A Conversation between Declan Ryan and Ange Mlinko
as part of a new Poetry London initiative supported by the Hawthornden Foundation
Declan Ryan: I’d love to talk a bit about poems as containers, or made things, to contain feeling, emotion, whatever we might call it. I know Derek Mahon’s been important to you, and he said in his Paris Review interview “That’s the combination that has the greatest potency, I think. The hissing chemicals inside the well-wrought urn; an urnful of explosives.” I wonder if we might begin with that idea, the poem as a wrought urn containing ‘explosives’?
Ange Mlinko: But what could be more obvious? In that interview, Mahon even references the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the need to marry those contradictory modalities. So, a very old idea. In my view the poet is first and foremost a singer, and as singers know, you need drama as well as technique; the technique is the urn, drama the gelignite.
Wait, but I’d rather say that the drama must be in the technique as well … technique is a drama, or it is nothing.
DR: Yes absolutely – there’s also something important in that inextricable-ness too, isn’t there, the idea that the way something’s made isn’t a later, added-on thing, but that really it’s partly the struggle or battle or interaction between those two things that makes it all ‘sing’ in the first place. The wrestle, or tussle, against the constraint that pushes things on. Maybe we should talk a bit about surprise, in that context too? I’m thinking of the Frost – much trotted out – notion of needing surprise for the writer, to give it to the reader, but also what might shade slightly nearer the mystical end of things, that idea of there being some alchemical thing which happens in the process of all this that isn’t conscious, or possible without participating in that sort of contradictory dual-ness.
AM: Right, Merrill said this; Gunn said this; Brodsky said this. You are taken to a new, surprising place you didn’t know existed when you are wrestling with a constraint. There is something mystical about it, which is why we still read about Rilke’s angels or Graves’s muses without batting an eye.
Do you remember when the quote “Étonne-moi!” was everywhere? I first heard it in Cocteau’s Orphée; he heard it from Diaghilev. “Astonish me.” That’s been a guiding principle. I want to write something the world has never seen. (Within reason. No one wants to be so idiosyncratic that they devolve into solipsism.) It seems to me the only way to justify the whole endeavor.
But that goes against the grain these days. Audiences want the familiar, variations on the same. Critics have found this to be true in the entertainment world, in music and film and television, but no one in poetry talks about it. Charles Bernstein once had a nicely scathing comment about everybody’s grandmother poems, differentiated only by ethnicity: “I see my Yiddishe mama on Hester Street…” “I see my abuela at her kitchen stove….”
Something has to offer resistance to emotional material. That’s language – mightier than us, older than us. It holds many more surprises than we are capable of comprehending. Which, again, is why Muses, why angels, why daemons.
DR: That’s so interesting – the ‘astonish me’ idea – and as you say, it’s not about something that seeks only ‘novelty’, that risk of the arbitrary ‘wacky’ image or idea, the thought experiment, but more that – again combustion – of something genuinely new, unthought of previously. There’s the Hart Crane line that an old ‘mentor’ of sorts of mine, Colin Falck, regularly quoted that this makes me think of –
It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader’s consciousness henceforward.
– that sense of a poem being able to reach beyond, or something, and articulate something newly, freshly, by that mighty old language, as you mention. The opposite of the sort of cookie-cutter poems you mention here, the formula to be filled in. I’d love to hear some examples of poems, or moments in poems, which have ‘astonished you’ in that way?
AM: If I try to make a list I will have a bad case of esprit de l’escalier. But since Tony Harrison just passed, let me offer a small homage to his inventiveness. I’m not thinking of his famous and most anthologized works – v. or the tributes to his parents and family – but, say, his Florida poems, “A Kumquat for John Keats” or “Cypress and Cedar.” Just ebullient and one-of-a-kind. Or if you go on the London Review of Books archive and look up the last half dozen poems he published there in the 00’s and teens — “Black Sea Aphrodite” or “The Grilling,” where the poet encounters Goethe’s ghost drinking volcanic wine on his way up Mount Vesuvius, and they banter over a Martial epigram, offered first in Latin, then in two translations, burning in my brain the unforgettable image of satyrs dancing hotfoot on the seething soil after an eruption. “Deathwatch Danceathon” is my ideal political poem.
DR: That’s great – I’ve been meaning to go back to him since the news, too – a good spur to do so. Talking of political poems – I’m reminded of your piece on Adrienne Rich a while back. Not sure if you want to re-open that door, as it were, but it feels related in some ways to what we’ve been talking about so far, the idea of what can be contained within the urn, so to speak, how much ‘hot’ material can be handled, if handled well. Do you have a feeling about what ‘political’ poetry that works well, in your view, does that means it can avoid the pitfalls of the stuff that doesn’t manage to rise above its occasion?
AM: A few months ago I borrowed The Faber Book of Political Verse, edited by Tom Paulin, from the library and I don’t know when I’ll return it, if ever. I think I had a notion that I would teach it, but then I would have to teach a lot of history, which is beyond my remit at the moment. So I’m not teaching the book, but I’m holding on to it just for the reading pleasure. (Rich, incidentally, isn’t in it. Bishop, surprisingly, is.)
Form and irony are indispensable. Form because something has to contain the passions (do we need passions to run higher than they already do?) and irony because history repeats, and repeats, and repeats. Because of Yeats and Auden, I think great political poems are often elegies.
Also, let me offer this quote from Paulin: “Politics, after all, is often relentlessly second-rate in style, language, and personality….”
Ange Mlinko is the author of six collections of poetry. Her seventh collection, Foxglovewise, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the U.S., and Faber in the U.K. Her new book of lyrical criticism, Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets was published by Oxford University Press in 2024. She teaches at the University of Florida where she edits Subtropics magazine.
Declan Ryan’s first collection, Crisis Actor, was published by Faber and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
