SNODGRASS:Yeah. And each one would
also have a different sound, I would hope. I don’t
mean that you necessarily pause at the end of a
line. But if you don’t have capital letters I assume
that the lines are ‘‘rove over,’’ as Hopkins says.
INT: A leitmotif in the poem is the speaker’s
feeling that he cannot write. It is introduced in
Section 1 when he envisions the farmer’s snowy
fields as being ‘‘spotless as paper spread/For me to
write,’’ continues in Section 4 where he compares
the frost-shriveled morning-glory vines to ‘‘broken
lines/of verses I can’t make,’’ is alluded to again in
Section 5 when he remembers singing songs to his
daughter at bedtime ‘‘Before I went for walks/And
did not write,’’ and then seems to be resolved in
Section 9 with his statement that ‘‘I write you only
the bitter poems/that you can’t read.’’ These refer-
ences seem a kind of objective correlative of the
speaker’s emotional limbo at the beginning of the
poem, and of his growing acceptance of the divorce
and separation at poem’s end. Did the writing
of‘‘Heart’s Needle’’represent an overcoming on
your part of a period of silence in our work?
SNODGRASS:Your inference is correct,
though perhaps the cause and effect weren’t
quite so direct. I see the passage in Section 1 as
more about the promise of what those fields
could produce, though I do recall that I often
talked about one’s terror of the blank page; the
other passages seem to me just as you suggest.
When my first marriage was breaking up I
had been blocked for about two years and did go
into therapy at the University Hospital in Iowa
City. Both problems rose at least partly from my
own passivity, and the therapy did help. The
doctor, by the way, was R. M. Powell, to whom
‘‘MHTIS...OU TIS’’ is addressed.
INT: The fox is an image which recurs several
times in the poem. Is there any special reason for
that?
SNODGRASS:I’m not sure. I always did
sing my daughter the song ‘‘Fox Went Out on a
Chilly Night,’’ from that old Burl Ives recording.
I tended to think of myself as being a fox type as
opposed to a hedgehog. I’d been reading Isaiah
Berlin, and I thought, OK, I wish desperately to
be a hedgehog, and I can’t; I’ve got to try to play
foxy. So I tended to identify with that kind of
critter.
INT: In your recently published After-
Images: Autobiographical Sketches(BOA Edi-
tions, 1999), you speak of your conviction that
‘‘one of the most important developments in our
poetry has been the polyvoiced poem,’’ and among
other examples you cite Eliot’sThe Waste Land
and Henry Reed’s ‘‘Naming of Parts.’’ Why in
your view has the polyvoiced poem been so
important?
SNODGRASS:Generally, I suspect that
this is related to the loss of religious faith and
surrendering the hope of finding some universal
philosophical system, some one formula or for-
mulation to sum up our fragmented experience.
For myself, I was very much moved by the
poems you mention, but also by Theodore
Weiss’sGunsightand especially by Henri Cou-
lette’sWar of the Secret Agents.(I was on a jury
that gave the latter the Lamont Poetry Prize.)
Poems of this type, I thought, offer something
like the oppositions of sonata form in music,
pitting theme against theme and building that
into a larger structure. Everybody then was
looking for ways to reproduce musical forms in
poetry; this seemed to work for me first in a
poem called ‘‘After Experience Taught Me...,’’
which pits two voices I’d discovered at the same
time (Spinoza and a hand-to-hand combat
instructor) against each other. In terms of idea,
of course, they’re saying the same thing (what-
ever you do to protect your life is justified), but
in actuality it means something far different
according to the personality of the speakers. I’d
been trying ever since the war to write about
those combat instructions, so when I liked the
result of this voice-collision, that made a large
impression on me.
INT: When viewed as a cycle of poems,
the monologues ofThe Fu ̈hrer Bunkerare poly-
voiced. This seems to me a perfect way of presenting
the Nazi hierarchy: from their own points of view, in
their own voices. And yet I wonder whether much of
the negative critical reaction to the book doesn’t
spring from a basic failure of aesthetic distance,
i.e., the failure of many critics to separate the
speaker of a given monologue from the author him-
self. Haven’t such critics in fact identified you with
the speakers of the cycle and thereby associated you
with the Nazis’ own evil?
SNODGRASS:That depends on what you
mean by ‘‘identify.’’ To do those poems, I did
have to find those characters in myself—and
they were there, at least as potentials, though I
suspect I’m less liable to violence and direct
cruelty than to the self-deceptions of people
like Himmler and Bormann. Someone onceHeart’s Needle