Christopher Buckley: You grew up in Minnesota and your parents were not professors, or artists, but your father was a craftsman, a tool maker and wood worker; did that have some influence on how you saw experience and work, and ultimately on how you wrote when you later came to writing poems?
C.G. Hanzlicek: My mother came from a family of nine children, and they were, you can imagine, quite poor. My mother’s childhood was difficult and abbreviated. Her parents took her out of school after the eighth grade and put her to work as a house maid. She worked for a doctor for several years, and he was kinder to her than her parents. I was named after him.
My father grew up in a very affectionate family of Czech extraction. He had three older sisters who doted on him. When he graduated high school, his oldest sister, who was teaching deaf children in New York City, offered to pay his way through college if he moved to New York, but he was already courting my mother, so he declined that future and went to work in the tool factory where my grandfather worked. Being a tool and die man in those days was a very skilled profession, and he mastered the skills quite quickly. During WWII, the tool company had many defense contracts, so my father’s skills also kept him out of the war.
Much of my childhood was spent in the wood shop my father had in our basement. He spent the days hunched over milling machines, and when he came home, his idea of relaxation was, as I once said in a poem, to “get lost in the softness of wood.” He was always making something, often from black walnut, and through him I learned the satisfaction that comes with making something, be it a table leg finely turned on lathe or a humble poem.
CB: How did you come to poetry; weren’t you initially interested in being a painter?
C.G.H: Maybe the initial question should be how I came to education. I had no idea what I was going to do after high school, but the most logical answer would probably have been to go to work in the factory alongside my father.
Back in 1960, the University of Minnesota was actually sending recruiters to the high schools in search of students. One of them came to my study hall and asked us to write an essay. Clear writing had always come quite naturally to me, and lo and behold, a few weeks later I got a letter from the university inviting me to apply. A few weeks after that, I was accepted, opening a future I hadn’t even dreamed about.
I immediately loved the freedom of campus life and threw myself into it “whole hog,” as they said in the Midwest. Because I was attracted to making things, I was also attracted to the idea of drawing and painting. One painting class was enough to disabuse me of that notion; I knew that I just didn’t have a skilled enough hand to please myself. I switched to an art history major, thinking that I might want to go into museum curating, but I hated the way art history was taught then. We looked at slide after slide of works of art without really ever talking about art. The exams for the courses were slide tests: name the artist, the date, the country of origin. I used to have a memory in those days, so I could do well on the tests, but I couldn’t imagine pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees doing nothing but testing my powers of memory.
Since I’d done well in English classes in high school, I switched to an English major and began to dabble in poetry. I had the good fortune of socially encountering a professor, Sarah Youngblood, who taught Shakespeare and W. B. Yeats and had an abiding interest in poetry. She invited me to stop by her office at any time and show her my poetry. I had been reading Gerard Manley Hopkins, never a good idea for a beginning poet, and the first poems I showed to Sarah were full of alliteration and pompous gas. That lovely woman had the patience of Job, and she couldn’t have been more generous with her time. I worked hard and eventually began to publish poems in the student literary magazine. Every time I saw Sarah, she would recommend someone for me to read, and it was she who told me that I should read James Wright and take courses from him.
CB: You attended the Univ. of Minnesota from 1960-64 and studied with James Wright. Did he actually teach poetry workshops there? What classes did you take with Wright?
C.G.H: The only creative writing course at the University of Minnesota at the time was a seminar restricted to graduate students and taught by Allen Tate, so my first workshop was in Sarah Youngblood’s office, and my second workshop was being around James Wright. I wouldn’t have traded either of these experiences for, as Shylock says, “a wilderness of monkeys.”
Wright primarily taught courses in the English novel (his PhD dissertation was on humor in the late Dickens). I took the three courses in that sequence from him.
Fortunately, the university also had a very strong Humanities department. There were only a couple of permanent faculty in that department, and they drew people from other disciplines to teach the courses. I had more units of Humanities courses from Wright than I had units in my English major. They were 5-unit courses, meaning they met every day of the week. We read the Russians, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx, Flaubert, you name it. It was fantastic. It made my brain buzz.
Wright was gifted with eidetic memory and remembered damned near every poem he’d ever read, and he would constantly recite poems to us, no matter what the subject matter of the course was. He once recited to me his favorite three pages of Flaubert’s prose as we were walking across campus together. When he met a poet for the first time, he would recite one of their poems to them. Believe me when I say this was not rehearsed, because I saw it happen spontaneously on several occasions.
CB: What specifically did you learn from Wright, other than the lessons one can pick up from reading his great work?
C.G.H: I only showed him one of my poems, to which he responded, “Write shorter sentences!” It was clear that he didn’t enjoy critiquing poems, so I left him alone on that score, but he was a model of a teacher and poet for me, and because of him I decided that I wanted to be a poet/professor. What could be better than spending one’s life in a classroom talking about necessary things?
CB: Describe the years, your writing life, before you went to Iowa, and how was it you ended up there? What poets were your early models? How many poems did you have in hand that you felt were “finished” when you landed at the Writers Workshop?
C.G.H: I didn’t know the Writers Workshop existed when I went to Iowa. I went there to get a PhD, and I chose Iowa because graduate students paid resident tuition ($150 per semester at that time), which meant I could make it through on part time jobs.
