Langdon Hammer: I’ve just seen Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, and when I read your poem “Bonfire,” the first of the four poems that follow, I can’t help seeing Troy in flames. The movie seems to me like a political allegory. Is that true of “Bonfire”?
Rosanna Warren: Certainly we’re living through a time of shock and destruction, politically and culturally. But I hope that the word scripture—not capitalized—suggests a wider range of meaning. The fire suggested to me the broader anxiety about meaning itself, about thought, and thought inscribed in writing, and how fragile it is: how easily “what we thought we knew” can go up in smoke. And how difficult it is to communicate genuinely, leaving only “shattered glints of what was meant.” I hope I haven’t explained too much: Poems need a good margin of mystery.
LH: Like dreams. Even when we think we have “interpreted” one, the fact that there was something to be interpreted—translated into other terms—means there is something more to be said. John Ashbery calls it “the ‘it was all a dream’ / Syndrome, though the ‘all’ tells tersely / Enough how it wasn’t.”
The subtitle of your poem “Crime Scenes”—“Weegee”—is the pseudonym of Ascher Fellig, New York City’s original tabloid nightcrawler, famous for beating the cops to crime scenes. I take it there’s a kind of poetry that you admire in those sensational black-and-white images.
RW: I try, in poems, to translate raw material—experience not yet interpreted by art—into formal patterns in words. Weegee’s photographs are as raw as they come (yet in their own way, they are formal compositions). I first saw his pictures years ago in a small gallery in Berlin and was fascinated. In the past few years, I began to think of the United States as a “crime scene,” and that made me remember Weegee, and I pored over his Naked City and lifted phrases from the book’s introduction. It amused me to splice his words with Lady Macbeth’s “the sleeping and the dead”: I want my poems to have the warp of deep traditional English poetry and the weft of the real, the present, the not-yet-art.
LH: Enheduana, whom you write about in “Mesopotamian,” was the first author to sign her name to a work of literature. This Sumerian priestess is an altogether different sort of artist from Weegee. But wait … maybe not!
RW: I love your “maybe not!” Enheduana was a priestess in Ur, dedicated to the moon goddess Nanna and to the terrifying Inana (later Ishtar), installed by her father Sargon of Akkad after he had conquered the whole Sumerian region. Later, a Sumerian rebellion expelled her from the temple and the city, and her hymns of protest are poems of crisis and outrage. Hence, Weegee …
LH: In our day of digital text, language can seem immaterial. But your poetry always reminds me of the sensuousness and physical power of written words.
RW: Poetry is about casting spells; word magic; as Rimbaud said, “Abracadabra.” A good spell, as advertisers know, has to have swing and rhyme and alliteration—sound-
binding.
LH: You must hear your poems as you write. Do you ever read them aloud to yourself?
RW: Yes, I murmur them aloud; I have to. I write by hand in a notebook, and that’s an important part of the composition, the visual part, since I began life, from childhood on, painting and drawing. The calligraphic shape emerging on the page—with all its hesitations, crossings-out, and side notes—is a kind of drawing. But the drawing also has to sing: therefore, the murmuring. One of my favorite books, for decades, has been John Hollander’s Vision and Resonance, a treasury of wisdom about the interplay of eye and ear in Western poetry, from the Greeks through the Renaissance.
LH: Yeats wrote that “a poem comes right with a click like a closing box.” Your poems have an energy, a wildness, that resists that click—which makes it the more convincing when you come around to it, as you do in the last lines of all four of these poems, where the final period feels like Weegee’s flash.
RW: I would like to think my poems have wildness. Frost: “Then there is this wildness whereof it is spoken …”
LH: Where does Frost say that?
RW: In “The Figure a Poem Makes,” his preface to his Collected Poems in 1939, an extraordinary meditation on freedom and form. By “wildness” he’s talking about kinds of freedom not only in poems (meter and disruption of meter) but also in life itself: “The figure is the same as for love.” Many sentences in that preface have oracular force. Speaking of mystery: “Just as the first mystery was how a poem could have a tune in such a straightness as metre, so the second mystery is how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfilled.” For Frost, the poem must be a discovery for the poet: “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove it must ride on its own melting.”
No, I don’t want my poems to close off interpretation; I want to leave the reader in an adventure of new understandings. But there has to be the authority of pattern, too, to make the spell work: hence the clinching rhyme of “bent” and “meant” in “Bonfire.” And for a poem to matter, there has to be something like revelation. Weegee’s flash! Yes! Poems are not just noise …
LH: Tell me about Dumuzi and Inana, who appear in “The Bridegroom.”
RW: When Sophus Helle’s new translations of Enheduana’s hymns came out a few years ago, they astonished me, and led me back into this ancient Sumerian/Akkadian/Babylonian world, which I had known before only through Gilgamesh. In a way, I felt I was reading about our world: violence, the crash of empires, the battle of mythologies. And beneath the politics, the elemental forces of fertility, creation, destruction.
Inana the Queen of Heaven rules this unruly reality, a turmoil of contradictions. I see her at work in our world (and for heaven’s sake—so to speak—right there in that eternally embattled land that is now Iraq and its neighbor states). Dumuzi (later, Tammuz) is a farmer-god, a principle of fertility, and the complex story about his marriage to Inana involves her banishing him to the Underworld but eventually rescuing him for half of each year: hence, seasons.
The poem took shape after I’d witnessed a scene straight out of Weegee. I saw a naked man stretched out sleeping on the sidewalk one evening in New York City, and Dumuzi was in my mind. Ever since my immersion in Latin poetry as a teenager, I’ve seen ancient literature as alive right now, immortal, illuminating who we are. Witness the current Odyssey craze!
