skill and unapologetic about his formalism, the
secret subject of ‘‘Warning,’’ a poem ostensibly
about ‘‘rumors that Richard Wilbur has had a
hip replacement so he could go on playing
tennis’’:
Wilbur’s ball and ceramic socket
Propel him like a racing sprocket
To where his artful serve and volley
Dole out love games and melancholy.
Tremble, opponents: learn by this
What power’s secured through artifice.
The poem is not just a charming tribute to
his important fellow poet, but a witty manifesto,
recalling Robert Frost’s quip that writing free
verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
After more than fifty years refining his ‘‘love
game,’’ Snodgrass keeps mindful of the rules,
and the rules have enabled him continually to
surprise and delight us. If his poems dare to
commit the occasional fault, they can still move
and enchant us with the power artifice can
secure.
Source:Jay Rogoff, ‘‘Shocking, Surprising Snodgrass,’’ in
Southern Review, September 22, 2006, pp. 885–92.
Roy Scheele
In the following excerpt from an interview, Snod-
grass gives a conversational retrospective of his
poetic career.
...[INTERVIEWER:] Heart’s Needlewas
published in 1959 and won the Pulitzer Prize for
Poetry in 1960. It is an amazing first book, made
even more so, perhaps, by the fact that it was
partly written while you were a student. It is diffi-
cult now to speak of the book outside its impor-
tance in contemporary literary history—its
influence on Robert Lowell’sLife Studies,for
example. Yet the title poem seems to me one of
the major American lyrics of the past fifty years,
and I would like to talk a bit about the poem itself.
Did you conceive of such a long sequence when you
began...?
SNODGRASS:...Somebody suggested to
me a cycle of short poems rather than a long
single poem, but I don’t remember who that
was. That was long ago, of course; I’ve changed
every molecule seven times since then. I started
making the first notes for that at a concert, and I
still have the concert program. I don’t think I
had any idea how many poems it might come to,
whether it would be several poems, or one, or
what. The writing stretched out over about two
and a half years, which is the amount of time that
the poem covers, season by season. I don’t
believe the writing exactly followed that pattern,
but it took roughly the same amount of time.
INT: Several of the poems in the book—‘‘At
the Park Dance,’’ ‘‘The Marsh,’’ ‘‘September in
the Park,’’ the two ‘‘Songs’’—have the centered
lines, and something of the tone, of certain sec-
tions in the title poem. ‘‘The Marsh’’ especially
suggests the subject matter and imagery of
‘‘Heart’s Needle.’’ Was ‘‘The Marsh’’ origininally
a draft section of the longer poem?
SNODGRASS:No. No, it wasn’t. I suspect
it was written first, but I am not positive. Oh, wait
a minute: I remember how I wrote it. Good
heavens, I haven’t thought of this in a long
time! I’d been out tromping around in the
woods, wandered into a marsh and saw the things
that come up in the poem. And I’d been trying to
write a poem about it, but it didn’t seem to work.
I had to monitor an exam for a friend, and I
thought, I’ve been stuck with the same phrases,
etc. for months. Since I have to get up and put the
time on the blackboard every five minutes, I’ll
write a line and if it doesn’t work within that five
minutes, I’ll cross it out and write another. At the
end of the two-hour exam, I had [a] poem, which
amazed me, because I usually take weeks,
months, years. I think this showed me something
about being more ruthless with my first
phrasings.
INT: Some sections of ‘‘Heart’s Needle’’ have
stanzas in which the lines are all flush left, with
capitalized first letters, while in other sections the
lines are centered and only the first letter of sen-
tences is capitalized. Was there a design to that?
SNODGRASS:No, only that I decided that if
I was going to make a series of shorter poems I
would want a slightly different form for each of
them.
INT: You wanted a different visual form.BUT I ALSO SUSPECT—RIGHTLY OR
WRONGLY—THAT I CAN’T WRITE POEMS NOW.... I DO
FEEL THAT IF I COULD INVENT A NEW KIND OF POEM,
THAT WOULD BE WORTH THE EFFORT. BUT THAT’S
NEVER GUARANTEED.’’Heart’s Needle