Rachel
Hadas [photo credit: Shalom Gorewitz] is the author of over twenty books of
poetry, essays, and translations, most recently a collection of
brief, lyrical prose texts,
Pastorals
(Measure Press 2025).
A recipient
of honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship at the Cullman Center
for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and an award in
literature from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters, she taught
English for many years at Rutgers University-Newark, in New Jersey, and
currently teaches at 92Y in New York.
She divides her time between New York City and Danville, Vermont.
For more
information please see www.rachelhadas.net
1. How did your first book or chapbook change
your life? How does your most recent
work compare to your previous? How does
it feel different?
My first
book was indeed a chapbook, Starting from Troy, published by David R. Godine
in 1975. I was in my twenties, and many of the poems had been written when I was still an undergraduate. I don’t know that the book changed my
life! I remember that I had unreasonable
expectations of what effect this tiny book might have. The journalist and poet
Don Marquis commented a century ago that expecting a poem or a book of poems to
garner much attention would be like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon
and waiting for the echo. That’s still
true; if anything, there’s now a veritable digital blizzard of rose petals, but
they’re all pretty silent.
As far as how my most recent book (Pastorals,
2025) compares with my first book, nothing dramatic
comes to mind. Not that my work hasn’t
changed and developed; of course it has.
But I’ve written so much over the past half a century – a daunting
amount and a daunting span of time – that it
feels arbitrary to single out one book just because it happens to be my most
recent. I’ve developed, I hope, a
distinctive poetic voice, which is unabashedly literate and also personal
without being confessional or hermetic.
My themes are often memory and loss, but I also pay attention to domestic
detail and the look of my surroundings, whether they’re a Greek island,
Riverside Park, a classroom, or a hospital room. The life-raft of language – the phrase is
James Merrill’s – has carried me over experiences from motherhood to
bereavement to teaching. I’ve always
been drawn to the way
poetry unites the outside and the inside – what Hannah Arendt called the public
realm, the world we share, and the private world of emotions, dreams, and our
daily consciousness, what goes on inside our heads. How to make sense of these two worlds, how to
tie them to together, how to make beauty from our human bewilderment?
2. How did you come to poetry first, as opposed
to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’ve never
had the slightest talent for fiction, for making up a story or characters or
working out a plot. I have great admiration for some novelists, but I’m not one
of them. Nonfiction prose I’ve enjoyed
writing over the years; sometimes book reviews or essays, sometimes poems that
asked to be turned into prose. But my
native medium has always, always been poetry.
3. 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?
I don’t
always know when or whether I’m starting a writing project, or quite how I’d
define such a project. If the “project”
is a poem, I’ll probably scribble something down, and it might take ten or more
revisions to lick it into shape, as the Roman poet Virgil described his writing
process. Those
revisions might take a week or less, or might take years; in the latter case I
might put a poem down, perhaps thinking it’s finished, and then look at it
again and realize how flabby it is. Often the leaner, tighter versions after
revision are much stronger. “Copious
notes” – not really. Copious drafts, sure.
I’ve gotten much better at self-editing over the years.
4. Where does a poem or work of prose 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?
I always
have more poems around, some published in periodicals, some unpublished, than
can fit into a book; the challenge is to carve the best book out of that
unwieldy mass. It’s rare for me to work
on a book from the beginning. I did
become aware, in writing my caregiving
memoir Strange Relation (2011), that the various poems and prose
pieces in it all belonged together, but it took me a while to sort them into
something like a coherent chronological order.
As I say, I’m not a natural storyteller.
My new book, Pastorals, is something of an exception too; early
in 2023 I realized that my many poems about our house in Vermont all bore a
strong family resemblance, needed to be together, and needed to be trimmed of
redundancies. And somewhat surprisingly,
they also (not having been among my most formally ambitious in the first place,
and I am something of a formalist) needed to be…prose! I’m not too fond of the term prose poem, but
there you are.
5. Are public readings part of or counter to your
creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Public
readings are fine if I don’t have to travel far or move heaven and earth to set
up a reading. As I get older I am less
invested in them. Literary conferences
or festivals which feature readings often have so many crammed into a few days
that the readings become a bit of a trial for all involved.
6. 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?
Theoretical
concerns; questions….These are interesting questions which the current fraught
and angry state of discourse turns into loaded questions. In trying to come up with a thoughtful
answer, let me quote the wise elder, poet, and thinker Robert Pinsky, who
recently had this to say about the role of poetry, which I see as the genre
where my main contribution lies: “…the
art of poetry…takes for its medium each individual person’s breath: inherently,
and by its nature, on an individual and human scale. That is the solace of poetry: not the
reassurance of safety, but the restoration of human scale, the
importance of each person, amid a world of risk.”
