Poet balances lyrical intensity, narrative
SARATOGA SPRINGS - Jay Rogoff said he was "hell-bent on writing." As an undergraduate
at the University of Pennsylvania, he tried fiction. But he soon realized that his
true love was poetry.
"I was better at it," said the Saratoga Springs poet, whose lyric works are delicately
brushed with narrative.
His first book of poetry, "The Cutoff," won the Washington Prize for Poetry in 1985.
Since then, he has published "First Hand," another award-winner as well as "How We
Came to Stand on That Shore."
The Queens native and lecturer in the English Department at Skidmore College is currently
refining his next book of poems, "The Long Fault."
Q: Tell me about your next book.
A: It has to do with my middle age. I'm thinking of mortality, the fault that we
are all going to fall into.
It also looks very much at history, different historical events, different human
civilizations and their headlong tumble into the long fault.
It's a less personal book. But I have a series of personal poems. I found a photograph
of my wife when she was 15 and so I started writing poems about it, and many of these
poems will be in there too.
Q: It is easier to write about your personal life?
A: I think it gets harder to write about your personal life. When I was younger,
I wrote a lot about my personal life. And many of the poems in "How We Came to Stand
on That Shore" are personal. And it seemed like the natural subject matter.
As I've gotten older, I've felt the need to have the poems be more responsible to
the state of the world and my sense of my relationship to the world. We like to think
we are not responsible for the terrible things that are happening in the world, but
we are connected in some way to death and suffering. I'm making the book sound like
a real downer, which it is not.
Q: How can art, poetry change the world?
A: As W.H. Auden says, "Poetry can make nothing happen." But the important thing
about Auden was he wrote poetry as if it could make something happen. And even if
you believe it is a futile exercise, you have to create something, put things together,
even if it is to make people more aware, to feel more intensely about the horrors
around us.
Q: So how did you come to poetry?
A: My first literary influence was Dr. Seuss. When I was four and five, I was reading
Dr. Seuss. I wrote my first poem at five. I wrote a little Dr. Seuss-style poem, a
narrative, that had silly animal names.
It didn't start my writing poetry, but it did start my delight in language and sounds
of language. I still use rhymes a lot and assonance a lot. The way the poem sounds
is just about as important to me as what it means.
When I started writing poetry seriously in high school and college, I became interested
in forms. The trend was free verse in the late '60s and early '70s when Allen Ginsberg
of course was very popular. The idea was to create the illusion of spontaneity, the
feeling it immediately was coming out of your heart and head; the idea of the poem
as an improvisation.
Against that, there were the more formal poets who thought of poetry as a thing that
was created like a work of art that was parallel to painting, sculpture or music.
I went through college going back and forth between those two and I still try to integrate
both.
Every once in a while, when my poetry is feeling too stiff, I try to make it sound
a little more spontaneous. And then when I've had enough of that, I go back to something
more formal. So I'm working between those two poles. When I do something loose for
a while, I do some sonnets.
Q: Do you like telling stories with your poems or just creating beautiful sounds?
A: I want it all. I have a strong narrative impulse. I like telling narrative through
selective lyrical moments of intensity and trust the reader to fill it in. I chop
out all the connective tissue and spin out lyricism. That lets me concentrate on sounds.
I wouldn't give up the lyrical intensity for the narrative.
©2006 the Sunday Gazette
