Brian Culhane: A CONVERSATION WITH RACHEL HADAS
Poet, essayist, and translator Rachel Hadas is the author of many books, including, most recently, Ghost Guest (2023), Pandemic Almanac (2022), and Piece by Piece (2021). Her newest collection, Forty-four Pastorals, is forthcoming from Measure Press. Hadas has published poems and essays in The New Yorker, Yale Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. Her poem “Voyage” is included in the 2024 Best American Poetry, edited by Mary Jo Salter. Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark for many years, Hadas has also taught writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the West Chester Poetry Conference, the Ninety-second Street YMHA in NYC, and the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center. She and her husband, filmmaker Shalom Gorewitz, live in New York City and in Danville, Vermont.
Brian Culhane is the author of Remembering Lethe: Poems (Able Muse Press, 2021) and The King’s Question (Graywolf Press, 2008), winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Award. He’s published poetry in The Paris Review, Parnassus, The Hudson Review, and elsewhere; his poems and essays have also appeared in Plume. He lives in Seattle and in New York’s Catskills.
This conversation occurred over Zoom on April 2nd of this year and focused on two of Rachel Hadas’s recent poems: “Love and Dread” and “In the Cloud.” (For readers’ convenience, each is reprinted prior to its discussion.)
Love and Dread
A desiccated daffodil.
A pigeon cooing on the sill.
The old cat lives on love and water.
Your mother’s balanced by your daughter:
one faces death, one will give birth.
The fulcrum is our life on earth,
beginning, ending in a bed.
We have to marry love and dread.
Dark clouds are roiling in the sky.
The daily drumbeat of the lie,
steady—no, crescendoing.
This premature deceptive spring,
forsythia’s in bloom already.
The challenge: balance. Keep it steady,
now sniffing daffodils’ aroma,
now Googling a rare sarcoma.
The ghost cat’s weightless on my lap.
My mother’s ghost floats through my nap,
as, dearest heart, we lie in bed.
Oh, we must marry love and dread:
must shield our senses from the glare
and clamor of chaos everywhere.
Life bestows gifts past expectation.
It’s time to plan a celebration:
dance at the wedding, drink and sing,
certain that summer follows spring,
that new life blossoms from the past.
The baby is the youngest guest.
But just how long can we depend
on a recurrence without end?
Everything changes, even change.
The tapestry of seasons strange-
ly stirs in an uneasy wind
that teases dreamlike through the mind.
I reach for you across the bed.
Oh, how to marry love and dread?
BC: Rachel, this poem first appeared in the November 18th issue of The New Yorker, back in 2019. before the start of the pandemic. While you don’t directly allude to the coming crisis, you certainly anticipate it. “Dread” somehow puts us right in the mood of that time. Is that sheer chance?
RH: Let me try to answer that by referring to Alicia Stallings’s forward to Love and Dread, where she points out that many readers will have first met the title poem a few months before the world found itself in the grip of a deadly pandemic. She says that “poetry has a way of being prescient.” So I was not dealing with the pandemic directly. Most of the poems in Love and Dread were written in 2016, ‘17 and ‘18, as far as I can remember. But there was certainly more of a widespread dread then—a partly political, partly personal dread of the precarity of things. Certainly, Trump is kind of looming, though he’s not named. There’s also my sense of having found a wonderful love late in life and thinking time is running out. The word “existential” is tossed around a lot, but it seems to fit here, too, because there are so many kinds of dread we’re dealing with, climate change, politics, even before COVID.
BC: The word “dread” is perfect, since it refers to an impending evil. Just for fun, I looked it up in the OED, which can give the frequency of the use of any given word. It turns out that the noun form of “dread” is actually quite rare in modern written English: just three instances per 1 million words.
RH: That’s interesting. The word dreadful is used quite often, as in that movie was dreadful. But the word “fear,” as in fear of war or fear of rattlesnakes, has supplanted dread, and so dread feels bigger, more abstract, somewhat stronger.
