“As Though I Were Another Person”: Five Questions for Lawrence Raab
Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1946, Lawrence Raab is rightfully considered an esteemed contemporary American poet whose work has captivated readers with its introspection and little bits of quick wit laced between the lines. Raab currently resides in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he has been deeply involved with William’s college as the Morris Professor of Rhetoric since joining the faculty in 1976. His dedication to teaching and writing has solidified his influence on the literary community, and all that read his work.
Raab is the author of several acclaimed poetry collections, including What We Don’t Know About Each Other ( 1993), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, The Probable World (2000), and Visible Signs: New and Selected Poems (2000). His collection Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (2015) received the national Jewish Book Award. Raab’s poetry has frequently appeared in Best American Poetry Anthology (BAP), including memorable works such as “Attack on the Crab Monsters” (2007) and “This Morning” (1997), which reflects his mastery of blending the mundane with the complex inner thoughts everyone can relate to.
I chose to interview Lawrence Raab because of his ability to weave profound reflections into accessible language, often infusing slight humor yet philosophical insight into his work. My interest in Lawrence Raab was sparked by his poem “The Great Poem” This poem had a playful, yet sad, diaristic undertone that really resonated with me, compelling me to delve deeper into his work. Raab’s skillful balance of meaning and understanding makes his poetry both relatable and thought provoking, offering insight for readers and aspiring poets alike.
While reading your work, I noticed a trend in your poetry, most prominent in poems “The Great Poem” and “In Dreams (Visible Signs).” You often write in a diaristic, fourth wall-breaking style. (“…strain or struggle that reminds the reader too much of the writer,”) Is there a specific creative process you undergo to achieve this?
In response to your question, I will say that I don’t think I use any “specific creative process” when I try to write a poem. Or if I do, it’s pretty much always the same, which is the advice I always gave my students: Don’t plan anything out in advance; don’t think of some meaning that the poem should convey; leave yourself open to being surprised. That’s what I think of as “inspiration,” discoveries made as the poem finds its shape and voice, not an idea that precedes the poem.
You reference Wordsworth and his experiences with nature within your poem April at the Ruins, suggesting a contrast between his idealized perception of nature and more sobering reality. How do you see your relationship with nature different from the Romantic poets like Wordsworth?
I don’t want to simplify Wordsworth, but let’s say he believes that a spiritual force exists in nature and I don’t, even if I wish I did. I wouldn’t say it’s the idealized as opposed to the real; perhaps it’s different versions—or different visions—of the real. Nature speaks to Wordsworth (or he says it does), whereas when the tree in “April at the Ruins” “thinks,” it’s artifice, make-believe, poetry. I don’t think any careful reader would believe that I literally believe that trees think. In “A Children’s Story” I have a bird, a wolf, a dog, and fire all speak just as they do all the time in children’s stories and poems and fables. No one is surprised by this. And the children to whom these stories are read don’t go around afterwards talking to fires or to birds, though they probably do talk to their dogs. Dogs are different. They listen.
Also, within “April at the Ruins,” I found something inspiring that you included. You deliberately ask “But can this really be what Wordsworth was thinking…” Instead of building off of remarks of great poets that have come before, you test those remarks made in the first place. Why challenge his ever-prevailing thoughts?
I like the idea of “testing” or “challenging” (your words) any idea in a poem. Of course I don’t know what Wordsworth was really thinking, I only know what he pretends to have been thinking when he puts that thought in a poem—that “all that we behold is full of blessings.” At the end of my poem I invoke one of Wordsworth’s most famous lines: “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.” And in a way I test it, perhaps even challenge it, by turning it around: “Ah, Nature,/surely we’ve betrayed the heart that loved us.” So I address Nature as if I could “really” do that, and I say something that’s certainly disastrously true at this moment—that we’ve betrayed nature. There’s nature and there’s Nature with a capital “N.” My “Ah, Nature…” is faux Wordsworth, which continues through “the heart that loved us,” and then is qualified: “…Or to be more precise,/could never love us.” And then requalified: “…not as we wished to be loved./as if we were still children…” It’s all as if, pretending something is something else, like metaphor, which we might say is the heart of poetry.
Another piece of your work I really wanted to touch ask you about is your poem Emily Dickinson’s House. Within the poem you note that you’ve lived close to Dickinson’s home but never visited it. What keeps you from visiting? Is this distance symbolic of something deeper in your relationship with Dickinson’s work or with the unknown itself?
I’ve just never gone to Dickinson’s house—or to Robert Frost’s grave either (which is nearby)–but this doesn’t say much if anything about my admiration for her poetry. The poem is really about strangeness and the unknown and how they are a necessary part of the imagination and of the work of writing poetry. I haven’t been to her house (though if I had, I’d feel free to say I hadn’t, if that made the poem better). I imagine her room, and I imagine her looking out her window, and what she might see, and then I imagine where that might imaginatively take her—to the “unseen moor” and the “narrow wind,” which I’m pretending in my poem that she sees but which are, in fact, images from poems of hers. She imagined them first.
Finally, while looking through your work, I came across an intriguing poem “The Questions Poems Ask.” It stuck out to me and really prompted me to reflect on a much deeper level. I especially noticed the line “Nobody, they’ve discovered, ever means what he says.” I found this especially interesting because I don’t think it’s an aspect that many other poets bother mentioning. Do you write the intention that people will never understand exactly what you mean when you write? Do you feel this is a positive, important element of poetry? Or do you feel resentment or a sense of loneliness because of this?
Well, I don’t believe that nobody ever means what he says. In the poem it’s an intentional—and I hope comic—overstatement, ascribed to “some people.” There are several different attitudes toward poetry at that moment in my poem, one of them being readers (let’s say certain literary theorists) who look for the difficulty in poems, those hidden codes they can decipher. They might well think that there is no such thing as a stable meaning, or an author, perhaps no such thing as “truth.” (This is true—these folks exist.) My poem wants to have fun with this. At the beginning I wonder if there are birds that run into trees. Toward the end I assert that crows don’t do that but “other, clumsier birds/bang into them all the time.” This is not true. I made it up. But maybe, even though I made it up, it is true. It could be. I just don’t know what kinds of birds are that clumsy. But the fox knows.