A Conversation with Dan Chiasson
2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 127; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/sew.2019.0029
ISSN1934-421X
Autores Tópico(s)Caribbean history, culture, and politics
ResumoA Conversation with Dan Chiasson Dan Chiasson and Spencer Hupp (bio) Dan Chiasson is the country’s most visible poet-critic, having contributed reviews to Poetry, the New York Review of Books, and since 2007, the New Yorker. In this capacity he has made a significant contribution to the way literary-minded Americans read and appreciate poetry. However, his virtues are not merely curatorial. He is a keen writer, and someone for whom the world of the mind — the creative impulse, figurative thought — is immediately accessible. In other words, Chiasson deals with the imagined, and its relationship to lived experience. While his education and inclinations are Classical, his idiom and tastes are up-to-date; by Chiasson’s estimate, Archilochus and Dickinson rank with Louis Glück and Terrance Hayes in terms of contemporary relevance. His reviews are equally agnostic; he’ll write on anything — but not everything — from Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson’s landmark second collection, House of Lords and Commons, to the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Sylvia Plath’s Collected Letters. The care with which Chiasson treats his subjects, poetic or otherwise, reveals a true generosity of attention and interest, and, like his own poetry, exercises in the possibilities of thought. His four collections to date (The Afterlife of Objects; Natural History; Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon; and Bicentennial) disclose [End Page 329] an uncommon clarity from a poet whose work operates within the many intersections of time and the imagination. I interviewed Chiasson when he came to Sewanee from Massachusetts (where he teaches at Wellesley) to deliver a lecture on the work and legacy of Heather McHugh, recipient of the Sewanee Review’s 2018 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. A second conversation followed, some months later, on the phone. Dan is a sharp and generous conversationalist — a cozy, consummate New Englander. I’m always excited to hear how a poet speaks, as the pattern of a poet’s speech often helps illuminate their work. That didn’t happen here. What I did learn from talking with Chiasson is how he constructs a line of critical thinking, which in this case, proved more fruitful. — Spencer Hupp SR: Where did you start with poetry? What poets and writers did you first cling to as interests or influences? Chiasson: Like a lot of poets of my generation or older, the first poem that really spoke to me was Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I first found it in the back of some ninth- or tenth-grade textbook. I memorized it. Like a lot of dorky, sexually baffled white boys, I saw myself in Prufrock. Around the same time there was a PBS series called Voices and Visions, and I can remember first watching the T. S. Eliot episode in my living room in Burlington, Vermont, on an occasion when I was able to commandeer the one TV from my grandparents, who liked Hogan’s Heroes or Across the Fence, a local show that gave tips on canning berries and such. Then, amazingly, from the same screen, over the same speakers, came Eliot’s voice: “Let us go then, you and I. . . .” It matters, I think, that that poem begins with an invitation. I took the invitation personally. [End Page 330] SR: When did you first think to pursue poetry professionally? Chiasson: “Professional” is such a fascinating word. A profession is “a public declaration,” and it relates to the vows taken by members of a religious order. If we use that older sense of the word, I guess I would name several moments. A beloved teacher died suddenly in high school. Somewhere, in the archives of Rice Memorial High School, there is a yearbook with my first poem, an elegy for him. It was a big literary production, with little notes stolen from Eliot and from Robert Lowell, whom I’d just started reading. But the poem was seen as serious and dignified, a way for the community to think through the loss. I still remember getting a phone call from a classmate, who had always styled himself as our class’s “poet,” essentially...
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