Issue Nine

Q. Who IS this guy?
A. Editor of BOA Editions, a highly respected, independent literary press devoted to poetry.  Under Ward’s stewardship BOA publishes an impressive twelve titles a year.  He is the only editor to have two books nominated in the same year for the National Book Award. In fact, BOA’s roster of poets reads like a who’s who of American poetry.  Their titles turn up repeatedly on readers’ shelves bearing stickers announcing major awards like the William Carlos Williams Award, The Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and the Pulitzer Prize.  All of this creates gravity around Thom Ward, a poet in his own right with two books and two chapbooks to his credit.  So, who IS this guy?  To find out, we visited him at a local watering hole near BOA’s unassuming office on East Avenue in Rochester, NY.  We discovered that Ward has something poets’ prize: a singular voice.

What does BOA stand for?
We don’t know the actual answer to that and I like it–it’s apocryphal that way.

And the logo?
The logo is not a mystery.  [It’s] Orpheus and the Lyre–the first poet from the great Helenistic tradition.  By Mirko Plyshenko.

BOA’s mission…
What we’re really trying to do is get poetry, as I like to say in the Japanese word Chi… intelligently into the hearts, minds and bodies of as many readers as possible. 

On Al Poulin, founder of BOA Editions…
–A grand and powerful, energetic personality.
–Al was particularly fond of being seen in bed at the end of his life wearing these floral boas.  The sort of things you’d see as if you’d landed in Waikiki.
–I’m incredibly grateful to Al and his vision 28 years ago, starting BOA with all the confidence of inexperience.

On being an editor…
–I have an innate ability to see what I would call blind spots in other people’s writing.   But that’s not something... that alone isn’t good enough.  I watched Al, I listened to Al, I used the speaker phone to great effect.  I would sit by Al and watch him at it and suggest and sometimes prescribe suggestions, macro and micro, for certain poems so they could find certain subterranean depths, certain psychological and philosophical urgencies that were latent but hadn’t come to the fore.
–A metaphor I use… on putting a manuscript together, is the symphonic motif as developed by Hayden.  The classic motif of four or five movements where you have an adagio movement, an allegro movement, a rondo movement, a minuet movement and then a final movement that brings in collaborative elements from the quatrain of those movements.
–The key thing about being an adroit editor is that you have to have aesthetic standards, but you do not want to superimpose your sensibility as a writer–my sensibility as a poet and teacher–as a superstructure, to use a communism metaphor, on the aesthetic velocity or maneuverings of said poet.
–You have to get inside their work and understand here’s how I can best help them negotiate the terrain that they need to negotiate, to make their poems become surpriseful, to move across–and [Steven] Dobyns says it better than anybody’s ever said it, Best Words, Best Order–to make the poem move effortlessly through this transference of energy where the reader moves from indifference to curiosity to interest to anticipation.

On a good manuscript…
–I know when I’m in the presence of a manuscript that I’m seriously considering sending a contract to for publication–that with all the minutiae that goes on in our lives, all the stimulus coming at us, the freneticism–what the manuscript does is it obliterates time and space.
–Synchronic time is a time of incredibly deep presence.  Where you have, due to the experience (and it can be any art experience, or experience with another person in a fraternal way or a passionate way, Eros or agape) your sense of diachronic time or narrative time is momentarily destroyed.
–There’s that great saying from the Tao Te Ching: ‘Life is so very short, we must move so very slowly.’  Being someone who’s been classified as a hypo–maniac myself, I’m moving in a thousand directions at once, and if the language can slow me down and make me attentive to that moment, then I know that this is a manuscript that is worth consideration.

On sticky notes…
I live by sticky notes.  I don’t know how I existed before sticky notes.  I got sticky notes all over the place.

On great language…
Freud learned everything from the poets (sorry Sigmund), that great language is the language of the unconscious.  And what is the unconscious?  It’s the language of the womb.  And what is the womb?  It’s the language of the water.  So you’re gasping for your air.  It’s a happy gasp; it’s almost like you’re submerged in the watery atmosphere of the language and you want to stay there.  You want to grow gills and a dorsal fin and splash about and swim with the words and the silences.

