AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Richie Hofmann and Cindy Juyoung Ok on Erotic Turmoil and More

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

Richie Hofmann: (POEM RECORDING PLAYS)

Angelic Richie with bite marks in such a clean room.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I'm Cindy Juyoung Ok, and I'm so grateful that you're here so we can move through the luscious poetry of our guest, who is Richie Hofmann. Richie has two poetry collections out, including the more recent A Hundred Lovers, out from Knopf in 2022. It's not a book that counts to 100 or only about love. It's a book that assembles and swivels on abandonment that stays, on the heart that enlivens, on inheritances that are created. Together we get to hear more of his recent poems and the ways he's thinking about his personal and recognizable canon of visual art, classical music, Greece, water, rooms, dust and death. I mean, what else is there? Richie, welcome to the podcast.

Richie Hofmann: Thank you for having me, Cindy.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Do you know the term spark bird?

Richie Hofmann: I do not.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: OK. So, it's what bird watchers call the bird that first caught their attention. So something that kind of started that fire for the new bird watcher, made them into a bird watcher. And you've often pointed to a particular moment in your finding of poetry, your kind of literary spark bird, your undergrad professor Bonnie Costello gifting you Divine Comedies by James Merrill, and that link kind of creating a young poet. But before your own poems came to be, you were also studying at that time with the intention of becoming a literary critic.

Richie Hofmann: Yeah, that's right.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. How does that background affect the way you read, write and think now?

Richie Hofmann: I think as far back as I can remember wanting to make my own poems, I've been steeped in literature, in other arts, and wanted to make work that commented on those works that was a scholarly engagement with things that mattered to me. I remember an early moment I had with the poet Rachel Hadas. I think I had brought her poems about Chinese archeology and extended meditations on Milton's Paradise Lost, and she asked me, "Where are you, where are you in all of these poems?" And I think in a weird way, it hadn't occurred to me that poems could also be a place where I learn about myself. And I think for the last decade or so, that's been one of my projects. How to become more intimately acquainted with who I am in the world.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Was that interaction with Rachel before you had fully sort of committed to poetry? Was it while you were still choosing?

Richie Hofmann: I think that's right. And I don't know if I consciously chose, Cindy. I feel like the poems just took over my life.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It chose you.

Richie Hofmann: They took over and they felt hot and they felt urgent. And soon they were eating up every moment I had, and there was no room for anything else.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Do you still have that feeling? That it's kind of taken over everything and everything is imbued with that urge?

Richie Hofmann: Yeah. I'm still waiting for poetry to let me go. But its grip is very strong. It's a monstrous grip. But I love being gripped.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, as your poem “Opulence,” I believe, goes. "I write poetry in bed/and criticism in the bath." And we all know the bed can be monstrous.

Richie Hofmann: That's right. It's easy to get lost there.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, speaking of gripping, the erotic is where your poems tend, where your poems love, I'm curious not only about their content of Eros, the kind of hints at sex, the lack thereof, but also the erotic syntax, the presence in language itself. As Carl Phillips says, the control and changing priorities of clauses and parts of speech is this question of power and that's erotic. And I know you discussed that shared impulse in a later interview as well. In what ways do you find the erotic, especially its queerness, in that medium that has sort of gripped you and the style and grammar of it? The units of the sound, line, poem.

Richie Hofmann: Poetry is such a full body experience. It not only engages the mind but also the breath, the mouth. Sometimes I wonder, is there really any difference between what we do and prose? And then I read a poem and I feel like there is something about that compression. Very sensuous worlds are contained in poems. I don't know exactly how that works, but I feel it as I read and write. Carl Phillips has a very complex syntax. There's a kind of sensuousness, a kind of pleasure in release that he's able to work. I feel like my sentences tend to be much simpler. But I also like to think about how different kinds of language can rub against each other.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It reminds me that distinction between... Poetry and prose reminds me of something James Tate wrote about the prose poem. That it's seductive because you're not expecting what we expect of a poem. You're expecting, “Oh, it's a little paragraph.” And then there's this something eternal or something profound that we find.

