A Conversation with Jared Carter, Part 2

Villanelles, Alexandroids, and a Life in Books

Jared Carter at Monticello. Photo by Diane Carter.

This is the second part of a conversation between Sunil Iyengar and Jared Carter. You can find the first part here.

Sunil Iyengar: I do have a few Paris Review-style questions. What is your process for writing—do you do it longhand, by computer, or both? When and how often do you write? Do you go through many drafts?

Jared Carter: With digital equipment, it’s easy to generate as many drafts as needed. Word-processing is a wonderful invention. I try to have the newest and most powerful desktop computer possible, fitted out with the latest and most sophisticated word-processing program available.

SI: Do you share your poems with anyone while they are in embryo? Friends, family, other poets?

JC: Now and then I show a poem to a close friend. But mostly I don’t show anything to anyone unless it has already been published. My wife Diane is the exception. Sometimes she reads and comments on what I’ve just written. She’s a retired teacher of English literature, speech, technical writing, and English as a Second Language. Invariably she notices details I’ve gotten wrong. For example, anytime something involving food or cooking appears in my work, she checks it out. She’s a fine chef, and knows far more about such matters than I ever did.

Diane Carter in 2015 with Cormac the Magnificent.

SI: Even with some of your meditative lyrics, I often wonder how much is real and how much imagined. In After the Rain, in a poem such as “The Believers,” executed in rhyme-royal, there is an elegiac mood that resolves effortlessly with a biblical reference at the end. The poem describes the speaker’s vision while on a guided tour of a meeting-hall in a Shaker village. Care to comment on this one?

JC: That meeting-hall is in a place called Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, a beautiful, otherworldly, historically recreated site forty miles west of Lexington, that I first discovered in 1968 while driving through Kentucky. An aerial view of that site appears on the cover of my second book, After the Rain. For me, all these years, Pleasant Hill has been an extremely holy and reverential place.

I have lots of unfinished, unpublished work involving the Shakers. “The Believers” is not my only published poem about them, but probably my favorite. Another such poem is “The Sprinkle House at Busro Creek,” which came about after I investigated the fact that the Shakers once had an outpost in Indiana. All of that writing is a product of my having visited a number of Shaker sites, owning a great many books about them, and realizing that their legacy has much to pass on to the rest of us.

SI: After the Rain introduces us to two natural creatures to which you seem to be especially attentive—the cicada and the mourning dove. This is a useful springboard for me to ask not only about your fascination with those creatures, but also about how you may have cultivated your powers of observing and rendering natural phenomena. Do you keep a journal? Consult reference books?

JC: I have kept a journal since I was eighteen, in one form or another. Nothing special or particularly scientific, just everyday thoughts and observations. Millions of words by now, handwritten, typewritten, digital. Some of the oldest entries, typed on newsprint and squirreled away in the garage, I haven’t looked at in fifty years. (All destined for the landfill, I’m afraid.)

During that summer in 1964 when we were hitch-hiking around Europe, I carried a very small portable Olympia typewriter. Every evening in the youth hostel I would type up the day’s events, churches seen, art museums visited. My first wife helped. As the entries built up, I would mail them back to Indiana. We called the cumulative manuscript The Summer of a Hundred Cities.

Unfortunately, I have no idea where it is now. Maybe out in the garage. Cumulatively, from about 1983 on, in what I call “my archives,” there are maybe 15 or 20 gigabytes of drafts, correspondence, and abandoned literary projects that have been transferred from one desktop to the next, and now reside in the latest machine’s solid-state storage. (A single nuclear electromagnetic pulse overhead, and it vanishes, along with your bank account.)

Reference books? In my house there is a bookshelf in the stairwell, on the first landing, entirely devoted to books about ancient Egypt. There is another shelf on the next landing containing 40 or 50 of those marvelous state guidebooks published in the late 1930s by FDR’s Works Progress Administration. Ask my wife. You cannot take more than a step or two in this house without knocking over a stack of books.

