12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rachel Hadas
RachelHadas [photo credit: Shalom Gorewitz] is the author of over twenty books ofpoetry, essays, and translations, most recently a collection of brief, lyrical prose texts,
Pastorals
(Measure Press 2025). A recipientof honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship at the Cullman Centerfor Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and an award inliterature from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters, she taughtEnglish for many years at Rutgers University-Newark, in New Jersey, andcurrently teaches at 92Y in New York. She divides her time between new York City and Danville, Vermont.
For moreinformation please see www.rachelhadas.net
1. How did your first book or chapbook changeyour life? How does your most recentwork compare to your previous? How doesit feel different?
My firstbook was indeed a chapbook, Starting from Troy, published by David R. Godinein 1975. I was in my twenties, and muchof the poems had been written when I was still an undergraduate. I don’t know that the book changed mylife! I remember that I had unreasonableexpectations of what effect this tiny book might have. The journalist and poetDon Marquis commented a century ago that expecting a poem or a book of poems togarner much attention would be like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyonand waiting for the echo. That’s stilltrue; if anything, there’s now a veritable digital blizzard of rose petals, butthey’re all pretty silent.
As far as how my most recent book (Pastorals,2025) compares with my first book, nothing dramaticcomes to mind. Not that my work hasn’tchanged and developed; of course it has. But I’ve written so much over the past half a century – a dauntingamount and a daunting span of time – what itfeels arbitrary to single out one book just because it happens to be my mostrecent. I’ve developed, I hope, adistinctive poetic voice, which is unabashedly literate and also personalwithout being confessional or hermetic. My themes are often memory and loss, but I also pay attention to domesticdetail and the look of my surroundings, whether they’re a Greek island,Riverside Park, a classroom, or a hospital room. The life-raft of language – the phrase isJames Merrill’s – has carried me over experiences from motherhood tobereavement to teaching. I’ve alwaysbeen drawn to the waypoetry unites the outside and the inside – what Hannah Arendt called the publicrealm, the world we share, and the private world of emotions, dreams, and ourdaily consciousness, what goes on inside our heads. How to make sense of these two worlds, how totie them to together, how to make beauty from our human bewilderment?
2. How did you come to poetry first, as opposedto, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’ve neverhad the slightest talent for fiction, for making up a story or characters orworking out a plot. I have great admiration for some novelists, but I’m not oneof them. Nonfiction prose I’ve enjoyedwriting over the years; sometimes book reviews or essays, sometimes poems thatasked to be turned into prose. But mynative medium has always, always been poetry.
3. How long does it take to start any particularwriting project? Does your writinginitially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to theirfinal shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I don’talways know when or whether I’m starting a writing project, or quite how I’ddefine such a project. If the “project”is a poem, I’ll probably scribble something down, and it might take ten or morerevisions to lick it into shape, as the Roman poet Virgil described his writingprocess. Thoserevisions might take a week or less, or might take years; in the latter case Imight put a poem down, perhaps thinking it’s finished, and then look at itagain and realize how flabby it is. Often the leaner, tighter versions afterrevision are much stronger. “Copiousnotes” – not really. Copious drafts, sure. I’ve gotten much better at self-editing over the years.
4. Where does a poem or work of prose usuallybegin for you? Are you an author ofshort pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working ona “book” from the very beginning?
I alwayshave more poems around, some published in periodicals, some unpublished, thancan fit into a book; the challenge is to carve the best book out of thatunwieldy mass. It’s rare for me to workon a book from the beginning. I didbecome aware, in writing my caregivingmemoir Strange Relation (2011), that the various poems and prosepieces in it all belonged together, but it took me a while to sort them intosomething like a coherent chronological order. As I say, I’m not a natural storyteller. My new book, Pastorals, is something of an exception too; earlyin 2023 I realized that my many poems about our house in Vermont all bore astrong family resemblance, needed to be together, and needed to be trimmed ofredundancies. And somewhat surprisingly,they also (not having been among my most formally ambitious in the first place,and I am something of a formalist) needed to be…prose! I’m not too fond of the term prose poem, butthere you are.
5. Are public readings part of or counter to yourcreative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Publicreadings are fine if I don’t have to travel far or move heaven and earth to setup a reading. As I get older I am lessinvested in them. Literary conferencesor festivals which feature readings often have so many crammed into a few daysthat the readings become a bit of a trial for all involved.