Richie Hofmann: You know, I've never really written a prose poem? I'm kind of scared to, for that reason.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Is it time?

Richie Hofmann: It's time for me to experiment in the prose poem. I think they dramatize what sentences can do. I don't know. I feel like lineation is one of the erotic touchstones of poetry. Fragments of language can be promiscuous and belong with the line above and belong with the line below. I feel like I'm always relying on lineation to make tension in poetry. I feel like I'd be very scared without it, but that fear might be exactly what should call me to the page.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I so agree about desire. My partner studies something called garden path sentences, which is this idea that you go down this path of the sentence, you think it's going one way and then there's a surprise. And then in poetry, often that can be at the line break. So it could be something like, “your desire is just” and then line break, and there's that feeling that just could be an adjective, it could mean it's fair. And then the next line could be “unfair.” It's, “just/unfair.” Now, just as in describing unfair. And I think that lineation provides that feeling of dullness. And when we read that, we kind of hold both truths momentarily at least.

Richie Hofmann: That's right. That's what feels promiscuous about it. That's what feels kind of generous about poems. They also have silence too. Things can slip in between lines. Feelings, atmospheres can kind of enter the room of the poem in those little breaks and silences in ways that I find really thrilling.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I tend to welcome the reader's projection in those spaces. That blankness allows for it to be a kind of communication or to change with each read, I think.

Richie Hofmann: Yeah. I read something recently that I was kind of obsessed with. The Scottish poet Don Paterson in his book, which is called The Poem, talks about the kind of emphasis that certain words get, up against a line ending or a stanza ending. And he says something only a poet could say. He says, “that which abuts the silence gets the salience.” That that thing that is closest to the blank space of the page is able to get a kind of salience through that space, through that echo. That's, I think, often why we feel those echoes or resonances at the ends of lines and stanzas and in that big way at the end of a poem.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And what's great about poetry is that that erotic blankness or silence in betweenness is happening on these layered levels, as you mentioned. The line, the stanza, the poem. You've identified in your own work, what you name erotic turmoil. And...

Richie Hofmann: In my life, Cindy. Erotic turmoil in my life.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: In your life. And I wondered if you think that there's also a slight redundance. Do you feel like Eros might also require or create some amount of turmoil always?

Richie Hofmann: Absolutely. I think it shakes us. It shakes us. It reminds us we're alive, it reminds us we're in a body. And poems do these things too.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, we wanna be shaken.

Richie Hofmann: Yes, but the turmoil is productive, even if it's terrifying.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, these new poems you have in the magazine have a sort of... I guess all your poems always have a longing clarity. Architecture, myth, symbol. There are always these multiple scale of forms. How are you conceiving of this in-progress third book as a place or as a story in which your new poems will eventually live together?

Richie Hofmann: Well, I felt like my first two books dealt with erotic turmoil of a present moment. Second Empire is kind of about a relationship being tested by infidelity that makes everything feel fragile. And A Hundred Lovers is maybe more celebratory of the same thing. It's about how multiplicity of experience can kind of deepen our sense of selves and our connection to many different partners. I thought I wanted to turn my gaze toward childhood. I've really not written much about childhood. Most of my friends have books about their growing up experience, their family. I love my family. We get along really well, but they're kind of artistically uninteresting to me. They're not the site of my wound the way other romantic relationships, I guess, have been. But I've been wanting to turn back to childhood. And just thinking about the particular dramas of growing up as a gay kid in a homophobic world. But also just how creepy and strange childhood is, I don't think of myself as having a particularly traumatic childhood, and yet I think about all that any child endures and survives to make it into adulthood. And I think that's gonna be the subject for the next book.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: There are so many horrors of childhood, and I think especially the pressure to be having fun and being easygoing is difficult on a child who's having to make sense of a sometimes truly scary place.

Richie Hofmann: No, it's true. And to really believe in the fun, to not let it just be a facade, to say, "Oh, I'm OK, I'm a perfectionist. Look how good at arts and crafts I am." But to really feel like you belong in the world is not an easy thing.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Were you really good at arts and crafts?

Richie Hofmann: Yeah, probably.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It started young, all the love for the different venues, the different mediums.

