‍This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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DF: Congratulations on the recent publication of Breathe, Bob. Before we get into the craft of poetry itself, I’d like to talk about the process of making a book. I’m curious how you go from the daily act of sitting at a desk and writing to actually publishing a new collection.

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BH: For the most part, it’s a feature of time. I’ll have a sense that I’ve built up enough work, so I start gathering and reading through old poems, setting aside the ones that I’m still interested in, printing them out—very old-fashioned, or a version of old-fashioned. Then a sorting begins that’s mostly about reading over and over, letting that process sort through the poems. Really, what I’m looking for is my initial response when I come upon a poem. I’ve found over time that it’s pretty easy to lie to yourself about what you think is good or what should go in a book. Maybe there’s a poem that got published in a big-deal place. It can be hard to let go of that. If I pick up this stack of poems when I don’t expect to, that lack of expectation or intention opens me up to them again, and it’s much easier to notice what happens when my eyes just land on a page.

Once I narrow that down, then I lay them out on the floor and go through that kind of thing again, although at that point, I’m looking for a sense of what poems want to live together, which ones might speak to each other in interesting ways. Also, which one might be a good poem to begin with or end with. A lot of times, when you’re putting together something that has any kind of structure, if you can create the undergird first, then it’s easier to place things around it. I’ll do that multiple times, during which the whole arrangement could change. That will go on for a period of months, until I end up with what I end up with, and then I have a book that hopefully I’ll never look at again. Because I’ll end up regretting what I’ve put in, regretting the existence of most of the poems.

In the book, there’s a continual interplay—sometimes I’d say collision—between the internal and external universes. I want to start with the inside stuff. It’s striking to me how many of your poems are love poems, particularly about your wife, Eve. How is writing connected to loving?

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I love writing. So, the act itself is fundamentally an embodiment of love. I do not love the poems; that’s a very different matter. But it’s hard to imagine things I like doing more, other than being with Eve. I just adore, adore, adore the writing process. Because of that, sitting down and starting is a moment of adoration and deep happiness.

I think she comes up so often simply because I do love her. I tend to write about things that are very close at hand, or close at mind. Today, a poem—I wasn’t able to finish, but started it. I saw something about the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, before I went up to write, and the thing that was on my mind was, “This is a poem about the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, which is a really boring thing to write about,” and I went from there. When I sit down, I usually don’t know what I’m going to write about. I gravitate toward the thing that is most interesting, most pressing. Oftentimes, she’ll come to mind in those moments.

You seem to encounter a lot of pain in that process, too. In a recent interview with Plume Poetry, you said, “As long as I can recall, I’ve killed the living in my poems.” For example, in Breathe, you write:

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My wife is made of time. As in
today, the day after, this year and more years and decades
and not enough. She’s her face and kiss
and when she’s gone she’ll be her absence.

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How do you think about the resonances or distinctions between love and grief?

To me, they’re absolutely the same thing. I write a fair amount about death, which I guess is a big cliché for a poet. It’s natural, when thinking of things you like, to think of them going away, particularly people. Because—another cliché—as you get older, you recognize you have less and less time. It’s natural to put love and the loss of love together. But it’s also hard to hold onto the fact that we’re going to go away, because every day I get up, she’s there. Every day I get up, the world is basically the same. But there’s something about writing that often brings death and loss to mind. They fit. I really can’t think of one without the other.

Memory seems central to this grieving−loving dynamic. You’ve written dozens of poems as eulogies. In Breathe, you say, “A memory / is the resuscitation of the dead,” and “When we remember… we are gods.” I think I understand that idea at a funeral. But in this anticipatory grief for the people you love right now, what’s the role of memory?

Take memory away and our minds don’t exist, not as we have them. We are so dependent on memory. Language is memory. So just speaking, you’re remembering. There’s nothing we can do that takes us out of the realm of memory. It’s like asking about love. I can see that to some extent it might seem like a non-answer, but when you ask these things, it’s occurring to me.

Although I’m definitely concerned about forgetting. I’ve seen my father and others go through the real deep forgetting that we can experience—Alzheimer’s, dementia, that kind of thing. Short of that, I don’t worry about forgetting things. But it may be because I write every day. Because I’m dealing with whatever is going on right up here, I feel like I’m taking care of business, number one. Number two, I don’t write things down when I’m not writing, or very rarely. Recently, I was watching a young kid walk, like two years old, and there was something that came to mind: that even a wind with a limp could knock him down. I liked that, and I was worried I would forget it, so I wrote that down. But that’s really unusual for me. Probably part of what attracts me to poems is that I can jump in, do it, and then move on and do something else. Then come back the next day and do it again.

It sounds like a snapshot. Although you said that this morning, you started a poem you weren’t able to finish. Is that something you’re going to come back to?

I think so. It’s interesting enough to me. It occurred to me toward the end of the poem that the Supreme Court, in not showing their work, has a lower expectation than I did when I was a kid doing story problems. I was good at math, but I would get in trouble if I didn’t show my work. And I think the scale is a little different. I think they should have to show their work. So that’s where I was.

