On making disorder make sense, on learning the voice of another:
Interview with poet and translator David Rigsbee by Mihaela Moscaliuc and Judith Vollmer
David Rigsbee’s Watchman in the Knife Factory: New and Selected Poems (Black Lawrence Press, 2024) and his translation of Dante’s Paradiso (Salmon Poetry, 2023) are the most recent additions to an extraordinary body of work. Rigsbee, whom Carolyn Kizer aptly called “the closest thing [we have] to a potential Renaissance man,” is the author of 21 books and chapbooks, including eleven previous full-length collections of poems, as well as an astute and sophisticated critic and book reviewer. The following interview was conducted by Moscaliuc and Vollmer via email during May-June 2024.
Moscaliuc: Watchman in the Knife Factory: New and Selected Poems (Black Lawrence Press, 2024) brings together selections from ten collections, along with over a dozen terrific new poems. Although this is a “Selected,” your poem “Collected Poems” from Your Heart Will Fly Away (1992) anticipates this “lifelong” project with trepidation and excitement. I imagine some decisions about what to include and what to leave out were easier than others. Did you approach this with any particular ‘principles’ (for lack of a better word) in mind?
I recently wrote an essay describing how this idea arose. In brief, one day I simply thought: what about a collected poems? I had published all those full-length collections, work spanning nearly fifty years, but much of it was now either out of print or hard to find. And although I had published a new and selected volume back in 2010, my subjects and in a sense my style, had moved on. Moreover, that book (The Red Tower: New & Selected Poems)—beautifully produced, by the way—didn’t follow a chronological pattern. If reconceived and expanded into a standard “collected poems,” it would, I hoped, reveal something about how poems pick up and fashion themes and how they develop a flexible aesthetic and voice over time. I pitched the idea to my editor, Diane Goettel, at Black Lawrence Press, and she immediately responded that she would be interested in such a manuscript. At the same time, I put the idea before a number of poet friends and got a good response. By the time I had all the books scanned into one file, I realized to my horror that it was well over 600 pages. Diane gently intervened to remind me that while she would still consider publishing a collected, it would be harder to promote than a new and selected. My friend Michael Waters concurred and added that a selected volume was more likely to be found in people’s hands than a collected, which would be, as the clichéd term suggests, a “brick.” He pointed to the selecteds of such poets as Lucille Clifton and Richard Hugo and offered the thought that those volumes were way more likely to be carried around than their collected counterparts, which they both had published too. I pictured the collecteds that lined my own shelves: Lowell, Auden, O’Hara, Ted Hughes, and Kizer, whose own brick came out a decade and a half before her demise, and who had remarked in my hearing that “a poet’s collected is a tombstone.” So in the end I decided to split the difference. I would submit a new and selected that represented all my work since the mid-70s but would omit poems that no longer resonated with me for whatever reason. Based on this principle, I left out all the poems from my first book, Stamping Ground, for example, despite its having been accepted on the recommendation of Joseph Brodsky and despite garnering good reviews. Still, it had the aroma of juvenilia about it, and that was the end of that. The resulting Watchman in the Knife Factory then contained what I hoped would be considered, as James Wright put it, “the poems of a grown man.” Whether it can find readers who confirm is another matter. It did come in at 388 pages, so in a sense, it’s as collected as I’m going to get, and I don’t have to confront so many of my runts or mistakes.
Moscaliuc: Dorianne Laux praises your poems’ “unhurried recollections” and Gerald Stern remarks on how “stubbornly honest and delicate” they are. With every single collection I have been impressed also by the self-awareness and culturally engaged consciousness you bring to the process of writing. Whether engaged in personal reflections on the past or on other writers and artists, or in critiques of our times, your poems examine and honor their subjects with trenchant honesty and a gaze that is at once self-directed (and often aware of the speaker’s own fallibility) and outward. Would you say a few words about where or how your poems often start and what happens after?
