Maureen McLane ’89, JF ’04, is a poet and critic. After her undergraduate studies in American history and literature, she studied English literature on a Rhodes Scholarship before earning her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. She is now a professor of English at NYU.
In addition to academic publications on British romanticism, McLane has written a hybrid work of memoir and criticism, My Poets, which became a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography. Her third, and most recent, collection of poetry, This Blue, was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award. (The finalists included four other Harvardians.) On Monday, McLane returned to Cambridge to give a reading as part of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series, and I spoke with her then.
Harvard Magazine: When did you first begin to read poetry?
Maureen McLane: I would probably say high school. There were some other things in the mix, in the environment in my childhood—some Lewis Carroll, nursery rhymes, hymns, my mother’s playing piano and guitar, poems my father might come out with—but in terms of reading poetry, it really came about through school.
I lived in upstate New York, and attended a really solid public school for my last years of high school—very un-fancy but very solid, something that's more and more a rarity these days; I’m sure there was an anthology we were using. I remember e.e. cummings’s poems making an impression, Dylan Thomas making an impression, probably some early Yeats. Literature classes in general were very stimulating to me, but those more sonically, rhetorically powerful poems lodged in my ear: Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill," and e.e. cummings's "anyone lived in a pretty how town." Robert Frost, that was another—his poem "Design."
HM: You begin one section of My Poets by talking about the lecture course you took in your freshman year with Helen Vendler, and the poetry section you had with William Corbett. Who were other teachers who were important to you?
MM: There were several people important to me who weren’t poetry people at all—they were historians or professors of music or choral directors. I also had a wonderful tutor, now a professor of English at the University of Chicago, Janice Knight; I mention her in the “My Elizabeth Bishop” chapter. Janice was and is a scholar of colonial America, but she also knew a ton about a certain line in American poetry, from William Carlos Williams to Charles Olson, and in another key Robert Lowell. She introduced me to Susan Howe’s work. Those people became important to me in various ways. I almost feel as if in the end the poets themselves are the most important teachers.
The really important thing that teachers did for me was to put things in my orbit. They exposed me to things. That is one huge contribution they made to me and to others, above and beyond their own pedagogical gifts, and the particular ways they explicated things. It was important simply that they were unbelievably informed enthusiasts, whether about this-or-that poet, or this-or-that problem of constitutional law. I do think that if you bend towards becoming a writer, at the end of the day, it’s writing that teaches you—other writers.
HM: How would you characterize yourself as a teacher?
MM: I feel one of my roles can be to put things in students’ orbits. My classes tend to be somewhat hybrid, so they tend to introduce students to some new works or new ways of thinking about works. There are different kinds of attentiveness that I hope to sponsor, ways to register things in works of literature—I want them to know that one doesn't have to be generating a massive interpretation all the time, that in fact there's so much pressure to generate some definitive statement about “x” that we often short-circuit an actual registration of the way something is put together, or its tonalities.
So I think that part of my job is to model forms of attention; part of it is to sustain a form of transmission. But I think I'm a little agnostic about that, too. I don’t think there is, as it were, some sort of canon I’m transmitting, but I do feel that there are long, complex, and wonderful genealogies of things that you want to point people in the direction of.
HM: You were an undergraduate at Harvard, and then you returned to teach. What was that like?
MM: I never had any plans to return, but I’d been in Chicago for a while—I got my Ph.D. there, and I taught there for a while—and then this wonderful [junior] fellowship arose at the Society of Fellows.
When I returned, I was at a very different phase of life. I’d lived in a very undergraduate way when I was here. I didn't know Boston at all, I didn't know Cambridge, I was a complete idiot. I really lived on-campus, and did things on-campus, and my whole life revolved around singing and acting and the House culture and my work and my studies. Being back as a fellow, Cambridge was very different—it was much more commercialized and cleaned-up than when I was an undergrad. I liked having proximity to Fresh Pond, and Mount Auburn Cemetery, and going to Walden. I felt like I was getting to know New England a little bit better, in a way that was very different from when I was 18. I liked that I was more aware of the environment.