BC: I admire the way you so quickly open this poem with a montage of flashing images. Those first three—the daffodil, the pigeon, the cat—immediately followed by a mother facing death and a daughter giving birth. Then comes a somewhat startling imperative: “We have to marry love and dread.” I’m curious about the writing process. Did those first drafts always begin with that kind of compression and speed?
RH: I can say several things to that without being able to answer your question precisely. I don’t have the drafts in front of me right now. And when I’m working well, I’m working fast. I might do three, four, or ten drafts of a poem, but I might do them quite quickly, one following the other. And I’m afraid I don’t remember exactly how that worked, but I can tell you that rhyme is a real motor for me. “Water” rhymes with “daughter” or “windowsill” with “daffodil”. If something had rhymed with tulip, I might have used that. On the other hand, there really was a desiccated daffodil. So I can’t answer you very precisely. The rapid cuts from one thing to another, those three images, the daffodil, the pigeon, the cat, and then to something bigger and then something bigger again, is partly influenced, I think, by my husband, who’s a filmmaker.
BC: As with jump cuts?
RH: Yes. And partly that, as long ago as the title poem of The Golden Road, which is a 2012 collection, I was getting tired of elegy. I was getting tired of poems that were looking backward and mourning, whether it was my late husband’s illness or much earlier, my father’s death, not to mention the deaths of people with AIDS whom I had known. And I say in The Golden Road, “Oh, Muse, take off your dove-gray cardigan.” I hadn’t even fallen in love with my current husband yet, but I felt as if my poems were too gloomy, and I’d also come to feel a lot of them were very wordy. So the jump cut feeling has to do with all of those senses.
BC: That reminds me of what Hitchcock said about film: “It’s life without the boring bits.”
RH: I like that. That’s great. And I used to tell my students that for me, revising a poem is like wringing dirty water out of a washcloth. You’re surprised by how much is in there when you start to wring it out. Now, for some people, revision might be the opposite. It might be filling gaps. How do you get from point A to point B? But I think I’m naturally wordier and yeah, Hitchcock said it just right: cut out the boring bits.
BC: I like the idea of rhyme, in a sense, casting up possibilities as almost inevitable. I’m also thinking of how certain poetic forms generate such. Like Shakespeare coming to the volta in the ninth line of some of the sonnets. He knew that he had to have a “still” or a ”yet” or a “nevertheless”—setting up some idea that would change the movement of the poem, turn it.
RH: I’ve started to think about rhymed couplets, either in pentameter rhyming couplets or even tetrameters. Around the time I wrote “Love and Dread” I was rereading Auden’s New Year Letter, which was written during the Second World War. And that’s in rhymed tetrameter couplets. And I don’t think I said, oh, I want to do what Auden’s doing, but somehow my meditative poems seem to fit that form; rhyme and the shortish pentameter line seems to work for them well. Also, I think I often write better when I’m writing in rhyme.
BC: You end “In the Cloud,” for example, with “time,” “chime,” and “rhyme.”
RH: That’s right.
BC: Let’s return to the poem at hand, though, and that imperative: “We must marry love and dread.” The verb “marry” means, of course, to unite, tie together—
RH: The two can’t be separated from one another. I don’t have any memory of how that line came to me. Obviously, “marry” fits better metrically than saying something like “combine” or “reconcile,” and then marry, of course, also has the emotional and sexual charge of human marriage. And this is also a love poem. But yes, we have to live knowing that these two things exist.
BC: I like the word “fulcrum.” The fulcrum, you write, is our life on earth, life between the bed of birth and the bed of death. A fulcrum is the point of a lever, right? Or what a balance pivots on. It’s just a little tiny point on which things turn.
RH: Yes.
