Fady Joudah in Conversation with Marilyn Hacker

Fady Joudah, himself a poet and translator, interviews Marilyn Hacker for issue 25 of The Wolf. A headnote lists her books of poems, among them Names, Essays on Departure and Desesperanto, her essay collection Unauthorized Voices, and eleven volumes of translation from the French, including work by Marie Etienne, Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Hédi Kaddour.

The first questions are about form. Hacker prefers 'metrical poetry' to 'received form', since all poetry is metrical, and after a century of open verse she calls that a tradition too. She lists the poets who drew her to metre when young, from Baudelaire and Donne to Lowell, Bishop and Auden, while also reading Celan, Pound and Rich, and says she holds no prescriptive view of metre against open form. Asked about American disdain for metre, she describes how the Black Arts and women's movements sometimes pressed poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden to give up formal choices, and notes that younger African American poets have reclaimed that line. She discusses sapphics, prompted by James Wright's poem to Horace and Agha Shahid Ali's use of the form, Hayden Carruth's 'paragraph' stanza, and the glosa as a conversation with another poet.

Joudah then asks why metre is more readily accepted in Britain and Ireland. Hacker, who lived in London in the latter half of her twenties, says she cannot claim expertise but sees greater distance between poetic schools in the United States, as when Objectivist specialists overlook Muriel Rukeyser. She remarks that many British poets working in metre are outsiders by class or origin, naming Tony Harrison, George Szirtes and Daljit Nagra. The talk moves to the mix of plain and elaborate diction in Names, and to modernism: she traces spoken language in poetry from Eliot, Pound and Williams to Richard Howard's dramatic monologues, and prefers working techniques to schools.

The last third covers the book-length poem, with a list of modern examples from the Cantos and Paterson to Brooks's Annie Allen and Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, and she names collections whose structure she admires, such as Szirtes's Reel and Jorie Graham's Overlord. On political poetry she cites Levertov, June Jordan and Darwish. On translation she calls it both the closest reading and a jumping-off point, a form with its own constraints, and says the poets she translates share a playful, unorthodox interest in form and narrative that is eccentric even in France.

Work

Names

Author

Marilyn Hacker

Publisher

Norton

Poems in this selection

• Paragraphs from a Day-Book
• Letter to Alfred Corn

since all poetry is metrical

Marilyn Hacker, The Wolf, issue 25

I do not have prescriptive ideas about metrical form versus open form

Marilyn Hacker, The Wolf, issue 25