Richie Hofmann: That's right. I think it's because arts were an escape. I don't know. What I encountered in the arts felt better than what I encountered in real life. I think that way about history too. I had a kind of naïve sense as a kid. That, oh, maybe in history I would have found my place. It was like this kind of ornate room. I remember seeing the palaces of Europe when I was a kid and living in Germany. I'm thinking, “Oh, like maybe there I would be OK.” And then, of course, you grow up and realized, no, you would have been killed there too.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: But it's a longing not only for a place, but at a time.

Richie Hofmann: That's right. And for a kind of excess of beauty, a kind of overwhelming beauty that I still am longing for.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The palace.

Richie Hofmann: The palace of the imagination. It's ornate there. And you can hide.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Let's hear something from this new third book. You're working on pushing out of the form, out of that sonnet form. And “Dolphin,” a poem that you have in the magazine, is certainly not a sonnet. It's long, it's different. Would you read just the beginning of it for us? Let's hear an excerpt.

Richie Hofmann: (READS POEM)

“Dolphin”

A dolphin fell in love with me.
Probably because of my looks—
people always said, What a pretty boy you are.

I was coming home from Gymnasium,
I was so sweaty from running,
we all were, we all ran into the sea,
its freshness,
we gargled the water, we threw it from our hair—

I washed my limbs in the waves,
and I heard him calling.

I didn’t want the other boys to see.

But I kept glancing at the shimmering sea,
hoping he was there. My dolphin.
I dreamed about becoming
a dolphin, being carried
on the waves, doing flips while the boys clapped from the docks,
chasing the elegant boats,
making choreography in their wakes.
I dreamed.

The sight of a dolphin is always
a little bit magical,
even on our island.

But he liked that I was human.
That is why he fell in love with me.
Because I wasn’t a dolphin.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Thank you so much for reading this poem which engages with this Greek story. This old Greek story, Hermias of Iasos. How did you come across it originally and what do you recall from first coming upon it?

Richie Hofmann: Yeah, I can't remember when I first encountered it. It's mentioned in several ancient sources. It's in Plutarch. It's in Pliny, about a boy in this town, I guess what is now Turkey. And he had some kind of friendship with a dolphin that ended in both of their deaths. Some sources say it was a storm and the dolphin tried to save him, but they both end up dead together on the beach and are buried in a joint tomb. And I was just so mesmerized by the kind of otherworldliness of the story. It's not a magical story. It's not like a myth where there are really gods or divine interventions. It's really a strange kind of story of friendship between a boy and a dolphin. And in retelling it, I wanted to give it a kind of contemporary psychological element.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: There's a line in the poem “I didn't want the other boys to see.” And what's interesting is there's a very unusual pattern in your work, which is often writing about refusing or overcoming shame. So “something has taken hold/of me—not hunger, not shame.” “Eros enters, where shame had lived.” And then in your first book, “inhaling avidly/the absence of shame.” That was shame leaving the body. So shame is on its way out. Do you associate the hiding of intimacy, not wanting the other boys to see with boyhood, with youth?

Richie Hofmann: I think that's where it feels most dramatic. I think I think about queerness and sexuality. I think about coming up in a world where one doesn't fit the prescribed narratives. And even worse than that, where the narrative that you might fit as a queer child is tragedy and death. I think shame is linked to that somehow. And I think I hadn't... Until I wrote this poem, Cindy, I hadn't thought about this key element of childhood. Which is that you're meant to build a self, but it happens in secret, in the shadows, in the privacy of your own head, in your own bedroom. In this boy's case, out in the sea with this dolphin. And I think there are kind of two forces of shame pressing in on his life. And one is the other schoolboys. And I imagine he's ostracized from them. And the other is the figure of the parents who are angry he's out swimming and they're disgusted by the salty smell that is all over his body. And there are these two kinds of forces of shame, making it even more difficult for the boy to come of age.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Those do seem like two psychological threats. There's the peer group, and then there's the adults. And you're always doing something wrong, and then you're having to define yourself in so many cases against their desires, their expectations.