I hit a rough patch in my second semester when I took a course in Pope, Dryden, and Swift. Since Swift was always pulling a fast one, he was okay, but I sincerely believed that Dryden was going to be the death of me. That same semester I was taking a seminar in James Joyce from Robert Scholes, who later became famous as a semiotic critic at Brown. Scholes and I lived in the same neighborhood, so we often walked home together after the Joyce seminar, and usually stopped for a beer on the way. One day I was weeping into my beer about Dryden and lamenting that I’d probably be a failure at getting a PhD. Scholes said, “You don’t belong in the PhD program, you belong in the Writers Workshop.” God bless that man. He told me where the Workshop office was, and armed with about ten poems, I sat down with Mark Strand. He made fun of one of my poems but accepted me into the program.
People I was reading in those days: Wright, of course, and Bly, Kinnell, Merwin, Justice, and one of my poetry gods, Theodore Roethke. Confessional poetry was becoming the rage then, so I read Lowell’s Life Studies and Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Sexton seemed less jittery than Plath, so I preferred her. I once wrote Sexton a fan letter, which she very sweetly answered. I was also reading a lot of poetry in translation—Wright had turned me on to Juan Ramon Jimenez—and Penguin was publishing that terrific series of Penguin European Poets.
CB: Who did you work with at Iowa—main influences? Was it mainly Marvin Bell? Were there any other poets in the workshop whose work or critiques you found helpful?
C.G.H: My first workshop was with George Starbuck, and thereafter I worked with Marvin Bell. I missed Donald Justice until my last summer semester since he was away on a two-year Ford Grant. The workshops were huge back in the day, Paul Engle wanted to grow the program as much as possible, so workshops had 30-40 people, which meant getting only one or two poems workshopped per semester. Marvin, however, held a lot of one on one conferences over coffee in the student union, and he was a meticulous close critic, which was exactly what I needed at the time.
Jon Anderson and James Tate were both in my workshops, and I was good friends with Steve Orlen—we had rooms next door to each other. There was a very flamboyant and eccentric guy named Bob White who really enlivened workshops. Someone had a poem called “Sparrow,” and Bob did an entire critique filled with bird puns and ending with, “I like the way the poem dovetails at the end.” As if he, himself, wasn’t a bird pun.
CB: Having read your work for 40 some years now, I am impressed with its consistency, how it is absolutely your voice, your way of translating the world. Would you say the “Pure Clear Word” of James Wright, (as Dave Smith coined it) was the main influence in your direction? And when do you think you developed or decided on your Voice, the style of poem you would write?
C.G.H: When people start writing, they imitate the voices of what they have been reading, what they love. I think one finds one’s voice when the other voices eventually fade, and you’re left standing naked in the voice that was actually yours all along. Certain things can help shed those other voices. For me it was reading the poets in Czeslaw Milosz’s anthology of postwar Polish poets, and also the Czech poets Miroslav Holub, Vladimir Holan, Josef Hanzlik, and Jaroslav Seifert. These Middle Europeans all worked in very direct voices, with minimal showiness. Milosz, in introducing the poems of Tadeusz Rozewicz, said that Rozewicz emerged from WWII with the feeling that art was an offense to human suffering, so his poems were both stripped down and terribly urgent. That notion has stuck with me all of my life, and I do my best not to be an offense to human suffering.
CB: Can you follow up with some thoughts on the value of clarity and accessibility as an aesthetic. Little, of course, goes much of anywhere without image and invention, and a turn on predictable outcomes. But the precision clarity requires, on top of imagination, has always made your poetry stand out from most of what is presented.
C.G.H: A quote from the poem “Route” by George Oppen comes to mind: “Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful / thing in the world, / A limited, limiting clarity // I have not and never did have any motive of poetry / But to achieve clarity.” Clarity can look easy on the page, but we all know how much easier it is to be vague and sloppy. A lack of clarity, for me, is an intellectual and artistic collapse.
CB: You came to teach at Fresno State in 1966. How did you obtain the position? Had you ever heard of Fresno at that time? Did you interview with Phil and Peter? What was the process like then?
C.G.H: I spent a lot of time in the placement office at the University of Iowa, checking out the job listings. It was urgent that I get a job immediately after graduating so that I would qualify for a teaching deferment to keep me out of the war in Vietnam. Most of the listings were strictly for composition, but then I noticed a listing from Fresno State that said they were looking for a poet. As I later learned, they were looking for a poet because Philip Levine and Peter Everwine were among the most popular teachers in the department; if it had worked twice, it might work again. I applied in a heartbeat. I had never heard of Fresno, so I looked it up in an encyclopedia, and it said that Fresno’s average temperature was 70 degrees. It did not specify that this number was arrived at by averaging temperatures from lows in the 30’s and 40’s and highs in the 100’s. But I really didn’t give a damn; I was tired of Minnesota and Iowa winters. There was no budget for flying me out for an interview. I had a phone interview with the department chair, Russ Leavenworth. Russ was an architecture buff, and he knew that my hometown, Owatonna, had a Louis Sullivan designed bank. I think he hired me just so we could talk about Sullivan.
CB: Did you have any initial reservations about moving to a town inland in the middle of California? What was Fresno like in those early days? Wasn’t it mostly Orchards with a railroad running through it? A much smaller population?