It was a great privilege and a pleasure to be at the Society of Fellows, which selects fellows across disciplines. It's a wonderful post, a research fellowship where you have no obligations except to do what you wish to pursue as your research, and to attend weekly dinners and lunches. I think most former Junior Fellows look back and think, What were we doing then, can you believe that? Can you believe we had this time?—and no departmental responsibilities. You got exposed to what the string theorists were thinking, what the sociologists or economists were thinking, or what this person in English was thinking.
HM: You write in My Poets about the power of listening to “aficionados read those poems or works they are committed to.” Is this an important teaching tool for you?
MM: I definitely bring recordings to class. Last week, I played Williams Carlos Williams. People are always surprised, as I was, by his voice—you tend to think of Williams as Mr. Energy, but his voice is very thin and high-pitched and reedy, in this recording made at the end of his life; next week I’ll play students some Pound. Recordings offer a great way to refocus one’s attention on the poem, and to realize, “Oh, this is how he or she heard that.” And sometimes I’ve invited living poets to read in class. I don't think, by the way, that is more “authentic.” I don't think a poet’s reading of his or her work is necessarily more authoritative. But I feel like it’s definitely a zone for encounter, a zone that’s really powerful.
I also think there is an inner ear, which is much more relevant to my sense of poetry than actual vocalization. Some people are very attuned to this ear. They compose in their minds, maybe reciting aloud, and only at the end do they write things down—which is amazing since we don’t usually have great memories anymore. But I do think there’s an inner ear that is activated when one writes. Or at least for me. And that is as loud, as audible, as our conversation right now.
HM: In My Poets, you write about attending readings, and socializing with writers, and the energy or tension of those live encounters—but in interviews, you’ve also said that you think that it’s “a tremendous gift to be lonely in poetry.” Could you talk about that?
MM: I really think this comes down to temperament. Other writers are much more readily sociable creatures. They feel there’s a kind of continuity between their writing life and their social life. I never experienced things that way at all. I mean, Frank O’Hara—phenomenal, right? He’s Mr. Sociable, and his poems are sociable, and he writes them in this apparently ad hoc, tossed-off way—but of course there’s a very discriminating mind that’s getting distilled into these things, so I feel like this was his way of being in the world. That’s fantastic. But I also think, I am not Frank O’Hara.
One reason I think I gravitated to lyric was its registration of a deep interiority that might be shareable. That was a thing I found resonant about, say, Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, or aspects of Dickinson, or George Herbert—that sense or illusion of a deep stillness, out of which came a poem. Social life is not that. It’s just not.
I meet younger writers who feel there is a pressure to participate in social scenes, and I just have zero patience or tolerance for that. I feel bad that they have to confront this pressure. I just think it's disgusting. For me, poetry was not a zone about professionalization or networking. You can say that I had the luxury and privilege of thinking that—but I took that privilege, and I hope to sponsor it for others. There are many, many different kinds of writerly engagement, but I feel that people should be given permission not to engage. There’s so much pressure to find a community, and one wants a community—but community may not come from the people organizing the poetry reading. It might be found among the folk-music hoboes down there, or the coders. A community for poets is not necessarily other living poets.
I mean, look: one doesn't want to feel perpetually lonely. But that’s a really delicate thing, and one should have permission to withdraw, and to sit with one’s own ambivalences. What is it to sit with oneself? It’s hard to do that.
HM: How does a poem begin for you? You’ve said that music has been important to you, and you've used the metaphor of key shifts, so do you tend to experience composition sonically?
MM: Shifts of thought are often hooked very closely to shifts in sound—you see this in Wordsworth, and to some extent in Bishop, and Paul Muldoon is brilliant at this—you’re being asked to pay attention in several different ways in those compositional moments. I‘m aware that my thinking can fall into rhyming patterns, which can be a problem. The musicality of thought is important to me—how sound can bring you to new places.
HM: This Blue seems very interested in how language changes the way we inhabit a landscape. Its first poem contains those lines, “Take it up Old Adam—/every day the world exists/to be named,” and in later poems there are trees that are said to go unnamed, or wildflowers that have forgotten their names.
