What You Want, Maureen N. McLane’s latest poetry collection (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) grows into discursive open harbors. These poems are disillusioned and cerebral, as colloquial as they are heady, as expansive as they are cyclical, trudging cognitive grooves to examine the degradation of the environment—the splendor and the prey—and the dilemmas posed by beauty and truth. And yet, What You Want, amidst scores of reprise and equinox, affirms presence and the radical possibility of the poem itself, often through spatiality, breath, and ironic vestiture. “Good morrow! I haven’t given up / yet! we haven’t! / The connectivity is good! / Today every conversation / found an open channel.” The refrain of wanting is examined with a prescient, erosive texture that encompasses notions surrounding death, technology, and environmental degradation with both wit and discordant impact. The poems move through shifting modalities of seasons and tides, brimming with questions surrounding desire, technology, language, and being within the marred recurrent forces of the natural world.
I have always been drawn to the inventive, intellectual dynamism of McLane’s work. McLane has published several books, including Same Life, This Blue, Mz N: the serial, What I’m Looking For: Selected Poems, and More Anon: Selected Poems. She is the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University.
I reached out to McLane, and we recently met in a restaurant overlooking Washington Square Park in New York City. McLane spoke with discernment, wit, candor, and immense erudition. We discussed the nature of the craft, discussing the work of poets such as Zbigniew Herbert, Bhanu Kapil, and Cathy Park Hong. We also met via Zoom to discuss the specifics of her latest work; the role of the terrain, modes of sublime terror and peril, stylistic inclinations (including notational and discursive forms), and the process of assembling the poems in What You Want.
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The Rumpus: Can you describe the process of writing What You Want? How did you engage with the notion of wanting?
Maureen N. McLane: The book emerged from different things I was writing and thinking about over several years. Some poems were written in response to prompts from friends. I have an ongoing fiftieth-birthday project [in which] I’ve asked friends to commission me to write poems for them, and the poems thus far have addressed everything from the birth of children to dance to landscape to formal requests—one friend asked for triolets!—to broader philosophical questions.
My friend Lanny Hammer commissioned me to write a version of Sappho’s “Fragment 58,” and I explored various translations and versions. My version of the poem is called “Get What You Want,” and it ended up being the axis around which the book rotates. The phrase “what you want” became a refrain, a perpetually open question rather than anything definable or answerable or conclusive.
“Fragment 58” invokes the myth of Tithonus, lover of Eos, the goddess of dawn. The goddess asked Zeus for immortality for her human lover, Tithonus, but forgot to ask for perpetual youth as well. So, Tithonus lives forever, but he continues to age. It’s a horribly ironic outcome—apparently getting what you want but not anticipating the full range of things you should have asked for. It’s a remarkable poem.
Rumpus: In the poem “From a Book of Hours” in What You Want, you write, “Winner / loses, the Marxist wrote, melancholic, / remembering the existentialist / adrift on a sea of certainties.” Your work often refers to various thinkers and philosophers. What leads you to this poetic practice of intertextuality?
McLane: That intertextual horizon is more visible to me after the fact: only in rereading drafts do I see what has moved to the surface of my writing and the various threads within it. I feel agnostic about the presence of such references in my work. These thinkers and writers are part of the way that my mind moves, and they sometimes become part of the weave of poems.
For me, domains of theory and philosophy aren’t separate from poetry; they are part of the texture of my sentience, just as some writers have a whole horizon of musical or artistic references that aren’t extraneous but actually constitutive of their habits of mind and thought. I’ve been reading a lot of environmental writing and ecocriticism and the ways in which these interact with Marxist theories of history. For me, these are tools to think with, think through, and sometimes even be blocked by. Perhaps that’s an alienated way of thinking about it. Perhaps it’s worth saying that, for me, invoking Hegel is as natural as invoking the sun, potentially. Potentially.
Rumpus: How did the natural environment, particularly the sea and the harbor, and the contemporary mode of the sublime shape the writing of What You Want? What is the significance of the dissolutions between opposing notions and modalities in your work?
McLane: What You Want ended up being in some ways a site-specific or site-occasioned book. It begins on the shore, near the ocean, and it spends a lot of time there. The first section is specifically centered around Gloucester, Massachusetts: I spent a few summers there. It was revelatory to spend time there, to feel one’s rhythms shift as they became newly attuned to the tides and other elements. There’s a vivid rhythmic pulse to the days that tends to be obscured when I am in New York City. We’re technically surrounded by tides in Manhattan, but it’s easy to forget that amidst all the concrete, glass, and steel.
The question of being on or near the sea shows up in various ways in What You Want. A lot of the book hinges on the boundary between land and ocean. The book is interested in an array of borderline states, the pleasures and dangers of that openness, the terrors that verge on the sublime when you reckon with the sea.
