Joanne: Hello, I'm Joanne Diaz. Abram: And I'm Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And this is Poetry for All. Abram: And today, we are delighted to have poet Richie Hofmann as our guest. Richie Hofmann is the author of two collections: Second Empire and A Hundred Lovers. His poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Yale Review, and many other literary magazines. And he's the recipient of Ruth Lilly and Wallace Stegner Fellowships. And we are delighted he is joining us today. Thank you so much for being here, Richie. Richie: Thank you so much for having me. You're very kind. Joanne: Richie, today we'll be discussing your poem, “Things That Are Rare”. Would you be willing to read this poem for us? With pleasure. “Things That Are Rare”. [To read the poem, visit this link: https://kenyonreview.org/piece/richie-hofmann/] Joanne: Wow. What a terrific reading. Thank you. Oh, such a beautiful poem. So beautiful. Abram: It's amazing. You know, one of the reasons we love, love when poets are actually able to join us and read their own poetry is because each poet reads their own poetry differently. And it was incredible to hear you read that because the pauses are so dramatic and they create this incredible mood. And I just wonder, is that how you hear it as you're writing it? Is this how you imagine your poetry read? It's one thing to see it on the page. It's another thing to hear it altogether. Richie: I think it's probably how I hear it in my head. I think of poems as moving kind of slowly and moving kind of against the grain of regular language. In some ways, I love the feeling of the poem as a kind of special event, not just the same thing as a subway announcement or the grocery list, but a little bit otherworldly and a little bit weird. Joanne: I love that. There's so much to admire in this poem. And I have so many questions. I don't even know where to begin, but I'll try. I'll try to narrow in. Maybe we could just start with. As you say, I love the way you slow us down, and I think that there are many ways you're doing that. Part of that is with the surprise of each sentence, each of which is quite brief. Look at line one, which is the same as the first sentence, right? “It is so easy to imagine your absence”. I'm so intrigued. I wonder about the dramatic situation that has spurred the speaker into utterance in this poem. And, you know, I think about your adjectives in this poem. There are quite a few, right? And they're so telling and they're so important. That word “easy”. “It is so easy to imagine your absence”, but you use it twice. “Maybe it is night, we are still handsome. / All the young are. / It is so easy. Another thing to be beautiful.” What are you doing with adjectives there? Why? What do you mean by easy? That's so interesting. Richie: Well, I think I wanted to create a mood of nighttime of the kind of haziness in between sleep where the lover and the self are both absent and present, where slipping in and out of consciousness feels effortless and easy. I think diction, you know, the poet's choice of words is one of my obsessions. I feel like I'm always trying to include more kinds of words in a short poem, and I wanted the kind of abstraction and, and bigness of a word like absence and imagine to kind of have some friction with easy and handsome and young these kind of very simple words. Abram: When I hear that first line, too, I'm struck by a different kind of way of slipping between things that comes up in that first line. “It's so easy to imagine your absence.” On the one hand, you could read that as I'm holding this thing loosely. It's easy to imagine your absence. On the other hand, there's this way of reading that's terrifying, right? Like it's too easy. It's too easy to imagine this terrifying possibility of your absence. I'm thinking about this right now because my wife is taking off on a flight tonight and I have a slight fear of flying. And every time she flies somewhere, I'm like, It's a little too easy to imagine her absence, and then I can't sleep, and that's a very different way of easy to imagine your absence, right? Richie: That's right. Abram: And so that first line creates this. Which way are we heading down the slopes of this poem right now? Is this a lightly held relationship or a relationship that means so much that it's terrifying to imagine your absence? Richie: That’s right. And in both cases, that desire or that love is fueled by, by fear in some sense, by the possibility of, I dunno, no longer holding the lover, no longer having them close somehow. Joanne: I love that. And, you know, just this morning, I was reading that interview in McSweeney's that, you know, featured you in your work. And I loved that interview so much. In it, there was the suggestion that your poems are sonnet like, right? There's a kind of sonnet thought or sonnet sensibility to a lot of your work. Do you feel that's true? Do you feel like that sounds right to you? Richie: Yes. I'm always thinking about the sonnet, especially about, I guess I'm most interested in a poem like this about the sonnet's tradition and history as both a poem of Eros and a poem of argument. And I think, in some sense, the poem is a little battle waged between the rhetorical and the sensuous, between these kinds of argumentative lines that open the poem, that try to advance some kind of declarative truth about the situation at hand, and the ultimate yielding in the poem to the world of the senses. To the objects in the room, to the sensation of touch. Joanne: Oh, I really love that because, and you know, I'm still looking at the early lines of the poem and really one of my favorite lines because I feel like there's so much to it. “It is so easy. Another thing to be beautiful”. So it's one thing to be handsome. It's one thing to be young. It's another thing to be beautiful. And I feel like there's a shift in that fourth line, where it's maybe the speaker could be wrong, or maybe is doubting themselves, you