Lucie Brock-Broido - New York, NY
Lucie lives in comfortable decadence in the Upper West Side, quite near Columbia University where she teaches. She welcomes me in her apartment and the luxurious red of the chairs and wall hangings suffocate me. Sweet William, a Maine Coon cat scampers away as I arrive, but he gets used to me quickly and is a major part of the interview, sometimes fielding questions for Lucie, sometimes just batting his powerful front paws at some of the wires and cords that keep my recorders and cameras running.
Although Lucie's been at Columbia for 10 years (she directs the program here, as she did a decade ago at Harvard), this is the first year she's not spent part of the time in her much-beloved "castle" in Cambridge, MA. She misses Cambridge because for years that is where she's written all of her dense and beautiful lyric poetry. She's rented her place out, and on two occasions has made the drive up just to sit in the driveway. She picks up mail from her boarder, but turns down the opportunity to go inside.
We drink powerful coffee and chat away a lot of a sunny winter afternoon. She talks with great fondness about her students, about their poetry. And she talks forcefully about how important it is for her to help them in any way. She went to Columbia years ago as a student, so she knows what her students face and she's a partner to them as they work.
I ask her a bit about her beautiful, haunting - but too infrequent - books, just three collections in almost 15 years, and she's candid in her response. She has a rigid writing season that begins in October and only lasts until early winter. The cold - cold that hurts - inspires yearning in her, and that in turn allows the poems to come. (To say her work is long-awaited puts too much emphasis on the 'long' and not enough on the 'waited.')
She's a rare beauty, a rare talent, and when afternoon moves to early evening, I feel forlorn in leaving. I say my goodbyes to William, and he tells me a secret. Lucie walks me down to the street, and I wander off - intoxicated - toward my car (somewhere) near Riverside Park.
Wherein the Author Ruminates a Bit on the City So Nice they Named it Twice
Of the rich variety of cultural advantages available to New York City residents, it's quite clear to me that the one that really matters the most is the freedom everyone feels to blow his or her car horn.
Sure, the ballet and all that bullshit is great. The Met. The Guggenheim. Yankee Stadium. Papaya King. But all of that is really available in any city with more than 50,000 people, but this horn thing. This is where New Yorkers carve their niche. The horn honking is constant. In an hour sitting in my car on the Upper West Side, I heard more than 650 cars honk their horns. The complex and beautiful language seemed to have three separate messages:
1) I have become bored with the view of your car. I wish for you to pull over and let me pass along so I may wait in traffic behind someone in a different color Toyota.
2) You have parked poorly, and I fear that should I try to make passage that I might press my bumper up against your own. Please come down from your Ritz Cracker box sized apartment and realign your car.
3) I am a cab driver with many appointments in my future, and therefore I am sounding my horn becase a) I require some space to make this left hand turn from the right hand lane, b) my last tip was dissatisfying, and I need to take out my anger on my current passenger, and my normal violent swerving is not working on its own, and 3) it has been several minutes since I last honked my horn.
That last section is a joke. Just the 3 comical reasons. Everything else is true.
New York is a remarkable place. I mean it. About half the people I know think it's the greatest city in the world. I mean just the bagels alone sway most of my pals. Many of them go to New York 3 times a year. They see some art. They get matinee tickets to either Phantom or an off-broadway play where actors dress like kitchen implements and revolt against the eastern-Bloc styled "drawer" they live in (you think I'm making this up, and I'm not). They eat a bagel the size of a Christmas turkey, and then take the train back to Pittsburgh or Baltimore. I trust them. I really do.
I love Times Square. I love the sidewalk in front of MTV. I love Central Park when it's not crowded. I love 30 Rock. I love looking out the windows of my hotel and thinking: "Holy shit! Look at all the tourists." I love the neighborhoods where locals sit on stoops and chat across the street with the neigbors, all while sitting on stoops, or in open windows. I love Riverside Park, narrow and bustling, but lovely for being jammed between the high rises and the Henry Hudson Parkway.
It's exciting and busy, and for many, the only place in the world where all of the senses can be stimulated simultaneously. I see its beauty; I see its allure. But once we finished our interview this afternoon, we hustled across the GW Bridge, and before too long we were two beers and two big plates of food into a terrific and funny evening at the Longhorn Steakhouse in Parsippany, New Jersey, for my money, the greatest city in the world.
