The Conversation: with Ancci

This conversation is about poetry and criticism—literature. Nothing more.

First of All:

During the course of a Paris Review Writers at Work interview, the English novelist Kingsley Amis was asked about 20th century writers that influenced him. He mentioned some names (Robert Frost, A. E. Houseman, Robert Graves, etc.) and said this: “It’s not a complete list—in fact I was once worried by this, that I couldn’t name more than a dozen admired contemporaries. But I mentioned it to Robert Graves, and he said, ‘Nonsense. You ought to be concerned if you admire more than that number. It shows you have no discrimination.’ Which is a good point!”

I make no secret of it. I am not sure that I admire, truly and completely, up to half-a-dozen of my contemporaries. I enjoy some of the things they write and I am glad for their successes. But my admiration for poets or critics of my generation (the latter are very few) is highly exclusive.

One of those I have high regard for is Ancci. The first time I met him in Ibadan, I wrote down an entry about it in my journal. Here is a glimpse of what I said: “He is a lovely fellow. Very humble and generous (in the way he spends his being) person. He has low but urgent eyes (if that makes sense). His under-lip was chapped (the harmattan). He wore this many-color shirt and brown trousers and a pair of “palms.” He told me he saw a list he wrote about his plans for 2024 recently. He planned to write 12 essays. He has written and published more than that.”

That is just a brief excerpt. I put it down because I am certain that the future will need it. I met him in December 2024. A few months before, in October, I wrote this: “I just got off a call with Ancci, the brilliant critic. We are about to enter great times in this country, as a people of literary culture. This young man is commenting on contemporary Nigerian culture in a serious way. . . That is how one creates “an intelligent public” (to take F. R. Leavis’s phrase), even if that public is not as large as the word would suggest. The deal is to have something, to have a select amount of people who care to look at literature dispassionately, or nearly so; who can agree that what they like may not be good and what is good may not be what they like, but who do not make the terrible mistake of thinking that what is good is equal to what they like (or vice versa).”

I consider Ancci Nigeria’s most important literary critic: He writes for The Republic and Afapinen and has had words printed in The Cleveland Review of Books, among other prestigious places. He won the E. E. SULE/SEVHAGE Prize for African Literary Criticism in 2023.

I think I have said enough to communicate how much respect I have for the man. But let me add a word or two about this conversation. I call it “The Conversation,” because it is exactly that: the Conversation. It began as an email conversation and has taken us months. And I am glad it took that long. I see talks with / between writers all the time. I read them and I find that my time has been spent to no end: people string words together making no sense. This one has range and it has focus and it is worth more than ten or twenty that play at being its kind on the internet, because, as I have said, Ancci’s mind has very few peers (not only in Nigeria but on the continent).

Happy reading.

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Ernest: My brother. Apologies for taking so long to respond to your last email. Thank you for the poems you shared. I admire Japanese poetry for its wit and sharpness. It is like Greek poetry in a number of ways. That lively short stroke with an acute resonance. Kenneth Rexroth translated some of them. Arabic poetry (Ghalib and Hafiz come to mind) has that feel as well (a serious refusal to be serious), though the Arabic poets wrote longer poems. I return to Rumi often (a Nigerian poet carried my collected Rumi away and I am still hurt by it). Recently returned to “A Great Wagon.” I was invited by those famous words (though not understood by many): “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, / there is a field. / I will meet you there.” The passage is very easy to misunderstand, as I had myself: He is not negating morality, he is saying that the “ideas” of what is right or not are not equal to action. Talking about goodness is not the same as practising goodness. Rumi is calling one, it seems, to the field of action. What is that field? I essay it is the field of love. (In Christianity, love is the action that matters. Any fish not cooked with love is not worth eating.)

So much on Rumi. Again, I am thinking about how poetry—a human voice (Rumi’s for example)—traverses time. Echoes down the long arc of time. It is interesting because in my first email to you I had suggested that “art is our way of resisting decay. But what use, one wonders, what use is a new translation of Nietzsche to Nietzsche? Who sells newspapers in Hades to give such news?”