Richie Hofmann: And I guess one of the strange ironies about this story that interested me is that the boy and his dolphin lover end up minted on coins, end up in the pages of the great historians of the ancient world. They end up kind of famous. They meet a tragic end, of course, no one wants to die on the beach. But it's also a kind of heroic death, too. And I think that's always been an element of queer experience that's interested me. That there is that possibility of the tragic outcome, but very often that tragic outcome is what makes the life meaningful in history. I was obsessed with Matthew Shepard as a kid.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, the student who was tortured and violently murdered in the 90s in an anti-gay attack.

Richie Hofmann: That was kind of like a moment in my childhood that was a rupture in the tranquility somehow. And I think his story too, he achieves an almost kind of saint like iconic status, but only through his tragic death. That's something that I think links these two stories from very different cultures in my mind.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: This feeling of inevitability that is marking the future's awareness of the figure.

Richie Hofmann: That's right.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Let's hear the end of this poem.

Richie Hofmann: It's such a strange poem.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It's long, it's luscious.

Richie Hofmann: But I had to make it. And look how long it is. Have you ever seen such a long poem for me? Cindy, look, this is growth.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: We needed it. It was time.

Richie Hofmann: (CONTINUES READING “DOLPHIN”)

It’s terrible what happens next, but our playing
turned rough. It was an accident.
I was bleeding
in the water, I hardly noticed at first,

but then the panic set in.
I started thrashing in the water.
My dolphin wanted to save me.

He hadn’t meant to cut my flesh
with his sharp fin,
the salt was stinging.
I blacked out.

I died on shore, my dolphin tossed me there.
And he flung himself there, too,
to die beside me.

I am a little famous.
I was loved by a dolphin.
They minted coins that showed us playing.
I never thought
they would miss me.

And they make songs about us,
the humans,
saying that dolphins were human once,
and charmed by singing.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: There were these elephants that were babies, whose moms had been hunted, whose moms had been killed. And at first they were taken care of by an individual human who was assigned to them. And so they would become very close, they would sort of imprint. And then when their assigned one human would move or die, the baby elephant would become extremely depressed and sick, refuse to eat. This kind of individual relationship was so difficult and deathly, it could be. Which reminds me of that dolphin. And their solution later was to spread the love around, to have elephants taken care of by many humans so that the baby elephants were connected with many. And if one was out of rotation, they wouldn't notice it as much. But that line about possess, possessing each other reminds me of that kind of the subjugation with relation to non-human animals. But it's through love. It's through reliance.

Richie Hofmann: That's right. And I think the boy and the dolphin take turns kind of being the obsessive partner somehow. I don't know. I wanted the poem to kind of capture all of these kinds of tensions between human and animal, between play and violence. But I think at the heart of it is some kind of obsession. I think the boy feels so freed by that relationship that he wants to be only there. He wants to live in the sea, even if it means his death. This is not in the original stories, which are pretty short and matter of fact, considering how strange the material is. But I thought, I wanted the boy to almost have a kind of premonition about his death somehow. He knows that Dionysus is carried to the underworld on the back of the dolphin. And he wonders if that's going to be his fate too.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, you've written, sometimes in form. So we have a question for you that is from another podcast guest. It's a question into the void because KB Brookins, the guest, didn't know that the question was for you, and just as you can leave one for a future poet into the void, someone yet to be booked. And it is about form.

KB Brookins: (RECORDING PLAYS) Hey, this is KB Brookins. And my question into the void is: Is form a political choice? When have you made your politics match your form? I asked this because I have been very interested in traditional forms and how might we use something as archaic as the sonnet or as the epic in order to talk about the issues that plague us in the twenty-first century?

Richie Hofmann: I love the question. It's a really hard question, but I love it. One of my earliest teachers was Natasha Trethewey, who has an incredible book in traditional forms called Native Guard. And I think that book is very much making an argument about who inhabits the form.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And the language.

