Interview about "To the Republic"

A few week's ago Vox Populi published my poem "To the Republic," a poem I wrote in (sort of) response to Horace's ode of the same name. My friend David Dear was puzzled by my poem, also puzzled by how the two poems were interconnected, so I invited him to write up a few questions and said I would try to answer them. Yesterday I sat down with those questions, which (not surprisingly, if you know David) were cogent and curious and demanded considerable thought from me. So today, with his permission, I'm sharing this Q&A about the poems.

1. Given that the Horace seems a relatively straightforward allegory, while yours is much more allusive, why did you choose Horace’s as the reference point for yours?

My poem was born during a session of my Thursday-night writing group. Each week, between four and ten women meet for a meal and then write two or three new drafts triggered by prompts that one or the other of us brings along. This draft arose from a very simple prompt that I brought to the group. Merely, we read Horace’s poem, reacted to it briefly, and then I said, “Write a poem titled ‘To the Republic.’” Each of us then wrote for ten minutes and afterward shared our drafts. We never do any workshopping of these drafts; merely we react to what we’re hearing and then move on. But what struck me about this raw work was how different our drafts all were from Horace’s. Each was a metaphor-in-embryo, and all reflected very individual, very private engagements with the notion of republic. No one wrote a “ship of state” kind of piece as he did. One could speculate on the reasons for that: a modern tendency to center work around the personal rather than the polemical; a male-female divide. But what I think, too, is that this very simple prompt tapped into a particular feature of metaphorical search that I have since identified in many resistance poems: the use of metaphor as both cloak (that is, protection from attack) and dagger (a weapon for attack). In addition, the prompt allowed me to see that preplanning a metaphor (Horace’s, for instance, feels very preplanned; Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain” is another) is different work from allowing a metaphor to take form organically . . . that is, letting a new poem discover, via the process of writing, the metaphor it will become. 

 2. Horace’s and yours are very different in form; yours in fact could be considered a sonnet. Was that a conscious choice and, if so, why that form?

I did not make any attempt to imitate Horace’s form, nor was I consciously framing my poem as a sonnet. Nonetheless, my thoughts are filled with sonnets, and I fairly often end up with fourteen-liners without trying to. The stanzas here are not traditional octaves and sestets but two sets of five followed by one set of four. So even though they add up to fourteen lines, I found myself playing with them as three five-line stanzas with the final line missing. So, no volta . . . rather, the absence of volta; something unresolved; something darkening.

 3. The light in your poem grows darker as the poem moves along, which seems clearly a metaphor, yet your description of nightfall evokes such quiet and peace. Why the apparent contrast?

The word republic evokes country. On that level of connotation, I love my country, and I fear for my country; ergo, the darkening. The word country itself has double meaning: the nation and the countryside. As a citizen, I am elegiac for my nation; and as a private person, I am elegiac for my forty acres of forest, now lost to me forever. So as I began to tease out new drafts of the poem, these metaphors entangled. Evening is a glorious moment in the Maine woods: the shifts of light, the day sounds becoming the night sounds, the animals alive in air and brush, the poignant singing thrush. But the woods at night are also full of danger. The predators emerge. And the small beings they hunt are not liable to see morning.

 4. Your poem features two animals of the night, an owl and a bat, and you’ve said the poem’s owl’s echoes of Minerva aren’t intentional. Why then did you choose those two, and what do you see them accomplishing in the poem?

I chose those two animals because they are exact for the situation. In the forest, on a summer night, at twilight, the owl and the bat take to the sky. They mark the transition between day and night. And of course they are both beautiful and deadly.

 5. In your last verse, what do you see the night not failing at?

I see the night as not failing to arrive. Twilight in summer is long and lingering, but night is still inevitable.

 6. Do you see the poem as optimistic or pessimistic, and why?

I don’t know that it’s either. I tried to write a poem that simply is. 

 7. It’s been said that a poem is never really finished, a poet eventually just walks away from it. Now that this one has been published, if you had the chance to go back to it, is there anything in it you’d change, and if so, what and why?

I wonder if the repetition of heavens (twice) and heavy so close to them is sonic overkill. I may tinker with that.