6. Do you have any theoretical concerns behindyour writing? What kinds of questionsare you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Theoreticalconcerns; questions….These are interesting questions which the current fraughtand angry state of discourse turns into loaded questions. In trying to come up with a thoughtfulanswer, let me quote the wise elder, poet, and thinker Robert Pinsky, whorecently had this to say about the role of poetry, which I see as the genrewhere my main contribution lies: “…theart of poetry…takes for its medium each individual person’s breath: inherently,and by its nature, on an individual and human scale. That is the solace of poetry: not thereassurance of safety, but the restoration of human scale, theimportance of each person, amid a world of risk.”
7. What do you see the current role of the writerbeing in larger culture? Do they evenhave one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
That quotefrom Pinsky above applies to this question about the role of the writer inlarger culture. If bywriter we mean poet. The other kinds ofwriting I happen to do are largely literary-critical and speakmore, I think, to the threatened areas of general knowledge and culturalmemory. Book reviewing for one – and thebooks I review are either poetry or nonfiction. A scholar like Edith Hall, who combines knowledge of the classics withmemoir, is right up my alley; see her fascinating 2024 book Facing Down the Furies.
Clearly,the role of the writer depends on what kind of writing they’re doing. I’ve studied classics and comparativeliterature and have translated both Ancient and Modern Greek. But perhaps more to the point, I grew up at atime and in a culture and family that was saturated with literature, and thatgeneral literary culture, which I feel I’ve absorbed by osmosis, serves me wellnow in unexpected and amusing if not lucrative ways. I retired from many yearsof teaching at Rutgers-Newark at the end of 2022, and thus have plenty of timeto devote to – well, what sometimes feels like answering questions aboutliterature which might come at me from all directions. In addition to being poetry editor of twovery different periodicals, Classical Outlook and The Robert Graves Review, I’ve been asked to in the past few weeks to contribute an opinionabout the American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962); to blurb a book aboutHerodotus; to review the excellentCanadian poet Karen Solie; and to help celebrate the American poet Anne Sexton (1928-74). I am not a specialist! But that’s what general knowledge – literaryand cultural knowledge – seems to mean.
8. Doyou find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential(or both)?
I haven’tworked much with outside editors; increasingly I am my own best editor. A good editor can be incredibly valuable, butthere are hardly any of them around anymore. In general I don’t think poets or critics much on editors, for better orworse. Poets tend to be generous withtheir time (of course there are exceptions) when it comes to reading andcritiquing other poets. I think of MollyPeacock’s wonderful recent book about her long personal and poetic friendshipwith Phillis Levin, A Friend Sails in on a Poem; or of David Kalstone’s 1989Becoming a Poet, an examination of the literary friendships of MarianneMoore and Elizabeth Bishop, and then of Bishop and Robert Lowell. As Elizabeth Bishop wrote long ago, poets keep each other warm all over the world. This is a case where email can be a boon.
9. Whatis the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to youdirectly)?
Oh gosh,many things come to mind. Mary Jo SalterI think (where did I hear this?) liked to say to her students “Remember, yourreader has a job” – which meant that they had other demands on their time thandecoding your hermetic poems! A.E. Stallings has advised “You cannot be too obvious, you cannot be too clear,”meaning not that poets should avoid clarity (I know it’s ambiguous) but the opposite:try to be intelligible. The practice ofasking for prose accompaniments to poems, which David Lehman has adhered to inhis Best American Poetry series, and which is now our policy at ClassicalOutlook, is often illuminating, but it can also reveal a startling gapbetween what’s in the writer’s head and what makes it onto the page.
10. How easy has it been for you to move betweengenres (poetry to essays to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
Movingbetween genres can be a good strategy for avoiding burnout and boredom or acreative brick wall, so long as one isn’t on a strict deadline, which I rarelyam. I might work on a book review in themorning and a poem or poems in the afternoon, or vice versa. Once I have drafts I start to edit, but theprocess of revising poems feels more leisurely than in the case with bookreviews or translations, particularly book reviews, for the simple reason thatlike most poets, I’m not inundated with time-sensitive requests for poems.
11. What kind of writing routine do you tend tokeep, or do you even have one? How doesa typical day (for you) begin?
I don’thave a rigid writing routine and never have had one. But I do tend to get antsy if I haven’t atleast revised or looked at a poem in progress, or started something new, in aweek or two (more antsy now that I’m retired – I used to be able to shelve workin progress when I was teaching). Ingeneral, mornings are good, lunch and right after is nap or sleepy time, and Imay or may not work in the later afternoon or the evening, depending. In the early months of 2017, when I was onsabbatical, I wrote almost all the poems that were published in Poems forCamilla (2018) sitting up in bed – my husband, as I recall, would bring mecoffee. But unlike Edith Wharton, Ididn’t have a maid to collect the manuscript pages I tossed to the floor whenI’d finished writing on them.
