Dante Di Stefano and I first met in an Introduction to Creative Writing class at Binghamton University in 1998. Now, 27 years later, this conversation reflects on the literary traditions, luminaries, and influences that inspire our work. Themes of witness, literary citizenship, love, and the ethics of art are examined in relation to our writing as we contemplate the role of first-person perspectives, the complexity of form, the intimacy of translation, confronting injustice, and the balance between self-expression and self-importance. This dialogue reveals the ways poetry intersects with history, humanity, and the individual artist’s pursuit of authenticity. We consider poetry as a living, breathing conversation that not only challenges but also connects the reader to the voices of the past. — Christian Teresi
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Dante Di Stefano: I have the sense that for you, as for me, poetry always unfolds as a conversation with the luminary works you love. Conversation, in this context, is also a form of exegesis. Would you talk about some of the dialogues you open with Hopkins, Shakespeare, Mandelstam in What Monsters You Make of Them?
Christian Teresi: All art comes from other art. All poetry is appropriated in one way or other. Even Shakespeare stole from Marlow. I wanted to acknowledge those facts and pay homage to some of the traditions that inspired me. And my mother taught me how important it is to read about cultures and histories beyond my own. But the other writers referenced in the book are a way for me to engage the intimacy and trust between reader and writer. My intimacy with reading Osip Mandelstam, for example, then became a way to enlarge the conversation with someone reading my poems that are partly about Mandelstam.
The Mandelstam references in the book are not just my speaker in the room with the reader. It’s also bits of Mandelstam’s ideas and history, or Hopkins, or Sonny Rollins, or Mayan Gods filtered through my experiences. And Mandelstam was influenced by Dante’s La Divina Commedia, and Dante by Virgil, and so all art comes from other art and that relationship crosses generations and time. It’s nonlinear. That transcendence is more important, influential and powerful than religion and politics, which is why much of the good and bad rhetoric of religion and politics appropriates from art. That human passion for art, from the earliest cave paintings, is what we remember most about ourselves. Art is the thing that has the most staying power. Not everyone has read Shakespeare, but more people have heard of him than Queen Elizabeth I. And Shakespeare didn’t have to colonize Ireland or India to gain renown. Art is the most important contribution humans have made to this world and language is our most important technology.
One of the things I love most about your second book, Ill Angels, is the many references to other writers and artists. And in your latest book, Midwhistle, there are references to Adam Zagajewski, Anne Carson, Eavan Boland, and Proust. How do you see your own connections to artistic predecessors and what is it about their histories that makes you unable to shake their influence?
DD: My writing life is always adjunct and subordinate to my reading life. I write to read better. I write to converse with the texts and lives and works I love. The art always bleeds into the life and the life always bleeds into the art. I am voracious for narrative, as voracious as I am for the music of words and the music of images. I want truth, too, even slant truth. I want perspectives that differ from my own. I note that What Monsters You Make of Them engages with poetry outside the English language tradition. How has your work as a translator — and as a reader of translations — influenced your poetry?
CT: Some of my favorite poets –– Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Mandelstam and Szymborska –– I’ve read only in translation. And translating poems has been another gift. Something that has become fundamentally important to my understanding of what poetry can accomplish.
I do not read or write in any language but English. I have professional colleagues who are talented polylingual language experts and translators and can comprehensively translate texts. Being fluent in the native language of the poet is essential to being a translator. So, I’m not a good translator on my own. I use language dictionaries and databases to translate and receive help from people who are fluent in other languages. Translation created a cultural and linguistic appreciation that would not have been possible if I knew only the English-version poems.
Translating, even in my limited capacity, is the most intense form of explication possible. There are increasingly good online resources that can help with translation. Anyone serious about poetry should try working in translation. Even if they never show it to anyone else. There are Mandelstam poems I’ve translated crudely while consulting numerous other translations from experts. I did it to see beyond what any of those numerous translations could offer on their own. That allowed me, as a non-Russian speaker, to get as close to Mandelstam’s intent as possible.
DD: The Carlos Drummond de Andrade quote that serves as the epigraph for your book’s first section nicely summarizes the thematic obsessions running throughout the collection. You bear witness to the evils and injustices that blight our world while contemplating how complicit we all are in the perpetuation of them. Could you expand on this central tension? And the Carlos Drummond de Andrade quote?