On image…
One of poetry’s ultimate aims... is to penetrate through sensation down through image, real image, image that matters, metaphorical image. Charles Simic, “Watermelon”: ‘Green Budhhas / on the fruit stand / we eat the smile / and spit out the teeth.’  There’s image.  Not Pepsi, not drink Coke… real image caught within idea... these things are anathema to the commercial enterprise of capitalism that drives this country.

On the word ‘confessional’…
Overwritten about and over-bandied about.

On translation…
–You’re never going to capture in another language the full velocity, the music, the complete idea because there are words that are untranslatable.
–Because of poetry’s long-standing and seminal oral tradition: even to speak a language that one does not understand, or fully understand, or only partially understand, is to put one in closer contact with the Other–the word ‘other’ coming from the Greek word ‘allo’–We have a choice in this life, as I see it: to work to learn what we can from the other (whether they differ in language, race, creed, color) and come to a more unified ‘humanness’ or to turn away from the other–toward bigotry, racism, prejudice, which is ‘auto’ (self–only thinking)–hence masturbatory thinking; masturbation is auto-eroticism, it’s right there in Webster’s Dictionary.
–The current U.S. government leaders are driving by auto-eroticism thinking (even if it’s only subconsciously).  But we don’t have to make that choice.  I, for one, despite my shortcomings and failures, will always strive toward ‘allo-ism’–bringing to American readers translations of poetry from other parts of the world are an essential part of that striving.

On sensuality…
I think sensuality, its tactile nature, is important because I think it’s a way toward a deeper conversation with our spirituality, our spirit, our soul.  So Rumi’s poem [translated by Robert Bly] is this: ‘Come to the garden love / where the flowers / have starred the pomegranates. / If you do not come, / they will not matter. / If you do come / they will not matter.’

On Li–Young Lee…
–He has become the best selling, or has sold through the most collections of poetry, even more so than Sylvia Plath in the last forty years.  Rose is on its thirty-first printing, The City in Which I Love You is on its twenty-fourth and Book of My Nights, which just came out a few years ago, is on its fifth.  We just did 3,500 copies.  I mean he’s anthologized in every language there is.
–He’s really a pure poet–he’s trying to make the words evaporate on the page.

On collaboration…
We do a lot of collaborations.  We do as many as we can.  Remember we’re a publishing organization; our mission is to publish distinguished collections of American poetry and poetry in translation and to advance the public interest in literature.  That’ll be the last thing I say before I expire!  It’s built into my thalamus!

On the Take No Prisoners Poetry Gang writing group...
A number of poems in that collection [Small Boat with Oars of Different Size] would not have found certain strengths, brilliances and maneuvers without the help of thinking in different ways.

On dangers for poets…
You do not want to be derivative of yourself. That’s a danger for any poet… you don’t want to become a caricature of yourself.

On unhappy writers and not writing…
Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman made one great confusion: they confused the energy of writing, the energy we put into writing as the body.  Writing is the shadow of the body.  The body’s shadow.  And if you confuse that, and you come to a point where the writing isn’t there for you, you do devastating things to yourself and the people around you.  You stick your head in the oven.  You jump off a bridge.  You go into a car and fill it with carbon monoxide.  I have a little poem in here [opens his journal] because I haven’t been writing, it’s called “Not Writing”: ‘The pressure evaporates, / the weight remains.’

On the holy three in literary publishing…
It’s not Dickinson, Frost and Stevens.  It’s FedEx, UPS and the Post Office.

On memorizing poems…
I’ve memorized over 200 poems.  It’s also something to do when you’re stuck in traffic when everyone else is type A and going ballistic… ‘There’s a certain slant of light, / on winter afternoons, / that impresses like the heavens / and cathedral tunes’ [Emily Dickinson]…and the guy in the Hummer next to me thinks I’m an absolute crackpot and what do I care?

On trains…
I love trains because of American poetry and manifest destiny and Whitman. [Billy Collins] said it’s almost as if the train is the car and the stanzas and the line and the images and the metaphors and the silences and the rhythms and the cadences, all that structural stuff that makes up a poem… it goes through this tunnel and on the other side of the tunnel are more tracks and the tracks at that point are the reader.  But if the poem as train does its work, that train becomes a place in which the writer no longer can pass but the reader is there to receive.

