“Structure with the Mystery”: A Conversation with Gail Mazur
We talked over Zoom shortly before the winter solstice in 2021 as Omicron swept through the world. Our conversation about our bad cats, the state of MFA programs, book design, poetry during the time of Zoom, and so much more did not make it into the interview, which focuses on poetic process, Gail Mazur’s marvelous Land’s End: New and Selected (University of Chicago Press, 2020), publishing a Selected Poems, the Blacksmith House literary series, and much more.
Gail Mazur is the author of Land’s End: New and Selected (University of Chicago, 2020), as well as seven previous collections, including They Can’t Take That Away from Me (Chicago, 2001), finalist for the National Book Award, and Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems (Chicago, 2005), winner of The Massachusetts Book Prize and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her poems have been widely anthologized, including in several Pushcart Prize Anthologies, the Best American Poetry, Robert Pinsky’s Essential Pleasures, and Gabriel Fried’s Heart of the Order, Baseball Poems, and other anthologies. A graduate of Smith College, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and the Radcliffe Institute. She was for 20 years Distinguished Senior Writer in Residence in Emerson College’s graduate program and taught in Boston University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown where she has served for many years on the Writing Committee. She is the founder of the Blacksmith House poetry reading series, one of the oldest continuous series in the country.
Baseball
The game of baseball is not a metaphor
and I know it’s not really life.
The chalky green diamond, the lovely
dusty brown lanes I see from airplanes
multiplying around the cities
are only near playing fields.
Their structure is not the frame
of history carved out of forest,
that is not what I see on my ascent.
And down in the stadium,
the veteran catcher guiding the young
pitcher through the innings, the line
of concentration between them,
that delicate filament is not
like the way you are helping me,
only it reminds me when I strain
for analogies, the way a rookie strains
for perfection, and the veteran,
in his wisdom,
seems to promise it,
it glows from his upheld glove,
and the man in front of me
in the grandstand, drinking banana
daiquiris from a thermos,
continuing through a whole dinner
to the aromatic cigar even as our team
is shut out, nearly hitless, he is
not like the farmer that Auden speaks of
in Breughel’s Icarus,
or the four inevitable woman-hating
drunkards, yelling, hugging
each other and moving up and down
continually for more beer
and the young wife trying to understand
what a full count could be
to please her husband happy in
his old dreams, or the little boy
in the Yankees cap already nodding
off to sleep against his father,
program and popcorn memories
sliding into the future,
and the old woman from Lincoln, Maine,
screaming at the Yankee slugger
with wounded knees to break his leg
this is not a microcosm,
not even a slice of life
and the terrible slumps,
when the greatest hitter mysteriously
goes hitless for weeks, or
the pitcher’s stuff is all junk
who threw like a magician all last month,
or the days when our guys look
like Sennett cops, slipping, bumping
each other, then suddenly, the play
that wasn’t humanly possible, the Kid
we know isn’t ready for the big leagues,
leaps into the air to catch a ball
that should have gone downtown
and coming off the field is hugged
and bottom-slapped by the sudden
sorcerers, the winning team
the question of what makes a man
slump when his form, his eye,
his power aren’t to blame, this isn’t
like the bad luck that hounds us,
and his frustration in the games
not like our deep rage
for disappointing ourselves
the ballpark is an artifact,
manufactured, safe, “scene in an Easter egg,”
and the order of the ball game,
the firm structure with the mystery
of accidents always contained,
not the wild field we wander in,
where I’m trying to recite the rules,
to repeat the statistics of the game,
and the wind keeps carrying my words away.
- from Land’s End: New and Selected (U. Chicago Press, 2020), first printed in Nightfire (1978)
/ / /
Tyler Mills: Land’s End: New and Selected Poems (U. Chicago Press 2020) is astonishing in its approach to diction. To me as a reader, each word reads as if it were sifted out of a landscape of complex and sharp stones and placed with great care into the organic structure of the poem that the voice has crafted. From your early poems like “Baseball” in Nightfire(1978) to the new poems in your book like “That was Then,” your mastery of diction and the physical force in a poem when a word lands perfectly is astonishing. I’m thinking about this moment from “That Was Then”:
It would be years before Midwestern boys
would challenge me
to defend Ginsberg, assuming
as an Easterner I’d not only know him,
but be complicit with him,
and maybe Kerouac too,
though so far I’d gone nowhere,
just flown to Winnetka
with a lacy bridesmaid dress
for my pregnant college friend
Susie’s wedding. Those boys
had got Sue back
where slipcovered sofas
were covered in plastic (7-20)
My question is how do you do this? You remain consistent in this mastery of diction across your many books. Your poems so carefully describe scenes visually and yet do so with a slight distance so that the speaker’s process of observation becomes a mode of truth telling and, as the poem unfolds, discovery.
