Broken World
Author Interview

On Broken World: Joseph Lease in conversation with Paul Hoover

Q: One of your poems is titled "Soul-making"; do you see poetry as a soul-making activity?

A: Soul-making, sure. Why not? That just seems true to me. I don't want to sell poetry short. Poetry isn't just a reminder of what we already know—it can be that—but it can also create life that we need—life that we don't recognize until we are in the poem. And, yes, it also returns us to ourselves and makes us new. And it demystifies lies. I love Keats's idea that the world teaches us to make our souls. I don't see why poets would want to escape from that.

Q: Your poetry is accessible and shapely, but also innovative. How do you manage to be both as a poet?

A: I like it when each word makes the story and the music clear, when there is nothing in the way. When the music is right, that's when a poem reaches people, lets people in, and I hope my work does that.

Q: You adopt some phrasing from Rilke and Whitman—for example, "There are millions of suns left" and "If I cried out, who among the angelic orders." It seems to me on the one hand you are acknowledging those poets as spiritual predecessors and on the other building a cosmology that is inevitably smudged with the darkness and foul play of our current history. Would you like to comment?

A: Well—I believe we must make it new. I believe we can. Whitman called himself a cosmos. All poets are connected to that, and we respond to it. It sounds funny to talk about cosmology—but why be afraid to? A life becomes connected and disconnected—we expand, we open, we fail. In "Free Again" you have 26 variations and the total is expansion of a life, a spirit, toward others. We open to our own contradictions, too. And I hope there is something funny and true and political about the way I twist—or torque—Rilke:

If I cried out,

Who among the angelic orders would

Slap my face, who would steal

My lunch money . . .

or Whitman: there are millions of suns left and what are we going to do with them? The contradictions are necessary, as Whitman said. We can't run away from the contradictions.

Q: Your poems often make use of parallel structures such as anaphora and incremental repetition. This lends them a kind of formal innocence, euphoria, and verbal energy approaching that of the chant: "faith and rain / brightness falls / blank as glass / brightness falls." What would you say to the assertion that your work is psalmic and prophetic?

A: The short answer is: yes.

The question you asked is really wonderful, but it's also like a giant bear trap . . . I don't quite know how to answer.

One reason why chants and psalms are important to us is that every age transforms them and makes them new, makes them particular as well as common. Music is powerful because its cadences make passages of thought or emotion actual in a construct of sounds, and a poem is music, a construct of words. My work is ear-driven; rhythmical control answers/embodies the emotion that animates the poem. In the years after Human Rights came out, I gave a lot of readings. I was traveling a lot, and reading to larger audiences than before. I wrote the poems in Broken World by reading them aloud over and over. The music became incantatory. I think of the poems as spells. Wide-awake spells. Sometimes very ironic spells.

Q: The poem "Cy Twombly" refers to transformation and wonder. Without trying to paraphrase your own complex weave of generation, transformation, wonder, and "the sweetest songs," do you see a role for transformation and wonder in an era of materialist poetics?

A: Especially in an era of materialistic poetics—there has to be a role for transformation and wonder. Poems ask, "what are we really doing while we're living?" (We don't want to come to the end of our lives and discover that we have not lived at all.) Poets try to be good storytellers (thoughtful and luminous and emotionally driven)—and make the language that embodies meaning—so I still believe that poetry transforms us. The music of poetry is a transformative experience. We all know—in a sort of abstract way—that being born is meaningful and dying is meaningful—but the meanings get lost in our worst moments—and they are reborn in poems.

Q: In dialectic of public and private, it strikes me that Broken World is seeking the public more than the private, or rather that it stands at the private threshold gazing back out at the "we" of history and community. Can you comment?

A: It seems to me that public and private are very charged terms. We're always in public and in private. Some of our most private moments take place in crowds. In our most private moments we think of public experiences that either empower us or make us feel defeated. In my poems I hope I move toward authentic community. Poetry does not have to promote thinking that celebrates individualism. The American tradition in lyric is never merely personal: it is representative, in other words, personal and political. So the I is the ground for the critique of romanticism and materialism in American culture.

Q: Given that we live in the New Dark Age, and knowing that transformation and "the sweetest songs" are possible, what would you have us do?

A: I'm charmed that you're asking me. Keep moving. Read and write. Ok, we live in a dark age. Feel outrage. Act upon it. Strengthen your creativity (political creativity, artistic creativity). Let your understanding of community become more and more creative. Help those around you. In art and in all aspects of everyday life. Sorry, that's what I feel. Find a way to be outraged with a sense of humor.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I'm working on a new book of poems (I'm calling it Citizen) that re-imagines and expands upon some of the issues and concerns I began to explore in Broken World—love and citizenship and what it feels like to move through both a spiritual and a civic night. I'm trying to explore the idea of "home" and trying to challenge it in a tender way. I'm trying to make poems that open new ground.