Rachel Hadas, poet, essayist, translator and professor, discusses her recent memoir, Strange Relation, about losing her husband to early-onset dementia. She also talks about lessons learned from more than 30 years as a professor, how one should try to take up reading poetry later in life, and why the Furies may have looked the other way when Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 4, Episode 3 - The Consolation of Poetry
I had a strange, conversation. Welcome to the Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host Gil Roth and you're listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to the show at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also find us on Twitter at vmspod@facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. This episode is coming to you from a hotel in London where I'm traveling for business. Actually, I'm traveling to Nottingham and Newcastle for business, but there are no direct flights there from Newark, so I'm spending the weekend in London on my own dime, and I'm hoping to get in a couple of interviews while I'm here. Now if I sound a little funny for this one, there are two big reasons. The main one is that right now I am currently in my 35th hour without sleep. I don't tend to sleep well on planes, and this one was a red eye landing in Heathrow around 8 a.m. in the morning. So my new strategy for tackling jet lag on these trips, which I may have mentioned in the past, is taking speed. It's not speed exactly. It's a drug called nuvitule, which is billed as a non-amphetamine wakefulness drug, and what it does is bind to everything that is awesome in my brain and keep me going for about 12 more hours, and I'd otherwise be expected to go. It might also be that I'm totally incoherent right now, but think I sound just fine. You guys can be the judge of that, but I dropped one around 9 a.m. in the morning local time, and it's about 9.30, so I've been going quite a while on this. Now the other big reason I may sound a little off is because I quit my job last week after 17 years at my company. I had this idea to launch a trade association within the industry that my magazine covered of just pharmaceutical contract manufacturing, and I'm going to leave my secure job and try to build this association and become a liaison between those companies and the FDA and put together all sorts of industry information to help show Congress how important the sector is, and I know this is a boring topic to most of you, but I've spent like 15 years building up a presence in this industry and getting an understanding of it and making it something I feel a vested interest in, and I am totally freaked out right now by the fact that I was able to make this jump. That said, a bunch of the companies that will be members in the association have told me they're completely supportive on this, and they will help fund the whole shebang, and they just have to kind of get all the business aspects of it rolling, and then start really hitting them up for money instead of just having nice conversations where they say they'll give me some money. Meanwhile, the problem is I'd already set up this trip to the UK to interview a bunch of potential advertisers back in November. It was going to be right after Thanksgiving that Friday they wanted to fly me out, but they had to change the schedule to mid-January, and now I kind of feel like a heel because I have to walk in there Monday and sort of tell them, "Well, I just gave notice at the magazine, and I'm sure I can smooth things over," and I plan on writing about the trip for the last issue that I'm going to edit, and all the higher-ups at my company want me to stay involved with the magazine as a contributing editor and member of the advisory board, so I'll still have some presence there, and then it's not like these guys are bringing me to England and I'm not doing something for them, but I will be devoting a lot of time to this association idea. The big thing is I took the big jump. I'm going to be unemployed or self-employed in about six weeks. I am terrified and exhilarated, and I'm on speed right now, so whatever. Anyway, let's get to the show. Our guest this episode is Rachel Haddes. Rachel's a poet, translator, essayist, and professor. She teaches at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Next guest of ours, Willard Spiegelman, told me to check out her work and invite her on the show, and I'm very glad that he did. In 2011, Rachel published a book called Strange Relation, a memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry with Paul Dry Books, and it chronicled the period after Rachel's husband, the music composer and professor George Edwards, was diagnosed with early onset dementia. Probably meaning he was about 61 years old, but this builds up for years, so sometime in his 50s, he started to develop what they discovered after the fact to be Alzheimer's. It's a really heartbreaking book about losing the person you love in slow motion, but Rachel does this really amazing job balancing the emotion, the practicality, and most importantly a poetry, both hers and others, that sort of helped her through all of this. It's a hard subject, but gives Strange Relation a read. I found it very, very rewarding. Now, one note, we recorded this sitting on her sofa in her apartment in the Upper West Side, and Rachel kind of moved the microphone back and forth a bunch, and so if you hear a weird clicking noise every so often, that's what it