7. 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?
That quote
from Pinsky above applies to this question about the role of the writer in
larger culture, if by
writer we mean poet. The other kinds of
writing I happen to do are largely literary-critical and speak
more, I think, to the threatened areas of general knowledge and cultural
memory. Book reviewing for one – and the
books I review are either poetry or nonfiction.
A scholar like Edith Hall, who combines knowledge of the classics with
memoir, is right up my alley; see her fascinating 2024 book Facing Down the Furies.
Clearly,
the role of the writer depends on what kind of writing they’re doing. I’ve studied classics and comparative
literature and have translated both Ancient and Modern Greek. But perhaps more to the point, I grew up at a
time and in a culture and family that was saturated with literature, and that
general literary culture, which I feel I’ve absorbed by osmosis, serves me well
now in unexpected and amusing if not lucrative ways. I retired from many years
of teaching at Rutgers-Newark at the end of 2022, and thus have plenty of time
to devote to – well, what sometimes feels like answering questions about
literature which might come at me from all directions. In addition to being poetry editor of two
very different periodicals, Classical Outlook and The Robert Graves Review, I’ve been asked to in the past few weeks to contribute an opinion
about the American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962); to blurb a book about
Herodotus; to review the excellent
Canadian poet Karen Solie; and to help celebrate the American poet Anne Sexton (1928-74). I am not a specialist! But that’s what general knowledge – literary
and cultural knowledge – seems to mean.
8. Do
you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential
(or both)?
I haven’t
worked much with outside editors; increasingly I am my own best editor. A good editor can be incredibly valuable, but
there are hardly any of them around anymore.
In general I don’t think poets or critics much on editors, for better or
worse. Poets tend to be generous with
their time (of course there are exceptions) when it comes to reading and
critiquing other poets. I think of Molly
Peacock’s wonderful recent book about her long personal and poetic friendship
with Phillis Levin, A Friend Sails in on a Poem; or of David Kalstone’s 1989
Becoming a Poet, an examination of the literary friendships of Marianne
Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, and then of Bishop and Robert Lowell. As Elizabeth Bishop wrote long ago, poets keep each other warm all over the world. This is a case where email can be a boon.
9. What
is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you
directly)?
Oh gosh,
many things come to mind. Mary Jo Salter
I think (where did I hear this?) liked to say to her students “Remember, your
reader has a job” – which meant that they had other demands on their time than
decoding your hermetic poems! A.E. Stallings has advised “You cannot be too obvious, you cannot be too clear,”
meaning not that poets should avoid clarity (I know it’s ambiguous) but the opposite:
try to be intelligible. The practice of
asking for prose accompaniments to poems, which David Lehman has adhered to in
his Best American Poetry series, and which is now our policy at Classical
Outlook, is often illuminating, but it can also reveal a startling gap
between what’s in the writer’s head and what makes it onto the page.
10. How easy has it been for you to move between
genres (poetry to essays to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
Moving
between genres can be a good strategy for avoiding burnout and boredom or a
creative brick wall, so long as one isn’t on a strict deadline, which I rarely
am. I might work on a book review in the
morning and a poem or poems in the afternoon, or vice versa. Once I have drafts I start to edit, but the
process of revising poems feels more leisurely than is the case with book
reviews or translations, particularly book reviews, for the simple reason that
like most poets, I’m not inundated with time-sensitive requests for poems.
11. What kind of writing routine do you tend to
keep, or do you even have one? How does
a typical day (for you) begin?
I don’t
have a rigid writing routine and never have had one. But I do tend to get antsy if I haven’t at
least revised or looked at a poem in progress, or started something new, in a
week or two (more antsy now that I’m retired – I used to be able to shelve work
in progress when I was teaching). In
general, mornings are good, lunch and right after is nap or sleepy time, and I
may or may not work in the later afternoon or the evening, depending. In the early months of 2017, when I was on
sabbatical, I wrote almost all the poems that were published in Poems for
Camilla (2018) sitting up in bed – my husband, as I recall, would bring me
coffee. But unlike Edith Wharton, I
didn’t have a maid to collect the manuscript pages I tossed to the floor when
I’d finished writing on them.
12.
