SEEING INTO THE PREDICTABLE: AN
INTERVIEW
OF CATHERINE TUFARIELLO
The
following interview
was conducted October 4, 2005
at the Greenwich Terrace Café in Valparaiso.
Kathleen Mullen:
I thought we’d start by talking a little about form. One of the
first things readers of your book will notice is that it’s full of
couplets and quatrains, sonnets and villanelles and so forth. How
did you get started writing poetry? And have you always written
in meter and rhyme?
Catherine Tufariello:
People sometimes ask me why I write in form. A lot of the
motivation is the sheer pleasure I get from it. Even my earliest
poems — I was twelve or thirteen — were metrical and rhyming.
That was in the mid-70’s, when meter and rhyme were thought of, more so
than today, as hopelessly quaint and outmoded. My teachers
encouraged me in writing, but I think they assumed I’d grow out of my
rhyming and metrical phase into writing free verse. In college I
did experiment with it, but I discovered that I needed something to
push against, some resistance, to give impetus and spur my
imagination. If the lines could be anything I wanted, if there
were no constraints, I found that total “freedom” paralyzing, whereas
what seemed to be limitation was liberating. It’s sort of an open
secret among poets who work in form that the constraints can free you
up.
Mullen:
So you were attracted to form from the beginning.
Tufariello:
Yes. But after starting grad school in the mid-80s, I completely
stopped writing poetry for eight or nine years. I was under
pressure to define myself as a critic — this was in the heyday of
literary theory — and though I always loved reading poetry, I lost
confidence in myself as a poet. What got me back to writing was
the experience of separation and divorce, which I wrote about maybe a
year and a half after it happened; I’d finished my Ph.D. and had begun
my first teaching job. The dam just broke. I’ll never forget the
intense feeling of joy, this sort of fierce joy, that the thing I
thought I had lost forever was really still there. It was
underground all the time and now it had burst out again. That summer I
spent writing the sonnets in the divorce sequence. There were
twenty-one of them, and I realized later that most of them weren’t much
good. For the book I chose five or six of the better ones.
I’ve had dry spells since, but never one that long, and I hope I can
keep writing new poems.
Mullen:
We’ll have to come back to questions of form later on. But,
speaking of new work, you’re going to be the featured poet in VPR this
spring. Have you decided which poems to submit?
Tufariello:
I’m pleased about being featured. My plan is to send Ed Byrne a
few unpublished poems, including some new verse riddles in a sequence
of fifteen or so that I’ve written over the last couple of years.
I’m also planning to try a few of these out at the Wordfest reading
next week.
Mullen:
Why riddles? What got you interested in writing those?
Tufariello:
Riddles have interested me at least since I read The Hobbit when I was twelve or
so. The wonderful riddle-guessing contest between Bilbo Baggins
and Gollum made a big impression! I like riddles because they’re
pure fun, but they also go to the heart of what poetry is and
does. They take something common, ordinary, normally taken for
granted — like snow or the grass or an egg — and reveal the mystery and
oddness of it. They’re one of the oldest literary forms, but they
still fascinate poets, and I think that’s why.
Mullen:
Emily Dickinson wrote quite a few riddles.
Tufariello:
Yes, some of them are pretty easy to guess (like the snow and train
ones) and others are harder and more abstract. Sylvia Plath has
that poem called “Metaphor” that starts, “I’m a riddle in nine
syllables,” and all the lines that follow have the same syllable
count. The speaker turns out to be a pregnant woman. It’s
sort of a funny poem — at one point she compares herself to a melon
balanced on two skinny tendrils — but it also gets across the
uncanniness of the whole experience of pregnancy. Joshua
Mehigan’s recent book The Optimist
has a riddle in Anglo-Saxon accentual verse in which the shape of the
poem on the page is a clue to the answer. Not that it helped me
get it! But I enjoy riddles even when they stump me.
Mullen:
Do you think your interest in riddles carries through to your other
poems or your approach to poetry?