12. When your writing gets stalled, wheredo you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
As I saidin answer to #10 above, moving between genres is good if you’re stalled. Translation is a good exercise. Reading, or letters from literary friends,can be good. But as David McFadden is quoted as saying in #14, books come frombooks. Not exclusively, but veryoften. There’s also, it occurs to me,the oracle of the everyday: what do I see out the window? What did I dream last night? What about that conversation I suddenlyremember having or overhearing?
13. What.Fragrance reminds you of home?
Fragrance:hmm. In Vermont, woodsmoke. Lilacs ifwe’re there early enough. In New York,sometimes petrichor, the indescribable smell of a rain-washed sidewalk. Pizza fragrance wafting out of an opendoor. Marijuana drifting down thestreet.
14. DavidW. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other formsthat influence your work, whether nature, music, science, or visual art?
As well asbooks, poems can come from walks, dreams, paintings, and countless other piecesof experience including memories. Science, music, the daily phantasmagoria of the news.
15. What other writers or writings areimportant for your work, or simply your life outside your work?
Really toomany writers are important to me to list. My life outside my work is sort of a head-scratcher. Here’s a wildly incomplete andunchronological list: Homer, Lucretius, Virgil, Keats, Proust, Anthony Powell,Edith Hall, A.E. Stallings, James Merrill, Thoreau, Lydia Davis. Baudelaire. Tolkien. Seneca.
16. Whatwould you like to do that you haven’t done?
I wouldlike to have known my father, the classicist Moses Hadas (1900-1966) for muchlonger than our lives permitted – I was seventeen when he died. But that doesn’t come under the category of“haven’t yet done,” does it? I both doand do not want to travel more, but not the way today’s travel conditionswork. Mostly my wishes involve havingthe health and energy to keep on doing what I love doing – writing, teaching –and to be able to spend more good time with my husband, my son and his wife,and friends. Not an imaginative list,perhaps, but not implausible either. Oh,and one literary genre I feel vaguely attracted to is drama – not fiction,never fiction, but voices. even encouraged me once, at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, to try my hand at writing a play. But when he heard that I didn’t have anagent, the matter stopped right there, which is okay.
17. If you could pick any other occupation toattempt, what would it be? Or,alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been awriter?
When I wasa little girl I wanted to be children’s book illustrator, or perhaps a monk ornun who illuminated manuscripts. I love to draw and paint in watercolors but amnot as good at those things as I used to be, which was never great. I started making collages around the time thepandemic started, and I still enjoy that. I’d never ever get into medical or nursing school, but I sometimes thinkI was a healer in another life. Or aninterpreter of dreams – but not a therapist!
18. What made you write, as opposed to doingsomething else?
Writing waswhat came naturally and early. And myfather’s death helped kick-start me into writing poetry. “Death is the mother of beauty,” WallaceStevens reminds us. I never used tounderstand that, but I do now. Therewas never really a “something else,” unless one counts teaching, which alsocame pretty naturally. There stillisn’t.
19. What was the last great book youread? What was the last great film?
Last greatbook I read? I’ve already mentioned the Edith Hall. I adored A.E. Stallings’s2025 study of the Parthenon marbles, FriezeFrame. I’m currently rereadingTrollope’s maddening and wonderful Can You Forgive Her? Last summer Ireread, and loved all over again, Lucasta Miller’s biography of Keats via poems. I read poetry all the time – most recently Charles Martin, Karen Solie, Juliet Mattila, and RichardTillinghast –there’s always something to savor. The weekly zoom group I’ve been in since 2022 has read Ovid’s Metamorphoses,Virgil’s Aeneid, and now Homer’s Odyssey. I and a couple of others hope that ParadiseLost will come next. The last film Isaw in a theater period was the very enjoyable Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. Great? I don’t know.
20. What are you currently working on?
I’m currently accumulating poems for maybe aNew and Selected, not sure. I seem to bewriting a lot, so there’s a lot of winnowing to do. Recently finished: a prosimetrum (prose andpoetry alternating) about myth, ie both poems of mine inspired by myth andprose interludes talking about the occasion of the poem, its inspiration,whatever. Put together, the proseportions form a kind of patchy memoir. This book is slated to be published late in 2025 or early 2026, but I’mnot holding my breath.
I’m also currentlyengaged, in a desultory way, with typing up the contents of commonplace booksI’ve kept for well over a decade – jottings down of passages I’d read thatseemed worth hanging onto. The resultingcompilations can also be sources of inspiration (see #14 above). For example, a phrase from something Howard Nemerov said or wrote, which I’d never have remembered had I not noted it downyears ago, inspired a sestina recently when I rediscovered it in my notebook.The phrase goes something like this – I can’t even remember it word for wordthis minute: “The world is always weaving itself over the ruins.”