When your writing gets stalled, where
do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
As I said
in answer to #10 above, moving between genres is good if you’re stalled. Translation is a good exercise. Reading, or letters from literary friends,
can be good. But as David McFadden is quoted as saying in #14, books come from
books. Not exclusively, but very
often. There’s also, it occurs to me,
the oracle of the everyday: what do I see out the window? What did I dream last night? What about that conversation I suddenly
remember having or overhearing?
13. What.
Fragrance reminds you of home?
Fragrance:
hmm. In Vermont, woodsmoke. Lilacs if
we’re there early enough. In New York,
sometimes petrichor, the indescribable smell of a rain-washed sidewalk. Pizza fragrance wafting out of an open
door. Marijuana drifting down the
street.
14. 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?
As well as
books, poems can come from walks, dreams, paintings, and countless other pieces
of experience including memories.
Science, music, the daily phantasmagoria of the news.
15.
What other writers or writings are
important for your work, or simply your life outside your work?
Really too
many writers are important to me to list. My life outside my work is sort of a head-scratcher. Here’s a wildly incomplete and
unchronological list: Homer, Lucretius, Virgil, Keats, Proust, Anthony Powell,
Edith Hall, A.E. Stallings, James Merrill, Thoreau, Lydia Davis, Baudelaire, Tolkien, Seneca.
16. What
would you like to do that you haven’t done?
I would
like to have known my father, the classicist Moses Hadas (1900-1966) for much
longer than our lives permitted – I was seventeen when he died. But that doesn’t come under the category of
“haven’t yet done,” does it? I both do
and do not want to travel more, but not the way today’s travel conditions
work. Mostly my wishes involve having
the health and energy to keep on doing what I love doing – writing, teaching –
and to be able to spend more good time with my husband, my son and his wife,
and friends. Not an imaginative list,
perhaps, but not implausible either. Oh,
and one literary genre I feel vaguely attracted to is drama – not fiction,
never fiction, but voices. Horton Foote
even encouraged me once, at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, to try my hand at writing a play. But when he heard that I didn’t have an
agent, the matter stopped right there, which is okay.
17. 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?
When I was
a little girl I wanted to be children’s book illustrator, or perhaps a monk or
nun who illuminated manuscripts. I love to draw and paint in watercolors but am
not as good at those things as I used to be, which was never great. I started making collages around the time the
pandemic started, and I still enjoy that.
I’d never ever get into medical or nursing school, but I sometimes think
I was a healer in another life. Or an
interpreter of dreams – but not a therapist!
18. What made you write, as opposed to doing
something else?
Writing was
what came naturally and early. And my
father’s death helped kick-start me into writing poetry. “Death is the mother of beauty,” Wallace
Stevens reminds us. I never used to
understand that, but I do now. There
was never really a “something else,” unless one counts teaching, which also
came pretty naturally. There still
isn’t.
19.
What was the last great book you
read? What was the last great film?
Last great
book I read? I’ve already mentioned the Edith Hall. I adored A.E. Stallings’s
2025 study of the Parthenon marbles, Frieze
Frame. I’m currently rereading
Trollope’s maddening and wonderful Can You Forgive Her? Last summer I
reread, and loved all over again, Lucasta Miller’s biography of Keats via poems. I read poetry all the time – most recently Charles Martin, Karen Solie, Juliet Mattila, and Richard Tillinghast –there’s always something to savor.
The weekly zoom group I’ve been in since 2022 has read Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
Virgil’s Aeneid, and now Homer’s Odyssey. I and a couple of others hope that Paradise
Lost will come next. The last film I
saw in a theater was the very enjoyable Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. Great? I don’t know.
20.
What are you currently working on?
I’m currently accumulating poems for maybe a
New and Selected, not sure. I seem to be
writing a lot, so there’s a lot of winnowing to do. Recently finished: a prosimetrum (prose and
poetry alternating) about myth, ie both poems of mine inspired by myth and
prose interludes talking about the occasion of the poem, its inspiration,
whatever. Put together, the prose
portions form a kind of patchy memoir.
This book is slated to be published late in 2025 or early 2026, but I’m
not holding my breath.
I’m also currently
engaged, in a desultory way, with typing up the contents of commonplace books
I’ve kept for well over a decade – jottings down of passages I’d read that
seemed worth hanging onto. The resulting
compilations can also be sources of inspiration (see #14 above). For example, a phrase from something Howard Nemerov said or wrote, which I’d never have remembered had I not noted it down
years ago, inspired a sestina recently when I rediscovered it in my notebook.
The phrase goes something like this – I can’t remember it word for word
this minute: “The world is always weaving itself over the ruins.”
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
