What Happens After? A Conversation with Richie Hofmann about the Intersection of Visual Art, Opera, and History in his poetry

Richie Hofmann is the author of a collection of poems, Second Empire (2015). He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems appear in the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, the New Republic, Ploughshares, and Poetry. He has been featured in the New York Times Style Magazine, Poetry Daily, the Academy of American Poets, Best New Poets, and Poets & Writers. His poem, “Children of the Sun,” is anthologized in Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now (2017). The New York Times featured his poem, "Book of Statues," in a reading by actor Matt Bomer. He has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He earned a B.A. from Boston University, an M.F.A. from the Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. in English literature from Emory University, where he has held the Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry. He is a book reviews editor for Kenyon Review and writes criticism for the Los Angeles Review of Books. A 2017-19 Wallace Stegner Fellow, he was recently named Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.

On May 7th, 2020, Richie Hofmann spoke with Interlochen Review editors Tatiana Shpakow and Priyanka Voruganti via Zoom. They discussed the influences of Benjamin Britten and James Merrill, how the events of past and recent history inform poetry, and the idiosyncrasy of one’s poetic voice.

Tatiana Shpakow: Your collection Second Empire opens with the poem “Sea Interlude: Dawn,” which serves as the first installment of a series of “Sea Interludes” throughout the book: would you walk us through the collection, and how you came to “create the world in which you love and is loved, a world at once distinct from homosexuality and inextricable from it,” as the Kenyon Review described it?

Richie Hofmann: Your question is about creating the shape of the book. I had written all of the Sea Interludes in one week. Originally, there were six of them. I was living in Atlanta at the time—when I was a student at Emory. We had a snow storm, which is rare in Atlanta. This was something like one whole inch of snow, which, in Traverse City, would be the lightest weather ever. But, in Atlanta, it was a big deal. They didn’t have the plows to shovel it up and no one had a personal shovel, so everything was shut down. We had no school for six days. You couldn’t even go to the grocery store—it was that debilitating. So I was stuck at home, longing for these other seaside places, and listening to Benjamin Britten’s music. I wrote those poems, which are inspired by the Sea Interludes from his opera Peter Grimes. 

When it came time to put the book together, I thought that those interludes could be placed throughout the book, as a way of telling an overarching story, and then the poems in between those interludes could serve to modify, complicate, and deepen the mood that each interlude expresses. I felt that they told the story: I’m in love, but I’m scared that it won’t last. Now I’m really scared it won’t last, what if something upends or destroys this relationship. And then finally in “Moonlight”—What happens after? How do you live in the aftermath of that love? So I knew that those four poems would be columns holding up the architecture of the book.

Priyanka Voruganti: It seems like you draw a lot of inspiration from James Merrill. I’m vaguely aware of Divine Comedies but more familiar with Merrill’s fantastical focus in The Changing Light at Sandover. In what ways has Merrill’s writing inspired yours? Are there any parallels between your work and his? What drew you to him?

RH: Divine Comedies is one of my favorite books. When I was a freshman in college, I was taking a poetry class and my teacher gave me a copy of that book as a gift. It was my first time ever reading any of James Merrill’s poems or even hearing about them, and I was instantly in love. I thought that there was such a world of feeling that his poems were exploding with. So I actually ended up writing my senior thesis in college on James Merrill and the visual arts—his poetry’s interest in painting. And his own collections of paintings, not just in the poems, but in life. I was very much in the world of those poems as a scholar when I was young. And I got this amazing opportunity to live in his house, which they keep open as a residency for writers. He died in 1995 and it’s pretty much exactly as it was at the time of his death. A poet will live in the apartment for six months or so; I came over the summer and helped organize his book collection. 

So I was living not only in the place where these poems were written but in the place where these poems came alive. The Changing Light at Sandover all takes place around that table, the crazily painted dining room in the apartment in Stonington and I was there, I was living there and writing there. I wrote a few poems in the book while I was there, including the poem “Mirror,” which has a rhyming pattern. It’s the oldest poem in the book—it’s about James Merrill’s mirror and about the way his ghost is a presence in my work and in my life. Merrill’s work is full of ghosts. Changing Light at Sandover is a great ghost story. So I thought it was appropriate to channel his spirit into my world and my work. 

PV: You said you focused your senior thesis on Merrill’s visual art, his paintings. In a lot of your work, there’s a clear emphasis on the aesthetic of things, on visual interpretations and translating that into poetry, or trying to emulate that through poetics. How do you see the overlap between visual art and poetry in your work? 

RH: It’s a complicated question. I think I’m drawn to visual art in poetry because I’m drawn to visual art in life. If there’s any place I could be right now, it would be in a museum looking at some huge painting and not stuck in my apartment. I have that autobiographical interest. In terms of the artistic connections, I think focusing on another art form gives a writer a window into all of these principles—design, form, shape, color, line, mood—that might teach them something about poetry and how poetry can exploit those things. There’s a long tradition—we call it ekphrasis––of poets responding to visual works of art. How can a poem be like a painting? There’s a lot of literature about lyric poetry’s relationship to still life. Where we have this focus on objects, this small, interior, domestic, private space that a lyric poem can be, as opposed to a kind of grand history painting that might be closer to epic. So I guess I’d say that thinking about visual art within a poem helps me think about what poetry can do, at the end of the day. Whenever you’re stuck, I recommend going and experiencing another art form. Whether it’s music, or theater, or the visual arts. Engaging with a different art form might give you another way in—artistically, formally—it might give you a new starting place with your own work. I’ve relied on that countless times. 

