Geoffrey
Brock’s first book of poems, Weighing
Light, appeared in 2005. His work appears in journals including Poetry, Paris Review, PN Review, New England Review,
and Hudson Review, and he has received
fellowships for his poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, The American
Antiquarian Society, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the Florida Arts Council. He
was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry from 2002-2004.He is also the translator of several books from the Italian: Cesare Pavese’s Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950, Roberto Calasso’s K., Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, and a new novel about the Armenian genocide, Skylark Farm, by Antonia Arslan. His translations have received the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize from Poetry, the Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, the ATA’s Lewis Galantière Award, the PEN Center USA Translation Award, the MLA’s Lois Roth Award, and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Translation Prize.
He is currently working on his second manuscript of poems (tentatively titled Voices Bright Flags) and, with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship, compiling a bilingual anthology of 20th-century Italian poetry, which will be published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. He teaches in the Programs in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he lives with his wife, the writer Padma Viswanathan, and their son, Ravi.
Statement of Poetics
I’m a little suspicious of artes poeticae, at least prose ones, because I find (and hope to continue finding) that my view of what poetry can and should be changes depending on what I’m reading and what’s happening to me and in the world around me. So I offer the following as some provisional jottings from the fall of 2006, rather than as a statement of poetics.
In general, I favor poetry that offers some combination of surface clarity and emotional or conceptual or tonal complexity. Such poems as Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” Stevens’ “Idea of Order,” Bishop’s “One Art,” Justice’s “Heart,” Hecht’s “A Hill,” and many Dickinson poems are all touchstones for me in this regard.
Some qualities that I think are generally undervalued in contemporary poetry: humor, seriousness, clarity, memorability. Perhaps the most overrated quality of contemporary poetry is that sort of obscurity or opacity that masquerades as difficulty or profundity; it’s usually the refuge of writers who don’t have much to say but want to be thought clever. This sort of difficulty is all too easy; the kind of simplicity that characterizes the poems mentioned in the previous paragraph is what’s hard.
On the whole I prefer short, elegant lyrics like those mentioned above—perhaps because I have a short attention span. But I also love certain messier, sprawling things, such as “Song of Myself” or Mercian Hymns or Autobiography of Red or Fredy Neptune.
There are some things I love when they’re done well and loathe when they’re done poorly. I love metrical poetry when the meter is supple, as it almost always is in the work of Dickinson, Yeats, Frost, Robinson, Stevens, Wilbur, Justice, Hecht, Hayden, Brooks, Hill, Bishop, Merrill, and others. I love good rhymes, particularly good slant rhymes, particularly good “pararhymes” (moon-moan, gold-beguiled, etc.) and good feminine consonantal rhymes (e.g., Justice’s marvelous cluster of common-human-omen-woman, Brooks’ taffy-coffee, sorry-prairie, etc.). But I can’t bear paint-by-numbers formalism, where every stress and every rhyme is in place but the poem lies lifeless on the page like Frankenstein’s monster before the lightning strikes. I’d rather read the worst free verse.
Pet peeve: the foolish and fallacious perception that so-called “formal” poetics is in some way linked with conservative politics (which is as senseless as the association of “experimental” poetics with progressive politics). This perception does as much harm to the current and future prospects of formal poetry as anything I can think of.
More pet peeves: terms like “formal” and “experimental” and “free verse.” How glaringly inadequate they are!
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