You answered (and I must quote the entire paragraph): “And yes, you are right to wonder if art is some sort of resistance to death because it is. Coincidentally, before I went offline some seven or eight days ago, the last thing I talked about with one of my course mates is how the reality of death—or its inevitability—provides the solid substrate for the intrinsic value we ascribe to the arts. In the message, I believe I said art would not have had the same or as much value to us, if at all, if we are deathless. If we think about it enough, poetry, music, storytelling, and the visual arts are our own way of attending disappointment on death, our way of avenging our congenital helplessness at the face of death. The ultimate ambition, pronounced or unpronounced, of any artist that knows what he is doing is the chance at attaining immortality, however hopeless and ridiculous that might sound. Death is too hard—or too ridiculous itself—for the human mind to accept lying down, without a fight.”

“Death is too hard—or too ridiculous itself—for the human mind to accept lying down, without a fight.”

Immortality seems too big a word for me. I don’t look to poetry for immortality; I look to Christ for that. I would say I want to make art not as a way to “avenge [my] congenital helplessness at the face of death” (which I think is a great phrase: I love your phrases, Ancci (those in your review of Adam are exceptionally good)). No. I don’t and won’t feel helpless in the face of death. However, I have a desire to have my work “remain” or “endure” (the way they are used in the KJV Bible), which ties into the idea of “resistance,” I want my work to exist in a struggle against decay. For me, the success of any artistic endeavour is in its pull factor.

There is an editorial by Christian Wiman that I like, “In Praise of Rareness,” where he suggested that critics cannot hope to be “immortal” (to use your word) through their work. You have published poetry in the past and you recently shared one you wrote four years ago with me, but I would describe you as a “Professional Critic” (in T. S. Eliot’s categorization of critics). Eliot defined this kind of critic as “the writer whose literary criticism is his chief, perhaps his only title to fame.” Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom and Christopher Ricks fall here. I know you like Bloom, but do you see yourself here? And, to bring back Wiman’s idea, do you think it is possible to survive through the writing of criticism? Have you given thought to the subject?

Ancci: Thank you, brother, for starting the conversation and the kind words.

That’s a brilliant reading of that stanza in Rumi’s poem, and now I see no finer, or even other, way to read those lines than that. Although I think saying the previous readers, including a less experienced yourself, misunderstood the line has in its pocket a notion or implication about criticism or reading I’d rather wish not brought out: a suggestion that criticism can be a science—that is, that we can arrive at a perfect reading, a reading that gets at the intended meaning of the poet. For instance, when you ‘essay’ the field to be of love, the verb itself has given off a scent of uncertainty, which is the mark of a true critic for two simple reasons: being assertive with the reading while at the same time holding the poem as the ultimate site of its own perfect meaning—that it knows more than you do as a critic. Although there are some readings about a line, a stanza, or a whole poem that totally miss the point, it is often the case that they miss the point because of some defects in experience or some accidents of ideological affiliation. (For instance, I would say your being a Christian helps you in giving us a more robust interpretation of the lines because love is central to your belief and if anything is beyond “ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,” it is not only reasonable, but expected that you think that thing is love because love is amoral: it is something human and definitional, something expected of us.)

In addition, literature is not written by formula, so reading it also by formula is in essence impossible. I will say, however, that there are simple, simplistic, and even slapdash readings, which I take the readings you are trying to modify to be, but it is often their being simple, simplistic, and even slapdash that sometimes allow us to arrive at a much finer reading: if a perfect reading were possible, what point, if not one annealed by arrogance, would we still have writing about Shakespeare, Dante, and Yeats now after some centuries of fine, perhaps even insurmountable, readings of their works? So instead of seeing those readings as misunderstandings, through which we are at the risk of thinking no one has ever thought or thought right before we come to the scene, we should see them as steps, to use the form of Giannis Antetokounmpo’s phrasing in that infamous after-game interview, towards a more refined reading.

