Breaking Norms: Departures from Rilke

An interview with Steven Cramer about the unique process behind his seventh poetry collection.

I recently had the great pleasure of speaking with one of my first poetry teachers/mentors, Steven Cramer, about his latest collection, Departures from Rilke. We discussed the unique process and set of constraints behind the poems in Departures from Rilke.

• Experimentation and influence as vital to a writer’s work—at every stage

• Community, craft, and editorial inputs that shaped this collection

• On influence: The writer as passionate reader first

• How to evolve as a writer, from book to book and generally

Steven Cramer’s seventh poetry collection is Departures from Rilke (Arrowsmith Press, 2023).  His previous volume, Listen (MadHat Press, 2020), was named a “must-read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Previous books include Clangings (Sarabande Books, 2012) and Goodbye to the Orchard (Sarabande, 2004), winner of the Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club and named a 2005 Massachusetts Honor Book. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other journals. Recipient of two grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, he founded and now teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University. 

Watch the video below, or keep scrolling to read the interview. To hear Steven read poems from Departures from Rilke, check out the video (I highly recommend it).

Breaking Norms: Departures from Rilke with Steven Cramer

Radha Marcum: Departures from Rilke has an origin story that is unique among your books. Would you mind sharing a little bit about the process of developing the poems? How was your process different for this book?

Steven Cramer: When I publish a book, I usually think, that’s it. This is my last book. I mean that in the sense of final, not just most recent. Before Departures from Rilke, I published Listen, which collected work over 10 or more years. It was interrupted by a project called Clangings, so I had just published 15 years of work. 

I had been writing new poems, but I wanted to do something different. I was rereading Rilke in translation. Although I can puzzle out versions of the originals in German, I don't read German idiomatically—and there's a big difference between reading and figuring it out and reading it as if it were your mind. 

I was reading some of the canonical translations and they were good translations, but they were so clearly translations. I was not getting that something I would get when I read a poem in English. I finally decided that that something is really texture, is language as paint. So I took a fairly well known poem and said, what would happen if I just behaved like an editor on the translation?

I imposed two limitations on myself. First, I had to trim a line's worth of words from each stanza. Given that English Rilke is characterized by an abundance of adjectives and adverbs, particularly in the lyrics from his collection New Poems, my second limitation was to transform as many adjectives and adverbs into verbs as possible, just to explore the potential outcomes. 

Another rule was deliberately breaking any conventional translation norms. If the poem deviated significantly from the premises of the original Rilke or its conventional translation, I went with the departure. I did one did another, did another. I worked through the two volumes, very spontaneously, over three months. If something didn't click, I didn’t do it. 

After this, I ended up with 57 departures from the real Rilke. Each departure followed the same pattern: starting with the original German, then a Microsoft-translated version (which, though often hilarious gibberish, proved useful), followed by at least one or two legitimate translations, and finally, my departure. 

As I continued, the departures became more and more unruly, they misbehaved more and more. I only realized it had turned into a book once I had accumulated that many departures. Reading through, I thought it read like a book.

Radha: It's fascinating to hear about the constraints that you placed on the poems and that you weren't necessarily thinking about it as a book project. You completed it in a remarkably short amount of time. 

Steven: I have friends who tell me when I'm on the right track or not, and I was encouraged to keep going with it.

Radha: I actually wanted to ask you about the role of community in this book, and maybe in your work generally.

Steven: I'm 70 now. I started writing poetry in 1974, over 40 years ago. Community has changed for me. Community used to be connected to colleges and universities, particularly during my time in the MFA program at Iowa, where I formed connections with friends and teachers. Fortunately, I've maintained friendships with some of my former teachers who, over the years, generously agreed to read my work without charging me. 

For the past two decades, I have shared all my poems with two accomplished poets. Our connection goes beyond mere support; we genuinely care about each other's work and are committed enough to be constructively critical. It's not a support group in the traditional sense, but it sustains the art, and I can't imagine navigating without them. I'm happy to say they feel the same way about me. Joyce and Terri serve as the litmus test. 

Regarding this particular book, my wife Hilary read every version before anyone else. She found it lacking in eccentricity. She said, not eccentric enough. 

Discussing this project might make it seem detached—like crafting shoes rather than poems—but the basis of Rilke as a sort of mask allowed me to write poems to lost friends, to family, to delve into my frustration with the world's current state. So it was an interesting release that I wasn't expecting. When I was writing every one of them I thought, well, how do I make it work?

Radha: I can relate. I can’t start with the subject or emotional core of a poem. For example, writing about the mass shooting that happened in my community, if I started with the purpose of writing about that event, the poem probably wouldn't work. It is only possible to get there through the mask you mention, through slant or sideways strategies, maybe with the help of existing art. 

Steven: Particularly an artwork by an artist who feels very passionately about something about which they don't know very much—about which they have more questions than answers. Because if you go in with the answers, then you're essentially going to be parroting what you already know.

Russia had invaded Ukraine before I started this project, so there are ways that this book responds to that. But I couldn't have approached it if I had sat down to do that. Allowing the poem to go in that direction seemed authentic enough. One of the horrible ironies is that there's always a new conflict, that a poem like “Bomb Site” can respond to.

Radha: I've written a lot about conflict—wars, weapons of mass destruction—and the thing that strikes me looking back is how relevant the old work still is, despite things or events having passed. Which is what we're talking about in Rilke, right? To what do you attribute Rilke’s power to remain relevant in our time?

Steven: Rilke is an odd poet for this particular period because, whether he's writing a short lyric or whether he's writing something that's more embracing and larger in scope, he’s a poet of the intense inner life. He's a poet of introspection. I was introduced to him by one of my most important teachers, the poet Jon Anderson. He read Rilke poems almost like prayers. No matter the subjects, Rilke’s poems reaffirm the value of the individual life. 