C.G.H: Short answer to the first question: Midwest winters, snow, below zero. And yes, there were a lot of orchards, both to the north and east of the city, figs and citrus mostly. I was from a small town, 12,000, and Fresno was around 130,000 then, so it seemed like a big small town. We’re at 500,000 now, so I spend more time in my car.
CB: And how old were you then? Didn’t some of the poets there become friends and poetry colleagues? Were you teaching classes with Larry Levis and Bruce Boston in them or were they gone on to MFA programs by that time? Did they and other Fresno poets become colleagues? Was there already a community of poets in place in Fresno?
C.G.H: I was 23 when I was hired, and had just turned 24 at the end of August before I started teaching in September. Phil Levine had just returned from a full year sabbatical in Spain, and he was so high on Spain that he was wearing espadrilles on the day I met him. He knew as much as anybody about the Spanish Civil War, and he had visited all of the hallowed places of his war heroes. I read Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War just so I could carry on a decent conversation with Phil.
Phil and his wife, Franny, were the hub around which the Fresno poetry wheel turned. When poets came here to read, they were the ones who hosted dinner parties. Phil was one of the funniest people on earth; he definitely could have done stand-up. He could also be a physical comedian: he once drop-kicked a book of poems—I won’t say whose book—directly into the fireplace flames. If laughter is the best medicine, then we always left an evening at the Levine’s healed. Comedy was also a teaching tool for Phil. He could dismantle a poem line by line, but he did it in such a funny way that the poet laughed all the way through revisions.
Another tool of Phil’s was to have students memorize a poem to recite to the class. Just reading a poem enough times to have it in memory teaches many things, not the least of which is rhythm. (Aside: I learned more about rhythm from reading Samuel Beckett’s novels than from any other source).
Phil was also a model for how the work of poetry gets done. He went into his study every morning, six days a week, and didn’t come out until lunch. He said that some days he just straightened paper clips and sharpened pencils, but if he wasn’t present when the muse dropped in, poems would be lost. The quantity and quality of his life’s work is a testament to his availability, his sweet surrender, to his art.
CB: You’ve told a story about a cheese omelet and Larry coming over for breakfast? Did you remain close to Larry, did you see any connection between his work and James Wright’s as you both were admirers of Wright’s poems?
C.G.H: Larry was in the first-class I taught at Fresno State. I mean this literally: 8:00 on a Monday morning. I think Larry was in his junior year then. He must have sensed that I was lonely in my new situation, and early on he introduced himself after class and invited me to have coffee. We began hanging out after most classes, and he introduced me to Bruce Boston. Bruce and his wife, Marsha, had a lot of parties to which I was invited, and all of a sudden, I had a social life.
Larry lived in my neighborhood, so early on I invited him to have breakfast with me. When he arrived, I had Schubert’s “Trout Quintet” playing on the stereo, and Larry seemed impressed. I don’t think he had much interest in the music—he was rock and roll to the bone—but it seemed to interest him that someone of my age was listening to classical music. He asked what we were having for breakfast, and I told him cheese omelets, which he said was great. When we sat down to eat, he opened his omelet with a fork and scraped all of the cheese out of it.
It was Larry who introduced me to Dianne, who later, lucky me, became my wife. We’ve been married for 51 years now.
Larry shared my enthusiasm for James Wright, and you could see traces of Wright in his early poems, some of them lingering into Wrecking Crew, his first book.
Larry and I stayed fairly close over the years. I have a pool table in my garage/study, and whenever Larry was in town, he’d come for dinner and a few games of pool.
CB: I remember Omar Salinas and others talking about the Café Midi in the early days; it seemed like a great place to gather and talk. Did most of the poets congregate there? Was it on Olive Street in the Tower District? What was it like back then?
C.G.H: Café Midi was one block north of Olive in the Tower District. It also greatly expanded my social life. Mort, the owner, was a piss-poor capitalist because he didn’t mind if you nursed a single cup of coffee for several hours. The chess players also hung out there, and there were usually two or three matches going at all times. On Friday nights, Mort sometimes showed films, whatever he could find to rent for his 16mm projector. On Saturday nights there was usually folk or blues by local musicians, and on Sunday afternoons there was live jazz. One Saturday night, Lightning Hopkins showed up and played an hour and half set. I don’t have any idea how that happened. Since many of the writers occupied the place, there were also poetry readings. Mort grilled a really good hamburger, so he could feed body as well as soul.
CB: The first anthology of Fresno Poets was Down at the Santa Fe Depot. Can you talk a bit about how that came about, some of the poets in that volume—that iconic photo on the cover.
C.G.H: I really didn’t have much to do with Down at the Santa Fe Depot other than being represented in it. The idea for it came from the editors, Jimmy Beloian and David Kherdian. I assumed it wouldn’t really go anywhere, but David Kherdian knew how to flog books, and it ended up selling several thousand copies. The cover photo was taken on a cold and foggy Saturday morning, which explains why all of us look overdressed for California. A handful of people who no longer lived in Fresno weren’t there for the picture.
CB: Living In It, 1971, your first book, is a handsome hand-made letterpress book from Kim Merker’s Stone Wall Press. It’s 5 ½ x 9 ½ and the shape of the book fits the shape of the poems—a beautiful book on hand-made English Paper. Merker also printed Phil’s first book, On the Edge. Did you meet Kim at Iowa, take his printing class? How did the book come about?