BC: So I want to focus on the image of these beds of birth and death, because in the final line of the poem, readers find yet another bed. Certainly a bed of intimacy, perhaps a bed of marriage. “I reach for you across the bed.” Now, one might imagine that being in bed beside a loved one would offer an attenuation of dread, but just as likely, and here’s that fulcrum, love may summon up the not unreasonable fear the loved one may one day not be there to hold, not be there to cherish. Love in this sense of imagined or anticipated bereavement may actually intensify dread.
RH: You’ve got it, Brian. I don’t think I can add too much. It’s just that I don’t recall a process where I mapped that out for myself. I tend to remember my poems, the ones that work, as having been written effortlessly, though I don’t think that’s ever quite true. Alicia Stalling says at the end of her foreword that I manage to marry dread—an anxiety for the future, not just the personal future, but the planetary one—with fierce joy. Dread says that things will end and not well, but love says, not yet. So I don’t want either love or dread to overwhelm the other one. At the same time, I would say, and I don’t think this is in the poem, but you can’t always be aware of the opposite emotion. Maybe they take turns or maybe they lie next to each other in parallel. The death is balanced by the birth. And how long can we depend on a recurrence without end? All of these reassurances, a baby is born, people are getting married, it’s spring, all of that is great. But how long? When will the music stop? So I don’t think there’s any real conclusion. As you know, the poem ends with a question. And it’s tough to end a poem with a question. It’s tough even to read it out loud. Poems want to end in a more declarative way.
BC: When I consider those particular lines, I’m reminded of Martha Nussbaum’s book on Greek tragedy, The Fragility of Goodness, and how she says that, being human, we must be vulnerable. There’s no choice. Chance is going to happen to us, and it could be good or bad—a meteor might strike where we’re standing. We have no clue, right? Just as in your poem there’s a certain inevitability that strikes me as beautifully said.
RH: Well, thank you. The word tragedy is so often misused. But I think as we get older, and we do get older, we come up against the limits of human experience or the limits of human life and personal loss, even if we’re not living in a very difficult time. An awful lot of poetry becomes more elegiac and darker. So whether you would call it tragedy or not, a tremendous amount of the poetry one sees now expresses some kind of mourning or apprehensiveness or a retrospective memory of a happier time. A lot of poetry is full of dread and full of sadness. And that’s probably been true forever.
BC: Let’s return to the techniques you use in the poem. I’m fascinated by the shifts in tone throughout. While you say our lives must confront the glare and clamor of chaos everywhere, you shift to images of the wedding and budding springtime, a much more hopeful view. Seasons follow seasons, flower will eventually flower, babies come forth, and so on. I think if you ended the poem on that note, it would be saccharine. Yet instead there’s another shift: even change changes. And I’m particularly thinking of that pivotal question you ask, How long can we depend on a recurrence without end? This idea ends the poem on a chastened note. Can you explain what would cause a recurrence without end to end?
RH: Well, whether it’s a death or a death of the planet, an apocalyptic happening on the large scale and on the smaller scale, things end. We can’t assume that because we have gone to Vermont every summer, we’ll always go. People assume a lot. They take for granted that things will go on. And I understand that. It’s natural. And to a large degree, I do too. I don’t do extremely well with transitions and changes. But regarding tone, one of the tones in this poem is more philosophical and detached and almost cold. And then one of the tones is more, you know, I’m lying on a bed with my beloved and I’m frightened. But there’s this kind of chilly, stoical voice in the poems too, if I’m not mistaken.
BC: Yes. I find the poem’s last three lines extremely moving. The picture of two people in bed holding one another even in the face of dread. It reminds me of Auden’s line in “September 1, 1939”: “Life remains a blessing, although you cannot bless.” You say, “Life bestows gifts past expectation.” There are even gifts in a pandemic. And for us, one of those gifts certainly has been your ability to make poetry that speaks to our time. And I’m thinking of Kenneth Burke’s idea of poetry as equipment for living. I find that this kind of poem gives me a way of handling the precariousness of not only the pandemic but the aftermath.
