Thank you so much for being our guest. We are so honored and excited about this issue.
OBR: Do you remember when you first knew you wanted to be a poet and who most inspired you during those early years?
Baker: I started writing seriously as an undergraduate English major at
It’s not so much that I wanted to be a poet, though, than that I wanted to write poems. Bob got me involved in teaching poetry to public school students, and he got me involved in the American Poets Series at the Jewish Community Center in
OBR: Of all of your poetry collections, which is your personal favorite and why?
Baker: I have no idea. Which is my favorite toe? I’m attached to them all, and they to me.
I guess my brand-new book, Never-Ending Birds, is the closest to me. It’s been something of a sea change of a book, gathering the first poems I have written since my divorce; the poems are underwritten by that fundamental circumstance, by the turmoil and heartache of such a loss. But each book is important to me. I learned something new in each, and I hope each one has its own pleasures or at least its own personality.
I still like the lyrical intensity and formal compression of poems in After the Reunion; and I think my biggest advance came with Changeable Thunder, when I started to deal more fully with historical influence and historical narratives. My voice and style changed with that book in some important ways. I had been extremely ill in the mid-90s, stricken with something called Chronic Fatigue/Immune Deficiency Syndrome, and when I started to recover, and write again, the work changed. I had changed.
OBR: Please tell us about your new collection and how is it unique compared to your previous collections?
Baker: Well, as I said, it’s a book about separation and divorce. It’s also about living in a new world. I have done a lot of reading and teaching in the fields of early American literature and naturalist writing, and I think this book is a kind of exploration narrative. To go to a new place—emotionally as well as physically—to report on the discoveries and perils and beauties to be found there.
During the last five years of my marriage, we lived on a ten-acre place in the country, and that land and landscape became really important to me. I took care of trees, and cut walking paths out of rather impassable undergrowth, and dredged a creek, and planted a mini-orchard, and more. I have always been connected to land, to place, to the animals and plants that grow on a place, but nowhere has been more fundamental to me than that place. Many of these new poems are about the custody and loss of—and sustaining connection to—the place and the life there. And of course the place was our home, where we made a family as we made a garden. I am still close to my ex-wife, Ann, and I still go every week to those acres to work and walk.
OBR: Where do you find the time to write with teaching and editing a literary magazine?
Baker: I don’t know. It’s never comfortable. Whatever I’m doing, I am aware of the zillion other things I am not doing. I’m pretty good at organizing time, though, and when I turn to a task, I tend to focus on it and then move to the next. I appreciate summers and long weekends and holidays, and sometimes even during the mania of a semester I am able to write poems. Sometimes not. In the good times, teaching and editing and reading and writing all feed each other. Other times, of course, each thing just gets in the way of everything else. I guess I feel lucky to have found those vocations—teacher, editor, writer—and they feel less like work than sustaining commitment.
OBR: You have had students go on to become very successful poets and writers. (Editor of Paris Review and Slate and author of Halflife, Meghan O’Rourke, comes to mind.) What do you think is the most important thing a writing teacher can instill in their students?
Baker: I have been so lucky to have so many gifted students, at
The most important thing we can give our poetry-writing students is time and attention. Our serious attention, our genuine interest. And hope. We can instill in them a sense of history and connection, and at the same time, we may be able to help them to find, in themselves, a distinct and original imagination. Being a poet is not about competing. It is about joining a vast, ever-changing conversation among poets and poems.
OBR: With all of the many literary magazines out there, what do you think is the main reason for the success and popularity of the Kenyon Review?
Baker: The Kenyon Review is seventy years old. Isn’t that amazing? All along the editors of the magazine have been remarkably devoted to excellence, to finding the truly distinctive work of the day. Each editor has had his or her specialties, and each subsequent editor has been able to build on the achievements of the previous. But the success of the Review is due to the contributors, mostly, to the people who read us and submit their best work. People hold the magazine in high esteem, and they typically give us their very best in turn. We try to stay very active in sniffing out great new emerging voices and talents. David Lynn, who has been the Editor now for fifteen years, is also an incredibly gifted leader and administrator. He’s just as savvy about finances, fund-raising, and public awareness as he is about literary judgment and vision.
OBR: Would you please tell us a little bit about your creative process?
Baker: I write slowly. I read, stew, think, rehearse. I often have many lines of a new poem by heart before I ever write it down. I live with a poem, and wait until I have more than that first good idea or phrase; I wait until I have a deeper sense of the poem, or story, or music in my head. Then I write hard and long, and rewrite hard and long. There’s no hurry, is there? I tend to write in the quiet and solitude, though I can revise just about anywhere; and I do compose mostly on the computer. As I start a new poem, I look for a line, a form, and listen for a quality of music—a pitch, a tone, a chordal progression—and wait for all of those shifting aspects to come into sync. Sometimes they do.
OBR: Who are your favorite contemporary poets today and what do you typically like to read?
Baker: I like so many people for so many reasons. I do think that W. S. Merwin is the greatest living American poet, a truly great poet. But I try to read very widely. Currently some of the books of poetry at my desk are by Fady Joudah, John Koethe, Alice Notley, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Emily Wilson, G. C. Waldrep. Oh, and that fellow Hopkins. I try to read with openness and listen and learn. I try not to affiliate my writing or my reading with a school or camp or clique or group or gang. I read the dead, over and over, Whitman and Dickinson, Keats, Edward Taylor, Millay, Issa, everyone. Often I think the issue is about the poems, not the poets, right?
OBR: What is the single most important piece of advice you could give to up and coming young writers today?
Baker: Read everything. Don’t worry about trying to find your “voice.” Poetry is not a career.
If there is no crying in baseball, then there is no hurry in poetry.
Okay, that’s more than one thing.
OBR: What is your definition of “good poetry”?
Baker: The authentic.
OBR: Love that David!!! Thank you so much for hanging out with us.
For some of David's breath-taking poetry and for ordering information regarding his new book, Never-Ending Birds, read on...