But if we weren’t having this conversation, I wouldn’t have thought about it. I have come to think of writing, for me, as performative. As a record of what is going on in my mind as I’m writing the poem. That’s the most interesting part of it to me, to try to actually capture my thoughts, my feelings, and put them in some kind of package that may be interesting to other people.

On that note, in her book on eros and lyric poetry, the classicist Anne Carson says, “What the reader wants from reading and what the lover wants from love are experiences of very similar design.” She describes an “intimate collusion” between reader and writer. How do you encounter or anticipate the reader in your poems or your process?

I do not think about readers at all. It’s one of the biggest mistakes writers make. I cannot begin to imagine your head, period. It’s so hard for us to really feel how someone else thinks, let alone how you are going to respond to something I write. Pulling and pushing those levers—I don’t know why anyone would go down that road. The only time I start thinking about readers is when submitting or doing a reading. But while writing, it is so dangerous to try to filter my words, our words, through someone else’s head and back around to ours, if that makes sense.

Having said that, the first idea makes a great deal of sense to me. What people want in the things they read is a sense of vitality and a sense that they’re encountering a human being, which requires a certain liveliness for it to feel like this is not just from a human, but this is a living being itself, this thing I’m reading. But in the process of maybe creating something like that, it’s deadly to think of a reader.

As dangerous as that idea of a reader can be, published poems do live out in the world. Some years ago, you told Poetry Northwest, “My interest in language—in public language—was born on the radio.” You were talking about music, the songs you first fell in love with. What does “public language” mean to you? What does it offer that private language or personal language cannot?

For me, written communication and poetry are pretty much the same thing. So the act is still intensely private and largely unsteered. The extent to which it’s conscious is retrograde, in that I’ll write a little and come back to read it. If I don’t like that, I’ll edit it. But again, I don’t come in with a sense of what I’m going to write about or how I’m going to write about it. So it remains this incredibly private, really personal endeavor that… I’ve never intended to be just for myself. It’s like a switch gets thrown as soon as I’m done, where if I think the poem is any good, I want it to go out into the world. I want people to engage with these readings, hopefully like them, get something out of them.

To go back to your question, trying to speak to common things, the public part of speech, is—to use an old-fashioned word—the responsibility of a writer. If you’re not trying to figure shit out—why are we here, how are we happy, how are we not, how do we get along, how do we love each other, how do we hate each other, why do we go to work, all of that—if you’re not trying to engage with that, get a different job. That to me is the public part of it. If I’m doing my job, looking at the things I deal with will naturally have public resonance, if the poems work.

I’ve always found it interesting that the more particular a writer is, the more universal the work will be to a reader.

Yes. It’s something that drove me nuts when I taught: students’ love of cliches. They would say, “Yeah, but if I say my heart is broken, everyone will know what I’m talking about.” I would try to convince them that everyone would think they know what you’re talking about, but if you can actually embody how you felt when this person or that person broke up with, on this corner, right after getting pizza, in the rain—the fullness of that, making people feel that they actually see it, will naturally have a corollary in their life. But it was one of the hardest things to convey to people, that being small is actually being big. Being specific is actually being general, if you do a good job of it.

I would say to students, “You’re wearing that shirt; you’re sitting at that crummy desk, on which someone wrote, you know, Fuck Trump, and behind you is a poster, for some reason, of Paris, in this room that has nothing to do with Paris. One fluorescent light above us is out, the other is flickering.” We exist in this very particular world. And going back to memory and detail, we’re dependent on that.

Absolutely. A writer [Richard Price] once said, “You don’t write about the horrors of war. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying in the road.”

Exactly. The notion of someone’s piece of brain in coffee, or something like that, to me, has always gotten at the worst aspects of war in a very simple and domestic way. How many people have ever seen a chunk of brain in coffee? Or something like it? It’s this very small set of people, but you see something like that and the world remains changed. Always will be.

At the same time, to go back to that phrase, “public language” on the radio, to me that suggests not only music, but also newscasts. These big, abstract trends are often not told in the language of specifics. In fact, current events permeate your writing, often at unexpected moments: climate change, Covid, abortion bans, antisemitism, gun violence. In your 2019 collection, Hold, you write:

Now I’m stuck, as politics
and poetry get along about as well as lips
and soldering irons, hawks and wet cement.

How does that tension—that sticking point—manifest in your poems?

I don’t know. I can’t let go of these things. The poem I talked about, which I started today, is not that unusual for me—things we would typically think of as political. Maybe I don’t think of them as political. A group of people deciding things about the death penalty, to me, doesn’t seem political; it seems kind of bizarre. Nine people get to decide these things? But ever since I started writing, these issues or ideas would show up in my writing. The tension for me is that it’s inherently boring, in a lot of ways. It’s so hard to do it without getting bogged down in the minutiae of the moment. There are plenty of my poems that don’t work because I didn’t do a good job of that. Political poems often get stuck in the minutiae of the moment. It’s kind of like you saying, if you want to write about war, you don’t write about “the horrors of war.” You put people in that context.

