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An Interview with Richard Howard

79 An Interview with Richard Howard The multiplicity of the self is both a truth and a lie for me,” Richard Howard declares in the following interview. The issue is central to Howard’s award-winning poetry, an oeuvre whose poems “written in other voices” (dramatic monologues and “twopart inventions”) somehow seem as revealing as personal lyrics about being gay and losing friends to AIDS. As James Longenbach writes, “All of his poems ‘make something’ of his self, collapsing© Star Black 80 Ri c hard Ho ward easy notions of interiority.” Howard is by all accounts a distinguished member of the American literary elite. His book Untitled Subjects won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. No matter what kind of poem, however, Howard’s stylistic virtuosity, his erudition, and his formal prowess have made him one of the most well-respected contemporary poets, a poet’s poet who is also an astute critic, prolific translator, and lexicographer. Longenbach has also noted that “Howard’s entire project is one of recovery, the exquisitely American need to create what Van Wyck Brooks called . . . a usable past. . . . The very expanse of [Howard’s] sentences, their twist and torque, is an American dream of plentitude.” Howard may be most well known for his mastery of the dramatic monologue, in the great tradition of Robert Browning. His poems in this genre are finely wrought, lavishly detailed, and athletic in their language. They often portray artists and historical personages, both known and obscure. In the interview below Howard talks in-depth about his relationship to “the great voices of the past that I live with in [a] companionable way,” and says simply, “I am there,” when discussing the Victorian writers whose voices he inhabits, teaches, learns from, writes about, and cherishes. Robert K. Martin writes, “For Howard, as for Wilde (to whom he owes so much), the truth is only the most complicated of masks; all selves are created, which is to say fictive.” Indeed, his poems in other voices reveal as much about Howard’s own personal, historical, and artistic concerns (which he shares below) as they reveal about his subjects and interests—though here he resists claiming that notion for himself. Martin also notes that Howard “invents, or finds, his fathers, just as he chooses his lovers; and the history of those he chooses is the history of his construction of self.” One of the ways Howard’s poetry constructs its identity is through his poems that are very much conversations and confrontations with literary “father 81 Ri c hard Howard figures,” another topic Howard addresses in the interview that follows. For example, Howard shares his thoughts about the influence of W. H. Auden (“a figure so powerful that I wanted him to get off my back. I felt like I was writing his poems”), Hart Crane (“I wanted to make it clear . . . I didn’t want to be identified with him”), and James Merrill (“one of the wittiest poets that I’ve known”). The interview is rounded out with Howard’s insight on poems of homage and elegy, on the “art poem” and the long poem (including discussions about his major poems “Decades” and “Oracles”), and on the art of translating. On this latter topic he says, “There is a distinct sense that there is a physical relationship, or an allusion to a physical relationship, that is not available in other relationships of a literary kind.” Howard is the author of over a dozen volumes of poetry. His most recent book, Without Saying, was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2004 Howard published simultaneously the collections Inner Voices: Selected Poems and Paper Trail: Selected Prose, which followed on the heels of his eleventh volume, Talking Cures, in 2002. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Howard has received numerous accolades throughout his career, including the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the PEN Translation Medal, the Levinson Prize, and the Ordre National du Mérite from the French government. He won the American Book Award in 1984 for his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Howard has also been a profound force shaping contemporary poetry. His survey of poets of his generation, Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950 (expanded in 1980), remains a touchstone of American poetry criticism. He was a longtime poetry editor for the prestigious Paris Review, as well...