“A Letter from Rome”: Seven Questions for Morri Creech
I have always been interested in the history of the ancients, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the political disputes that end in death to the gods– honestly anything about them is exciting to me. It’s another life that is significantly different from modern day life in so many ways. When I was looking through Best American Poetry 2025 for any poems that seemed interesting this one immediately caught my eye. I was curious what it would be like; would it just be a letter from Rome? Like a postcard? This poem surprised me because I figured that most poets would write about things they are familiar with, not another age where it’s mainly speculation. Morri Creech‘s “A Letter from Rome” demonstrates various unique characteristics in the way it explores the ancients and a time period that we aren’t familiar with.
Morri Creech is a remarkable poet with many accomplishments. Some of his accolades include “A Letter from Rome” being put into Best American Poetry 2025, his collection The Sleep of Reason qualifying as a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer prize, and his collection Field Knowledge winning the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize from Waywiser Press. He has also received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize at least twice. Currently, he is the Writer in Residence at Queens University Of Charlotte, North Carolina.
I read that you went to Winthrop University in South Carolina. Did any historical events that took place there or people you met inspire any of your poems?
While I didn’t have any experiences at Winthrop that directly influenced my work—aside from the tons of reading I did during that time in my life—I did have the good fortune to study with a terrific mentor, the poet Susan Ludvigson. She encouraged me to follow my vision, to write about the things that mattered to me, but to put the art before any of my poems’ ancillary concerns. To put expression over agenda, in other words. As the great twentieth century Irish poet W. B. Yeats said once, “The rhetorician would deceive his neighbors, / the sentimentalist himself; while art / is but a vision of reality.” I don’t want to fool my neighbors or myself; I want a vision that transcends, and that gets at the heart of what is real. Trying too hard to persuade on the one hand, and falling into sentimental self-delusion on the other, are the poles to avoid when writing. At least Yeats thought so. And I agree.
Historically, Publius was used as a pseudonym to publish the Federalist Papers. Are you using “Publius” to explore political responsibility and consequences? It seems like it is addressed to Publius, who was someone who deserted when they were needed. If this is true, was it a portrayal of someone in today’s world, who was this directed to?
Publius Valerius Poplicola was one of the founders and statesmen of the early Roman Republic. I was thinking of him, too. But, yes, I did have in mind the authors of the Federalist Papers. Though “A Letter from Rome” is first a poem about Roman history—about a fictive friendship between one man who has chosen to stay in Rome during the turbulent political moment following Caesar’s assassination and another who has chosen to flee—there are, I hope, some resonances that recall our own current political moment, one rife with partisanship, acrimony, the threat of overreaching executive power, and an abiding sense of uncertainty. Naming the character Publius was an attempt to summon the constitution and the men who worked hard to ratify it, since the power and resilience of that document are in question at the moment and seemed to hang in the balance when the poem was first written. But the address wasn’t directed to anyone in particular, at least from a political perspective. If anyone, it was addressed to my friend Joseph Harrison, the great American poet who died of cancer in February of last year, with whom I frequently discussed American politics, and to whom the poem is dedicated. The poem has a political component and a personal component, and the two parts are in conversation with one another, I hope, throughout the length of the piece. It is about anxiety, not about accusations or answers. It’s about what it feels like to live in a moment when all you thought you knew gets turned topsy turvy.
The final line, “Publius, when night falls, one starts to see,” made me think about how, once it is too late to prevent it from happening, the consequences come to light about the decision. This poem also seems to have many political allusions and themes. Was the final line meant to connect to any current political statuses of the US?
In the final line, I am trying to suggest that, the darker things get, the clearer one sees one’s circumstances. Often, in times of equilibrium, we are lulled into a sense of calm, I think, and we fail to see the forces at work under the surface that threaten that equilibrium. Those forces become crystalline when the calm gives way to trouble. The “current political statuses” of the U.S. that you ask about are, for me, vicious partisanship—”you are either in my camp or the enemy camp”—the polarization of politics, and the anticipation of a dangerous expansion of executive power. The line is about the clarity that comes in moments of chaos.
