NP: I have to begin by asking you about the sonnet, the defining form of Killing Orpheus. I’m curious to hear what initially attracted you to the sonnet, and what about the form compelled you to keep returning to it. I’m curious, too, about your relationship to formal constraints. While your lines conform to a rough pentameter, you aren’t strict with the meter, and while you often employ rhyme, you don’t always adhere to established patterns. In other words, there’s a kind of relaxed rigor to your work—one of many qualities I admire deeply about it.
FM: Sonnets are the most durable poetic form in English for a reason. They’re short enough to demand radical, almost haiku-like brevity, but long enough to work out a problem. Sometimes I tell myself, “If you can’t say what you mean in fourteen lines, you probably don’t have anything to say.” I’m not sure if that’s true, but either way, brevity is a wholesome discipline. There’s also Don Paterson’s theory that sonnets embody the golden ratio. Voltas usually show up around line 9, giving the poem an 8:6 or 9:5 ratio, which is fairly close to 1.618. It’s an imprecise theory, but it points to something real. Roses, whelks, and sonnets seem to share a geometric cleanness. Then, too, lines of iambic pentamer in English take, on average, three seconds to read aloud, and this corresponds to Pöppell’s “perceptual instant,” the duration of “now.” So a sonnet is fourteen specimens of “now” sewn together by rhyme. Sonnets are easy to memorize, geometrically interesting, and knife-short. They have a lot going for them. I have a sense that I will never exhaust the possibilities of the sonnet. Nobody will.
As for the “relaxed rigor” (thank you), my favorite handler of poetic form is Philip Larkin. His meter is muscular, not robotic. His off-rhymes chime instead of clang. Irish poets like Heaney and Muldoon share this formal sensibility. They seem to prefer faint music which does not call attention to itself. Larkin’s meter reminds me of how a human skeleton gives flesh solidity even when you cannot see the bones.
NP: I’ve long been fascinated with how poets open their first book—what sentence, even what word, launches a career. You begin with the idea of growth (“It only grows in high, elk-trampled fields…”) and return to the idea a few times throughout the collection, in the title of “Penelope, Growing Old,” in “After Abel” (“Bullfrogs called, Grow. Grow.”), and in the growth of the speaker’s daughter, who goes from an infant to a one-year-old across the book’s first section. What other forms of growing occur in Killing Orpheus? Would you say that the collection charts your own growth, and not only as a poet, but also as a husband and father?
FM: That’s a good observation. I hadn’t noticed the motif. I suppose my fundamental perspective is biological. When disoriented, I return to science. Which is to say, when faced with the mysteries that will one day peel me off this rock, I cling to the brave, pitiful certainties of science. These certainties are clumsy, they’re brittle, they’re limited, their self-assurance is tragic, but they’re a place to start. So, growth: flowers accumulate tough little fibrous cells. Trees stack golden rings. As for my daughter, what does it mean that she grows? How can I keep up? How can I become more alert to the ramifications of her consciousness? Should I try to shape her soul? Should I even want to? These are frightening questions. Who am I to answer them? At least I can say that she grows.
I guess the longer you look at nature, the more you sense a life force in things. Bullfrogs want to devour flies. Moss spreads over rocks. Vines strangle each other for the crispest bites of sunlight. This life force can seem like evidence of Darwinian brutality and indifference, or it can seem like life’s ebullience, something that can nourish hope. In nature, children, and poetry, we are confronted with a plenitude that does not interpret itself.
I teach high school English, and kids love talking about a character’s “growth.” What does that mean? Do they mean the biological force that thickens jungles? Are they pointing down the dreary path of moral self-improvement? Are they being lazy, or do they have an innate sense that life, art, and jungles are playing the same game?
I think poems emerge from someone’s life the way mushrooms fruit from an underground fungus. The white threads remain invisible.
NP: The brilliant “Antivenom” could be read as an oblique retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, with the beloved trailing behind the speaker in a hellish landscape. It could be read also as a version of the Garden of Eden story, with the central couple expelled from the paradise of air conditioning and troubled by the threat of snakes. This fluency in mythic narratives is one of the most admirable qualities of your poetry. From your perspective, what does myth offer the poet imaginatively? Moreover, what does history offer? For while you write about present-tense experiences, your poetry seems at least as interested in the past, and especially in the ancient past.
FM: Great, difficult question. What doesn’t myth offer? Indigenous Australian “Songlines” feel like the purest form of myth to me: retracing the steps of one’s ancestors, re-singing the world into existence. Myths can be primal, innocent utterances, and the force of their breath can blast away the trash of the intellect. Geoffrey Hill’s “Genesis” has haunted me for years: “There is no bloodless myth will hold.” I don’t know why this line clutches my heart. What is a “bloodless” myth, and why am I scared my life will become one? For that matter, what is a warm-blooded myth? I’m not sure, but I feel confident ancient myths will never run dry. It is each generation’s challenge to become adequate to myth.