Oh, I love Bloom, particularly because there is no reading him without becoming the kind of reader you need to be to earn the name you wish to be called as a critic, which is serious. As a reader of literature, he is the standard for me. But even he was not of the notion that he could survive through his criticism. I remember him writing throughout his criticism and agreeing when his interviewer for Five Books, Eve Gerber, says he has always observed that criticism has a short shelf life. It is more than an observation but indeed a truism that criticism does have a short shelf life. And while Bloom’s critical cenacle of exception to this fact that includes such formidable critics like Dr. Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, and Walter Pater might seem obvious enough exceptions to you and me because, well, they are the critics to read for a strong critical foundation in the tradition, especially as an aesthete, we still have nothing to do about the truth that there are nonetheless hardcore common readers in the true Johnsonian and Woolfian sense that have never read a single essay of criticism from these critics who are to us, common but “professional” readers as you mentioned Eliot categorizes me, indispensable. Writing criticism, for me, is as necessary as eating food and drinking water until it ceases to be so. And to answer your question, it seems counterintuitive to be worried about surviving or being immortal (both of which I think ultimately translate to the same thing, by the way) doing this necessary activity. It is simply pointless as it is pointless—and even farcical—wanting to be immortal for drinking water and eating beans.

“Literature is not written by formula, so reading it also by formula is in essence impossible.”

This kind of ambition is also pointless because you don’t have any hope of being disappointed or rewarded when you fail or succeed to survive because you are dead. So, what is the point? What is the point of worrying about something that neither promises you pain nor pleasure like death, as opposed to dying, itself? Although not particularly relevant to the whole point of wanting to survive or become immortal but stringently relevant to the concept of ambition, the ending of Joseph Fasano’s “For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper” is everything from frank to apposite about how I think about my relationship to doing criticism: “Love is for the ones who love the work.” Love is indeed for those who love the work that love requires, so I love the work and want to do it well, but definitely not to the extent of being troubled or preoccupied with the thought of whether I will be remembered for it or not. That criticism has a short shelf life, again, is a truism. So, if I were doing criticism to be remembered, the premise of that statement in fact would have discouraged and even chased me away to do something else. And I know it to be a truism because Taylor Coleridge comes to us not as a critic, as fine a critic as he was, but as a poet. (I have read through “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” more times than I have been moved by the ecumenical brilliance of Biographia Literaria to leaf through two of its many chapters in a sitting.) Also, I only know the great Sainte-Beuve wrote some of the most brilliant criticisms ever written because reading criticism is an important part of my work. Therefore, gaining immortality through criticism is relative: a critic can only have a hope of surviving or becoming immortal among his peers in the coming generations. My work is to push myself to do the best that is possible. The rest is best left to time, the great assessor.

Ernest: I do not believe criticism to be a science but I believe there are correct and incorrect readings of works of art. There can be two different correct readings of a poem: since one can look at a piece of poetry from more than one angle. In that case, it is usually a matter of emphasis rather than of correct judgement. I do agree with you that “the poem [is] the ultimate site of its own perfect meaning—that it knows more than [I] do as a critic.” Without a doubt. A bad critical writing is primarily bad because it refuses to seek out what the poem itself means. If we agree that the poem contains its own meaning (and that that meaning can be described but never replicated as a living thing as it is in the poem), we must as critics seek out that meaning. Much of Marxist criticism is bad criticism for this reason, it ignores the work of art. It assumes that it can read into a piece something that is not there. Language is a tool for communicating; much as poetry reclaims the ontological aspect of language, poetry does not ignore the functional facility of language.

Whatever reason we ascribe to bad criticism, I think it is fundamentally a moral problem. It is a problem of impatience with the art. I like Kafka’s Zürau Aphorisms very much. One of the aphorisms reads: “All human errors stem from impatience, a premature breaking off of a methodical approach, an ostensible pinning down of an ostensible object.” That is a moral problem and is not simply “naive.” A man who drove impatiently (or carelessly) and got a child killed would not be considered naive. He would go to jail. I don’t like putting the failure of judgement down simply to stupidity. Every failure is a serious failure. It can be ignored, but we must take what people do seriously, including the way they read literature.

That said, I don’t believe in a “perfect reading” of any piece of literature (unless you are using “perfect” metaphorically, as with Eliot being called “the perfect critic”). I believe in a precise reading. It may be impossible to be perfect, but it is very possible to be precise. All that is required is a lot of learning and a lot of patience and, as you note, plenty of love for the thing.