My habit is to write poems in bunches. Because I spent many years on a school schedule, I had time off in the summer, so most of the poems are summer poems in a sense. This habit persisted after I retired, as habits do. I should also add that I prefer to work on poems while outdoors, so seasons take on an added importance. My poems grow out of each other. This is pretty clear from my previous two collections, School of the Americas and This Much I Can Tell You. I like the idea that poems beget other poems, form families and lineages. From that vantage you detect leitmotifs and observe how the poems talk and play among themselves. My poems start when the first line comes into my head or when a situation intrigues me and I want to work it, such as with the image of the globe in “North State” or of the image of deceased people emerging from silos in “The Red Dot” and flying up the east coast. Once I have these, it’s as if I have the keys to them too. They (the images) will show me where I need to go.
Moscaliuc: In reviewing your own work toward assembling this New and Selected, did you notice ways in which you work has transformed over the years, maybe in ways you hadn’t been fully aware of? One thing I experienced, re-reading the work, is a movement toward a different kind of clarity, a distillation (in the poem’s movement as well as its dictions) that preserves complexity but feels more assured in its questioning.
I often think of Clive James’ remark that it’s so hard for a poet to be clear that anyone who can achieve clarity should make it his or her duty never to do anything else. Of course the notion of clarity is itself problematic. After all, we’re dealing with marks on a page, so it’s both material and symbolic from the get-go. But taking into account this basic paradox, I still find it useful to try for clear images. I try in the face of the realization that everything in life is complex, so the clarity of images often conceals a messiness and nit-picking that takes place below the surface, not to mention that every other image that passes before our eyes is a non sequitur from the preceding image. The philosopher David Hume sensibly alludes to this unfortunate state of things. Our minds therefore have to make sense. This is what poems explicitly do, even if they have to make disorder, or to salute paradox. Oscar Wilde warned us to take an interest in surfaces, not only because that’s what we encounter first, but because doing so allows us to experience an ambit that understatement enlarges. In plain terms, the clearer the surface, the more we can see beneath. The wise novelist Reynolds Price, who was also a fine poet, has an essay in which he compares the poetics of understatement at the one end to that of overstatement (think Baroque) at the other. In other words, Jack Gilbert here and Richard Wilbur there. The actual models he uses are Hemingway and John Milton. The score of poetry can be read as the kind of music which each makes, and what Reynolds did was to suggest that the reader’s participation becomes an important factor. In the case of Hemingway, readers are invited to fill in the blanks. Look at the simple scene described in “Hills like White Elephants.” It’s very clear what’s going on: the man is leaning on the woman to have an abortion while they wait in a hot train station in Spain. Hemingway describes the setting, and yet he only has to sketch it. We have to do the rest, so this reliance on understated images invites the reader to complete the story. The reader, that is, becomes invested in making the poem come to life. Milton, on the other hand, seems to prefer eloquence (Nabokov, whom I love, would be another case in point), but in doing so, he cuts into the reader’s imaginative participation.
But there is another thing that came to me after years of giving and going to poetry readings. I remember the person who would come up after the reading and say, “You know, I really liked that last poem you read, but I’m not sure I got it all. I’m going to have to read it again when I get home.” After a while, you think, what’s wrong here? I began to think about revision as a time to clarify so that the first-time hearer of a poem would at least perceive the chalk outline of the poem on the page. Yeats took to writing prose versions of his poems before committing them to lines and stanzas. He wanted to make sure everything was clear, so he would compare the poem to the prose to make sure it was all straightforward in a gumshoe fashion. In this way, by imposing his say-so in the place of elusive truth about the whatever, he emerged from the misty romanticism of his early work.
Moscaliuc: You have mentioned, in a number of essays and interviews, the influences various writers, including Carolyn Kizer and Joseph Brodsky, have had on your life as a poet, translator, critic, and editor. Who are some of the other artists to whom you return?