You mention history. History possesses an acrid, tragic flavor. Perhaps I’m convinced of this because I am a Southerner. History is an anthology of depraved acts, and I think the poet has a responsibility to be both surprised (in his heart) and unsurprised (in his head) by each depravity. I am not interested in teaching moral lessons about the past, although some poets do this very well. If I have an aim, I am more interested in making the reader’s nervous system wake up to the past.
Arguably, all art begins with remembering. Mnemosyne was the mother of all muses. Personal, historical, and mythological memory all pulse through the best, most human poetry, not because juggling these forms of memory is intellectually impressive, but because those three forms of memory are always present in a human life. I think it takes a strange sort of humility and attention to notice all three at once.
NP: I often found myself laughing as I made my way through Killing Orpheus, even on a second and third read. The title poem, for example, manages to be both hilarious and horrifying as it reenacts Orpheus’s murder in a gladiatorial arena. (The moment when the doomed combatant strums the lyre never fails to elicit a chuckle.) Would you say that humor is an important feature of your work? Is it something you look for in other poets? And if so, who are some of your favorite comedic poets?
FM: I’m not sure if humor is an important feature of my work. Maybe it is. At minimum, humor precludes self-seriousness, which can kill a piece of writing.
That said, light verse does not appeal to me. Stabs of humor do. Andrew Hudgins’s poem “Praying Drunk” is hilarious: “Our Father, who art in Heaven, I am drunk. / Again. Red wine. For which I offer thanks.” Dorothy Parker is still sharp. Melville (in prose) is one of the funniest writers in our language. Anne Carson’s weird humor and Louise Glück’s dry humor have nourished me. Same with Szymborska. And Kay Ryan. Humor and beauty provoke a similar shock of recognition.
Most really wonderful writers are funny, and maybe this is because laughing, weeping, and singing are three prongs of the same impulse to jump into an abyss.
NP: “Adam’s Task” portrays the act of naming—language—as its own kind of original sin, forever dividing mankind from the natural world. This notion is picked up by “Wild Azaleas,” which describes the work of capturing the titular flowers with a paintbrush, and which possesses a rather dim view of the descriptive powers of language by comparison. Perhaps ironically, one of the great pleasures of your poetry is how vividly it depicts the natural world, how closely it attends to insects, animals, trees, and flowers—subjects that another collection might overlook. If language is both bridge and wedge, both window and wall, allowing us to see anew the garden it banishes us from, how do you think of your role as a poet? How do you reconcile the contradiction?
FM: I like how you put it: “Language is both window and wall.” I can’t improve on that. To me, this paradox is near the core of poetry. It genuinely bothers me. I want to know the world because I love it. Knowing is, to me, linguistic. Yet to name a thing is to reduce it to that name. Maybe you have to alienate something to love it. Steven Millhauser’s short story “History of a Disturbance” is brilliant on this topic. The narrator starts to realize that words do violence to the world. After his wife asks if he loves her, it seems to him “that that single word, ‘love,’ was trying to compress within itself a multitude of meanings, was trying to take many precise and separate feelings and crush them into a single mushy mass, which I was being asked to hold in my hands like a big sticky ball.” The narrator takes a secular vow of silence, refusing to harm the world with language anymore. His wife is furious. Language is the stuff of relationships. What could be a more total rejection than silence?
As Christian Wiman reminds us in My Bright Abyss, “You can’t spend your whole life questioning whether language can represent reality. At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you will use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent.”
Poets are always doomed to fail. There is no saying the unsayable. Yet the sad, piquant ache I get from Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb” transcends failure. Larkin has brushed up against the flank of something vast. I guess I write poems because there is something out there, vast and impenetrable by language, that language somehow carries us closer to.
NP: I can imagine that arranging the collection presented challenges, as there is neither an overarching narrative nor a single theme, and while the sonnet predominates, not all of the poems are in received forms. Can you talk about how you landed on the current (quite wonderful) arrangement? What were your organizing principles or goals? On a related note, I would love to hear about your platonic ideal of a poetry collection, and what you plan to do with your next book.
FM: My editor, Jake Grefenstette, observed that many of the poems include brutality and death. I have no particular desire to write poems about brutality and death; in fact, like Bartleby, I’d prefer not to. Maybe it was embarrassment that made me “hide” the darker poems deeper in the collection in an early version. Jake suggested bringing some of them up front. This struck me as an honest suggestion. The structure of the manuscript felt easier to figure out once I started trying to be honest about what the poems were saying.
If I have a platonic ideal for a poetry collection, it’s that the collection would balance xenia (hospitality, inviting the reader in) and challenge. By “challenge” I mean respecting the reader’s intelligence.
For my next collection, we will see. I doubt if anyone controls his fascinations. I would like to write a book of sonnets; even though I have written dozens, I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of the form. Then I have an impossible dream of writing a single long narrative poem with a genuinely propulsive plot. I’m not sure I’ve found a model of this rich propulsiveness in the past two centuries, except possibly in Robinson Jeffers.