is. But I promise though, I will not let any more guests be comfortable when we're recording. From now on, you're sitting at the table with these mic stands, and that's it. And now, the virtual memories conversation with Rachel had us. The one book that I've read of yours is your memoir, Strange Relation, and it was a pretty harrowing book to read, and much more so to live through about your husband's descent into early onset dementia. Within it, you managed to kind of balance the poetical and the practical. You talk about both of the day-to-day aspects of this sort of life, as well as how it influenced and inspired your art, and what sort of pieces of poetry and other things from your past, and I don't want to say give solace, but help you through this experience. Can you talk a bit about what that experience was and the roots of the poetry that it brought out? Sure, I'll try. It all seems like quite a long time ago now. George died just over two years ago, and the experience seems quite distant. I'm grateful to say, and writing helps us to live through something, and then it helps us to remember it, if we want to. So a lot of the book was written in short pieces. Some of them were poems, which later were turned into prose. Some of them were prose pieces. Some of them were something that became a crossover. It sounds very strange, but the genres kept switching on me. I don't have a very strong chronological DNA to put it mildly, but this is the closest thing to a chronological book I've ever written. At the same time, dementia can only be understood by flashbacks. It's what I call 2020 hindsight. You don't realize until you're in the middle of this terrible experience that it probably began 10 years ago. And obviously, writing about life also proceeds by hindsight. So that's one thing that I would say. Poetry enables me to understand something better by trying to articulate it, and it also, I think, has always been a place where I have more courage and more clarity than I do in everyday life. So that whether it was my mother's cancer or the failure of an early marriage of mine or my husband's dementia, it was as if poetry, almost like a dream, gave me access to that and allowed me to express it before the rest of my life caught up with that. So that's one thing I'd say. What was your history with poetry? Well I came from a very bookish family. I had a wonderful mother and grandmother who read to me all the time. My only memory, actually, of the only grandmother I knew, my mother's mother was that she would read me Edward Lear. But most of the reading I enjoyed being read to and reading was not necessarily poetry, it was stories. Poetry sort of chose me early on. The combination of the fact that poetry was emotional, pretty, and short, and not narrative seemed to hit the spot somehow. So it's really hard to say, Gil. I mean by the time I was 12 years old, I was imitating E.E. Cummings. When I was 14, I would read a Shakespeare sonnet, get that into my head and start writing sonnets. I had a lot of fluency and a very good memory, which many, many young people do, and then they lose it. I just think that's a psychological fact. But there was never much doubt in my mind that poetry was the kind of writing I wanted to do and that made me happy. I don't know if that is an adequate answer. I think so. And your family was supportive of that? Oh, sure. And then when I was 17, my father died and that kind of jump-started me into elegy. So it gave me, in a sense, something to write about. Adolescent love affairs and death, which we all think experienced. But also the kind of writing I wanted to imitate was poetry, so that I would say, let's write a sonnet like Shakespeare. Let's write something that sounds like T.S. Eliot or Keats. I never was really, I love to read Dickens as a teenager, but I never said, let's write it. Dickens novel. I lacked the expansiveness. So poetry was what I had a talent for, I think. I mean, you know, the way they say most kids draw, but some kids go on drawing or everybody's musical. In my case, that is not true, but everybody has some kind of creative something, and in my case, it was certainly poetry. It also helped that I had very good Latin in school and that I majored in classics in college. I've never regretted not majoring in English, so that majoring in classics was a great way to find out that you don't have to reinvent the wheel, that the great Roman poets were imitating the Greeks and that it was okay to imitate, that it was okay to do differently what had already been done. I have to tell you, summer of 2012 is when I first finally dived into the Romans. I had such ambivalence about them because of my Athenocentrism coming from St. John's college that I just couldn't, well, that's just a knock off of Homer, why would I read Virgil? And then it was going back to St. John's and talking to one of the tutors, Tom May, who as he put it, within five minutes of our first conversation in almost 20 years, I said, "Well, Gil, you needed the Athenians to come up with the concepts, but without the Romans, you would never have the institutions." And that's why you need to study Roman, and I spent that summer with Ovid and Virgil. That's pretty much what Virgil says in book six of the Aeneid. Other people will be better sculptors and better poets, but you, Roman, will lay down the laws. I had wonderful Latin in high school. I really loved Virgil and Catullus in high school. My mother was a Latin teacher. My