SI: Your next volume, chronologically, is Les Barricades Mystérieuses (1999). Composed entirely of villanelles, it showcases your lyrical mastery. (There also are some outstanding love poems!) I know you’ve spoken about this elsewhere, but can you tell us about the title, how you came up with this sequence, and what you intended with the volume? For example, did you intend for the poems to be in conversation with each other, and, if so, how?

JC: Back before the internet, in the 1990s, I occasionally spoke by phone with different people around the country who were interested in my work. One wise and helpful person in particular pointed out something I took to heart. He claimed to have noticed that most American poets who have any success with a first book almost always write about the same thing in their second book.

That’s certainly what I had done with After the Rain. By the time they get to a third book, he said, they’re mostly repeating themselves. They have nothing new to say, and nobody wants to hear it anyway. The moral: a third book of poems should avoid repeating what made the first two worth reading. I thought he was onto something, and I tried to make my third book different.

That third one consists of 32 villanelles, out of the 100 or more that I composed. It’s completely different from the first two books, and some people think it’s my best book. This could be credited to the influence of my editor at Cleveland State, Leonard Trawick, a soft-spoken Southerner from Alabama, with a Ph.D. from Harvard.

I had already edited and designed a number of books while at Bobb-Merrill, and later for Hackett Publishing. Especially when it came to design, I had strong opinions about how my own books should look, inside and out. Leonard Trawick, with whom I had already worked on After the Rain, not only listened to what I had to say, but also improved on some of my ideas. (Charlie Hughes, of Wind Publications in Kentucky, the publisher of my next two books, had that same flexibility and inventiveness.)

The poems in Barricades are intended as a sequence. If you look closely, there’s a submerged narrative. We’re still in Mississinewa County, sort of. Two former lovers, now much older, both fairly well-educated, have arranged a tryst in an old farmhouse located at the crest of a glacial moraine somewhere in the Midwestern boondocks. Together once more, they celebrate their past, and re-explore the surrounding countryside. But that’s not all they’re into, if you check out the front-cover art.

As for the title—the villanelle is a French form, hence a title in French. When I began writing villanelles, I expected them to be difficult, some kind of barrier or barricade. Not at all. Almost the opposite. Once you establish the first stanza, the rest almost follows. From start to finish, it took me about an uninterrupted week of work to come up with a halfway decent villanelle. (A finished Alexandroid averages about a day, but only one out of ten is worth keeping.)

One other curious thing: a lot of the time I was writing villanelles, in the 1990s, I was listening to CDs of different pianists and harpsichordists play “The Well-Tempered Clavier” and other keyboard works by Bach. I’m a clutzy amateur pianist, and happened to have the Schirmer volume on hand. I found I could play a few of the easier ones, and I memorized the Fugue Number 2 in C Minor, which I particularly liked.

Strangely, in the years since, and while I’ve been working on Alexandroids, I seem to prefer listening to Scarlatti. I’m not sure why. (Bach and Scarlatti were born in the same year, however, along with Handel. Does that signify anything?)

I suspect this came about because a villanelle, like a fugue, contains repetitive elements that progress through increasingly intricate and contrasting counterpoint variations and yet still manage to come together effortlessly at the close. Bach locates such marvelous inventions within a much larger, completely comprehensive, architectonic framework. Evidently, while working on the villanelles, and not possessing Bach’s mastery, I still hoped to imitate his approach, on a far smaller scale, in a book of formal poems.

When, years later, I began writing Alexandroids, I found that I wanted them to be more like Scarlatti’s sonatas, which are brief, can begin in any way or any key, develop in inconceivable ways, do just about anything imaginable, and close like the lid of a jeweler’s box. A sonata by Scarlatti is not part of a vast system, but more like some rare moth circling and landing on an exotic flower. I wanted the Alexandroids to be like that. Hearkening back to Bach, however, I have put 100 Alexandroids into a sequential and thematic framework in my next book.