MM: I think it's very interesting—what it means, say, to come across the name for a plant in French. Part of this question of naming and place aligns with my interest in English as a big and actually multilingual instrument. I guess I really do subscribe to the notion of language in general, and names in particular, as having a kind of spell-like or incantational or incarnational potentiality. That’s a pretty archaic and powerful trope. I was not a person who grew up knowing the names of almost anything. I often encountered things first verbally and only then in the world.
Actually, Jamaica Kincaid talks about this, in another key, in her book Lucy, where the heroine talks about having Wordsworth shoved down her throat—his poem about daffodils. Our heroine is from the West Indies and she’s in New York as a nanny, and her employer wants to take her to Central Park and show her all the daffodils. This is the first time Lucy’s seen actual daffodils, and Lucy’s incredibly annoyed with this bourgeois white woman who’s trying to have her say, “Isn’t that beautiful?” So I think that, (a) Kincaid is amazing, but (b), another way to think about it is that words are as palpable as things. A lot of my poems might be working through that: how we can feel that way, and how naming both honors things and lets them blossom, but how names may not be the only, or very efficient, way for talking about energy in the world.
Learning the name of a fungus could really anchor you in a region; certain words for trees could conjure something about the American Northeast. But somebody like Wordsworth, for all his yammering on about nature, apparently couldn't tell one bird from another. So I sort of feel like my interest here both is and is not about being an actual naturalist. There are a lot of ways to anchor oneself in the world. For me, it tends to be a linguistic anchoring.
HM: Another dimension to that relationship in This Blue is the way you play with the language of conscious consumerism, or environmentalism.
MM: I tend to be a “both/and” and a “neither/nor” person and that’s sort of tricky and fussy, but it’s the way I tend to encounter things. A phrase like “conscious consumerism” makes me want to die. Now, it might specify something that’s really productive. I’m actually interested in how things that come from the ad world or from activism, tags that we get, that seem like clichés, how they can be reactivated in a poem. I think one can’t but register all that.
I feel both that there’s an enormously vibrating version of some kind of environmentalism in the book, but also that it’s not driving a poetic car straight down the road of that discourse. I feel like I’ve been deeply influenced by various people talking about the Anthropocene, and different ways of thinking about the animal, the mineral, and vegetal. What end of the telescope are you looking through? One could have in the same mental field an animal and the products associated with it, or humans and the fact that we’ll all become humus, organic matter. What’s your scale of attention? Your temporal scope?
HM: How do you arrange the poetry in your books? They’re all divided into sections, and all end with an envoi.
MM: My last two books have central sections that speak to a complex set of associations with particular places—France in World Enough, Italy in This Blue, upstate New York and New England in both—so it made sense that certain poems would go together. It’s also the case that some of the poems are so strongly voiced that if I were to begin with them, people might think the entire book is in that one mode, and I wanted to avoid that. And I often write sequences. So I almost think of the sections more musically, as modal shifts.
A lot of mental energy goes into organizing the structure. There are different arcs in the books, from the general to the apparently super-personal, back to the general. And that kind of arc, I'm interested in—in ushering people through a series of mental and tonal landscapes, of sound- and thought-worlds. For good or ill, my books have not tended to be that narrative.
I think an envoi marks a kind of “sending forth of the book” to the world. It also allows you to back away from something, to modulate out of certain kinds of intensities, and to gesture maybe to something in the future. It can either restate a note, or it can pan more broadly. I like very short poems, too, though not all of my envois have been super short. But I like the sense that something distilled might be a final note in the ear.
HM: Do you have a particular approach to reading your own poetry aloud?
MM: There is, of course, that dread “poetry voice” and I hope I don’t channel that. You can get locked into your own sense of things, and your way may not be the best way to read that poem. You can get little tics. One doesn’t want to have tics, one doesn’t want things to be routinized, and I think about that. Sometimes people are surprised by my reading. I remember the poet Kevin Prufer said, “Oh, your poems are a lot funnier than I thought they were”—he was being very nice, but I didn’t know how to take that! I had to wonder, is it not coming across on the page, am I having to be the minstrel of my own poems via my readings?