father was a classicist. But unfortunately, that didn't go straight. I mean, Lamarck to the contrary, I wasn't born knowing Greek, alas. There's a phenotype and the genotype, there are things you could put on after. Something like that, something like that. But still, it was enough of a upbringing to keep you. I'm coming from a father who was much more mechanical, just a hands-on sort of guy. My mother read a lot, but it's just, I didn't, I was raised on comic books and science fiction, frankly. And stuff was, was it much later? Well, it's interesting though. I sometimes think that, my mother was incredibly well read, but I sometimes think that she gave me the raw materials and I cooked them, you know, a good vocabulary, a love of the written and the spoken word, but she was very sort of buttoned up emotionally and poetry is a way to let your emotions out, indeed, to figure out what your emotions are. Poetry was a good friend. James Merrill says somewhere, the life raft of language. That's in his Ouija board trilogy. And I would say yes, yes. Are you able to go back and look at your early early work? Sometimes. Godine, David Godine published a chapbook of mine called Starting From Troy. Indeed, I was thinking about The Aeneid and the Fall of Troy in 1975 and I can look at that, some of that's high school work. What's kind of harder is to look at the books I was publishing in the 80s and 90s. It was much easier to publish poetry than it is now and a lot of those poems, I would like to wring out like a wet washcloth, they're just kind of wordy. I have the good words, but I have too many of them. And I think I've become a little more laconic in my old age. Interesting. I'm getting to think as a process of stripping down as you've gotten older. Getting better at revising, I mean, I like to say to my students, if your poems bore and confuse you, think how much they bore and confuse other people. So I'm trying to be, I'm not turning into an images to poet, but to really, to cut back on adverbs, to cut back on abstractions, to, I think that's Elmore Leonard's advice also is never use an adverb, but go on. I think Stephen King says that as well in his book about being a writer. But the other thing I wanted to say about, let's see if I can reconfigure here. Up-bringing? Classic. In this incredibly murky world of dementia where one has control over so few things, I took what I was good at, and I'm really not good at very many things. I took this ability to, in poetry, to put something into words, to face it head-on, to be fairly honest. And I do believe that if I had been a chemist or a mathematician or a musician or a carpenter, I think people use whatever resources they have. I mean, I met a lot of people, women especially, who were coping with similar situations with their husbands. They weren't all poets, but many of them were doing extremely well, whether their resources were religious or sociological or whatever. Yeah, I thought it was interesting within the book, the way you sort of, at least early on, balanced back and forth between classic poetry and, for lack of a better word, I don't say self-help books, but you know where I'm coming from, you know, books of people sharing this experience, most of whom are not coming from a classical poetry. And books I would never otherwise have read. Yeah. So what did you learn from that beyond the practical aspects of, you know, things you needed to do or to watch for while you were dealing with Georgia's descent? That's a good question. That's not that easy for me to remember now, because a lot of this is mercifully in the rearview mirror, but I always feel with self-help books of any kind, and I would include books about how to care for someone with dementia. If you get one good idea from a 300-page book, it's enough, you know, "Dianno." Everything is necessary and nothing is sufficient. The particular thing that was troubling me in the early years after my husband's diagnosis, which was at the end of '04 and the beginning of '05, was what precisely was the name of his disease? What did he have? There was sort of a differential diagnosis, a phrase I'd only heard on the TV show House, and then I learned what it meant. And I became aware a year or two later that that was a quixotic quest. There was no clear answer short of an autopsy, and the answer didn't matter. One had to focus on something else, but early on I was reading books with titles like, "What if it's not Alzheimer's?" Or, you know, "How to recognize frontotemporal dementia?" So I was trying to read books by people who'd had an experience like mine, and you want to know that you're not alone. So that, I think that was the main thing. You're not alone, and poetry also tells you that you're not alone in what is a very lonely experience. Yes, as you mentioned, he died a few years after the book had been finished. Well, you finished the book. Actually, he died in October of 2011, and the book came out in February of 2011. One person said to me, "Why didn't you wait till he died to publish the book?" I didn't know when he was treated. Yeah, he can't wait about a timer, right? Okay. But did poetry prepare you for that, or did the process of losing him over the years? I know it's a real difficult question to put, but, you know, was he already dead, in a sense to you? Oh, I think in many ways. I think my son certainly said that. My son, who was probably only 12 or 13, when his father began to fade out, and when he died, Jonathan