SI: Just two technical notes that your villanelles elicited from me about your formal poetry. You often employ half-rhymes or assonance in lieu of exact rhymes. Yet once you choose a meter for a given poem, you follow it meticulously, amid artful variations. Is this a fair assessment, and does it suggest anything about your working methods?

JC: Well, after you’ve read Emily Dickinson and Wilfred Owen, you’re licensed to employ all the half-rhymes you like. The meter in those villanelles is pretty much iambic pentameter. What distinguishes them from most other poems in that form is, first, that the repeating lines do not vary in word sequence, although, when broken into different phrases, they can vary in capitalization and punctuation. In this way they differ from the vast majority of contemporary villanelles I encounter these days, in which it seems that approximating the repeating lines is acceptable.

Second, those poems exhibit considerable enjambment throughout, which sometimes runs from one triad to the next. The enjambment contributes to an onrushing effect. The entire poem becomes not so much a series of statements with repeating end rhymes, but rather a series of events that keep occurring in different ways within a repetitive, rhyming structure.

By the way, a new villanelle of mine called “Shelter” recently appeared in New Verse Review, and might help to illustrate what I’m trying to explain here. (It’s a sequel to the much earlier “Palimpsest.”) In my own experience the villanelle has been an extremely liberating form. It is not so much a structure as a system of opportunity. Recently I ran across an excellent summary of such opportunity in François Cheng’s Chinese Poetic Writing:

. . . the idea that the poem inhabits not only a time but a space as well. This space is not an abstracted, limited, or confined space, but rather a place where human signs and signified things are taken in a continuous multidirectional play.

SI: Another technical note, from reading your villanelles in particular—again, I think it applies to many of your poems as a whole. Your diction has, to me, a fine blend of concrete and abstract nouns, and of mono- and multisyllabic words. The language, while being supple, does not call attention to itself. Do you have any reflections on this score? Is something consciously at work here in these stylistic choices?

JC: Yes, definitely. Clarity above all. Short, everyday, Anglo-Saxon words are essential in the quest for clarity. (I make up for this minimal obsession in the Alexandroids, where I try to sneak in all kinds of jaw-breakers and fifty-cent words.)

SI: In your next volume, Cross This Bridge at a Walk (2006), you feature a narrative poem I regret not having included in my anthology: “Covered Bridge.” To what extent was the incident real as described? Your great-great-grandfather did fight in Sherman’s army, correct?

JC: You’re correct, the protagonist in that poem is not the same person as my great-great grandfather, Elias Baxter Decker, who actually served in one of General Sherman’s three armies on the march to Savannah and the sea. That main character, Barnabas Decker, is sort of an imaginary cousin, who did not go off to the war, but stayed on the home front.

The real Elias Baxter Decker was of course one of the family patriarchs, with a splendid monument in the country cemetery at New Lancaster, containing a majority of my ancestors on my mother’s side. When I was five, his daughter, Cleva Honor Decker, a retired schoolteacher, long ago interred out there with the rest of them, taught me how to read and write. She also regaled me with stories her father had told her about what it was like marching through Georgia. (For back-up, I have fifty letters he sent home to his wife, Lavinia, in Tipton County.)

SI: A poem in your next volume, A Dance in the Street (2012), I find excruciatingly moving. I’m referring to “At the Art Institute.” The poem entices the reader via shrewdly enjambed lines of two or three beats each, in telling a short anecdote, rather like Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room.” Unlike most of your other poem, it interacts—even fleetingly—with other works of art. Yet other poems of yours also center on objects, natural or human-made. Tell us about the kinds of visual artworks or artists who have strongly affected you.

JC: I’m a fine-arts groupie, for sure. I’ve done my share of gawking in museums of art, ever since art-history class at Yale and “darkness at noon” at Harvard. In turn this takes us back to that great-uncle of mine, Henshaw, and his legacy, and also, for example, to my uncollected poem, “Hawkbill Knife,” Or to the prose poem “Summer Studio.” And of course to the much earlier poem, “Configuration.”

