Interview with Jonathan Galassi and Robyn Creswell
This year marks the 75th anniversary of publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG), and, as part of commemorating that occasion, president Jonathan Galassi and poetry editor-at-large Robyn Creswell have assembled a comprehensive selection of the poetry list aptly titled: The FSG Poetry Anthology. Both former poetry editors of The Paris Review, Galassi has edited and published poets at FSG since 1986 and is a celebrated poet and translator in his own right; Creswell teaches comparative literature at Yale University and is a literary translator with an emphasis on the Arab world. The interview that follows was conducted over several rounds of emails, elaborating the sensibility they sought to bring to this anthology.
The book is dedicated to Robert Giroux, who inaugurated the poetry list in 1956 with Homage to Mistress Bradstreet by his friend and former Columbia University classmate John Berryman. In Carol Johnsen’s 1974 documentary I Don’t Think I Will Sing Any More Just Now, Giroux says “I happened to think it is one of his greatest books. It was greeted that way with the critics. Edmund Wilson, certainly one of the best American critics, said it was the best long poem by an American since T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Well, the publication of that book marked an absolute milestone in John’s life. He had made it with the publication of that book.” The imprint was Farrar, Straus & Cudahy at the time, but as fate would have it, eight years later, the first book to wear Giroux’s name was another poetry collection, Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead. (For an encounter with Giroux that yields insight into the age, read his interview with George Plimpton, The Art of Publishing No. 3, from the summer 2000 number of The Paris Review.)
A publisher’s list is a form of history writing; that of FSG offers a chronicle of poetry’s vicissitudes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The anthology distills that chronicle and delivers it into our hands. But it is more than mere record. As an account of the past — of how the now of poetry came to be — it also constitutes a theory of the present. In the pages of The FSG Poetry Anthology, readers can trace roads more and less traveled by. Both the well-trodden and the untried continue tasking poets today. Between and inside the lines of this curated commotion, poetry reminds us that all art strives to transcend itself, that “there are / still songs to sing beyond / mankind” (Paul Celan, tr. Pierre Joris).
How would you describe the editorial sensibility of FSG as evidenced by the Poetry Anthology? What is the vision emerging from this selection of what poetry has been and may yet become?
Robyn Creswell (RC): In our introduction to the Anthology, we describe the company’s editorial sensibility as a series of widening, more or less concentric circles. At the center of those circles is Robert Giroux, who published the first generation of FSG poets — Berryman (a friend of Giroux’s), Bishop, Lowell, and others. Giroux also published some remarkable foreign poets: Pablo Neruda, Nelly Sachs, Salvatore Quasimodo. The anthology begins with two poems of self-multiplication, Berryman’s “Dream Song #22” (“I am the little man who smokes & smokes. / I am the girl who does know better but”) and Neruda’s “We Are Many,” which begins (in Alastair Reid’s translation), “Of the many men who I am, who we are, / I can’t find a single one.” Each is, in its way, a poem about trying out new voices, new identities, a discovery of the self as mysteriously fluid, or mysteriously stable. This seemed like a good place to start — with a voice becoming a chorus, a mixture of the native and the foreign, an openness to the future’s flux. Neruda writes, “I never know who I am, / nor how many I am or will be.”
Jonathan Galassi (JG): I would add that it’s problematic deriving principles and motives ex post facto from a series of disparate editorial choices, but at its heart, the FSG poetic project begins with the problem of what comes after Modernism — which of course was everyone’s problem. The Poundians, who lived at New Directions and elsewhere, went in several directions. Giroux, who was an Eliot wingman, went in others, as did Eliot’s heirs at Faber & Faber, with whom FSG was closely allied. What was fundamental everywhere was an existential angst that was characteristic of the moment in all ways. Lowell torqued old-fashioned rhetoric, with powerful results; Bishop resorted to quietly freighted description (“The road appears to have been abandoned”). Walcott wrote: “The classics can console. But not enough.” That says it all, really. Giroux’s poets wrote out of an exquisite familiarity with and understanding of tradition, feeling out new ways of making it new.
Hilma af Klint, Series VIII. Picture of the Starting Point, 1920. Hilma af Klint Foundation.
The “chorus” and “classics” you respectively raise echo the chorus verses from Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy. Where do “hope and history rhyme” in newer poets on the list who are “feeling out new ways of making it new”?
JG: As Hannah Sullivan says, “When things are patternless, their fascination’s stronger. / Failed form is hectic with loveliness, and compels us longer.” Yusef Komunyakaa says, “The body remembers / every wish one lives for or doesn’t, or even horror.” I think that being true to one’s perceptions, disjunctive as they are, is what the poets have to offer us, what makes them into a chorus, even if a raucous one. Poets from the past, too, still speaking to us today, as appositely as ever.
RC: You know, Pound’s slogan was a translation from classical Chinese, and Thoreau had already used it in Walden, which is just a reminder that new things — including new poems — are often revisions of very old things. That’s a lesson Modernism teaches with a vengeance. Our anthology tries to face backward and forward at the same time. We think that FSG’s poetry is an important and distinct literary tradition — not in the fusty sense of the term, but in the dynamic (even Eliotic) sense of a thing that’s always in a state of transformation. New additions alter one’s sense of what came before. In selecting the older poems of this book, we kept an ear cocked for the notes that we knew we would hear again later on. I think you could get as much pleasure reading our anthology back-to-front as reading it the traditional way.