I think you’re the train.
[laughs] I think I’m the caboose.

On his artistic temperament…
I want to play.  I want a sense of poems that can be very serious yet can still have a sense of language play.  I want to be able to hear... [long pause] I want dramatic urgency in a poem… I want muscular poems.

On bringing poetry to people without resources…
When our books come back hurt, slightly damaged, dinged from people who have whipped them about like Frisbees in bookstores or whatever, they come back to Consortium and they’re sent back to BOA and we send these books out.  We’ve sent out thousands of books the past several years, to correctional facilities in New York State, all across the country, to Native American reservations, small urban and rural libraries without the resources to buy collections of contemporary American fiction and poetry.  Schools, a number of urban schools here in Rochester...

On what’s next for BOA…
–We’re bringing in Russell Edson next spring... what a wonderful, quirky acrobat of the imagination he is!  Most of his poems have orangutans or octopus ink in them!  He’s America’s most premier prose poet out of the surrealist sort of Dadaist tradition of the French in the Twenties... The title of his book sort of says it all; it’s called The Rooster’s Wife.
–We have a contract to publish Wislawa Symborska which is major, we were chosen over the big houses for that.  Rick Hilles, who is a fine translator out of University of Michigan, has done that. The collection is called Awhile.
–Within the Lannan [translation series] I’m also trying to expand the number of voices and languages we bring into the series… we’ll be doing two French.  We’ve done Gerard Martin and we’re doing Jean–Michel Maulpoix who are two different kinds of French poets, but neither of them had ever had an English translation done.  We need to bring people who are alive and important to the American public.

On success…
Success breeds more opportunity... Success doesn’t necessarily make it any easier.

On voice…
Miles Davis... has a great line: ‘Man it sure takes you a long time to sound like yourself.’  Whatever that sounding like yourself is, each person inherently has it if they’re trying to be a writer.  And I am... drawn into the vortex of those people who can sound like themselves.

On the bottom line…
I guess the bottom line was if you could tell me–as I sit listening to this jazz music–that I could play half as well or a third as well as Bennie Goodman or Artie Shaw or Eddie Daniels or Richard Stoltzman on the jazz clarinet, I wouldn’t write one more damn line again in my life.  I just want to be a jazz clarinetist.  That could be the first line.  I just wanna play Begin the Began, man, I just wanna smooth that out.

On his wife…
–I was in graduate school, at Fort Collins, Colorado State University.  At that time, I guess I was heavily under the happy, passionate elixir of a woman named Barbara Valente who was here [Rochester] with her 2 children, and I was enjoying the program there and at some point (look what a cliché) the absence from Barbara, and after being through enough relationships, I knew this was the woman I wanted to marry.  Whether she wanted to marry me is another issue!
– She’s my reality check.

On art…
‘Because how often we forget / that art is only / a portal to love, that the waiting / is work, that one / strident move will deliver us / from sweetheart / to sonofabitch.’ [“Anaphoric”].  Art is foreplay for love and not vice versa.

On poems as gifts…
The gift happens when the maker also realizes this:
‘The Poets light but Lamps – / Themselves – go out – / The Wicks they stimulate – / If vital Light / Inhere as do the Suns – / Each Age a Lens / Disseminating their / Circumference –‘ [Poem 883, Emily Dickinson]  Miss Emily.  I’ll say it again: ‘The Poets light but Lamps / Themselves – go out.’  That’s it, man, we’re dust.

On Herman Melville…
Let’s remember Elizabeth Melville’s now famous/infamous letter to her mother of 1854: ‘P.S. Mother, Herman has taken to writing poetry.  You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.’

BOA Editions can be found on the web at www.BOAEditions.org.  Titles can also be purchased by calling them directly (585–546–3410) or by visiting your local bookseller.  Thom Ward’s books of poetry, Small Boats With Oars of Different Size and Various Orbits, are available through Carnegie Mellon University Press.

    –photos by dellas