Interview with Stephen Yenser by Jerry Williams
/Poet, editor, critic, and professor Stephen Yenser is the author of three poetry collections: Stone Fruit (2016), Blue Guide (2006), and The Fire in All Things (1993). A winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, he has also received an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in Poetry and the Bernard F. Connors Prize for Poetry from the Paris Review, a Discovery/The Nation Poetry award, a Pushcart Prize, two Fulbright Fellowships and three appearances in The Best American Poetry Series.
Stephen, who was the 1989 recipient of the Harvey L. Eby Award for the Art of Teaching, has had a profound impact on the UCLA community. To his many students, however, the influence runs deeper. He is, as one former student wrote, “the kind of teacher one finds once in a lifetime.”
James Merrill was a great influence on Stephen. Yenser and the poet J.D. McClatchy co-edited James Merrill’s Collected Poems (2002), Collected Novels and Plays of James Merrill (2003), and The Changing Light at Sandover (2006). He also edited and annotated Merrill’s Book of Ephraim (2018).
Stephen is the author of several books of criticism, including Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell (1975) and The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill (1987), as well as the essay collection A Boundless Field: American Poetry at Large (2002). Former director of creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, Stephen is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus there. He curates the Hammer Poetry Readings at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
The interview is conducted by Jeral (Jerry) Williams, retired Professor of Psychology, novice poet and currently a member of Sue Walker’s MBG workshop.
A. Your Path and Major Influences:
JW: Stephen, thank you for taking your valuable time for this interview. We grew up in the Riverside neighborhood of Wichita, Kansas. We attended the same schools. After high school, you went to Wichita State University and then did your graduate work at The University of Wisconsin. I am unfamiliar with your academic journey from that point forward. What path did you take to your present position as Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California Los Angeles?
SY: I’m afraid my academic career has been rather humdrum, Jerry. UCLA has been my only employer in the United States since I left graduate school. It took a couple years for me to adapt to Los Angeles, but I came to feel that, for a variety of reasons, it is the city in this country that I want to live in. I taught in Iraq for one year, when on leave from graduate school, and then in France and later in Greece, on leave from UCLA, for a year each.
JW: Stephen, I read your mother wrote and published poems.
a. Did she start you on your path to poetry?
b. James Merrill was a great influence on you. Can you put his influence into words?
c. Were there other major influences in you becoming a writer and more specifically to writing poetry?
SY: I cannot now imagine my life without James Merrill, though I was already 24—a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin—when I met him. My mother wrote light verse and published a few poems in places like Ladies Home Journal and Cosmopolitan, and I was proud of her work in that genre, but she did not encourage me to write verse. She fed my curiosity about language—“Look it up!” was what she said about any question I had in regard to vocabulary—and she helped me correct my prose when I was young. (In fact, she annoyed me no end by making changes in diction and syntax when she typed papers for me.) She was a hungry reader and we had a small library, so I grew up with that appetite myself. But nothing I wrote before I met James was worth preserving.
He taught a short class at the University of Wisconsin. It was billed as a workshop, but it wouldn’t be recognized as such these days. We read almost none of one other’s drafts, because he was quite rightly wary of our embarrassing ourselves, though we were welcome to talk to him in private about them. In class, we talked about the poetry assigned—Bishop, Lowell, Berryman, Moore, and others. His devotion to the art—always understated, apparent from the beginning in part by virtue of the yards of verse he had by memory—was exemplary for a few of us who stayed in touch with him. Our relationship—his and mine—was at first epistolary. We were not often in the same geographical location in the first years, but we wrote letters regularly and became close friends. He was my best friend for almost 25 years, until his death. I hasten to say that he was also the best friend of other people because of his capacity for sympathy and commitment. Needless to say, perhaps, he was also the most savvy of critics and my best reader, and his appraisals of my poems were invaluable, as were his recommendations of works to read—as well as music to hear.
JW: In the late 1960’s many important events relating to the Vietnam War occurred on the Madison campus. Have those events influenced on your writing? (I read “Hija to Emerson’s Birthday” several times and I could not help but wonder, did the protest events in Madison influence the poem?)
SY: I took part in a couple anti-war demonstrations in Madison and was arrested during one here at UCLA, but I didn’t write poems about the seemingly endless Vietnam train wreck. The “Hija” came later. Just before I met James, I had spent a year in Baghdad on a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, and I have often harked back to that experience for material. A hija is an Arabic genre, a sharply satiric poem aimed often at an individual and shot through with invective. My contribution was occasioned not by one war but by the American interventionist policy over a couple of decades, including the years of the Bush presidencies. (When I first submitted it for publication, it was turned down by an editor on the grounds that it was not fair to the Bushes—as of course it wasn’t. Poetry magazine had a better understanding of the genre and eventually published it.)
JW: What more can you say about the experience in Baghdad and its influence?
SY: The time in Baghdad was a pivotal period for me. I had never before lived abroad, and I loved the opportunities afforded by being installed in a foreign culture. As you know, the study of another language is a side door into your native tongue, and the same is true mutatis mutandis of interaction with another culture as a whole, with its own history and values—and its views of your native country. Baghdad was also a point d’appui for sorties into other countries in the Middle East. And at the end of the year there my wife and I spent the summer driving in a VW Bug from Baghdad to London so that we got to visit sites and museums whose architecture and art have been with me ever since and have contributed enormously to my work.
