A Conversation with John Balaban

John Balaban is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, including four volumes that together have won the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Prize, a National Poetry Series Selection, and two nominations for the National Book Award. His Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2003, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005, he was a judge for the National Book Awards. His new book of poetry is Empires (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). In addition to writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, he is a translator of Vietnamese poetry and a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. In 1999, with two Vietnamese friends, he founded the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation. In 2008, he was awarded a medal from the Ministry of Culture of Vietnam for his translations of poetry and his leadership in the restoration of the ancient text collection at the National Library.

This interview took place in October 2019 at John’s home in Cary, North Carolina, and a month later in November during the Miami Book Fair.

JOE WALPOLE:

Your most recent book of poems, Empires, is very much concerned with the decline of what we may call the American empire. Is it a departure, a new direction, from your previous work?

JOHN BALABAN:

The scope is different, but the direction has always been there. I’ve always been more interested in public issues than in personal complaint. What’s different in this book is that in the first part, the issues are largely global and cultural regarding the rise and fall of empires and those moments where a shift occurs that might not be perceptible at first, but nonetheless the change is complete and done. Sometimes the shift happens and we don’t know it. Other times, like the World Trade Center bombing, we know right away that something’s changed in our lives forever. And these things have gone on not just recently but ever since humans built empires. Empires have a youth and vitality to them, and they have a maturity, and then they start to decay.

My notion is that ours is in that period of decay. The grand days of the spread of the American empire—not that we ever thought of it necessarily as empire—are diminishing. That’s why the poem moves from moments like that in America. There’s a poem in there about Christmas

Eve at Washington’s Crossing. It commemorates Washington’s troops sneaking across the Delaware blocked with ice in a blizzard to attack the Hessians at Trenton and with that surprise attack reversing the war, giving the American troops time to organize. Then came Valley Forge, that bitter winter where Washington lost troops, with some just walking home. No shoes, no coats, no boots; they just quit. But those who remained hung on, and the question is why. Whatever made them think they could succeed? Do we now even have such a possibility? What could we do to pull ourselves together in sacrifice? Is there even such a riverbank that we would gather on—obviously metaphorically—where we would band together about something for our own common good that would require common sacrifice? That little poem worries about that.

“Poetry Reading by the Black Sea” is a poem about Ovid, who was exiled by the emperor Augustus to the Black Sea and Tomis, a remote port where Latin wasn’t even spoken. In other words, here you put the greatest poet in the empire in a place where nobody speaks his language. It wasn’t even technically exile. Exile, or exsilium, in Roman times was a legal category. If you were in exsilium you could not come within sixty miles of Rome. You could travel anywhere in the world, but you could not come any closer to Rome. But there was a crueler, more specific punishment called relegatus, which was Ovid’s punishment. Ovid could not leave that seaport...