One of contemporary America’s most gifted and influential lyric poets, Stanley Plumly died on April 11, 2019, a month short of his eightieth birthday at home in Frederick, Maryland. Stanley was for many years a Kenyon Review contributor, friend, and summer workshop instructor. He left behind a just-finished manuscript of poetry, Middle Distance, which will appear from W. W. Norton in August 2020. Two longtime friends, David Baker and Michael Collier, exchange ideas about his work, legacy, and this new book in particular.
David Baker: Now that Middle Distance is in the world, and I’ve sat down to read through the finished book, I am struck once more with a combination of awe and sorrow. I’m so sad that Stan is gone and grateful to have this superb book. Jill Bialosky and Norton have done a masterful job with it.
Middle Distance feels to me familiar in important ways. And it feels new, too—for some surprising formal adventures, for Stan’s down-to-the-wire reportage on his illness and the effects of medical treatment on his psyche and poetry, as well as for the surprise of newness that real poetry always brings along.
So, what are some of your own favorite poems here? And what surprises you? What are some of the first things we should tell readers as they find Middle Distance?
Michael Collier: I agree, Middle Distance is perhaps his most formally adventurous book and yet its textures of landscape, place, family, friends, and allusiveness are reassuringly familiar. The formal adventures and inventions, especially in “Travel & Leisure” and “Night Pastorals,” are not only signs of a lifelong aesthetic restlessness but they are also signs of the specific tenacity he needed in order to finish the book.
My favorite poems include the two mentioned above but also “White Rhino,” “Middle Distance,” “Jesus Wept.” and the last five poems which form a kind of tender goodbye to those he loved, especially Margaret and the life they shared. Two of those poems, “Crepuscular” and “As You Leave the Room,” are threaded with quotations from Stevens, Lowell, Bishop, Housman, and Larkin; and are his farewell to poetry.
DB: Yes, that’s a helpful way to hear the last poems, as his farewell to people and to poetry. For readers new to Stan’s work, they will also find throughout this book the gorgeous contribution of a lifelong, devoted lyric poet. This book is full of life, engagement, friendship, and love of people, family, and the natural landscapes of his old home in Ohio and his home in Maryland for the past thirty years.
So what, for you, are some of those long-term strands that Stan continues in this new book? I guess I mean to identify some of his signature aspects.
MC: The continuing story of his childhood in Ohio and Virginia, his sympathetic mother and antagonistic, strong but broken father, “whose hands lacked the subtlety of the square.” Stanley was the divided son who could never completely sort out whether he was more like his mother or father. He was always “the boy on the step” and isn’t that a form of middle distance?
And then, of course, clouds, trees, birds, and weather. Stanley always knew the daily weather forecast.
DB: Yes, he’d stick his weather finger up in the air and grin. You were close to Stan in College Park and I think you saw this book from beginning to completion. Here in Granville, Ohio, I had a different vantage. Stan would send me poems, one at a time, as he wrote them, sometimes as he revised them; I have a big file. He’d send me mockups of the Table of Contents and his plans, and then a version of the manuscript, and then another version. He was tireless in writing and revising, wasn’t he?
MC: I think the book both of us saw as he was writing these new poems was a collected manuscript. They formed the last section, I believe. And it was clear to us that they comprised their own remarkable book. Stanley had a kind of fixed on the idea that Jill was expecting his next book to be a collected. He liked to keep his word, but it didn’t take much convincing to get him to see that the last section formed its own volume. Margaret was in agreement, too. I’d say Stanley was relieved and I also think it invigorated him to attend to those poems as a book and to finish a few new poems, perhaps.
DB: He just kept writing! I remember as he finished Old Heart (2007), then Orphan Hours (2012), and then Against Sunset (2016), each time he’d tell me, with a typical, half-playful groan, “Well, David, this is probably my last book.” Then he’d write more poems, another book. After Against Sunset, he had planned on a collected volume; I’ve got a couple of different run-throughs for a table of contents for a collected that he sent me. But then with his illness deepening in about 2017, he just wrote harder and found himself, in the middle distance, with a whole new book. I imagine it was due partly to his Keatsian sense of “leading a posthumous existence.”
MC: Yes, he was constant writer. I don’t know what bird’s song sounds like do the work, do the work, do the work, but that’s the song Stanley sang. And he was an obsessive reviser, although not as obsessive as his friend Galway Kinnell.
DB: There’s another way to measure his patience and persistence. The last poem in Middle Distance is a short, haunted lyric “With Weather.” Stan left the poem unfinished or unended; its final line is clipped short and unstopped by any punctuation. The paradox is of endlessness, a space left for silence. I did some digging, and Stan first published this poem—in a different version—in his first chapbook How the Plains Indians Got Horses and reprinted it in his book Giraffe. Let me be clearer: Stan first printed this poem in 1973! There are several other instances in his later books where he’d revise, re-form, rewrite, and reprint a poem, book to book. The feeling is that writing a poem is sometimes a long process of ongoing revision and repetition. Do you have a sense of his revising practices? How long did it take him to write a poem, in general? How many drafts?
MC: Ever since you pointed out to me the provenance of “With Weather,” I’ve been thinking about why Stanley used a revised and very old poem not only as the last one in Middle Distance but also it would have been, most likely, the last poem in the collected manuscript. In other words, it’s a kind of epitaph, but before I talk about that I want to say something about patience and persistence.