JW: You seem to have been influenced by the Greek Islands. What is the source of that interest?
SY: In the course of that drive through the Middle East and Europe we stopped in Greece, the culture of which had been a mild obsession of mine in college and grad school. Athens was of course less densely populated and more immediately accommodating decades ago, and I discovered that I relished its street life as much as I did the vestiges of its history. I hadn’t foreseen the allure of its islands, which was irresistible even though I am not an avid beach-goer. The islands we visited then—and the ones that have remained my favorites, though I have gone elsewhere—were the Cyclades, that constellation in the Aegean centered on Delos. On our way there from Mykonos, which had not yet become as fashionable as it is now, we got off at the “wrong” island, Tinos, and were captivated. Ever since, when I have gone back to Greece, often by myself, I have preferred to stay on islands that are somewhat out of the way. There is no end to them, I’m happy to say. For me, in their time, sojourns on islands like Folegandros and Amorgos have been at least at fruitful as those on Naxos and Santorini, but on any of them it is easy to be alone, set one’s own schedule, subvert it by noon, and write and read, or loaf and invite your soul, as Whitman bragged of doing. One’s impoverished vocabulary guarantees isolation no less than a means of basic communication, and it is personally quite gratifying to add—and regain—a few words and phrases on every visit. A notebook, a decent dictionary, and a volume of poems by Cavafy, whose mostly short poems are stringent as retsina and stark as the landscape beyond the village tavern, make for an afternoon of mulling memories and musing on places to scatter your ashes.
B. Professional Development:
JW: You have established yourself as an excellent critic. I am a neophyte to the nuances of poetry, especially academic poetry interests. Please educate me about the role of a critic as you see it?
SY: Ah, that’s easy: to speak up about outstanding poets. There have been times, I suppose, and some would argue that they include our time, when the critic’s job is to distinguish good books from bad. I think—and I’m pleased to be on Auden’s side in this regard—that even good volumes of verse, and even good poets, get overlooked and eventually lost without smart public appreciation. The chaff is sure to blow away in time. Hours and efforts expended on scorning poor work (which is a facile task) are lost.
JW: In one of your reviews the writer described your work in terms of good jazz. Is that a reasonable analogy?
SY: That was—is—a very generous critic, who is also a fine poet, and I have admired jazz since I was a teenager, so I was delighted to read his comment. As he knows, the analogy works better in the case of some poems than others. No strict formalist, I often draw on received forms, and in those instances I might improvise less. Like many poets, I enjoy moving in and out of modes and even combining them. I think that such variation is good for the sensibility.
JW: Do you have a writing routine?
SY: Not as much of one as I’d wish. I highly recommend a regime. I envy poets who work well in the morning, but I have never been one of them, and my afternoons are subject to more vicissitudes. When I was younger, nights were most productive. Now, when my time is more my own than it has been, I simply aim to find several hours every day. Most writers, and I am among them, find it impossible to work hard for more than that—except of course in those unpredictable, golden periods of grace.
JW: You have been recognized as an excellent teacher. Do you have a few basic principles you stress to beginning writers?
SY: Well, your “routine” is one prescription, as I’ve said. Some other desiderata are old standards. Be hard on yourself. Stay open to smart criticism made in good faith. Learn to love revision. But believe that the perfect poem is an illusion—indeed, a nemesis. (I’ve been rereading The Plague for the first time since I was an undergraduate, and one of Camus’s characters spends the entire novel retouching the first sentence of his own work in progress. He seems content, but that regime sounds like something from the Inferno.) Do what you haven’t done, lest you come to imitate yourself rather than the masters. Read the masters.
I’ll add one pedagogical note. James Merrill, asked how in the world he could grade creative writers, responded: “I give an A to those who love poetry, a B to those who love themselves, and a C to the others.”
C. Personal
JW: One of my favorite people of all time is John Wooden, the highly successful long time basketball coach at UCLA. A little known fact about him is -- he read and recited poetry as an everyday activity. He regularly recited choice lines to his players at practice, “Attitude,” John Wooden wrote, “is as important as knowing how to shoot a jump shot properly. Poetry, in all its forms, was an efficient tool for this.”
As a well-known poetry expert in the UCLA community did you ever have the occasion to meet Coach Wooden and talk poetry?
SY: No, alas. I admired him and would have loved to do so.
JW: I have been reading your individual poems and I am preparing to read one of your collections. Which one would you suggest I read first?
SY: I’m sorry that I’m not qualified to respond to this question, partly because I’m not sure what your chief interests are these days, apart from poetry. I will note that a few poems in each book have something to do with Kansas, as well as Greece.
JW: One of my North High classmates rose to be Vice-President of Productions for Disney studios. He told me, he visited Kansas to keep his feet on the ground. He needed the grounding because of the rarefied air of living in Los Angeles. Do you have activities to keep you grounded?
SY: In Disney studios, he would have to breathe a different air than I do. I have always felt more or less grounded, alas and hooray.