C.G.H: I only met Merker once in Iowa City. It was at an afternoon lawn party thrown by the aforementioned Robert Scholes, and Merker made a fabulous entrance as he and his wife drove up in an amazing rarity of a car—the body style was called a landaulet—from the 1930’s.
The book happened a few years later, due to Robert Scholes—what a friend—telling Kim that I had a book. Dianne and I made a stop in Iowa City on our way to visit my parents. We went to Kim’s print shop, and by grand coincidence he was setting type for my book, so we got to watch his hands at work. The book Kim did just before mine had been printed on machine-made paper, and Kim didn’t like the look of it, so he went back to hand-made paper for mine.
CB: Living In It seems to carry a little of the Iowa imagistic influence. The title poem, however, was one of only two you chose to reprint in the landmark Down at the Santa Fe Depot. This poem seems more direct and risks more personal emotion and narrative gravitas. Did this poem point the way for following poems and books?
C.G.H: Yeah, “Living in It” was one of the poems that revealed my own voice to me. It allowed me an openness that I truly wanted.
CB: STARS was the 1977-78 Devins Award winning book from the Univ. of Missouri Press, an important poetry prize they offered for several years. The poems are, to me, in your mature voice and vision. They risk an honest lyric voice, a keen and deep appreciation of nature and the environment, and close attention is paid to relatives and others you know closely. And off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other poets whose books have a blurb from James Wright—who said in part: “Hanzlicek prunes and thereby truly liberates his gift for beautiful sounds by taking great care to use precise diction. The poems are full of clear and unmistakable genuine emotion, and they are thoroughly lucid and coherent from beginning to end.” Can you speak to the journey from your first book to STARS?
C.G.H: When I look back at it, Living in It was a very dark book. It was written during the Vietnam war. There were frequent rumors that the government was going to stop granting teaching deferments, so Dianne and I were constantly trying to figure out what we’d do if I got drafted. Move to Canada? Go to jail? It was oppressive, and it shows in the poems.
CB: “Eclipse,” the long poem that ends STARS, seems to me the “star” of the book. How did this one evolve? The personal narrative is compelling as it selects the emblematic events of the past, and then section 7 takes us to more of a time present and focuses on the simple details of nature, the irony of belief in nothing but the present. How representative then is this poem of your work in general, the work that comes after this poem?
C.G.H: Old W. B. Yeats once said that the only two things worthy of occupying the serious mind are sex and death. He meant sex in the broadest sense, of course. Both are the core explorations of “Eclipse,” and you could easily say that they are still occupying me. I’ve written a lot of love poems over the years, because Dianne’s love is what has gotten me through those years. My beloved paternal grandfather died when I was a senior in high school, so that set me to early brooding on inevitability.
CB: Your next book, Calling the Dead, is anchored by a 14-part elegy for your father. In the middle of the book, it is an amazing constellation of memory, imagination, and thinking that pulls in much of the struggle in life, leading to death—the implicit fact that we must face in our lives—as well as the loss, the absence, that calls so much into question. You balance the dark weight of such loss with a poetic inquiry and resolution, that is philosophical in its view, but not in the phrasing. Rather, the syntax and diction here are clear and exact, and risk a great deal in their directness without the voice ever becoming self-conscious or reflexive. How did this poem develop, how do you see the parts working symphonically?
C.G.H: My father was only 58 when he died of a heart attack, so it came as a real shock. I remember that on the drive to the airport after the funeral, I was telling myself that if I couldn’t write my way out of what I was feeling, I would be as good as dead. I began working on those poems just a few days after getting back home. No emotion recollected in tranquility; it was all heat of the moment. I’ve written quite a few sequences over the years, and I never begin thinking that I’m writing a sequence. One poem comes, and then another, and if I’m lucky, some more, and it’s only at the end that I start thinking about the order of the poems. In that sequence, I wanted to bring some kind of nobility to a man who was unfailingly kind to me, who worked his ass off all of his life, and who died an agonizing death.
CB: “Room for Doubt,” as I remember, was a poem you often read around the time of the publication of Calling the Dead. A number of your poems refuse to suffer fools, and this one especially is fierce with its appreciation of life, the implicit and explicit morality in that. Talk a bit about its intention.
C.G.H: Those boys were unthinkingly cruel. They were torturing a creature, in this case an angel shark, almost out of habit. I probably inflicted some cruelties myself as a boy. Let’s face it, boys are neanderthals. But these boys were old enough to know better. I could have given them a lecture on karma, but it would have been like whistling into an empty beer bottle. So I got even with them in a poem, which has been read by tens of people.
CB: “Portrait of Peter Everwine” had to be written around 1980 or so. Peter was a close friend of yours for over 50 years, and this kind of a poem is difficult to write, to find a credible strategy for. And now Peter is gone almost a year; you have a poem, and elegy for him in the latest issue of MIRAMAR. Tell us a little about Peter and your friendship, the writing of these poems? Here’s the most recent one:
Elegy for Peter Everwine
I’m hoping that in your last moment
You were lifted out of time
And let gently down onto a train in Italy,
Chuffing through a star-driven night.
Two men across from you played scopa,
But your mind was far from cards.
At the depot in Piemonte,
You were met by the village elders
Who took you to a candlelit house.
Around the table, family stories unfolded,
And you had a last glass of Barolo,
Never so sweet to the tongue,
And then you threw back your head
And released your final, glorious guffaw.