CT: Part of the problem with how politics is often practiced today is that people of all ideological spectrums fail to be honest about their own shortcomings. And social media amplifies the problem because it’s the greatest propaganda machine ever created, and it often dims thoughtful debate and originality. It’s right to express outrage at suffering. But frequently outrage on social media is undermined by reactionary expressions filled with platitudes, demagoguery and inaccuracy. And, of course, rumors, innuendos, and anecdotal experience are then costumed as fact. Julius Caesar divorced his wife Pompeia in 62 BC because of a rumor she was having an affair. He didn’t believe the rumor but felt his wife must be above all suspicion. Perception being viewed as reality is a very old habit and problem. It’s partly what makes social media so addictive and feeds other addictions, commodifies one’s life, or denigrates immigrants. The delusion induced by digital anxiety, algorithms, and surveillance capitalism is a problem that is getting worse and too few people take seriously.
And America and American poets are as susceptible to this problem as anyone else. There is a “daily ration of error, delivered to our door” as Andrade says in that quotation. Anyone can find false nourishment “By ruthless milkmen of evil. / By ruthless bread boys of evil.” The tensions in contemporary American poetry created by sibling rivalries, ageism, and histrionics are like junk food –– they’re plentiful, and have an addictive taste and empty calories.
The quotation establishes a theme that’s repeated in the book about how often we misjudge, are ignorant or apathetic. It works on a fulcrum with the book’s title, What Monsters You Make of Them, to examine horrific behavior and acknowledge that our understanding of what we deem monstrous may be a misperception. The title is taken from Hamlet. All of us, just as Hamlet, have a split consciousness and are capable of acts of kindness and unkindness. I wanted to explore that duality and the ways society and I have erred in our assumptions about injustice and violence.
And we’re all complicit in terrible acts by looking the other way –– by paying taxes to governments that exports materiel to other governments that slaughter civilians, by thinking that brutal acts by authoritarians on other continents are unimportant. It’s less about explaining the existence of the Jewish ghetto in Venice, the stoning of a teenage girl in Africa, or the cultural imperialism of Christian missionaries than trying to interrogate injustice and my own relationship to “the world’s crimes” that we all take part in or conceal. It’s about giving a voice to injustice and violence, and allowing the reader to examine the complicity and responsibility of the speaker, the author, and themselves.
Your poems make me think about the use of tone and voice, particularly as they pertain to the skillful use of a first-person perspective. I find the use of first-person in my own writing is precarious because it’s too easy to rely on a sympathy or affection for the world that I find inauthentic. It allows me to demonstrate how sensitive I am to the detriment of more complicated ideas that go unsaid. And yet, there are poets like Louise Gluck whose use of first person is so good that it’s as if the perspective falls away and her “I” becomes the reader. How do you find space for that perspective that isn’t indulgent and self-important?
DD: For me, keeping the poem turned outward helps. If I imagine that I’m talking to my children and my wife and my brother and my mother and my friends on the page, then right away I avoid the pitfalls of self-indulgence. Even when a self speaks, the lyric decenters and atomizes it as it’s searching for communion.
I once heard Zadie Smith say that her best self gets put on the page. I tend to feel that way too. The fact is I do have a deep sympathy and affection for the world and the things and people and animals in it, and I want to say it over and over again before I die. I’m willing to risk sentimentality and self-indulgence to do that.
Moving away from my first-person poems, I love the poems where you put two or more figures in conversation — “Sonny Rollins Explains the Apocrypha to Judas,” “Mike Tyson Explains Middle Age to John Keats,” “The Nine Mayan Gods of the Underworld Explain Delusions to John Roberts,” “Ruth Stone Explains the Book of the Dead to Sylvia Plath.” I love the idea of eavesdropping on these exchanges. These are the slant-persona poems. They don’t aspire to a radical shifting of voice — or some variety of ventriloquism — but you are channeling spirits and biographies and histories in these “confrontations.”