I’m trying to find a way to mix the current with the general and the abiding, and ultimately, connect it to my life or someone’s life. That’s why the notion of the story problems when I was a kid, having to show my work, makes that poem interesting to me. Realizing that this very simple expectation that was placed on me is not being placed on this group of people. It makes it intimate, it makes it human, in a way that justifies the poem for me. Whereas if I hadn’t stumbled on something like that, I probably wouldn’t have gone any further with the poem. Or if I finished it, I wouldn’t have done anything with it, because it would have seemed boring or stupid.

The contrast between the ‘minutiae of the moment’ and the general or abiding is interesting, because in terms of language and detail, it’s the opposite. The language of politics is the language of cliché, language that is as acceptable as possible to as many people as possible, which is the opposite of the detail you mentioned before.

Yeah. What comes to mind is something I heard someone say about [James] Talarico: that people may like his ideas, but they like him because he feels like a good guy. Which gets around the cliché. On the flip side, there’s something of the opposite going on with Trump. People like him because he’s a shit, and he opens the door for their shittiness. With politicians, we often don’t get attached or repelled by their content, by their policies. There’s this gut-level thing. They smell right to us or they don’t, they feel right or don’t. So the clichés, I don’t know that they end up mattering that much. I don’t think we’re really listening all that closely, once we’ve made these decisions about these people. A lot of us—not your wonkier types, folks that are really interested in policy—but most of us aren’t really listening all that deeply. What is said doesn’t matter a great deal, which doesn’t really work with poetry.

Is that what you’re getting at in the line I read from Hold, about the enmity between politics and poetry? Is it about political language and poetic language?

Yeah. It makes sense that politicians wouldn’t really care for poets, and poets really wouldn’t care for politicians, given our relationship to language. I think with politicians, a lot of the time, they’re trying to say things that help you not listen, that sounds like something I believe in, or want to believe in, and I don’t really need to get too deep. It allows me to be who I want to be, to believe what I want to believe, and to feel that this person shares these beliefs and will try to advance them in the world. Whereas with poetry, you’re trying to go the opposite direction.

The opposite direction—so political language tries to meet the listener wherever they are, and poetic language tries to bring the reader or listener to where the poet is?

Maybe, but the real difference goes back to the notion of specificity. I’m trying to put you in my head. With any poem, I am trying to get this, in a particular moment, in a way that you can pick it up and recognize it and feel some sense of resonance in your life. Something that maybe makes you see something you hadn’t, but more so—and this is really clichéd—feel less alone. To do that, I have to be really specific. I have to be willing to be myself. As fully as I can, as specifically as I can, which requires me to develop a language that is my own. Either a specific language, where there’s something so dancing about the words, or a language of imagination that is unique in a way that still speaks to you of those possibilities in your own life.

You told Plume Poetry, “Compassion is a key ingredient in an antidote to the politics of division.” Has your experience of writing about politics or social issues evolved over time—as you’ve changed, or as the world has?

I’ve come to realize that the personal is the most political. In the poem about the Supreme Court shadow docket, if I looked at it right now, what would appeal to me most is the stuff that is the most personal. In my case, in that poem, it would be the stuff that’s most imaginative. Because it’s coming from me, because it reflects my nature and how I feel. I have grounded that poem, which is ultimately political, where it needs to be, which is in someone’s life.

​In my day-to-day life, I’m private. I’m small—I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. Just that I like being at home, hanging out with Eve, doing our stuff. But in poems, I feel bigger. When I’m writing them, I feel unlimited. And often, what they end up being about is an expression of empathy. An expression of shared difficulties, shared experiences, both wonderful and horrible. To me, that is endless—the wonderful and the horrible.

Absolutely. I’ve got one last question for you. Almost every review of your work uses words like “whimsy” and “humor” and “delight,” despite how much pain and loss your poems encounter. I suspect that’s partially due to your turns of phrase, your puns, the way you play with words. To return to Anne Carson for a moment, she writes: “Puns appear in all literatures, are apparently as old as language and unfailingly fascinate us. Why? If we had the answer to this question we would know more what the lover is searching for as he moves and reasons through the borderlands of his desire.”

What’s your answer?

I think you may be right, and I get tired of the “humor,” “whimsy.” To me, it’s because language is incomplete. Language points to other language, no way around it. All language is metaphorical—you have to connect it to something else for language to work. To me, that’s why puns. I’m usually not doing these things to be funny, to be whimsical. It’s just my mind following the bounce of words. It’s not something I do consciously; it’s a thing language does to me. Why puns is because language is broken. The way one thing becomes another speaks to the liquidity of language. Once anything has that kind of existence, there’s going to be a fluidity, a turbulence, a change that’s constant. A potential to be explored.