Richie Hofmann: And the language. That's right. And how that changes the form and adds to the form. I think there's got to be a politics in putting anything to the page, in making anything with shape and body. I often think of what Henri Cole says at the beginning of Middle Earth when I'm writing, I want to write something that's true, that has body, that is proof of my existence. I think as a teacher, one of my obsessions is kind of destabilizing our notion of the past as staid or conservative or polite. I just taught Shakespeare's sonnets and there's a way in which we think of them as standard and canonical. They kind of define what the sonnet means. But going back and rereading them, I couldn't believe how weird they were and how unsettling their sexual politics is. Not just by the standards of early modern England, but by ours as well.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Completely.

Richie Hofmann: I feel like I'm moving away from the sonnet, I have to. My new work, I want it to be longer. I want it to push beyond this idea of the lyric poem as inhabiting a single moment. I don't know. I have to push myself, Cindy. I feel like getting better as an artist often means learning what you're good at and then not doing it.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. And giving it its space and giving it its moment and moving on. It reminds me so much of... I know you're more of a Mozart person. But this question of form and what we do with it and how we're changed by it makes me think about Bach versus Beethoven. Like Bach is more making beauty within the form, keeping that received shape and loving dance, loving religion. And then Beethoven is more emotion driven and a bit less form concerned, especially later in the more romantic era. There's a way in which the form shifts. And it seems like you have that with marriage as a form, teaching as a form, and I guess too, the sonnet as a form. What it can all be, how it can shift from the inside.

Richie Hofmann: How we can fit into it. How it makes room for us and how we have to kind of push at the contours and see what yields.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I think in addition to sound, sense seems to come up a lot in your poems.

Richie Hofmann: Oh, it's. true. I mean, I reread A Hundred Lovers and I realize how much fragrance and smell is in that book. And I just think that's another thing I have to really fight against as I work on new poems. I cannot become the poet of smells. I have to find other ways to, to harness emotion to the material world than through fragrance in my next work. I'm trying, but it's a journey.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: There's just a lot to write about, right? There are herbs, there are flowers, the smell of bodies, earth smells. It's not just one smell.

Richie Hofmann: No, that's right. And the way it enters the body and is connected to memory, it's really moving to me.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Let's move to the dreams and entanglements and power dynamics in adulthood. Should we hear from “Breed Me”?

Richie Hofmann: Just pulling it up.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Beautiful.

Richie Hofmann: (READS POEM)

“Breed Me”

My sweat soaked the sheets.

You used to be like everyone else

but then

the way you hurt me (fingers, teeth):

I grew accustomed to it

then I craved it

then I got bored

and other men tried to put death into my mouth.

Angelic Richie with bite marks

in such a clean room.

I deplore clutter but I do like flowers.

A tall drinking glass filled with peonies

the color of underwear.

I like hard and classical.

The ceiling black like Caravaggio’s wine.

Through the blinds, obscure gods shined,

making the outlines of my body

a kind of emptiness.

The ceiling fan

pushed heat around

even though it was snowing outside.

You forgave

my love of surfaces.

It’s not a tragedy we couldn’t have a child.

I had a pain inside me

and I needed you to deepen it.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Those last two lines. I see them in lights.

Richie Hofmann: Well, you don't... I don't think you ever really write the ending of a poem. You just kind of hear it, don't you? You like, pluck it out of this... I know that sounds insane, but poets say these kinds of things.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It comes to you.

Richie Hofmann: Yeah. You just hear it in the universe. And then you just have to, I don't know, tie it to the document, somehow.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: it sounds like it came already formed. Birthed fully.

Richie Hofmann: Yeah. I feel... I don't know. People always say, "your poems are so elegant," and I don't know what they mean. I thought, do they mean gay? Do they mean ... You know? What do they mean?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Elegance.

Richie Hofmann: Elegant, yeah. "He's an elegant young man." But I think to fight against that impulse toward really polished language, I often set up an exercise where I'll write really quickly. I love writing on airplanes because I like being strapped into a chair and deprived of a little oxygen while I work on the poems. And I feel like it gives me access to things that maybe that editorial part of my brain would not think is acceptable. And I think “Breed Me” is an example of one of those poems where I wanted it to be a cauldron, where these different kinds of language could bubble up and inform one another. The kind of gay slang of “Breed Me” with its kind of vulgar rhetorical intensity and the refinement of the speaker. It's a poem about aesthetics to his love of flowers and love of classical surfaces, but that it's tied in some way to this excitement by a world of pain, by a world of subjugation, obsession, annihilation. A kind of fantasy of something more violent and powerful.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: There's a great and also very self-aware openness to being against elegance. To what extent is the measure of kink here and maybe elsewhere, a measure of depth?