I like to use a tentative tone at times in discussing works of art (“I essay”). But when I wrote that about the Rumi poem, I was aware of Rumi’s belief as expressed in his oeuvre. Rumi was a Sufi poet and love was central to his thinking, his poetic thought. The world was a-brim with the love of God for him. Even more, Rumi consistently sampled the gospels. In fact, later in the same poem I quoted from, he writes, “I would love to kiss you. / The price of kissing is your life. // Now my loving is running toward my life shouting, / What a bargain, let’s buy it.” That is a summary of the gospels right there and those four lines are burning with love, with awe (awe and love are inextricable for the Sufi poet). So, my essaying is rooted in what I know of Rumi’s work and thinking, if inflected by my own life. I mentioned my faith but in brackets; it is distinct from my essaying. I mentioned it as a whisper to a friend.

“Whatever reason we ascribe to bad criticism, I think it is fundamentally a moral problem. It is a problem of impatience with the art.”

You say criticism is for you like drinking water or eating. Randall Jarrell told a story in A Sad Heart at the Supermarket, the first words in the book: “The philosopher Diogenes lived in a tub in the market place. He owned the clothes on his back and a wooden cup; one morning, when he saw a man drinking out of his hands, he threw away the cup.” William Logan said Diogenes had been mistaken: He should never have thrown his bowl away. The bowl is criticism and water is poetry. Surely you could drink poetry straight with your hands (without involving your mind and discriminating). However, a bowl makes it a lot easier to drink, and, I suspect (though Logan does not make this point), there is an element of culture, of civilization, in drinking with a bowl. Is criticism inevitable? It depends on who you are asking. For the critic, it is not. Bill Logan said the critic cannot but criticise.

I asked this question in Ibadan: What do you think criticism is? And, close to that: How do you feel about “contemporary Nigerian criticism”?

Ancci: Yes: hasty reading often makes for an incorrect reading. Also, reading a writer holistically does condition how one reads a particular piece as your reading of Rumi’s other works conditioned your reading of “A Great Wagon” and essentially made it better. I know this improves the critical intelligence, but do you think it is necessary for a critic to read the whole body of a writer’s work to write about a single piece of his work intelligently? Is reading the whole oeuvre a necessity rather than an instance of a critic just going a bit further in his practice?

You asked whether criticism is indispensable. For me, it is. But first Clive James in “These Staggering Questions” has this to say: “Criticism is not indispensable to art. It is indispensable to civilization—a more inclusive thing. When Pushkin lamented the absence of criticism in Russia, he wasn’t begging for assistance in writing poems. He wanted to write them in a civilized country.” Here James’s understanding of criticism is limited not only to written criticism but also to corrective criticism, both of which criticism, in its purest sense, is much more than. Generally speaking, I think criticism is inevitable because it is essentially a reaction. And as you said, poetry or anything else would not have been as enjoyable without the criticism of it. Even the reader that simply reads a poem without writing about it is still doing criticism when he is moved enough to talk about it with someone else, and we do that more often than we write about what we read. Talking about literature in an informal setting is an instance of criticism. This is what I believe: the joy of literature is finalised in criticism, especially in this broader sense that includes sharing our reading experience as much through casual conversation as in writing.

“When Pushkin lamented the absence of criticism in Russia, he wasn’t begging for assistance in writing poems. He wanted to write them in a civilized country,” Clive James.

You also asked what criticism is for me. For me, criticism is nothing but a well-made argument. However, the well-made argument in the case of literary criticism has to be, if only at the end of reading it, apparent because, as we keep saying, the literary work is at the end of the day the site of its own perfect meaning. A critic might not be able to get to that perfect meaning but has to get close enough in his argument. Inside that argument is a clear statement of judgement whether the literary work is good or bad, which I think, as you reminded me in Ibadan, is as redolent of serious, authoritative criticism as breathing is of nose.