What You Want also has a low-key seasonal structure. It begins in a summer modality, and then it goes into the winter and up into the mountains. There’s also a springlike section that brings us to various locales in the UK and Europe. The book then returns to the seashore and another summer. So in that sense, the book meditates on what it is to return and the notion of returning with a difference.
Rumpus: The notions of return and sublime terror are often intertwined with cessation, continuity in the aftermath, and a certain self-conscious reflexivity of the speaker. In What You Want, you write, “It’s disgusting / this posthumous stance I adopt / some days and some days it’s thrust / upon me, unwanted vestiture.” Could you speak to the role of the posthumous in What You Want?
McLane: I certainly respond to poets who take up that thought experiment, as if speaking beyond or after death, as in Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a fly buzz when I died.” In a late poem, Wallace Stevens writes, “It is an illusion that we were ever alive,” which is an amazing line that strikes me as hilarious as well as dreary and depressive. One can sometimes feel posthumous in one’s own life. We shed incarnations and skins, and we look back on things as if they were from another life, even someone else’s life.
This points to broader psychic questions about what it means to sit at that hinge between life and death. For Jungians and alchemists, the nigredo state refers to an alchemical soul-death or spiritual death, a period of decomposition and degradation. Possible horizons of revivification may arise out of this state. All these ideas were probably humming in the background of my mind.
Rumpus: How do contemplations regarding immortality, mortality, and the nature of the mind—particularly in terms of borders and spatiality—function in this book?
McLane: To some extent, I have affinities with a Romantic tradition of writing—a mainly Anglophone romanticism. Poems in the book such as “Deflection: An Ode” draw upon many romantic-era motifs and poems, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection Ode.” Romantic-era odes often have a flexible structure that expands and contracts, a wonderful patterning that doesn’t adhere to a prescribed form. I’m attracted to such forms and to possibilities in extended lyric—a mode interested the movements of mind, its turns, swerves, and pivots. I think of Pindar, Wordsworth, Elizabeth Bishop, James Schuyler, Jorie Graham, Olena Davis, and Alice Notley.
Poems in this mode are striking in terms of their capacity for surprise, their capacious nature. They’re often open to philosophy and theories of cognition and emotion, and all this likely lies behind “Deflection: An Ode,” as does more specifically Coleridge’s Ode and also Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” and his Tintern Abbey poem. Wordsworth gathered some of his poems under the title “moods of my own mind,” which I always found extremely comical but also portable.
Romantic poets were really preoccupied with structures of mind, its various faculties (imagination, fancy, memory), its relation to sensation and emotion. They didn’t consider such faculties or capacities as if they were merely personal but rather as part of the human condition itself, a species capacity. And in Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry,” he suggests that some aspects of sentience should be considered across species, not just vis-à-vis humans.
I think your question about borders and spatiality is especially interesting because poems can be incredible mental rockets, vehicles for border-crossing and time-travel. A lot of poems want to place you in the darting mind of the poem. Some want to address you—as “the beloved,” say, or as someone hated, or they implicitly situate you as an overhearer of such an address. But poems can also be spaceships offering interstellar as well as time travel. Think of Dante. Or Shelley’s Adonais poem.
Rumpus: How did you structure the sections of this book, and what led to the looser and more discursive structures of the poems in the third and fourth sections?
McLane: The third section of the book has poems set in the UK and in parts of Europe, Italy in particular, where I spent some time over the past eight years. Those landscapes are, for me, inflected with considerations of politics, political economy, rising seas, and refugee crises; these kinds of concern became part of the air I was breathing, so to speak. The air we breathe is a political, chemical, historical air, and the poems throughout the book register that in various ways.
As you say, some of the poems in the third section are much more discursive [and] some are more notational. I was interested in a mix of poetic textures. I was thinking a lot about Roland Barthes and the minimal act of writing in which it suffices just to register phenomena—think of haiku; or think of Lorine Niedecker’s work. One doesn’t have to interpret or laboriously generate meaning. But I’m also interested in elaborate, wrought, omnivorous, all-engines-firing discourse. A maximal mode.
So there are a lot of different textures and modes in the book—notational forms, triolets, and little songs or ditties. The last sustained poem in the book is a long series of triolets, which brings us back to the shore where we began. I was hoping this return would lead to further amplitude. Things often deepen when we return to them in new keys.
Rumpus: In “Deflection: An Ode,” you write, “Oh, Ana! / We receive what we give. / No. There is no law / karmic or golden / of reciprocity or equilibrium / even Newton’s broken / along a quantum wave. . . . ” How do you construct or engage with this contemplative, ruminative, philosophical mode of poetics?
