Hilary Sideris : part five

What poems or books do you return to?

There’s something about reading poems in translation and poems in the English of another time that gets me generating ideas and making quirky connections. I go back to Neruda, Pessoa, Quasimodo. I like reading the original and translation side by side and thinking about the translator’s choices, limitations, possibilities. I also love rereading the small Folger paperback editions of Shakespeare plays I read long ago, with the glosses and images of obsolete objects on the opposite page—a weapon called a partisan, a tool called a harrow, a game called hoodman-blind. There are so many stories to tell about flounder, basil, Western versus English saddles, the etymology of the word gift. I’ve learned that I can meditate on the names and facts of a story or phenomenon and, when I’m lucky, make something of my own.  

Hilary Sideris : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

I like the free verse possibilities of the sonnet form, with its volta or turn toward the end. I like the way a poem can unwind in couplets or tercets over time, against white space,  like a thread that breaks and mends, a shape becoming three dimensional, a sculpture on the page. A poem can’t do that without music.

I enjoy formality that surprises me, the subtle power of half or partial rhymes. There is also a lot to be gained from juxtaposing lyrical language with anti-poetic words and phrases. I enjoy the tension between jargony or pseudo-scientific language and purely lyrical phrasing. It’s like the tension between the Anglo-Saxon and Latin words and phrases in Shakespeare. In English we’re lucky to have so much doubleness to draw on.

Hilary Sideris : part three

How has your consideration of poetry changed since you began? 

In my twenties I was thrilled to discover Bill Knott, who sometimes wrote in rhyme and meter, always in surprising ways. He also used some confessional elements, lamenting, often comically, his personal plight, as well as grim facts of history. His poems are both hilarious and disturbing. I didn’t know poets could do that. In his poem about Ezra Pound, “Penny Wise,” he wrote:

well alright
I grant you
he was a fascist
ahem antisemitism the
er war and wall
I’m not defending them
but at least
you’ve got to admit
at least he
made the quatrains run on time

Knott spoke in a comedic voice about history’s traumas. He was idiosyncratic, both formal and informal, an oddball (I speak of the poems, having never met the man.) Later, I discovered D. Nurkse, Charles Simic, and the comedic female voices of Terri Ford, Jennifer Knox, and Sarah Sarai.

Hilary Sideris : part two

How did you first engage with poetry? 

I took my first poetry workshop as a student at Indiana University in the 80s. Those were the days of the Confessionalists and Deep Imagists – Sylvia Plath and James Wright are two of the poets I first loved. Both poets inspired imitators who responded to the pathos and brilliant imagery of their work, but weren’t always as technically gifted—or interested in craft. Without my knowing it, in a sense, the strong formal music in Plath and Wright’s poems attracted me. By which I mean, they used form so well that it didn’t feel like form.

Hilary Sideris : part one

Hilary Sideris has recently published poems in The American Journal of Poetry, Bellevue Literary Review, Free State Review, Gravel, Main Street Rag, Rhino, Salamander, Sixth Finch, and Southern Poetry Review. She is the author of several chapbooks as well as Most Likely to Die, poems in the voice of Keith Richards (Poets Wear Prada 2014), The Inclination to Make Waves (Big Wonderful 2016), Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay 2019) and The Silent B (Dos Madres 2019).

What are you working on? 

I’m working on some poems that take place in my neighborhood, Kensington, Brooklyn, since Trump. The poems are based loosely on conversations and encounters I’ve had at the laundromat, nail salon, post office. Poems that come directly from my experience are the hardest for me to write. Stevens wrote in a letter to his wife, “The plain truth is, no doubt, that I like to be anything but my plain self.” It’s liberating to put on a mask, which Stevens did a lot. I’ve escaped from my plain self by writing poems about fish, poems addressed to plants. I wrote a book of poems in the voice of Keith Richards called Most Likely to Die and a book of four-letter word poems called The Inclination to Make Waves. In the word poems, I played with dictionary definitions, etymologies, and the multiple meaning of words, which allowed me to write about myself without setting out to do so. I like to trick myself like that.