TS: So you mentioned Benjamin Britten earlier as being an influence for Sea Interludes. On your website, you detail that you taught, "Literature and Opera," at Stanford, in which students drafted full-length opera libretti adapted from literary sources. Would you talk about the intersection between opera and poetry, and how that influenced Second Empire?

RH: Your mention of Benjamin Britten reminds me of something else. That Benjamin Britten and James Merrill were both gay, which is rarer than you’d think in the history of the arts. And both major artists from the past. One of my interests in this book was about creating or imagining a kind of lineage of gay history. So I think my interest in those two artists in particular has something to do with being queer and being in history. 

Opera. Well I love the Sea Interludes—go listen to them, they’ve been recorded a lot. They’re absolutely magnificent. Deeply expressive pieces. In a way, I think that they’re very emotion-forward. I think that’s why they were so inspiring for me during that week of snow days. They unlock a world of feeling for you. And interestingly, they’re the part of the opera that has no singing in it. They’re just in between the scenes. So I think, as in my book, in the Britten opera, the Interludes set the mood. They set the tone that the story emerges out of. I think that’s something I was copying from Britten when I was organizing this book. I guess there are other operas in this book—Parsifal—and the title of the book, Second Empire, comes from the Second Empire-style opera house in Paris, the Palais Garnier. Opera is just something that’s always in the background of my work. I don’t know if my poetry has been shaped by opera, other than the fact that it makes me think about what it means to have a voice. What it means to step out of the action and comment on the emotions. That’s what an aria is. In a lot of ways they’re similar to poems. They’re not so interested in telling a story per se, but those arias are moments where we step outside of the story and talk about the interior emotional implications of the narrative on the characters. That’s probably the most useful link to poetry.

PV: In an interview with the Columbia Journal, you said: “I have a somewhat formal voice as a poet: I am drawn to sentences that aren’t speech-like. There is a formality and otherworldliness that I hope to cultivate in my poems.” In our Master Class with you, you elaborated on this, speaking about how a poem is an “event of language, somewhat perpendicular to human speech.” I loved how you put that. Why are you drawn to writing of this kind of vernacular or syntax? In what ways does your poetic voice say things, notice things, do things, that normal human speech can’t?

RH: I think, on the most basic level, it has to do with one’s private, personal taste. Relating to your opera question, I’ve always liked art that is very arty, that is very artificial and high octane. So that’s probably something that I look for in a poem. I began most of my poetry writing with writing poems in traditional received forms, with rhymes, sonnets, classical forms. I’ve always been interested in the way that poetry is a shaped, artificial expression. So I think it’s probably something that I just have in my taste about art. Other poets are really masters at capturing human speech. Those people who write screenplays or plays have such a difficult job where all of the action is in dialogue and voice, and to make that sound really real is something I always envy and admire. 

Weirdly enough, I think Robert Frost is a poet I admire for capturing speech. He is someone writing in perfect iambic pentameter, but he is also very good at conveying speech patterns and psychology at the same time. I tend to like things that are very shaped, though. I’m drawn to poems that feel a little bit alien to our usual way of speaking. I have many friends, and students, and teachers who are much more interested in capturing contemporary speech and I admire that, but it’s just never been part of my practice—yet! Who knows? I’m old compared to you people, but I’m not so old yet.

TS: You were the recipient of the Wallace Stegner Fellowship and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. Could you tell us what that experience was like and how those opportunities and how it affected your writing? 

RH: The Ruth Lilly Fellowship given by the Poetry Foundation is a really great honor. For a lot of poets it’s kind of the first time you get any attention as a young writer, and that’s something to be celebrated. One of the prizes of that fellowship is getting to be published in Poetry magazine, which has such an illustrious and meaningful history, now more than a hundred years old. I always follow the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and I’m always excited to see who the new winners are every year, because I’m always looking to be introduced to new voices. I think there’s something really exciting about what young people are doing, what new people are doing. The Ruth Lilly Fellowship is a kind of debut onto the scene for a lot of writers—it’s a really rare and special opportunity. 

The Stegner Fellowship is totally different, because it’s not a prize so much as an opportunity to spend two years with funding to work on your poems. So upon winning that fellowship, you get to go to Stanford, and it’s like a second, even more serious MFA Program.. You get to take a workshop every week, you get to study with amazing writers like one of my heroes, Eavan Boland, who died last week. All of us in that community are still reeling from her death; she meant so much to us. I loved reading everyone’s remembrances of her and seeing what an immense impact she had on writers all over the world and in her twenty-five years of running that program. In the Stegner fellowship, you’re also with talented and interesting young poets, and you’re getting the privilege of seeing what they’re working on week after week. Like any good workshop, there’s a teacher, but the real teachers are all of the other students, too, and you’re learning every week from what their poems are doing, what you think is working in their work, and what you think isn’t working in their work. I found the Stegner fellowship to be such a privilege: to get to sit in a room with my favorite up-and-coming writers and to get a first glimpse at what they were working on before it is published, before it is in a book, before it is online, and to get to be part of a conversation about it. That was really inspiring for me. 