said, "You know, I had a dream a year and a half ago." In which I said goodbye to him. I don't think that either my son or I, or anyone, said, "This death is shocking. He's died too soon." A life is as long as it is. One of the other things I say is, I mean, a life is as long as life is worth living, I would say. And I like to say to my students, "What is a book, if not somebody talking to you who can't talk to you anymore?" I had collected my husband's wonderful essays in a book, his CD of his music came out in April of 2011. That's what remains of him that is the most precious. I don't know if that answers your question. It does. I had wondered, you know, if the finality of death mattered as much as what you'd already lost in the process over the years. I mean, another partial and sort of lateral answer to that question is, one of the boilerplate letters of condolence I got from one of the dementia organizations I belonged to had language that offended me at the time because it was boilerplate, but it actually turned out to be true, saying, "We have found that when people die of dementia, their loved ones eventually get them back. It's after the person is physically gone that you begin to recover the pre-ilness personality." And that's actually true. And I find that with time that keeps changing so that I remember the funny things my husband said. And I remember, you know, I'll suddenly laugh, whereas the last few years were so difficult for him and for me, there wasn't much laughter there. Interesting. Yeah. You mentioned talking to your students about this sort of thing. How much of this process impacts, you know, the way you were teaching or the thing? Did you have any input into what you were selecting to teach? I think there's a number of answers to that, too. One is that teaching provided some wonderful social interaction that was lacking at home. So I had a lot of teaching mojo in those years. On the other hand, I tried not to come in and say to the students, "This is what's going on at home." It was too private. So that went into poetry. I wanted it not to be secretive about it, but also not to lay it all out there. I think in terms of my reading, all kinds of things popped into perspective for me. All kinds of poems I was reading from Thomas Hardy to Kavafi to Homer, which I write about in the book. So that was my reading. And I was then able to say to students, "Look at the different ways of reading this poem." In terms of what I was teaching, I began to get deeper into the world of what's been called narrative medicine or literature in medicine or medical humanities. And that's certainly related to my husband's illness, but I have to say it predates it. I mean, my book on ending dialogue, which comes from work I did at Gay Men's Health Crisis in the late '80s, I'd almost forgotten this book, and I thought, "Whoa, I was sitting in a workshop down in Chelsea in a basement room with a shut door with men who were dying of AIDS in the late '80s." So this was clearly a need of mine. Here is how we mix poetry and mortality. Yes, and you talk about that within the book. Yeah, yeah. I recovered that. Yeah. And also of the mind doing things in the background that you're not conscious of preparing this work. That's right. Yeah, that's right. How long have you been teaching? I started teaching at Rutgers in the fall of 1981. It's a long time. I was 10. It's a very long time. You probably were not even born. Well, yes, maybe you were. I'm older than that. You were just barely born. That sort of health students changed in that time. Well, I could say a lot about, you know, the death of the humanities and the attention span of the tuned-in generation, but I would say that I have learned over the years not to expect them to have read a whole lot. But beyond that, they know a lot, I don't know, and I know a lot that they don't know. I just had the privilege of writing something for a Rutgers publication. I was asked to contribute a little 750 words on how has Rutgers New York changed, or how the students changed, or what's your experience been like since 1981, and I have really loved teaching there always. I don't know that I can extend it to every other school, but it's an extremely diverse school. And the students don't take the education for granted. College education is worth struggling for. Many of them speak different languages at home. Their parents probably want them to be accountants. I don't expect them to be English majors. That's fine. I wasn't an English major myself. I like to say I majored in classics. I have an MA in poetry and a PhD in comparative literature. You know, I barely read any English novels. It's fine. And over the years, I've developed more courses that seem to have been tailor-made for non-majors, though that wasn't my intention at the time. Literature and medicine, mythology and literature, children's literature, these are all things that speak to the students as human beings. So I love teaching. There's a lot of teaching DNA in my family, and I love it. Is there a favorite poem you like to teach? Oh, I'm not good at answering that. They're our favorite poets, and they turn up in strange relation. Kavafy, Philip Larkin, Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Keats, that's a bouquet for you. I have to say, the last couple of years I've gone back to St. John's College to do these four-day seminars. Last year was Moby Dick. The previous one was Stories of Flannery O'Connor, with two