OUT OF THIS WORLD

Poet Albert Goldbarth discusses his 1950s space paraphernalia collection.


By Richard Siken
Poetry Media Service

Albert Goldbarth is the author of over 20 books of poetry, including, most recently, The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems; his many honors include two National Book Critic Circle awards.

Richard Siken: What do you collect?
Albert Goldbarth: 1950s outer space stuffs, toy spaceships and robots. Also, I have a bunch of homages to the manual typewriter, some old manual typewriters, some of them quite beautiful as physical objects, and lots of old typewriter ribbon tins with beautiful designs lithographed onto the covers. I've always been a hoarder, a kind of bower bird-like creator of displays from out of my hoard. By my standards, there isn't a real line of demarcation between "junk" and "collectibles." The question is: is it lovely to my eye?

RS: Do you type on the typewriters you collect?
AG: No, I just look at them and imbibe the aura they have for me. That's true for the toy spaceships and robots. For example, many of them, as you know, are meant to be wound up, or they're battery operated. Some of them are extraordinarily intricate and very jazzy performance objects--they move, they beep, they clang, they spark--but generally I just like to look at them. Sometimes, when I'm moving around my spaceships, I feel that I'm doing something similar to what Joseph Cornell did--arranging his bird eggs and feathers and clipping from magazines--although I know there is some element of hubris in saying that.

RS: How many objects do you have in your collection?
AG: I've never counted, but I've been accumulating these things for well over 20 years now. I love a certain kind of 1950s outer space look--Cadillac-finned rocket ships, bubble-helmeted space guys and gals, fantastically futuristic space guns that go zap. I also have a cornucopia of old kids' coloring books, comic books, paperbacks, pulp magazines, board games. A lot of it is just packed away--there really is no more room for display--but the brunt of it exists in what would be, in a more normal household, the dining room. After a long time in negotiations, my wife and I have yielded [this room] to the outer space collection.

RS: What's the most important item in your collection?
AG: Although it's hard to pick, that might be a Buck Rogers spaceship. It's from 1934, created by the Marx Toy Company--that was a very famous producer of American toys from the '20s up into the early '60s--and it is probably the first commercially produced toy spaceship ever. To my eyes it's just lovely, faithfully produced from the way the spaceship looked in the Buck Rogers comic strip. It's just fantastically, almost ichthyologically finned, with the most beautiful array of deco colors displayed all over it.

I suppose one of the nice things about the toy spaceships--and in some sense the toy robots, too--is that no matter how imaginative or surreal they are, they're made, by definition, out of the real material they would exist in if they existed in our actual world. You're looking at a tin spaceship, opposed to a plastic spaceship or a carved wooden spaceship. You're looking at a tin robot, and they have the look of working models, something someone might actually stumble over if they walked outside and saw this spaceship parked at the curb. So at one and the same time you have this fantasy object that never could exist, made of a material that we choose to believe has an actual existence in some other nearby universe.

RS: Why tin? Why not some other metal?
AG: The story that has come down to me, through various sources, is that after World War II, when the Japanese economy was virtually dead, due to our own intervention, the Japanese realized there were all these tin cans around that the American soldiers had left behind. They collected them, smoothed them out, and used them for the original batch, as fodder for the first generation of Japanese tin toys. There's a sort of symbolic lovely revenge that evened the economic playing field. The original tin they had at hand and was free, and to this sudden lucky windfall they were able to add new techniques in vibrant color lithography and new possibilities for windup and battery-operated mechanisms, so that long before the Japanese became the primary inventors of transistor circuits or Toyota cars, the world of American childhood was being defined by tin Japanese space fleets.

RS: Do your friends and family understand your obsession, or do they give you grief?
AG: Obsession? Who said it was an obsession? My wife understands. We've had our moments of disagreement over dust issues. On the whole, I think she's intellectually supportive, even though, on a day-to-day basis, I think she might walk through the dining room and think of other uses to which it could be put. Friends generally tend to find it pretty amazing when they walk into some of the rooms here. Often, if they haven't seen the things before, and they're at a loss for any other analogy, they say "Ooooh, it's like a museum" or "Ooooh, this is the ideal toy room I dreamt of as a child." [My favorite reaction is from] those who really see these things with the same kind of understanding of the era and the pizzazz of innocence that these toys possess.

