room. Gorgeous line. And a little creepy. Yeah. You know, this speaker is a real neat freak. And that's, I guess, another of the binaries in the poem is between like kind of dirt, you know, the dirtiness and the and the kind of neoclassical perfection.
00:24:13
Speaker
Yeah. And all of the inferences therein, right? Like the sexualized ones, like a clean room. Like you can't talk about cleanliness when you've just talked about and certain kinds of like queer sex right all the associations of what like dirty or clean mean in terms of like infection and so on like are immediately emerged full stop or period for you new line i deplore clutter but i do like flowers That's like a real, to me, turn in the poem. I think for me, I don't know how you feel, but like for me, this is where the poem moves somewhere differently. It's not the Angelic Ritchie, it's this.
00:24:46
Speaker
It's like, let me tell you another thing that's related to all these other things, but actually is in a slightly different world or in slightly different register. And that for me is where I'm like, okay, actually, maybe this poem is about something else too.
00:24:59
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that feels accurate. And again, we're in the the sentence and the line have kind of aligned, which I think signals a kind of shift as well.
00:25:10
Speaker
I don't know. i'm I'm obsessed with sonnets. I've written so many. I mean, I've written so many of them. But I mean, that's I'm not unique in that. I think like there's very few people who've written one sonnet.
00:25:22
Speaker
Like once you start, you just can't stop, you know? And so I become obsessed with the way poems turn and swerve. And I think, you know, as I moved into this next book and I was having this fantasy of longer poems, I think another kind of craft question for me was like, how do I keep turning poem inside of it And of course all poems do this, but I had become accustomed to a certain architecture.
00:25:49
Speaker
that lended itself toward that swerve and and, you know, in these kinds of stacked, I think of these poems as stacked, in these stacked kind of poems, like how, you know, how can I execute a turn and and still and sustain it without everything falling apart?
00:26:05
Speaker
how do you How do you know if you've stacked too many things? Yeah, that's that's that's the question. Or not enough things. Yeah, that's that's right. that's right Especially if you don't have the reliance on a received form, like the 14-line requirement that you can just... you know The other destabilizing thing about a longer poem like this is that you don't know when it's going to end. You can't see the whole thing At once, which is one of the things I love about sonnets is that you can like, you can experience its muscularity while also knowing exactly where you are in the whole thing.
00:26:38
Speaker
and And in a longer poem, you can. And so that's ah another kind of challenge of stability. Yeah. placement right and i i just also love like i deplore clutter but i do like flowers as though flowers are clutter right when when we're so used to thinking of flowers as like beauty is like there's something natural thing but to equate them with that feels really there's like an edge to that line that i really appreciate i wanted to let a little more personality in yeah yeah yeah we're learning more about the speaker right like we're definitely
00:27:10
Speaker
immersing ourselves in their world a tall drinking glass filled with peonies the color of underwear i like hard and classical like we've got more of these like hard lines now right these individual statements and then sentences that are lines that are seemingly instructing us about the speaker's world but are also because like i like hard and classical the ceiling black like caravaggio's wine It's that kind of, you know, wait where it seems like someone is telling you something, but actually it seems like they're becoming more cryptic somehow.
00:27:42
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, it may be I mean, I think I liked, I liked the invocation of that kind of light and dark from Caravaggio's paintings, but also that it was wine, that the whole space is a kind of place of intoxication, but also of liquid.
00:27:58
Speaker
And again, I had never thought about fluid, like fluids, um in this poem, but, you know, we do get, we do get sweat and what's being put into the mouth and the drinking glass. Like there's all of these kinds of like liquid surfaces. I think everything is kind of, and that's maybe another form of unraveling.
00:28:18
Speaker
like becoming liquefaction. That's the word. Like liquefaction, of course, you know, an erotic encounter is an act of liquefaction in some sense, right? You become liquid in one another's hands.
00:28:33
Speaker
and and and those And the poem does move that way, right? Like if you're describing that kind of like the flow of these... very irregular line endings, right? Like some you've got two words per line, others you've got much longer lines. It's very fluid in its movement. It's less structured, as you were saying.
00:28:50
Speaker
what we also get in this little part is this little soundscape of wine, blinds, shined, outlines, a real little mini rhyming section that that is that isn't kind of captured elsewhere, right? There are much softer kind of sound plays earlier on. and And I wonder to myself, like, how does wine take us to shine to the outline right like to me that flow of thought of wine shine outline is ah and blinds is again a process of so of obscuring right um of of the wine doing something to like seeing through something something that's shining but then the outline you know you drink wine and the outline becomes less clear
00:29:38
Speaker
Not clear, right? Yeah. um But also, like, as the light is changing, like, surfaces are becoming harder in a way. Like, the the but the body has an outline all of the sudden in what had presumably been a dark room. And the blinds, I don't know, like, there's, so like, I guess I'm just thinking of that, those high contrasts. Like, it's either black or white, that kind of intensity you know, and I've said we're binary before, but of course, like the speaker's obsessed with high contrast surfaces.