Dave Smith - Baltimore, MD
I ran the undergraduate writing program at Johns Hopkins for the last three years, so today is a bit of a homecoming. We drive past the greatest diner in creation, the New Wyman, and then head over to campus. While my wife circles the parking lots, I run in quick to surprise my former partner in the writing program, Susie. She was my program's administrator, but more importantly, she was my pal and my colleague, and a day did not pass that we did not put our heads together to try and figure out ways in which to make the new program work better.
I bound up the stairs in Gilman Hall and it's like old times. "Hey," I say, when Susie turns around and sees me. "I haven't gotten a paycheck in six months. What's up?" We hug and talk about some of the new construction on campus. Susie checks in on this blog from time to time so knows roughly where I've been. She says, "How are you doing?" and all I can think of, after 40+ poets and 16,000 miles, is - "I'm tired." Then we both laugh. She's busy and I've got to get to my interview, so we make a promise for my wife and I to get together with her and her husband for lunch when we come back through Baltimore later in February, and I race out to head over to see Hopkins's newest poet.
Dave Smith has only been in Baltimore for about 18 months, but his imposing stone house shows a man at home and comfortable. We move through the first floor to a back room surrounded by windows that open into the back yard. A cat scurries across. I meet Smith's wife and they settle some plans for later while I get my gear out. Smith co-edited the Southern Review for a dozen years, and is as well known for that as he is for his terrific and vast production of poetry.
We sit at a wood table, facing each other. Smith has on jeans; a purple shirt pops out of a nice blue sweater.
He answers in complex but complete thoughts, filling in gaps in answers by looping back, putting periods in by saying, "I think that's enough." His voice resonates in this room, and he listens to each question and weighs it a bit before answering. The answers develop clearly and forcefully. Even when he completely disagrees with an idea that I'm searching for insight on, he does it like a gentleman, with a polite revamping and then a new path.
We go out front after we've chatted and I position him in front of the house, on a slight rise above me. The family dog - who barked when I went up these stairs when I arrived - sees me now and is silent. Smith is patient while I take out both 35mm cameras and start shooting. While we stand there, we talk about an old friend of his, someone who taught me in grad school more than 20 years ago. Smith remembers him in the old days, and thinks fondly of him now. We both love his work.
Before I go, I mention where I'm headed in the coming weeks. He hears one name and asks me to take along a special message. His eyes light up a bit - it's a fond memory or an inside joke, I think. I promise to pass along the greeting, and I go.
Rita Dove, Charlottesville, VA
More than two decades ago I was a befuddled but beautiful Psych major at Arizona State University. I had long hair and a 31" waist. I was riddled with insecurities, however, about my future (which is, of course, just like today), and I was in receipt of another college transcript showing a wide variety of shades, nuances, and colors, but hardly any A's or B's.
I was searching for a reason to get out of school, or maybe a reason to stay in. I did poorly in the Psych classes I finished, but I wasn't finishing too many of them. I had found my way into a ton of other classes, however: Philosophy, Mass Com, Sociology, and a few classes in writing (everything from freshman comp to introductions to poetry and fiction).
I walked across campus to the Language and Literature building, an 8 story behemoth that housed classrooms and several Humanities departments, and took the elevator up to English. I supplicated myself in front of the departmental secretaries and told them a version of the tale that brought me to my knees. "I need to change my major," I said. "Can I get a degree in English?"
The three secretaries came to the front desk and took turns tilting their heads at me, then shaking them sadly. I may be wrong, but I think one of them reached across and patted my hand. "It's too late," one of them said. "You're a junior. Tough it out." "Have you started taking your required courses yet?" another said. I proffered my transcripts, which showed a variety of courses, low level writing courses, nothing meaty. "I think you better see someone," one of them said. "Give him to Rita," one of them said.
They pointed and I began my middlepassage down the hallway to an open door. Before Rita Dove could say much more than hello, I collapsed into a chair in her office and began sawing the mad, deep cello of my heart. Except for the occasional squeak of the chair, my robust and romantic woeful story washed us both. I thought I might weep. Surely this young, beautiful woman would see the pain, the misery, and she would weep, too. I waited.
"I don't know how to do it," she said. "But I'll get some forms." And she disappeared.
An hour later or so I walked out of the Language and Literature building into blinding sunshine. (This is not metaphorical at all; it was always blinding sunshine in those halcyon Tempe days.) I was an English major. I had the forms. Rita had solved it all. She gave me a schedule for the coming semesters. She asked if I was going to be all right, and sent me along the way I had come.
Rita Dove lives in a spectacular and quiet neighborhood outside Charlottesville. In the directions to her house are these words: field, meadow, Ivy, pond, lane, hills, and rolling. I stand outside the house and look down at this little body of water behind their house. It's partially covered with ice, but the sun is beaming down on it, shining up mad shards, erratic ribbons of light.
