Books: The Bronze Arms by Richie Hofmann

Blog Editor Chase Isbell interviews Richie Hofmann about The Bronze Arms, a poetry collection about erotic desire and classical beauty. The pair discuss technique as a foundation for Hofmann’s thoughts on poetics as well as form and its deconstruction, especially that of the sonnet. Hofmann also speaks about how his writing approaches the erotic, both as an identitarian category and as an aesthetic, and where sadomasochism, monstrosity, and self-destruction come into play. Finally, throughout the interview, they discuss Europe and the legacy of classical antiquity. Hofmann’s poem “Braying” was featured in Issue 62.1.

I think this book represents your most avant-garde collection yet. The Bronze Arms is an aesthetic experiment in which the form of its poems corresponds to the heightened extremity of their subject matter, capturing through their style erotic desperation, submission, and destruction. No aspect of this collection better exemplifies this than your short, fragmented poems. These poems, which I am having a hard time even thinking of as poems, are without titles, have no obvious beginnings and endings, and sit near the margin of the page, askew and isolated. I think they are brilliant. I am including my favorite one below:

he chewed my hair softly

while I slept on his chest

any fragment of him unhinges me

masters me

What can you tell us about these short poems? How did you arrive on not only their form (or formlessness) but also their placement and styling on the page?

I think of these poems variously as fragments, as ruins, as imitations of ancient Greek poetic fragments, as footnotes. They punctuate the longer poems in the collection, and usually in runs or sequences, that seek to juxtapose distinct feelings and instances. I wrote them to give an additional texture—a more heightened and otherworldly voice—to the collection, and one that could enact the book’s interest in absence, in trace, in survival. Like the bronze arms, they suggest a body we cannot access or experience. I wanted to dramatize their smallness and fragmentary nature by placing them all the way at the bottom of a white page; they use no punctuation and no initial capitals. My early readers have had more eloquent ideas about them. My editor Deborah Garrison called them “stumbling blocks in the book’s maze.” Callie Siskel called them “drowned lyrics,” down at the floor of the page. Robyn Schiff, noting the book’s interest in ekphrasis and museums, called them “captions for images we cannot see.”

These short poems are contrasted by this collection containing some of the longest of your career. On The Poetry Foundation Podcast, you talked about your interest in writing longer poems and described the long poem as symbolizing your growth as a writer. Now that you’ve published a book with many long poems, what you have learned from them? What have they given you, stylistically or otherwise, that the shorter poems of your previous collections did not? Do they still feel like a sign of growth for you?

Most importantly, the longer length of poems allowed me to experiment with different ways of understanding and deploying time. Whereas the poems in A Hundred Lovers mostly take place in single lyric moments, these new poems span greater lengths of time—sometimes whole centuries, sometimes back to the speaker’s childhood—and can play more expressively with tense.

Speaking of longer poems, for me, “Dolphin” is your most beautiful long poem in this collection and a real departure from the poems I have come to expect from you, not just for its length, but also for its reliance on narrative. Does “Dolphin,” or your interest in longer poems in general, represent a shift toward narrative poetry? How would you characterize your relationship to not only poetic narrative but also the lyrical? How do you see these two poetic impulses playing out in this collection?

It was a personal challenge to write a poem that could tell a story. Of course, I adapted my version from ancient sources. But I wanted to give the narrative a contemporary, more psychological stance. Still, for me, the parts of the poem I’m most drawn to are the tensions between shame and exuberance, between death and eternal fame, as well as the suggestive details—the white blankets getting dripped on, for instance. That’s the lyrical impulse I think—tensions in feeling expressed through objects. I’m not sure it will be a shift in my work, more broadly. I don’t see myself writing a novel any time soon. I should try reading one.

The story of Hermias of Iasos, the narrative told in “Dolphin,” seems apt for metaphors that address themes across your entire oeuvre: the vulnerability of queer boyhood, violence and the sexual encounter, sex in a space of ostracization, etc. What was it that drew you to tell this story in “Dolphin,” but also to return to the image of the dying boy on the beach again and again in poems like “Drowning on Crete” and “Arms”? How did its repetition as a motif change your relationship to Hermias of Iasos and his story?

The book started with the writing of “Arms” nine summers ago or so, when I was teaching young writers at Kenyon College. That’s a poem about my own “mythic” story of nearly drowning on Crete as a boy—I was interested, I think, in how stories become myths over time. Crete, of course, supplied all of the mythic atmosphere, that historical and literary context elevating the stakes of the catastrophe. When I came across the Hermias story, I found a myth with a different outcome: the boy and the dolphin die. And their life, their relationship, is transmuted into literature, history, art. Ancient coins with the boy and the dolphin depicted on them felt like a beautiful symbol for the casting of life into artifact.

