He Used to Write About Movies. Now He’s America’s Most Prominent Guide to Poetry.

For 23 years, A.O. Scott was a film critic for the New York Times. For the past five months, he has been the nation’s most prominent poetry critic, writing a monthly column that uses the Times’ interactive technology to analyze a single poem at a time. Scott isn’t coming to poetry as a true outsider. He finished all the coursework and exams for a Ph.D. in literature, and he was a literary critic before he started writing about movies. But when most writing about poetry is done by poets and lifelong academics, many of whom seem to view other poets and academics as their primary audience, that still makes Scott an unusual and welcome presence.

Scott’s columns on such poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, Philip Larkin, and Diane Seuss are inviting, approachable, playful, and smart. He’s a perceptive reader, and he has a knack for writing about poems in ways that lend shape and even excitement to the act of reading and thinking about them. He’s also comfortable ignoring some of the orthodoxies that too often obscure what it’s actually like to read a poem. Scott and I met over Zoom to talk about what poems are actually for, why many sophisticated readers fear poetry, and why I’m wrong to think a couple of em dashes cannot be a hug. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Jonathan Farmer: Why did you decide to start writing about poems?

A.O. Scott: I’ve always been interested in poetry. In a previous life, I was doing a Ph.D. in English, and the dissertation that I never wrote was about mid-20^th-century American poetry. It had always been part of how I thought of myself as a critic, and it’s the sort of interpretation and analysis that I was most comfortable with. You can have a poem all in front of you; you can really see how it works. Writing and thinking about poems was a great kind of pleasure and intellectual exercise, but for a long time I didn’t do it. I kept reading poetry, but for the last, I don’t know, 25 or 30 years, I’ve been very much a casual reader of poetry—not someone professionally invested in it, not someone who specializes in it.

So how did you end up going pro?

When I moved over from being a movie reviewer to my current job at the Book Review, I thought, Well, I’d like to do something with poetry, and there was this interactive feature that had existed for a while, called the Close Read. There hadn’t been any for a while, and I thought I’d like to do this Frank O’Hara poem, “Having a Coke With You.” It was going to be just a one-off thing. We published it about a year ago, and there was great response, lots of people read it. The comments were great and a lot of people said, “I’m not interested in poems so much, but this was really fun.”

It took four months to do, because the technology is so elaborate, and there were tons of permissions to clear. About six months later, right before the election, we thought: What if we just published something that we could do quick and easy, something you can think about for two or three minutes while you’re freaking out about everything else? And it went really well, and we thought, you know, what if we just kept doing this?

Do you have a sense of who the readers are? Are they mostly people who were already invested in poems, or … ?

This is something we thought a lot about. We want people who are invested in poetry to be satisfied and engaged in it. But, while we don’t want it to be simplified or pandering, we also want it to be accessible to people who are not. I mean, there’s a great resistance to reading poetry, and a lot of people are intimidated by it, even people who read a lot and have pretty sophisticated literary tastes.

Poems are vehicles of meaning and feeling. I go back to Frank O’Hara’s formulation in “Personism.” He says, “The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages,” and I think it’s important—not in every case, but for the poems that we’re selecting—to have a sense that there’s a writer here. There’s a poet, or even just a persona, who is trying to say something, and the way that it’s being said is as important or more important than what’s being said.

We’re paying attention to the sound of words, to rhymes, to line breaks, to meter if there’s meter, to the repetition of certain words, to the choice of words, even to punctuation—to all of the things that contribute to the sound and the visual presentation of the poem. But we’re also trying—and this has been the most important thing for me—we’re trying to make something. We’re trying to highlight the beauty of the poem, and the affective power of the poem, but we’re also trying to make something that is beautiful.

This is something that I’ve always believed in. I always thought, when I was reviewing movies, that it wasn’t sufficient just to acknowledge or to describe the emotion. It was important to convey it. So I would try to write criticism that would move people in some way, that would make them laugh. Or, you know, choke up. And I worked hard at that, and I felt like, well, this is another chance to do something like that.

One of the things I like about these columns is that they have a shape, and they have a kind of narrative arc that at least imitates the act of reading a poem. But as much as I admire your readings of these poems, there are places where I get frustrated, claims that feel pretty far removed from the experience of the poem. For example, in the piece about George Oppen, you describe the dashes around the word child as a hug. To me, moves like that seem to treat the poem as a set of raw materials waiting to be put to use. But I’m pretty sure you don’t see them that way! So what’s your goal with that kind of analysis?

Part of that is that I think there is a place—and I’ve always believed this, going back to my own schooling—there is always a place for the extravagant reading.

That’s a great term.

