KARAN

Henry, I like your poems a lot. I like how they live in that charged space between myth and memory, between the divine and the devastated. Across these pieces, history keeps reanimating itself: Stalin’s ghost, the dead rising from their pods, Jonah trapped inside language. It’s as if the ancient and the modern world are arguing inside the same body. Let’s begin here: what compels you toward these historical and biblical hauntings? What do you find there that the present alone can’t offer?

HENRY

I’m truly humbled by your kind words and the attention you’ve paid to my work. 

The present for me doesn’t exist without the past. We’re all ancient artifacts with genetic material dating back from our parents to the world’s first single-celled organisms. The same could be said about writing. There is no present in writing. By the time we’ve written down a word, the present has past.

I’ve never written about a current event. I don’t think I could. Everything worth writing about, for me, is deeply layered, and it takes time for complexities to reveal themselves. And why restrict oneself to a limited palette? The dead and the living should inhabit the same page. The page, the dead sheaf of a tree, is as ancient as anything on earth. What is the computer screen, made of glass, but shattered and recompressed fossilized shells?

So yes, history, hauntings, the bible, all of it exists in a brief moment of this primordial soup we experience as time.

KARAN

In “Stalin’s Ghost,” grief becomes strangely tender, and even the dictator is granted a moment of quiet, “releasing a butterfly into the burning forest.” It’s horrifying and human all at once. How do you navigate writing about violence or atrocity (& you do this often) without reducing it to either sentimentality or spectacle?

HENRY

As a child of Holocaust survivors, I’ve thought a lot about the perpetrators of atrocities and how Arendt’s analysis of Eichman explains not only how these heinous criminals are fundamentally human but how this concept makes them even more terrifying. For example, what makes someone like Hitler so frightening to me is his love of dogs. I love dogs, too! How can someone who loves animals be capable of such cruelty? So when constructing Stalin, another one of history’s most awful people, I had to think of what makes him human. In my upcoming collection, Between the Trees, Stalin makes several appearances: as a ghost, as a specter who lords over the imprisoned poets in Lubyanka prison, and as the subject of a series of short poems I call postcards, in which I portray him as someone who loves cake and admires sunsets. That someone with those qualities can also be responsible for tens of millions of deaths is to me where true horror lies.

KARAN

“Dying of Thirst, Surrounded by Water” reads like a fevered dream of inheritance — part elegy, part political satire, part apocalypse. There’s a dizzying orchestration of tones here: absurdity beside grief, humor beside horror. How do you think about tonal balance in your work? When do you know a poem has reached its proper temperature?

HENRY

I’ve been trying out new ways (new for me, that is) of layering different voices—personal, historical, factual, found—in an attempt to make sense out of the cacophony of information out there in the world today. Perhaps “make sense” is the wrong way to say it since there’s no making sense of it. But there are ways of ordering things to reflect the experience of disorientation that makes the disorientation less disorienting. Or maybe it makes the disorientation more tangible. That is, we can experience it in the safe space of a poem. I also enjoy tangential leaps, especially when they manage to circle back in a way that makes the reader feel as if the various dots have been connected, even if those connections are impossible to articulate.

KARAN

Your language is rich with metamorphosis: corpses bloom into dragonflies, bullets into relics, rain into voices. It’s as if trauma itself keeps reincarnating through imagery. What does transformation (transcendence?) mean to you?

HENRY

I believe you answered the question yourself. Inherited trauma does reincarnate, through DNA, through experience, through imagery, through choices we make both consciously and subconsciously. It pops up in unexpected places and at unexpected times. We can’t escape our inherited trauma so better to face it head on rather than let it sneak up on us.   

KARAN

“In the Dream of Money” feels chillingly prophetic — it’s fascinating to see capitalism as theology. “All prayers start and end with money,” you write, and that line could hang over our entire century. What made you want to write this poem? Do you see poetry as a moral or political act, or more as a spiritual counterweight?