Tufariello:
Yes, I guess so, in that I’m attracted to subjects that seem familiar
and predictable, but turn out to be strange or surprising.
There’s a poem about this, “Plot Summary,” in the divorce
sequence. It’s about the feeling that I was trapped in a bad
play, in which I already knew the plot. I was bored in advance and felt
nothing could come of my being forced to enact this role of the
rejected wife. What I discovered in actually undergoing it was
that’s not where the surprises were, that the experience of divorce was
quite different from what I had predicted from the bare outlines.
So I think in general I’m drawn to moments where suddenly you are able
to see into the essence of something you thought you knew. “The
Dream of Extra Room” is like that, or “The Walrus at Coney Island.” You
think you know the walrus until you see him dive into the water and
then you realize what his real element is.
Mullen:
It’s also like the ending of “Chemist’s Daughter” where the world looks
solid but is “wild as thought.” That’s one of my favorite of your
poems.
Tufariello:
That’s nice to hear because I wasn’t certain I had brought that one
off. I rewrote it many times and in different forms before I
finally settled on this 12-line form. For a long time it had a
hexameter in the last line, but a friend of mine said, “You’ve got to
get rid of that.” And I did, and now the end’s a lot better.
Mullen:
So it expanded and contracted, almost like the universe you were
writing about. Do you find mostly that when you revise, those
revisions expand or contract?
Tufariello:
On the whole I think I’m more inclined to cut; the impulse of
compression is strong. Sometimes I find the first stanza of the
poem is expendable. Maybe I was warming up, gathering momentum at the
beginning, and the real start of the poem came later. If it’s
stanzaic, I end up realizing that a stanza could be eliminated without
harming the poem, that it doesn’t need to be there, and in fact cutting
it would make the poem better. The poem I’m working on now, I keep
struggling with that. I keep putting the first stanza in, then
taking it out, and I haven’t quite decided what to do with it.
So, I do a fair amount of both changing lines and removing parts that I
consider extraneous, that don’t contribute to the whole effect.
Mullen:
And how do you know that, how do you come to know that?
Tufariello:
That’s a good question! And I’m not sure I can answer it.
For me, the real core of the poem sometimes doesn’t become clear until
quite a lot of time has passed. It’s sort of an intuitive
process. And at a certain point I realize I can’t do any more
with the poem. Then it’s “finished.”
Mullen:
Thinking about the whole book, do you see a difference between the
first and the later poems? They aren’t at all chronological, are
they?
Tufariello:
Well it’s interesting you ask that, because my editor at Texas Tech,
Robert Fink, helped a lot with the organization and the revising.
The manuscript as I put it together was pretty loose in its
organization. But the book now has more of an autobiographical
arc, or a journey, from poems of childhood, then a descent into
darkness, dealing with loss and grief, (the infertility poems are a
part of that), and then a pulling out into a sort of redemption, a joy
at the end. The book, as he helped me reshape it, works toward
the birth of my daughter, and so has more of a narrative arc than my
version did. The poems aren’t arranged chronologically, in the
order I wrote them, but they imply a story. At first I was
resistant to the idea that a poetry book needed an underlying
narrative. It’s not the way I read a book of poems, never from
beginning to end, but I tend to dip in, let the book fall open and read
it there. So I was taken aback at his feeling that the manuscript
wasn’t yet a book, and we negotiated over it. Now I’m
grateful. I couldn’t see the thematic connections between poems
I’d written at such different periods in my life, and I think the book
is stronger for that reconstruction.
Mullen:
I think the book does deserve study on that level. I think of
Wallace Stevens’ saying, “One poem proves another and the whole.” So,
at some level, do you think the poems in your book converse with one
another?
Tufariello:
Yes; and I came to realize that the movement of many of the individual
poems in the book, as well as the sequences, had that same structure —
descent, then emergence. Certainly the sequence on infertility
had that movement, in the sense that it comes through into recognition
that a marriage without children still constitutes a family, and then
the poems about pregnancy are kind of a coda to that. Another
surprise.