of my favorite tutors. There's usually a second seminar going on at the same time with another two tutors, and this year my two favorites are doing Dante, which I haven't read, and I know I need to sit down and do, but the other tutor, Eva Brann, who I interviewed. Oh, the Homer lady, yes. And another tutor, she, the two of them are doing poems of Robert Frost, who I only have the scantest of being an American guy, knowledge of. And I'm seriously debating doing that and going with a smaller bite instead of the larger inferno for four days, largely because it's a four-day event, and I just don't know if Dante would go off the rails in that span of time. What riches. I mean, what a great choice. The publisher of Strange Relation, Paul Dry, is a friend of Eva Brann, and has published some of her books about home. Oh, yeah. I was going to ask about the publishing history with that, too. Yeah. The St. John's connection goes quite a long ways. Robert Frost has just a passage in his wonderful poem Home Burial, which is a husband and wife talking and arguing after the death of their infant son who's buried in the backyard. There's about 10 lines, which I quote here. I could even read it, where she is talking about the incredible loneliness of what it's like to suffer a bereavement. I mean, Frost deeply understood that. So one of the things I'd say about poetry is it helps the painful experience that I went through helped me to read poetry better, to read it better for myself and therefore no doubt to teach it better. I mean, it's a win-win situation. There's in a horrible dilemma, which there's no way out of short of death, poetry can only be a positive, if that makes sense. I hear you, but it actually raises the question, for me, of what do you suggest that someone who's artistically minded but has an incredibly hectic, tightly wound life and spends much more time with novels and almost no time at all with poetry? I'm asking for a friend, not me. How would you suggest that person begin to slow down and move into poems? Where would you suggest someone to spend? I'm not sure that there's any one recipe. If that person wants to get to know more poems, they might take a course. They might go to a poetry reading series. They might buy a good anthology. If we assume this person has a really hectic day job and lives out in the suburbs in Northern New Jersey, where there isn't a lot of poetry readings around, do you have anybody you suggest someone in middle age say, not me, would start? I would probably say if they have a true desire to improve their acquaintance with poetry, I would say get a good book and read one poem a day in the morning or in the evening and either get a book by one poet or maybe an anthology. That's the best thing. I think that probably is more efficient than going to poetry readings because you could be too tired at the end of the day. See, for my friend, yes, he would be entirely. Whoever. That person. How important is memorization in your history with poetry? Many poets of my generation, for example, Dana Joya and others really require their students to memorize. I think it's very helpful in getting iambic pentameter into your ear for one thing. I mean, I find about 25% of my students have a terrible time with meter. They simply can't hear it. And I think it's partly because they haven't been read to enough and maybe they haven't had to memorize. And the meter really helps you to memorize poems. However, poetry is incredibly patient and forgiving. Poetry is like a house with all the doors open. Kate says the soul is a mansion with many apartments, you know, poetry is like that. So, however you come to poetry, it will welcome you and be patient. And I don't want to say you've got to memorize that poem. I think it's good to memorize poems and it's a whole lot easier to do when you're young and if you just hear them read often enough. But I mean, the other thing I'd say is that poems in free verse are much harder to memorize than metered poems. That's one way that Greek and Latin poetry is very helpful. I mean, I memorized an ode of Horace both in Horace's Latin and in Milton's translation when I was in high school. Couldn't have done that without the meter. But having said that, I really don't want to lay down the law that you have to memorize poems. But Frost, whom we've referred to, said, "I would like to lodge a few poems where they're hard to get rid of." Which sounds like a splinter under your thumbnail. That's going more with a spear. But you know, that's fine too. But there are times when you're in the dentist's chair or in some waiting room or something when it really is nice to be able to go to your inner Rolodex and pull up a poem. But obviously Google and so forth and all kinds of handheld devices have made it much easier to carry your memory around with you in your hand. That's okay too. I used to have Prufrock in its entirety in my brain. But you know, again, that was in my 20s. That's it? Wait until you're my age. You mentioned there's a lot more poetry publishing going on back in the '80s into the '90s. What changed? I don't know. I think you would know as much as I about this. But I think what I really mean is it was easier to publish a collection. I mean, my first two books after the chapbook that Godin did in '75, my first two books were published by Wesleyan University Press. In '83 and '87 I think I just think that's harder now. I mean, university presses used to be regarded almost as small