I was wondering if you’d like to speak to how your sense of tone emerges either from the subjects of your poems — history, family, literature, art, politics — or perhaps the emotional stakes the speaker brings to the poem’s occasion?
In other words, in your approach to diction — which is so incredibly precise and rich and sharp, but also organic — do you feel this stance is coming from the subjects of the poems that are emerging as you write them? Or perhaps the emotional stakes the speaker is bringing to the utterance? Or a mix of both? Or neither? And I was wondering if there is a way in which the speaker’s approach to the past — skepticism, critical distance, or something else — folds into all of this? In asking this question, I’m thinking about the personal past but also a sense of history because, I feel, the personal is always connected with the larger historical moment.
Gail Mazur: A lot of the questions that you just posed are almost unanswerable because a lot of writing of poems comes from impulse, the diction is my diction, the voice is mine. We bring our reason and practice to revision. Say, a lot of times, the first draft is not halfway there, then a different combination of brainwork comes in after the first draft. The baseball poem [see end of interview] was, at the time I wrote it, a unique writing experience because I was reading on my bed, which is not unique at all (!), a poetry magazine — I don’t remember what it was. And suddenly, I thought, I’m just going to take a word from each page for a few pages. It could have been “and” and “the.” I didn’t think, And then I’m going to write a poem about baseball. I was just playing, really.
So I thumbed through the magazine and chose six words, and I’ve never known if they were words I kept or not because they weren’t important, but that’s what happens sometimes — you don’t realize you have a poem coming and then something makes it come. I wouldn’t even say it triggers it. I think when you surf for words like that — I heard later that Mark Strand gave this exercise when he was teaching at Iowa called “running theft,” which he said, just thumb through a book and write down some words that pop off the pages at you. Don’t study the page. I didn’t know about Mark’s exercise, but that is what happened that day with “Baseball.”
I think what happens is when writing some poems, especially a poem with a “subject,” you want to bring everything you’ve got to bear on it. And the first draft in “Baseball” — and this is unusual — isn’t so different from the final draft in this poem because obviously there was baseball lore in my limbic that, as a Boston Red Sox fan, I’d already half written it and didn’t know it. I felt I went where I wanted to go, and when I quoted John Updike’s essay about Ted Williams who was a Red Sox great, about his last game, called “Hub Fans Bid the Kid Adieu,” I was there. It was almost automatic writing. Updike called Fenway, which was the smallest park in the majors, “a scene in an Easter egg.” And I thought I wanted to let this going go everywhere. I felt as if this was the first time I fully did that.
But I very seldom, almost never, have “planned” a poem. They’re usually simmering somewhere in me until they’re ready to being life “on the page. If I say, I want to write about a painting, I usually don’t do that — at least not then, not soon. The subject is approaching behind my own back somehow, the poem’s planning itself, so I don’t know how to answer your question. How to describe the mysterious process is another question and not the question that you asked. Sometimes, I’ll make a series of unconnected notes in my journals, and then, suddenly: poof, I mean: poem.
Mills: I’m thinking about your stance toward poetry as a reader and as an artist. There’s something there about being in conversation with texts and with other poems and other poets and artists. Maybe part of your process is an ongoing internal dialogue with these things?
Mazur: I think, at least at a subconscious level, we’re all always in conversation with poems we’ve read, but maybe not conversation exactly. It’s more like they’ve entered the bloodstream. Reading poems constantly reinforces the musicalities of poems, of the directions a poem’s music take it — I think, like a lot of poets, I’m grateful when the poem begins with an urgent impulse. Not just the urgency of getting to work, but that the poem is starting already, and you’ve got to get where you can write it, which isn’t always “convenient,” but you have no choice, you’re in it!
I don’t feel I have a particularly cerebral approach to talking about how a poem gets written because there’s something unfamiliar — new — about the process every time. Especially with the poems I treasure the most — I’m not sure how they happened to get here. Or should I say, how I got them here!