Mullen:
How does that work — that sense of seeming predictability opening into
something unknown — in the religious poems sequence? Or is that
sequence in there for a different reason?
Tufariello:
That’s an interesting question.
Mullen:
I think of the image of Boaz, waking up and seeing the shivering girl,
her hair “a mist of musk.” That’s surely an unpredictable
event. I was wondering why the religious poems were there, how
they participate in the larger movement of the book.
Tufariello:
Well, a lot of the poems in the book are about women’s lives and
women’s experiences. Though I’m not traditionally religious, I’m
drawn to the stories of the Bible and find a lot of imaginative impetus
there. One part of the impulse behind the Rebecca poems, for
instance, was that they let me approach the subject of infertility
indirectly before being able to talk about it in a personal way, trying
to get inside of her mind and imagine what her infertility must have
been like for her. And similarly with Ruth, she’s a character
whose sweetness I love. I love that story, in a way, because God
doesn’t appear or speak in it. There are no angels or divine
visitations. It’s so human, and the people seem believable and
familiar. Naomi is full of contradictions, and she seems very
modern when she rails at God (the seemingly absent God who isn’t really
absent) for abandoning her. And Boaz is a complicated figure
also, what his motives are, finally. But what he does is kind.
Mullen:
I want to come back to something you just said, how writing poems from
a distance can allow the writer to write more personal poems. One thing
I like especially about the sonnets in that sequence is their
conversational, sometimes irreverent tone. You seem to get that
through using questions, and I wonder whether that’s a conscious choice
or whether it flowed from the interrogation of the story itself.
Tufariello:
It’s funny, that wasn’t a conscious strategy. But I had a lot of
curiosity about the story. Maybe it comes from the general poetic
impulse of curiosity — feeling that what I think I know, perhaps I
don’t really know. Perhaps it’s allowing issues of doubt to come
in, wanting to get at what’s really underlying something, that might
not be immediately obvious. I think it’s also a way of getting a
contemporary purchase on these very old stories.
Mullen:
That goes along, again, with looking at something that seems
predictable and finding something unknown. So, writing poems
about Rebecca’s infertility allowed you to approach your own
infertility more directly?
Tufariello:
It did. I think I needed to attain a certain amount of distance
before I could write the sequence that came later. One thing that
helped me was using form. Even though I write out of my own
experience, and some of those experiences are painful, I never wanted
to be a confessional poet. I hope I avoid that through the
distancing involved in making experience into an artifact, a work of
art. So that it’s not raw feeling, or emotional
exhibitionism. I want readers to feel a sense of connection
rather than embarrassment, that they’re reading somebody’s private
journal when they’d rather not.
Mullen:
So that’s what form does for you?
Tufariello:
One of the things it does for me, yes. I keep coming back to a
short poem by Auden. It’s in his Collected Poems, a couplet near the
end: “Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, /
Force us to have second thoughts, free from the fetters of Self.”
I think that’s really true, because when I use meter and, typically,
rhyme, I can’t just write down my first impulse, first thought, which
might be clichéd or trite or false. I have to dig deeper,
and often end up surprising myself. The use of rhyme can do that,
bring in the element of randomness, serendipity into the writing.
That’s part of the reason I love using it: in casting about for a
rhyme pair, I end up generating a new image. For instance, in
“Free Time” needing a rhyme for “fish” (of which there aren’t many!)
led me to the metaphor for the cat’s ears, each one “a separately
tuning radar dish.” That came with a sort of happy shock, after I
thought I’d boxed myself into a corner.
Reading other poets, I also love surprises, the
sense that “Oh, there’s an unusual word, or an unusual rhyme, but it
fits perfectly.”
Mullen:
Can you give an example or two of what you mean?