HENRY

Money is the greatest delusion we collectively share. No one really understands it, do they? And yet we all pretend it makes perfect sense. And it gets stranger and stranger as capitalism marches forward. We make money for someone somewhere with every click or tap on our screens. Our data is either stolen or handed over willingly so that some criminal entity or corporation can monetize it. We’re taught to consume starting from infancy so that we continue to feed the beast, aka the economy. Even the holiest day of the year in this part of the world is centered on shopping. I would argue that money has infected every facet of contemporary society.

Poetry can be a moral or political act, but it doesn’t have to be. I think it’s always a spiritual counterweight simply by virtue of the fact that time we spend engrossed in poems (whether reading of writing) is time we spend away from corporate manipulation. Those moments are becoming increasingly rare.

KARAN

Then there’s “Ode to the Turtle,” which turns wry, almost fabulist with myth, anecdote, and joke folded into a meditation on endurance. Humor isn’t always something we expect in your work, but here it feels essential. What role does humor play in your writing life — as deflection, revelation, or maybe survival?

HENRY

Humor, I think, is a very useful tool, the kind of red meat Eliot talks about the poet using to distract the dog in order to rob the house. It’s also the greatest gift in life. It’s free for one thing. And it makes you feel good. On the other hand, humor is the child of trauma. That’s why there are so many Jewish comedians and comics. It is the healthiest coping mechanism I can think of.

KARAN

“Jonah” compresses an epic into a single breath: pure sound, repetition, confusion, prayer. It’s as if language itself is drowning and resurfacing. What draws you to the music of disorientation? And what’s your relationship to faith now, if faith means anything at all?

HENRY

The music of disorientation—I love that! There’s something so appealing about reading a poem by a master like Ashbery, not really understand what it’s “about”, yet still love the way we’re guided along on twists and turns that work both as linguistic gymnastics and as a kind of beautiful music. I’m no Ashbery, but sometimes I try to take my reader on a dance set to the music of disorientation. “Jonah” is an example of that. 

I wrote the poem because I love the metaphor. You can only really read it as metaphor, right? Even if you’re religious, you can’t possibly believe it. What does it mean to feel as if you’re inside of something that has swallowed you, and how is that different from swallowing oneself, and isn’t that really a metaphor for being spiritually lost, rudderless, which I suppose is related to faith, but not in a dogmatic sense. And I was having fun with the rhythm and something about it drew me to the earworm in Eliot’s “Fragment of an Agon”, where Sweeney goes on a rant about a man who may have killed a woman and he says, “He didn’t know if he was alive and the girl was dead/ He didn’t know if the girl was alive and he was dead” and something about the way Eliot reads that (there’s a wonderful recording of it in the public domain), the way he gets so drawn into the music in Sweeney’s mind that it borders on insanity (“Death or life or life or death/ Death is life and life is death”) infected the “Jonah” poem. I knew it had to end with a cry out to something greater than Jonah and the rhyming itself suggested the French.

KARAN

Your “Ars Poetica” is strikingly physical — “steel teeth dragging translucent lice.” It’s repulsive and beautiful in equal measure, a manifesto disguised as image. What does writing cost you physically or psychically? How do you know when a poem has taken enough? Or perhaps it’s not that dramatic?

HENRY

I don’t think it’s nearly that dramatic! I think of poetry as a humble vocation. Poetry doesn’t torture anyone, although tortured people often write poetry. Poetry, I think, is a way of making sense of what makes no sense and the older I get the more I realize that very little in this life makes sense. Of course, we construct intricate ways not to think about that, and perhaps that’s what makes poetry such an incredible (pun intended) medium. For a moment, while we’re writing it or reading it, things crystalize, become clear, we’ve created order out of chaos, but as a great poet once said, when the singing ends and we turn toward the town, it’s gone. Our brains cannot hold onto it, so we must again descend into the darkness of disorder with our little flashlight. Well, that does sound dramatic after all.