I wouldn’t be walking around, saying “Well, Gail, you love baseball, write a poem about baseball!” The poems knock at the door. I have poems about the death of people I loved, and that’s not a plan, it’s just what’s there. And part of it is trying to make something out of something that hurts or delights — or bewilders. So when I write poems about my husband, both loss and delights drive those poems. The joy of, say, art-making, of experiencing its highs and lows at once.
Mills: I think we’re getting at something important. Now what I’m wondering about is that acute emotional register that you spoke of. I love what you said about something that hurts and delights and how that can be an instigating force in your work. I’m seeing in your work an amazingly sharp, precise, and rich tone — and a consistency across all of your books in that way. Each poem is a beautifully rich mosaic where you step back and see the whole piece (or poem) and step forward and see these amazing stones (or words) perfectly placed. I keep coming back to how beauty and care at the level of diction creates this effect. In hearing about your process, I’m wondering if it’s connecting to that — the heightened emotional impulse that brings the poem to the page or activates the ear? The voice that appears when you can’t stop writing a poem? In a dry spell I think I’ll never write again, and then the voice comes back, and in your work, I wonder if maybe it’s something about the relationship between the impulse of something that hurts and delights and connecting it with the poem’s subject? Perhaps that is where the incredibly rich precision comes from?
Mazur: I don’t think it starts with hurt and delight. I think that’s sometimes the landscape I’m working out of, but I don’t ever think, Oh I love this so much that I’m going to write about it, and I have a poem in mind. Or this emotional pain is so devastating, maybe I can write it out. It never works that way. It always works in getting to the impulse of making. Do you know what I mean? I have a poem in my collection Land’s End, one of my favorites, called “Young Apple Tree, December,” I was asked to write a poem for the dedication of a tree to Florence Ladd, who was retiring as Director of the Radcliffe Institute. At that point, I wasn’t sure what I wanted the poem to do. I finally asked my husband, “Say something to me about a tree. Anything.” And he said, “When they grow, they seek balance.” And I thought, Oh, I know what I want to do. But I didn’t know that when I sat down, I’d say, “What you’d want for it you’d want / for a child” and write it all supposedly from the perspective young tree as a being. That is, I think, one of my most deeply felt poems, and it started with an “assignment.” The assignment wasn’t “write a poem for this friend,” but—for me—“When they grow, they seek balance.” And in a way, for instance, the baseball poem, to have started the poem by saying it wasn’t a metaphor (“The game of baseball is not a metaphor”), what that got me to do was to say all the way it is real, but at the same time I meant that it was a metaphor. It’s not this, not that—but all of it was. That wasn’t a plan for the poem. I don’t work that way. I’m a creature and the poem is victim of my impulses.
Mills: I keep thinking about Keats, and how he wrote in one of his letters that he doesn’t like poetry that has palpable designs on us. And I keep thinking about what you are saying and how your poems don’t — they originate within the ways language can lead and guide us, and I love that about your work.
Mazur: Thank you! I think it’s true that so often the first line is the impetus. With “Young Apple Tree, December,” I started with, “What you want for it you’d want / for a child,” then I could just expand on that. And of course you’re always thinking of the music and pacing and who-knows-what unexpected things. Or you’re not thinking about it then, but you are when you’re revising. I’m a compulsive reviser. I usually have at least 25 drafts of a poem, sometimes many more.
I was just thinking about another poem in the book that I was really pleased with called “To the Makers,” which is a nod to “Lament for the Makers” (William Dunbar). But I was really thinking of Bishop and Lowell, the older poets who were here when I was starting out and whom I loved. And sometimes I feel like I learned most of what I know from their work. But then I also learned a lot from Allen Ginsberg. Really a lot. And I can count so many, many other poets — actually, countless. But I’m trying to think how “To the Makers” started, and it started with “You were like famous cities with rivers and traffic, / with architecture from ingenious eras.” If you start that way, you’ve got to explain it.