C.G.H: As you say, Peter and I were friends for over 50 years, and it was a friendship that grew closer with each passing year. We shared tastes in art, music, poetry, everything that matters. In the last twenty years or so, I became increasingly dependent on him as a critic for my work. He knew me so well that he also knew my limits, so his critiques took that into account. If he made a suggestion that I might at first think required too big a stretch on my part, I would think my way into accomplishing it, because, after all, Peter thinks I can do it. I never considered a poem finished until I had at least a provisional imprimatur from Peter. I emailed him every poem I wrote. We were in touch several times a week, and we went to lunch together every Thursday afternoon. In the poem quoted above, I end with his laughter because everyone who knew Peter loved to hear him laugh. I often turned into a comedian in his presence, just to provoke that laugh. The hardest part about getting older is not what happens to you, it’s what happens to those around you.
On the Thursday before he died, Peter said he didn’t feel up to going to lunch, so I said I would come to see him, and we talked at his dining room table. He handed me his two-volume set of Audubon bird watercolors, saying, “You should have these.”
I didn’t see this as something as portentous as it was, because I, too, am beginning to think about shedding things. He also said, at one point, that he thought he was writing better than he ever had, to which I added my most profound agreement.
On the following Sunday morning, his companion, Connie, who lives sixty miles south of here, called me to say that Peter was not answering his phone. I went to check on him, but I had grabbed the wrong key and couldn’t get into his house. After going to every window and shouting his name, I called 911. I don’t want to talk about what happened after that except to say that I’m glad I had the wrong key, or I would have been the one to find him, my brother, my father, whatever masculine words would describe our relationship, mon semblable, mon frère.
It seems to me that Fresno poets have come into an unfair amount of losses. It started years ago with Robert L. Jones, and then it was Larry, and Ernesto Trejo, and Roberta Spear, all of whom died young, and the list goes on and on.
CB: Secrets has poems in which the poet takes a look inward, but with a wry objective angle, with some wit, and almost affection for an “other.” I am thinking here of three especially that occur in a row, “In the Dark Again,” “A Short Ode to My Shoes,” and “C.G. Hanzlicek.” I admire how the persona of each poem becomes an everyman almost. Did turning 40 have a lot to do with this stance? Tell us about these poems in relation to where you saw yourself in your poetic career and about the idea of staying “grounded” as a writer/poet?
C.G.H: I guess you could read all three of those poems as being against the notion of self-improvement. The psyche or soul or whatever you want to call it, isn’t something that can be remodeled like a bathroom. After a certain point, you’re pretty much stuck with the brain-plumbing that got you that far. Since it’s all you’ve got, you might as well enjoy it. Or at least accept it.
CB: In addition to the sequence of twelve poems for your daughter, Secrets has another longer poem that concludes the book, “The Long Arc.” What drove the narrative here, the emotional center?
C.G.H: It’s just a stream of memories from childhood, mostly pleasant, but some are more ominous. Most of the memories involve my feeling of comfort in the natural world. I was an only child, so much of my play was solitary, but in the woods or next to the river, I never felt lonely.
CB: “Flycasting at Sunset,” a short poem, is one of my favorites of yours and I think could be a hallmark of your voice and vision; with great concision it manages to preserve a landscape of the past (I’m guessing this is Minnesota?) and move far into the future:
Flycasting At Sunset
Ripe wheat runs down the hillside
To where the lily pads begin.
I launch the canoe
And paddle through waveless water
The color of whiskey.
Purple martins
Clear the insects from my course.
I have no anchor;
I ship the oar and drift.
With a pliers
I straighten and bend the hook
On my fly until it snaps,
Then cast out as far as I can
And wait for stars.
CB: When we were talking about this poem you said you had forgotten it somewhat, the kind of joke of bending the hook. I think that you were being way too modest. To me, this is a very serious poem, though sonorous and highly lyric. The precision of detail here, the calm and specific order of observation leads emblematically, absolutely to a conclusion which is both resonant and unexpected and which, I have always felt, moves outward with both a suggestion of mortality and of a larger, almost universal, vision of life. Isn’t that what the poem achieves, what most of your work aims for?
C.G.H: Again, it’s a scene of comfort in the natural world. My parents had a cabin on a lake in Minnesota. I liked to go out in the canoe at sunset, after the water-skiers had gone home and I had the lake pretty much to myself. My fly fishing was just a ruse. I broke the hook off the fly so that no fish would disturb my meditation.
CB: “Men at Forty-Five” opens your 1994 book, Against Dreaming. The wit counterpointed with the gravitas of mortality makes for a powerful opening poem. How does that poem set up the book? And how was it that you went back to the University of Missouri Press after two books with Carnegie Mellon?
C.G.H: Donald Justice had a poem called “Men at Forty,” and I was riffing on that. His men at forty are bleak, and I was thinking, “C’mon, Don, give us at least another five years before we’re good as dead.” The poem is a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but its serious side is to face the futility of trying to weigh whether your life has amounted to what you might have wanted. If the only thing you see in the mirror every day is the face of failure, you might as well curl up and die.
University of Missouri Press for years only published first books, for the Devins Award, and then suddenly they started a poetry series. I’d had a very pleasant experience with them when Stars was published, so I submitted Against Dreaming, and that led to another pleasant experience. Then they asked me to be an outside reader for the series. I picked a book, they published it, and shortly after they stopped publishing poetry altogether. I hope I didn’t kill the series.
