From Istanbul has several sonnets in it, as does Green, which came out the same year. Did your translation work inspire you to explore that form?

From Istanbul
BY Sidney Wade
(Yapi Kredi Yayinlar, 1998)

No, I’ve always loved the imperishability of the form — as Paul Muldoon has shown, you can wrestle it into all sorts of peculiar shapes, yet it retains its essential “sonnethood.” There are a couple of sonnets in my first book, Empty Sleeves, and, as you noted, quite a few in Green and From Istanbul, as well as in Stroke. I like to stretch the sonnet into shapes it didn’t originally intend — I’ll rhyme it abcdefg/abcdefg, as I did in “No Comfort To Be Had” and “Sexual Blossoms and Their Fierce Addictions” (from Stroke). I like the fact that the distance of the rhyming words from one another makes it almost impossible to hear them, but then I get irritated when critics or reviewers don’t notice the form. Form has always been powerfully generative for me — in fact, most of the poems in “Stroke” are written in one form or another. There are several sonnets, many poems written in the stanza invented by John Berryman for his long poem, “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” quite a few syllabics, and one poem written in the form Richard Wilbur used for his poem, “A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra.” I arrived at that one serendipitously. I had long wanted to write a poem celebrating the remarkable fountain in Terminal A at the Detroit Metro Airport (if you ever pass through, make sure to allow enough time to go see and marvel at it — it’s the only fountain in the world, I believe, that has a sense of humor!), and just as I was most frustrated with my lack of ideas as to how to proceed, I ran across a review of Wilbur’s then newly published Collected Poems. The reviewer had mentioned his Villa Sciarra poem, and that brought me back to re-read it. I decided I would use his rhyme and metrical schemes in my poem, and, half-way through, I realized that with some nudging, I could get my poem to end on Wilbur’s poem’s final line. I was very pleased with my achievement, and still am, but when Les Murray read it, he told me he liked everything about the poem except the final line! Of course it would take an incredibly sensitive ear, like Les possesses, to perceive that there was a difference, but I have to say I’m still very fond of it.

I enjoy your slender “monosonnets” in Stroke. Can you speak to how you arrived at this form?

As I mentioned earlier, I love messing with sonnets, and my poems over time have become skinnier and skinnier. It was a natural progression, I suppose, to get to that extreme. I am only aware of one other poem written in that form — Brad Leithauser’s “Post-coitum Tristesse,” which I read way back in 1985, but I don’t know whether he invented or discovered it.

One thing I deeply admire in your poetry is the way in which what is not said in a poem brings so much power to what is said. I’m thinking of “On the Verge” in Green, in which the allusion to The Odyssey is so implicit that it taps into the power of the myth rather than the myth itself, and “No Comfort to Be Had” in Stroke, in which the word “stroke” is never once mentioned. Pulling this off as a poet takes an incredible amount of control — over language and over the shape of the poem. How do you do this?

One of the things I tell my students at the beginning of each semester is that they should trust that the reader can infer a great deal of information from strongly constructed lines, from metaphors, from careful word choice, so they shouldn’t feel obliged to get every little detail of “the story” in. It basically has to do with the lesson of economy, which is one of great poetry’s most salient characteristics. In editing and re-editing our own work, we must train ourselves to take everything out of the poem that doesn’t absolutely have to be there, sometimes including “a” and “the.”

I understand you have a new book of poetry, Out of this World, coming out in April. Can you give us a foretaste of it? What direction does it take in the arc of your development as a poet?

I’ve changed the title of that book several times already, and now I’m pretty sure it’s going to be called Edge. In it you’ll see the long, skinny poems I’ve been talking about — mostly one to four syllables per line. I like to think I’m achieving ever more compression of sound and sense to fit within those slender borders. Ah — there’s another monosonnet, this one with two stanzas. Since I finished the manuscript of Edge, and since the machinery of poetry production grinds exceeding slow, I’m now a third of the way through another book. A year and a half ago I magically turned into a birder, and the new poems are all about birds — so far I’ve written about a Cardinal, a Whimbrel, Pelicans, a Killdeer, sparrowing, spishing, my cat who eats birds, Starlings, Brown-headed cowbirds, and a Burrowing Owl. But there are 914 species of birds in North America, so I’ve got a ways to go. Oh. I’ve also got a poem about a radish in there amongst the birds.