While we are on the subject, human–animal relationships are another repetition in this book. Besides the boy and the dolphin, you also titled a poem after the Minotaur, the half-human, half-bull hybrid of Greco-Roman myth, an allusion further underscored by the repetition of the title “Maze” across several poems. The human–animal relationship seems to coalesce in your poems as a particularly potent metaphor in the context of male homosexuality. I’m thinking of lines like “Don’t you hate animals? / Don’t you hate / being an animal? / His animal? This / animal . . .”Is there a human–animal-homosexual relationship theory at play here? Do animalistic qualities or human–animal hybrids inform these poems’ latent homosexuality? And finally, how are you thinking about the human–animal binary overall?

Your eloquent question suggests a more sophisticated theory than my poems could ever commit to. I think the answer is yes. I think the collection, as a whole, is interested in monstrosity. Rereading the poem, “Minotaur,” one of my very favorites in the book, I keep switching back and forth between the speaker as Minotaur and the “you” as Minotaur—maybe both elements contain both elements. Though I don’t have a unified theory, I can say, I’m very interested in how poems “use” animals as images, as symbols, as analogues for human behavior. Some of my very favorite human–animal poems include Thom Gunn’s “Tamer and Hawk,” Louise Glück’s “Parable of the Swans,” and Henri Cole’s “Twilight.”

You have a line in your second poetry collection, A Hundred Lovers, that goes “I dreamed light BDSM dreams.” If the speaker of the poems in The Bronze Arms is dreaming, surely this collection goes well beyond light BDSM. “Breed Me,” perhaps my favorite poem in this book, orients the reader toward the extremity of the sadomasochistic themes in this collection, ending with the lines “I had a pain inside me / And I needed you to deepen it.” Did you conceive of The Bronze Arms as deepening the sadomasochism of your poems? Was there a conscious heightening of the erotic power dynamics? And what can you tell us about your interest in power differentials, extremity, and other elements of sadomasochistic erotics?

Thank you! I meant that line in A Hundred Lovers to be a little funny and a little prudish, a little coy, like the speaker of that book. “Breed Me” is perhaps more brazen, and certainly more intense, though I hope that poem, too, doesn’t take itself too seriously. In both books, I think I’ve endeavored to offer a complex picture of sexuality—one that could be beautiful and ugly, uptight and unboundaried, pleasurable and…whatever is beyond pleasure, or the opposite of it. The truth is, I’m not a gifted theoretician. I approach poems mostly from the standpoint of technique—and so what interests me most is how language can technically accomplish the experience of extremity, for instance. For me, that is through radical juxtaposition in “Breed Me”: clutter and Caravaggio, peonies and underwear, bitten angels out of Baroque art and the platitudes of sexting. The uneasy rubbing together of these fragments of language creates a landscape of heat and coolness in the poem.

Again on The Poetry Foundation Podcast, you said that you do not think of your poems through the paradigm of kink. If kink is not the right hermeneutics for interpreting these poems, the right epistemology for how we should come to know them, what is the right language through which to think about your work? Is me calling these poems sadomasochistic a misnomer, a misunderstanding? And if it is not the cultural history of kink that you feel yourself in dialogue with, do you think of yourself as participating in a particular lineage or a certain genealogy of poetics about death and sex?

Not a misnomer or misunderstanding, at all, it’s just not my vocabulary. That doesn’t bother me. Our nomenclature is shifting all the time. People label my work “queer,” which is plausible. Once someone wrote that I was a “gay man,” and I had to realize, oh yes, I suppose I am! I feel in conversation with a long lineage of poets, exploring passion and extremity, including contemporary heroes like Frank Bidart, Carl Phillips, Sylvie Baumgartel, and Maggie Millner. As strange as it sounds, sometimes I feel like every poem I’ve ever written has been speaking to Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt.” Desire, shame, sexuality, possession, art, the animal, touch, discipline and wildness—it’s really all there in that poem that never stops feeding me, “wild for to hold, though I seem tame.” Is that an insane thing to say?

You wrote a great essay in The Yale Review last year about Richard Siken, one of our greatest living poets concerned with death and sex. You focus much of your essay about his approach to confessional poetry and the way that Crush and its legacy have reinvigorated the confessional tradition. What is your writing’s relationship to the confessional? I do not necessarily think of you as a confessional poet. Yes, your poems are deeply intimate, disclosing erotic fantasy and emotional internality, but they also concern themselves with the broader arcs of history, myth, and cultural legacy that transcend any individual speaker. Do you think of yourself as a confessional poet? How should your readers be thinking about the lyrical “I” in these poems?

