Robert West Interview, with Doug Van Gundy

Robert, one of the things that I first notice reading these poems is that they are relatively short and that they rhyme.  That doesn't seem like a recipe for a broad readership, unless you happen to be living in the eighteenth century.  Do you ever run into resistance to these brief, formal poems from editors and readers?

I'm sure some editors have returned my submissions because the poems were rhymed and metrical: different editors have different tastes, and that's fine. Of course there are "free verse" camps and "formalist" camps (both of those terms are so problematic, I can't use them without setting them off with quotation marks), but it seems obvious to me that good poems can be written using any number of strategies, some of which are quite old, some of which are more recent. Look at W. H. Auden, Donald Justice, Ursula K. LeGuin, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Robert Morgan, Natasha Trethewey: they've all written terrific poems in forms ranging from free verse to syllabics to rhymed and metrical verse. What I avoid, in terms of not wanting to sound archaic, is wrenching syntax or choosing an odd word for the sake of accommodating the meter or completing a rhyme. I want my "formalist" poems to sound relatively natural in those terms. I think if you do that, you can write a poem that sounds contemporary but is also forceful, authoritative-sounding.

As for brevity, that's an interesting issue I could go on and on about—but that would be too ironic. Very short poems have a very long history of getting little respect. You see Martial apologizing for the fact that he usually writes short poems, but the notion that bigger is better is—with regard to poetry, anyway—a Western idea. After all, at the same time that Milton is making his name in England by writing epics, Bashō is making his name in Japan by writing haiku. And the great classical Chinese poets—Li Po and Tu Fu, for instance—usually wrote fairly short poems. I actually think that most American readers today, to the extent that they're interested in reading poetry at all, are more interested in reading fairly short poems than they are in reading long ones. How long is "long"? You and I would say a long poem is something like The Aeneid or Beowulf or, on the short end, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," but I think most of our students would probably call a poem long if it ran over two or three pages.


I think that you are right – most readers want to read relatively short poems.  I remember discovering "Corsons Inlet" by A.R. Ammons in my Norton Anthology of American Poetry as an undergrad and being amazed that he could maintain that logic and tone over six whole pages!  But the contemporary writers of really small poems (in terms of real estate, not ideas), and I am thinking of poets like Jonathan Williams and Samuel Menashe here, seem to be relegated to the margins. 

I have a great admiration for the kind of restraint that is required to write a complete poem that sums up a genuine human experience in four lines, like your poem here, "Church".  What is it about the constraint of these short poems that appeals to you?  Or do you feel them constraining at all?

I’m sure I felt the same way when I first read “Corsons Inlet”; like you, I first read Ammons as an undergraduate. I liked that poem, but I doubt I understood it much ’til I started teaching it. Now there’s a poet who, in addition to writing a lot of mid-length and truly long poems, wrote a lot of micropoems. The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons is one of my favorite collections.

Jonathan Williams and Samuel Menashe wrote some terrific little poems, but you’re right that they and many other devotees of the small scale have been consigned to the margins. Lorine Niedecker is only now getting something like her due. Emily Dickinson may be the one poet in English who’s won an indisputably giant reputation without writing poems that are long in any sense of the word. That said, it’s interesting how often a canonical poet’s representation in anthologies includes one or two very short poems. For Tennyson it’s “The Eagle,” for William Carlos Williams it’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” for Ezra Pound it’s “In a Station of the Metro,” for Frost it’s “Fire and Ice” or “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” for Gwendolyn Brooks it’s “We Real Cool,” and so on. We accord honor to the very short poem, but we seem less willing to accord honor to poets who make it their specialty.

As for my own interest in writing that kind of poem, it goes back to the late ’90s, when I was first sending out poems for publication but didn’t yet have much sense of direction. Peter Makuck at Tar River Poetry accepted a couple of poems that were quite brief and said I was very good with that scale. Happy for guidance, I set out to specialize in miniatures. I don’t much cared to be called a minimalist, though: I want the poems to be affecting and memorable. The idea is to get the maximum impact out of a minimal number of words. It’s a challenge I enjoy, and it’s also something that’s not already being done well by everybody else. I also like the fact that most of my poems are fairly easy to memorize.

I should say something about “Church,” since you mention that one in particular. That’s a poem in response to a very good sermon by the Rev. Danny Rowland, a deeply humane pastor and an excellent preacher. You could also see that little poem as a compression of the fifth of Czesław Miłosz’s “Six Lectures in Verse”; there are many other connections you could make. I realize I’m risking sounding holier-than-thou in that poem by using the third person plural rather than the first, but after trying it both ways, I think there’s little doubt the poem is better as it is.

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