I mean, you get all those violent sexual scenes,
dealing with touch, inSong of Myself—I forget
which section it is—that turn into what I think is
a description of a gang rape. Bloom said it was
masturbation, somebody else said it was some-
thing else, but Whitman’s very careful not to tell
you exactly who’s doing what to whom, with
what, and yet you know there’s some kind of
wild sexual thing happening. Well, of course he
had to get it printed, and he couldn’t have if he
had been more specific. And of course he got it
printed partly because everybody was very care-
ful not to understand. But he tells you everything
you need to know.
INT: You’ve remarked that your typical way
of revising a poem is not to pare or tighten it but to
expand it, to write a longer version of the original.
You do this, I take it, in order to allow your own
voice, your real thoughts and feelings, freer play.
But does your sense of poetic tact also assert itself
as you revise?
SNODGRASS:I don’t know. I don’t think I
approach it that consciously. I just ask, ‘‘Does
this sound better?’’ I don’t usually ask in what
way is it better. I do know this: if the poem
is working, as you revise it it gets to seeming
more and more tossed off, freehand, whereas
the initial drafts often seem very midnight-oil-
covered—labored. If you’re any good at revi-
sing, as you work at it the poem gets to seeming
more spontaneous.
INT: A good deal of your work in recent
years—theCock Robinpoems, for example—is
in light verse. What freedom and/or restrictions do
you experience in writing light verse?
SNODGRASS:I enjoy writing comic and/
or light verse but for many years didn’t dare
indulge myself—we all had to be so serious.
DeLoss McGraw’s paintings helped spring me.
And, like almost nothing else I’ve written, these
came very quickly and without my usual endless
revisions. Also causal was a sense of relief and
celebration when I found that I could, after all,
finishThe Fu ̈hrer Bunker.I thought that was the
major commitment of my career; if I couldn’t
finish it, I’d die a failure. When I was sure I could
finish, I found an example in Rilke’sDuino Ele-
gies.(I’m not suggesting that I rose to those
heights.) Before he was quite finished but knew
he could, Rilke started theSonnets to Orpheus
and wrote fifty-six of them in eighteen days.
They, of course, aren’t light verse, but they are
elective and gratuitious—not, like theElegies,
mandatory.
INT: Given the hard work of drafting and
revising, is the writing of poems fun for you?
SNODGRASS:Except perhaps for those
poems based on McGraw, I don’t think writing
poetry has ever been fun for me. It’s just that I
feel so much worse if I don’t write poems.
Since I’ve finishedThe Fu ̈hrer Bunker,I’ve
only written six or eight poems. That’s partly
because I’m writing prose pieces: first, the auto-
biographical sketches; now, a book of critical
essays; next, a book of what I call de/composi-
tions. These were my favorite teaching device:
I’d take a fine poem and make revisions which
destroyed its excellences, then ask the students
what I’d lost from the original. Handling the
poems that closely, they had to experience how
little of a poem’s greatness lay in its dictionary
sense, in the literal, translatable meaning. Of
course these projects have taken much more
time and effort than I expected—most pages
have probably been revised twenty times or so.
Maybe I need a classroom full of students taking
an exam!
But I also suspect—rightly or wrongly—
that I can’t write poems now. I have puzzled
over this and come up with four or five possible
causes; I’ve no idea which is (or are) actually the
case. I don’t even know whether it’s good or
bad—perhaps anything I wrote at my age
would be weaker. I do feel that if I could invent
a new kind of poem, that would be worth the
effort. But that’s never guaranteed. We’ll see
what happens when I finish these books.
Source:Roy Scheele, ‘‘A Conversation with W. D. Snod-
grass,’’ inNew England Review, Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter
2000, pp. 56–66.Sources
Pratt, William, Review ofEach in His Season, by W.D.
Snodgrass, inWorld Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 2,
Spring 1994, p. 375.
Rogoff, Jay, ‘‘Shocking, Surprising Snodgrass,’’ inSouth-
ern Review, Vol. 42, No. 4, Autumn 2006, pp. 885–86.
Rosenthal, M. L., ‘‘Notes From the Future: Two Poets,’’
inNation, October 24, 1959, pp. 257–58.
Snodgrass, W. D., ‘‘Heart’s Needle,’’ inNot for Special-
ists: New and Selected Poems, BOA Editions, 2006, pp.
19–34.Heart’s Needle