Tufariello:
Well, A.E. Stallings does this all the time in her work. She has
a poem about visiting a notions shop in which she refers to “a quincunx
of bright buttons on a card.” Another poem ends by referring to
“the dark glissando of the snake.” Such apt but unexpected
words. As for surprise rhymes, I’ve always envied Larkin managing
to rhyme “fangs” and “meringues”! That’s in “A Study of Reading
Habits.” I can’t imagine anybody else yoking those two words.
Mullen:
You do use a variety of forms, what one reviewer calls “a zoo of
forms.” Even so, I think you invent forms sometimes.
Tufariello:
Sometimes, yes. I get a lot of pleasure out of that, using nonce
forms or ones that are less common. One example is the poem in
memory of Hans and Sophie Scholl of the White Rose resistance group.
Mullen:
Oh, really, that’s a form poem? I’d missed that.
Tufariello:
Actually it’s a loose form, variable meter, which sort of straddles the
borderline between metrical and free verse. There’s a base meter
that’s sometimes realized and sometimes just alluded to or even
rejected. Or there are two base meters in competition, playing
off against each other. There’s rhyme, but not in a fixed or
predictable pattern. To me it has an improvisatory feel, as if
you were feeling your way forward, groping ahead. I learned about
this form in a workshop with Dana Gioia at the West Chester University
poetry conference and wanted to try it. We studied “The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock” as an example, where Eliot approaches and
retreats from the iambic pentameter norm, shifting from line to line,
through the whole poem. So I had in my mind to try it. Then a few
months later I thought about using it to write the poem about the
Scholls. That’s the poem it took me longest to write — twenty
years between starting and finishing it. I first read Hans and
Sophie’s story when I was about twelve, and I was very moved by their
and their friends’ heroism. They were extremely important to my
growing up.
When I was sixteen I wrote to their sister, Inge
Aicher-Scholl, Hans and Sophie’s biographer and a peace activist in
Germany in her own right, and began a correspondence with her. In
the next few years I tried over and over to write an elegy for them, in
free verse, in blank verse, various forms, but I couldn’t make it work
and gave up. A long time after, in September 1998, when I was
living in New York, I came across her obituary in the paper and began
to think about writing the poem again. This time, I thought also
about the idea of writing a poem in variable meter, and said to myself,
“Why not try it in that form?” It freed me up to write the
poem: I got concerned about the technical aspects of making the
poem work and that distracted me from the fear that had frozen me
before, that I could not do justice to these people, not write an elegy
that would be fitting for them.
Mullen:
Another way that constraint can free the poem…
Tufariello:
Yes, and the poem came quickly after that. The image of the
leaflets spiraling down under the skylight — the gaiety, carelessness,
what the Italians would call the sprezzatura,
of that gesture — that image had haunted me for twenty years. I’d
even intuited that it could be the center of the poem; but I couldn’t
do anything with it until I had the form to distract me from my anxiety.
Mullen:
“I wasn’t able to do anything with the image until I had the
form.” There you go.
Tufariello:
Usually poems start for me with a line or lines that come easily and
are the donnée the
poem evolves from. Sometimes they’re the first, or somewhere in
the middle, or maybe the last… Though I guess you’re not supposed to
admit that! Frost is the big authority quoted against it, saying
he didn’t like poems that seemed written toward a good ending:
“That’s trickery. You’ve got to be the happy discoverer of your
ends.” What I like to hope is that the “last line first” poems don’t
necessarily read that way. But I need to have a few specific
lines, not just a concept or idea, or the poem doesn’t get off the
ground. Until I have that specific language and a sense of the form I
might use…
Mullen:
So you really have the sense of form right away from the very beginning?
Tufariello:
Often I grope toward it. But discovering the form the poem
“wants” to be, which is the way it feels, is the catalyst for following
through and completing it.
Mullen:
Does it inhere in the rhythms of the line or lines you have as your donnée?