McLane: “Deflection: An Ode” is addressed to a friend, Anahid Nersessian, whose work and scholarship is brilliantly alert to environmental catastrophe, poetics, form. The poem is grounded in a specific Adirondack landscape in a particular season, a particular moment. It’s one of the poems most engaged with the philosophical concerns we inherit from romanticism—the notion of the mind as an emergent property, interactions between the mind and so-called nature. Given Ana’s commission—to write a poem with that title—this ruminative, philosophical mode was literally baked into the poem.
There are so many different ways of thinking about a poem—some might be seen as containers or vessels—others could be power technologies. Extraordinary poems such as Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” or Jorie Graham’s “Notes on the Reality of the Self” are ruminative and meditative. They center a figure or several figures in a landscape, but they also open out to broader questions—about the sea, say, about the knowledge that flows and flees, about the strangeness and commonness of our self-experience as sensing and thinking creatures.
I’ve spent a lot of time with M. H. Abrams’s idea of the “Greater Romantic Lyric” and with long, meditative, ruminative poems such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” This capacity in poems for mental shifts and switchbacks really appeals to me, as does their capacity to hold and shape time.
For example, in Coleridge’s “Dejection Ode,” the speaker is hearing a wind come in, and you realize by the end of the ode and its many twists that the whole poem has been timed against the full arrival of that storm and against or within the movement of the evening from dusk to midnight. There’s an extraordinary registering of time in the poem. Elements of the natural world—wind, rain, weather—are old tropes, but they’re also ongoing sensible realities. The sun rises every day, and we live in a universe of rhythmic pulses, counter-pulses, and mechanical and algorithmic bursts. I’m interested in how all that can show up in the neural network of the poem.
I tend not to be a poet of will. I may sometimes make a conscious commitment to a form or a project, but I also rely on a capacity for self-surprise. It’s an interesting dance, the one between what you think you’re doing and what you end up doing.
Rumpus: You’ve written extensively about Romanticism, and you’ve talked about your productive ambivalence towards the Romantic poets. How does this form a symbiosis with your creative work?
McLane: I read some Romantic-era poems in college and maybe a few in high school. But it wasn’t until I went on to do a PhD that I read more broadly within the period. Mary Shelley, Thomas Malthus, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Olaudah Equiano, Robert Burns, Walter Scott.
I was initially interested in the way twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry engaged with psychoanalytic and anthropological discourse. But the more I pursued that, the more I found myself backing into questions that were being posed during the Romantic period.
The late eighteenth century is a very charged, rich period for thinking about poetry and modernity. I began exploring how different poets and writers thought about the increasingly fraught category of the human (as in “The Declaration of the Rights of Man,” Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads).
Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Man: Epistle I” has a different sense of the category of “Man” from, say, Percy Shelley in Prometheus Unbound or Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. “Man,” “the Human,” “Woman”—all these categories are newly contested in an era of revolutions, industrialization, emergent feminism, urbanism, and all the other “isms.” So too, “liberty,” “equality,” “freedom.” Many of these poets were responding to the French and American revolutions as well as the Haitian revolution.
They were grappling with these huge unavoidable things. While I was very compelled by Wordsworth and Percy Shelley, I also felt ambivalent about them and some of their work. Wordsworth is famously unappealing—something of a drip, becoming a Tory reactionary in the latter half of his career, writing odes to duty and so on—but his early work is fascinating in terms of his sense of social responsibility as well as his development of an autobiographical mode. A writer like Blake is incredible, singular, and eccentric, and I love him. And Percy Shelley is remarkable technically, figuratively, and intellectually, particularly in the ways he is trying to think about democracy and revolution.
Rumpus: You write, “Who gets to live / in the 21st century?” How were you grappling with notions of modernity while writing this book?
McLane: I’ve been interested in political economy, precarity, and duress for a long time, and these were romantic concerns too! This shows up in all my books. Various thinkers, from Adam Smith to Marx to writers on the so-called Anthropocene, have been provocative and sometimes distressing companions to my work.
As to the lines you quote: poems can be instruments of questioning and meditation. They can also be goads, refusals, critiques, provocations. Sometimes lines or phrases come to me or impose themselves on me as emergent and urgent questions. Some poems hope to move toward new ways of holding, posing, sharing, probing, discharging certain kinds of emotional complexes, or turning them around. I suppose some poems are trying to have a 3D relation to these preoccupations rather than being impaled by them.
“Who does get to live?” is an active question. It’s a site of contest. There are all kinds of incentives for pessimism, and maybe that’s a higher kind of realism. For me, poems hold out a place of testing and wondering and listening, of “being in uncertainties,” as Keats put it.
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Author photograph by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