00:30:10
Speaker
Which is very film noir, right? Like the blinds, the light, the black and white. Like this is a noir movie, right? Like this opening scene of the body. That's right. It's like the um the chalk outline around the dead body. Yeah. Like kinded emptiness right like the body evacuated. Like that's exactly what that is. Yeah.
00:30:26
Speaker
That feels true. That just feels true to me. um It was also making me think of, I know if you know the Alain Robguier novel, ah Jealousy.
00:30:38
Speaker
um And like, he plays on like, jealousy, right in French, meaning like the blind and like, what's like, just thinking like the blind that lets light in, but also obscures, right? Like it's literally obscuring the view.
00:30:49
Speaker
Yes. And then thinking about the relationship between that and the outlines of the body, right? What can get into the body, what like what penetrates us, what spills out of us, right? Those, you know, and and we can't really be fully known or seen or understood in the process.
00:31:08
Speaker
Exactly. and Then the ceiling fan pushed heat around, even though snowing outside. So we're back in this kind of very grounded moment. um I also like the the fan pushing heat around, like swirling around us like the poem is, right? Like the poem is circling this thing, which is the title, right? Which is Breed Me, which is this particular act or this particular invocation or request.
00:31:33
Speaker
So we're like, oh, we're back in we're back in the grounded world. Great. And then you say, or then the speaker says, you forgave my love of surfaces. It's not a tragedy. We couldn't have a child. And I was like, oh, my God.
00:31:45
Speaker
The kind of directness, the very, like, it's shocking those lines to me. Yeah, I don't know. It's like a coming to It's like in that in the heat of the encounter, like you're just a dead body lying there, kind of drained and draining.
00:32:02
Speaker
And I don't know, I think there's a sense that this the speaker is able to come to terms with himself. And there's a there's like an increased clarity somehow when when that we look past the surfaces when everything kind of melts and what's left is just ultimately f ah failed encounter or an unproductive encounter that like has to exist, of course, outside of and economy of ah pregnancy and childbearing and all of that, but that but that maybe isn't tragic.
00:32:41
Speaker
isn in tragic or isn't failed in the end, but no less free of pain. And I really love how you return to that idea of like the breeding, right? That in this scenario is like, it's not a tragedy we couldn't have. Like that this is a breeding that doesn't produce a child. But again, in that kind of queer ah framing of like AIDS and illness, right? The idea of the child, right? And the and the bug chasing and all that kind of stuff, right? Like there's a real double edgeness to that line that I find quite striking.
00:33:10
Speaker
And the surfaces too, right? I can't help think like this is you talking about the poem, right? Like you forgave my love of surfaces, right? It's almost like you're saying to the reader, like, please let me have these aesthetic little play. You know, like, let me let me play with aesthetics for like five minutes, please.
00:33:25
Speaker
Even while I'm telling you about this deep pain. Yeah.
Poetry's Lingering Resonance
00:33:29
Speaker
Yeah. And is the, and is the, and do the aesthetics deepen or alleviate the pain? Like, I don't have an answer to that, but I think it's a question that the whole book will contend with, um which is just so filled with antiquity and art and thinking about the bodies and the recovery of bodies and the recovery of childhood you how for so many of us a deep pain undergirds our love of beauty or our need for beautiful things right like and I needed you to deepen it like we would expect like I had a pain inside me and I wanted you to get rid of it right like in in a very like cheesy cliche way but actually it's I want you to give me more of that or like to deepen it
00:34:19
Speaker
And that feels like, but it also, as you said at the beginning, like this is past tense, right? So like that does feel maybe there is an afterlife to this poem. i You know, ah whether that's always the case with poems, right? They're very of a moment, but this almost tries to invoke or make us think that like that was in the past and maybe something else is happening now.
00:34:38
Speaker
i don't know. That's kind of one ambivalent thought I'm left with at the end. Yeah, I mean, and i don't think I i i even know and exists in memory, but like all poems, there's there are just moments that reverberate out of it.
00:34:54
Speaker
And ah poem only has to be convincing, I guess, for the duration of itself in a way, right? Like you you know you don't get held to extreme scrutiny as a writer of a poem. It has to have that immediate effect.