Richie Hofmann: Let me think about that. I guess, kink isn't a word I tend to use somehow. I don't know there's a way that kink feels totally permissive. Like it creates a kind of structure for desire. And I think more and more, I'm interested in something that isn't quite containable or can't quite be labeled or made safe. Made... I don't know. I'm kind of looking for...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Larger erotic.

Richie Hofmann: Yeah. Something without protection. Something without language. I don't know. I think of kink usually in relation to community, and I kind of am looking for a kind of total abandonment...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Solipsism.

Richie Hofmann: In these poems. Yeah. Just total giving of oneself to the moment. There's no intellectual framework here, just the senses.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Nothing social. Just the senses.

Richie Hofmann: “Angelic Richie with bite marks/in such a clean room.”

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Robert Mapplethorpe, the artist, is a major influence on your work as a whole. What are the dichotomies or dualities that you find yourself working through in this new book given Mapplethorpe's interest in light and shadow, masculinity, femininity and the contrast that you find in your poems and he finds in his photographs?

Richie Hofmann: When I feel lost in poetry, which is almost all the time, I find myself turning to exemplars in the other arts that I love. Music and opera, but photography also, which I think shares something with poetry. It's kind of snapshot quality, it's kind of sense of stillness. And I've for a long time been drawn to the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe. The way those pictures express a kind of ferocious sexuality, but also a totally serene and tranquil repose. They're black and white. There's a kind of smoothness, a sculptural quality to the bodies, to the flowers, even when its subjects find themselves in, what we might call, extreme postures. And that's something I'm often looking to recreate in my work.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, the intimacy, the interiority, it's a bit eerie. It's so extreme.

Richie Hofmann: That's right. And they ask questions about who we are in relation to the pictures also. I'm more and more interested in his early Polaroids. And I think that kind of informs some aesthetic element of my new work. I think I'm increasingly interested in a tension between something that feels composed and artificial. Prestigious even, like the sonnet. And something that feels dashed off. Something that feels diaristic. Something that feels like you wrote it in an airplane. I think that's an element that's suffusing these new poems, too.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The older Polaroids you mentioned, you know, Mapplethorpe was making while also being in these sites of public connection of queer observation and thought. Here's his partner, Jack Walls, talking about Mapplethorpe's relationship to New York.

Jack Walls: (RECORDING PLAYS)

He was a night person, basically. Usually we would walk down to the piers. 'Cause that's when Christopher Street was still a vital force, you know what I mean. This is pre-AIDS, or when people knew very little about AIDS. And it was actually a nice walk to walk down Christopher Street. We would do that. That's where he got his inspiration from. Robert was on the outside. I think Robert always felt he was an outsider.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Has public space in that way played any kind of role in your writing and your gathering process? And maybe in ways that wouldn't be obvious from the poems themselves?

Richie Hofmann: Well, I guess I would say that almost every poem is populated with many other people. I mean, very rarely does a poem end, “and my speaker is alone in a room.” Usually the moment of inspiration is in these encounters. Some of them with people he knows well, and other times with a stranger in the night. I think Mapplethorpe's pictures also give us access to a queer history that's vanished. One of my abiding interests is how queer people see themselves fitting in to history. I think there's this sense that you're always learning how to be a queer person completely alone. But of course, countless other people have navigated this before you. And it's very important, I think, to my poetry to imagine queerness as an historical phenomenon, too, with a rich, rich tradition. And in spite of all of the alienation, in spite of all of the loneliness and fear that is sadly so often a part of living a queer life, there's a richness to connect to, even if it's from another time.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Let's listen to a clip of Mapplethorpe talking about what draws him to his subjects and maybe what is available to him.