Tufariello:
Often, yes. Usually the first line or lines will determine the
meter, and the lines that come to me just out of the blue are nearly
always metrical. Because I’ve read a lot of poetry, most of it written
before the twentieth century, writing in meter myself feels
natural. The rhyme scheme is harder and sometimes takes a long
time. I don’t think I’ve ever decided to write a sonnet; I
usually rough out a few lines or quatrains and then think, maybe this
is a sonnet. One sonnet in the book, “In Glass,” started out a
much longer poem and then got shorter and shorter, so finally I said,
“OK, this is really a sonnet.”
Mullen:
We’ve been talking about how poems find their forms. How do
subjects find you?
Tufariello:
That is the way it feels, often, that subjects choose me more than I
choose them. That was certainly true of, say, the White Rose
elegy and the poems on divorce and infertility. I guess I
gravitate to subjects with a powerful emotional pull. Before
writing the divorce sonnets, I’d read sonnet sequences, including
several by women, that dealt with a break up or loss of a relationship
— May Sarton’s “A Divorce of Lovers,” Elinor Wylie’s sonnets, Millay’s,
Marilyn Hacker’s, George Meredith’s “Modern Love.” So I knew
there was a tradition of writing on this topic, that it was sort of an
underside to the love sonnet tradition, and that gave me the idea that
I could master this difficult experience through writing about
it. But with the experience of infertility it was different; I
found many poems on related subjects — stillbirth, miscarriage,
abortion — but almost nothing on infertility. That’s begun to
change in the years since. But at the time I felt excited and
challenged by the thought of taking on a subject that hadn’t been
addressed by poets over and over again.
So pretty early on I wanted to try to write about
the experience of infertility, but at first I was too caught up in it
to have any distance. At first I was involved in the experience
as a patient, suffering anxiety and grief; but later I was also a poet
in that experience, responding with curiosity and empathy, thinking
there are lots of people in this situation and I want to render it
faithfully, to give voice to this pain in such a way that other women
will empathize and feel I’ve spoken to their experience as well.
The subject had seized me, and I felt that I was positioned, equipped
to speak about it.
Mullen:
How did this deep involvement affect you as a writer?
Tufariello:
I wrote the sequence pretty quickly for me, in about two or three
months, in fact, just a few months before I conceived my
daughter. When I wrote “After All,” it was important to me to
make peace with my infertility, to reconcile myself and to recognize
that a family without children could still be a family. But even
then I was toward the end of my journey without knowing it.
Mullen:
So it was like the divorce sequence in the short time and intensity of
composing it?
Tufariello:
The sequences have a long build-up. But other poems sit in my
notebook for years and then I go back and think, “Is this salvageable
or is it just a failed start?”
Mullen:
So you keep a notebook, then?
Tufariello:
Kind of on and off, though I’m not as disciplined as I could be about
it. Most poets do, I think, just to jot stray ideas or lines in,
and then periodically go back and see what’s there. Of course a lot of
it, most of it, you end up not using.
Mullen:
What about revision on those poems? I remember James Merrill
saying, “Revision is the only certain pleasure.”
Tufariello:
I haven’t heard that one! Sometimes it’s a pleasure, other times
more of an obsession. Most of my poems are laboriously revised
and take a long time. Sometimes I get impatient with it.
Part of the problem is I don’t write my poems linearly, from beginning
to end — only once in a while do I draft something from start to
finish. Usually they’re like fiendish jigsaw puzzles, with lines
getting nudged around on the page until they do or don’t snap into
place. I’m not sure where lines will go, so my drafts are just a
mess of arrows shooting here and there and it takes a long time to put
it together and even to figure out whether I’ll be able to keep it or
if it’s just a failed experiment. With the Walrus poem, I had some
lines, maybe half a dozen in the notebook, and a year and a half later
I went back to it, started again, and was able to finish it. I
take comfort sometimes in something Samuel Johnson said, “What was
written without effort is, in general, read without pleasure.”
That’s not a popular idea with all poets, but I think it’s true.
And of course you have to conceal the effort involved, which is the
hardest part.