00:35:10
Speaker
um But then every now and then there's something that that lingers and that touches other poems or that touches other experiences of your life. um One of my friends described this as like a little pepper caught in the teeth, right? That there's like the meal has ended, but there's still this...
00:35:31
Speaker
beautiful, mysterious evocation of it. And I guess I wish, i wish a little of that pepper into the teeth of all of my readers. That's a beautiful place to transition, I think, to, like you, you've mentioned a couple of times about writing, think about memory, think about like grounding, like, do you have a,
00:35:52
Speaker
conventional writing practice. Are you writing your poems in the same place? Do you have rituals? Do you have certain things around you? is it always, you know, are you writing by hand on your phone? like Yeah, it's it's hard to say. I mean, I wish I were more disciplined than I am.
00:36:07
Speaker
i will I will say I lead a very boring life. Like I like you know, i'm I'm not so wild. That's not true. but i But there are several rituals I really love. I love writing poems in bed.
00:36:21
Speaker
You know, I have a line in another poem. I write poetry in bed and criticism in the bath. And that's, just you know, people are like, wow, what a profound idea. And I'm like, no, like I just, there's something about being in a bed surrounded by books, surrounded by papers, you know, that I just, I just love. i can't do that all of the time because it's hard to live in a civilized modern way and just to be in bed all day writing poems.
00:36:50
Speaker
But for me, like that is the greatest pleasure. It's like just, you know, being in bed. There's like, you're between waking and sleeping. You're, you know, like you're awake, but you're not really in the world yet until you...
00:37:03
Speaker
foolishly step out of bed. There's something like very special about that place for me. And I guess that's why so many of my poems take place in bed. Right. And very like liminal as well in that way. But in in the between space, what's funny is that of how, I don't know how many interviews I've done so far of this, 80% of people have said they write in bed.
00:37:24
Speaker
And I'm like, I guess we've been told it wrong this whole time. Don't get a desk. Go and write in bed. I didn't bet. Yeah, there's something very special about it. But how many write in the bath? yeah I mean, I would worry that my laptop would fall in, but anyway.
00:37:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's a danger. I set up a chair and put the laptop on top of it. And then I'm like half hanging out of the bath. and I wouldn't want water dripping on the keyboard. I don't know. It's true. I mean, it's a humiliating, it's a humiliating experience, but, you know, the work gets written, right?
00:37:55
Speaker
Do you have early writing memories? Do you remember when you first thought, hey, this is the thing I can do or want to do or could do? You know, I think when I went to university and I started really falling in love with poetry, it kind of became clear that maybe this is something I wanted to do.
00:38:13
Speaker
i But I never thought I could be a poet. I just didn't think that was a possible outcome. i wanted to be an English professor. I wanted to do close reading all of the time.
00:38:26
Speaker
That was the pleasure of both reading and writing for me. And I, you know, it was also kind of humbling because, you know, as a literary historian, you recognize that maybe three or four pieces of writing will exist, you know, from a single century. Yeah.
00:38:47
Speaker
And so, you know, i think I still feel very humbled and that, you know, that the the course of my natural life will not be enough time to to master any of this.
00:39:02
Speaker
and I love that. That's not what was expecting you to say, but I like it. I know you obviously teach creative writing. Do you have any little exercises that listeners might try or want to try? or or are there things you kind of share with your students that you think might be useful broad more broadly?
00:39:19
Speaker
I mean, it's my passion, Chris. i'm obsessed with teaching. Because it's so fun to write and then you get to, you know, do it with with other people and watch them discovering their voice and who they are.
00:39:32
Speaker
In terms of an exercise, you know, I've become really obsessed with how poems can kind of organize time. One I recently gave to my young students that I thought was interesting was that they had to write a poem that was an autobiography of their entire life, in which they were born in line one and died in line 21.
00:39:58
Speaker
I like that as a prompt. As general advice, I typically tell people to to really let their personalities into their work.
00:40:08
Speaker
I think the darkest possible outcome of a creative writing class or workshop is that everyone writes in the same way. And I read for so many contests and I hate seeing that everyone is producing the same kind of work and like copying off of the same person. And so I'm always telling students the languages you grew up speaking, the music you listen to, the texts that you love and uniquely amalgamate, like will give your workforce an originality. So lean into that rather than run away from who you are and what you love.
00:40:41
Speaker
Amazing. Do you have any good essays on writing that you would recommend? Or if not essays, books that, you know, like on the practice or the craft, you love that word seemingly. So is that a bad thing?