JW: I know Kansas has some tough memories for you. Have you returned to Kansas and celebrated your roots, or is it something you have put behind you?
SY: I have gone back for most of my high school class’s major reunions, because I want to visit old haunts and to see dear friends from those years, some of whom were intimately involved with what you might think are “tough memories.” There’s nothing there that I want to put behind me.
But I do find much about Kansas, which I once thought was basically like the rest of the world, alien. I have recently read fellow Kansan Thomas Frank’s shrewd book, popular some 15 years ago, titled What’s the Matter with Kansas?—and it seems more relevant now than ever. Its thesis is that the majority of Kansans are dedicated to political views that are antithetical to fundamental American (and indeed universal) values and corrosive of their own lives. The condition he diagnoses is paradoxical—and painful for me to acknowledge. Those who would benefit most from his book—including some of my old friends—are the very people whose prejudices prohibit their reading it.
JW: Stephen, thanks again for your time. I am delighted to renew our acquaintanceship after so many years. When your brother, Kelly, reached out to me and I learned of your success, I would not have imagined my current interest in poetry. I am enjoying your individual poems and look forward to delving into one of your collections.
I want readers to have an increased awareness of your poetry. I have copied two of them: Preserves and Intensive Care. I gave my commentary on each. Thank you for permission to publish them.
Preserves
BY STEPHEN YENSER
Nervy, sparrow-like,
Eyes Cherokee,
Blackberry black,
Arrow-quick,
Picky eater,
Meager spirit,
Converted Quaker,
She taught her grandson
Arithmetic
And pruning tactics
And let him touch
Through her cotton nightie
Small, tense nipples.
Her hands, arthritic,
Knitted doilies,
Breaded tomatoes,
Puréed apples,
And put up apricots,
While the hoarded guilts
Made for bright quilts,
The torrid migraines’
Counterpanes.
commentary
“Preserves” by Stephen Yenser: the title moved me to times past and memories of my grandmothers. His physical description did not favor either of them, but gave me a clear picture of a narrow alert woman of faith. To my understanding “meager spirit” is important and positive for a Quaker – Blessed are the poor in spirit. I learned she was a helpful woman who taught, knitted, cooked and quilted. All positive skills my grandmothers shared.
Stephen memorably frames these positive traits with the intriguing phrase, “And let him touch / Through her cotton nightie / Small tense nipples.” Then he closes with a well-crafted allusion to her personal struggles. I was left to wonder and imagine the struggles.
Reading his poem led me to consider the guilt of my grandmothers; did they have any? What was it? Thus, as with most good poetry, I was not only engaged with Stephen’s voice, but with also my own experience. He made reading a pleasure.
INTENSIVE CARE
BY STEPHEN YENSER
I put it to you that this was solely in his sunflower state
and that his haliodraping het was why maids all sighed
for him, ventured and vied for him. Hm?
--Finnegans Wake
One might think it could not be done,
Since he’d been strung up so
(Having survived what metamorphosed one
Friend in a flash to what a glossy photo
The D.A. showed him later misconstrued
As some garage sale mannequin,
The other to a jailbird, denim-blue.)
And cast in plaster from the chest
Down to one heel, to boot.
One might think that, disabled, he’d at last
Be able to button up, to imitate,
If ever, the Saint who stood out like a statute
Beyond the frosted panes and blessed
The molded pigeons and the molting too.
One might . . . Yet under snow packed nurses’
Suspicious noses, in spite
Of Demerol, in spite of tranquilizers,
Pulleys and wires, she made him almost nightly
(God bless her never-say-die attitude)
See how it could be even worse,
The accident he kept coming through.
commentary
I experienced Stephen Yenser’s poem “Intensive Care” from two perspectives; an adolescent acquaintance and an ICU survivor.
I grew up in the same neighborhood as Stephen in Wichita, Kansas. He has been open about the accident referred to in his poem. I well remember hearing about the accident. I recall the details of events leading up to the accident. Like many other teenagers, I drove by the scene to see for myself.
I applaud Stephen’s courage facing a tough memory. I knew the driver, I knew the circumstances and I knew Steve. To acknowledge the death of a friend, imply culpability by references to the DA and another friend being a jailbird takes strength. Such strength as he recognized in his nurse; strength he showed in sharing his world with us.
The poem, as I read it, is a reflection on his struggle with survival guilt. Survivor’s guilt is normal for the situation. He was privileged to be a survivor. One friend was killed another went to jail. He lived, jailed only by his injuries and memories. His nurse knew he was privileged to survive, his poetry shows his struggle. To my mind the struggle is well described in the memorable last line: “The accident he kept coming through.”
I wonder if his mind still allows him to keep coming through the memory of the accident. Although I was a tangential observer of the events, even today, 60 years later, every time I drive by 13th and Perry, I have memories of the wreck.
In any case, Stephen did survive and we are better for it.
I am a stroke survivor who spent several days in an ICU and several more, very needy days in a rehab facility. I am touched by Steve’s ability to capture his helplessness and the strength of those around him. Insights I understood, and with which I strongly identified in my experience of his poem.