SI: By the time we get to, say, the “New Poems” in Darkened Rooms of Summer (2014), your “New and Selected,” introduced by Ted Kooser, it’s startling to find a departure from your longer and longer-lined poems. You use a verse form that you note you have invented, and which already has come up in this interview: the Alexandroid.

JC: I invented it with some posthumous support from Swinburne’s tribute to Landor, and with the encouragement of Mr. C. B. “Kip” Anderson, a poet friend based in Concord, Mass. As a newly introduced form, the Alexandroid has been a lot of fun, but it hasn’t caught on much. I do seem to be getting a few more of them published these days, and that’s been gratifying.

Carter at Landor’s grave, with the inscription by Swinburne. Photograph by Diane Carter.

SI: As others have remarked, these poems are concise, like haiku or tanka. Can you tell us how the form came about, and is the correspondence with Chinese and Japanese poetry apt in your opinion?

JC: I thought up the Alexandroid because, as with the earlier villanelles, I wanted to try something different. And yes, I’m crazy about Du Fu, Li Bai, and Wang Wei, but they’re not particularly known for writing concisely. Rather, they wrote extremely complicated rhyming poems that in some English translations seem marvelously direct and moving.

In developing the Alexandroid, I was striving for compression and brevity. A sonnet in iambic pentameter has, theoretically, 140 syllables; an Alexandroid has 72, about half that many. As with the traditional brief Japanese forms, haiku and tanka, one is forced to get to the point.

My recent Alexandroid “November,” in the 2025 Halloween issue of New Verse Review, attempts to achieve such compression. If you look closely at that poem, certain elements associated with Florence—the Duomo and the Ponte Vecchio, Dante, the ghosts of the city’s political past, the city’s longtime fear of the French military, the flood of 1967—flash for milliseconds in the oncoming twilight. A lot is implied.

As I was working on that poem I had a hunch that somewhere it had a predecessor, and later I found it—lines 60-62 of The Waste Land, describing a shadowy city with figures crossing crossing a bridge.

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge . . .

In my poem “November” it is a gray fog of an autumnal dusk, and a different city and bridge, but the parallels and contrasts are noticeable.

SI: I don’t want to leave readers with the impression that you write only three-stanza rhyming poems these days. The Land Itself (2019), superbly edited by BJ Omanson, includes some of your older poems, but also several new ones in various forms and line lengths.

JC: No, perish the thought, that anyone would assume that these days I’m producing only poems in traditional forms. I still write free verse and prose. I have in storage two completed manuscripts of free-verse poems, and two more consisting of Alexandroids.

SI: One of my favorite poems in The Land Itself is “Dowser.” It’s in iambic pentameter and a tricky rhyme scheme, about an undertaker who needs to find a dowser to help him locate a coffin underground. Again, this poem speaks with the authority of first-hand knowledge. But is the incident invented?

JC: The three stanzas are sonnet-like; the incident is entirely invented. Whoever I happen to be seated next to—undertaker, housewife, student, stockbroker—I ask a lot of questions.

SI: What are some of the biggest risks you have taken as a working poet? Any regrets?

JC: I try to avoid risk. Regret never changes what brought about the regret. As for bonehead mistakes, wasted opportunities, and assorted faux pas, in real life and in my writing, there have been dozens, if not hundreds—actual and figurative moments when I couldn’t haul in the bullet pass, or watched my buzzer-beater clank off the rim. (For example, after that interview with Helen Vendler, Harvard hired somebody else.)

SI: Can you comment on the current scene for emerging poets and publishers of poetry?

JC: No, not really. I’ve been pretty much self-exiled from that sort of thing all along. Back before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Saints fans delighted in shouting “Who dat?” at visiting teams and players. When it comes to the current crop of contemporary poets, I often find myself wondering Who dat?