Albert Goldbarth is the 2008 winner of the Poetry Foundation's Mark Twain Poetry Award for humor in poetry. Richard Siken's poetry collection Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. This article originally appeared on www.poetryfoundation.org. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation. Read more about Albert Goldbarth, and his poetry, at www.poetryfoundation.org

© 2008 by Richard Siken. All rights reserved.

HUMANIZING ROBOTS--AND VICE VERSA

Matthea Harvey discusses the futuristic imagery of her latest poetry collection. By Jeannine Hall Gailey Poetry Media Service Matthea Harvey's latest book, Modern Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, is obsessed with devastated worlds and hybrid forms of life. In two extended abecedarian sequences, the "Terror of the Future" and "The Future of Terror," Harvey explores the dysfunction between civilian and military populations in a stark, futuristic environment. In the "Robo-Boy" series of poems, a robot-boy struggles to define himself in human terms while confronting a brutal and confusing world. 

Jeannine Hall Gailey: Are you interested in Japanese pop culture? If so, do you have any favorite anime? 

Matthea Harvey: I love [Hayao] Miyazaki's Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle. There is such freedom of invention in both of them. In the same way that a strong voice in a poem can transport you anywhere, that distinctive animation style lets you surrender to the story. The characters are wonderful--I am a particular fan of the mysterious No Face, a black figure with a white mask face who seems connected to the Noh tradition, and the critterly Susuwatari, soot sprites that are essentially fuzzy black spheres with big eyes. 

JHG: Do you think the images and themes of manga and anime have permeated our artistic sensibilities? Have cyborgs and post-apocalyptic landscapes affected your writing? 

MH: I think many cultures are interested in post-apocalyptic landscapes and human-robot hybrids--we're always projecting ourselves into the future, aren't we? The post-apocalyptic world of "The Future of Terror" and "Terror of the Future" arose in the writing. My interest in hybrids may go back to the centaurs in Greek mythology and, in The Chronicles of Narnia, the mermaids. I can't remember a time when I wasn't interested in hybrids. I recently found some mind-boggling photo-hybrids online by Khoa Tran--a cat-penguin, a horse-duck, and a dog-gull, among others. And I've just remembered how enchanted I was by Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies. 

JHG: When I first read your Robo-Boy poems, I immediately thought of the early-fifties Japanese anime series Astro Boy, which is about a boy-robot hero powered by nuclear energy who tries to save the world from various villains and disasters. Astro Boy ponders questions of free will and good and evil despite his robotic form. 

MH: Robots are another old love. My first robot crushes were R2-D2 and K9, Doctor Who's robot dog. I didn't know anything about Astro Boy until you mentioned him to me, but reading about him and watching a few episodes, he's clearly Robo-Boy's cooler cousin. I particularly love that Astro Boy prefers the cube shape to the shape of a flower, and I liked the scene in which his skin suit is pulled over his robot body. Astro Boy (with his rocket legs and laser fingers) is much more powerful than Robo-Boy, though: He's a force for good in the world, whereas Robo-Boy is just trying to muddle through, like we are. I liked writing about him because of his different perspective on the human, especially those things we take for granted, such as fingerprints and experiencing the full palette of emotions. 

JHG: One of the things I find most interesting is Robo-Boy's struggle to be both fully human and fully machine, a common theme in anime series such as Ghost in the Shell and FullMetal Alchemist, and in Miyazaki's works, such as Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Does Robo-Boy personify our discomfort and fear that technology is dehumanizing us? 

MH: I wasn't consciously thinking about our fears about technology (though I dislike the slightest change to my computer). Robo-Boy's struggle is part of the whole book's concern with being in the middle of things--cat/goat, poetry/prose (I think the equator probably feels that it is in an uncomfortable position). In Robo-Boy's case, his struggle is as you describe it: being half-machine and half-human. Somehow, that struggle seems to magnify the human struggles we all go through: who am I, where do I fit in, etc. For that reason, and because I wanted his own struggle about identity to be mirrored in the reader's perceptions, I was careful not to describe his physical characteristics too much--I wanted him to shimmer between people's ideas of what a robot looks like and what a boy looks like. I admired how with Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, you sometimes forget that Geryon is a red monster. But now let me contradict myself: Delirium Press published a limited edition chapbook of the Robo-Boy poems called No One Will See Themself in You, and Doug McNamara did the illustrations. His Robo-Boy was quite mechanical (you could see the rivets on his head) but incredibly human in affect. That preserved the shimmer, I think. I spent a good bit of the fall making cardboard robots and spray painting them silver on my roof (I had a Halloween robot book party when Modern Life came out), and it reinforced something that Scott McCloud talks about in Understanding Comics: how quick we are to see human qualities--for example, we see a face in two dots and a semicircle. It's a bit sad to think we're a species scurrying around looking for reflections of ourselves, but also sweet. 

