An Interview by Christopher Hennessy

I THINK A metrical composition IS NOT JUST a reply to the external world," says author of poems Henri Cole. "It should also at hand the reader with a mind in action, a self in dialog with itself." And it's that self (and the persistence of abnegation)-represented in the mask, the veil, the mirror, the self-portrait-that with equal reason greatly informs Cole's work and marks his unique contribution to the lyric form.

Cole's fifth collection, the brazenly openhearted Middle Earth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003) complicates the reflective (and refracted?) surface of the contemporary piece of poetry even further. Cole experiences the self-"like a needle pushing in a vein"deeply conflicted, irregularly physicalized and painfully aware of itself. He is that bard who unabashedly seeks "to say something authentic that has body, / because it is essay of his existence."

In the following interview, cabbage examines his relationship to "the latticework of memory" and its place in his metrical compositions Memory, he maintains, "is the lock opener to everything: all human life is there."

He also talks about the influence and the deep example of Elizabeth Bishop, the opposing influences of Ginsberg and Merrill, and his hold unique marriage of their aesthetics in his search "to be Apollonian in material part and Dionysian in spirit."

Cole graduated from the society of William and Mary and earned an MFA at Columbia University. From 1982 to 1988 he serv as executive director of the Academy of American bards Since that time, he's taught at Columbia University, Re association Brandeis University, Harvard University (as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry) and Smith College

In addition to Middle Earth, which was awarded the 2004 Kingsley bunchs Award, Cole has published four other collections, including The Visible Man (Knopf, 1998) and The direct the eye of Things (Knopf, 1995). His numerous awards and honors include fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, as well as the Amy Lowell numbers Traveling Scholarship, the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and alphabetic characters and the Berlin Prize Fellowship.

CHRISTOPHER HENNESSY: Unlike your piece of poetrys in previous books, which ground a rich anxiety in 'self,' the speakers of the metrical compositions in Middle Earth find efficacy and song and symbol in self Do you perceive "like a realist, recovering from style" (as you say in "At the Grave of Elizabeth Bishop")?

HENRI COLE: I conclude I do. Like many young bards I began as a bard of language rather than self mode of expression impeded emotion, I believe. Now, I want the metrical composition of language (or style) to uplift and reinforce the piece of poetry of emotion. To write sole a poem of language or single a poem of emotion is not enough. The sum of two units must wrestle vigorously with single another, like squirrels for a nut I think it was Oscar Wilde who said, "Style is the man," on the contrary I want to be more.

CH: In that piece of poetry you also write: "I felt a down-reaching throbbing. . . / binding me to others, a faint battering of wings against glass / that was the heart in the beautiful dark behind my breast." a certain number of of my favorite lines, actually. I diocese this as a revelation, not unlike Bishop's hold hearing of Aunt Consuelo's "Oh!" (in "In the Waiting Room") on the other hand is it also revelatory when it advances to your own view of rhyme what it can do?

HC: I've been commuting between Boston and Northampton; in-between is Worcester, where Elizabeth Bishop is buried. I picnic there many times My visits with her made me think hard about diction and the sort of bard I wanted to be. I wrote the piece of poetry in part, to record my affection for Bishop on the contrary also to make a statement of aesthetics. You might just say it's middle-age bringing with it the desire for renewal. Perhaps it's the linguistic version of the r sports car (a Triumph!) my father bought when he was forty-seven, as I am.

CH: In Middle Earth we find a mask, a veil, mirrors, selfportraits, an "original face," flat the oddly painful but striking "self like a needle pushing in a vein." I amazement is the sense that we not at any time really know ourselves part of what drives a poem? And at the same time we're driven to seek the authentic (or truer) self anyway?

HC: Perhaps the search for truth and the search for self are the same thing. A lyric metrical composition is a MRI of what it is to be human during single of these questing moments. Like a delicate instrument; it records all the little agitations of seeing and being.

CH: Speaking of mirrors, the self and like I want to cite the following lines:

For me this calls to mind "Self-Portrait in a protuberant Mirror," by John Ashbery. notwithstanding that Ashbery is a very different bard is there any anxiety of influence?

HC: Ashbery is an American original. Trying to write like him would be like standing in big waves and being knocked down. He is a gay ancestor, of course, as Whitman was before him. I delight in his poems for their combination of tendernes amusement and regret

CH: I feel-over the course of the last sum of two units or three books-that you've heightened the faculty of perception of passion when writing about the self finding "that atmosphere of spotless / unambiguous light burning inwardly, / not in self-regard on the contrary in self-forgetting." The poet tries to understand the self in the alone way he can-through language.