Interview

Ever since I first heard Charles Martin read, I've admired the crisp lucidity of his craft. But while preparing for our talk, which took place on September 8, 2017 at his home in Syracuse, New York, I started to suspect that he values a looser kind of insight too, like what Paul Klee described as "exactitude winged by intuition." I began by asking about a discovery he made in his early studies of Catullus—how a certain poem called "poem 64" was arranged symmetrically. Charles explained that this technique arose during a time when people were still writing poems on scrolls, so it made sense to try things like that since you could hold the two scenes together. The scene on the outside could be juxtaposed against its corresponding scene on the inside. But with books, he explained, we don't have that luxury … unless you tear the pages.

Eric Berlin:

So is symmetry something that listeners and readers can sense instinctively?

Charles Martin:

Not always. Dylan Thomas wrote a poem called "Prologue" at the beginning of his collected poems, and it's done in a chiasmic arrangement where A, the first line, rhymes with A, the last line, and it spans two or three pages so that by the time reader gets to the last line he's not going to remember oh, that's rhyming with the first line. As a structural device, chiasmus has its limitations over a period like that. James Merrill has a wonderful poem called "Pearl," a late poem, which is arranged chiasmically so the first and last lines rhyme, and it's only about 30 lines long so it fits on a page, and readers will notice that, I think. Some will at least!

EB:

So there's a scope to the perception of symmetry. Within a single line maybe, like the so-called "golden line," which Ovid sometimes used, "in which a pair of adjectives and their respective nouns at either end enclose a verb in the middle."

CM:

Certainly, Latin readers would have responded to that and approved of that kind of thing, because you can hold it in your mind if it's a line long.

EB:

So what is it about symmetry that you think affects readers? Is it the presence of mind that we sense in it?

CM:

Probably so. But there are certain limitations to that, because the reader doesn't always get it. One of Catullus's editors noted that in a poem of his where he was supposed to be dying and he's calling out to Lesbia, most likely, to condemn her heartlessness, if you read down the left-hand side you find an anagram that translates "by nature, as hard as bronze." So here he is dying, and he still has the wit to put in a little acrostic verse. But it took about 2,000 years before anybody noticed that. So the little hidden stuff, the arrangement, the symmetrical arrangement of a long poem probably goes past most people. When I pointed out the symmetry in "poem 64," I got a lot of pushback.

EB:

You've said, "the poet's one who brings order to the world's waste bit by bit, letter by letter, And each laboriously traced / on his own flesh, until he's dressed in / an artful weave of self-expression." Whether that order is perceived by the reader or not, does it serve a purpose in the building of the poem?

CM:

I think it has to. You know, a lot of these things, even the order that Marianne Moore creates with her syllabic arrangement, may not be apparent to anybody else. But it's got to be apparent to her as she writes the poem. As a result, it does create an order for that poem.

EB:

How do you avoid contrivance when you're consciously building formal structures out of words?

CM:

I don't know entirely that you do. That's one of those questions [laughing] that I would probably dodge.

EB:

So, how do you think readers react to form differently than...