JHG: The post-apocalyptic tone in "Terror of the Future" and "The Future of Terror" seems to me clearly focused on the anxieties of Americans post-September 11. Roland Kelts, among others, has compared our bewilderment after September 11 to the bewilderment of the Japanese after World War II. 

MH: The book was written post-9/11, and the terror and anger in the book are partly from that event, but I think the poems address that in a general way (paradoxically by being very specific). "The Future of Terror" and "Terror of the Future" series are set in an apocalyptic time in the future--I didn't imagine any particular country--so it makes sense that the anxiety in them could apply to any war-time. Terror doesn't know historical or national boundaries. Jeannine Hall Gailey is the author of Becoming the Villainess and an editorial consultant at Crab Creek Review. Her web site is jeanninegailey.com. This interview originally appeared on poetryfoundation.org. Read more about Matthea Harvey, and her poetry, at poetryfoundation.org © 2008 by Jeannine Hall Gailey. All rights reserved.

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TRANSLATING POETRY INTO POETRY

C. K. Williams on becoming a poet, and how he creates English versions of ancient Greek dramas--without knowing any Greek.


By David Gewanter
Poetry Foundation Media Services

C. K. Williams is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Singing, winner of the National Book Award. The full interview is available at www.poetryfoundation.org.

David Gewanter: You've said that you wrote your first poem at 19 and a girl liked it, and things moved on from there. How does that early experience look from this stage in your life?
C.K. Williams: Incredibly unlikely. That's always been my feeling about having become a poet when I did. I still don't know how it really came about. Except for the writing of that first poem, and then futzing around with another. . . . When I arrived as a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, the architect Louis Kahn, who taught there, was just becoming famous. My roommate was one of his students, and I became part of Kahn's circle and began to understand a little the life of an artist, which is what Kahn was--more than most, or any, other architect I've ever known. So when I began to write, I must have realized that one actually could be an artist, that there were such things in the real world, and that I might even possibly be one, too.

DG: Your list of works includes several translations. Can you talk about some of the circumstances of translations?
CKW: The first Greek translation I did was Sophocles, Women of Trachis. I was commissioned to do it for the Oxford series, and I had a collaborator with whom I worked who gave me the literal version of the whole play, and I worked with as many other versions as I could find.

DG: This is an old question about translation: do you take an aspect of contemporary language, and of the panoply of people in your experience, and then put them in, say, ancient Greece in order to make the poetry vivid? Or do you keep the strangeness?
CKW: Obviously I took the language of our day, which is my own language; but the mind of the language, if you can call it that, was the characters'. One of the characters in The Bacchae is a god, a nutty god. There was never any question of using anybody I knew as a model for him . . . except perhaps my own nuttiness.

DG: Nowadays, the sought-after translator might be a poet who doesn't know much, or any, of the language, and who works with a person who knows the original language.
CKW: Many of the best translations of poetry have been done by people who don't know the language of the original.

DG: This is turning everything on its head.
CKW: It sounds that way, but it's true. Translating poetry isn't just moving from one language to another; you're translating poetry into poetry, and that's not the same thing. A scholar who has a foreign language will be able to translate any text into English, but translating into poetry requires a poet. You can see this in other languages besides English. The best translation of Faust in French is by Gerard de Nerval, who had hardly any German. And Robert Lowell, in Imitations, did a number of marvelous poems from languages he didn't have.

DG: That's why you say that the translating of poetry and the composition of poetry are almost the same.
CKW: Yes.

DG: Some final questions. You're working on a Collected Poems. Some previous poets, Wordsworth, and Auden, re-edited their earlier poems. How do you view the incessantly tinkering poet, the person who is always fiddling with things, a Giacometti who won't let things go?
CKW: I'm like that; I'm an obsessive reviser. It takes me forever sometimes to finish a poem, and I'll often revise after a poem comes out in a magazine, though very, very rarely after it's in a book.