PV: Thinking about history and the continuation of that into the history of American poetry and how current events shape that history, in your Master Class we were talking about how your poetry is concerned with history, and especially pertaining to one’s contemporary complicity in past histories, be it the events of evil or good. Can you speak a bit more on this and how your work addresses history and the idea of complicity? 

RH: Poetry is an expression of experience and each individual experience that a poem might capture is not untouched by those huge forces that shape our lives, so I think there’s a way that poetry can be a space where you reflect on those forces and keep them complicated. I think that’s what a poem can do that an essay on history can’t quite do, because in poetry there’s just not a single answer, as much as we may want there to be one as readers and writers. It’s a very complex space where you can explore all kinds of vectors and how they converge in an individual voice.

One of the questions that I am always asking is: how can I exist, how do I exist, in this immense world that is here and now and that I participate in, and that has come before me and will come after. How did all of those forces converge to make not just the life that I would live, but to shape the experience of that life that I would have, artistically and in other ways? I think that’s how history enters into this book. In a way it is about a desire to feel connected with other people, with other places, with other times, to have some assurance knowing that something existed before you, that you fit into this big and complex trajectory. That history seems to be a part of what shapes our identities, and that identity is how we shape our language, how we are shaped by language, all of that is going to be at play in poems. Probably even in poems that you don’t think engage with politics or engage with history. Those places are not going to be untouched by all that’s come before it. 

Poetry is this very ancient art form and sometimes I’m very moved to think that we are writing it today, engaging with it today. Our poems don’t look very different from the poems in the past. Maybe rhyming couplets were really popular in the Victorian period and now they’re less popular, but at the end of the day, the real stuff of poems, the questions about life and death, about love and desire, those are the same questions that Sappho had when she was writing on Lesbos. We imagine those pieces as the outcome of all of the human pain that she lived and experienced, and it’s nearly identical to the human pain we experience now, even thousands of years later, in an unfathomably different world. Across languages, across cultures, across styles, we have these deep questions about why we’re here and how we’re to live. Poetry has always been one way of getting closer to an answer. 

PV: So when you have a poem in which the contemporary manifests in conjunction alongside the archaic, for example with Les Troyens, is weaving the present into a piece about the past an attempt at rewriting history or shifting the historical gaze? Or, alternatively, is weaving the present into the past a way of introducing a new lens through which to view the past? 

RH: I would say that it’s really about understanding the present through the past, or understanding how the past teaches us more about our own moment. When I’m writing a poem, I don’t know if I’m thinking about it with a real critical sensibility. But I think my interest in history is the desire to better understand our present. All the vectors of my identity, I want to understand them better. I want to keep them complicated, and history is one fertile landscape in which to see myself in the poems and in the world that I’m observing. 

TS: In an interview with the Columbia Journal, you talked a little bit about your next manuscript, an exploration of the city of your ancestors. Could you tell us a little bit about other projects you’re currently working on or are planning for the future?

RH: I always have many of them going. I wish I were focused and organized and could be working just on one thing at a time. You can tell I’m not the organized type. I’m working on a couple of manuscripts. When I got to Stanford, I thought that I had to start fresh, and write a poem every week. For me, as a writer, there’s a real value to that, to not think about what is the project, what is the big thing? I love to design these ridiculous, ambitious projects that I’ll never complete because they make me feel more secure having this big scaffolding. I have to say, it’s felt really good, these past couple of years, to put all of that to the side. All of these beautiful things, history and the role of the arts, to turn that all off and just work, poem to poem. Not to think, Oh, this is going to fit into some book, or this is going to fit into some theoretical interest I have, but to let the poems help me discover my obsessions. I feel secure when I have those scaffolds, but I often wonder if they’re holding me back, or if they’re limiting what I’m writing about, or how I’m going to approach something. Lately, I’ve just been working on individual poems and finding new and great friends to share those poems with and to not be too beholden to the idea of a book or a project. That’s been really refreshing. I wish that refreshment for all of you, for everyone. It feels good to be a poem poet, not a book poet. 

PV: Have you been writing anything about the current climate? 

RH: I think it’s been influencing me in a couple of ways. I tried to write one poem about my life now, which is being stuck indoors, or taking a bath and walking into another room being the extent of my exercise, but that didn’t prove too interesting. I have noticed that in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been in far away places in my mind. Poetry is a place to be steeped in memory, in fantasy, and I don’t think I’ve ever needed that quite as much as now, when our world is so narrowed. I haven’t written anything in a public voice about the disease or criticising Trump about his horrible response, or anything like that. I feel like I’m not ready yet to engage with the public world in these poems. I’m mostly in the private world of memory and fantasy, and trying to escape through that, into the page and to a new world.