It’s a complete invention, but I was honoring them and honoring “Lament for the Makers,” too. And there were things in it I knew were real, like, I say, “you were not the loneliest people alive.” But I know sometimes Bishop felt like she was the loneliest person alive. And Lowell, with his psychological crises, had to have also felt “different” from everyone else. And in the middle of the poem, I start a stanza with, “Day by day your lives were a tumult of beginnings.” Day by Day is the title of Lowell’s last collection of poems. That “your lives were a tumult,” that was true of both of them. But then I said,
When you began, you couldn’t know —
this you keep showing me —
where your constructions would lead.
And that’s what I wanted to say about them. I’m not sure if it’s true for them, but it’s true for me. When I start, I don’t think “this is going to be in couplets” or “this is a sonnet” or “I want to be sure I say such and such.” It’s probably why I don’t write as much as some other people. The poem is building up somewhere I don’t know about, often don’t even know how to get to.
But that’s one of my favorite of my poems, because it’s less a lament than a thank-you.
Mills: What you said reminded me of Bishop and how she didn’t rush her work either! Her poems are so rich and beautiful and precise, and she didn’t have a massive Collected Poems.
Mazur: I was very gratified to find at the Vassar Library the first thirteen drafts of Bishop’s “One Art,” and I thought, I get this way of writing completely. There was no “One Art” in the first draft. There were phrases here and there, and enormous changes. And it so often happens that the changes that shift the poem toward what it’s going to become happen in the middle of the draft. And her writing was chicken scratch. I got the drafts from Vassar and blew them up at the copy center at Staples so you have an easier time reading her corrections, which went on forever. In the last stanza she might be correcting an article.
I don’t think, First thought best thought is my motto. That was Allen Ginsberg’s! I think, First thought, thank heavens I have one!
Mills: I’ve looked at her drafts for “One Art” as well, and I remember she started the poem originally with the speaker trying to find her reading glasses, and how that got cut from later drafts.
Mazur: Yes, she started with, “It’s easy to lose things” —
Mills: Yes, “It’s easy to lose things!”
Mazur: She didn’t start, “I’m going to write a poem about my losses.” But her life was so filled with them from the start, and it was what I love also about that poem. Aside from how it’s formally perfect, the poem is also defiant. She’s lost everything, and if there’s an art to it, she’s got the art of living with loss. This courageous poem’s irony is heartbreaking and brave.
It’s a model of restraint. And in a way, Lowell is often the opposite. He’s wide open in the work we think of a lot in the middle and later years.
And that’s not to say they’re the poets I’m obsessed with. They’re my parents in poetry. They’re the poets that when I was young … I mean, I first heard Robert Lowell read when I was 17, and it was an accident. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know anyone who wrote poetry. The next time, I heard him read, it was from Life Studies in the Boston Public Garden when I was 22 and already a mother and soon to have a second child. I wasn’t writing poetry — I think now, Why was I going to poetry events back then? In the ‘50s, the poetry world as we know it engendered by MFA programs and the professionalizing of writing poetry and teaching it — that didn’t exist, not when I was in my teens, not to my knowledge. It probably exploded ten years later. So seeing those poets, hearing them read their work, was incredibly powerful for me. Probably because of the way my mind worked, I understood their poems. They didn’t talk so differently from the way I talked.
Mills: There’s an immediacy of voice in their poems and the embrace of the free verse mode and personal self, and that must have really resonated with you as a young poet.
Mazur: Also that this wasn’t what I’d been learning as a student. This is what I learned from them. Anything could go in a poem if it’s in the right place. There’s nothing that isn’t appropriate. If you think about appropriateness you shouldn’t be in the arts at all.
It didn’t make me think, I want to write like them, but it was the permission to write like myself and honor my own impulses working on a poem. Nothing’s off limits — except for the limits you set yourself. I mean you have to weigh your delight with what you just wrote and your willingness to dare bare yourself. And on the other hand, thinking, Do I want to soften this, do I want to be this naked? Will the poem benefit? Is it even true to what I’m thinking? Am I thinking? Have I violated something, someone, I don’t want to violate?
Mills: And, too, a poem like “That Was Then” in the New Poems section of your book, walks that line so well in thinking about the women who had been “got” by those boys (“where slipcovered sofas / were covered in plastic / for good measure and everyone // stayed put and for every guy / a compliant dropout girl, for every girl a sacheted drawer // of cashmere sweater sets”). I love this poem for how unflinchingly it looks at gender politics and misogyny, and does so with compassion while also being cutting.