I have a pantheon of poets I return to: Amichai, Cavafy, Kunitz, Larkin, Gluck, Walcott, Bogan, Stern. There are also living poets whose work I follow closely. These include John Skoyles and David St. John, Alice Oswald, Michael Waters, and Roberts Pinsky and Hass. Usually before I begin a new poem I read poems by several by these poets, just to have their cadences in my head. I want to see the landscape they make up. They help me get going, especially in the rollout and making a strong, expansive closure. When I’m done, I imagine what they would think about my poem: does it achieve clarity? Might they think I’m trying to get away with something? What obstacles stand in the way of the poem’s wish to express? David Wagoner remarked that the failure of imagination mars the work of so many young poets. They lack the follow-through and the finish by which a successful poem announces its value. I’ve found that having these poets in my head just before beginning a new poem helps me find what I need to do.
Moscaliuc: Before we turn to Judith Vollmer’s questions about your translation of Dante’s Paradiso (Salmon Poetry, 2023), would you say a few words on the poems that appear in these pages of Plume?
I think these poems are characteristic of the kinds of things I’ve been trying to do in the latter part of my writing career.
The first poem, “Composition,” goes to my interest in clarity and understatement, as opposed to ornamentation and articulation (in the strict sense). The poem raises the question: how powerful can poetry be? The ultimate test of course would be to raise the dead, to conquer death. The poet fails, of course, and then the poem turns back to the real world before imagination dissolves. The last line I borrowed from Louise Bogan, as if to say, it’s not me: it’s the poem. It’s not the poet’s power either. It’s the poem’s courtesy and pity, its willingness to reveal, its example. That’s what matters, and that’s what takes over.
“The Red Dot” finds the speaker (me) in an aftermath situation. This is a scenario common to many poets, indeed, to most people. I imagine my family in their tenderness rising from their graves and flying to my rescue. They have forgiven me of my trespasses against poetry (as they understood it), which included despair, complacency, ambition, and dissembling, just as I absolve them of the fate of being dead. The poem ends on the prospect of a notification, the kind you get on computers. That’s the “red dot.” This poem came to me as a kind of fever-dream, as Coleridge would have put it.
“North State” is another dream poem. This one is about my father, who succumbed to lung cancer. At the time I was living in Raleigh near the Natural History Museum, whose new wing consisted of an appendage in the shape of Earth itself, suspended just above the ground and rising several stories. As the workmen went about fitting the girders, each one emblazoned with the name of the company, North State Steel, I begin to think of it as a metaphor of the creation of the world, or more correctly as a metaphor for the creation of the world, of earth in space, and the world of Raleigh. In the poem, my father alludes to his illness as he can no longer keep up with me, so there is the creation of the end too. The poem ends with imagining that the globe is a blind eye, always open, but always closed to the reality that begins just before it.
The final poem, “The Slug,” describes a story that arose around the suicide of my brother. The police who came to investigate were wary of calling the act a suicide because they couldn’t find the bullet. In the poem I imagine this confusion as a kind of detective story that needed an answer to bring official closure. I bring to attention his suicide note, an impression of which I found hand-written on his desk blotter and imagine he was coding his confession like Leonardo, that is, reversed so that you had to hold it up to a mirror to read it. The mirror gives us everything we desperately want to know, but in reverse and in that reversal, making sense. The bullet is finally found when the officers remove the body—in the very spot where he fell. Mystery solved. I compare this discovery to finding the Hope Diamond, whose value is inestimable and nothing at the same time. The poem is about reversals, of fortune, of the moment, of presence and absence.
Vollmer: Your reading of Beatrice is the most layered and enticing of all of the English translations I have read. I marvel at your presentation of her—as you state in your introduction—as far more than “the idêe fixe of a massively complicated man and poet, held onto for dear life to pull the ship of orthodoxy into the channel.” I’m wondering if you see her as a kind of goddess- destroyer of the channel itself. You seem to read her as one immeasurable step ahead not only of pilgrim, or even author Dante, but of all mortals, as she’s absolutely unencumbered by dogma. Can you tell me how you released and sustained such unstoppable forward motion in the genius she truly is? How you envisioned her as such a transfigurative wonder?
