Piotr Florczyk in conversation with Ange Mlinko, occasioned by the release of Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets, Mlinko’s collection of literary essays, out now from Oxford University Press.
It seems the number of books in print increases every year — a condition which never ceases to surprise me; not long ago the demise of print seemed imminent. Now, the number of ebooks, and audiobooks, for that matter, continues to go up, too, but the literary marketplace, imperfect though it is, has found a way to accommodate the new media and readerly expectations without killing the printed book. Win-win? Not quite. In a world where everyone’s a critic, it is difficult to speak about books with anything approaching authority, and even more difficult to find readers and writers who can write about the swelling titles with precise wisdom.
The esteem once enjoyed by literary critics in this country is certainly a thing of the past, but perhaps the situation is less dire than I tend to imagine. Some erudite book critics — perhaps two dozen or so — continue to meet the deluge and explain it to us. And in the realm of poetry publishing, which has been afflicted by the rise of the “Instapoets” who ply their trade on social media, the role of the critic is more important than ever.
Ange Mlinko is one such critic. (She is also herself a poet, which no doubt aids her criticism.) While serving as a professor of English and creative writing, she writes about books with the keen insight unburdened by literary theories. Her drive to understand her subjects on their terms — and her own — is refreshing. Subtle yet discerning, her criticism both guides and delights — as evidenced by her new book, Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets. The poets treated by Mlinko have found in her the most astute and generous of readers. They are lucky — and so are we.
Piotr Florczyk: In the essays gathered in Difficult Ornaments you write about Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, Harry Mathews, and Laura Riding Jackson, none of whom was born or raised in Florida. In fact, like you, most had their roots in the Northeast. Why these six and not others, including poets still alive?
Ange Mlinko: The book suggested itself to me around the time I was writing a review essay for the London Review of Books on Harry Mathews’ collected poems. His extravagant sestina, “Cool Gales Shall Fan the Glades,” evoked Florida to me — I knew he lived for part of the year in Key West — and I wanted to investigate that. Then I was rereading Marianne Moore’s “Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns,” and I thought aha — this too is a Florida poem of sorts. What if I were to juxtapose them? And what might they have in common with our most famous Florida poem, “The Idea of Order at Key West?” or our second most famous, Bishop’s “Florida?” The book then took shape from this chain of close readings. It began with individual poems, not poets.
And I certainly never meant to be encyclopedic. Many poets have passed through Florida, but that’s not interesting in and of itself. Robert Frost had a winter residence, Pencil Pines, near Miami, but the landscape didn’t take root in his soul. Richard Wilbur has a couple of elegant poems about Key West, where he also spent winters, but they aren’t bangers.
PF: All poets hail from somewhere, but some try to write themselves out of their hometown or background. In other words, they write what they don’t rather than what they do know. Was this the case with any of the six? Did Florida enchant them enough to change the style and subject of their work?
AM: Yes, that’s a good way to put it. They sharpened their senses on new landscapes, and nurtured their imagination on what they didn’t know, à la Keats and “negative capability.” Stevens and Bishop were stimulated by a kind of Crusoe fascination — Florida as tabula rasa: Edenic, unspoiled. It’s hard to speculate about the famously mysterious and contrarian Riding, but she seems to have thrived on a primitive minimalism (she lived without electricity or running water for years in Wabasso). Merrill and Mathews were a bit more realistic, I think, about the place. Merrill doesn’t edit out the dirty and despoliated aspects of Florida. Mathews complicates the notion of a primitive Florida and overlays it with Arcadian motifs from Mediterranean lore.
PF: At the opening of one of your chapters you recall driving from Gainesville to Key West accompanied by a “feeling of fatefulness” about the peninsula. If the drive were a poem, would it be a narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end, or a series of seemingly random snapshots? In other words, how do you see and hear and feel Florida?
AM: I suppose I see it as a long, southbound sentence that ends in ellipses (the Keys) . . . .
