Slant has published two previous Q&A sessions with Robert Cording, which you can find here and here. For his third Slant title and eleventh poetry collection, What’s Possible, he agreed to answer a few questions as a retrospective on his work.
You titled this volume, your “New and Selected,” What’s Possible. That title poem wrestles with your son’s passing: the moment you really believed that “Daniel is dead. He’s not coming back. / Not ever.” Is What’s Possible also about what is not possible? Why did you choose this title for the collection?
The title for the book is, I hope, more expansive than its meaning in the title poem. Certainly in the lines you mention “what’s possible” is also, as you say, what’s not possible: the return of my son. In the book as a whole, I wanted the title to take up the two possibilities of what’s possible—the inevitable sorrows of just being alive; and, on the other side, the always surprising beauty, grace, and joy that living brings. I believe with my entire self in what Wendell Berry has said: “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.”
When returning to your previous work, what drew you to the particular poems that you selected? Is there a common thread among them?
I’ve always felt my work centered on the inextricable nature of joy and sorrow. I’d say the selection of poems drew on three aspects: that for me the ordinary world is extraordinary; that what’s extraordinary is we live in a creation that need not be, but is; and that our work is, as Gary Snyder has said, to make the real world as real as possible. To me that involves my attempts, however often I’ve failed, to see the world and not my “idea” of the world, as Wallace Stevens put it. I have always felt the unearthly earthliness of the world I live in and I hope the poems I’ve chosen reflect that in myriad ways.
How has your work changed since your early career as a poet?
The simple answer is I’m older: if you live for seventy-six years there is much that is unavoidable that comes one’s way. If you write for more than forty of those years, your technical skills certainly evolve and get better. By “better” I mean something like the capability to take on more of the breadth of one’s experience.
I grew up in a family in which one set of great-grandparents and both sets of grandparents, as well as all my aunt and uncles, were alive and close by. During my teenage and college years, all of my extended family reached the end of their lives. Someone close to me died almost every year. When I started writing near the end of college, all those deaths had exploded any simple view of the world I might have held. And the world itself was in chaos—the Viet Nam world, a government that couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth, and the ever-present, never-faced racism and sexism of those times. My mother, who thought I was a gloomy kid, asked that I make a list of everything I thought was bad and good about the world. I never even completed the list of the bad, which had grown unbearably long, when I came to this moment: why did I still think life was good? I had my question. I knew what I wanted to write about.
I think Virginia Woolf said, “Nothing is ever one thing.” One of my sons would die at 31 when I was in my late sixties. Again that old question: why amid the intensity of my grief did the world’s beauty and joy still make itself felt? If my work has evolved, I would like to think I’ve gotten better at letting this mystery question me.
Who are your most important poetic influences?
I would say George Herbert, Keats, and Wordsworth. Herbert taught me to distrust the self that is always “weaving itself” into the sense of the poem, coloring the clarity of the world with its own needs and prejudices. Keats held up his requirement of “Negative Capability” as the standard I should strive for. And Wordsworth—I think as a very young poet, I heard in Wordsworth the sound of my own voice, the sound of words I wanted to have and the syntax of sentences that looked to embrace the world around him. I could probably reduce my work to something as mundane as—he liked looking at things. So did Wordsworth.
Your poetry is full of a vivid awareness of the natural world, especially birds: purple martins, Muscovy ducks, black vultures, a great horned owl. Where did your attentiveness to nature begin, and how does it affect your poetry?
Even though I grew up in the suburban/urban world of Palisades Park, New Jersey, I spent a large part of my formative years in the Adirondacks, in the Bear Mountain, Seven Lakes region of southern New York, and out on the tip of Long Island at Greenport where my grandfather kept a boat. Fishing, canoeing, boats; the Schroon River and Lake George and Long Island Sound—those were the places and activities on which I spent a good portion of my childhood, teenage, and college years. The days on the water with family, but often by myself, taught me the pleasures of what Wordsworth called “solitude”—not the loneliness we often attach to being alone, but the feeling of the multitude of things to look at and fill my thoughts with.
That’s an interesting point—the importance of solitude, perhaps also of silence. Do you think poetry is a particularly difficult art in the contemporary age of constant connection?
I don’t think our age is all that different. The industrial world was already pressing on the agrarian world of Wordsworth. Solitude for Wordsworth wasn’t a walling off of the outside world. His idea that poetry arises from “emotion recollected in tranquility” simply means that our feelings (for Wordsworth the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”) must be processed and refined, that any form of artistic expression comes from contemplating our past experiences, of trying to make sense of the many-faceted nature of our moving through the world. That many-faceted nature of the world certainly changes—who imagined the internet as it now exists in 1949, the year of my birth? But that means there is constantly changing, always new subject matter that must be reflected on. The importance of solitude has to do with the quality of reflection we bring to everything around us—what does this or that mean to me. Too often everything we think or say has nothing to do with what we truly believe. I need to know where I stand and why I stand there. That doesn’t mean I have answers; it means that I believe in the faith that seeks understanding.
Many of your poems deal with memory—either memories of a particular person or the memory of a specific episode or event. Does writing a poem about something that happened sharpen, or soften, your memory of the event? How does poetry develop memory?
I think most of my poems are written one to three years after the events of the poem. Sometimes there is even a longer interim of time. Partly that has to do with my need to understand why a certain sight or event resonated so strongly with me. And partly that has to do with my desire to bring a number of times, events, things I’ve read and thought about all into one poem. Someone once said I write “two or three thing” poems and it’s true.
I would also say that for me memory is an act of momentary resurrection doomed, of course, to fail since whatever is brought back—an event, a person, a place—is both there and not there, alive for the duration of the poem and then a reminder of what is no longer.
