Every so often, I get an unexpected review copy of a poetry collection. Such was the case with April Bernard's Romanticism (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.). Just released earlier this month, this collection was a nice little pre-summer read. In fact, I'd say the poems in Romanticism are perfect reading for summer nights.

Here's one of my favorites:

Romance

I pine. There is an obstacle to our love.

Every time I hear the postman, I think: At last, the letter!
He has overcome the obstacle--

(It is a large obstacle, an actual alp, with a tree line and sheer rock face
streaked with snow even in July)

for love of me! For three years, nine decades, and one century or so, there
has been no letter. I still wait for the letter.

But lately I wonder if my predicament is outside the human,
neither noble nor farcical; if my heart courts pain

because it aimes for immortality, something grander
than I can imagine. Most of what I imagine,

what I want, is small: Hands with mine in the sink, washing dishes,
the smell of wool, feet tangling mine in bed. I know

the gods punish the proud, but I do not yet know
why they punish the humble. Although after all

it is not humble to ask, every minute or so, for happiness.

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What are you up to?

I'm using the conventions, underlying ideas, and some of the forms of Romantic period poetry and song lyrics for my own purposes.

In the press release for your collection, it claims that Romanticism the book looks to investigate Romanticism the idea. What's your take on the intersection of Romanticism and poetry?  

Romanticism means many things: It means the primacy of feeling; an embrace of the irrational (in reaction to the Augustan Age of Reason); a championing of the individual in terms of democratic rights and a repudiation of the monarchy in revolutionary fervor. The great Romantic poets of the Romantic Age were of course Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats & Byron (and there were others). The impulse towards what we call the "Romantic" existed long before the actual period (circa 1770-1830) and it persisted long after. The operas of the 19th century, many writers of the Victorian age and even well into the 20th century, are participating in a Romanticist aesthetic. It exists today as one of the possibilities available to all artists. In music, painting, fiction poetry, etc.

Do you have a favorite romantic poem?

Of the classic Romantic poets, I have a hard time choosing among the many great poems, but if I had to I'd pick Keats's "To Autumn." It is one of the most beautiful poems ever written, sublime in its swoop of feeling, its tactile sense of ripeness and melancholy in the same moment.

This is your fourth poetry collection. How do you go about assembling your collections of poems?

Each one is different. The simplest way to describe how I wrote this one is to say that early on I had the idea of writing from and about the Romantic period in my head, and as poems arose they either suited my central theme or they didn't. Those that didn't I put aside. I was very excited when I got the idea of writing the "lieder" and then the opera arias, and could have continued with that indefinitely. Indeed I still am.

Your individual poems have been published in many fine publications, including A Public Space, The New Yorker, and Agni. How do you handle submitting your poems to publications?

The same way everybody does; I send out a group of poems to the editor, hoping one or two will catch his or her eye.  Luckily for me, as I have published more books I am more frequently asked to submit work and can feel sure at least that someone will read it.

You teach at Bennington College. Does teaching inform or influence your writing?

I love teaching. I had a long career as a magazine and book editor, and I find teaching is vastly more energizing for my own work—though of course too much can also be exhausting. I am a missionary for reading; I love to teach literature, and believe that the only way to become a good writer is by reading. (By the way, I will continue to teach in the Bennington MFA program, but as of this fall I will be Director of Creative Writing at Skidmore College.)

Who or what are you currently reading?

My graduate students; Dickens; Lyndall Gordon's excellent biography of T.S. Eliot; Dan Hofstadter's The Love Affair as a Work of Art; Cavafy; Ingeborg Bachman.

If you could offer only one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

Read the greats; don't waste your time with ephemera. That includes Shakespeare, also Elizabeth Bishop, also Frank Bidart, also Henry James and G.M. Hopkins and P.G. Wodehouse. And Austen and Chekhov and Milton and Dickinson and....

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To learn more about April Bernard's collection Romanticism, go to the W.W. Norton site at: www.wwnorton.com

To check out other poet interviews on Poetic Asides, click here.

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Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:55:49 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [2]