How long did it take you to write the book?
In one sense it takes any poet a conscious lifetime to write any poem-that is, one's past sometimes wants to be written about, so that one might come better to understand one's feelings about this or that. One of the poems in "Light Disguise," "Stars and Stripes: Liberty Bell March," tries to recreate, in various layers and levels of affectionate irony, having to do family calisthenics at age 11. On the other hand, a poem that is in effect precisely dated, the last one in the book, comes of arriving by train in Vienna at dusk on March 15, 2000. But even that poem draws on reading done in college. The short answer to the question is: 31 years, since the oldest poem in the book was written, if I recall rightly, in 1971 and the last in 2002. At the reading [at the College] I read a poem written this past summer.
What or who was your inspiration?
The impulse to start writing poems normally comes of intense reading of poems. Of course I was taught, and taught well, a few poems in high school and college, but it was not until I wrote my senior thesis on T.S. Eliot-for the religion department at Princeton-that I realized that the rhythms of lines and the sounds of words, and not only the paraphrasable content of the poems, were registering so strongly that I ought to try to write something of my own. But then I did not in fact do it; rather, I wrote a play and then another play, both utterly unreadable now, spent two years in the Army, one in France on a Fulbright, and then five in graduate school and six at the College before scribbling some lines that seemed passable. So I was 36 when that first poem was written. Fortunately it was published soon enough, which led me to write another one, etc. But that's not the whole story.
Although I did not major in English in college, I did take a bunch of literature courses, and was affected by them. Not to emulation, exactly, but affected in ways that had something to do with wanting to write. My heroes were not poets, but prose writers, the usual undergraduate favorites of those days and these: Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Camus. It was the absorption in Eliot at the same time that I was in a senior seminar on American poets that was the critical step, I still think.
In graduate school I worked on the great 17th-century poets. Who would not be 'inspired' by Donne, Jonson, Milton, Marvell? And yet the strongest push, I believe, came in the year in France, when I was supposed to be mastering (impossible task) Mallarme. Instead, I read repeatedly two recently published books, Robert Lowell's "Life Studies" and Philip Larkin's "The Less Deceived." And I read Richard Wilbur that year, and soon after that Elizabeth Bishop and Randall Jarrell and James Merrill. That was enough to let me know that someday I wanted to see if I could write a readable poem. But it was a number of years before I actually did it. I wouldn't want to speak of 'inspiration'-always in quotes, as grand a word as it is-without noting that "Light Disguise" is dedicated to a neuroscientist and student of psychoanalysis I know well, Lisa Raskin.
Is there any particular poet or writer that you attribute your style to?
I imagine that many of the poets just named had something to do with my own poems, but I would have a hard time being very specific about it. A poet of course has to write in his or her own voice, and that voice itself normally evolves over time. Most poets write less elaborately as the years go by, and probably I am no exception. To write a poem like "Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance" [by Elizabeth Bishop] or "The Whitsun Weddings" [by Philip Larkin] is worth all the gold in Tiffany's.
How do you hope readers will react to your poetry?
Like other poets, I would want the poems to speak for themselves, fully expecting that they will speak differently to different readers.