However, the critical tasks only start with judgement, it doesn’t end with it. This reminds me of that marvelous beginning to Clive James’s “Rough Guides to Shakespeare,” which weirdly enough is one of my least favourite of his essays: “Alan Yentob says that Leonardo da Vinci is a great artist. Michael Wood says that Shakespeare is a great playwright. There is nothing remarkable about saying these things, even on BBC1. All depends on how they are said.” There is nothing remarkable about judgement because judgement can also be made by fools, which does not preclude its necessity to criticism. What is remarkable that is equidistant to fools and thinkers alike is critical intelligence arrested often by the latter through their power of patience and command of description, both of which feed into the most important skill of any critic: the ability to make a case for the judgement so made. Judgement is both easy and difficult to make after the text, and the text can’t be known as it is judged until the critic has defended his judgement as a logician would his philosophical position. Meanwhile, even judgement can be disregarded in our discussion of what criticism is because judgement is expected to feature in the realization of any good criticism because it is the literary allotrope of a refined or deliberate language. Leaving the discussion of judgement out because it is a necessity, I thus believe the first task of the literary critic is the same as the first task of the art critic, which is to describe the artefact to be so criticized. A critic must be able to describe the artefact as clearly and intelligently as possible. It is out of this description that everything else we can describe a critic or a piece of criticism as being emerges.

Criticism is also, for me, a way of educating myself in public. This public self-education Frank Kermode “take[s] to be the reviewer’s privilege” in his introduction to Pleasing Myself. For instance, there are many books whose lessons I would not have been able to remember if I didn’t try to write about them. The reason for this is simple for someone who wants to see in what ways to contribute to the existing conversation about literature: the responsibility of evaluation of any artefact comes with the risk of a preventable failure or shame (which goes back to our discussion on how impatience often contributes to incorrect readings of texts). And that failure or shame can only be prevented, in my case as a literary critic, by reading the text as closely as possible, thinking about it as hard as possible, and coming up with as logical an explanation for my judgement as possible. In the best of the critics I have read and loved, there is an element of self-education in the art of writing criticism: I feel there is nothing such as critical expertise because critical intelligence and competence are earned incidentally—in the sense that what they write is incidental prose, that is, their work as critics is presupposed by other works. However, the real trick or talent is to show the duo of critical intelligence and competence anyhow but incidentally: the trick is to write the incidental prose in a way that the reader experiences both qualities with a consistency that can be notched up easily to noetic as well as stylistic discipline. Criticism, for me, is a continuous art because critical intelligence is cultivated in installments, on occasions.

“Criticism, for me, is a continuous art because critical intelligence is cultivated in installments, on occasions.”

I feel great about Nigerian criticism.

You have often put forth the argument that a serious and ambitious poet has no business reading his contemporaries? Why do you think that is harmful, if at all? What particularly is there to gain by reading the past, whose fashions and styles are no longer in vogue? Can we apply that to fiction and non-fiction writers as well?

Ernest: I like the idea that the writing of criticism is a form of self-education. For sure, one realizes how little one knows about literature when one starts out writing about it, one sees the ground that needs to be covered; and, because work has to be done, a certain urgency attends the whole thing.

It depends on the critic and on what he wants to write about. But knowing the work of the author you intend to write about (“knowing,” meaning: having real familiarity with the work) helps the critic to mark out his spot in the poet’s county or country; allows him to define and pursue his aim very clearly. It’s also a good thing if one intends to trace the development of an artist. Or if one intends to weigh a new book in light of the ones that came before by the hand of the same poet or writer. But, ultimately, the thing is to know the best of the best literature in and out, to have what I have called “real familiarity” with great literature. I don’t think anyone who has not read and who does not love great books—anyone who has not become intimate with solid literature, first in the tradition in which he intends to work—can write good criticism.

To answer your last question: a poet writing in the English language has to read widely and deeply in the English tradition for the following reasons.

One, the young poet is just beginning to find his way. He has no taste and has no sense of discrimination. He needs to cultivate taste and a sense of discrimination, he needs to learn to love the right things. Yes? If he goes into the field of contemporary poetry and decides to cultivate taste there, he will hurt his art very badly. Remember that this person cannot yet know what is good or not, he has no good eyes, has not grown a moustache of fine sense. Also, the contemporary poetic landscape has not been justly criticised: not by human hands but by the greatest of critics, Time itself. It’s a different case with the past: here, the great critic called Time has sifted, has left us the best of the best and the considerably good among the lot. It is wiser for a person who has no sight to go into that field to cultivate it.