presses and then there were trade presses like Knopf and Athenaeum where all these wonderful poets of the '60s and '70s like James Merrill and John Hollander and WS Merwin published and all of those places have just cut back incredibly on the amount of poetry they publish. There's still places that do trade publishers but university presses still publish some poetry. I'm very grateful to Northwestern University Press for publishing this but what has happened? There's a proliferation of small presses and online publishing and I think that's wonderful. But I think young poets looking to publish their first book are increasingly turning to contests which is a very low percentage shot and I think there's just the sense that the market is kind of flooded with books but I'm really not sure how different that is from the way it's ever been. I mean Randall Gerel talks about that many years about all the books and poems coming over the transom. So maybe I'm contradicting myself but I'm saying that it was easier for me back in the day. I published two books of poetry with Rutgers University Press. They don't publish poetry anymore. I published one with Princeton University Press. They don't publish. It started a new series but many of these university presses you could kind of depend on no longer publish poetry. So poets have to be very resourceful. I don't know how helpful that is. I think it's quite it's part of why I don't write poetry. I've only recently sort of get back into writing it all so I'm doing what you do. Yeah I figure this is my... This is a form of publication. I think it's an art in a sense. And there's too much poetry written and too much poetry published. I think that's always been true. That's part of the question. Everybody has a golden age somewhere in the past but was it ever that good or was there always ten tons of crap to show? Yeah well Randall Gerel is very funny. He says the trouble with the golden age is everybody goes around saying how yellow everything looks. And Emily Dickinson has a great poem that begins publication is the auction of the mind of man. I mean she was not interested in commercial publication and Kavafy who is now one of the most globally influential poets in the world. He speaks to so many issues now including globalization and diaspora and gay studies and whatever. Kavafy didn't publish during his lifetime practically at all. He would put together sheafs of poems for his friends. Here let me attach a new poem with a paper clip. And I think I am saying that I was busily publishing poems and magazines and collecting them into books and not of course I had my share of rejections but I don't think I realized what an easy ride I was getting. So there's a sifting process. After Alan Ginsburg died Helen Vendler magisterially said time will edit him. Meaning really that Ginsburg hadn't done a lot of editing himself and she was right. She was right. That's what happens. So if you're remembered by a few poems if I'm remembered in 50 years God knows for strange relation and nothing else that's fine with me. Prolific poet in her day. Remembered for one book. Is there a poem you would have as an epigram? Did I misuse epigraph? I always screw that up. I know there's epigram, epigraph and epitaph. Yeah all does that too but you know I didn't want to get two more bits. Well one of the most popular poems and most anthologized and taught in AP classes of mine is a poem called the Red Hat which came out in the New Yorker in 1995. Has been anthologized and I think it's interesting that even the title is not abstract. It's about the time when my son began going to school and we could see his red hat from a distance as he began to walk by himself to school. Very relatable as students would say not abstract. Not harrowing. Who knows but that's probably if I made royalties from being included on AP exams that would be the poem I'd be cashing in from. Who are you reading? Who am I reading? Prose about poetry. Just who do you read that is? Good question. I'm rereading Samaria Renault right now, the historical novelist. I am reading my colleague James Goodman's wonderful book about Abraham and Isaac called Where is the Lamb? About the way Genesis 22 has been read from ancient times until now. Wonderful book and I've been recommending it to people and Jim Goodman tells me that his publisher has done next to nothing for publicity so let me plug it right here. We'll make sure. For our stress came out last fall I think where is the lamb? When Isaac says to Abraham father I see the wood for the sacrifice but where is the lamb? And Abraham says God will provide the lamb my son. It's a harrowing story and how do you read that story? I go back all the time to Kavafi or James Merrill or Frost if I'm writing something I find I need to pick up something and look it up. Of poets writing now I'm a great admirer of A.E. Stallings, a wonderful poet born in 1968, therefore about your age and a translator from the classics. I find a lot of the poets I most admire are also doing some other kind of literary work. They're writing essays, they're writing criticism, they're translating and sometimes they don't write for a while and that's fine too. But I tend to be reading several things at once. Favorite translators particularly from the Greek? Well I love Alicia's translation she's translating Hesiod right now and we spoke of Roman poetry she translated Lucretius in 2007 into rhymed 14ers which is a real tour de force. Great