PF: In your Preface to Difficult Ornaments you call “a passion for language and its ability to communicate not just abstractly, mind to mind, but also materially, between bodies” a quality that’s fundamental to poetry. Is this a thinly veiled cry to remind all of us that craft matters?
AM: I hope I’m just stating the obvious. I mean yes, the non-verbal aspects of poetry — rhythm and prosody — are somatic, they operate somewhere beyond the cerebral, even when you are just reading silently in your armchair.
PF: In the same Preface, you characterize the tropics as “nature’s own laboratory of invention and experiment,” which I read as praise for things that are unstable, constantly changing or evolving, thus difficulty to pin down. I suppose one can write great poems in an Alpine Swiss village, that is, a postcard perfect place unchanged for centuries, but that’s not the same as writing in and from a place of discomfort or troubling immediacy, is it?
AM: I don’t like being prescriptive about poetic inspiration — Shelley got “Mont Blanc” out of a place unchanged for centuries, and that very quality became the troubled gist of the poem — but great poets experiment, and that involves, at the least, mutability of life and imagination. I think of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as the Poets’ Bible, and that is precisely its message: everything in Creation changes, and nothing truly dies. The tropical landscape is a trope for that.
PF: “The word play, the labyrinthine syntax, the patterning, and most of all the metaphors that […] blossom into full-blown metonyms” constitute some of the ‘difficult ornaments’ that you discuss by close-reading the six poets. Do you think these elements and qualities matter to poets writing today as much as they did to someone like Stevens, Moore, or Merrill?
AM: Americans have a strong Calvinist inclination to strip all that away and call what’s left the “real” poetry, the way we fetishize a Shaker table and chairs on a plain hardwood floor. At one point in my book I mention The Scarlet Letter, pointing out how Hester Prynne’s brazen ornamentation of her “tramp stamp,” so to speak, is a reproach to her stultifyingly sanctimonious community. I would say we’re still a sanctimonious society when it comes to art, and Stevens, Moore, Merrill, et al. are exceptions that prove the rule. Emily Dickinson. If you stripped her of difficult ornaments, what would be left?! If we taught her alongside Shakespeare and Donne and Herbert, rather than Whitman, we would be better educated. I regret that poetry survey courses focus on period and nationality, not affinity and artistry.
PF: In your essay on Stevens, you write that he is “a rebuke to the pavophobic reader who equates drabness with directness, directness with truth,” and reading this I couldn’t help but think of Keats and his “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” You seem to agree with Keats, but then beauty can surely be misleading or used to some nefarious ends as well.
AM: Maybe I’m obtuse, but I just don’t get this argument. It’s in our nature to make beautiful things; it’s also in our nature to do terrible deeds. The former doesn’t cancel out the latter, to be sure, but why do people so badly want to argue that the latter cancels out the former?
PF: Writing in her journal in 1941, Elizabeth Bishop noted the eerie silence of Key West at night, then in the morning likened the place to “a queer antique musical instrument floating in the sea.” I think I know the answer — after all you write that poets like Bishop “help us to see better and hear more sharply”— but, speaking of your own poetry or critical preferences, do you favor image-based details or those that come through via rhythm or phonemes?
AM: Ideally it should come together all at once in a kind of synesthesia. But I’d like to make a special plea for thinking through images. The importance of creating a vivid picture for the mind’s eye goes back to Homer and his development of energeia — he even invents ekphrasis with his set piece on the shield of Achilles, in which he etches a cosmos in miniature. Go in fear of abstractions — that’s what Modernists preached. I have a suspicion of unearned oracular pronouncements. Vatic authority I find totally shady.
