any of those moments individually. This provides,
I hope, the illusion both of time past and of time in
the process of passing, just as sunlight through a
stained glass window provides the illusion of whole-
ness and coherence.
We asked you earlier about the relationship of
The Pilot Star Elegies to your earlier collections.
How do you feel your work has grown over the four
volumes? Have particular themes and concerns
tended to emerge, without your immanent knowl-
edge or consent, as dominant shapers of the way
you write poetry?
As for the first part of your question, I couldn’t
really say. As for the second part, I can say yes,
absolutely. You see, I still harbor the rather quaint
idea that poems have things to teach me, and one
of the things they have to teach is how to write a
poem. Because of that, I tend to try, as much as
possible, to let the poem have the reins. Of course,
there are unavoidable tics and mannerisms in any
poet, but I’m less interested in refining those char-
acteristics into some fixed idea of a style than I am
in finding out what elements of style will best draw
out the inner workings of my subject.
Many of your poems have a deceptively
prosaic character: they are built with lines 12–14
syllables long, they have slant rhymes, and prose
responsibilities. How did you come to this style?
(Is this, in other words, a response to the Whit-
manic tradition of long lines, an Englishing of the
French alexandrine, or an attempt to break the
English pentameter by extending it a foot or two?)Volume 24 225
Blumenthal Prize from Poetry,a Pushcart Prize in
both poetry and the essay, and the 1984 appoint-
ment as Robert Frost Poet at the Frost house in Fran-
conia, New Hampshire. He has received fellowships
from the Ingraim Merrill and Guggenheim founda-
tions, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
From 1990–1997, Mr. Santos served as external ex-
aminer and poet-in-residence at the Poets’ House in
Portmuck, Northern Ireland, and in 1999 he re-
ceived an Award for Literary Excellence from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is cur-
rently professor of English at the University of
Missouri–Columbia.
[James Rother]: The way books of poetry ac-
quire their titles is often curious and fascinating.
What led you to chooseThe Pilot Star Elegies as
its title?
[Sherod Santos]: In the navigational world
there are such things called pilot stars, those stars
in the firmament which, at any given time of year,
one might fix on to establish one’s location on the
earth. This interested me both for literal and
metaphorical reasons, and of course I felt those rea-
sons served, however obliquely, the tonal structure
of the collection overall.
Do you feel thatThe Pilot Star Elegies repre-
sents a departure from your three earlier books of
poetry,Accidental Weather, The Southern Reaches,
andThe City of Women?
I think there is something of a departure in both
The City of Womenand The Pilot Star Elegies,
though that has less to do with any purposeful de-
sign on my part, at least as I began writing those
books, than it does with the varying demands of
the books themselves. The first is concerned with
erotic and romantic love, the second with death, so
it seems natural that they’d acquire somewhat dif-
ferent ways of speaking.
In this latest collection you seem less preoc-
cupied with objects and situations shimmering in
suspended time, as in (to cite the term you use in
“Abandoned Railway Station”) a boule-de-neige,
than with a more worldly engagement with people
and places thrown together in a time-sharing of ex-
ile and loss?
What you describe by way of the boule de neige
is, essentially, the lyric poem, and it’s fair to say
that in these last two books I have worked within a
much larger temporal framework. Still, my ambi-
tion was always to approach that framework through
the moment of the lyric, by arranging those mo-
ments, somewhat in the manner of a stained glass
window, into a composition that’s not contained in
Portrait of a Couple at Century’s EndRead everything,
avoid thinking you’re a
genius, don’t settle too
early on for what kind of
poetry you want to write,
and be willing and able to
give up everything for the
work without expecting
anything whatsoever in
return.”