“I would rather crouch next to Shakespeare than stand next to Mary Oliver.”

The second reason follows from that. It is a matter of ambition. I want to be a great poet; to do that I won’t go and apprentice under the fairly good poets, I will go to the masters: Shakespeare, John Milton, Donne, George Herbert, Pope, Keats, Eliot, Geoffrey Hill. The quality of the poet’s ambition will determine whom he goes to. When Kobe Bryant wanted to become a great basketball player, he went to the best of the best to ask them questions. And he outdid his heroes—I think he outdid Michael Jordan. If I don’t outdo Shakespeare (who can?), let me touch the hem of his garment. I would rather crouch next to Shakespeare than stand next to Mary Oliver.

The third point follows from that. Many of those writing today don’t realize that when the 23rd century comes around: Ernest Ogunyemi and Carl Philips, Christian Wiman and Ishion Hutchinson, Romeo Oriogun and Kwame Dawes, and Tade Ipadeola and Ilya Kaminsky (etc, etc): we will all be considered poets of the 21st century. Time narrows the farther you are from it. All the poets now living are going to be contemporaries to future readers. When I read Philip Larkin’s The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, Dylan Thomas, who was born 74 years after Thomas Hardy, is in my mind a contemporary of Hardy. He is, they are in the same book.

That’s why I can’t go copying Carl Philips or Christian Wiman. I can take a lesson or two from them but I cannot take the bulk of my learning from them. I may happen to write fairly good poems by imitating them, but it would never exceed the limit that they have reached in their art. And since my work, made on the example of their work, would not reach beyond their achievement, when the future comes around, my work would be relegated behind theirs. I tell you, the future will be ruthless. It is why writing one original poem is better than imitating everybody and writing the same poems again and again. The future has no empathy.

Fourth, it is also a case of allowing for a more diverse reading experience for future readers. If the future is going to consider every poet writing from around 2000 to the end of this century as contemporaries: well, I better stake out a place of my own for the benefit of those readers, and others better do the same, so that when future readers open, say, The “Idi-Agbon” Book of 21st Century Nigerian Poetry, they find that the poems do not all read like lazy sex, are not all clamoring about Gaza, making needless talk about what happened to their mother or their heads.

Lastly, it is easier to steal from the past, and it is more lucrative. Way more lucrative. Steal from a contemporary and it is plagiarism. Steal from Keats and it is learning.

“I think a poet has to swim against the tide of his times—and retain something of those times while at it.”

Does this apply to fiction and nonfiction? Well, I cannot say. But the last good novel I read was Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, and John Ruskin is still the greatest prose writer in the English language. I think one may learn a thing or two from contemporary prose writers (I enjoy John Updike), but, from my little reading, nineteenth century English prose reads way better than 20th century prose.

You said something about the style of Shakespeare no longer being “in vogue.” That is exactly why it is great. It was never in vogue and it will never be in vogue. As Ben Jonson said in his elegy for Shakespeare, “He was not of an age but for all time!” Great poetry has the urgency of blood, however old. I never want to write poems that are “in vogue,” especially with that echo—Vogue magazine. Poets who write in step with what’s “in fashion” have their reward. I think a poet has to swim against the tide of his times—and retain something of those times while at it; but he is no friend of the trends of his age. He would be doomed if he tried to be.

What is currently on your table? What are you reading? I am close to the sea and thinking of rereading The Odyssey. I am reading Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne. It’s an odd read for me but I am learning new words and some of the bits of true stories are moving. I read Robert Frost’s first three books recently, Early Poems. I probably find more bread in Frost than in Eliot (late Eliot is not so good, man: too preachy, no pitch?) and I wish someone would send me Adam Plunkett’s new biography of him, Love and Need. I finished Peter Levi’s biography of Tennyson a while ago.

