HoboEye Q&A:
Sidney Hall, Jr., New Hampshire

McInnis: Reading through your new book "Fumbling in the Light," I'm captured by an abiding playfulness in your poems, a freedom with humor and light-heartedness that creates an intimacy with the reader. How does a sense of humor factor into your work?

Hall: You are right that I cultivate a sense of humor and lightness in my poems. While the poems are ultimately serious, I want them to have a feeling of a certain kind of clear light, or lightness. I think both of the words 'play' and 'light' contain multiple meanings that are important to poetry. But I'm not looking for playfulness in the Ogden Nash sense. I'm looking for the same kind of surprise as him, perhaps, but surprise about the bigger things, things that can change our lives.

My father, who died when he was 67, had the best sense of humor of anyone I've known personally. At his funeral, one of my cousins said, 'It was like having a cross between Woody Allen and Danny Kaye for an uncle." So I grew up with a sense of humor and a sense of irony, and also grew up believing my father's maxim that you can lose everything you have as long as you don't lose a sense of humor. That might sound like a cliché to some, but I think it's also deeply true.

Humor has both a strong imaginative component and a strong emotional component. While it frees the mind to imagine, it also frees the heart and makes it more open. When I give a poetry reading, I usually try to intersperse more overtly humorous poems with more subtly humorous ones. I find that the audience opens up both imaginatively and emotionally, to both me and to my poems, as they experience this. So humor is not only intrinsic to the thought in my poems, but it's also a very useful tool.

Comedians often remark that it is precisely because they see the tragedy of life that they need to face it with humor, and this is probably true for poets as well. It seems all great poetry has some level of humor in it. Even very serious poems achieve their ends by playing.

McInnis: Your distinctions were spot on, I thought. I'm skeptical of so-called serious people who eschew humor. And in poetry as well. I think of that essay from Charles Simic, "Cut the Comedy," when he talks about getting hissed at for laughing during the opening scene of Krapp's Last Tape. The idea that laughter is alien in front of serious art.

Rubbish, I say. Since you mentioned Woody Allen, I'll have to invoke one of his lines from Stardust Memories, when his character gets to ask the space aliens about the meaning of life and how he can help the world. "You wanna help the world, tell funnier jokes!" Something to that.

There's an essential rebelliousness to humor, too, don't you think?

Hall: I agree, there really is an essential rebelliousness to humor and that is another reason it works in poetry. Like poetry itself, it's subversive. You might want to take a look at my essay, "The Poem as a Marble."

McInnis: In your essay "The Poem as a Marble," you playfully translate the basic why and how of reading poetry. I think we all understand the difficulties behind selling poetry. There's an ongoing debate among poets, of course, about the difference between clarity and a compromising lack of mystery in poetry. Billy Collins is one of the poets most often referenced as clear to the point of pandering. The poet other poets love to hate, citing his commanding fees as evidence of his supposed pandering. What's the difference between clarity and compromising the mystery in your poems?

Hall: I am very fond of Valery's phrase, "There is nothing so mysterious as clarity." So I don't think it's right to make too much of a distinction between clarity and mystery. I aim for a high degree of clarity in my poems. I want the poems to be as real as reality. But the poems with the most clarity are also the poems with the most mystery for me, and ultimately poetry is all about mystery. Philosophers can try to reckon with mystery. Poets live in it and want it to survive.

When I think of the term 'clarity,' it reminds me of Pound's phrase, "Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoklean light."

However, there probably are poems that are all clarity and no mystery. They have what Robert Frost called something like the "dull tone of the plain statement," and he mentioned how many books are getting filled with it. I don't think I can judge whether Billy Collins falls into this category. I don't hold his clarity against him. I think it's admirable. But then we have to judge whether the poems have lasting value and explore mystery.

There are also poems that are all mystery and no clarity. They can be important poems, but I tend to suspect them when there is no point of clarity. It's the reader's job to try to sense whether it's worth digging for the ore. When it is, we are in the realm of revelation.

No poet should seek either clarity or mystery with the goal of selling poetry. It's nice to make money with poetry but it is not poetry's job to do that. Every poem has a purpose of its own and wants to take us there no matter how much we resist or try to please ourselves or others by going in another direction. When the poem goes where it has to go, it is a success, and sometimes the reading public wants to go there too and sometimes it doesn't. I think perhaps the true test of a poem is whether you can read it a hundred times or more and still not feel like you have understood the mystery, even when clarity is no longer an issue.


The Union Bluff Hotel

Outside the Union Bluff Hotel
the kitchen staff is taking a cigarette break
just as I pass on the sidewalk.

“I was far too nice,”
a woman says, and then another,
“Me too, I was far too nice in my first marriage,
I let him have everything.”

Like some ignorant tourist,
I smile in their direction
as though I am listening in on a joke.

But they don’t smile, two women
and a man, they just
keep smoking and talking.

Poem courtesy of Hobblebush Books and the author. All rights reserved.

Purchase "Fumbling in the Light" online >


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