Mazur: Thank you, and there are two things there. One, the friend that I wrote about — it was so long ago that we were friends, we were just students together. I knew she’d never see this poem and nobody she knew would see it. And also, my teacher, Mr. Rinker, was probably the most profound, or only profound, influence that I had as a student in high school. I mean, I had good teachers, I was in a good public school. He was extraordinary. But when I wrote it, I knew he wouldn’t see the poem because by then he’d be 120 … He probably gave me the earliest signal that I could write, be a writer. He was formal, almost old-fashioned, unlike any of the other teachers. I don’t remember the paper, and I was always delinquent with my homework. But he wrote on one paper, “Rejoice that you have written this sentence!” A lifetime later, I still remember how important it was to me. Not that I knew I was craving it. There was nothing that I was rejoicing for about what I was doing, I was a 17-year-old girl anxious about other things that 17-year-olds are anxious about. I didn’t want to dishonor him in the poem. I hoped I showed gratitude.
Mills: I think you did: “How he did his best to console me, / girl weeping by his blackboard, / poor girl with no useful tools at her disposal.” I think there’s great compassion there. Even when he says, “But what could be so wrong … when you’re beautiful?” The poem sets that statement up for that being part of the problem of that time.
Mazur: The poem has compassion, but if he were alive, it would have been awful of me to write it that way. I wouldn’t have. So what is that? I think there is the fact I knew no one would know him. Sometimes I think, Does he have a niece or nephew who reads poetry who would be hurt by this poem? I had a sister who was born with brain damage, so I worry about this thing maybe more than most people. It comes to mind more for me than it does for most people. It shaped me. It shaped me, the weight of being the — unforgivably, undeservedly — “lucky one”.
Mills: What you’re asking makes me think of memoir writers, too, and the line between poetry and nonfiction sometimes being blurred where we’re writing about people in our lives who were real, who have names. And the stakes of doing that are high, I think. I admire that you do this so beautifully in your poems.
Since we’re talking about people, I’d love to ask you about the flowers of “Stanley” — Stanley Kunitz, beloved poet, from Provincetown — and how your earlier poem “September” from Zeppo’s First Wife (2005) as well as “At Land’s End” reveal him and his gifts and his life force. The part of “At Lands End,” a poem from the New Poems portion of your book that also serves as the title poem for Land’s End: New and Selected Poems, begins:
This garden, its descendants of Stanley’s anemones,
flowing, pearlescent — like the nacre of shells,
their offspring mine now, in my yard, fragile
beside the orange blare of Dugan’s trumpet vine —
my almanac of inheritances swanning
around my own bee balm and butterfly bush,
monarchs and black swallowtails fluttering,
a sunflower bowing its great human head
toward the sun …
The poem moves seamlessly into a meditation on receiving “today’s news” — which the poem turns into compost when addressing Stanley again: “so ready to drop your tools, compost the cuttings, / compost your newspapers for the garden’s future.” Would you like to speak about knowing Stanley Kunitz and what he meant for you? What does it mean to cultivate a garden with “descendants of Stanley’s anemones” either literally or metaphorically as a poet? Is this something you see yourself doing or you see contemporary poets doing now? Would you speak about Cape Cod as a creative landscape?
Gail Mazur: Stanley and I became friends when I was in my 50s and he was more of an example to me as a person who nurtured young poets and cultivated his garden. He had a long, long life as you probably know — he was 101 when he died — and probably until he was 99, he was doing shockingly well. He had built the second half of his life on this great project in Provincetown, the Fine Arts Work Center, which was his idea, to save the arts life of Provincetown, to save it for artists and writers. Its quality of light at land’s end, its distance from everywhere, its art histories. He could see it was going to become unaffordable, and he and several others (I think almost all men), either art collectors or artists and writers, got the idea to make it possible for artists and writers at the beginning of their careers to spend an off-season year together in Provincetown, and this group of founders would find a way to subsidize it. And years later, after my husband and I were invited to give talks there, somehow Stanley pulled us into this place, and we fell in love with Provincetown and with everything that the old Provincetown represented, and I watched Stanley’s passionate enthusiasm not only for young writers and artists who came over the years and for the town itself. At our “jury” meetings, he never stopped caring madly about the choices we made, fighting for writers he thought most promising — and he was often proven right. He never came to a point in his life when things didn’t matter, he was a phenomenon. But he became one of my favorite people because of that unslakeable hunger. And it was really remarkable, and I was very aware — I have a yard and a garden in Cambridge, but I was not involved the way he was in it, I liked planting it but not really spending my days tending it — Stanley was a model of the deep gratification in that. He was a gardener from the time he was 20, and when I met him he was in his early ‘80s.