know? And I feel like there's a kind of potential error in the poem that's being explored. And as you say, that shift to the objects in the room is a part of that meditation on that potential error. Do you sense that as well? Richie: I do. I think in some sense, the poems about contingency, I mean, we have the rareness in the title, the possibility that, or the truth that youth is fleeting, that the handsomeness is fleeting, and maybe also the fear that the love affair also will have an end. Abram: You know, a good sonnet also has these turns within it. Maybe one specific turn, sometimes more than one turn. And if we're thinking of this poem in relation to sonnets, I also feel that turn in the fourth line, but especially going into the fifth line, the first four lines are imagining this relationship, imagining your absence. We're still handsome. Another thing to be beautiful. Suddenly we shift in the fifth line to presence. A very physical, immediate presence, the room itself, the curtain, the books in the room, the shirts, the open collars. And so it's almost a response in some ways to imagining absences to be fully present now in this room. Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of shifts that you build into your poetry and how you imagine those shifts to speak to one another? Richie: Absolutely. I think that's such an eloquent comment. And I'm looking at the poem now and, and remembering too that those clipped end-stopped lines and short sentences that Joanne mentioned yield to something longer, right? We have the first instance of enjambment, the spilling over of the sentence into the next line, the way that the season kind of hangs precariously on the line. I'm thinking, you know, these kinds of shifts are not just happening in the speaker's gaze, but also in the music of the poem. Abram: That's beautiful. You know, one of the things Joanne has taught me as we've been doing this podcast together is to look in particular for the periods, for the sentences, for the grammatical structures and the way that they're playing off the structures of the poem. And just as you say, and just so our listeners who maybe don't have the poem in front of them can know, there's five short sentences in the first four lines. And then the next four lines, if we're thinking of it like quatrains, the next four lines are one sentence. And that kind of creates this incredible rhythm to the poem itself. Joanne: This isn't a formal verse poem, but it does have a formality to it in some ways. It does create that mood, but listen to it, “How gently the curtain falls back down / and the room is dark again, the season /of in-betweenities, / my eyes heavy, my lips numb.” There are ways in which you're creating alliances among some of the sounds and stresses, and the way that you land on some of the words, it's really remarkable. It's so beautiful, you know? And also that sentence, as you say, Abram, it's a long sentence, at least in the world of the poem, that goes across those four lines. How it begins, “how gently the curtain falls back down”. It's almost a tone of both mindfulness and bemusement, you know? Abram: Yeah, and I'd love to just talk about the, continuities and the contrasts. So, we've talked a little bit about the contrast between the second four lines and the first four lines, but there are certain continuities as well that I think are pretty important to setting the tone, setting the mood, setting the attitude. So, in those first lines we have imagine, maybe, nighttime. In the second four lines we have the room is dark, it's in-betweenities. Everything is sort of hazy, as you said at the beginning, everything is in between, everything is a maybe, everything is like it could go this way it or could go that way. And as we get to that next line “fingerprints on the unjacketed books”. I mean, it's just a few short words and it's a single image, and yet it's probably one of the most powerful, quick images that stresses both presence and absence. Joanne: Yeah, how do you do it? Richie: Well, I love when a poem can unlock a kind of world where just a single detail can kind of fill in the space of the rest of the room. That's something that I'm always excited by in poems that I read. You know, I'm thinking about this poem in relation to one of my obsessions since childhood, which is still life painting. You know, one of my hero poets is James Merrill. And he said once in an interview that when he's stuck, he often looks to the objects in the room as a way to begin as a way in. And I think I'm always thinking about how objects have emotion, have feelings in them. How they can evoke, if they're precisely rendered, they can evoke an environment of feeling. Here, I think you're very right, the fingerprints suggest both presence and absence. The books are unjacketed, maybe that's a little illicit. This is a kind of naked book, a kind of undressed book. And of course that's my goal for this collection, is to kind of be a naked book. And the speaker and the lover are presumably naked too, with the shirts hanging in the closet. So, I wanted those objects to suggest, not just kind of random details of a physical environment, but an environment that was loaded or, or charged. Joanne: Oh my God. That is amazing. I love the way you describe that. And it's apparent in every poem in this collection. Even if the poetic speaker is in a public space, whether it's a marketplace or an urban street or whether it's a very private domestic space, like in this poem with my small room and the open closet and the unjacketed books, everything just thrums with activity and sensuality and even agency of a certain kind, you know, like there's that book by Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, you know, and what a wonderful title that is. And I love the book itself. And ever since I've read it, it really challenged me to re-evaluate my relationship to, as you say, to objects and the possibility that they can not only carry our memories, but