Explore
HOME
PROGRAM OVERVIEW
APPLY
FINANCIAL AID
ALUMNI
MFA ANTHOLOGIES
PURCHASE LECTURES
NEWS
CONTACT
AN EXCERPT FROM THE 35th ANNIVERSARY GALA’S “FIVE QUESTIONS”
The Gala began with three interviews between veteran faculty, each of whom have taught with the Program for at least twenty residencies: Robert Boswell and Tony Hoagland, Stephen Dobyns and Tom Lux, and Heather McHugh and Ellen Bryant Voigt. In this excerpt from the first conversation, Tony and Boz discuss how they each came to writing, and about being graduate students together:
Tony: Let’s go back…. You were a psychologist, you were working in California, you had a house on Malibu, on the beach, you were making money… life was sweet, you were helping people—and you gave it all up to go study fiction….Why don’t you tell us a little about that choice—let’s call it a crisis, to dramatize it, a stanza break…tell us about that move.
Boz: Well, I wasn’t actually a psychologist— I was a counselor, and it wasn’t Malibu, it was Mission Beach…and I was accidently actually saving money… and I had a girlfriend who was lovely and made a lot of money, and it seemed like the ideal life—…but I was miserable….The turning point for me actually came when I was lying on the beach and reading The Collected Stories of John Cheever, and I read “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill.” Which is a funny story, but I started crying, because the end of the story basically says that you don’t have to be a thief (in this case), that you’re on this earth because you choose to be, and you can do what you want with your life, and you’re not beholden to the bones of your father, or anyone else—you can do what you want. I can remember…I paced all weekend, I didn’t sleep—… and then I sent away for applications. I decided to go to graduate school, decided to change my life. …
Tony: [Unlike you] I had no profession in store for me. Poetry was simply an obsession. I wasn’t good at it, and I screwed up everything else on a daily basis, but my relationship with poetry stayed rich. Poetry was always there for me when I went to it, and I actually had an attention span where it was concerned, so it was a kind of default progress for me, to keep on writing it and to keep on studying it and trying to get better.
Boz: When we were in graduate school…what was clear from the get-go, was that you were the model for the serious student—you were passionate— it’ll surprise you all to hear that he was opinionated. And I can remember talking to one of our peers—I had teased you a little in workshop before we really knew each other, and she told me, “I’m surprised you did that. We’re all sort of afraid of Tony.” But I realized it was because you came ready to engage in some serious way. Now it’s 30 years later, we’ve taught at four institutions together, we still teach at a couple of them together, and I feel like you’ve still got that fire [that you had in graduate school]. So, my question is, is that fire merely the product of deep psychological wounds, or [laughter] –can you tell us how you keep that flame burning?
Tony: …I don’t remember myself as frightening, though I was, I guess, a little intense. I certainly don’t remember myself as being very talented. I had to work really, really hard at poetry, and had to figure things out, because other people in that program were truly talented…. I didn’t have anything special except, you know, my wounds, and my weird idea that poetry had the answers. I don’t think I had other systems to fall back on….
For you, family has always been terrifically important…. You are foolishly, deeply loyal—you have an authentic sense of the region you come from…whereas I have almost no sense of family, I don’t come from a particular region, …and when poetry came to me, as a teenager, I was in an impoverished state of disorientation—so, those poets I was reading, they really became my family: Philip Larkin and Frank O’Hara and Ray Carver –they became my reference points for how to relate to the world: how to bear it, how to process it, how to think, how to feel—all those things. I was like the boy in the bubble: poetry became my oxygen. And in many ways, for me poetry is still a reliable source of reasons to live, and also ways to have fun. I think I’ve kept my fire by teaching a lot—by teaching and remembering for myself, even if my students aren’t listening, why this is a humanly important activity, and I have a foolish conviction that poetry is still important to the world, important to human nature, capable of making it deeper and better and more self-knowing…. I haven’t found anything better to believe in.