RH: Life certainly does bestow gifts past expectation, and the pandemic gave us plenty of gifts. Again, I wasn’t really thinking of that gift because this poem is from around the time Trump was inaugurated. I collapsed a few events together. We did have a cat that died early in 2017, and our granddaughter was born early in 2017. My mother-in-law died somewhat later, but she had been very sick beginning early in 2017. And there was a wedding that we went to in May or June of 2017. So there were all these things happening, but in collapsing them, I enhance the reality just a bit.
BC: Let’s now turn to the other poem we’re discussing here:
In the Cloud
I made a list I can’t find now
(where did all my folders go?)
of words my students didn’t know.
Turmeric, poultice, fallacy,
cadence, meringue, Antigone,
last but not least Persephone
are just a few that stick with me,
plucked from the poems that we read
(I tried to stay a week ahead)
between September and December.
Many more I don’t remember.
But think of all the words they knew
or thought they knew. I thought so, too.
Thinking too hard, though, doesn’t do.
Words deeply pondered start to freeze—
as when before our tired eyes
Zoom stalls and stops (and no surprise),
leaving a dark screen, a blank hour
to fill with after and before.
Nonsense syllables devour
denotations. Happy, sad;
joyful or lonely; good or bad:
What does this mean to you? I said.
What does beautiful really mean?
I asked them as I tried to lean
into the noncommittal screen,
scanning until my eyes were sore
for the soul in each black square.
Were there really people there?
Did each name hide a secret face
sheltering somewhere in place,
some unimaginable space?
Each word they may have learned from me
in Gen. Ed. “Reading Poetry”
carries its meaning quietly,
concealed behind the livid glow
of all we learned we didn’t know.
Alone together, here we are,
stranded in our shared nowhere,
marooned in space, while, free from time,
meanings proliferate and chime
as words, unfettered, dance and rhyme.
BC: So this is a poem, obviously, about being a professor at a time when the student and teacher are forcibly separated by the pandemic. Teaching takes place via the internet and on the screen. And as you say sardonically in another poem (“Zoom and Zoom”), “Thank you, pandemic, goodbye to classrooms.” So the first section of the poem, the first fourteen lines or so, focus on the words your students didn’t know. And it’s quite the range. Your students’ relative ignorance is something here you take in stride and supply definitions. Later, with the more abstract but common words, like happy and good and bad, you ask them for their own definitions. What does “beautiful” really mean to you? you ask them. So there’s an admirable balance there heuristically, as the answers you’ve supplied at the beginning are balanced by the answers that you are trying to bring out from them in the following section. Similarly, teaching poetry is a balancing act, isn’t it? How do we balance what readers do and don’t know? And further, not only words, but I’m thinking of allusions and the whole history of literature. Which your poetry, in particular, as it stretches back to the classics, incorporates. It’s, to me, a huge leap, a leap of hope that you’re not simply writing to yourself.
RH: This thought reminds me of a poem of mine that was recently published in Able Muse called “A Name for It.” It was written at the end of my last semester of teaching at Rutgers in the fall of ’22. When students often didn’t know what a word meant, they got used to just asking me, instead of looking it up on their phones. And I love that. They’d sort of yell, “What does that mean?” Especially nature words, terms like “mourning dove.” And those questions reminded me of my mother, who was very good at answering many kinds of questions. As children, my sister and I were constantly asking her what words meant, and she always knew. So it’s kind of a tribute to my mother as well. My sister, by the way, grew up to be a terrific editor.
BC: I remember as a teenager reading Shakespeare’s sonnet “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” and thinking about what he meant by the phrase “trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries.” I had the mental image of someone kind of kicking at heaven’s door without a boot. It took me years to learn bootless had nothing to do with boots! Rachel, you also have that wonderful poem about trying to remember the name of a particular flower, which ironically in the end turns out to be a forget-me-not.
RH: Thanks! But you know, I can’t remember the title of that poem.