PF: In Epilogue, you turn to Laura Riding Jackson, who exchanged poetry for philosophy and lived out her days in Florida. Her former hut, where she had lived with her second husband, now hosts a writing group. I agree that there is something odd about a poet who gave up poetry being an inspiration for other poets, but then I’m also drawn to this idea of “the poet who falls silent”; in fact, I’m reminded of another poet, a Polish one, who wrote that “not writing poetry — that’s poetry, too.” Why do you see this falling silent as “a powerful conceit”?
AM: I suppose it comes from a notion of poetry as language at the extremity — at the edge of madness or death. You know that bit of dialogue in Cocteau’s Orphée: “What do you mean by ‘poet?’ ‘To write, without being a writer.’” Riding (sorry, it can’t help but sound like a pun!) was disgusted by this idea of a poet as quasi-mystic; she thought it was all a bag of tricks. Language, she thought, was a rational instrument that had the power to order our thinking, whereas with poetry we were trying mostly to disorder it. I disagree with her, to say the least. I don’t think our best poets try to disorder language at all.
PF: You also remind us that “Apparent simplicity is shrewd,” because “it only pretends to be disinterested, uninvested, or uninvolved” in ornamentation, which brings to mind the idea that spare, surgically precise poems are often the most difficult ones to translate. Likewise, sometimes it is the plainest of poems that cuts to the bone the most. Why do you think that is?
AM: I don’t know if I agree that the plainest poets are the hardest to translate. But you’re right: I tell my students that at moments of heightened emotion, the words must go plain. Yet wouldn’t Riding call that a trick? It’s just craft talk. If you want really plain language that cuts to the bone, listen to folk or country or blues songs. That’s what you go to when you want to shed a tear. Poems give us something different. I don’t think I’ve ever gone to a poem to shed a tear or wallow in my own heartbreak. I think I turn to poetry for an expression of the highest intelligence, grace, dignity, clear-sighted irony, and yes, joy.
PF: I am not the first person to notice that poetry books seem to have grown longer over the last decade or so. It’s as if poets were trying to get a little closer to novelists and others who lay claim to relevance through their writing, which is, at least in part, why much of contemporary poetry seems steeped in political and cultural rhetoric. Do you miss poems that served up the oblique or half-said vs. the punditry?
AM: I don’t have to miss it — there are plenty of subtle poets around, even if they don’t always get prizes. I avoid poet-pundits altogether.
Piotr Florczyk: Those of us who have followed your career closely know you as a poet and as an astute critic. That alone makes you a phenomenon, since fewer and fewer people, or so it seems, are happy to wear the double mantle of poet-critic. What does this tell us about the poetry community in America?
AM: I talked a bit about this in one of my recent essays for the New York Review of Books. There are theories — for instance, that it’s just not safe or pragmatic to criticize your colleagues, who will sooner or later be judging your books for prizes. That’s the cynical view, and there’s some truth to it.
But more insidious is the sheer anti-intellectualism of the field; bad education; a lazy notion of sincerity and authenticity. Don’t you think poetry is siloed away from fiction and essays precisely so it can serve this function of being “all heart” without the pesky intellect? Americans set a low, low bar for poetry, so that critics look stupid for trying to have a discourse about it.
PF: One of my favorite writers (and critics), J.M. Coetzee, has said somewhere that all criticism is autobiographical. Would you agree?
AM: I’d be hard pressed to disagree with anything Coetzee says. I interpret that sentence to mean that the poet or novelist’s own (somewhat amorphous, hardly manifesto-ready) credos will undermine their objectivity. But one doesn’t read critics for objectivity. One reads them for sensibility.
PF: Do you write poems when you can’t write criticism, the way that some poets who translate do, relying on one or the other activity to help keep the flame alive, or would you say that the two activities are mutually reinforcing?
AM: Wouldn’t it be the other way around — that I write criticism when I can’t write poems? It is true that one can’t write poetry all day, whereas prose offers itself as an endless enterprise. (Prose is cheap, prose is fungible.)