[Left: Gail with Frank Bidart, Mark Doty, and Carl Phillips] I was teaching at the U of Houston the year before, and he loved writing about art. They were going to have a Monet show at the museum, and the writing program was saying they thought they’d invite Stanley Kunitz to read at the museum, and I said, “He’s 82!” They invited him to read, and he came. And I’m older now than he was then, and I don’t want people to say that about me “Oh she’s too fragile!” But he was indomitable. He had made the second half of his life an exercise in generosity and nurturing younger writers and artists. I saw that as a model of how to keep your own humanity alive. And at that time my children had left, so I wasn’t “nurturing anyone,” I’d just begun teaching a few years before. He was a (R)omantic and a pragmatist. He understood about money, about art, and he knew politics. He was one of the most engaged “elders” I’ve ever known.
You could see how he stayed alive with his interest in younger writers — and other writers, maybe not so young, too. He was as flawed as anyone; he wasn’t a saint. He had been very close to Lowell, and he was very ungenerous in talking to me about him, and I thought he was competitive decades after Lowell’s death. But I understood also that Lowell outshone his generation for a time and wasn’t always reliably kind himself. But he was manic depressive, and Stanley was the most emotionally healthy person I’ve ever known. (That’s probably not true. But I’ve never known anyone that old who was that open.) When he started to fade, when he was 99, we would take turns going to visit him, so he always had company. We would sit in the little bay window in his house. One day, Major Jackson and I and two or three other people were there, and his project that summer was reading from Moby Dick aloud, passing the book around. It was wonderful, each of us reading, Stanley and all, passing the book … I was thinking about it last night. It was fun — thrilling, but also fun. A great way to be with people reading together. Not a seminar, rather, the joy of reading together.
Mills: Would you like to speak to running the Blacksmith House series — and poetry and community in your life?
Mazur: For me, looking back on it, it was an accident that I started the Blacksmith House Series. The owner/founder of the Grolier Bookshop, who was an elderly man, had just died and it seemed inevitable that the Grolier was closing (it would later reopen and is still alive in Harvard Square). I had moved to Cambridge a few years before. The Grolier had been one of those places that changed my life, a bookstore that was all poetry, which meant everyone in there was coming to the bookstore only to buy or browse — or unhappily, steal — poetry. There weren’t poetry readings then except occasionally at universities, and nobody outside the university ever knew about them. They weren’t part of the literary landscape the way they are now. I can’t even remember if bookstores hosted readings then — I don’t think they did. Or it was once a year or something. So, I talked to the Director of Cambridge Adult Education, and I said, “I want to do something for poetry writers and readers — I don’t know what.” And she said, “Well, I could give you the Blacksmith House (the home of Longfellow’s “village smithy” which had a café in it), one night a week.” And I thought, I’ll ask some people to read. Everybody that I asked that first fall — I didn’t read there — nobody had a book, which was really great, in a way. I didn’t have a budget. We passed the hat. But at the time, they had just started the Eastern shuttle planes, and it was $16 to fly to New York. I remember Mark Strand read and we collected $64 dollars. And he was really excited, because outside of the rare university readings, no one was getting paid to do a poetry reading. What the Blacksmith House Series did was exactly what I wanted, got people together excited about poems, but all I did was run the reading. People came — all sorts of people writing poetry. Some nights, Elizabeth Bishop and Octavio Paz were there. And sometimes, when I was coming down to the street to come to the Blacksmith House, I’d see Lowell or Seamus Heaney browsing in the bookstore on the corner, Reading International, before the reading. It was just amazing. That probably cured me to some degree of a kind of shyness — at least, well, I like giving readings. Soon, the younger writers, a lot of them, had books. And finally, almost everyone that was reading had a new book. But it still went on, it still goes on, and I think I did 36 nights a year.
