Roger Greenwald grew up in New York City. He attended The City College and the Poetry Project workshop at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, then completed graduate degrees at the University of Toronto, where he founded and edited the international literary annual WRIT Magazine. He has published four books of poems: Connecting Flight (Williams-Wallace), Slow Mountain Train (Tiger Bark), The Half-Life (Tiger Bark), and in October 2024, An Opening in the Vertical World (Black Widow). He has won two CBC Literary Awards (for poetry and travel literature), the 2018 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize from Exile Magazine, and the 2024 Littoral Press Poetry Prize, as well as many awards for his translations from Scandinavian languages. More, including videos from book launches, at www.rogergreenwald.org .
Q: How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
A: My first book didn’t change my life at all. It bestowed on me the label “published poet,” a phrase that people outside the literary world imagine is a compliment. I think that formally my first book was my wildest, its music the jazziest. To whatever extent my subsequent books are edgy, their venturesome explorations are more about states of mind or states of being than about form. But in my most recent work (published only in journals so far) I have sometimes tried to stretch form again, though in different ways from those in my first book.
Q: How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
A: As a reader I first came to poetry as a kid: Dr. Seuss and then Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous anthology, A Child’s Garden of Verses. I wrote my first two “serious” poems around age eight. My mother’s father, who was a Linotype operator, set them and printed them on galley sheets. Wish I could find those!
Q: How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
A: In poetry I don’t have writing projects (aside from translations). In prose fiction or memoir, sometimes. At a conference once, a Norwegian poet, adopting a false-naive tone, said to me, “What’s a ‘literary project’? I thought writers wrote books.” I replied, “A literary project is something that can be described on a grant application.” But hats off to poets who conceive of and write through-composed books of high quality, crowns of sonnets, long poetic sequences, etc. The time that poems take to germinate varies, but once I’m ready to write a poem, that usually goes fast. Sometimes my first draft is close to the final version; at other times, especially with longer poems, I revise quite a bit, in stages, and in response to feedback.
Q: Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?
A: A poem usually begins with a line that I know is a good line of verse. Often it’s the first line of a potential poem, but sometimes it’s the last line. I make book mss from pieces I have written. They may be short or long, and there may be a sequence of several poems. But I don’t start out working on a book.
Q: Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
A: I love reading to an audience and am never nervous. I like seeing how different poems go over and hearing any comments that people may offer. Although my readings aren’t part of my writing process, they do involve creative work, because I usually work with a musician, and that collaboration affects my choice of poems and increases attention to tone, mood, and pacing.
Q: Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
A: I have a few principles (which
theorists may choose to regard as theoretical, but which I regard as
practical). One is that in verse, every line should work as a line. That is
different from saying that line breaks should do something. The craft of
the break is easier to master than the art of the line, which is a rhythmic
unit held at least somewhat taut by a certain tension, and at the same time a
semantic and syntactical unit that strives to offer some interest by virtue of
how it begins and ends and what relations its words have to one another. Those
relations may depend on logical meaning, image, and sound.
I am not trying to answer-pre-existing questions. Each poem may grow out
of its own question and may then raise other questions. There are always the
questions of how to make the poem speak to others and how to shape it so it
offers aesthetic rewards, but these are not questions that can be described as
subject matter.
The current questions are “What day is it?”; “Who will publish my next
book?”; and “How can it get a competent review?”
Q: What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
A: The writer’s role qua writer is to write well. The writer’s role as “author” is to try to give the gift of his/her work to readers. Writers who choose to be active in the larger culture or polity do so as citizens and as humans.
Q: Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
A: “Everyone needs an editor.” But by “editor” I mean any perceptive reader who can offer constructive criticism. For poets that is most often a poet colleague. But if someone at a publishing house has queries and suggestions to offer, that is all to the good, because all feedback is potentially helpful. If I reject 90% of a colleague’s suggestions, I say thanks for the 10% that yielded improvements.
Q: What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
A: The best advice about poetry that I ever got came from the American poet Francine Sterle: Keep assembling your poems into book manuscripts. Don’t wait for one book to be published or even accepted to start making the next one.
Q: How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
A: It has been relatively easy for me to move between poetry and prose (whether prose poetry or fiction), and from writing to translating and back. But I found that writing a lot of discursive prose (e.g. a dissertation) put my language-generating brain in a groove that felt more like a rut when I tried to climb out of it. As for the appeal, translation kept my hand in when for one reason or another I wasn’t writing. And the contact with another language, as well as the deep immersion in another writer’s worldview and voice that translation requires, can stimulate and broaden one’s own work.
Q: What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
A: I don’t have a writing routine. A typical day begins with reading and answering e-mail.
Q: When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
A: I don’t consider not-writing to be a stall. A poet can’t be writing poetry all the time. (Pity the poor novelist, Who wishes she could’ve left home, Who uses all her hours to write pages, But still feels like she’s pushing a stone.) At one point in my life when I simply could not write, I did a lot of translating. But since 2016 or so I have more or less withdrawn from translation to focus on my own work and on getting it published.
Q: What fragrance reminds you of home?
A: Or “Which home reminds me of a fragrance?” The Bronx: furniture polish and perfume. Bergen: juniper and old leather. Toronto: the absence of salt in the air, the smell of what’s missing.
Q: David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
A: Music is perhaps the largest influence on my poetry: on the shape and movement and sound of the poems, the feeling carried by the voice. Music is also part of the subject matter of a good many of my poems. But I have also written poems inspired by and/or about film, dance, nature, and visual art. My scientific background supplies some of my imagery and vocabulary, but science is not a dominant element.
Q: What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
A: This could be a long list! Catullus, Whitman, Shakespeare, Donne, Hopkins, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Stanley Kunitz, Muriel Rukeyser, Joel Oppenheimer, John Ashbery, Joel Sloman, Robert David Cohen, Gunnar Harding, Henrik Nordbrandt, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, James Salter, Susanne Langer.
Q: What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?
A: Travel back in time and make better decisions. But “yet” implies possibilities and the future. Organize my archives. Get my manuscripts published. Get sensitive reviews in print and reach a wider audience. Ah, the impossible creeps back into the list.
Q: If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
A: If I had had musical training from an early age I probably would have become a composer. If my early life had been so different that I had not become writer, I might have become a medical researcher or, more likely, a lawyer.
Q: What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
A: Magical thinking. The need to imagine that I could communicate with the dead and that the right incantation could have an effect on others.
Q: What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
A: Poetry: Heavenly Questions, by Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Novel: The Werewolf (a purely metaphorical title), by Aksel Sandemose, which I was re-reading. Film: La Grande bellezza (The Great Beauty).
Q: What are you currently working on?
A: Putting together the manuscript of
another book of poems. Submitting to journals and festivals. Trying to get my
just-published book reviewed.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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