Liv Lansdale with Gerry LaFemina
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as opposed to fugue-like. You have to have lots of variations. You encounter many more crossroads, and I’ve liked wrestling with and making those decisions to go here rather than there, which those crossroads necessitate. LL: Do you have colleagues whom you rely on for your own work, whose taste, as expressed in their own writing, doesn’t match yours? SD: No, I mostly show my poems to Larry Raab, who’s a poet who teaches at Williams and has five or six books. We’ve known one another for twentyfive years. And to Barbara, my wife. And occasionally to Jill Allyn Rosser. Do you know her? She’s the editor of the New Ohio Review? And now and then to Gerry and a few other people. But mostly to Larry, because of our long relationship, plus he’s very smart, and I can tolerate his severity because I know he has my true interests at heart. LL: I wanted to ask about brevity. Sometimes I try to explain to people who don’t read poetry why it might be worthwhile. I guess I’m talking about compression. Could you talk about that? SD: It was some years ago when I looked at my poems and realized I was a page, page-and-a-half guy. Which means I always started thinking of closure at the same time. I tried to defy that. It was revision by expansion rather than by paring. So I’d get to that point maybe fifteen or eighteen lines in where I’d normally think of closure, and I’d try to introduce a detail that the poem could not easily accommodate, that the imagination had to reach for, make a home for. And then there’s a brevity within that length, too. We can imagine even Whitman or Ginsburg leaving a lot out in order to achieve an effect they desired. You want tension and you want precision. In composing, sometimes you compress big things into smaller things. Sometimes you reduce thirty-two line poems to two-line poems, as Pound did “In a Station of the Metro.” Sometimes it will depend whether you compose by phrase or image, or by the sentence. I tend to move my poems along by the sentence. LL: Do you ever know the ending first? SD: I rarely know the ending, and I doubt that it’s useful to know it beforehand. You would hope to surprise yourself enough in the course of writing the poem that if you knew the ending beforehand, you’d have to change it. If I don’t surprise or startle myself early on in a poem, I know I’m not in it