When my husband, Michael, was ill, I just didn’t want to have to be out one night a week. It was too uncertain what was going to happen. And I asked Andrea Cohen, the poet, who had been my assistant, if she would take it over, and she did. And does it beautifully. It is really thriving, writers love to read there. And we even have a budget. And people have to pay to get in (when we passed the hat people didn’t have to pay). It was great for me to do, and sometimes I’ll have a student, especially an adult student, moving back to their hometown where there are no poets, and I say, Go to the library and ask them if you can schedule poetry readings, and ask the people you would like to have come. Because that’s what I did. It’s hard for people to imagine now, but the poetry world in Cambridge didn’t exist except in a little part of Harvard, where Robert Lowell, and later Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney, taught one semester a year.
Probably when I moved here, there were only a couple graduate writing programs in the country, and Iowa in Iowa City was THE “writing program.” That was changing quickly.
Mills: I want to make sure I ask you about the process of crafting your New and Selected Poems and organizing them. As you shaped your manuscript and chose which new poems to include at the beginning of the collection, were you thinking about dipping into your oeuvre to select poems about particular themes in order to tell a kind of story that resonates with your new work? Or did you choose your favorite poems from your earlier books, thinking later about what lyric arc they might shape? In other words, how did you group and select the poems in Land’s End? And were there poems that didn’t make it that surprised you or poems you chose that you didn’t expect to select?
Gail Mazur: I think when you do a selected later in your life, you’re really just thinking about the “best” poems. That’s what I was thinking. I don’t have a thesis for that. It was painful to have to shrink the work to so few pages. There were lots of poems I wished I could have included. Those decisions were hard to make, but I had to make the process in terms of what I objectively felt were the strongest poems. Because if I did it by narrative, I might include some lesser poems that were links, which you might tend to do in a new collection of poems. It was very hard — horrible — winnowing it down. Because of that, I constantly think, Oh dear, this poem isn’t in there, but usually I look it up and it is! Because I took out so much — I had a page limit. I didn’t particularly want a Selected Poems since I had done one ten years before. My first book was published when I was 40 (my first two books were with David Godine), and “Baseball” was in my first book. I chose only “Baseball” from that book for Land’s End because I’d always felt it was a breakthrough poem. The selection process is really hard—when you’ve published several books of poems, you really like more than a third of them. And then the decision to choose a poem with a sort of autumnal title like “At Land’s End” seemed inevitable.
There were poems that meant a lot to me, some of which we’ve touched on today that I would have hated to do without, so I had to do without something else. I’m grateful for the book, and that it looks so beautiful. It looks so beautiful with Mike’s cover.
Mills: Are you working on something now?
Mazur: It’s poem by poem. I haven’t been incredibly productive during COVID. The way that poems come for me — maybe I haven’t opened the door to them. Or maybe I don’t always hear them when they’re knocking. Anyway, I have “begun again” — that’s how I feel when I start after a new book is published — finished enough, that I can think of it as the start of my next book.
Mills: This conversation has been so rich and wonderful. Thank you. I hope our paths cross in person sometime!
Mazur: I hope our paths cross with anyone’s sometime soon!
/ / / / /
Young Apple Tree, December
What you want for it is what you’d want
for a child: that she take hold;
that her roots find home in stony
winter soil; that she take seasons
in stride, seasons that shape and
reshape her; that like a dancer’s,
her limbs grow pliant, graceful
and surprising; that she know,
in her branchings, to seek balance;
that she know when to flower, when
to wait for the returns; that she turn
to a giving sun; that she know to share
fruit as it ripens, that what’s lost
to her will be replaced; that early
summer afternoons, a full blossoming
tree, she cast lacy shadows; that change
not frighten her, rather change
meet her embrace; that remembering
her small history, she find her place
in an orchard; that she bed her own
orchard; that she outlast you;
that she prepare for the hungry world,
the fallen world, the loony world,
something shapely, useful, new, delicious.
- from Land’s End: New and Selected (U. Chicago Press, 2020), first printed in They Can’t Take That Away from Me (2001)
/ / /
To the Makers
You were like famous cities with rivers and traffic,
with architecture from ingenious eras,
with protest marches and festivals, museums and pharmacies
and criminal pleasures —
all the essentials needed to endure. Reading you,
I re-visit your structures of grids and avenues, your alleys,
I follow overgrown paths,
I re-visit the terror and joy of being lost,
the ways to court discomfort, to dare chaos,
the knowledge of drowning in a pitch-dark harbor.