I’ve never had a poem just come to me, in the sense
that it was a spontaneous outpouring that didn’t need anything else
done to it. But now and then a poem does come quickly, sort of a
gift from the Muse, and those are especially exciting. I remember
writing the octave of “Lorenzo Lotto’s Annunciation” before I left for
work and mulling it over all day. I was stuck on the
sestet. But I sat up in bed that night at 2 a.m., wide awake,
suddenly knowing the rhymes I needed and how it should be structured,
and got up and finished the poem.
Mullen:
Do certain forms have certain subjects or qualities of subject attached
to them? I mean, you used the villanelle for “Snow Angel,”
couplets for “Keeping My Name,” a poem no less intense than “Snow
Angel” but with a very different subject.
Tufariello:
Yes, that’s probably true: I can’t imagine a serious limerick,
for instance, and triple meters are usually more playful than iambs or
trochees. Rhymed couplets draw a lot of attention to themselves,
so I use them when that’s part of the effect I want — like in “Keeping
My Name,” which is about playing with words. The villanelle, with
its two repeated refrains, lends itself to subjects that involve
repetition. And the triolet and pantoum…
Mullen:
Oh, remind me of the pantoum.
Tufariello:
“Zero at the Bone” is a pantoum. It’s a four-line stanza.
Lines 2 and 4 are repeated as lines 1 and 3 of the next stanza, and it
continues interlocking in that way until the last stanza where lines 2
and 4 appear in reversed order. So the first line is also the
last. Repeating forms are good for conveying states of mind —
obsession, say — where you go around in circles and have a difficult
time breaking out of it. Of course, the sonnet is used for so
many things. It’s one of the most versatile forms.
Mullen:
Do you vary your sonnet forms at all?
Tufariello:
I started out with the Shakespearean form, then played around with
others. In a couple of instances I improvised a rhyme scheme, and
for “In Glass” I used two stanzas of six lines and a two line
ending. Later I realized that this symmetry felt “right” because
the poem is about embryos created half by each parent. I have
managed one or two Petrarchan sonnets, but it’s so difficult in
English. Even very good poets often have one strained rhyme in a
Petrarchan sonnet. Then, Meredith used a sixteen-line sonnet
form. Lowell wrote blank verse sonnets. A lot of poems
published now are alluding to sonnet forms even if they aren’t,
strictly speaking, sonnets. Maybe “Chemist’s Daughter” is a
little like that, the basic structure, but not the exact form.
Mullen:
Speaking of sonnets, we haven’t talked yet about the translations from
Italian in the book. Did you grow up speaking
Italian? I picked that sense up from your poem “Keeping My
Name.” It seemed the language of your growing up, the lilt of the
Italian.
Tufariello:
Actually, Italian speakers sometimes tell me I pronounce my name
incorrectly, that it should have four syllables instead of five, but
that’s the way our family said it — without elision. And no, I
didn’t grow up speaking the language. I wish I had. My
mother isn’t Italian — her ethnicity is Irish and Austrian — and my
father’s parents thought it was important to raise their children so
they would assimilate as Americans. So my father and his younger
brother and sister spoke English both at school and at home. My
father has retained only a little Italian, mostly a few of his father’s
colorful curses. Maybe it was partly that he and my grandmother
wanted to talk without the children understanding them. Always
useful, as I now see! Anyway, I did study Italian later, but
would much have preferred to grow up with it.
Mullen:
So how did you get interested in translating?
Tufariello:
This will sound strange, but it was really by accident. At a
poetry conference several years ago, I met a fellow participant, Mike
Juster (he publishes as A.M. Juster) who was working on translating
some of Petrarch’s sonnets. He approached me because he’d heard I
was also translating Petrarch and wanted to know if we could exchange
work. In fact I’d done no translating at that time, but this got
me turning over the possibility. Why not try it?
I had a reading knowledge of modern Italian, but the
medieval Italian of the poems I translated was beyond me. I got
hold of a useful prose translation of Petrarch by Robert Durling.