To a point, they are mutually reinforcing. At the end of the day, I’m giving form to something, which requires rigor and creativity, whether it’s a poem or essay. The same mysterious, irrational confluence animates both. But of course I value my poems over my essays. The big book at the end of my life is not a book of criticism.
PF: You have been a professor at UFL for many years now, but earlier in your career you wrote and taught overseas, including in Lebanon. Has the experience influenced your work at all?
AM: When I was young I viewed travel as a prerequisite to being a writer — to be cosmopolitan was to be, ipso facto, cultured. But I’m much more wary now of the greedy, consumptive nature of digesting experience for the sake of writing about it, and it was only after an extended stay in Beirut that I was really shaken out of my complacency. For all that I had traveled to experience artifacts — mainly in museums or historic districts — it wasn’t until Lebanon that I became profoundly aware of deep time, in large part because of visiting archeological sites like Byblos and Baalbek, but also because I had to live there, shop for food there, learn to make new kinds of food, send my kids to school there. The two kinds of time juxtaposed — experiencing the rhythm of daily life in this old place, and being constantly reminded of the pancaked layers of history beneath my feet — changed my life, and my work. Maybe also that it was a militarized country, and I was no cossetted tourist. The ruins around me weren’t just ancient artefacts, but relics of recent wars.
I ceased to think of poetry as an aesthetic response, or rather reaction, to my own life. It wasn’t only about my memory of my life, but about the memory of the species, as far as any individual’s capacity could take it.
PF: The Poetry Society of America used to run this survey, where, among other questions, they asked select poets, “What makes American poetry American?” Invariably, many poets praised the variegated richness of the American poetry scene, but I’ve always found that answer a bit lazy. Have you ever participated in the survey? If you haven’t, how would you answer the question? Or if you have, would it give a different answer today?
AM: No, I’ve never been surveyed! But it seems to me the only answer is “the language.” I’m interested in all English-language poetry, from whatever country, but every country has different inflections which then end up characterizing their poets. I suppose that’s why I tell my students that, no matter what register you choose to write in, your work shouldn’t stray too far from the vernacular. (Inevitably, there are students who want to write in a nineteenth- or seventeenth-century diction and I have to carefully explain why that’s pastiche, and pastiche isn’t ever more than an exercise.)
But if I were to be brutally honest, I am not at all interested in what makes poetry “American.” As I said above, I’d teach Dickinson alongside Donne — or Hopkins — not Whitman. I’d teach Basil Bunting alongside Pound, or Thom Gunn alongside James Merrill. Yeats alongside Stevens. That’s how I was introduced to poetry—through these cosmopolitan Modernist anthologies—and it seems like a regression, to go back to talking about “American” poets as though they were exceptional.
PF: Finally, given how prolific you’ve been as a poet, I am less interested in asking about your work-in-progress than about who you’re reading or where you get your inspiration from? Is it ideas? The news? Your childhood? Dreams?
AM: I get inspiration from history, especially as it is filtered through artists or musicians. Two big tomes I’m slowly making my way through are The Island by Nicholas Jenkins (about Auden’s England) and Mozart in Motion by Patrick Mackie. A student gave me a CD set of Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, performed by Keith Jarrett, and the liner notes are just a revelation alongside the music. I’ve just watched Richter: The Enigma, a documentary/interview with the great pianist Sviatoslav Richter. There’s archival footage from the Soviet Union from the early to mid twentieth century, and even just hearing him speak (which I can understand a bit from my childhood Russian) transports me. I thought I wasn’t a podcast person until I started listening to The Rest Is History, which I’m now obsessed with — thank goodness there are 500 episodes or so: it will keep me busy for quite a while. In a secondhand shop, I picked up François Guizot’s four-volume history of France that begins with the Gauls and segues into the Merovingians. A queen went swimming in the ocean and was impregnated by a sea monster, which must have done wonders for the bloodline.
I might not write poems directly about these sources, but they keep my imagination alive.
PF: Thank you for your time.
AM: My pleasure!