“POETRY IS PRIMORDIAL” – AN INTERVIEW WITH A.F. MORITZ

A F. (Albert) Moritz ranks among the most important poets writing in English today. The author of 22 volumes of verse alongside his work as a translator and editor, he is the recipient of the Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the English-speaking world’s most celebrated poetry award. He has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Fellowship, and the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters among other honours.

Born in the United States, Moritz’s entire post-education life has been spent in Toronto, where he was poet laureate between 2019 and 2023. He is the Blake C. Goldring Professor Emeritus in the Arts and Society at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, and resides in Toronto.

The interview below forms part of a longer conversation between Moritz and Ars Notoria Editorial Committee Member J.W. Wood which will be published at a later date.

Ars Notoria: Thank you for taking the time to speak to us. There is a strong sense of lives coming to an end and completion in Great Silent Ballad, your new book. The first two pieces are explicitly about death, while “What Now” sees the narrator speak from beyond the grave, and again in “A Blue Bicycle”. Finally, there’s “I Was a Useless Man”, in which the narrator imagines living to be 128. What has led to this interest in completions, endings and – in a sense – beginnings?

MORITZ: That the narrator of “I Was a Useless Man” lives to 128 is, of course, a reference to the Hayflick limit. People always say, “well, we’re going to create ourselves to be immortal.” But Hayflick was a biologist who worked out the fact that the cells can only renew themselves ultimately in the human body to a maximum number of 128 years. So the poem looks at the idea that there’s an ultimate limit to how long you can live. And I’m saying okay, we might exist in another form. But I love you in this form.

I have the suspicion of the body and the love of the body. You know I have the lament of the body and the praise of the body, and so I don’t know that I know what this means, but I know that I want to circle around it because it’s ultimate. I want to stay near it and in it, because it’s ultimate.

So then you have the idea that the poets have always had, and which you perhaps find in the stages of life, that concept from the developmental psychology of Eric Erikson which has been so imitated ever since. Erikson’s idea was that there’re continual deaths and rebirths in life. As you go through different stages, you have to say goodbye to something, and it’s like the butterfly emerging, which has been used from time immemorial.

That idea is part of the inspiration for “Folk Blues”, which is a poem just a few in front of “I Was a Useless Man.” We come to think that death and resurrection are simply an allegory for what we do when living. Such an idea raises questions that continually circulate in our culture. It used to be, and still could be, the opposite: the great changes we make or undergo, leaving something and gaining something, were an image of life, death, and immortality.

Another example would be the poem, “Dead Skunk in the Road” from the first part of Great Silent Ballad. Its title refers to the folk-idiom song, “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road” by Loudon Wainwright III. Let me quote from the end of the poem…

For one who thinks
that the carelessly murdered skunk
sleek, lovely friend and pest of our backyard
that summer, is dead, there is nothing …
For anyone who waits, thinking of our friend
of that summer, the skunk,
there is marvelous destiny.
As long as there are two who think this way in the city,
the rest are safe in their nothingness.
For what those two think is not
just what they think.

I feel that if you’re aspiring to immortality, you create it, and everybody who doesn’t believe in it exists safely without gratitude in the world that you have created for them – that is, the potential for immortality. And that is the real immortality, you know.

Ars Notoria: On the topic of immortality, literary or otherwise, I was very pleased to see that you have memorialised the French poet Yves Bonnefoy in this volume. Could you say more about what inspired this?

MORITZ: I find him extremely important and wise when it comes to how human beings can relativise and subordinate the scientific and technological, and reestablish contact in the here and now with other forms of thinking, and other forms of experience…which are the thinking and the experiences that are in fact the most important, the foundational. It’s not as easy for us as just saying, we shall embrace the primitive or the other. (And I never use the word primitive in a pejorative sense. I mean original by it.)

Bonnefoy deals with this. Having been largely trained and raised up in thoughts and physical surroundings that are scientific, technological, how we can find those other forms of knowing?

Gerard Manley Hopkins is my saint on this particular thing for a sort of aphorism in his poem “God’s Grandeur”. First he says that “Generations have trod, have trod, have trod”; and everything is “bleared, smeared” with human doings. But then he states, “And yet, for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things”.

This, to me, is really important from Hopkins, and it informs much of Great Silent Ballad – the assertion that you can go down into each thing at any moment, and into the very core, and up to the very summit. That this, like Hopkins says in those lines, is a perpetual reality, a perpetual possibility. So I saw Bonnefoy looking for that, and finding it in a way, I find his poetry even more profound on it than that of Octavio Paz, who proclaimed it theoretically, and who does achieve it also.

Ars Notoria: Mention of the nineteenth century, and the Romantics – though we might posit Hopkins as the first modern, especially since he was not brought to public attention until 1918 – brings to mind the radical poetry of Shelley or Byron. Are you seeking to create a form of radical modern Romanticism in this volume?

MORITZ: There’s several different topics all linked in what you’re saying. I feel like when I began in high school and then in university to develop my ideas of romanticism I saw, despite everything that history and historical literary criticism says, that romanticism is the true and unsurpassed modernism and postmodernism. It is more modern than what was arrived at by the so-called modernists and postmodernists.