have a kind of agency in space that affects us, you know? Richie: The other poet that I've learned so much from is Cavafy, the modern Greek poet who lived in Alexandria and who often writes of these memories of sexual encounters and for the duration of the poem, very often, even though they're in the past tense, even though he often indicates in the ending of the poem that this was many years ago, those encounters feel so alive, those bodies and those details of the room. I think that's probably something I've learned from him. I've been thinking about, you know, he lived 1863 to 1933. And I've been thinking about what unites our experiences of desire. But also, what's so different? I mean, what is available to me that wasn't available to him in his time? That open closet at the end of the poem. And of course, I'm, in some sense, a member of, really the first post-closet generation of homosexual people and I've been thinking about my relationship to Cavafy in this poem and in others too. Joanne: That is amazing. I don't know if this has any bearing on anything. This is just me fangirling on your work But I read it, when I got the book in the mail, I read it once just all the way through and it had my full attention. And then I read it a second time and this might sound weird, but I felt compelled to play the music of Erik Satie as I listened to it. And, maybe a little Claude Debussy. Richie: I love that, Joanne. Oh, absolutely. And every poem is, I don't know, every poem in some sense is a kind of complex and layered love letter for me to other arts, To not just Merrill and Cavafy and I mean, Sappho too, probably in this, in this poem of absence and presence, but to visual arts and music, which are such an important part of my life and work. I love that you singled out Satie and Debussy. I mean, you know, if a book has a soundtrack, I think the predominant music in this one is solo piano. Some of those pieces are mentioned throughout the book, but I like to think of a collection of poems as having a kind of predominant soundtrack, a predominant season, a predominant texture or fabric. I love the way that those other kinds of sensual elements can kind of hold poems together. Abram: Well, we were talking just before this recording started about the way poets arrange poetry in their books. I wonder if you could speak a little bit to how you arranged the poems in this book, what poems come before and after things that are rare, how they might affect the reading of this poem in and of itself. I'm just curious about your process there. Richie: I spend many, many hours, , especially with my poetry friend Kara van de Graaf, putting the book together. I always find it very difficult to put the book together entirely on my own. It's one of the interesting things about poetry is I feel like in so many ways, in our literary culture, it's a collaborative art form, not just with the dead people I'm constantly conversing with, but also with our friends and teachers and workshop mates and other poets and readers. So it's very important to me how a book progresses in a certain order. I think what, you know, because my books aren't necessarily telling a kind of straightforward story, I think I'm usually thinking of mood. How poems kind of can be strung along and, and delicately calibrate mood from the ending of one poem to the beginning of the next. I really think what matters most is how one poem ends and how the next one begins. It's more like a chain of beads to me than, maybe, an operatic production. Joanne: Yeah, that's really nice. I want to come back to your adjectives, especially toward the end of the poem if I could. And it's the last two sentences, they really, boy, do they stay with me. “Inside the collars / of the shirts in the open closet— / An affluent night. / You’ve touched everything in my small room.” Okay, an affluent night? Wow, what an odd adjective to use because when I hear affluent, my primary association is wealth, abundance, luxury. What does it mean in the penultimate line of this poem for the speaker to describe the knight as affluent? Richie: I liked that strange phrase. I'd never heard it before. Affluent night. You know, I feel like I'm always listening for strange phrases and trying to mime them in some sense in a poem, but I hadn't heard that one before. I liked the word affluent because, like in-betweenities, it's a kind of ugly word. I feel like I mostly use it usually as a euphemism for wealth, in some sense, right? It's like, oh, and, you know, he went to an affluent high school or something, right? You know, you would never describe, like, a king as affluent or something. It usually has a kind of sociological bourgeois kind of euphemistic quality that I liked. But of course the history of the work, you know, it means to freely flow, to overflow with, right? It's about prosperity and abundance. And I thought, you know, that's the intensity of this connection. That's the luxury. That's the opulence of intimacy, even in this kind of humble room, right? The small room, in the last line, the night gets to be opulent. That's what it means to not have the lover be absent, to have the lover present, there in bed, still young, still handsome. It's still the night. Dawn hasn't ruined everything. We get to be rich with one another, at least a little longer. Joanne: Yeah. Yeah, that's beautiful. Well, with all that we've said and thought about, I wonder, would you be willing to read this poem again? Richie: Yes. Things that are rare. [Poem] Joanne: Richie, wow. Thank you so much for sharing this poem with us and for talking with us today. Richie: Thank you so much. It's been totally delightful. Abram: To see more about Richie Hofmann, you can check the notes on the episode for our podcast at poetryforall.fireside.fm Joanne: And we hope that you will follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And if you like what you heard today, we hope that you will subscribe as well. Abram: Thanks for listening.