Paul Nemser’s third book of poetry, A Thousand Curves, won the Editor’s Choice Award from Red Mountain Press and is forthcoming in April 2021. His book Taurus (2013) won the New American Poetry Prize. A chapbook, Tales of the Tetragrammaton, appeared from Mayapple Press in 2014. His poems appear widely in magazines. He lives with his wife Rebecca in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Harborside, Maine. His poem “For An Astronomer’s Daughter” can be found here. It appears in the Jan/Feb 2021 issue of KROnline.
What was the original impulse for writing A Thousand Curves?
This book is a collection of poems written over a lifetime of writing poetry. My first two books were long narratives, with characters set in a particular place. But throughout my life, I have also been writing shorter poems, exploring different geographies, voices, forms. The poems in A Thousand Curves don’t connect in a linear way, but they resonate, they keep coming back to certain subjects. The impulse to write the poems in this book was an impulse to find a place for poetry to happen.
How has your writing changed since you started out?
I started writing when I was a small child, and I’ve always been influenced by the poetry that I loved as a child, nursery rhymes, nonsense verse and all kinds of wordplay. Elements of wordplay and sound effects have always been part of my poetry, but the subject matter and the imagery has changed dramatically as I have seen more of life and as I have read thousands of great poems. I read poems every day. More recently, I have found myself moving toward issues of life and death.
There’s a strong sense of place in many of your poems—many of the poems in the book are about Maine.
Rebecca and I have been coming to Maine since our honeymoon in 1974. I found Maine to be physically very beautiful and in a number of ways similar to Oregon, where I grew up, with evergreens, rocky shores, mountains, cold seas. Since I’ve lived in urban settings my whole life, the time in Maine became a way to immerse in the natural world, the world of birds, animals, tides, forests, weather. Experiencing life in lakes and near the ocean is a constant reminder that we exist in time, vanish in time. You see it in tides, the waves slapping at the shore, birds circling, intervals of storms, washed-up debris. No matter how wild or destructive these scenes can be, eventually the terror leaves, and there’s a time of peace.
You read poems every day. What do you read?
I respond to poems that transport me, that take me somewhere new—a place, a person, a time, real or imagined.
Poems are enlivening, illuminating encounters with people from all over the world, from the beginning of time until now. Reading poetry allows me to understand what it means to be human.