translators I love Robert Fitzgerald's Homer. I was a lot of more guy I never took up Fitzgerald I've got to. Lattimore was the first Iliad that I read but you know I think that Homer is very hard to translate badly I think the story carries you along I mean you would really have to have a black thumb to ruin Homer I'm more interested in tragedy in the sense that I think tragedy is quite hard to translate well because people translate Greek tragedy into some language that was never spoken on land or sea I translated one play of Euripides about 15 years ago and I'm going for two more Euripides plays but I have to say does the world need another translation of Euripides and then I think well maybe maybe you're right what do you feel you bring to it well first of all these are two plays about Iphigenia and I find that my students are fascinated by the story of the sacrifice of Iphigenia okay so there are different endings to that myth and Iphigenia in all this has one ending and Iphigenia among the Torians has another ending which is already very interesting and what else do I bring to it I try to make it kind of snappy I try to actually speaking of memorization I try to use rhyme and meter however loose the meter and however slant the rhyme because if I don't have a kind of formal constraint I find it's Prosy and Leaden so I'm just at the beginning of dipping into the Iphigenia in all this and check in with me in a year but I'm enjoying it. Second Minions daughter right okay so my question that it came up last last September when I interviewed Thane Rosenbaum we did he did a book on on vengeance and in the middle of it I well I was reading it I took a break and reread the Orstaya why didn't the Furies go after Agamemnon because he kills blood relation and that seems to be the trigger for Orestes getting hunted down is there a thing about the the the amenities that it's very good question okay because I mentioned to my brother who's a classics guy and I have to bring it up at St. John's at some point because I was one of my big quite my other big what did your brother say he's curious he thought maybe it's not simply the blood murder that has to take place but you know someone has to call down and oath to bring the amenities or it's possible it wasn't actually his daughter which which is a you know always a possibility but my other question that I had reading that was why the first play is called Agamemnon yeah that is a very good question and I don't know the answer unless Agamemnon is technically the protagonist he has one scene and that's what I found so interesting this time not being at St. John's and sitting down and reading something and realizing that would be a great question to open a seminar with unfortunately I'm sitting out here in northern New Jersey and thank you thank you for mentioning it I was thinking that maybe Orestes killing his own mother it doesn't get much more taboo than that she holds out her breasts to him so the fact that Agamemnon kills his daughter perhaps his daughter is his property and there's a wonderful book by a French scholar in the early 19th century called the ancient city his name was Fustel du Coulange I could spell it that's a wonderful name isn't that a great name and I think Fustel says basing his scholarship on all kinds of primary sources both Greek and Latin that fathers owned their family you could kill your child if you wanted and you weren't breaking any laws so I think that's part of that Agamemnon was killing his property Orestes wasn't and then also Agamemnon was indeed told by the Oracle and by the Prophet that he had to do this he was in a very tight corner but Orestes also gets a hollow and I already yeah look through that when Orestes gets Apollo's no Athena's incitement to do it so yeah they both had gods on their side but one gets it is such a big problem then and it's been it's been differently construed Rassine has a wonderful tragedy called Iphigenia in all us and I have to plug the late Barry Unsworth who was a terrific historical novelist who died in 2012 a book of his about slavery won the Booker Prize some time in the eighties and one of his last books is called Songs of the Kings came out in 2003 just around the time the Iraq war was starting and it's about the sacrifice of Iphigenia and the politics behind it and I do recommend it and nobody comes out looking good not Kalkas not Odysseus not Agamemnon not anyone Iphigenia looks all right but the men look absolutely terrible and you know she's going to meet with a bad end yeah that's right there's also a wonderful movie by the British British by the Greek director Kakoyanes called Iphigenia with Irene Papas as the furious Clytemnestra so I don't have any answer Gil these are great questions but that's how tragedy tends to be there's and I actually talk about that in here in this that you're you're in a situation where nothing is going to work you're in a tight corner I even have a little poem called The Choice which talks about Agamemnon I mean not to compare myself to tragedy in that way but but that's again what the poetry does for you that's what poetry does you come to understand it yeah that you were facing I think as you put it you know it can't be either way and it has to be both that's right which is a depressing way to end a conversation we really should come up with something else oh no we should mention something else actually would you like to read a poem of yours one of your sure face any any preferences