First of all, I wanted to suggest the cadence of the original, which includes, for example, an enormous number of embedded phrases, suggesting contemplation looking over its own shoulder. It has a chugging quality too as if an old locomotive made its way across a vast terrain, something Dante would not have foreseen, but its self-overcoming and self-correcting syntax seems to me contemporary. Although people make a big deal of the terza rima form, I wanted to avoid fetishizing that feature. This gave me an opportunity also to be as faithful to the literal as I know how without sounding academic. Merwin was my role model here, by the way. As for Beatrice, I wanted to suggest in my introduction that one of the pilgrim Dante’s undisclosed motives is to make us aware of the fact that his attraction to Beatrice originally resided in the beauty of her bodily form. Even in her ultimate transfiguration in the Commedia, Dante never quite replaces the memory of the natural gravitational pull. In other words, the corporeal memory of Beatrice coexists with the spiritual muse. Thus, he would never ensnare her in dogma, even though dogma is the parlance of Paradiso.
Vollmer: As you’ve noted, Paradiso is a feast of pyrotechnics and ultra-surrealist, cosmic vortices onto a reality that does not end with Earth (or does it, truly?). Can you perhaps describe the kind of physical or spiritual space or place you found yourself in while translating such passages? I’m curious about how you navigated an abstraction enormous as “light” while paying attention to lamps, jewels, flames, objects utterly familiar.
Light is a thing, but it’s also an idea, as in “God is your best idea,” a quote I got from my ex-wife, herself a Beatrice figure to my efforts after our recent split, when I embarked on this translation. The project wound up taking up five years, plus another to figure out the notes. Actually, the push that led me to Dante came from my daughter, who suggested I needed an epic project, something to frame the otherwise footloose years that followed my divorce and retirement from active teaching. She thought being bound to the Dantean wheel would be a therapeutic discipline, not only for me, but for my poetry. Plus, as with any translation, the trick was to learn the voice of the other, to try to assume its spirit as I experienced it, and in my case to draw me out of the zone that was my perspective and into a new plausible, if superseded, spiritual and poetic territory. I don’t mean to be abstract, but I will note that Dante’s formal and spiritual systems are closed in the sense that one finally comes upon answers, that the world hangs together, unlike the world envisioned by Yeats in “The Second Coming.“ I note too that Yeats’ head-spinning A Vision was his attempt to push back from the vexed and baffled world toward one in which answers were possible, not just questions appearing like motes in a cloud chamber. Does the world hang together, or does it fall apart? That’s the great question all of us have to pose before we can proceed. So in a nutshell, attending to Dante became a daily routine for me, something that allowed me—in fact required me—to call upon all the craft I had to make this medieval epic poem feel right in contemporary English.
Vollmer: Most readers of the Divine Comedy, you remind us, are drawn to Inferno, with Purgatorio the close second. It seems to me that Paradiso has been waiting for you. I’m reminded of Leopardi’s reverence for the neighbor girl Sylvia, who resembles, perhaps symbolically, Dante’s Beatrice when she was a girl. If you could name one literary or personal muse who accompanied you in making this translation, who would it be?