I don’t think of myself as a confessional poet, per se, though my work is obsessed with the relationship between life and art, between opera and autobiography. Siken’s work is concerned with this, too, across all of his books, as is the work of our mutual mentor Louise Glück. I most often approach the “I” of the poem as a stand-in for the self (writer and reader) experiencing the poem in its duration of unfolding. But the poetic “I” does its own marvelous and mysterious work; it is my sincere hope that the poems transcend the particularities of my body, identity, and moment.

You told The Paris Review that “Armed Cavalier” took its title from a line in one of Michealangelo’s sonnets and that you also found in that sonnet the inspiration for the poem’s themes of torturous love. You write in this poem “Strangers unman me,” suggesting that erotic pleasure brings about an undoing, a reordering of self. I bring this line up specifically and its context in a broader literary tradition represented by Michaelangelo because I am interested in the intricate dance you do throughout these poems to both invoke male homoerotic poetic traditions but also to deconstruct them, to undo them. These poems suggest a complicated, perhaps unstable, relationship to domination and submission, masculinity and femininity, and sexual activity and passivity. That sex can be one’s undoing is often the point of these poems. Can you tell me how you are thinking about sexual identity in this collection? How do you balance the literal history of sexuality, dictated by material conditions, cultural norms, and social expectations, with the unstable, disordered feelings that sex so often conjures in these poems?

I’m so grateful for the intelligence of your reading here. I don’t know much about sexuality except that I experience it as messy, slippery, ungraspable, ever-shifting, ever-accruing in richness, beauty, anxiety, emptiness, and pleasure. It is something that feels entirely unique to us as individuals with desires, and, at the same time, it is (as you suggest) shaped by the attitudes of our time toward the body, gender, marriage, sex, etc. etc. This dual nature is something that I’m fascinated by in the love poem. All love poems seem to me to be, at once, totally timeless and almost uniform in their feelings, while also teaching us a lot about history and change and cultural specificity. Michelangelo’s work is so impossibly difficult to understand, from all of these perspectives—it is totally subversive and totally orthodox, quite idiosyncratic even as it defines the very center of the tradition. Shakespeare’s sonnets are like this too, as are Mozart’s operas. So much art I love seems to deconstruct the very tradition it also builds.

I’m interested in the form of “The Bronzes,” a poem that particularly emphasizes the fantasy of being in the loving embrace of erotic domination. Interestingly, this poem is made up of couplets, two-line stanzas divided quite clearly by markers. How did you decide on the form of this poem? And what is the couplet doing here?

There are two Riace bronzes, two bodies, two lovers in the poem, two arms reaching up from the sand, underwater. I wanted each couplet to feel so extra discrete and contained, held together beneath the surface of the poem…

Your admiration for the sonnet is well documented. You made an entire collection’s worth in your second book, A Hundred Lovers, and in a conversation with Carl Phillips and Garth Greenwell in The Yale Review, you praised the form as “infinitely expressive.” However, The Bronze Arms notably lacks this affinity for the sonnet, instead favoring, as I’ve already said, more unconventional formal ambitions. Now that you are on the other side of this book, what is your relationship to the sonnet like today? Does it mean the same things to you now that it once did? And do you see yourself returning to the form anytime soon?

The sonnet is the perfect form, and it defines the modern lyric poem. I consciously wanted to experiment and to “break out” of the form I had come to rely on. With different shapes, different musics and different ideas can become possible. In a new book, I wanted to discover them. As for new work, I’m interested in poems that rhyme again, and poems without punctuation. If not the sonnet, in particular, I find myself chasing after song forms as I start something new.

In all three of your collections, you write thoughtfully with an attention to “Western” literature and history, with Europe, in its classical and premodern iterations, providing your poems with many of their allusions, metaphors, and imagery. Speaking for myself, I know I have found it increasingly difficult to write and think about Europe, despite my great interest in it, because of right-wing forces that have coopted ideas about “Western Civilization” to legitimize and organize their racist, authoritarian ideologies. While there have always been strands of conservativism invested in doing this work, the particular turn to fascist politics across the globe unfolding today has only reinvigorated this discourse with higher stakes. Are you or your writing affected by right-wing narratives that attempt to define European cultural history for conservative ends? How are you able to resist these fascist, ethnonationalist discourses in your writing? In other words, perhaps naively, I’m asking how do we write about Europe in a time of heightened white supremacy? I would like to know how, if at all, these questions inform how you approach writing about European life, culture, and art objects in your poems.

No political movement owns or has the right to control our shared texts and objects. Politics requires simplification and conformity. Art requires complexification and multiplicity. The mystery and beauty of antiquity, for instance, will thankfully outlast us, as well as our ideas about it.