Door to a Noisy Room: An Interview with Peter Waldor
Alice James Books: You've been working on this book for quite a while. I'm guessing it's gone through many, many iterations . . . how did it feel to have to finalize it, once it was accepted for publication? Did you struggle with calling it "done?"
Peter Waldor: Ovid and Dickinson left instructions that their work be destroyed. I suppose I should have tossed my manuscript on a bonfire, but I didn't see any flames nearby, so I sent the manuscript out to a few small presses instead. I had been working on the manuscript for ten years or more. I knew it wasn't finished, but I also knew I would go crazy if I looked at the poems for one more minute. Many poems got whittled away a word or line at a time until they vanished altogether. Some expanded like an accordion, then abruptly collapsed. No one looked at the poems over the years, except for my wife and children. I did not have the benefit of a friend with a sharp pencil, so it took me a long time to see the most obvious things. All the little editing victories were hard won, but they sure were satisfying. I hope readers feel the same way!
AJB: Did you make a conscious choice to be a non-academic poet after finishing the program at Iowa? Do you find it better for your poetry to be working outside of the academic or publishing world?
PW: After Iowa I was an academic: I went straight to Franklin & Marshall College, where I was poet-in-residence for two years. Two great years. Teaching poetry forced me to study it and learn it in a way that I never had before. My concentration was never better and my students were full of good ideas. Unfortunately, I wrote several hundred forgettable poems over those two years. Despite loving Franklin & Marshall, I did make a "conscious choice" to leave. I was uneasy about having my ability to earn a living be tied to my success as a poet. The idea that I had to write in a certain way to publish in certain magazines and win this award or that award troubled me. I wasn't interested in doing that, and I don’t think I would have been smart enough to do it anyway. At the time I wasn't publishing at all (fortunately) and I did not see any possibility that would change. I do miss the challenge of smart students.
Perhaps it was one great rationalization, but I said to myself, better to let my poetry go wherever it wanted to go, free of the poetry world. I also had a great opportunity to work with my father and brother in their insurance business. The three of us ate lunch together, at M & M Pizzeria in Hillside New Jersey, nearly every day for twenty years. (I've asked Vito at M & M if I can come and give a lunchtime reading after the book comes out. He joked that he will wait to see what the reviews are like before he makes his decision!) I wrote for many years with no contact at all with the poetry world. I even spared the magazines from hearing from me. Whether my poetry suffered or was enhanced by this approach, I don't know. I was always confident (arrogant, some might say) about the masters staying with me wherever I went. No matter where I got my paycheck, Whitman would be smiling over one shoulder and Dickinson over the other.
AJB: You have said that "work" is an important subject in your poems—in what way does your work in the insurance business influence/contribute to your work in poetry?
PW: Nearly all poets have done work in addition to writing poetry, whether it is teaching the stuff or something else altogether. Of course, I should have been wary of the insurance business—with its glamorous image and rich literary heritage—but I could not resist. Kafka couldn't resist, and neither could that other guy, what's his name, Stevens—he got his start in East Orange, where my grandfather ran a bar with a sign on the door that said "A camel can go 10 days without a drink but who wants to be a camel!" Stevens probably transformed it to the "Palaz of Hoon" and changed the strong stuff (which I believe was illegal) to tea. I think I got a little smarter, at least as an editor of my own work and I feel sure that my work in the insurance business had something to do with it. I cannot say what the connection is.
In my insurance travels, I have been very lucky to meet a great cast of characters from many walks and runs of life. Some I have befriended, some be-enemied, some I have only heard their stories or talked to them for a minute in passing. Many of these people, in one way or another, made it into my poetry. My hope is that they made it in as directly as possible. Too much obliquity, too much varnish is not for me.
AJB: A number of the poems from Door to a Noisy Room are biblically themed. What drew you to those specific passages, stories and characters?