That would be Linda Gregg, whose soul and memory I carry like an amulet. An admired and deeply elemental poet, she died in early 2019. My poetic relationship with Linda lasted from the mid-70s until her death—but with a 38-year gap that I write about in a memoir I’m working on. Our friendship’s reboot lasted for three years during which we talked daily for hours over the phone and increasingly in person about every aspect of poetry, from the Greeks to Jack Gilbert to Allen Ginsberg and Robert Duncan, to Joseph Brodsky, whom we both knew and esteemed. About Stevens as a poet of extremes, about Jack Gilbert as a maestro. She asked the most important questions about poetry, always aiming to locate the bell tone in it. She was a classicist—a characterization to which I’m also drawn—and a headlong romantic, meaning nothing got in the way of her drive. Her interest in helping me think about Dante goes back to our first acquaintance, when we read Troubadour poets aloud to each other and discussed how the tradition of courtly love motivated those poets to stretch and affirm the aesthetic implications of the traditions, often in the form of boasting and intramural competition, always in the form of trying to go the distance, of finding the “extreme thought” that the Russians in the early part of the last century spoke of. Brodsky was lurking in the background too. He had noticed that my nose, for example, resembled Dante’s in the famous Botticelli profile. He would send me postcards saying things like, “If you want a rose, follow your nose.” In the end there was the famous Rose in Paradiso. Linda was also exemplary because, not only did she read and discuss with me the early stream of cantos I brought to her apartment in St. Mark’s Place, where we sat at her round kitchen table and talked endlessly, she led me to think a lot about the value of considering a muse, to be inspired by another one can’t quite reach, can’t meld with except at the cost of identity, and yet can’t imagine living in the mind without, either. So one is left with dreaming and digging, finally, when the time is right, taking wing, even soaring. In addition to arriving on the scene as one who embodied poetry itself, Linda was also a muse, California variety. I doubt that without her encouragement I would have been unable to go so deeply into the project. By the way, I have a poem about Leopardi in the book and I try to show how it was Sylvia that made Rome available to him, crippled as he was. I do this by taking off from the memory of a not-favorite uncle of mine who died of A.L.S.
Dante speaking to Beatrice for the last time (Paradiso, XXXI, ll. 79-93):
“O Lady, in whom resides my hope,
and who for my salvation was suffered
to leave the imprint of her feet in hell,
it is thanks to your excellence
and power that I have recognized virtue
and grace in all the things I have seen.
You led me, a slave, to freedom
by all those ways and using all the means
that were within your power to employ.
Preserve me in your magnificence,
so that my soul, brought to health, may be
pleasing to you when it leaves the body.”
So I entreated her, and she, so
distant as it seemed, looked down and smiled,
then turned back to the eternal fountain.
Four poems from Watchman in the Knife Factory: New and Selected Poems (2024)
Composition
And then there was the Greek poet
who heard a man had died upstairs
in the boarding house where he was drinking.
He pleaded with the undertaker to delay
removing the body before he had a chance
to address it. So insistent was he that he
was granted his request and spent the night
reading poems over a dead man’s body,
expecting a resurrection to rival Lazarus.
All night long he chanted his best work
and finally descended, haggard and dispirited.
It is the power of language that it doesn’t
need to tell you how the story ends: it is
the crispness of pine, after the air of summer.
The Red Dot
After we embraced at the crosswalk
in the coarse fidelity of separation
our chests together one brief last time
in the rain, in the bluster, the puddles,
the honking taxis, the herds of umbrellas,
then my family rose from their silos
and crossed the sky to find me.
My mother and father like a flying
boxcar, my father with his trumpet,
then my brother with the hole
in his temple untouched, soaring
up the east coast, practically
stratospheric, like a hawk in autumn,
whose vision increases with distance,
looking to find me, past the forests
of Pennsylvania, past the Pine Barrens,
finally turning east before Paterson,
down through swirling pipes of rain,
the dark copper clouds, the towers
rising from the river, the shining rooftops,
my mother and father swerving out,
then turning in from the sea, looking
to land, looking for their other son,
the one who had summoned them
and my brother whose eternal muteness
would someday become speech,
and that pass for eloquence, as
Nietzsche himself reassured us. I came
home and sat by the computer screen
checking, as I had always done,
for the ruby dot announcing a message,
light that burns a hole in everything,
a change of heart as if the heart were
no longer hurtling into the rain, no longer
losing, anxiously whispering, change me.
Instead, I heard them overhead.
I looked up and we smiled at each other.
I was being airlifted by beloved
spirits called to the old vastness
from the sleep of their cylinders,
who bore my name, who still believed,
sleepy as they were, that they knew me.