I think that might be relevant right now, the notion of the individual life. I don't believe in the soul, but I do believe in the self, in consciousness. Conscious experience is all we have. It’s how we decide what's good and what's bad. Rilke’s ferocious attention to the individual life is a kind of a counter to the collective. The cultivation of collective experience now seems to take place on social media. 

This particular product project of departing from another text has quite a history to it. It goes way back to the Renaissance English lyric, the departures from Petrarch that Wyatt and Surrey, and other others important into the English language, wrote. There are more recent examples, too. My own mentor, Donald Justice, wrote a book called Departures and Departures from Rilke is dedicated to him. 

One of the things that I think the practice [of departures] does, without being too conscious about it, is pay homage to reading as an experience that is a life experience, not secondary to life, if that makes sense.

Radha: That makes so much sense. There's a way in which poems begin to live in the body before we even hear or parse them. That access to the interior experience happens on multiple levels in response to a work and to the history that precedes it. 

I know a lot of poets will be curious about the book’s organization. How did you organize the poems? How did you decide which poems would make the cut? 

Steven: I decided early on I was going to maintain Rilke’s order, even with the large gaps in between the poems that I departed from and the poems that I didn't. 

When I sent it to Arrowsmith, the editor said, we'd love to do this book but that first poem has to go. It was based on Rilke’s famous “Archaic Torso of Apollo” that ends “you must change your life.” It has been translated a gazillion times. Mine was a parody of it. I didn't take long for me to say yes to that change. 

There was another poem that I was working on, a portrait of a real jerk, a Putin-like character. I tried and tried and tried. But my poet friends said, it's not working. You have to get rid of that. That's the kind of thing that good friends who are fellow artists say to you. You really do need people who will gently send you back to the drawing board or say no, sorry, not this. 

I know a lot of poets who are in writing groups. And they say, well, it’s really a support group. I think you don't have to be mean—you don't have to be ruthless—to be rigorous. 

Radha: In the workshops I teach, students like to ask: What's at stake in the poem? I don’t think it’s a bad question, but I think a better question is, what's at play? And how is this poem in conversation with with poets of the past, like Rilke?

Steven: Play is hard work. I remember something you said to me at Bennington, maybe near the end of our semesters together. You said, I think you're getting harder on me as I get better.

Radha: So do you feel like you've gotten harder on yourself as you've developed as a writer? Is that part of the internal development? 

Steven: Yes, I think I've gotten harder on myself in the sense that I don't want to repeat myself. My books as very different from one another. That matters a lot to me. Clangings is a book-length poem, all in the same five quatrain sections. Listen has four sections and certain parts of it are very much miscellaneous, and I don't mind that. I didn't try to overdetermine anything thematically. 

Philip Larkin had this great notion. Somebody asked him, How do you order your books? He said, Well, like a variety show. First you have the dancing horses, and then you have the opera singer, and then you have the person who spins plates, and then you have the one who recites Shakespeare. 

Variety is important to me. I really get bored when every poem looks the same—poets who find their trademark and stick with it. 

Radha: Who was it that said reputation is based on repetition? Ashbury? That is one strategy: Automatic pilot. I appreciate you sharing about the development of your books, each being unique, the work evolving—how you try different things, not sticking to a personal brand. 

I imagine there are some risks to that in a writing career, possibly in publishing. Do you think about that? What advice would you give to poets who are emerging or who are on a second book or a third? How would you encourage them to think about their development from book to book? 

Steven: Those are very different stages. The poet who has enough poems for a book, but hasn't published the first book yet, needs to have more of an eye on what an editor might have time to be interested in. After the first book,  a poet may have a publisher who is open to reading the next work, although there are fewer and fewer of those. 

For me, it's almost always a question of form. I don't say, Oh, I've written enough about that and now I should write about something else. I try to think as little about subject matter as possible. The language on the page leads to subject matter. If you have published a book, and you think it's a good book, and you like it, try writing bad poems in new ways because I guarantee you will write you because you can't help but have an allegiance to what worked. If you break what worked, you’re going to write in new ways. 

Our late Poet Laureate Louise Glück, who was a teacher of mine, was asked by an audience member after reading, how do you know when a poem is done? She said, My friends told me. And she wasn't kidding. She elaborated a bit and said sometimes the friends made suggestions that encouraged her to do something very different than what they suggested. But she was so invested in the success of that individual work, she was the last person to judge it. 

When Rilke reached a dead end with his work, he went to Paris and started working as Rodin's assistant. And Rodin said, You gotta get out into the world. And that's where these thing poems in New Poems came from. Yeats, after becoming a very successful poet, appealed to Ezra Pound. He was essentially asking, How do I become modern? 

Radha: It seems the secret ingredient to any success on the page—and we could argue about what “success” is—but the secret to having created something of worth is to have surrounded oneself with the right mentors, the right peers, the voices of the dead. Any work that seems to be of any value is in that kind of dialog.

Steven: I know of no writer worthy of the name wasn't a passionate reader first. By passionate I don't just mean you let it wash over you. You go back and say, how did they do that? And how would I do that? That's not plagiarism. That's influence. Take the last stanza of Keats's “To Autumn” and compare it to the last stanza of Stevens’ “Sunday Morning.” Put them together and you realize that Keats's last stanza is inhabiting the mind of Stevens as he's writing.

Learn more about Departure from Rilke and Steven Cramer’s work at stevencramer.com.

---

Looking for clarity about what it takes to get poetry published? Join me for: