12 or 20 (second series) questions with Cynthia Hogue
Cynthia Hogue’s new poetry collection is instead, it is dark (Red HenPress, 2023). Her ekphrastic Covid chapbook is entitled Contain (TramEditions 2022), and her new collaborative translation from the French of NicoleBrossard is Distantly (Omnidawn 2022). She served as Guest Editor forPoem-a-Day for September (2022), sponsored by the Academy of American Poets.Hogue was the inaugural Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern andContemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She lives in Tucson.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does yourmost recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book in the States was published about thirtyyears ago, The Woman in Red (Ahsahta Press, 1989). I also had a limited-editioncollection published by Whiteknights Press in the U.K. earlier in the decade, Wherethe Parallels Cross. Both books were published around the time that I wasworking on and finishing up a Ph.D. at the University of Arizona, and thanks tothem, I was offered my first job at the University of New Orleans as apoet-scholar. Now, that job changed my life.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say,fiction or non-fiction?
I started writing poetry as a child. It's true, I alsowrote in other genres. I created a neighborhood newspaper when I was 10. Iwould assign the other children articles to write, but in fact, I wrote andproduced the only issue I was able to make by myself. In high school, a specialclass in creative writing was offered by my favorite English teacher, and inthat class, I wrote poetry. I attended Oberlin College in the year they offeredtheir first creative writing class in poetry, in the Experimental College. Itried other genres, but always returned to poetry. I had fun trying out fictionin New Orleans, but never finished anything I wrote. And I labored on amemoir-essay about living with someone, my first husband, with TourettesSyndrome, and also about the onset of Rheumatoid Arthritis in my mid-forties. Iwas pleased with those essays, but the first took me a decade to finish, sinceI didn't know what I was doing!
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writingproject? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Dofirst drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work comeout of copious notes?
Really depends on the project. In the last decade or so, asI explored drawing on research for book-length projects, my whole creativeprocess shifted from writing individual poems in short bursts to a slower,longer framework for completing a book, even if poems were arranged in series.I discovered a remarkable slave story in New Orleans right before I was leavingfor another position, the last slave to use the courts to sue for emancipationon the eve of the courts being closed to slaves with the signing of theFugitive Slave law. This slave, Cora Arsene, won her case. Dred Scott, in adifferent state but the same year, did not. Writing that long poem entailed adecade of research about Southern slave history (including the HaitianRevolution), and much much consideration of genre. The new collection, instead,it is dark, began with the shock of my husband's massive heartattack. He was born into occupied France, and my rather inchoateimpulse as I began the book was to honor his life by turning some of hismemories and dreams into poems. I conducted a lot of research and ended upinterviewing his extended family in France for this collection.
4 - Where does a poem or translation usually begin for you?Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project,or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
For the translation of Nicole Brossard's Lointaines,which I published last year with Omnidawn as Distantly (with myco-translator, Sylvain Gallais), I eased into that serial project as if it werehot water, translating poems in the series here and there until we finallydecided to translated the whole book. With my last poetry collection, InJune the Labyrinth, I had been going on a sort of annual pilgrimage toChartres Cathedral every year for a decade when I decided to challenge myselfto write a book-length serial poem around the subject of the labyrinth. Iwanted to see if I could sustain a book-length project, but I adopted a loosenarrative structure to do so.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creativeprocess? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I rarely do solo readings, preferring group readings, andthey are certainly not part of my creative process, no.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind yourwriting? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? Whatdo you even think the current questions are?
I just returned fromthe wonderful New Orleans Poetry Festival, where I was on a panel called“Uncanny Activisms” (Lesley Wheeler’s terms for poetry in the tradition ofspells and prayers), so this is what I’ve been thinking about of late: Howcan/does poetry effect change? How does poetry matter (I actually neverquestion that it matters, being such an ancient art form, but realistically,how many people does it reach?) In his essay “On Poetry,” Velimir Khlebnikovraised the question of spells and incantations, magic words that are sometimes“beyonsense” in sacred or folk language. Great power is attributed to thesewords, and to magic spells, he says, because they are believed to contain magicand be capable of influencing our fate. Such poems and incantations go straightover the heads of leaders to Spirit. Khlebnikov said that “the magic in a wordremains magic even if it is not understood, and loses none of its power.” Thesedays, I am thinking very pointedly about the humane, inflected inspiritual and activist terms, in the hopes of changing, affecting, orraising consciousness. And sometimes, because I greatly admire many works indidactic tradition, I write poems with dryer, discursive statements inflectedby sonic lyricism.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being inlarger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writershould be?
In the past, great writers could be cultural and politicalvoices, like a Yeats, Orwell, Pablo Neruda, Gore Vidal, Simone de Beauvoir, AlbertCamus. James Baldwin. Toni Morrison. Margaret Atwood today, Barbara Kingsolver,Ta-Nehisi Coates. The larger culture, I believe, benefits from the voices ofwriters and artists speaking in a more public arena, but now, with socialmedia, there is a levelling effect. A real democracy of voices. It can be hardto judge which voices are worth listening to. What writers offer is athoughtful, attentive, perhaps an ethical viewpoint. Many writers make theirliving teaching, and one by one, as students of literature and creative writinglearn the field, they are changed, at least potentially. Writers play the roleof mentor, sometimes guide, teaching students the skills to think forthemselves. Maybe that isn’t the role I think they should have, but I’ve cometo see it as important.
8—I’ve skipped that question, as I don’t have muchexperience with an outside editor.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (notnecessarily given to you directly)?
Go where you are loved. Over the courseof a life, one receives much advice and counsel, sometimes requested andsometimes offered. This piece of advice is to be found in H.D.’s Trilogy, Ithink, and it is likely from the Bible. Once I took it in, during a dark timein my life, I never forgot it, and sometimes, I follow it.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres(poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
I don’t see translating poetry as moving between genres.It’s certainly moving between languages, but in my experience, I feel I know myway around a poem that has been translated literally from another language—evenif I don’t immediately understand what the poet is doing. The strong appeal oftranslating other poets is the work enlarges your horizon, your language, andreplenishes and inspires the imagination.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, ordo you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Every day, I begin with some kind of writing. If I don’thave many interruptions, and especially, if I’m working on a longer project,I’ll usually write a poem or at least a draft. When I was writing my pandemicchapbook, CONTAIN, in the first months of lockdown, I had received a gorgeousvisual series from an artist I met at MacDowell, and I went into a kind ofaltered state of consciousness, meditating each day on one of the visual formsand writing an ekphrastic poem. Since there were no interruptions at that stageof the pandemic lockdown, I wrote 40 poems in 40 days. Very unusual for me, butthen the circumstances were intense and extraordinary.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn orreturn for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I turn to poetry, reading some or many of the books piledon floor and desk, and I turn to nature.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Lilacs.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come frombooks, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature,music, science or visual art?
As mentioned earlier, visual art (in the case of CONTAIN,the series by the remarkable Morgan O’Hara), sometimes history (as in the slavenarrative, “Ars Cora”), sometimes architecture (such as Chartres Cathedral,which has one of the few labyrinths that survived the French revolution), andin the beginning and for many years, and even now, nature.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for yourwork, or simply your life outside of your work?
Dickinson and H.D., to some extent Marianne Moore, Stevens,Eliot, Gwendolyn Brooks, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, C.D. Wright, Forrest Gander, Lissa Wolsak, Nicole Brossard, Kathleen Fraser. Gary Snyder was veryimportant to me at one point, and Robert Bly, William Stafford. Nathaniel Mackey and Rachel Blau DuPlessis are amazing. I read deeply into Afaa Weaver,Alice Fulton, Brenda Hillman. Seamus Heaney’s North, his translation of Beowulf.Paul Celan. Those are some of the poets I return to. I am always open to prosethat is as beautifully written as poetry. I always read Barbara Kingsolver.There was a German writer I was much taken with, and she was beautifullytranslated: Christa Wolf. I am friends with a prose writer of great gifts,Karen Brennan (who is also a fine poet).
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Actually, I went to Greece once many years ago, and I wouldlike to go back. The last time I saw an eastern autumn was ages ago, and I planto return to New York next fall to see the leaves.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt,what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended updoing had you not been a writer?
I’d been planning on being a doctor. A scientist. Orperhaps a naturalist. I loved the outdoors. I began college as a biology major.But I loathed dissecting piglets and frogs and I fell in love with poetry. Mygrandmother had a gorgeous soprano, and had I inherited her voice, I might havetried to be an opera singer. I do love music.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing somethingelse?
I seemed to be good at it. I was otherwise very messed upwhen I was young, and writing poems was like my North Star.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was thelast great film?
Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver. Eo, one of the most painfulanimal rights films to watch, which I almost couldn’t finish watching.
20- What are you currently working on?
Ipublished three books over the last year, so I am in a fallow period. Gatheringmy thoughts, doing some readings and writing micro-essays.
rob,Thank you so much for these questions! This has been fun.