Tyranny and wars advanced in your histories,
also infirmities of soul and body
were your portion, yet you were not yearning only,
not heartbreak only,
you were not the loneliest people alive.
There was your work, and then, you had one another,
you spoke with gods and heroes,
you cherished your conversations in many languages.
It is true, you were secretive, observers — spies —
but that was as it has to be,
it was only your work you were given to serve.
You weren’t mere investigators of useless things,
the pragmatic seemed no more or less
suggestive to you than articles of turbulence
or rapture — strands of hair in a basin,
light in a dusty stairwell
a pitcher of sangria, woe and laughter,
the feel in the hand of a broken thing.
Day by day, your lives were a tumult of beginnings.
When you began, you couldn’t know —
this you keep showing me —
where your constructions would lead,
what you made you made from the inchoate,
muscled and shaped not toward the monumental
but toward a form of truth that would matter,
the inaccessible become necessary.
Though I am speaking to you, I’m not alone
natured by your art,
even today you animate the minutiae
of the vast, unsigned cosmos,
and though the twentieth century ended without you,
now, decades after your precipitate departures,
your pages are still touched by many,
still touch many,
and the lit screens you never used sing your lines.
- from Land’s End: New and Selected (U. Chicago Press, 2020), first printed in Figures in a Landscape (2011)
/ / / / /
At Land’s End
This garden, its descendants of Stanley’s anemones,
flowing, pearlescent — like the nacre of shells,
their offspring mine now, in my yard, fragile
beside the orange blare of Dugan’s trumpet vine —
my almanac of inheritances swanning
around my own bee balm and butterfly bush,
monarchs and black swallowtails fluttering,
a sunflower bowing its great human head
toward the sun. The garden’s heart, the lilies,
its consoling perfumes, the richesse of memory…
What would they say today, I wonder, our Old Ones —
Stanley, ancient and clear-eyed, ready to jump into action,
and Dugan, irascible, a furious activism far in his past,
removed, really, past caring about much —
yet somehow bracing, abrasive.
Their — our — century long over, and today’s new —
preposterous — still somehow unthinkable:
a savage clown “at the helm,” breaking
the toys of the circus he never liked anyway—
every treasure, every human pact,
tossed aside as if they were created to be broken.
Playthings of the world, mortal, uprooted.
Oh, Stanley, tending your cultivated dune
under the sun of justice, wiry, undefeated, feeding
your annual seedlings. One late afternoon
long ago, a little too early for martinis,
you lay down your clippers on warm flagstone
by a withering clump of weeds—
Gail, you said, grabbing my wrist, urgent,
what are we going to do about Bosnia?
Where did it come from, where does it go, that sense of agency?
You, so ready to drop your tools, compost the cuttings,
Compost your newspapers for the garden’s future —
The Times, The Globe —
as if here at land’s end, here on the coast, urgent,
together we’d have energies to do battle forever.
As if we could rescue the guttering world …
- from Land’s End: New and Selected (U. Chicago Press, 2020), first printed in Salamander
/ / / / /
Dear Migraine
You’re the shadow shadow lurking in me
and the lunatic light waiting in that shadow.
Ghostwriter of my half-life, intention’s ambush
I can’t prepare for, ruthless whammy
you have me ogling a blinding sun,
my right eye naked even with both lids closed —
glowering sun, unerring navigator
around this darkened room, you’re my laser probe,
I’m your unwilling wavelength,
I can never transcend your modus operandi,
I’ve given up trying to outsmart you,
and the new thinking says I didn’t invent you —
whatever you were to me I’ve outgrown,
I don’t need you, but you’re tenacity embodied,
Tightening my skull, my temple, like plastic wrap.
Many times, I’ve traveled to a dry climate
that wouldn’t pander to you, as if the great map
of America’s deserts held the key to a pain-free future,
but you were an encroaching line in the sand,
then you were the sand. We’ve spent the best years
of my life intertwined: wherever I land
you entrap me in the unraveled faces
of panhandlers, their features my features —
you, little death I won’t stop for, little death
luring me across your footbridge to the other side,
oblivion’s anodyne. Soon—I can’t know where or when—
we’ll dance the ache to ache again on my life’s fragments,
one part abandoned, the other abundance—
- from Land’s End: New and Selected (U. Chicago Press, 2020), first printed in Figures in a Landscape (2011)