CB: The majority of this book is divided between poems about your Czech heritage and visits to Prague and the Mahler Sequence that ends the book. First, talk a bit about the inspiration for the Czech poems. You made a visit to Prague when it was still under the boot heel of Russia. What did you discover there other than that there were no crowds of tourists on the Charles Bridge? You were looking up family, right?
C.G.H: We were in Prague for three weeks with our daughter, who was five at the time. All three of us had a glorious time. I had just published a book of translations of Vladimir Holan, with enormous help from Dana Habova, who was a simultaneous translator of English to Czech in Prague. She often worked for the government, translating at conferences and that sort of thing, and she also worked in the film industry when they were dubbing movies from English to Czech. She could feed the dubbing actors their dialog in an instant. Holan was a sort of national hero. He had been banned from publishing from 1948 until the Prague Spring of 1968, which ushered in a brief period of liberalization. Through all those years of being banned, Holan still wrote every day. His collected poems are published in ten volumes of perhaps an average of 250 pages each. Having published my English versions of Holan opened all sorts of doors for us in Prague. We also got to spend a good deal of time with Miroslav Holub, who had read twice in Fresno and stayed with us for several days on both occasions.
Dana Habova and her husband drove us to my grandfather’s village in northern Bohemia. He had left for America when he was in his teens, but I still felt that he was present there. I climbed a hill on the edge of the village, and below me was a man hand-cutting hay with a scythe. At that point, I felt like I was standing inside my grandfather’s boyhood body; he must have witnessed exactly the same scene. There were almost no tourists then in Prague: a few Germans, a few Brits, and we only ran into one couple from America.
CB: The Mahler sequence is a great symphonic—pun intended—movement. How did this develop for you, how did the music inspire the poems as the poems do not really take up the music per se, but rather range through a lyric landscape and use the symphonies as a jumping off point for a larger imagination and personal engagement with the world?
C.G.H: Well, I’ve been a Mahlerian since my undergraduate days. I still listen to him all of the time. To me, he is the most expansive soul in music. Our daughter recently took us to see Gustavo Dudamel conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony at Disney Hall in Los Angeles. Fantastic Frank Gehry building, and an overwhelming performance of my favorite Mahler. I started with just one poem, a sort of thank-you to Mahler for having given me music of such dimension. I speak directly to Mahler in all of the poems. I got a second poem, and then a third, and after some months I was up to seven poems, at which point I told myself I had to come up with two more, since Mahler had nine symphonies in all. As it turned out, the ninth poem was my favorite. Although the poems aren’t direct responses to the music, in the course of my conversations with him—he’s a strangely quiet guy—images that have their background in the music do occasionally come up. Mahler was born and raised in Bohemia, so some Czech themes also arise. The main framework, though, is a humble man trying to converse with a giant.
CB: The University of Pittsburgh Press published The Cave: Selected and New Poems in 2001. Peter Everwine commented that “Hanzlicek has the power to surprise in us a conviction that “in the end, beyond the metaphors,/We can’t help loving life.” There is a lovely and moving elegy for Larry Levis among the new poems, “Sierra Noon” and this is a profound poem of place, a poem that shows how place marks our lives. When did this poem come to you?
C.G.H: I don’t remember. I don’t even remember when I had good memory, but I’m guessing that I just started off writing about that landscape, and then at some point Larry entered my mind and therefore the poem. This arrival at an unexpected point happens often for me, and when it happens, it always delights me. Larry was definitely a man of place. As I point out in the poem, the landscape of his youth never left him, and it kept appearing in poems throughout his life. I also consider myself a man of place, but at some point in my life, I ceased being a Midwesterner and became a man of the West, the landscape that I now feel most at home in.
CB: You do not write many prose poems, nor much about politics. “DeStalinization in Prague” does both, and with sly insight and wit. Talk about this one.
C.G.H: The Czechs have faced many calamities in their history, and often their defensive weapon of choice has been humor, most often tinged with irony. Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk is a prime literary example of deflation by irony. The monument mentioned in my poem—Stalin leading a group of workers and peasants into the future—was a gigantic eyesore perched on a hill above the Vltava river. The Czechs called the monument “The Bread Queue,” and said that Stalin was smiling so broadly because he was first in line. They had to wait until the era of deStalinization to dynamite the statue, but they had long ago blown it to pieces with irony.
I don’t write much about politics, yet I’m a deeply political person, and with Trump around, it has become a full-time job. It’s hard to write about politics and make it interesting, much less beautiful. I have a recent little poem about an avocet, a beautiful bird of the marshes. Originally, Trump was in it: “Waddling the walls of the White House / Tweeting twaddle at 4:00 AM.” I loved the sound of those lines, but Trump is too grotesque to share the avocet’s world, so I yanked him out by the neck. There are vaguely political lines remaining in my description of the avocet: “She does not care / About the powers that be” and “She moves in a world / That seeks its own level, / A world of quietude. // She lives outside of history.” So in a way, I describe politics by its absence.
CB: The title poem “The Cave” is a hard and experiential look into factory work mid-century in America, which moves seamlessly into a memory from childhood visiting a tourist cave, and finally ends in a larger appreciation of the seen world. The ending is classic Hanzlicek, resolving in a realization that is surprising, but which is earned from the sum of all the specifics. How did this poem come together?
