An Interview with Ryan Wilson

Ryan Wilson is a poet, translator, and literary critic from Georgia. His collection of poetry, The Stranger World, was published in June 2017; his monograph, How to Think Like a Poet, was published in 2019; and Proteus Bound: Selected Translations, 2008-2020 was published in 2021.  He serves as the editor-in-chief of Literary Matters, the online literary journal of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. Currently, he teaches in the English Department at the Catholic University of America.  I was given the opportunity to ask him some questions about his writing style, journey as a poet, and advice for developing writers. 

You’ve stated that your life as a poet began during your freshman year of college.  What are some ways that your poetic style has evolved throughout this journey?

When I was an undergraduate, I had no style. I had no sense of self. Perhaps such a feeling is normal enough among the young. At about that age, Rimbaud had written the brilliant, and brilliantly ungrammatical, sentence: Car JE est un autre, “For I is an other.” Moreover, in the 18th century, the French naturalist, Comte de Buffon, famously said: Le style est l’homme meme. So, perhaps saying that one had no style and saying that one had no sense of self amount to the same thing. In any case, I knew that I had been play-acting my entire life, faking it, and I didn’t want to do that anymore, if I could avoid it.

But how does one escape the sense that one is play-acting all the time? Perhaps foolhardy with youth’s vibrant nescience, I set out to build a self, to make my real life like an ideal I had created in my mind of what a good life might be. That ideal was a composite, and it didn’t really exist. That is, nobody really lived the way I imagined I might.  

Partly my ideal came from an evening I was fortunate enough to spend with the now all-but-forgotten writer, scholar, and critic, Marion Montgomery. Marion was a self-described “Hillbilly Thomist,” and he wrote excellently on a dazzling array of subjects, notably on T.S. Eliot, Henry James, and Flannery O’Connor. In any case, when I was 17 or 18, I had the pleasure of spending an evening with him and his wife, Dot, at their home, and I remember well his quoting, in response to my frustration with my own writing, T.S. Eliot’s inspiring edict: “No cause is ever lost or won. It is only believed in or not.” In fact, he seemed to have read everything, and to be able to quote everything. In the lamplight of the Montgomery family’s parlor, enraptured by a labyrinth of books, the heady smell of his tobacco smoke hanging in the air, I felt both alien and profoundly at home, as if I’d found where I wanted to be but didn’t yet belong there, or, perhaps, as if I’d found where I belonged, but hadn’t yet committed myself fully to wanting to be there. It’s easy for the young to desire estrangement in order to have a sense, however illusory, of the dramatic in one’s life. And it’s easy to perform such an estrangement so long as one is young enough that consequences hang in the distance like a mirage.  

Partly, my ideal image came from the wonderful and widely-anthologized writer, Judith Ortiz Cofer, who had been my mother’s friend for many years and quondam office-mate at a small college in Georgia. Judith became my teacher when I was an undergraduate, and then became my friend.… What I admired most about Judith—aside from her wonderful stories, essays, memoirs, and poems—was her energy: she seemed indefatigable, almost superhuman…

And partly, my ideal image derived from my own imagination, from my own (erroneous) notion of what a “real writer” might be like. I had an extraordinarily Romantic notion of writing and of the writer’s life. What was accurate in my imaginative notion was drawn from folks like Marion and Judith, and that was work: constant, arduous, passionate work. I didn’t go in for the mopey image of the Romantic poet mooning about and looking forlorn—though I did go in for a bit of bohemianism—but I knew that to become a writer took tremendous amounts of work, feats of reading, and fits of furious writing….

So, I read everything I could. I would read 100+ books of contemporary poetry each year, alongside the great works of the English language, and the great works of philosophy, and later theology. Over time, I dusted off the languages I’d studied and taught myself other languages so that I could encounter the masterpieces of the Western World firsthand….

While doing all of this reading, I was also writing hundreds and thousands of bad poems, and eventually bad translations. Fail, fail, fail. But, eventually, over many years, as I attempted to assimilate the various writers who meant the most to me into an integrity, and to incorporate what I had learned from my own failures and fragmentary successes into that integrity, I began to develop a vision of my own, and with that vision came a style, and perhaps even a plausible selfhood.   

