Joan Larkin’s sixth book of poems is Old Stranger (Alice James Books 2024). Her previous work includes My Body: New and Selected Poems, winner of the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award, and Blue Hanuman (Hanging Loose Press). A lifelong teacher, Joan has served on the faculties of Sarah Lawrence College, Smith College, and Brooklyn College, among others. Her honors include Lambda and NEA awards and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
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| Joan Larkin, poet and author of Old Stranger |
Joan Larkin: I’m almost never thinking about a possible reader when I write. Instead, I’m focused on trying to find words for some experience or feeling that won’t let go of me. But thinking about who might be listening does come into the revision process. The reader matters––I don’t want to be obscure, nor do I want to explain what the images convey. To make a world the reader can enter, I work to describe what I’m seeing with an exactness and vividness that satisfies me as fresh and true, and to make a kind of “mouth music” that gives me a kind of primal pleasure. I feel surprised and lucky when a reader responds with recognition.
You seem to resist making conclusions or tying up loose ends in these poems. Why is it some of the poems come across more as questions than as answers, and who are the questions being asked of?
Though I love to end a poem on a strong image and want it to be a memorable one, my choice not to tie up loose ends or to provide an answer is deliberate. Sometimes I go through several drafts before seeing that I can cut a final line or lines that state something I’ve already physicalized in the poem. The poem can’t be an essay. I want to make a world that goes on spinning.
The language in Old Stranger is precise and crisp, with no wasted verbiage. You also create startling combinations of words, such as “red milk,” or “well of onions her bread signature.” Do you think the texture of your writing has changed in this book, and if so, what was the progression for you to the style in this new collection?
I do think that the texture of my writing has changed in this book. Less chatting. More elliptical leaps. I’m less concerned with whether a line makes sense (though I do want to make sense!) than that it be alive. Ezra Pound’s “Deliver it alive” is still the test.
I didn’t get there alone. One example of what changed over more than a decade of conversation with a few trusted poets: I’d written a long poem about 17th century Baroque painter Artemesia Gentileschi, line after line filled with details from my research into her life. After a long silence, my friend Jean Valentine pointed to six lines that focused on a single painting and said, “This is the heart of the poem.” Dubious, I asked, “But is it enough?” Her reply, “It is, for me,” changed the way I saw what mattered most in the poem and in many others over the years since.
A number of the poems in Old Stranger are ekphrastic, meaning they’re inspired by a particular work of art. Those include six short poems on paintings by the German artist Paula Modersohn Becker, the woman Rainer Maria Rilke addressed so personally in his major poem “Requiem for a Friend.” What is it about a particular work of art that provokes a poem for you?
Music and visual art––made things––have engaged and sustained me from early on. My two brief long-ago marriages were to painters, and I’ve fallen in blind love with singers and other artists, my attachment in part the result of mistaking the maker for the making-ness. Turpentine fumes and the squeak of a bow still attract me like nothing else. I’m drawn to what can I learn from the artist’s process and skill, vision and commitment, and what it can touch in me.
The Paula Modersohn-Becker self-portrait I chose for the cover of Old Stranger looked to me as if her face were a whitish mask she was holding up, both covering and revealing the face underneath––suggesting the play between her art and interior life. I saw the beaded necklace as the sole marker of femaleness. The expression of mouth, eyes, and hand spoke of a vivid consciousness I wanted to know more about. Modersohn-Becker painted it in the first decade of the 20th century, long before I attended literature classes in which work by women poets was absent. The college library’s sole book about Emily Dickinson was part of the American Men of Letters series. But Modersohn-Becker, like Dickinson, knew what she was: “wood, with a gift for burning” (Adrienne Rich’s self-image in her 1970s poem “Song”). Modersohn-Becker produced strong, original work before her early death from childbirth. Her cut-short artist’s life, as well as what I saw in a revelatory gallery exhibit, drew me to make ekphrastic work based on her paintings. Similarly, Camille Claudel’s tragic career and Bonnard’s wife’s role as his barely visible model inspired poems of loss and erasure.
Some of the poems in Old Stranger strike me as being almost a new genre, poems such as “My Father’s Tie Rack.” Those poems capture a moment of precise observation that takes place at a specific time, but one that echoes down a tunnel of memories into the past. How did you come upon that form, and do you have a way of referring to it or a name for it?
I think of “My Father’s Tie Rack” simply as a list poem. But in the process of revising it, I also thought, What if this could be a kind of loose sonnet? Limiting a poem to fourteen lines or imposing some other rule (for example a certain number of strong stresses to the line) helps me work the language to make it more concise and alive. There’s power in limiting one’s options.
I often don’t know what shape a poem is going to take until some sound pattern begins to recur and a form suggests itself. But with “My Father’s Tie Rack,” I had a clear idea beforehand that I wanted to write a list poem, in this case a list of images and metaphors to evoke neckties I remembered––something extravagant and unusual about them had struck my young eyes, each tie a piece of art. I didn’t know consciously at the beginning that I wanted to convey my father’s complex, rich personality. And I had no idea that I’d end up intuitively swerving toward an image of his death (“the hole”) and the hint of power or even violence contained in the final word, “belts.” In hindsight, I see that the poem is both a portrait and an encounter.
The way this poem took shape is true of others, too, where my unconscious mind was making choices. I love your discerning that a particular observation “echoes down a tunnel of memories into the past,” but in the moment of writing, I typically don’t understand or consciously control the process. The U-turns a draft wants to take often surprise me.
In many poems you describe a vivid incident from your earlier years, such as “All at Once.” Are there particular types of experiences that sparked those poems?
I’m still thinking about familial and societal expectations of girls and women, of shame and trauma held under pressure at a depth. But though difficult past experiences still ignite poems, my old ways of seeing and representing them have changed as I’ve loosened my hold on my old story lines. “All at Once” was sparked by a memory of what people used to call a shotgun wedding (do we still say that?), followed by a miscarriage in a car on a cross-country journey. What I wanted to do in that poem was to look back without attachment and evoke the physical sensations of that awful moment in the car. I wanted to find language for the life of the body––the house of pleasure and trauma, wounding and healing.
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