Rita and her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn, greet me and we try to remember the details of the last time we met, two decades ago. Fred was moving a box of books out of or into Rita's office. He thinks that's right. He and Rita would have just moved to Arizona; he was likely helping her get her office set up.
Fred goes off to his study and Rita and I sit in the living room on large white couches. There's a piano in the corner. An acoustic guitar casual up against the wall behind an occasional chair. Rita looks exactly like she did 22 years ago. She smiles at some of the memories I recall at the beginning of our chat. I'm trying to give her a sense of how important that one hour of February 1982 was, without making too much of a fool of myself. My life changed that day. I gave away the obligation to do something for others and took the charge of doing something for myself. I chased a dream that was my own, a dream (reading and writing?) without obvious and sensible rewards. And the past 2 decades are only possible because I made that walk on that one day.
But we leave that behind. Rita is glad to hear it, but we move on to the interview.
It's good to note, I think, that Rita Dove is a brilliant poet, one of extraordinary grace. Her books are rich, textured, funny, beautiful, honest, fearless, enlightening, and - always - sharply wrought. Her poems swirl into life and then explode into clarity with one final line, one last stanza. Sometimes just the right word.
She is one of the most admired and honored poets of her generation, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a Poet Laureate. She has collected awards and achievements of a remarkable range. But one thing she tells me today obscures all the rest: She and Fred are ballroom dancers.
She talks about a wild notion that drove them and their neighbors into some lessons. She and Fred were the only ones who stuck it out, and now they dance in the style of the "American Smooth," a somewhat loose interpretaion of the sometimes arcane and rigid rules of classical ballroom dancing. The foxtrot. The waltz. Samba. They have outfits. I've seen photos. Fred with his flowing gold mane in a tuxedo, Rita in a spangly purple number.
We finish our chat about the suddenly mundane matters of poetry and place and then go outside for some photos. Fred joins us as does my wife and we stand in a loose formation overlooking the pond. What I want to say is, "Fred, I want to see you dance. Give Rita a twirl, would you?" I have such envy over this that I'm getting the kind of crazy thoughts I'm usually able to keep at bay. Maybe after the trip is over, my wife and I should start some lessons. I like the sound of that. Twirl. I want a tux like Fred's got. I want what Fred and Rita have. Not the house. Not the pond.
I want to dance the American Smooth.
Nikki Giovanni - Blacksburg, VA
Nikki is wearing a medal when I meet her at her office on the campus of Virginia Tech. Her poetry has won almost uncountable awards, plaudits, and honors, but this is an actual medal. I'm thinking figure skating or the 400m hurdles or something.
But the medal is from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences which Nikki got earlier this week at the annual Grammy Awards dinner in Los Angeles. Her spectacular spoken word release of "The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection" lost out to Al Franken - go figure - but the nomination, the medal, and the good seats she had (near Carole King) made the trip a great success.
She's wearing the medal because her students wanted to see it. Just before our chat starts she even gets a call from a student who wants to know about the medal. Did she wear it to class? Did the other students like it? Was Nikki on TV? Nikki answers the questions, reminds the student to turn her paper in, and has to admit that she never got her mug on the TV. And it's too bad, because it's a great mug, open and vital.
On the walls of her office she displays posters of Tupac Shakur, Bob Marley, and Prince, and her long love of music fills her work in the same way. So I smile at the picture of her sitting there on Tuesday watching Prince and Beyonce tear up the opening number, and then later George Clinton and P-Funk tear the roof off the sucker.
We talk a little about Nikki's life in Appalachia: Knoxville, Cincinnati, and here in southwestern Virginia. She spent ten years in New York City and loved it, but her life has been here. I can see the campus out her window behind her. The blinds are wide open, and the sun on this seasonable February afternoon pours in, lighting up Nikki from behind, giving her spectacular white/platinum hair a real glow.
Nikki wants to talk about place widely, and in further locales than anyone else so far on the trip. We talk about Mars, about the need for humans to keep exploring. The wheel took over for the horse, Nikki tells me, and it follows that if we can get to Mars, we really should. She talks about space and the future of humankind with such fervor that I have to ask a question. "What about a poet on that first crew to Mars?" I ask. Nikki's eyes light up. "I think it should be a woman, a black woman, a black woman in her 60s." She laughs.
We wrap it up with some photos. I take another peek at the medal. It's cool, but not as cool as Nikki.