Of course, this last paragraph belies the truth, which is that each new poem requires, to some extent, a new vision and style. Each new work requires a new self, and I am always wriggling around in the confines of the vision and selfhood I’ve created as one wriggles around inside a sweater that’s a bit too small. As soon as you think you know how to write a poem, you can no longer write a poem. You’re doomed to repeat yourself tediously. Each time you confront a blank page, you begin a new adventure. But, having completed previous adventures successfully, to whatever degree, can be a help on each new adventure, so long as one doesn’t expect the new adventure to follow the path of the old one.

Not only do you write original works of both poetry and prose, but you also publish original translations.  For example, your 2021 book Proteus Bound: Selected Translations 2008–2020 features new English translations of Horace and Dante among other sources.  What inspired you to first begin translating? 

I didn’t begin to take translation seriously until I was a graduate student at Boston University. There I had the good fortune to study with a former U.S. Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, and with the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, both of whom changed my life forever, and for the better. But maybe more life-changing were my studies with Rosanna Warren, particularly her course in literary translation. I had ‘translated’ passages from Latin, Spanish, and Portuguese in various language classes, but those exercises were, well, exercises. I didn’t realize how much artistry goes into a literary translation. 

Studying with Rosanna, I found that literary translation requires the most intensive kind of reading, requires scholarly study, requires one to possess a mastery of myriad poetic techniques in one’s own tongue, and requires, finally, inspiration, much as original poems require inspiration. The difference between translating a poem and writing an original poem is that one doesn’t have to come up with the subject or form when translating. Consequently, for many years, on days when I was not feeling inspired to attempt or to work on an original poem of my own, I would try to translate a poem. And, often enough, some image or figure or technique I discovered, or rediscovered, in the process of translating would function as a heuristic for an original poem the next day or the next week. 

So I began to work on languages, and to translate more widely, across more cultures and wider periods of time, doing ever more research and study.  Doing so taught me more about reading and writing, and about my own abilities as a writer, than any class or teacher ever could. As Yeats says, in “Sailing to Byzantium:” “Nor is there singing school, but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence.” If you want to learn an art, study the masters, the monuments of that art’s magnificence. 

How has the time spent translating others’ works affected your style and process in crafting original pieces? 

The more one learns about literature, the more one sees that writers most often reach the new by combining things that are old with their own sensibilities and experiences. That is, the great works of literature usually don’t burst forth ex nihilo: they have sources. Even the Iliad and the Odyssey, if we follow the 20th century scholar Milman Parry, derived from pre-existing folk-songs….

Aeneas carries his father, Anchises, on his back, and he carries his lares and penates, and he leads his son, Ascanius, by the hand, and tries to guide poor Creusa (who doesn’t make it) as he embarks on his own odyssey. That is, he undertakes a journey—a journey for which he was destined—that will lead him to a new place, to a new civilization. But he doesn’t undertake the journey empty-handed. Rather, he carries what of his past he can carry with him, carries forward the past even as he moves into the unknown. 

That’s much like writing. I might go so far as to say that’s a plausible figure for culture. And, indeed, that process is repeated across millennia, continents, cultures, and languages. When we are born, we’re put upon the waters in an odyssey. Do we forsake all that came before? Do we forsake the journey forward? Or do we try to preserve what we love best from the past as we venture into the future with the hope of making something even better?  

In translating widely, I found my masters. I found my fathers. The most important, for me, are Horace, Dante, and Baudelaire. Horace is perhaps the most perfect lyric poet who ever lived. Every word, every syllable is just so, and his poems maintain an aequam mentem—an even mind, a levelheadedness. He is a poet of sunlight and order, comparable, perhaps, to the best fiction of E.M. Forster. 

