Poetry Consultations with July Westhale

I read poems the way a lock picker reads a door– I’m interested in how they work, and how they open, which is a different from admiring what they do. When I come to a manuscript, I am looking at every decision the poem has made, including the decisions made unconsciously.

It could be said that a poem carries its argument in its body. Syntax, white space, line breaks, stanza breaks, punctuation, and form are not decoration, nor are they neutral. Each one is a claim the poem is making about how meaning moves. My first question when working with another poet is whether the formal decisions are doing the same work as the content, or different work, and whether that difference is intentional. Sometimes it is! Often it isn’t.

The rules of craft exist to be understood before they are broken. Still, I am not interested in policing form; I am interested in helping a poet understand what a rule is doing so that the choice to break it becomes a choice, not a drift. The white space is where the poem decides what silence costs.

As a poet, I’m a maximalist, an imagistic obsessive, someone who tends toward accumulation and has to work for compression. As Translation Editor at Pleiades, I come to poems in two languages, which means I have spent time thinking about what survives the crossing and what doesn’t. It sharpens the ear. The poets I return to are Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg for the kind of plainness that is secretly ruthless, Ada Limón for earned emotional directness, Fanny Howe for the permission she gives difficulty, Carl Phillips for what syntax can carry when it is asked to carry everything.