By THIRSTY
David Lehman is one of the
most prominent editors, anthologists, poets and literary critics in contemporary
American literature. He is the author or editor of myriad collections of poetry and was
the founding editor of TheBest
American Poetry series in 1988. Lehman’s honors include
fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation
and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and he has received awards from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s
Award.
Stay Thirsty Magazine had the pleasure of visiting with David Lehman at his home in New York City for this Conversation about his newest work, Playlist.
STAY
THIRSTY: Your latest book of poetry, Playlist, is in fact one long poem organized by days from November
20, 2017 through January 15, 2018. How did the idea for this structure come
about?
DAVID
LEHMAN: On that November 20 I was driving around my
neighborhood in Ithaca, where my wife and I have a house to which we like to
go, leaving the metropolis behind. I have satellite radio in my car, and I like
moving among four or five channels, from jazz to classical, from Big Band swing
to solo vocalists. Music is a great subject for poetry and can provide the
reader with a soundtrack for the day. After writing a few poems largely
centered on the music, I decided to write one a day, to see if the impulse
could sustain itself and renew itself daily. The daily poem and I are old
friends, and it was fun to go there.
STAY
THIRSTY: Why does the duration of the poem cover those specific
days?
DAVID
LEHMAN: I was mindful of A. R. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year, his long poem in daily installments
typed on narrow adding-machine tape from December 6, 1963 to January 10, 1964.
For nearly thirty years Archie and his wife lived in a house near the
intersection of Hanshaw Road and The Parkway, which is less than a half mile
from where Stacey and I live. So it was not only the music, but the sight of
Archie’s old house and the memories it evoked that inspired me. Archie is the
poem’s tutelary spirit.
STAY
THIRSTY: Your poem references music, movies, people and events,
often from the mid-twentieth century. What is it about that period of time that
so attracts you?
DAVID
LEHMAN: The music and movies of the 1940s and 1950s are
superior to those of our own time. I value what you can see and hear in those
old films and songs: wit, romance, glamour, style, a belief in outmoded virtues
such as honor and heroism.
STAY
THIRSTY: Radio has played a character role in your poetry in
the past and, in this poem, you credit Channel 71 on the Sirius radio network as
almost a tour guide to the past as you drive from Ithaca to New York City. Of
all the electronic media, you seem to be most enchanted with radio. Why?
DAVID
LEHMAN: The radio – to use McLuhan’s categories – is a “hot”
medium in the sense that it requires the reader to participate in a way that
television does not. If you listen to a ball game on the radio, you feel
impelled to visualize the stadium and the action. You’re more involved than
when you watch the game on television or on your computer via an Internet
server. Sirius 71, (“Siriusly Sinatra”) is excellent as are “Real Jazz” (67),
“40s Junction” (73), and “Symphony Hall” (75).
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| David Lehman |
STAY
THIRSTY: From classical music to jazz, from Hoagy Carmichael to
Nat King Cole, from Louis Armstrong to Ira Gershwin, and from Beethoven to
Schubert, music appears to be the superhighway into your soul. What sparked
your love of music and if there were three songs that most represent who you
are, what would they be?
DAVID
LEHMAN:
The Lady is a Tramp
Our Love is Here to Stay
Too Marvelous for Words
The first because of its superior irony; the second because of the marriage of lovely music
and simple but lively lyric; the third because of the melody and the wonderful bridge
crafted by Johnny Mercer: “You’re much, too much, and oh, too very, very, / to
ever be / in Webster’s Dictionary.” Three of the best versions of the song are
those of Jo Stafford, Doris Day, and Helen Forrest. May I mention two other
songs? Harold Arlen’s “Come Rain or Come Shine,” a love song suffused with
melancholy, and Jerome Kern’s “Make Believe,” a soaring ode to love at first
sight and to the power of the imagination.
STAY
THIRSTY: You dedicate this book to your friend A. R. (“Archie”)
Ammons with a deep reverence for his person and his work. How influential was
he in your growth as a poet and have you had the same impact on any young poets?
DAVID
LEHMAN: Archie was a big influence. I like to draw an analogy
between Ammons’s long poems and the paintings of the abstract expressionists.
In both cases there is an emphasis on motion, movement, process; the poem or
painting seems to be “an arena of impulses,” in Harold Rosenberg’s phrase, or a
chronicle of its own coming into being. Archie found a way to put himself on
paper directly, in language available to anyone. He also had a direct
relationship with the wind, mountains, rivers, brooks, waterfalls. A true romantic,
he allowed the wind of inspiration to blow through the trees like the Aeolian
harp in Coleridge’s poem. All of these things appeal to me.
I hope that through my
teaching and my writing I have had a positive influence on young poets. You
never know what history has in store for you. It is possible that you’ll be
ignored soon after you die. It is also possible that you will enjoy posthumous
fame you never anticipated.
STAY
THIRSTY: Why does the color blue keep appearing in your poem?
DAVID
LEHMAN: That may have less to do with the color than with the
word. Think of the meaning of “blue” in “My Blue Heaven,” “Blue Skies,” “Blue
Moon,” “Saint Louis Blues,” “Rhapsody in Blue,” “in windless depths of blue
tranquility” (Edith Wharton). You can be blue (sad), can have the blues, can
aspire to the azure of immortality. The other colors have their virtues, too,
of course, perhaps green above all.
When I make paintings,
drawings, or collages, my favorite color is probably yellow.
STAY
THIRSTY: If you were to leave the reader with one thought from Playlist, what would it be?
DAVID
LEHMAN: What I told the faceless friend who asked me for one
piece of advice: listen to Count Basie’s “April in Paris,” and write. Or dance.
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