Dante is, to my mind, the poet who has explored most deeply the human soul. The same poet who wrote Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate also wrote E’n la sua voluntade è nostra pace, respectively the most despairing and most hopeful lines of verse ever written. His use of figurae, or patterns, across the cantos and canticles of the Commedia is the most elaborate and subtle patterning in all of literature, and his Vita Nuova—in which the mortal Beatrice becomes a sign of and pathway to the divine—initiates the Renaissance vision that informs the development of Raphael, the work of Michelangelo, and the highest flourishing of Art. That is, Dante gives us poetry which embodies a sacramental vision of the world. 

Baudelaire is the great poet of shadows and fog (offsetting Horace’s sunlit lyrics), of subterranean secrets, of tension between the interior and exterior life, a poet whose own pursuit of beauty leads to a grandeur that simultaneously exalts the capacity of the human individual and satirizes the diminished state of the modern person, who has abdicated, or forgotten, how wonderful he or she is in frivolous pursuits or in what Orwell would later nominate, ‘groupthink.’

I could, of course, go on endlessly about all three. In short, however, I have taken what little I could from my masters and attempted to merge them together in my own poems, to synthesize them with my own observations and experiences. While my own work doesn’t belong in the same sentence—or book, even—with theirs, it would be yet poorer still if I hadn’t worked on translating them. 

You serve as the editor-in-chief of the online magazine Literary Matters. What brought you to the magazine?

Because the full story would prove rather tedious, I’ll try to summarize briefly. In the early 1990s, an astonishingly talented group of writers, critics, and scholars came together to form the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW). Many of those founding members were literary lions, living legends: Anthony Hecht, Marjorie Perloff, Robert Pinsky, Christopher Ricks, Mark Strand, John Updike, Derek Walcott, Rosanna Warren, C.K. Williams, etc. Their goal was simple: to promote literature and literary studies. 

Early on, the ALSCW established a print journal, Literary Imagination, published by Oxford University Press. Literary Imagination has been, and remains, one of the best literary magazines in the English-speaking world. 

For many years, the ALSCW grew and thrived, and for a long while was housed at Boston University. About six years ago, it became necessary for the ALSCW to move, and CUA’s heroic English Department chair, Prof. Suarez, arranged to bring the ALSCW to CUA. 

Now, in addition to Literary Imagination, the ALSCW had been publishing a newsletter called Literary Matters, which was produced as a .pdf file and e-mailed to members of the association. It included news about ALSCW members’ readings and new books, and sometimes included a few poems, reviews, and interviews. When Prof. Suarez kindly asked me to help out with the ALSCW and to run Literary Matters, I knew almost immediately that I needed to transform Literary Matters into an online literary journal. Why? Literary Imagination, as wonderful as it is and subscribed to, as it is, by libraries all over the world, has a very limited presence online. Meanwhile, I was acutely aware that writers of my generation, and readers of my generation and the younger generations, were primarily getting their reading matter online. And so, for the ALSCW to continue to thrive, the association needed a strong online venue to reach a broader and younger audience. 

As a result, I started building Literary Matters. At first, I did everything: I read all the submissions, sent out all solicitations, did all the editorial work, all the financial work, all the secretarial work, etc. I regularly worked 100+ hour weeks, without being paid for my work. But I wanted to make something good. ….Most importantly, though, my goal is, as it has always been, to provide the best writing available, from the best writers writing today, entirely free to anyone and everyone. I didn’t grow up with the internet, or free access to great writing. My grandparents didn’t even get past 4th grade in their education, and could barely read. Meanwhile, because of generous gifts to the ALSCW, we’re able to pay our contributors a small honorarium. Thus, writers both receive payment for their work and have it distributed to the widest possible audience, without anyone having to buy a subscription or conquer a paywall. In this ambition to remunerate writers and to give away the best writing possible for free, Literary Matters is more or less unique. 

Anyone who visits our page—literarymatters.org—can read original work from U.S. Poets Laureate and winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant, and many more of the most prestigious prizes around, as well as work from promising younger writers, enormously talented writers who have been underappreciated, etc., all entirely free. 

Do you have any advice for young, developing literary magazines like Vermilion?

The best advice is to know your audience, know your authors, and try to publish work whose content and form is most suitable in the context of the rhetorical triangle. 

But I might add a few “bonus” recommendations. 