any of yours or no no I've only read stuff from strange relations so I don't have a good background in your work so okay so this is a poem which could have been in strange relation I mean it was written in the summer of 2009 when I was still probably putting together material that made it into strange relation but it's about the fact that we can only pay attention to so many things at once and it's called only so much I'd gone to grab a little time in the country in Vermont where I have a house in the summer of '09 and almost immediately the phone rang and there was a crisis with my husband so this is about sitting in a field that's probably all the background that's needed okay only so much I bend to the open notebook distracted turn my head tiny brown ants are climbing up a stalk of golden run it isn't clear what goal they hope to reach I pick up a sharpened pencil start to sketch a passing cloud the sky goes dull I shut the notebook and open it from the back to right there is only so much we can notice all at once now this morning's dream makes an appearance packed lecture hall where students overflow to aisles and floor what do they want to know I have the sense they're gathered here to learn some kind of surgery the brain donation card wallet size arrived in this morning's mail I closed the notebook the patient ants still crawl a sudden breeze the grasses toss their tops wild strawberry runners are clamoring over this rock where if I sat here long enough eventually the tough live tendrils would also crisscross me I could climb down from my temporary tower go to the house and fill a glass with water get out my water colors dip my brush memorialize this moment with a wash of color sketch the runners trace a border as if imitation equaled order or I could take a walk down to the brook or stretch out in the hammock with a book or let my thoughts red runners trace a line to the null magnet of my husband's brain the hospital where he's undergoing observation the arid wide plateau of the condition a battleground to which I will return but there is room for only so much attention you turned a pretty awful personal event to some beautiful art another one to share with us thank you thank you thank you it's it's a gift let me let me read a few lines from the Robert Frost poem I was talking about before sure if that's okay this is from home burial and the wife is very bitter at the terrible loneliness of bereavement the nearest friends can go with anyone to death come so far short they might as well not try to go at all no from the time when one is sick to death one is alone and he dies more alone friends make pretense of following to the grave but before one is in it their minds are turned and making the best of their way back to life and living people and things they understand and I was interested in turning I say here turning away from illness or death is one natural human response though not the only one friends can appear from the most unexpected quarters doctors professionally but often also generously turn toward not away from illness but there's a kind of turning different from either the cold shoulder or the offer of help and then I talk about the way we sometimes turn to supernatural agents or to God we either turn away or we turn toward and the poetic trope apostrophe means we turn to address the greasioner or the night and gale or whatever so in that moment when you don't know where to turn that seems to be a poetic moment as well as a religious moment and a psychological moment maybe I turn toward some audience you know let's listen to this Rachel had us thank you so much for your time you're so welcome it's been a pleasure wonderful questions and that was Rachel had us check out her memoir strange relation from Paul Dry Books at your favorite bookstore and look up her volumes of poetry too I picked up one in our local library that I really enjoyed you can visit her site for more information about her poems and essays and her late husband's music and writing and more uh that's at rachelhadas.com which is R-A-C-H-E-L-H-A-D-A-S Rachel Hadas that's one D in there and that's it for this week's virtual memory show thank you so much for listening I'll be back next week with a conversation with Paul Gravette this legendary figure in the British cartooning scene and the author of the about to be released comics art from Yale University Press also like I said I just gave up my job and that's what was subsidizing this show I don't foresee charging for the podcast maybe down the line I'll be able to get advertising but I would really appreciate it if you enjoy the show go to our website chimeraobscura.com/vm and make a donation through PayPal you'll see the donate button in the right side column of the of every page at chimeraobscura.com I do this show out of love but it would be nice to be able to cover my web hosting costs some months you know and trips like this just going in to see Rachel is the toll at the George Washington and the parking and everything so there are little things like that that are going to start to pile up unless I've got much more money coming into this association than I think I do anyway as ever I don't want to be pitiful if you've got ideas for guests drop me a line at growth at chimeraobscura.com or VMS pod on Twitter or at our Facebook page facebook.com/virtualmemorieshow until next time I am Gil Roth and you are awesome keep it that way [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]