I’ve learned most of my mythology about the ancient Romans from reading the Percy Jackson books. Did you have a certain teacher or book, or movie that got you interested in writing a poem with a historical lens? If this is true, what was it, and why were you so fascinated about it?
I learned my Roman gods and myths from Edith Hamilton’s Mythology in high school, and I got my sense of history from Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Suetonius’ The Lives of the Caesars, and other books like that. I really got into history in my mid-thirties. And I was a history minor in college. So I’ve always been drawn to historical narratives, I guess. But the circumstances in “A Letter from Rome” are drawn from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. And the poem was certainly inspired by my trip to Rome in 2022. My wife and I took a group of college students on a trip abroad there. It was an amazing two weeks.
Do you consider yourself part of a “school” of poetry? And if that is the case, can you provide some background on how you began that journey and how it influences your poetry?
I don’t consider myself part of a school of poetry, though others do. I frequently get lumped into the “formalist” camp, or the “poets who use rhyme and meter.” (“A Letter from Rome” is in “blank verse”: unrhymed iambic pentameter). But I’m pretty fiercely individualistic, and I don’t like being seen as part of any school or movement. My choice to write in rhyme and meter has to do with a fidelity to the tradition of great poetry in English, extending back some six centuries—I was an English major, not a Creative Writing major, in college, and I see my art through the lens of a longer tradition, one in which rhyme and meter are vital. The decision to write formally also reflects my contrariness; I noted early on that free verse was the dominant mode, so I decided to do otherwise. But I read mostly free verse, and I’m not biased toward formal poets in my reading of contemporary poetry, though I do appreciate when someone does it exceedingly well, like A. E. Stallings, Shane McCrae, or Joshua Mehigan.
Was there ever a time in your life that you hated poetry? If you did hate it, what changed your mind? Did you ever see yourself having a poem in Best American Poetry?
I never hated poetry, but I was indifferent to it. I hated school generally when I was young—I failed grades ten and twelve—but when I got to community college, I discovered poets who were writing in the 1950’s and 1960’s, poets who sounded like people actually spoke during my lifetime. I was enchanted. My professor, Chris Forhan, a fine poet and teacher, introduced me to the work of John Berryman. There was something about his sad quirkiness (“Dream Song 29”) that spoke to me immediately. I haven’t looked back since. It never occurred to me that I would be in Best American Poetry. I was deeply surprised to get the news. And, of course, I just narrowly made my way in: this edition is the last they plan to do. There will be no more Best American Poetry, at least not in its current incarnation.
When you write poems, do you mean for them to be read by the public, or by fellow poets? As you write with political themes, do you hope that your poems will make people change their views, or do you write poems just to put your opinion in the world?
I mean for my poems to be read by both a general audience and by fellow poets. I don’t write to change people’s political views; as W. H. Auden once said, “poetry makes nothing happen,” and I believe that subordinating the artistry of a poem to some political imperative impoverishes both the art and the politics. I don’t like propaganda, and I feel that poetry meant to persuade risks becoming prop art, something I don’t value personally, though political poems written from a personal perspective that attempt to persuade through an invitation to empathize with the speaker’s experience can be quite moving. I actually don’t think a poem is likely to be persuasive to people who disagree with the poem’s aims. I’ve never changed my position on an issue because I read a poem. What I want to do is write poems that resonate with political themes but that have some larger human dimension, something even someone who disagrees with my politics might enjoy. (To some degree, I don’t even consider myself a political poet.) I admire George Herbert’s “Denial,” for instance, a deeply Christian poem; and I admire Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,” a powerful assertion of atheism. I don’t have to choose between them; I certainly have my own private views about religion, but they don’t enter into my appreciation of those two poets. Poems should survive, and even transcend, their politics and attitudes. I may miss the mark, but that’s what I’m always shooting for.