“Moonrise”: Eight Questions for Maureen McLane
Maureen McLane was born in December, 1967, and she grew up in upstate New York and studied at Oxford University, the University of Chicago, and Harvard. She is a successful poet, critic, and professor at New York University, where she teaches English. In past years, she has taught at MIT, Harvard, and East Harlem Poetry Project. She is the author of multiple books of poetry, including This Blue, My Poets, and What You Want. She is also a contributing editor at Boston Review and a poetry editor at Grey. Her poem “Moonrise” was included in Best American Poetry 2023. Recently, her poem, “Clearing,” was published in the London Review of Books.
Maureen McLane’s poem, “Moonrise,” was written during the pandemic, a harsh time for everyone. In this poem, companionship is an underlying theme. COVID-19 affected people across the globe, making it an understandable and familiar concept. When interviewing her, she mentioned “[She] was pretty isolated, in a small town in upstate NY with [her] partner, thinking of friends, thinking of the complexities of that (and our ongoing) moment.” The poem captures her emotions and opinions on the world during that time. I found it fascinating how her writing reflects her critics on literature and the modern world. Her word choices caught my attention, as they seemed so intentional and meaningful. Her other poems, such as “Passage” and “One Canoe,” also captivated me, and made me research and interview her. It was a great honor to interview her, and the experience had led me to see poetry and literature in a different light.
I noticed how you studied in a variety of different universities and environments such as Oxford and Harvard. Have those different places influenced your perspective on writing and how you approach poetry?
The most direct way those environments influenced me, I suppose, is in giving me the time and space and opportunity to read and think — and in exposing me to some vital teachers and habits of mind. I studied American History and Literature at Harvard, and took a number of poetry classes, including a survey by an eminent scholar, Helen Vendler, and another class by a dynamic poet and memoirist Bill Corbett: a lot of poems got lodged in my ear and mind then — anonymous lyrics, Dickinson, Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Olson. A certain New England-y orientation — both to landscape and history — took shape then. And at Oxford I had two years to read widely in English literature, criticism, and theory, and to pursue a kind of self-education alongside the official, fairly conservative course of study then offered: that had me swimming in all kinds of waters — Chaucer, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein (the last two I chose; they weren’t ‘assigned’), romantic poets. But your intuition about the place is astute — in both places I spent a lot of time outside, walking or running and occasionally on the river, and this sense of the aliveness of the environment was and is very important to me. Maybe it’s relevant too that throughout my 20s I was singing a lot, in small groups — some vocal jazz and a capella ensembles, early music groups, a Bach Choir; so music and voice were always resonating. (Back in the US I worked as a church organist too — a very mediocre one.) Then too all kinds of non-literary experiences — erotic, or via travel, experiencing myself as “an American” in the UK — were important. One often doesn’t know at the time what will matter later.
In the beginning of stanza two, you used the word “comrades.” There are many synonyms to this word; could you explain why you chose this word specifically?
I was thinking of romantic-era “conversation poems” — the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge established this kind of poem (see e.g. “The Nightingale,” or “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”), poems addressed to friends. In “Moonrise,” “comrade” was summoning one register of friendship, of being — or hoping to be — in a shared community with shared purpose: “comrade” — with its military and political associations — has socialist/communist/revolutionary vibrations that a word like “friend” does not. “Moonrise” was written during the pandemic, when I was pretty isolated, in a small town in upstate NY with my partner, thinking of friends, thinking of the complexities of that (and our ongoing) moment, and thinking perhaps aspirationally of organized community.
In the first two lines, you blurred reality and poetry together. I interpreted this as emphasizing the connection between literature and the natural world. Could you tell me more about these lines?
Your question makes me think of Marianne Moore, “Literature is a phase of life.” Life inflects how you read and vice-versa. In Coleridge’s “Dejection Ode” (another conversation poem) a moon is rising; it begins with an epigraph in fact from an old ballad in which an ominous moon indicates a coming storm. If these kinds of things are in the back of your mind, you might then — as I did — see a rising moon one summer night and think of poems and of other moons in history and literature. Or you might read a poem and recall the moon you saw last night. My poem is in some kind of half-conscious dialogue with Coleridge’s — it is maybe an attempt to ward off dejection, by keeping open channels with and for friends, and thinking about the broadest kinds of planetary motions and earthly rhythms: the tides, the moon’s pull, etc.
I noticed that towards the end of your poem “Moonrise,” the stanzas get shorter and the pace starts to slow down. What was your writing process and the reasoning behind this change?