Robert Mapplethorpe: (RECORDING PLAYS)

Somehow I was able to pick up the magic of the moment and work with it, you know? That's my rush in doing photography. It's like you get to a place and you can do it with the flower, you can do it with the cock, you can do it with a portrait, where it's really kind of like you don't know why it's happening, but it's happening. You've like somehow tapped into a space that's magic. (RECORDING ENDS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: There's a bit of that dashed-offness you were mentioning.

Richie Hofmann: Yes. But also even in the instant of grasping something immediately, the possibility of perfection. I mean, the big Mapplethorpe show at the end of his life is called The Perfect Moment. And I've always thought that could be the title, really, to any poem I'll ever make.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You've said in an interview that you like to tell your students to just have a title that could apply to any poem as this sort of backup and maybe Perfect Moment is on that list.

Richie Hofmann: That's my new title, “The Perfect Moment.” You've done it, Cindy. You've helped me find a new title. You and Mapplethorpe together.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: A book full of them. Just a bunch of perfect moment.

Richie Hofmann: That's all I want from poetry. On some level, I think. As I grow up.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You've also talked about Cavafy, the Greek poet who published in the twentieth century and wrote of unfulfilled need and rapturous sex. Auden wrote about him in the introduction of the edition translated by Rae Dalven. Cavafy was a homosexual, and his erotic poems make no attempt to conceal the fact, very matter of fact. As a Cavafy head, do you have an allegiance to a particular translation on a particular edition or a period of Cavafy’s work?

Richie Hofmann: I love this question. I will say I'm partial to the erotic poems. The poems of Byzantine history, a lot of those are somewhat lost on me. And I think they're animating a kind of political moment that I don't always have access to as a twenty-first century person. But the erotic poems feel so immediate to me, Cindy. Those rooms he writes about are charged. I mean, the vases, the bed, the table, the flower. That's something I aspire to in all of my poems. Do I have an allegiance to a particular translation? I get asked this actually from friends who want to enter into his work, and I'm really terrible at it because…

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It's tough.

Richie Hofmann: And you kind of need them all. You know, no one translator does every poem in my favorite way. I think Keeley and Sherrard have the kind of imprimatur of being one of the first major ones and a kind of standard scholarly edition. But I love Daniel Mendelsohn as a writer and translator, and there are even more Cavafy poems to be found in the archive that he makes available. So that might be a place to start if you want to be a Cavafy head like us.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Richie's friends, listen up.

Richie Hofmann: That's right. But every new translation I read gives me something new. I don't have modern Greek yet. I should study it. During the pandemic, I started studying ancient Greek, which is really hard, especially over Zoom. But I'm hoping to continue with that study somehow, maybe in person. And maybe in 2700 or 2850 years, I'll be ready for modern Greek.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Were you listening? Were you taking ancient Greek on a class or was it like one on one?

Richie Hofmann: No, I did a class over Zoom through the University of Chicago, and it was probably too hard for me. But I knew that in those first months of COVID, I would need a different kind of outlet than just my own writing or teaching. And I don't know, I'm weird that... I like grammar. I love that kind of stuff. There's also... This sounds so foolish, but there's a real beauty to the way the letters look that I enjoyed making in my notebook, writing by hand. Being reminded that making words and making literature is a physical process, too. And not just something that happens in our heads or on our notes apps. But that there can be a real kind of power and inscribing the page with something that looks visually beautiful too.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. And that is meaningful to the language that you write in as well. Because English also is related to Greek in some way. There's a way that you're gathering this, what's come from it, the trickles, the ripples.

Richie Hofmann: And always, how can I make a poem that looks beautiful too? I've been doing these kind of one line stanzas in the new work, that kind of remind me to think very deeply about the line and how there's a kind of rawness to the poem, even as it unfolds in its narrative direction or in its rhetorical direction. That the end of the day, it's strung together by words and lines. And there's a fragility there. It could so easily be unraveled, undone.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, there aren't recordings of Cavafy reading his work in the original language, but there's a great translation read by Robert Pinsky, if you'd like to take a listen, of the poem “Body, Remember.”