When he came for his job interview at Maryland in 1984, where I was already teaching, he mentioned that in addition to a new book of poems, he spoke about a book of essays, The Abrupt Edge, and a book about Keats, Posthumous Keats, that he was working on. It’s not until 2003 that the essays appear as Argument and Song and then Posthumous Keats in 2008. He finished those books, and a book of poems, Old Heart, 2007, after he had a heart attack, a mild one that required stents. It was an event that woke him up. From 2003 to 2018, he published seven books, three of those are heavily researched literary and art history biographies. And now with Middle Distance, an eighth. I don’t know anyone of his generation who worked so hard in such a short period of time.
But back to “With Weather”! As an epitaph, it provides a fairly accurate and haunting portrait of Stanley, a watcher of weather, a solitary observer, and very accurately, “a man in love with something— / some word, a gesture, the one line of light / lost among a line of trees, a man in a chair / watching it start to rain a little and snow.”
DB: That’s vintage Plumly phrasing and syntax, isn’t it? Long-breathed, musing, amused, self-revising, and (of course) more than a little melancholy.
I’m glad you mention Stan’s prose books, too, his outpouring of a longtime engagement with Romantic poets and painters. I bet many readers will be surprised by the prose in this book of poems. Four of the twenty-nine individual pieces in Middle Distance are in prose—ranging from four pages to fifteen pages each—and a fifth switches back and forth from prose to poetry. How do these work for you in the book? “Germans,” for instance, is a fascinating sustained memory of the last years of WW II and the German prisoners-of-war encamped near Stan’s family in Virginia. Other pieces of prose here touch on marriage, illness, his parents. Are these his version of autobiography? How do they work amid the poems?
MC: He had started writing a memoir before he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, and through and after the initial treatment he was still at it but it didn’t come naturally to him. He’s actually a great autobiographical poet but much of the biography is in the music, lyricism as memory, and also a terrific, fluent historian. In “Middle Distance,” he writes, “History is easy. I could write all day / dropping names into the spaces between.” He mentioned to me that he was thinking of writing his memoir in the third person or maybe he was already doing it and he wondered what I thought. I told him I was having a hard time imagining what that would look like. Perhaps the problem he was having with his memoir was exactly that, distance. But to get to your question about the pages of gorgeous prose in the book, especially in “Germans,” yes, they seem certain to have been taken from the memoir.
DB: Readers may be struck by the aura of the posthumousness in Middle Distance. I noted earlier that he was fascinated by Keats’ notion of the posthumous existence, and that played into the creation of this last book. But he was writing about death decades ago. Is that due to his father’s bad heart, or his own health issues, or something else? Stan’s poems, his books, seem always to have carried that shadow in them: “I am floating // above a doorway or a grave.” This sentence virtually defines the bifocal “middle distance” of his imagination. I’ll point out this is from his book Out-of-the-Body Travel, published in 1976.
MC: Exactly! “Many a time I have been half in love with easeful death.” (Keats). He was haunted by the fact of his father’s early death by heart attack and apprehensive about his fate being similar. It’s not for nothing he titles his new and selected poems Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me. Although Stanley was older than his father was when he had his heart attack, what woke Stanley up in the aftermath and gave him the amazing energy to do so much work during the last almost twenty years of his life was that death was no longer easeful. It was fucking real.
DB: Stan never had children. But he had a zillion students and even more friends. In fact, as his books proceeded, they seem increasingly filled with people—mother and father in his first books, and close friends. But then his books become richly populated, the living and the dead, family and writers and pals. I’d go so far as to claim that Stan was one of the great poets of friendship, that rarest of subjects.
MC: I completely agree with you about the way friendship is expressed and illustrated in the poems and the fact of it manifested with his many former students He loved going to AWP every year, didn’t he? The panel you invited him to join annually was a great boon to him. I loved how he’d find a corner in the hotel bar and from there hold gregarious court. But he was also a solitary. Anyone reading Middle Distance will see that. The last line of the book is “You could sit there alone.”
DB: Yes, he would hold court at AWP, at the bar, the bookroom, a table tucked away. You couldn’t walk across the lobby or down an aisle with him, without someone or many someones stopping him and wanting to talk or listen. Those AWP panels also let him write about poetry and poets he loved. He was a great teacher in those essays—part scholar, part guide, part enthusiast.
So, Michael, let’s close with Stan’s poems themselves. That’s the best way to pay tribute to his gifts. How about we each record a couple, and we can stream those directly here with our conversation?
I’ll read the first poem in Middle Distance, “White Rhino,” since it’s so characteristic of his complexity. It’s a sort of self-portrait-of-the-artist-as-endangered-species—playful but just as sorrowful. I’ll also read “The Ward,” to give readers here a sense of his capability to write his best work even in the middle of chemotherapy and suffering.
MC: I’ve chosen to read “Jesus Wept.” because the first poem’s self-scrutiny and vulnerability moves me deeply. Earlier, you quoted from “Out-of-the-Body Travel.” Isn’t “Jesus Wept.” the ultimate out-of-the-body poem: “When I was alive I remember feeling myself beside myself…”? And the fact that he says, in the past tense, “When I was alive,” tells us how he considers his condition, his having been brought back from dead by doctors and nurses, which was certainly the case.
I want to finish with “The Winter Beach at Sanderling,” set in the Outer Banks where Stanley and Margaret loved to visit, especially in winter, because it is beautifully observed and employs the fourteen-line, sonnet-like form he favored but also because the implied question in the second-to-last line, “how dark down does water go before the tide,” is like a powerful riddle about knowledge and experience offered to the reader by someone who will soon find out the answer.