[LAUGHTER]
BC: Well, it’s “Blue Flower.” And as I read it, I thought it was a poem that answered Frost’s “A Passing Glimpse,” if you recall that poem.
RH: Oh, that’s so interesting. Not consciously, though.
BC: OK, now back to “In the Cloud,” the title of which literally refers to the internet’s cloud or cloud computing.
RH: There are many poems about Zoom and teaching on Zoom and the metaphorical reach of Zoom. Mary Jo Salter has a very good new book called Zoom Rooms. And she has a sequence of sonnets right in the middle of that book, which is all about Zoom.
BC: During the pandemic, you and all other teachers had to somehow teach ghostly images on screens. Or as you put it, “I asked them as I tried to lean/into the non-committal screen.” The gray screen’s a cloud too, making nebulous the students’ identities and even their very presence. As you ask, were there really people there? And I’m not sure how many readers understand the strictures placed then on teachers. You might just have the student’s name in the floating dark box, because the student has chosen not to appear. We also say that someone’s head is in a cloud. In this case, students are mentally elsewhere. So my question is, how do you reach students whose lives are so much in the cloud, literally, but also figuratively?
RH: I can’t answer that question any more than anyone else. This poem was about a course I taught in the fall of 2020. And I feel as if everything has become more speeded up and more distracting since then. People are constantly being taught that students have an attention span that’s so tiny, that you have to give them lots of visuals and you have to do a lot of PowerPoints and this and that. I would try to be very clear. I would try to engage them, and I would literally lean forward. And I usually ended class early because I was so spent and felt hungry as if I’d been hiking up a mountain. And I think that’s because in a classroom with living people, you get more energy back from them.
BC: Yeah, it’s more spontaneous and a give-and-take. It’s especially true with teaching poetry, just because it’s such a concentrated art form. It demands a sustained looking at words, punctuation, poetic forms.
RH: I will say apropos of this poem, that four lines from the end, when I say we’re stranded in our shared nowhere. . . .There’s a very good book by a woman who was in my class at Radcliffe, Sherry Turkle, called Alone Together. She writes a lot about technology, and about how students—and not only students— don’t know how to have conversations. So anyway, the idea of being alone together—I almost feel I should have a footnote crediting Sherry. You know, these are not perceptions that are unique to me. Plenty of people have noticed these things.
BC: Yes, but you put that experience in language that is so vivid that it’s memorable in a way that a 400-page book isn’t. In your “Afterword” to Pandemic Almanac, you write about the pandemic as a time that’s very private, but it’s a shared kind of privacy, a shared type of isolation being alone together. I also like the idea that writing, the act of writing poetry, is a shared privacy.
RH: That’s one of the remarkable things about poetry, maybe as an equipment for living, that it can be the most intimate form of expression. And yet other people can understand it and appreciate it and get their own meaning from it. It’s amazing in that way.
BC: I wish that the constant turn to biographical explanation weren’t hazing the picture, as it were; we tend to turn immediately to explanations having to do with a writer’s private life. This takes the reader away from paying attention to the words. And I want to pay attention a bit to those last lines, which I frankly was scratching my head about. You say that you and your students, and presumably your readers, are marooned in space, while meanings—and I assume this encompasses the words’ meanings that you touched on in the prior part of the poem—as well as broader existential meanings—are free from time, unfettered, and they chime, dance and rhyme. Can you help me with that?
RH: I might have just been carried away by the music, you know. But if it means anything, it means that we are in our shared nowhere, and we have this sense of being marooned, like on a desert island. And the meanings of the words aren’t dependent on us anymore. And they’re not time bound the way we are. So being unfettered, they might seem to be contrasting with us. Are we in fetters? Not exactly. But we’re mortal and we’re marooned. And certainly during the pandemic, no one felt very free. But the words feel freer than we do. That’s about the best I can do.
BC: Your words reverberate with a great deal of feeling, even though I’m hard pressed to put my finger on the exact meaning. But I have to say, when I read that marooned part, it put me in mind of Robinson Crusoe and Elizabeth Bishop’s amazing dramatic monologue, “Crusoe in England.”