DG: Some poets were very restrictive in their publication, but their other poems and drafts--I mean Philip Larkin and Elizabeth Bishop--have now been presented to the public. Does that give us the fuller sense of the poet, or should there be more priority given to the poems the poet wanted published?
CKW: Well, in Larkin's case, I think that it may have given a somewhat fuller sense of him; his letters had already given perhaps too full a vision of him. I certainly wouldn't want anyone to publish my drafts, or the poems that never worked out--what I call "dead poems" or "note poems." I'm going to put that in my will.

David Gewanter is author of In the Belly and The Sleep of Reason, and he is also co-editor of The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

© 2007 by David Gewanter. All rights reserved.

Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

THE POET OF GREEN BANANAS AND BACALAO

How a plate of food reminds Victor Hernández Cruz of history. by Francisco Aragón POETRY FOUNDATION SYNDICATE Victor Hernández Cruz was born in Puerto Rico in 1949, and his family moved to New York City when he was five. He has published nine books, including his most recent collection, The Mountain in the Sea, and currently divides his time between Morocco and Puerto Rico. The entirety of this interview is available at poetryfoundation.org. 

Franciso Aragón: What draws you to the historical, given that the lyric seems to be the dominant mode in American poetry today? 

Victor Hernández Cruz: It's a personal obsession with me to study the history of cultures, my culture, the history of the Caribbean, how the Caribbean formed. To me that's all very exciting, and I have to find a way to make the personal historical. I have to touch history through my personal life. So if I eat a plate of food and I see green bananas, and I see some rice, and I see some bacalao [dried salted cod], then I already see an historical situation there. 

FA: Right on your plate? 

VCH: Right on my plate, because if I'm going to eat this food, I'd like to know how it was composed. They weren't eating green bananas in Spain, because green bananas come from Guinea, from Africa; and bacalao is from--the Spanish and the Portuguese cultivated that way of cooking it; the ways of putting other things in it were developed in the Caribbean . . . so I see right away the Caribbean, slavery, the Taino Indians and what happened to them, the interchange of cultures, and the shifts of the whole exploration era. This happens when I look at food or when I listen to music--I see a Spanish melody going to an African rhythm with indigenous instruments. 

FA: What can you tell me about the poem "Root of Three," which begins

I walk in New York with a mountain in my pocket I walked in Puerto Rico with a guitar in my belly I walked in Spain with Mecca in my sandals.

VCH: The Arabs were in Spain 800 years. They contributed greatly to the culture, and they themselves had a great civilization and culture there--Córdoba, Sevilla--you had streets, fountains, orange groves, 400 or 500 mosques; they had great scholars, it was the center of translation from Greek to Arabic, and from there to other languages. They revived the Greek classics, they had doctors writing books, they had great music. 

FA: What are some of your other major concerns? 

VCH: The history of immigration in a worldwide sense; the idea of civilizations coming into other civilizations; what happened when the Spaniards opened up the oceans and began to explore the Americas and thought they were in Asia, mistook Cuba for Japan, and then thought they were in India. To me all of this is very fascinating, and because I am a product of that combination of cultures and races, to me it's an obsession to study those things--to study how the Spanish did when they first gave them pineapple. I read somewhere that when the Indians gave them this sweet delicious pineapple, the Spanish ran to the bushes to vomit. That should have been a sign of things to come, because they started sawing everybody down. So anybody who doesn't like pineapple, you know is going to end up killing you (laughter). 

FA: You don't write what many would call autobiographical lyric poems. Was this a conscious decision? VCH: Well, the poetry's not really mine. The poetry's not really about myself, it's all about my culture. I'm not writing about my person and what I do. 

FA: So you use poetry as a way to get away from your personality? 

VCH: One person is not very important on the planet Earth. I mean one person in the history of time. . . . We're alive 80 years; that could be like a second on the cosmic clock. And so my personal life could just bore somebody if I told them what I did every day. There are things I can extract from my personal life, but I use them as stepping-stones or a springboard toward other things. 

Francisco Aragón is the author of Puerta del Sol and editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. The founding editor of Momotombo Press, he directs Letras Latinas--the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. © 2007 by Francisco Aragón. All rights reserved. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

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