Well, I stole it. There’s a great essay by Neil Hertz called “Two Extravagant Teachings,” which is about being in a seminar and doing a close reading of a poem. The professor’s making these increasingly outrageous claims about it and saying to the students, “How far can I go with this? How far will you let me go?” The argument of the essay is that the extravagance is the way, the only way, that you can latch on to what’s really there—by going too far in whatever speculative direction.

We were looking at the Oppen poem, and one of the designers saw those em dashes coming out of the word child and said, “That’s the child holding out its arms.” I just love that. And I’m not sure that Oppen didn’t see that. He was meticulous, to say the least, and he physically made the poems …

He used wood and nails and glue to assemble poems.

Exactly. I mean, in the years that he wasn’t writing poems, he was making furniture and working as a tool- and die-maker, so he had a sense of the materiality of the poems. But some of that is maybe purposely to go too far, to test the limits as a way of saying to the readers, “Look, this is not a precious Fabergé egg.”

Let’s go back to that imaginary seminar. I’m assuming you were taught a lot of things about what we should and shouldn’t do with poems. For example, I imagine you were taught that we shouldn’t read them biographically, but to my great delight, you ignore that. How has the way that you read and write about poems diverged from what you were originally taught?

The poetry that I was working on back when I was in in graduate school seemed to directly challenge that. I was writing about the late 1950s and the whole confessional movement, where there were poets who were moving out of an impersonal, formalist approach toward something that was more expressive, that was more autobiographical. I was interested in how that dogma of impersonality is always undermined throughout the history of poetry. I mean, Dante is writing about his girlfriend and his friends and enemies in Florence.

Right. Go back to Wyatt and the courtiers. They were constantly messing around with what everybody knew about them and about everybody else at court.

Exactly! That was basically gossip. I mean, they didn’t think that students in English seminars in the 1950s were going to be analyzing the prosody. They were writing naughty poems about Anne Boleyn.

There are all kinds of impediments put up to the reading of poetry, such that an ordinary reader will feel, you know, it’s not for them. If I have a mission, it’s to try to push against that, because it seems to me that it is possible to be a casual reader of poetry. That’s how I think of myself. It’s a little disingenuous, obviously: I have training, and you and I are talking about Wyatt and Dante and stuff, but nonetheless, the way that I read poetry is the way that I do crossword puzzles or I watch television. But how do you get there? How do you make the case for that?

The George Oppen poem is called “From a Photograph.” And I think one of the most brilliant things that the designers did was the way that photograph arrives in your reading of the piece.
You’ve been reading a poem called “From a Photograph,” and you’ve been forming an image of it in your head, and then there it is. And it gives you a little bit of a chill.

You seem to be drawn to what I think of as the double nature of poems, the way the experience of the poem can work against the experience that’s described in the poem. But you also seem interested in aligning the elements of the poem. I’m much more sympathetic to the former impulse. Do you want to make a case for the latter one?

Say a little more about what you mean.

I think there’s a risk in writing about poems, because we can treat them almost comprehensively. We can just about identify every component, and we can try to make those components mesh together like a single, efficient machine. And my feeling is that sound and sensation are more slippery than that. They don’t line up comfortably. They aren’t that reducible. It’s a little bit like when someone describes a piece of classical music as being about something, which always baffles me. But you seem to really like when these things can kind of be stacked up …

Well, I think it varies. It depends a lot on the poem and the poet, because I think that some of what you described is an issue not even of criticism, but of craft. I mean, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”—

Which I admire but do not love, in large part because it does line up so well.

Yeah. I describe it as perfect and say, “That’s a technical description.”

She was 20 years old when she fucking wrote that poem, and like, just that one line: “Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.” That is just incredible. Just to write that line when you’re, I don’t know, a sophomore in college, and then you could just go on and become Adrienne Rich, and everything else that she became.

It’s fascinating to me: The whole history of formalism in 20^th-century poetry, and form as an ideological trope. I’ve never figured out, to my own satisfaction, the idea there’s a political and ideological investment in form and in the act of blowing it up.

Well, poets are often accustomed to thinking metaphorically, so you end up with a lot of metaphorical thinking about poems. Regularity in a poem becomes equivalent to regularity in politics. There are a lot of those arguments, which only work as metaphor, but that end up driving a lot of poetic ideology.

And that becomes sort of literalized in a way, so that if you smash the tyranny of iambic pentameter, you’ll strike a blow against capitalism. Which might not be exactly right.

I’m not even sure how regular capitalism is. It looks pretty disruptive to me.

That’s a good point.

Is there a poem you wish you could write about that just doesn’t fit this format?

We have a huge Google Doc where we just collect possibilities, which is one of the most fun parts of the job. But the poet I always come back to and always want to read more of is Wallace Stevens. And some of his poems are long. But even with the short ones, he writes at a level of abstraction, and the metaphors are so intricate and are, like, metaphors for metaphors, and I have about 1,000 words. I just don’t know if I could do it. Maybe if we do this for years.