RH: Great, because marooned is a striking word. And it does remind one of a desert island and Robinson Crusoe. I didn’t think of that or not consciously, but that’s what words can do. They can take you to someplace you’ve never been or that you didn’t remember having visited or read about before. It strikes me over and over what a shared enterprise writing is. No matter how you might feel very alienated from your community or maybe you’re transgender and you’re, you know, you’re rejecting this and that. But as long as you’re using language, you’re playing the human game. It’s your writing because you’ve learned to read and you’ve learned to write and you feel you have something to say, even if some of these younger poets we’re aware of haven’t read very much by our standards. But still, it’s some kind of an effort to communicate. I like to think.
BC: That’s heartening, Rachel. So now I want to end our chat by asking you a little bit about life post-pandemic. You recently retired from a long and illustrious career as a professor at Rutgers. Has your recent retirement changed your writing life? And if so, how?
RH: Basically, I’m doing the things I’ve always done, which is writing, doing some editing, doing some reviewing. I just feel more time to do them in. I feel less pressure. I’m doing less multitasking. There are usually three or four poems I’m working on. I don’t feel any urge to work on them every day. But if I haven’t worked on poems for a few weeks, I get jumpy and crotchety. I bet you know the feeling. And then if I’m asked to do something like judge a contest or screen poems, there’s plenty of time for that. So I don’t think life’s changed tremendously. I’m trying to be more comfortable with the idea of doing something without immediate feedback. I mean, I tend to submit poems, but if nothing gets accepted for a while, that’s okay. Often I will go back and revise.
BC: You put out a New and Selected poems a very long time ago, didn’t you?
RH: A New and Selected in 1998 when I turned fifty; it was called Halfway Down the Hall, one’s 50s being halfway to somewhere. I have two books coming out in 2025. I’m not sure, but I suspect they’ll be back-to-back. And they both are the result of this sifting process, and they both have a lot of prose in them. In 2023 I looked at the poems I’d written in Vermont over the years, and surprise, surprise, there’s a lot of landscape imagery and a lot of memory in most of them. And I turned most of those poems into short lyrical prose pieces, because they seem to me to be among my prosier poems anyway. That was a very interesting process.
BC: So these are a series of prose poems?
RH: They’re called Forty-four Pastorals because they share a pastoral theme. I don’t much like the term prose poems. They seem to me to be poetic prose rather than prosy poems. That book should be coming out from Measure Press. And with the other project, which I worked on with great pleasure early in 2023, after I had retired for good, I did feel a sense of expansiveness. I felt that I could stretch my wings a little. This book, entitled From Which We Start Awake, is in a venerable genre called a prosimetrum, where you have a poem inserted into a passage of prose, so that they alternate. I believe that you also get that poetry/prose, poetry/prose form in Japanese and Chinese literature, where you’ll be writing along in a journal and then you’ll have a haiku. James Merrill has a fairly late prose piece, fifteen or twenty pages or so, called “Prose of Departure.” It’s a travel journal about a trip to Japan, though it’s also very much about AIDS. On just about every page, there’s a rhymed haiku, summing up what’s gone before.
All the poems in my prosimetrum are about mythology, which I’ve greatly enjoyed teaching over the years. And some of the poems go back ten or twenty years, some are newer. To go along with each poem, I wrote a brief prose meditation or little essay, a page or two long, or less. And those little prose pieces were all written in 2023. And that’s coming out from Able Muse Press.
BC: Did the meditations have to do with the subject of the poem?
RH: Good question. Both that and my life. If you put the prose pieces together, they form a kind of patchwork memoir. I found that the little prose pieces were very easy to write. And no one asked me to write them. I just did it. It’s fun to feel that freedom.
BC: Thanks so much, Rachel, for sharing your thoughts, and it’s exciting to see this new work coming out so soon.