C.G.H: Well, again, there was accidental arrival taking place in that poem. I began with the image of workers in the pre-OSHA era gradually going deaf from the thunderous noises in the forge shop. Pondering deafness led me to thinking that the sense I would least like to lose is sight, since I live and work in a world of imagery. That led to the childhood memory of visiting a cave and being plunged into total darkness by the tour guide. That led to my embrace of the seen rather than the unseen world at the end of the poem. Pascal’s wager lurks behind this. My theory is that if there is a God, He is by nature a skeptic, so if I manufacture faith just to possibly come out on the positive side of a wager, God will see through my choice and take all of my chips anyway. Ergo, I might as well go with my gut and embrace this world as the only paradise we are likely to witness.
CB: In 2013 The Lives of Birds was published by Tebot Bach in the Ash Tree Poetry series which David St. John got going to publish Fresno poets. Again, I defer to Peter Everwine—how could one not—in his evaluation of the project and accomplishment of this book. In part he says, “Hanzlicek is drawn to those occasions when the common and familiar give way to what is transcendent or redemptive, which is to say that he is essentially a poet of celebrations.” I think that is a perfect evaluation of these poems. I love how these poems celebrate, often, as advertised, in the life of birds, the small but luminous detail, and how we all reach for some transcendence as lives on this planet. I feel that poem after poem, this is one of your best books, if not your best. Authenticity of voice, real subject and the ability to sing it directly, are the hallmarks of great poetry. The title poem is the last in the book and offers us that great earned affection for life that close attention and appreciation rewards. Your eye and imagination cherish the tenuous connection of all of our lives. Can you say something about the composition of the title poem then, its wit as well as its gravity, and how the two almost always come together in your poems?
C.G.H: I always think of a poem as a balancing act. I like to find a balance between thought and feeling, the tragic and the comic, etc. I think I achieved a pretty good balance in this poem. The main mission of the poem is to be a love poem to my wife, and also a love poem to the world of birds. The poem begins with a crow murdering a young jay, but then the poem balances that with delights that have come to me from both crows and jays. And there’s humor in the poem, too, the balancing act.
CB: Translations. I recall that back in the ‘70s you published A Bird’s Companion, translations of Native American poems and songs. Were you working from a prose gloss, did you have some knowledge of the languages?
C.G.H: I taught a course in Native American literature several times, and I was always unhappy with the translations of tribal poetry. The language of the translations was always the language of the translator at that moment, which was often at a distance from us, so the poems were too flowery, too ornamental to be believed. I just didn’t think that Sitting Bull could have spoken in Longfellow’s diction. My sources, with one exception, were from Frances Densmore. Densmore was an anthropologist and musicologist who traveled to many tribes and recorded their songs. As a byproduct, she also wrote down, very literally, the words to the songs, all of which were printed in various issues of the Bureau of Ethnology Bulletins. In these, I felt I was as close as I could get to originals, and I worked from them, and used the translations in my classes.
CB: Later, you published Mirroring: Selected Poems of Vladimir Holan which won the Robert Payne Award from the Columbia University Translation Center. Did you meet him in Prague? How did that project come about? And also, I seem to remember Miroslav Holub reading at Fresno State in the late ‘70s, in a science classroom? Did you know him, invite him to campus?
C.G.H: As mentioned earlier, Holub read at Fresno State twice and stayed with us both times. On his second visit, we were standing at the center and on top of the Millerton Dam, watching the hawks below us hunting along the San Joaquin River. Holub told me that Vladimir Holan had recently died, and I said, “God, I’d give my left leg to translate Holan.” Holub thought for a moment, and then said, “This could be done!” He talked to Holan’s editor in Prague, and put me in touch with Dana Habova, who had co-translated some of Miroslav’s books in the Field translation series. We were off and running. Holan’s editor selected the poems and gave them to Dana, and she sent me very literal translations. It took a year, and this was before email, so if I had a question about something, it took ten days for the airmail exchange to answer my question. I didn’t write a single poem of my own during that period, since anything I would have said would have been tinged with Holan’s voice. Prior to that, the only Holan in English was a slim Penguin edition that was not distributed in America. Wesleyan University Press took the book quite quickly. They called me on a Saturday afternoon and told me they needed an introduction that had to be mailed on Monday for a board meeting the next week, so I hammered out a six-page introduction in one day.
CB: Now for an important subject: Poetry, and pool. I remember when you converted your garage into a poolroom, re-stuccoed the walls, installed a fine table with leather pockets. I remember shooting 14.1 with you and Jon Veinberg there a few times, but by then I had lost the stroke I had mastered at 16 and 17 when I used to hustle games in the three bowling alleys in Santa Barbara. For a number of years each time I called Jon he had recently been over to your place to shoot a few games. Jon was a great poet and great soul; was he any good at pool? And in one of the poems published in your chapbook, A Dozen for Leah, 1982, there was a poem about several special cues made of exotic woods? Did you actually have many of those? It was finally a kind of metaphysical poem, right? And I think that whenever Larry was in town he came over to shoot pool. As I recall, the talk was usually more about pool than poetry, but certainly the table was a source of some community?
C.G.H: Jon Veinberg was an above average pool player and consummate poor loser, but amid the tensions of competition, we shared many stories and much laughter. Jon was of Estonian heritage, and we both had a deep respect for the poetry of oppressed societies, and we both liked to crack wise, so there was a lot of back and forth between the sacred and the profane. Those were my fondest days at the pool table.