In a sense, Literary Studies has created the problem. Take the modern institution called the Department of English, initiated in Oxford in 1850, which is essentially a product of a hegemonic vision of “progress”, and has the rubrics of “progress” built into it; that is, the idea that one period or perspective must be simply the antecedent to a following and better one. So it looks for and has to find ways in which something succeeds something else, and improves on it, departs from it or replaces it. This is a false view of literature, so in the whole enterprise of academic literary criticism there’s the false view that there’s something progressive going on. Really, there’s an expressive manifestation of the ever-present primordial, in a form inflected by the current state of humanity.

Poetry is primordial. The primordial always reacts and adapts its language and form to the current events. But how does how does literary criticism in history say that romanticism got superseded by symbolism and modernism? Basically, it says, the romantics were so naive as to continue to believe in and seek an ontology. Later came the “modern” discovery, the pure ironic mind that does not believe in anything except its own pre-eminence. And this knowing can know that all is meaningless, but still it knows, and knowing, for it, insofar as it itself is interested in something, is supreme, and it alone knows in the whole universe. It alone knows in this sense. But if you read something like [Coleridge’s] “Frost at Midnight”, or Byron’s “Prometheus”, you see that the Romantics already fully envisioned this, and that their work is not an ignorant, lingering belief in ontology as an echo of God. On the contrary, it’s a completely awake and new realisation that you have to continue to seek while you doubt.

And if you look at our culture in any kind of intelligent way, except when it falls apart into fundamentalism or complete anomie, you find the tension between doubt and seeking. You could condense that thought into this idea. Yes, we have a vision of nothingness, and of the ironic mind alone. But we don’t want to rest with this, and we continue to go on and look and look and look, and the looking itself is a finding in a way, and even though it’s defeated again and again, it starts again and again, and this itself is an earnest of the fact that there is somewhere to arrive, although it is not a stasis. It gives you a vision of what heaven is which is already totally there in Blake, or even in the materialist “mortalist”, Shelley: the never-ending adventure, infinitely more dire than this mortal one yet free from death.

Ars Notoria: We seem as a species to have had enough of science and technology as metaphors. We may be seeking new metaphors now, in parallel to our search for new political forms that respond to what’s called the “digital revolution”. What poets such as yourself are doing is to seek new metaphors for the expression of the sacred in a world that demands proof of everything, however specious that proof may eventually prove to be.

MORITZ: I would agree with that. I am not above seeking a new metaphor in the sense of invention or innovation. But I think what these new metaphors have to be is renewal of existing metaphors. I don’t know that anybody is going to think of something that somebody else—and in fact almost everyone else–has not thought about, has not thought of. And when it’s a question of life and death, it’s salutary to think that everybody who might read you with understanding would already have thought of the same things you think of.

What might be new is to have humility. And not think that my philosophy or my words in a poem are going to be the last word. To critique the idea of having the last word. Rather, whether in argument or in proposing philosophical or scientific explanation, to be content with the realisation that there’s an inexhaustible richness of exploration, and that is life, and that is what we want, and if we discover that, then the place we discover will be infinitely opening up to us in more discovering. That’s our discovery, not the discovery of what the whole thing means, and the total map of the entire place.

One idea I try to express is that we arrive and explore by creating a path, and wherever we go is the path that we’re on. We pass things and keep wanting to turn aside but don’t. And we wonder what was down there. Then we decide one day to turn aside. But now that’s still only the single path that we’re on, and where we might have gone is the path we turned off from, one among all those paths that we pass and are not taking. And we realise that we’re always on a narrow track from which we see wonders in the midst of a vast continent that we can never get to all of. And that’s the only way we can have a path – to keep exploring.

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The Guitar

I climbed to the little half-way house
on Pendant Mountain to escape
the last days of the war,
and sat down and looked back to gape
at the city I’d left burning below. The smoke
half hid the red fire, blue river, and green slope,
and the trailing mist of clouds brushing my hair
half-hid the snowy creases of the peaks. My guitar
lay beside me. Eyesight more than hope strives
and performs and never ceases. I thought I knew
the history of the upper air—eternity—
and of the deep valley: my world was dying.
I had planned to play, once I had reached that cabin,
the quiet of the heart beyond dismay. But I let it lie.
All that day, all that I did as I sat there
between the two silences was stare.

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A Seduction

The beach aspen
twinkles
without being excited
and shamed. How calm,
its quivery opening
of every flounce of its
dress of green, silver,
and white flesh, the gaps
appearing and disappearing,
the slight
tremors giving constant
glimpses, bringing
to light, drawing
thought to their
bared skeleton,
naked stem, scaffolding
of groins, branches
and main trunk,
conduit of
passing treasure.

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Need I Say It

I boarded the train in Ontario.
I sat awhile. It wasn’t moving.
Walked forward through the cars.
Nobody. Kept walking. At the last one,
got out, having smelled the sea. I’d crossed
the continent, waddling down the aisles,
shoving the stiff doors open, stepping over couplings,
and I was at the Pacific. Not a living soul. The water
was seething on the beach, filled with beautiful corpses,
preserved perfect— “lissome”, “buxom”—opening
and closing their arms, legs, and eyes
with the wave motion. I stripped,
plunged into the foam, and naked as they were,
and freely, however I want, without fear
of issue or exhaustion, contempt or refusal, I
copulated need I say it with everybody.

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