PW: Imagine this: Jeremiah is railing against the king and government for irreligious behavior and corruption, and Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians are about to invade the country and cast the Israelites into their first diaspora. The king has had enough, and has Jeremiah thrown into a watery pit, probably to die a terrible death. The fighting begins, and there is chaos in Jerusalem. Jeremiah is stranded in the pit, but the great Ebed Melech remembers him. Ebed, a eunuch from Ethiopia, part of the royal court (probably captured and enslaved in some military campaign) does not run for his own life, but finds the pit to rescue Jeremiah. Not only does he throw down a rope to pull Jeremiah out, he throws down rags for Jeremiah to wedge between the rope and his body, because his skin is so tender from being wet for too long. When I read this scene in the Bible (Tanakh, JPS edition) and got to the part about the rags, it was one of the greatest moments in literature for me—I should say one of the greatest moments for me. Naturally I became determined to retell Ebed Melech’s story, so there you have my poem "Ebed Melech, the Ethiopian Eunuch," overlaid with some Marx, pizza and modern-day religious zealots, all to add some complexity to keep the modern reader happy.
I hope, for Ebed Melech's sake, I have pulled it off. I hope I haven't fallen into the pit so many writers fall into: they are so moved by some great scene from literature that they are compelled to retell the story with their own psychoanalytical/literary critical/personal experience stamped on for good measure but all they come up with is some expository rehash. I am drawn, as others are, to the great stories both within the tradition I grew up in and anything else I can get my hands on, or ears on. When it comes to the great stories, whether they be read in rotting cuneiform or spoken on street corners, I am polymorphous perverse. Though I consider myself a skeptic, I believe all these stories when I read them. Ebed Melech is certainly off the beaten Biblical track. Sometimes I fall for the old chestnuts—for example, the twenty-third psalm (which must be the most widely read poem in history), which I take on in the poem "Insurance Man." I hope I was able to wipe away "the film of familiarity" there.
AJB: Some of your poems broach somber topics. How do you think you were able to write about such themes without straying too far into morbidity?
PW: Thank you for suggesting I have not strayed too far into morbidity. I hope you are right. I can't deny that streak runs through me. I have tried to resist it or transform it as best I can. The poem "Ribs," for example, chronicles the time I accidentally walked in upon an autopsy in progress. Shrinking violet that I am, I came pretty close to fainting. (I wish the images would faint out of my memory.) The poem was a way to claw my way out of that room. It can be easy to write about the morbid in a maudlin, B-horror movie way. That route is not for me.
AJB: In the poem "South Orange Winter," the season is expressed in the opening line as "The trees honest now." What relationship does this idea of the truth of a bare landscape have to your poetry?
PW: Interesting that you suggest the bare landscape as a motif in my poetry. I have spent a lot of time in the mountains and my favorite places are always well above tree line, where there isn't much oxygen and only a few flowers between the rocks and snow. I feel most at home on knife edge (preferably butter knife) ridges. I have tossed any poem I have written that describes those times. If I can't bear them, I could never ask a reader to try. Those forbidding wild places are for other
poets to render. Perhaps that love of a bare landscape surfaces in different ways in my work? You have helped me to understand "South Orange Winter."
AJB: Do you read a lot outside of the poetry genre? Who are some of your favorite fiction and/or nonfiction writers?
PW: With three little children, my nighttime reading is pretty limited, though I am always searching for a passage in Ovid or the Arabian Nights that does not have too many beheadings for a bedtime story. I used to read fiction day and night, mainly the classics, which I am still only a hundredth of the way through. All-time favorites are Don Quixote (which modernism still has not caught up with, these several hundred years later), War and Peace, and Remembrance of Things Past. Three great action-adventure stories. I could go on. . . .
AJB: What do you think your short-lined style tells readers, compared to longer-lined poems? Do you prefer brevity in the poetry you read, as well as in the poetry you write?
PW: I still dream of the hearty five-beat line and I memorize its adherents. I love the music of the Romantics. Years ago my line was much longer—slack, flabby, sluggish, hard to read through. I didn’t go to Line Watchers for a cure. It happened naturally. My lines kept losing words. I did explicit counting less and less. There is nowhere to hide in the short line. It’s thought that the first word and last word of the line have the most pressure on them, but with short lines, every word is like the last word.
Regarding the poetry I read, I wish I could say I am drawn to the epics. These days I seem to go for brevity: Celan, Williams, Dugan, Cavafy, their shorter lyrics. I hope my temperament as a poet is not closing some important reading doors for me. I think I will go home tonight and reread Paradise Lost.