I did have one custom cue made by a man named Paul Huebler from Kansas City. I couldn’t afford one of his cues made from exotic woods, mine was his base level cue, but it was perfectly balanced and a pleasure to hold.
I said earlier that Larry and I shot pool whenever he came on a visit to Fresno, but he wasn’t a fan of 14.1 continuous, also called straight pool, which is played to 125 points. When there’s only one ball left on the table, you rack the other fourteen balls and try to break the rack with the ball left on the table, which goes on until one player has scored 125. Willie Mosconi, the greatest pool player ever to live, once sank over 400 balls in a row in an exhibition.
That was too much of a grind for Larry, who liked to live fast, so we usually played one game of 14.1 continuous and then switched to 8-ball.
Yes, the pool poem in the sequence of poems to Leah is kind of metaphysical in that I’m in heaven, which is a pool parlor where I play with six of the old greats of the game. Minnesota Fats is not among them. He was a fraud, and Mosconi could wipe the floor with him even after he’d suffered two strokes.
CB: I want to touch on poetry citizenship. You worked with Phil and Peter for close to 40 years and Directed the creative writing and MFA programs toward the end of your time at CSU Fresno. You must have helped many young writers?
C.G.H: The program was small for most of my time here because we only had an MA option in creative writing. We were dealing almost exclusively with local students, but that was fine, because we liked them. A lot of our students had grown up in poverty of one degree or another, and that meant that they were not afraid of work. And poetry is work of the loneliest sort. Many of those students went on to lives of real accomplishment. When Bill Matthews came here to read, I asked him why he came here from New York to read for so little money. He said, “Fresno is on the poetry map, and I had to see it.” Students as much as the faculty put us on the map.
CB: And you headed the Fresno Poets Association and ran the reading series for 15 years. What was the scene like in Fresno, on campus and in the various venues for the Poets’ Association? What are some of the memories of the poets who came to Fresno to read? Did Local poets draw as well as poets from across the country?
C.G.H: The FPA series was held at the Fresno Art Museum, which had a very nice auditorium that they rented to us for $100 a night. We charged admission so that I could cover airfare for several readings a year, and we also had many annual donors. I did a mailing for each reading and included a poem or two, so people had an inkling of what they were going to hear. I don’t want to test my memory by trying to rattle off a list of who came to read over the fifteen years, but Belle Waring, Nancy Willard, Bill Matthews, Robert Wrigley, B. H. Fairchild, Milena Morling, Dorianne Laux, Beverly Lowry (a prose writer), Brian Turner, and Joseph Stroud, a princely poet in my book, were among them.
CB: Lastly, a question about the amazing community of poets from Fresno, and “The Fresno School.” Looking back to the early days when you first arrived through more recent times, what strikes you, what do you cherish?
C.G.H: The first anthology of Fresno poets, Down at the Santa Fe Depot, appeared in 1970. That was followed by Piecework in 1987 and How Much Earth in 2001. As new voices emerged, each anthology grew a little longer to accommodate them. The Fresno Poets became something spoken about. Some called it the Fresno school, but I never liked that designation. What I cherish is that in Fresno, poetry is not a competitive sport. We all support each other, and everyone is happy when one of us publishes a new book. “Are you writing” is as familiar a form of greeting as “hello” here. There is no school of similar aims and styles but there is a vibrant community of vastly different aims and styles. I don’t want to disparage any city, so I’ll just randomly say that no one speaks of the Tampa poets, or the Kansas City poets or the Phoenix poets. But the Fresno poets is a thing, a beautiful, unlikely, but real thing. It has been an inspiring place to spend a career and has given me many rich friendships.
C.G. Hanzlicek is the author of nine books of poetry: Living in It, Stars (winner of the 1977 Devins Award for Poetry), Calling the Dead, A Dozen for Leah, When There Are No Secrets, Mahler: Poems and Etchings, Against Dreaming, The Cave: Selected and New Poems, and, most recently, The Lives of Birds. In the summer of 2001, he retired from California State University, Fresno, where he taught for 35 years and was for most of those years the director of the Creative Writing Program.
Christopher Buckley’s recent books are STAR JOURNAL: SELECTED POEMS, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press; The Far Republics, winner of the Vern Rutsala Prize, Cloudbank books, 2017; CHAOS THEORY from Plume Editions, and CLOUD MEMOIR: SELECTED LONGER POEMS from Stephen F. Austin State University Press. AGNOSTIC is published by Lynx House Press, 2019.
Among several critical collections and anthologies he has edited: A Condition of the Spirit: The Life and Work of Larry Levis, 2004, with Alexander Long; Homage to Vallejo, Greenhouse Review Press, 2006; and Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California, with Gary Young, 2008.
With David Oliveira and M.L. Williams he is editor of How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets, 2001, and he has edited On the Poetry of Philip Levine: Stranger to Nothing, Univ. of Michigan Press 1991, and FIRST LIGHT: A Festschrift for Philip Levine on his 85th Birthday, 2013. With Jon Veinberg, he edited Messenger to the Stars: A Luis Omar Salinas New and Selected Poems & Reader, in 2014.
THE LONG EMBRACE: 21 CONTEMPORARY POETS ON THE LONG POEMS OF PHILIP LEVINE is forthcoming from Lynx House Press, 2020.
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