Ancci: I recently finished reading African Urban Echoes, an anthology on African urban cities edited by Jide Salawu and Rasaq Malik Gbolahan. Also, I am making my way through Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel, and I am always reading my way through Clive James’s oeuvre: going to sleep with The Meaning of Recognition at the moment. Although every collection by James contains more memorable essays than one might expect, “Criticism a la Kermode” and “Primo Levi and the Painted Veil” stand out as the prize essays of this volume so far.

I remember the first time you came to visit me in Ibadan we read from memory two of Wallace Stevens’s poems, namely “The Snow Man” and “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.” I have been thinking about the importance of memorability to poetry. Do you think memorability—in the sense of writing a poem in a way that makes it easier to be memorised like Trumbull Stickney’s “Mnemosyne” and Stevens’s shorter poems, for instance—is or should be fundamental to the writing of poetry? And is memorability something you think about when writing your poems? Also, does the ease with which one can commit a poem to memory, like most of Shakespeare’s sonnets, contribute to its value, to its poetic quality, even, especially since memorability is often accomplished through technique?

Ernest: A poem does not have to be easy to memorize for it to be valuable, but a poem’s “music has to remain in the ear” (to paraphrase Ezra Pound). This is the case with Stevens’s shorter poems and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Any seriously good poem has that quality, even with the work of a poet like Geoffrey Hill that looks tough, as if wrought in stone.

“The ear is the rarest thing in poetry,” Christian Wiman.

Was it David Jones that said something about the shape that words cast on the ear? I can’t remember now. But, yes, a poem has to cast a shape on the ear. Like water poured out on the dust, it has to leave a pattern, a trace of the path it took.

Certainly. This quality makes it easy to commit a poem to memory. For instance, the poems by Christian Wiman that I know by heart, I did not memorize them. I read them again and again and the music of the words just stayed with me. It has taken years in some cases, with “All My Friends” for example.

One of the sad things about contemporary poetry is how inert it is musically. Anne Stevenson, in an essay for Poetry, describes the language of contemporary poems as similar to lab-manufactured vegetables. A poet writes to move that inertia—as Hill said somewhere.

But, as Christian Wiman once said to me, “the ear is the rarest thing in poetry.” He added that it is hard to find any poet “whose work has survived that is not marked by some singular feeling for language.” You think of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or the poets that Edgar Allan Poe quotes in his “The Poetic Principle.” Nobody reads them now.

The inertia of contemporary language will become a part of the inertia of history. Any poet who is not writing against that inertia will have his work become part of the dead past.

What are you working on? Or, more to the point, what is one major project you would love to write (a critical project)?

Ancci: I agree. Robert Frost’s “The Silken Tent,” which James Parker of The Atlantic considers “a card-carrying bad poem” on account of its syntactic difficulty, is one of those valuable poems that are not so easy to memorize. But it’s obvious Parker is not patient enough with the poem to flesh out why its weird syntax, if a bit anachronistic for modernism, is not “icky,” but an attempt towards the arrest of the sublime through the technical unfamiliar. Memorability does save us time as well as excuse our aesthetic prejudices; and despite how difficult the poem is to commit to memory, its music remains beautifully in the ear. You just have to read it out loud.

I am finishing up an essay on Ayinla Omowura’s music, which has been in the works since way back when. Being the only music that is irrepressibly fresh to me, Àpàlà, especially Omowura’s act, holds something special for me, which makes writing about its finest practitioner challenging. But this is the kind of challenge I love: I get to spend a lot of time with the work and be stubborn with it without any frustrations.

The one major project I’d love to write is already on the books, which means I have it somewhat planned out. The big question for me in literature is the question of style. So, the project will be on those nonfiction writers whose style I enjoy. It is my belief that their writings are formidable because, to them, the style is as important as the story they want to tell and thus both are inseparable. Why is it that the sort of writing that stays with us is the same sort we keep coming back to? I believe it is by virtue of its distinctive style that we keep coming back, and what that distinctiveness looks like in, and achieves for, each writer is what I want to describe in my project. Though I have to finish the current academic commitment I’m in before probing all that. It’s hard to have to wait, but I am assured in the belief that a book that will live through you won’t leave you alone.

“It’s hard to have to wait, but I am assured in the belief that a book that will live through you won’t leave you alone.” 🔹

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