The first poet I read in detail was – somewhat surprisingly – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I bought an old copy of his poetical works for a dollar, and studied it carefully (I’d come across a stanza from his poem “Tegner’s Drapa” quoted somewhere: “I heard a voice that cried / Baldur the beautiful / is dead, is dead / and through the misty air / passed like the mournful cry / of sunward sailing cranes”). That really knocked me out as a child. Sometime after that, I moved on to A. E. Housman, whose curt laconic stanzas suited me perfectly as an adolescent (“Where you would not, lie you must / Lie you must and not with me”).
The first actual “modern” poet I read was Apollinaire. I studied French at school, so discovering his work (“La Chanson du Mal-aimé”) had the effect of revolutionising me and showing me that there were exciting alternatives to the more rigid and traditional patterns I’d got used to.
Would you say your childhood and teenage experience of poetry has had a distinct influence on how you write poetry now, and why?
For years I was addicted to strict forms, in obedience to models such as Housman and (a bit later) W. H. Auden, whose work I still adore. I really can’t stand most of the poems I wrote then now. I think that I first started to write poems which had some quality of permanence to them (for me, at any rate) when I realised that the kind of time and attention I was prepared to give to translating poems out of foreign languages had to apply to my own work as well. I found out that poems I’d written years before might still need new lines, new stanza – in some cases a complete overhaul, and that this process had no clear end.
Who is another poet whose poetry you admire and why?
There are so many! Right now I’ll say the German poet Paul Celan, though, as I’ve just been translating from his work and I find it an endless source of fascination and joy. It’s hard for me to think of anyone who combines so much intensity and attention to detail with so much lyrical inventiveness and ability to evoke the anarchy of the world (what the Chinese call “the 10,000 things”).
How would you summarise one of your poems in one paragraph?
I published a poem called “Our Lady” in an online anthology in 2005 [http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/fugacity/ross.asp]. It begins with the lines “Our Lady / of Perpetual Tension / intercede for me ...” and goes on to list a number of causes which might combine to produce the somewhat OCD-like symptoms which one might refer to as “perpetual tension” or (to use a term a friend introduced me to sometime later ) “free-floating anxiety”. Hunter S. Thompson refers to this feeling simply as “the Fear.”
How would you describe the appeal of this poem to readers?
I feel that a lot of people can identify with this pit-of-the-stomach sensation of a world accelerating out of control towards some inexplicable abyss of fear and chaos. I try to keep the causes of anxiety in the poem strange and clear in order to give a feeling of dream (or nightmare) logic – even though just about all of them happen to be quite true.
Could you share a stanza or small section of this poem?
the bus doors
are wedged open
the men in silver suits
unzip their skin
How would you describe the contribution this stanza or small section makes to the poem?
This is the end of the poem, after the speaker has described the obstacles impeding his / her attempt to get a piece of machinery fixed; that sudden shock you get when you realise you have to finish a job in days rather than weeks; and the sensation of trying to get to a shop in time to buy a much-desired something, only to find it had shut a moment before. At this point the anxieties become more sinister (or transcendent), as the Martians / Men in Black / Asylum doctors suddenly unmask, “unzip their skin” ...
Would you describe your poetry primarily as narrative, thematic, character portrait, or how would you describe your poetry?
I’d say that my poetry was primarily narrative. I try to make my stories as pared down and suggestive as possible, though, so hopefully there’s little nineteenth-century sprawl left in them. I like to think of people reading them and then gradually becoming aware that there’s something subtly off about the events or emotions being described. I definitely want to unsettle and perturb my readers as much as I want to please them ...
Do you read your poetry aloud to people? If so, how would you describe the size and response of your listening audiences?
Yes, I do. The groups would range in size from a hundred or so to twenty or thirty. Sometimes I join in group readings with other poets, sometimes I give readings on my own. What I like most is to mix in reading other people’s poems with my own (it’s so much easier to perform other people’s work), but when the stipulation is made – as it so often is – that I can only read my own work, I tend to fudge the issue a bit by reading out translations as well as originals. The response varies. I find that I often get the most enthusiastic reception when I read work I would think of as pretty difficult (word-jumbles, passages in foreign languages, etc.)
Do you write groups of poems to form collections? If so, how were the poems connected in your most recent collection?
Again, it varies. I do believe that collections need a good deal of narrative logic to justify their appearing together as a book, but sometimes this connectedness isn’t really apparent to me until after I’ve written all the constituent poems. My most recent published full-length collection was a group of poems written during a visit to the Czech republic, and inspired by the experience of visiting the Nazi “model ghetto” Theresienstadt. I called the book To Terezín (2007), and it included prose pieces from my journal and even some mini-essays as well as poems.
The book I’m working on now, though, is a rather more conventional grouping of poems written over the past couple of years, linked by some common themes and ideas. I’ve tentatively entitled it Models, and I try to look at that word in a lot of different ways: role-models, miniatures, fashion models, poetic models etc. etc.
Author website: The Imaginary Museum - http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/
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