To be honest, there was no reasoning! Often people think every element of a poem is willed or chosen; often it’s not, at least for me. One discovers things in the writing. For me, writing is itself a process of discovery, not of transcribing pre-existing thoughts. This poem I drafted in a notebook (how I usually write — my notebooks are a mix of drafts, lists, random jottings); and then I would have gone back, re-read, edited and tweaked . . . but in the drafting I did find myself shifting into a more musical, rhymey, songlike structure in the last section of the poem: partly submitting to the movement of the waves, natural rhythms, opening out the scope of the poem . . .
Have there been any specific poets or people who have significantly influenced your journey in poetry?
A ton! I’ve mentioned a few already. Some influences I’ve written about in my book My Poets — in addition to the writers and people already mentioned, I could invoke Sappho, Shelley, Louise Glück, Anne Carson, Wordsworth, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, contemporary poets like Katie Peterson, Srikanth Reddy, Catherine Barnett. Feminism, queer theory, psychoanalysis: all big influences. And my partner Laura Slatkin — her work on ancient epic and tragedy, her sensibility, her conversation. My public life in poetry owes much to my editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Jonathan Galassi, who published my first book of poems and every one since. Paul Muldoon was important both as a brilliant poet and an acute editor.
What, in your mind, are the advantages and disadvantages of writing poetry in America today?
Largely the same as the advantages and disadvantages of living in America today. More local to poetry, perhaps: advantages — a big country, many ‘scenes’ and languages, many poetry communities and hubs, a pluralistic horizon (compared to, e.g., the UK, until fairly recently). Disadvantages: poetry is generally not a mass art but a so-called minor art: for some that is a disadvantage; it can also be an advantage, a reprieve from the idiotic pressures of endless marketing/self-branding. Though that infects poetry as much as any other aspect of contemporary life. Given the array of crises confronting us now, many writers are asking, as they must, why write (at all), and more specifically, why write poetry.
In many of your poems, you write about nature and the passage of time. Could you explain your relationship with the natural world and how it has shaped your view on modern society?
A huge question . . . I think I am quite susceptible to a place/environment and that informs many poems: whether that place is New York City, or the Adirondacks/Lake Champlain region (where I spend good parts of the summer), or other places I’ve lived or visited. Seasons matter to me, and landscapes, and also cityscapes: all of these are ‘environments.’ But I do find that spending time out of the city is a good re-set; I’m more alert and open to what is around me, to the elements, to both “inner and outer weather,” to invoke Robert Frost. One place the conjunction of nature and time passing makes itself felt — the tradition of haiku, which I return to and learn from. Hmm to your question about modern society: OOF! So much distraction and duress, as well as convenience, but at what cost? I am wary of nostalgists and people who uncomplicatedly celebrate ‘rural life.’ I have learned a lot from writers like Thoreau, or Timothy Morton (on “ecology without nature”), environmentalist Bill McKibben, or Susan Griffin (RIP), the great writer on feminism and ecology, and from birders like Carole Slatkin. And my thinking is inflected too by romantic poets who were so preoccupied by the onset of modernity — the destruction of the natural world, urbanization, industrialization, the enclosure (privatization) of land: Wordsworth, and working-class poets like John Clare and Robert Burns. But cities are, for good and for ill, our nature too.
When you first started writing poetry, what were your thoughts on the craft, and how has that changed as you have become more involved in the poetry community?
I think I always had an instinct for reading broadly, and for tolerating incomprehension; some of the poets who ultimately mattered the most to me were ones I couldn’t understand at all when I first read them (e.g. O’Hara, Wallace Stevens, Olson). And poets I care about have very different ideas about ‘craft’: Chaucer’s vs Allen Ginsberg’s, say — not easily comparable. I always had an interest in form — partly aligned with my musical training. I’m agnostic about “craft.” Some brilliant poets work by a kind of divination — Jack Spicer, Ariana Reines. Probably Ezra Pound was right to say “Poetry must be as well written as prose”: beyond that, it’s all open. To the last part of your question: I don’t know if there is a ‘poetry community’ per se — it can look like that from the outside (as it were), and there are certainly various communities, and yes there are MFA programs and various links made there, and institutions and journals which support poetry. But to be honest I’ve always been super allergic to the notion of a “poetry community,” versus any other kind of community. I respond more to the line of poets as antinomians, non-joiners (e.g. Dickinson, S. Howe, Brigit Pegeen Kelly), even as some of our greatest poets are also poets of and for a people or community (e.g. Whitman, Gwendolyn Brooks). These are the kinds of tensions I sit with.