I don’t think it’s by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.
Everyone thinks they’re going to write one book of poems or one novel.
I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.
Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.
Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.
I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.
The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
Women love a sick child or a healthy animal; A man who is both itches them like an incubus.
I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I’ve had the same address and phone number since then.
I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.
The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn’t exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.
The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It’s not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it’s an interesting tension between interior and exterior.
Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.
Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I’m writing myself, but equally closely technically.
When you translate poetry in particular, you’re obliged to look at how the writer with whom you’re working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I’ve found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise – nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.
Paris is a wonderful city. I can’t say I belong to an especially anglophone community.
Poetry dovetails contradictions.
I crave uncomplicated quiet, and the sky.
When I was in love with her, with a lover’s tendency to mythify the beloved did I know her better than I do now, when we know our limits? Now.