CT: I call those “conversation poems” that they’re less dialogues, less persona poems, than interpretations of the artists and their ideas as you suggest. If they’re personas they’re “slant-personas” and I like that idea too. I wasn’t interested in trying to appropriate the literal voice of these people, but I was inspired by their histories and philosophies and wanted to try and conjure for the reader the kind of wonder I felt in my research about them. I was interested in the idea of exposing some of their beliefs, whether I believed them or not, and the lessons and questions of their experience that I found compelling.
DD: My favorite poem in this book is “Like Shining from Shook Foil.” This is a novelistic poem about a grisly historical event, the kind of poem Cormac McCarthy would have written if he had written poetry. Could you talk about this poem as history and explain its role in the collection’s arc?
CT: I read McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses when I was 13 and the experience was transformative. I spent a lot of high school reading McCarthy. Blood Meridian made a big impression on my teenage self. One of the things McCarthy does better than most other writers is examine honestly how compassion and unethical behavior are prominent features of humanity, often manifesting in the same person –– as McCarthy himself demonstrated in his own life. And his books are based on heavily researched history.
When I considered as an adolescent that I might want to be a writer, I badly wanted to write like McCarthy. As an adult, one of the few ways I can emulate his artistry without devolving into mimicry is to also base my writing in research. And “Like Shining from Shook Foil” was one of those poems. It started as wanting to write about a ghost story my mother used to tell her children about a family in rural Rensselaer County, New York that was killed by their farmhand who then buried them under their floorboards. She always said the story was true but for a long time I couldn’t find any proof. I spent several years working on the structure of the poem and imaging a plausible backstory until a family friend, someone steeped in the history of that region, confirmed the story and told me about the Morner family, murdered on their farm in 1911.
DD: Another poem I love in What Monsters You Make of Them is “Encomium Post Requiem,” which fuses the love poem with the elegy in a unique way. It’s a love poem whose subject is in mourning. Could you talk about this poem as a love poem and discuss its place in the collection as a whole?
CT: Elegies are just a kind of love poem, I think. My wife was close to her grandmother and often talks about her as if she is still learning from her, which resurrects her from her death 20 years ago. I never met her grandmother but listening to Jaimie talk about her would make anyone wish they had. Jaimie’s love for me is in part a reflection of her grandmother who was one of the people who taught her about love. Hence, “The woman I love loves” in the poem. And love works backward from me to Jaimie to her grandmother too. Love makes time and history fluid. This is also part of the act of survival that is poetry. Love is a kind of survival mechanism.
DD: Who is an underrated underread poet you’d recommend to others?
CT: I don’t know about underrated, but Lindsey Hera Bird, Jean Follain, Renee Gladman, and Jay Wright are underread. Katherine Larson, who is also a molecular biologist, wrote an extraordinary book called Radial Symmetry that won the 2010 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. It’s one of my favorite books of poems of the last twenty years.
But for living poets, I wish more people read BH Fairchild, Kathleen Graber, Richard Reeves, Paisley Rekdal, Mary Ruefle, and Richard Siken. They’re not underread but I think they deserve a larger audience.
A lot of good poets are underread and some poets are overread. And the field sometimes confuses popularity with talent. But I think time has a way of working those things out, and good poets generally find the audience they deserve one way or another.
What poems do you wish you knew better? What books are on your nightstand that weren’t there a year ago? What are some of the best poets that were new to you in the last five years?
DD: I have 2010 Toyota Corolla with a CD player in it. So, on my way to and from work or running errands, I always listen to poetry CDs. Usually, it’s Hopkins, Frost, Ginsberg, or Ruth Stone, but last year I had an 18 CD version of Paradise Lost and I listened to it for months. I would replay each CD several times before moving on to the next one, and eventually I finished, but I still don’t feel like I know John Milton well enough.
When Louise Glück won the Nobel, I realized I hadn’t read much of her work. I’d read part of an essay collection she wrote and a few poems, but nothing else. I realized my understanding of the world and poetry is vertebraed by all the writing I haven’t read as much as it is by what I have. I bought Glück’s collected poems, but I still don’t know her as well as I should.
I’m also curious about contemporary Italian poetry. I wish I could read Italian, and I wish more contemporary Italian poets were translated into English. My friend Marella Feltrin-Morris did some amazing translations of a contemporary Italian poet named Francesco Targhetta, and her translations left me hungry for more.