It’s very close to the original, so that helped me work out the literal
meaning when I wasn’t sure; yet the prose didn’t bias my formal choices
in any way. And then Mike Juster, and the poet and translator
Dick Davis, and another friend who knows Italian very well helped me
with some of the harder bits. I did feel very comfortable with
the sonnet form, which helped a lot.
Mullen:
I guess that gives some hope to people who have the sensibility for the
language, but not expertise in it.
Tufariello:
Maybe! Of course, fluency in both the source and target languages
is the ideal. And I’ve sometimes felt a bit uneasy about it. But
even apart from his forms, I felt an affinity for Petrarch — the
emotional intensity and psychological complexity of his sonnets, their
raptness and paradoxes. I felt in contact with something bigger
than myself, which is one of the pleasures of translating.
Mullen:
What you just described sounds like one of the pleasures of reading
poetry, too. Is there a poet you feel especially influenced by?
Tufariello:
Of living poets, I think of Richard Wilbur as my most important
influence. I still remember coming across his work in a bookstore
in Manhattan when I was nineteen or twenty. I picked his book off
the shelf at random and when I began reading it, I remember my heart
beating harder and harder, and thinking, “I didn’t know anyone was
doing this any more.” It reminded me of George Herbert, so much
inventiveness and delight and a kind of sweetness to the poems. I knew
that something enormously difficult had been done with such grace it
seemed effortless. I bought the book, brought it home and
immediately began memorizing it. It was so important to me,
because it gave me encouragement that what I was trying to do in my own
fumbling early way was valid. Writing formal poetry was
legitimate, still worth doing, and reading Wilbur heartened me a lot.
Mullen:
My first memorized poetry was Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”
So I can’t get away from those meters either! I was fifteen and
had got it in a prayer book; I thought it was a prayer, so I said it
every day.
Tufariello:
Oh, I fell in love with Hopkins at the same age and memorized some of
the shorter ones — “The Windhover,” “Pied Beauty,” “Hurrahing in
Harvest”…. I always feel a sense of connection with other poets
who can quote the poems they love from memory. Though you have to
be careful about it or people think you’re showing off!
Mullen:
(Winding down now) Where do you see yourself going with your
poetry? Do you have a sense of what might come next?
Tufariello:
Well, I’m almost hesitant to predict, because whatever answer I give is
probably going to be wrong. But I wanted to say something
earlier when we were talking about influences: Seven or eight
years ago I can remember hearing Dana Gioia say, “After forty, a poet
is always most influenced by his or her own previous work.” At
the time I didn’t quite know what to make of it, partly because I
started publishing so late. My first book didn’t come out until
the week I turned forty-one. But now that I’ve gotten older and
the first book is behind me, I see the truth in that. You want to
build on your strengths and avoid your past mistakes and
weaknesses. But on the other hand, not just to repeat yourself
and fall into ruts. I think that really does influence the way
you see yourself going in the future: not to repeat yourself and turn
complacent, but to move forward in some way. One of the ways I
can see myself doing that — I think my poems will always be deeply
personal — but I might want to move away from the autobiographical to
venture into more dramatic verse or narrative verse or persona
poems. The most recent poem I’ve written is a longish one in
blank verse, and it felt refreshing after years of working in strict
rhyme and stanza forms. Also, I love good light verse, and that
might be fun to try. Or even maybe satiric verse. In high
school I remember an assignment to write a poem using Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a model, but on
a contemporary subject; I wrote The
Carterbury Tales and really had fun with the political satire.
Mullen:
What about children’s poems? You have that nice one modeled after
the fairies’ song in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream.
Tufariello:
I think often about writing a book for children. Now that my
daughter is older (she’s four), we enjoy making up stories
together. It’s such an imaginative age.
Mullen:
You and Sophie should write a poem, blend those voices.
Tufariello:
Maybe so!
Mullen:
Well, this seems like a good place to stop. I’ve enjoyed the
conversation. Thanks for doing this.
Tufariello:
It’s been a pleasure for me too, Kathleen. Thank you.
