An Interview by Christopher Hennessy

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2004 by Hennessy, Christopher

I THINK A POEM IS NOT JUST a response to the external world," says poet Henri Cole. "It should also present the reader with a mind in action, a self in dialog with itself." And it's that self (and the persistence of abnegation)-represented in the mask, the veil, the mirror, the self-portrait-that so greatly informs Cole's work and marks his unique contribution to the lyric form.

Cole's fifth collection, the brazenly openhearted Middle Earth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), complicates the reflective (and refracted?) surface of the contemporary poem even further. Cole experiences the self-"like a needle, pushing in a vein"deeply conflicted, oddly physicalized and painfully aware of itself. He is that poet who unabashedly seeks "to say something true that has body, / because it is proof of his existence."

In the following interview, Cole examines his relationship to "the latticework of memory" and its place in his poems. Memory, he maintains, "is the key to everything: all human life is there."

He also talks about the influence and the profound example of Elizabeth Bishop, the opposing influences of Ginsberg and Merrill, and his own unique marriage of their aesthetics in his quest "to be Apollonian in body and Dionysian in spirit."

Cole graduated from the College of William and Mary and earned an MFA at Columbia University. From 1982 to 1988, he served as executive director of the Academy of American Poets. Since that time, he's taught at Columbia University, Reed College, Brandeis University, Harvard University (as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry) and Smith College.

In addition to Middle Earth, which was awarded the 2004 Kingsley Tufts Award, Cole has published four other collections, including The Visible Man (Knopf, 1998) and The Look of Things (Knopf, 1995). His numerous awards and honors include fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, as well as the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Berlin Prize Fellowship.

CHRISTOPHER HENNESSY: Unlike your poems in previous books, which found a rich anxiety in 'self,' the speakers of the poems in Middle Earth find energy and song and symbol in self. Do you feel "like a realist, recovering from style" (as you say in "At the Grave of Elizabeth Bishop")?

HENRI COLE: I suppose I do. Like many young poets, I began as a poet of language rather than self. Style impeded emotion, I believe. Now, I want the poem of language (or style) to uplift and reinforce the poem of emotion. To write only a poem of language or only a poem of emotion is not enough. The two must wrestle vigorously with one another, like squirrels for a nut. I think it was Oscar Wilde who said, "Style is the man," but I want to be more.

CH: In that poem you also write: "I felt a deep throbbing. . . / binding me to others, a faint battering of wings against glass / that was the heart in the lovely dark behind my breast." Some of my favorite lines, actually. I see this as a revelation, not unlike Bishop's own hearing of Aunt Consuelo's "Oh!" (in "In the Waiting Room"). But is it also revelatory when it comes to your own view of poetry, what it can do?

HC: I've been commuting between Boston and Northampton; in-between is Worcester, where Elizabeth Bishop is buried. I picnic there often. My visits with her made me think hard about style and the sort of poet I wanted to be. I wrote the poem, in part, to record my affection for Bishop but also to make a statement of aesthetics. You might just say it's middle-age bringing with it the desire for renewal. Perhaps it's the linguistic version of the red sports car (a Triumph!) my father bought when he was forty-seven, as I am.

CH: In Middle Earth we find a mask, a veil, mirrors, selfportraits, an "original face," even the oddly painful but striking "self, like a needle, pushing in a vein." I wonder, is the sense that we never really know ourselves part of what drives a poem? And yet we're driven to seek the true (or truer) self anyway?

HC: Perhaps the quest for truth and the quest for self are the same thing. A lyric poem is a MRI of what it is to be human during one of these questing moments. Like a delicate instrument; it records all the little agitations of seeing and being.

CH: Speaking of mirrors, the self and such, I want to cite the following lines:

For me, this calls to mind "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," by John Ashbery. Though Ashbery is a very different poet, is there any anxiety of influence?

HC: Ashbery is an American original. Trying to write like him would be like standing in big waves and being knocked down. He is a gay ancestor, of course, as Whitman was before him. I love his poems for their combination of tenderness, amusement and regret.

CH: I feel-over the course of the last two or three books-that you've heightened the sense of passion when writing about the self, finding "that atmosphere of pure / unambiguous light burning inwardly, / not in self-regard but in self-forgetting." The poet tries to understand the self in the only way he can-through language.