Several recently read books still idling on my nightstand are Red Studio by Murray Silverstein, Elswhere: An Elegy by Faisal Mohyuddin, Of Tyrant by Leah Umansky, and Marie Howe’s New and Selected.
I recently reorganized by bookshelves and put all of William Heyen’s books and all of H.L. Hix’s books on one bookcase next to my easy chair in my bedroom. In the last five years, I have really dug into Heyen and Hix and I am always learning new things from those two.
What is something you haven’t done yet in poetry that you’d like to do at some point?
CT: I know I’m not interested in writing another book like What Monsters You Make of Them. I’m enthusiastic about sharing it with people but spent a long time writing it and then became comfortable with the idea that it would never be published. I’m comfortable with the idea that I may never publish another book. The business of trying to get a book published can be wearisome and dull. Poetry is something I desperately need in my life, but I never want to feel desperate about the publishing side of the endeavor. At times I erred in that desire. I haven’t written a poem in over a year, but I think about poetry all the time. Whenever those next poems come, I hope they are immersive and delightfully strange.
You’ve done a lot to create audiences for other poets, curating their work through events, anthologies, and interviews. What are some of the best lessons you’ve learned from these experiences and why is celebrating other poets so essential to your discourse and work?
DD: All the things I’ve done for other poets, I am also doing for myself because it’s fun and because I love poetry and poets so much. I have learned that I always have time, even when I don’t. I am always learning how, again and again to persevere in the face of rejection. I don’t take things personally and I don’t view my relationships with other writers and editors as transactional. When I do something for someone, I don’t expect anything in return. I try to do the things for other writers that I wish someone would do for me — and to do things that have been done for me along the way. If my wife and kids read my poetry, and a handful of friends like you, I feel lucky.
I’ve learned to be humble even as I remain ambitious, and to look at everything related to poetry as an adventure. I’ve also learned that sometimes I must dial back and reprioritize.
Lastly, I learned that small gestures of support matter — going to readings, sending someone an email praising a poem, buying their books directly from small presses and sharing them with friends.
CT: I heard an interview recently with a writer who has been famous for over two decades. Their answers sounded like they were trying hard to be profound and it came across to me as overly precious. It occurred to me that this author had been famous for so long that they’re expected to sound profound all the time. Their answers in some ways were the consequence of being a public figure asked to perform constantly. What’s the best way for authors to stay authentic to themselves and their work, and what dangers do you see for art from the expectations of the audience?
DD: To stay authentic, stay vulnerable. Move outside your circle of friends. The provincialism of the cosmopolitan and the closed loop of university and college life has created some unfortunate cul de sacs in contemporary American poetry. At the same time, one of the most pernicious aspects of daily life in America is the ingrained anti-intellectualism that appears to be the default setting for many of our fellow citizens.
Do things for other people. I suggest that you are going to remain authentic to yourself and to your art if you spend more time deeply engaging with, and busily singing through, the world, and less time turned inward.
The great thing about poetry is that there is no audience. As Tim Green has pointed out, a handful of poetry “bestsellers” are assigned in syllabi across the nation. A handful of poets are on the lips of the poetry cognoscenti for a few years and then are replaced by a handful more. The poetry middle class, those of us lucky enough to publish at small university presses, prop up the poetry luminaries of the moment and put money in the pockets of literary institutions.
For every Rupi Kaur and Billy Collins and Mary Oliver and Amanda Gorman who breaks through to a wider audience, there are a hundred Dante Di Stefanos. I don’t find this situation lamentable. Contradictorily, I do believe in unfettered quixotic ambition. I do aspire to write a poem as durable and infinite as “The Wreck of the Deutschland” or “Sonnet 18,” or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” or “Goblin Market,” or “Lady Lazarus,” or “won’t you celebrate with me,” or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
I have interacted with many people at all levels in the poetry world who feel like they haven’t received the accolades and attention they deserve. While I can understand this feeling, I also think it’s ridiculous. When you focus too narrowly on recognition, you are missing the point of our shared art, which is to dwell inside poems and to live by poetry, which is a great way to move through the brief instant of a life bookended by darkness.
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To. read Christian Teresi’s poem “Reading Nadezhda Mandelstam in Virgin Islands National Park,” published earlier On The Seawall, click here.