1. Anyone interested in editing needs to be a master of grammar. I realize that mastering grammar sounds like about as much fun as letting novice dentists practice performing root canals on your teeth, but the truth is that nothing is more liberating, in verbal terms, than a mastery of grammar. Studying inflected languages like Latin and Greek can do wonders for your comprehension of grammar and of what sentences can do. At the very least, make yourself a master of the language in which you write and edit. 

2. As the Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, “No matter how deep a literary work may be, if it bores the reader, it is worthless.” Singer—whose posthumous work I’ve had the pleasure of publishing in Literary Matters—here echoes Horace, who, in his “Epistle to the Pisos,” writes, aut prodesse aut volunt delectare poetae: “Poets wish either to delight or to instruct.” Horace’s either/or is really more of a both/and. If a piece of writing doesn’t delight, whatever instruction it offers is, more or less, irrelevant. Nobody wants to sit through an aggressively bad movie to find out its moral. The same is true of writing. As Pascal wrote in his Pensées: “All that is only for the sake of the author is worthless.” 

3. Read everything. To be a good editor, one must cultivate literary knowledge both broadly and deeply. Read the ancients and the English-language classics; read the moderns and our contemporaries. Read literature from all periods and from all over the world. Read, read, read. Then, exhausted, read some more. And read widely in contemporary literary journals. Spend your free time wandering the wonderful stacks at Mullen Library, or talking about your reading with each other. The serious pursuit of literature isn’t a hobby: it’s a lifestyle. You will never read everything you ought to have read. Die trying. 

4. Practice humility. Before you approach a piece of writing for the first time, put down your hard-won and prized satchel of expectations and preferences. Meet every piece where it is. Good literary writing is frequently autonomous, from the Greek autos, “self,” and nomos, or “law.” That is, works of literature, if they’re good, generally follow their own laws. Surely, The Divine Comedy and The Waste Land and Ulysses and To the Lighthouse and The Sound & the Fury, Cane and The Invisible Man and Borges’ Ficcciones have proven that great writing makes its own rules. If you can’t put down your expectations and preferences and meet each work as a stranger, practicing ξενία (“xenia”) or “hospitality,” you’ll have a hard time reading anything that isn’t conventional, and a harder time developing your own sensibility and taste. 

5. Don’t sell yourself short. Whenever young persons ask my advice about anything to do with art, I say the same thing: don’t sell yourself short. The greatest paintings, the greatest symphonies, the greatest poems, plays, novels, stories, and essays in the world—they’re all there for *you*. With a bit of work, which is really leisure (try digging irrigation ditches in the summer sun of Georgia with a mattock and a shovel, as I have, and you’ll see the difference), you can begin to appreciate them, and with a bit more, you can appreciate them more fully, ad infinitum. The more you give, the more you get. In the “Phaedrus,” Plato writes: τὸ δὲ θεῖον, καλόν, σοφόν, ἀγαθόν…: “For the divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness.” Pursue the divine. Don’t settle for fads. Don’t settle for believing what you’re told. Don’t settle. Imagine a life for yourself like nobody else’s, a life devoted to beauty, wisdom, and goodness, and then make that ideal life your real life. 

Finally, if you could only write in one poetic meter for the rest of your life, which would you choose and why? 

Heaven, forbid! Sure, Georgio Morandi could paint bottles over and over and again, all his life long. But asking a poet to work in one meter? Madness. 

I wish, honestly, that I had a startling answer: the heroic dactylic hexameter, the Latin elegiac meter, the catalectic trochaic octometer, or the Alcaic strophe. I wish very much that I could say: the heterometric form I’ve adapted into English from Paul Claudel’s verset claudélien for several poems from my forthcoming book, Ghostlight. But the honest answer is, inevitably, blank verse. (As an aside, English majors and poetry lovers should read my friend Robert B. Shaw’s masterful book, Blank Verse, which is a definitive history and analysis of the meter.) Despite its being the most common meter in all of English verse, despite its having been deployed by immortal masters like Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, the possibilities of blank verse are not yet, I think, exhausted. No more exhausted, anyway, than the past itself. 

November 2022