But that remark only shows how out of it I am. Seriously, I wish the new poets well, and I hope their dreams all come true. I myself have been extremely fortunate. I’ve been able to keep writing, and my wife and I have been able to travel. As an educator, she’s a world traveler in her own right, but together we’ve visited Germany and Brazil, and spent time in Portugal and Spain. I finally managed to get back to Florence a few years ago. You can’t do any better than that.

Carter in Portugal. Photograph by Diane Carter.

One of the things I learned from living in a village in France is that you can go just about anywhere—metropolis, small town, mountain chalet, nearby dairy farm—and if you’re an observant writer, there’s always something worth investigating and checking out. So it really doesn’t matter where you are, as long as you keep asking questions. That’s why I continue to appreciate the Midwest. It’s near at hand and every bit as interesting as anywhere else, and besides, everybody speaks English.

SI: What are you working on these days?

JC: I’m sorting through possible additions to a manuscript a longtime friend, H. L. Hix, helped me assemble few years ago, called A Constant Grace. It’s a compendium of various reviews, articles, and interviews that have considered my work. He’s already written an introduction, but new stuff keeps appearing.

SI: What are you reading?

JC: In bed at night, I’m reading R. Carlyle Bulley’s The Old Northwest, which won the Pulitzer for history in 1950. It’s a two-volume set published by Indiana University Press, and designed—of all people—by my favorite book designer, Bruce Rogers. (Who was, of course, a Hoosier.) For the one or two days each week when Diane and I drive cross-town for coffee and croissants, I’m slowly plowing through the first volume of the Library of America’s edition of Henry Adams’s history of Jefferson’s administration.

SI: How is that going for you?

JC: I’m beginning to agree with Garry Wills, who thinks it’s the greatest work of history ever written by an American. I’m terribly impressed by Adams, a genuine weirdo, but a brilliant scholar. And what a writer! Consider this passage, early on, where he’s talking about what it was like to approach Jefferson’s inscrutability:

A few broad strokes of the brush would paint the portraits of all the early presidents . . . but Jefferson could only be painted touch by touch, with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended on the shifting and uncertain flicker of its semi-transparent shadows.

People who haven’t read him assume his magnum opus will be slow and stodgy; not at all. It’s brilliant, panoramic, and quite trenchant in places. Among native skeptics, he’s right up there with Bierce, Twain, and Vidal. (Would that any of us might prefer to be remembered as the target of wit, rather than be forgotten altogether.)

Henry Adams is the protagonist in one of my finished projects, A Task for Bronze. It consists of 21 Alexandroids, with photographs and notes, and focuses on the Adams Memorial in Washington, DC. There have been no takers. (But my wife likes it.)

SI: Fast forward from the 1880s, when Henry Adams began publishing his true magnum opus, as you call it. Do you have any general advice for poets now writing?

JC: I can only repeat advice I was fortunate to have inherited from others. A few aphorisms have guided me during the long haul:

• To the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.

• From a certain point onward there is no longer any

  turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

• The writer’s task is not to judge, but to understand.

• The way is not difficult. Only cease to cherish opinion.

SI: Thank you, Jared. It’s been a privilege. We haven’t met in person, but I’ve attempted an Alexandroid in your honor:

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Straight Talk

How bracing to have met you twice—
            first through your work,
An open book that will entice
            all but the block-

Heads who resent a poetry 
            they understand. 
Or think they do. Straight talk, you see,
            is not on brand

These days—not at least since the moderns.
            The second time
We met through emails. Yours, like Auden’s
            jokes, wax sublime.

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JC: A first-rate Alexandroid! What a thoughtful way of ending our talk. Thank you, Sunil, and thank you for inviting me to be part of this discussion.

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Sunil Iyengar lives outside Washington, D.C. and writes poems and book reviews. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, A Call from the Shallows (Finishing Line Press), and editor of newly released The Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse (Franciscan University Press).