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Frank Bidart
Watching the Spring
Festival
Farrar, Straus &
Giroux
Interview conducted
by Craig Morgan
Teicher.
Craig Morgan Teicher:
This is your third book to be nominated for the National
Book Awards. How do you feel?
Frank
Bidart: One has to be as stoic as possible
about these things. I am grateful for the attention
it gives the book—I really am. One just has to
try very hard not to get one’s ego involved in
it. I am genuinely honored.
CMT: Would it be an
important landmark in your career to win?
FB:
Of course one wants to win, but I think
it’s also very important not to get one’s
own sense of one’s work mixed up with how a particular
book is received–that would be a real trap. I
think everyone wants to be respected by one’s
peers, and I certainly want to feel that there is an
audience that thinks what I do is worth taking seriously.
There’s a danger in corresponding in too perfect
a fashion or in too narrow a fashion to the taste of
one’s time. One has to try to at least conceive
a work that is not bound by that. So I really like this
very much, though at the same time I guess I’m
afraid of the danger of making such things a measure
of what one is doing as a writer. I’ve been lucky—I
feel that the world has been very good to me, and I
am incredibly lucky to have a great editor [in Jonathan
Galassi] who’s also the publisher who really likes
my work. It’s also good list of nominees, and
I’m very, very honored to be on that list. That’s
really part of my pleasure.
CMT: Watching the
Spring Festival is your first book of mostly shorter
poems. Now that the book is done and published, are
you still writing shorter things, or are you working
on longer poems again?
FB:
I’ve written a couple of short
poems since the book, but I very much feel that the
project of the book is over, that some energy or vein
was exhausted. I feel I’ve got to do it all over
again. I think it’ll be a long time before my
next book. I don’t think it’ll be a book
that will be written quickly. The last book was written
very quickly. Ideally I hope there’s going to
be another “Hour of the Night” in it [The
“Hours of the Night” poems are a series
of extended poems that have appeared in three of Bidart’s
book so far] . I haven’t given that larger project
up, but I needed to be in an antechamber for a while.
It’s just beginning to assume any kind of shape.
CMT: You think of the
short poems as existing in an antechamber?
FB:
They’re the most intimate poems I’ve written.
I learned things about how to shape a short poem in
the process of writing this book that I needed to learn.
So in some ways, I’m thinking it’s gone
beyond what I’ve done before. On the other hand,
it does not include a kind of large overview poem. In
a way what I would like to do is to join some of the
feeling for lyric texture in these more recent poems
to the larger structure. But I don’t know if I
can do that.
CMT: Are you writing
all the time?
FB:
Yes, but I keep getting stuck. I’ve been carrying
around a poem now for about nine months that has been
driving me completely nuts. Then I wrote one very short
poem that happened very quickly, in a couple of days.
This other poem, I keep scribbling, I keep revising,
but I keep not finishing.
 Craig
Morgan Teicher is a poet, critic, and freelance writer.
His first book of poems, Brenda Is In The Room And
Other Poems, was chosen by Paul Hoover as winner
of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry and was published
by the Center for Literary Publishing. His collection
of short stories and fables, called Cradle Book,
will be published in spring 2010 by BOA Editions Ltd.
www.craigmorganteicher.com
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