Richie Hofmann: Uh!

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And it's... I knew you would know. I knew you'd know.

Richie Hofmann: And I would never say no to hearing Robert Pinsky read a poem. I mean, we talk about musicality in poetry, and Robert makes poems musical in a totally fresh way every time he reads.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. Well, he literally wrote the book on sound, so we know he knows what he's doing. And this is the Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard Collected, that poem. And it reminds us of those unfulfilled desires of others onto the body not only love but being longed after.

Robert Pinsky: (RECORDING PLAYS)

Body, remember not only how much you were loved,
not only the beds you lay on,
but also those desires that glowed openly
in eyes that looked at you,
trembled for you in the voices—
only some chance obstacle frustrated them.
Now that it’s all finally in the past,
it seems almost as if you gave yourself
to those desires too—how they glowed,
remember, in eyes that looked at you,
remember, body, how they trembled for you in those voices.

Richie Hofmann: A perfect moment.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I love any poem that starts with a negation. “Body, remember not” right? It's bold and it's very directive and it feels like it has some of that more erotic syntax of know.

Richie Hofmann: Yeah. And every time a poem refuses something and mentions it by name, it's of course also making that thing present too for the mind of the reader. So even though it's negating the love, it's also making the love present. Even though it's negating the beds that the poet speaker finds himself in, it's also making them present. It's bringing them into the now. Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: This poem feels like a classic Cavafy poem to me. It's got everything.

Richie Hofmann: It's really interesting to me. I think he's a poet who he often think about as a nostalgic poet. He's always looking back to these hot encounters, to these nights of total sensuous presence, usually with young men. And they're made so particular in the poems, too. Usually it's a young man of 23, a young man of 19. I mean, he always remembers exactly the age that they are. And a lot of times the emotion in Cavafy's poems come from the distance between the now in which we're reading the poem and that memory. There's another Cavafy poem I love called “On Board Ship.” And the ending of the poem is “these things are from very long ago.” And that's always kind of where we find ourselves in Cavafy's poem. Desiring to be thrust back somehow into the memories that shaped us.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. And the attachment to those individuals turned out really to be an attachment to youth in general or to memory.

Richie Hofmann: To a younger self. To an experience of desire that wasn't going anywhere in Cavafy's time. These encounters all happened in secret. They all happened in back alleys. These are a lot of what nowadays we would call sex work. And yet they are almost entirely where Cavafy finds his poetry, finds the sensuous contours of the Alexandria, of his autobiographical life.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: What do you think you would tell the body or your body to remember?

Richie Hofmann: Remember you're alive. Time is short. Love as deeply and freely as you can. Give yourself to sensuous experience. Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid. That's what I would tell my body. That's what I'm telling myself right now.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Thank you so much for sharing how you reflect on this past work, but also what you're looking forward to and what you're moving on from as well in your new work.

Richie Hofmann: Thank you so much for having me, Cindy. It was great spending time with you.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It really was.

Richie Hofmann: I know. I'm obsessed with you.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I know. I wish we could chat for longer. I feel like... Yeah, we could just go on and on.

Richie Hofmann: I know. It's an exciting time to be a poet and a poetry reader.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. It really is.

Richie Hofmann: Who would have thought?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: We're lucky.

Richie Hofmann: I know it's true.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: A bright and gathered thanks to Richie Hofmann. Richie is the author of two collections of poems, A Hundred Lovers out from Knopf from 2022 and Second Empire from Alice James Books from 2015. You can read three poems by him in the July/August 2023 issue of poetry in print and online. If you're not yet a subscriber to the magazine, there's a special rate for podcast listeners. For a limited time, you can get a full year of the magazine for $20. Ten book length issues for just $20. Visit poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer to subscribe. poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster dePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Special thanks to The Favorite Poem Project for Robert Pinsky's reading of “Body, Remember” by C.P. Cavafy, and to ART/new York for the interview with Robert Mapplethorpe and the one with Jack Walls. Thank you also to Lev Mamuya and to KB Brookins. Until next time, with a reminder to grip and be gripped by poems and bodies. Thank you for listening.