Léon Spilliaert, Sea Wall, Light Reflections, 1908, Bonhams.
The notion that “new additions alter one’s sense of what came before” comes through very strongly. In a different but related sense, singling poems out for inclusion in an anthology will inevitably alter one's sense of what came before in the context of their original collection. Were there any poems that took on a strikingly new disposition for you outside of the books they’re from? And in what way?
JG: So much of reading is rereading. In fact, isn’t that what makes poetry what it is — that it’s always in context, an echo not a choice, even when it wants most not to be, like a recalcitrant child? Go ahead and be a Dadaist or a Futurist, like Marinetti who wanted to fill in the canals of Venice and outlaw pasta. Venice is surviving — not to mention pasta. Every poem is written out of the alphabet soup of what was. As Frank Bidart wrote, “Each book reads me.” So every time you reread, say, Eliot’s “Marina,” or Bishop’s “Cape Breton,” or anything by James Schuyler, it’s astonishingly new. Not that this is an answer to your question!
RC: My day job is studying Arabic literature, and I’ve taught Mahmoud Darwish’s “Eleven Planets” many times in my seminars at Yale. Darwish published the poem in 1992 — the five hundredth anniversary of the Moors’ expulsion from Andalusia, as well as Columbus’s landing in the New World. It’s a meditation on the cycles of conquest and migration, the violent hinge between historical eras, the echo Palestinian experience finds in fifteenth-century Iberia. It’s a poem of terrifying poise and wisdom. In our anthology, I found that it rhymes with a completely different set of conflicts and circumstances, with their own poetic chroniclers: Eliza Griswold’s “Retreat,” Christopher Logue’s “War Music,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Prussian Nights,” Durs Grünbein’s “Lament of a Legionnaire.” There’s a lot to be said about the pleasures of putting together an anthology. Beyond the joy of rereading and rediscovering FSG’s archive, there’s a sort of bricoleur’s satisfaction in assembling familiar things into newly meaningful combinations.
Vicente Mostre, La Expulsión en el Puerto de Denia, 1613.
In the way you mentioned history, there seem to be two dynamics at play. On the one hand, you say "new things — including new poems — are often revisions of very old things," while in the other, the old, the past — something like the Moors’ expulsion from Andalusia — feels somehow completely new: not really past but part of an ongoing cycle of conquest. If we may generalize here, Modernism’s understanding of history seems to suggest that the past is a growing pile of wreckage (or as Hegel put it, a “slaughter-bench”) that must be redeemed in the present, while the present is nothing but the opportunity for that redemption. To make this specific to poetry, art’s past is perhaps nothing but the amorphous accumulation of unfulfilled aesthetic experiences, cut short and now forgotten or neutralized; while the present is nothing but the possibility of writing a new poem — something different and fresh that can reactivate the entirety of the past. I wonder if you can reflect further on this historical consciousness (or your idea of history) and how this might have informed your curation of the anthology.
JG: Speaking for myself — Robyn may have a very different view — I see the anthology as reflecting a faith in poetry as “news that stays news” — speech that has the power, across time, to keep raising the flat line of life, a simultaneity that is transhistorical. The poets we are publishing in the 2020s include the Beowulf poet and Baudelaire, as well as voices out of the more recent modernist past, set alongside many new voices. Eliot’s shored fragments aren’t just embers from the wreckage; they’re seeds that can't help but germinate new attitudes, new expression. They are what we remember. Yes, belatedness is our wallpaper, as John Koethe suggests, in his sardonic “What Was Poetry?”, the penultimate poem in the book. But a stronger note, I think, is sounded in Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript,” with which we close:
You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
Poetry is language that retains this power to keep breaking into the here and there, enforcing change.
RC: Wreckage and redemption are powerful figures for historians (and philosophers of history) to conjure with, but I don’t think Jonathan and I approached our anthology in that light. We did want the older poems to illuminate the newer ones, and vice versa, but the process of putting the book together was more like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Some people start with frames, of course, but we built the puzzle from the inside out, inductively, unsystematically. Each piece touches several others, and we gradually discovered larger and looser groupings as well. At the same time — here my metaphor begins to strain — I can imagine different ways of putting these pieces together, or of using different pieces entirely (FSG’s archive is vast, after all). We wanted the finished product to keep some trace of the improvisation that went into its construction. We didn’t want to make a monument. I think any good anthology will invite readers to imagine alternative ways of arranging its parts.
Robert Rauschenberg, Rebus, 1955. MoMA.
Jonathan Galassi has been an editor at FSG since 1986. He has also published three books of poems and translations of the poetry of Eugenio Montale, Giacomo Leopardi, and Primo Levi. His second novel, School Days, will be published in April.
Robyn Creswell teaches Comparative Literature at Yale. His translation of Iman Mersal's book of poems, The Threshold, will be published next year by FSG.