00:40:54
Speaker
No, no, I just, there were there are people who like love the woodcraft there were people who like, I never want to say the woodcraft. Well, it gives me the fiction that I'm like actually making something with tools and like, it it keeps me from being an indulgent art. I'm not making art, you know, I'm just an art, you know, artisanal.
00:41:13
Speaker
um yeah I don't know. i I'm constantly looking for these kinds of books. I would say ultimately none are super satisfactory to me. My advice is usually to just find the poems or fiction or whatever it is that you're obsessed with and copy it.
00:41:33
Speaker
And I try to get to the heart of what those writers are doing. Like, i I still feel this way, that that like being a teacher is just kind of an accident of time, that my real teachers are the poems that I'm obsessed with. And they might be very recent poems by my peers and, you know, mentors who are my parents' or grandparents' age.
00:41:56
Speaker
or very old things that are teaching me. Like I just, I just got this translation of the poems of Du Bellet and Pierre Ronsard that I'm going to bring on vacation. I mean, who cares about those poets, but I know they're going to teach me something new that I can use. So I'm always, you know, go find, go find your teachers. Yeah.
00:42:22
Speaker
On that, before I ask you the last question, this new book that you mentioned a couple of times, like, are there poets like these teachers of yours that this book is in dialogue with? Like, are there poets that are like clearly ringing in the background when we pick up this book?
00:42:37
Speaker
Well, I think I'm obsessed with Sappho. And I've been experimenting with writing really short kind of pseudo fragmentary poems.
00:42:49
Speaker
And so she's absolutely in my head. I can't approach, you know, I can barely approach her work. Like to even try to imitate Sappho is to turn to a pile of rubble oneself, you know, but I think, you know, she's someone, you know, who I'm thinking about in a very, in a very kind of old way.
00:43:11
Speaker
um Petrarch too, I'm never far from from Petrarch and from you know his his kind of, the games he plays in his poem between their kinds of fictions of love and intimacy and their kind of obsession with architecture and surface. Those are two very old you know very old poets who i'm I'm thinking about more than is healthy.
00:43:35
Speaker
We love obsessions here. We're so obsessed, the two of us. That's great. Okay, the final question is like, what are you recommending to listeners? New books, old books? Like you've given us recommendations already, but is there something new or something coming out that you'd recommend?
00:43:50
Speaker
There's something new that um I'm really loving making my way through. It's an anthology and it's it's huge. So the New Yorker magazine is 100 years old, which is kind of a wild thing.
00:44:04
Speaker
And there Kevin Young, the editor, the poetry editor there, has put together, a i mean, an enormous anthology called A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker.
00:44:15
Speaker
And it's so beautifully organized. It goes chronologically by decades, but then also has these interludes that are kind of informed by the time of the day, you know, the dawn, going to work, the lunch break,
00:44:32
Speaker
after your dinner drink, you know, it's so kind of elegant and the wealth of poetry inside of it is just phenomenal. And I've had a lot of fun discovering that some of the poems I just loved already, like Mirror by Sylvia Plath or James Merrill's The Broken Home were, you know, first published in this magazine. And just to see the range of it is really inspiring. And, you know, I i keep i keep telling people like this, it'll take a century for me to to read all the poems. So if you're, you know, if you're looking for something very generous as a text that will not be exhaustible, then i really, i recommend checking out this anthology. Amazing. We love this recommendation. And I mean, I don't know Kevin Young, but he sounds like the kind of generous person, right? He's, he's, see he sounds lovely whenever I've seen him interviews.
00:45:24
Speaker
He's utterly brilliant. His poetry is incredible. He's a great editor. You know, i i was his assistant when I was 22, you know so I know him. i know him fairly well. But even knowing him and admiring him, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't ever stop me from being astounded by by the energy and and generosity of the work he does in the world.
00:45:48
Speaker
So highly recommended poet. Great. And I'm going to link the episode of the poetry podcast that you did with him. ah We talked about French novel, right? I think that's the poem you talked about. yeah We will link that in on the page because it's a really great episode. And I love that poem too. Oh, thank you.
00:46:07
Speaker
And I love Henri Cole. I talk about his poem Twilight. So many recommendations. Thank you, Richie. And thank you yeah for spending your time with me today. It's been a real pleasure. No, it's been so fun. I hope I've said something useful.
Closing Remarks and Credits
00:46:23
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this episode. Please subscribe if you haven't already, leave a review and share with people you know. You can also follow the show and me on Instagram at Books Up Close and on YouTube.
00:46:35
Speaker
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00:46:48
Speaker
This show is made possible by an Impact Accelerator Award from the University of Hertfordshire and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.