That said I am drawn (as many are) toward the intersection of repulsion and beauty. There’s something so truthful that happens when those two opposing mindsets meet. What I mean by truthful is that spark we feel inside when something takes on a profound ineffable significance. We feel it in music when a chord is struck that surprises and enchants us. We feel it when we contemplate artwork from Michelangelo to modern masters like de Kooning and Rothko. Is it awe? The sublime? Whatever it is, we experience it only briefly, but it feels so profound that we search it out wherever we can.

KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, though the answers are always wildly different: there’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes — poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all? And do you feel it shifting?

HENRY

Hmm, I’ve never thought of poetry that way. I suppose any good poem should have all these ingredients. Sort of like salt, fat, sugar, acid in cooking. If your writing comes from a genuine place, all these cardinal directions will likely be baked into nearly every line. At least that’s the kind of writing I’m drawn to. I have no patience for intellectual exercises on one hand or sentimental work on the other.

KARAN

What’s the best piece of advice — artistic, spiritual, or otherwise — that’s stayed with you across your years of writing and publishing? Or some you’d like to offer to emerging writers?

HENRY

Read, read, read. Read the masters. Start with Chaucer and work your way to living young contemporary writers. Don’t skip anyone because of their life choices, their sexuality, their gender, their biases, their fetishes or obsessions, even the most poorly behaved. Read them closely, read them carefully, learn everything you can from them. Steal what they do well. Keep digging up more. Collect poetic gems. Watch each gesture or turn. Only poets can teach poets how to write. Don’t get caught up in theory or rhetoric or what others write or say about poets and poetry.  

KARAN

Would you kindly offer our readers a poetry prompt — something strange, simple, or rigorous — to help them begin a new poem?

HENRY

I’m not big into prompts myself, but what I like to do if I’m “stuck” is to go to my bookshelves, randomly pick up a book of poetry and flip through the pages reading whatever passages come up. It might take a few books to get there, but eventually a word or a phrase will stick , and that’s enough to get you started.

KARAN

Please also recommend a piece of art — a film, a painting, a song (anything other than a poem) — that’s sustained you lately or that you wish everyone could sit with.

HENRY

A Serious Man (2009) by the Coen Brothers is an unsung masterpiece, especially for anyone with a poetic sensibility. It’s a movie about doubt and accepting doubt and holding onto doubt as its own form of truth. As humans we are uncomfortable living without answers. But in life there really are no answers. And that’s something that poetry captures really well. In every other aspect of life, the ineffable is avoided at every cost. Only in poetry is it celebrated.

I also recently saw Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece, Frankenstein, and found it profound. It speaks to so many things that are pertinent in poetry—most obviously the struggle to the death of creator and creation, master and apprentice, father and son. It is also full of ugliness and beauty and sometimes it is difficult to discern the difference.

KARAN

And finally, Henry, since we believe in studying masters’ masters — who are the poets, artists, or thinkers who’ve most shaped your sense of what’s possible in language?

HENRY

I’ve alluded to a few of them already: Eliot, Stevens, and Ashbery. From the modernists, I would add Yeats, Bishop, and Plath. If I go back further, Shakespeare, Keats, and Donne. Of more recent past poets: Charles Wright, James Merrill, WS Merwin, Pablo Neruda, Louise Glück, Charles Simic, James Tate, CK Williams, Gerald Stern. Among living poets, I love Diane Seuss, Patricia Smith, Frederick Siedel, Bob Hicock, Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Amy Gerstler, Mary Rufle, John Murillo. These are just a few. I could list hundreds who have written poems that have blown me away.

Sadly, I am not very familiar with contemporary visual artists,but I have definitely been influenced by the modernist masters. Some of my poems reference their work directly: Duchamp, Motherwell, Chagall, Magritte, Rothko. Other poems incorporate their work in spirit.