Up we went and I saw Canal shrink
into a line, the line into a spinning
propeller, so I looked straight up, my family
pulling me up in the updraft, through
the plunging temperatures, until it was
full black, and yet there were stars.
Here they peeled off and faded,
leaving me; they were just clouds
themselves now, morphing and turning.
Because I was vexed, I pretended
it was them. Because there was no
red dot, only black city rain,
I found myself floating, knowing
how Pluto would rise from his throne
pointing earthward, not heavenward,
though I was exalted in my wedding suit
waiting to have my ears rubbed,
which was the special sign for love
for no one could mistake thinking
that’s what it’s like. Not even
the sweet dead in their cerements.
Not even a stranger.
North State
My father came to me in a dream
to walk with me around a stadium.
Not wearing the jaunty motley of his last months:
the patchwork newsboy cap and paneled shirt
he wore when tearing around town,
smoke streaming from the car window.
“I’m not gonna make it,” he said.
“This may be the last time.
I don’t have the breath for it.”
We cried and smiled all at once.
The apparition faded, and I lapped the spot
before I knew. That morning
I had stopped to take some pictures
of a new structure: a five-story globe
affixed to a museum headquarters.
It was Sunday, the crews were gone,
but the wooden scaffolding clung
to the girders, “North State Steel”
spray-painted on each rib.
I had come before the planks were taken away
like cross-hatching erased,
before the world was made,
the panels bolted in place and painted
that planetary blue of earth from space,
that pendant marble
on which everything is always lost
like a glass eye that never sees
what it never ceases to watch.
The Slug
When they found him in bed,
facing up, the police were hesitant
to rule my brother’s death a suicide.
The pistol lay there yes, in his left hand
and yes, there was an exit wound
so blood had equal opportunity to sop
the bed from either side and mix its
metallic odor with the smell of gunpowder.
But any habitué of CSI would know
the perp will remove the bullet, if possible,
and so the cops were suspicious,
unwilling to say what we feared most.
Instead, they bracketed their skepticism
and went about collecting other evidence,
taking samples and pictures, measuring
the ricochet crater in the dresser trim,
as his body lay, like savasana in yoga,
a difficult pose because you have to
commit to stillness against every itch
or urge to rearrange the limbs and bring
them into closer alignment with the inanimate.
They found the note, beer cans, rifled
files. I myself discovered the note too,
reversed, embossed on a blotter—and clear
only on the reverse side, so that you
had to hold the eerie dispatch to a mirror
and read it like Leonardo’s journals,
those discourses disallowed to commoners.
But what could be more common
than the wish to spare more pain,
as halting words, especially, arrive
one at a time, to serve? It was not
until hours after the fact that
the coroner ordered the body moved.
Then they found it, the bullet. In its
journey out the .38 barrel and through
my brother’s wits, it had bounced
like a pinball around the machine
of the bedroom, furniture its bumpers,
and come to rest. Falling back on it,
he had both hit a bullseye and written
a mystery before the lead was cool.
The cops were amazed at the dead man’s
surprise and crowded around the slug
like miners around the Hope Diamond,
for whom, as with the real miners, there
was no profit to be had from finding
such a conspicuous, untradeable treasure.
David Rigsbee‘s awards include two Fellowships in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities (for The American Academy in Rome), The Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Foundation, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a Pushcart Prize, an Award from the Academy of American Poets, and others. He has also published critical books on the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Carolyn Kizer and coedited Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry. His most recent books are Watchman in the Knife Factory: New & Selected Poems (Black Lawrence Press) and a translation of Dante’s Paradiso (Salmon Poetry).
Judith Vollmer’s sixth and most recent book is THE SOUND BOAT: New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin Press 2022). Awards include grants from the NEA and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; the Brittingham, the Four Lakes, and the Center for Book Arts poetry prizes; and finalist honors for the Paterson Prize. She lives in Pittsburgh and teaches privately.
