I had the pleasure to interview Lloyd Schwartz about his latest book of poetry: "ARTUR SCHNABEL AND JOSEPH SZIGETI PLAY MOZART AT THE FRICK COLLECTION (APRIL 4, 1948) and other poems." Schwartz's work is full of musicality and delicately gets the marrow of life.
From the Citation for the 2025 David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Annual Poetry Prize:
"A simultaneous delicacy and ferocity of introspection, interiority, and inhabiting of minds that is intoxicating.... lyrics that spiral into haunting snapshots of fractured lives..."
You have written that you hope people will call your new poetry collection your best book.
I think this is an odd but interesting and (I hope) entertaining and moving book about living in the world and how to respond to it. I love to overhear conversations and listen to people talking. I think plain speech can be as beautiful and moving as a more poetic diction. There's a poem in this book that's about what people were saying immediately after 9/11 and another poem about things I just happened to overhear that seemed hilarious or oracular. There's a section of quiet, intimate, personal poems based on Vermeer, or visiting a poet I loved (you have a poem in that same series), and it ends with a section of poems about making art--paintings, movies, music--and what that might mean to us, and questions how important that is to us. Art--engaging with it or making it--has been a central part of my life, has probably kept me alive. I think the poems in this book come closer to dealing with that question than the poems in any of my previous books.
You dedicate your first poem to Attila Józef, the late great Hungarian poet. How does he speak to you? He was known as the 'proletarian' poet. You have a working-class background.
The poem is really a loose translation not an actual dedication. But you're absolutely right, He came from the working-class and lived a short painful life. But this marvelous poem spoke to me more because it reflected the way an artist responds to a terrifying world situation, as artists do now. Maybe the best we can do is write an elegy for a world we knew and loved, a world that seems no longer possible.
The title of your book refers to a famous concert at the Frick Museum in New York when Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti played Mozart. They were very different in sensibility—but they gelled together at this event. Could you do this with a poet vastly different than yourself?
Wow--I hope so! The poets I've been close to--Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop from an earlier generation--Frank Bidart, Gail Mazur, Robert Pinsky from my own generation--Jill McDonough, Tara Skurtu, Andrea Cohen from a younger generation--seem very different from me. I could never write their poems. Yet I love their work and love reading together with them, and have even read their poems at readings, workshops, and discussions. How dull the arts would be if everyone worked in the same style. That's one of the ideas behind the Schnabel/Szigeti poem. It's one of the things that drives me crazy when I open a magazine and read poems that all sound like they were written for the same workshop.
I noticed you have translated Victor Neborak's poem " Fish" Compare this to Elizabeth Bishop's poem of the same name. He seems more political than Bishop was.
I think this is an odd but interesting and (I hope) entertaining and moving book about living in the world and how to respond to it. I love to overhear conversations and listen to people talking. I think plain speech can be as beautiful and moving as a more poetic diction. There's a poem in this book that's about what people were saying immediately after 9/11 and another poem about things I just happened to overhear that seemed hilarious or oracular. There's a section of quiet, intimate, personal poems based on Vermeer, or visiting a poet I loved (you have a poem in that same series), and it ends with a section of poems about making art--paintings, movies, music--and what that might mean to us, and questions how important that is to us. Art--engaging with it or making it--has been a central part of my life, has probably kept me alive. I think the poems in this book come closer to dealing with that question than the poems in any of my previous books.
You dedicate your first poem to Attila Józef, the late great Hungarian poet. How does he speak to you? He was known as the 'proletarian' poet. You have a working-class background.
The poem is really a loose translation not an actual dedication. But you're absolutely right, He came from the working-class and lived a short painful life. But this marvelous poem spoke to me more because it reflected the way an artist responds to a terrifying world situation, as artists do now. Maybe the best we can do is write an elegy for a world we knew and loved, a world that seems no longer possible.
The title of your book refers to a famous concert at the Frick Museum in New York when Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti played Mozart. They were very different in sensibility—but they gelled together at this event. Could you do this with a poet vastly different than yourself?
Wow--I hope so! The poets I've been close to--Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop from an earlier generation--Frank Bidart, Gail Mazur, Robert Pinsky from my own generation--Jill McDonough, Tara Skurtu, Andrea Cohen from a younger generation--seem very different from me. I could never write their poems. Yet I love their work and love reading together with them, and have even read their poems at readings, workshops, and discussions. How dull the arts would be if everyone worked in the same style. That's one of the ideas behind the Schnabel/Szigeti poem. It's one of the things that drives me crazy when I open a magazine and read poems that all sound like they were written for the same workshop.
I noticed you have translated Victor Neborak's poem " Fish" Compare this to Elizabeth Bishop's poem of the same name. He seems more political than Bishop was.
Bishop could be very political, but in a slyer, less overt way. For decades, "The Fish" was her most famous and popular poem. Now it's "One Art." Neither is overtly political. But all three have to do with suffering. In "The Fish," Bishop lets the fish go when she identifies with its suffering. Could we real that as a political statement?
As you are a Pulitzer Prize winning music credit-- I am not surprised that you dedicated a poem to Paul Verlaine. Many composers put his work to music. Has your own work been put to music? Sometimes when I hear you read your poems-- I am thinking they could be songs.
Thank you! I knew that Verlaine poem because it's one of Debussy's greatest song-settings. Yes--a bunch of my poems have been set to music by composers I admire. It's so fascinating to hear how someone from a different artistic world responds to any of my poems. I once wrote a poem that I had hoped the wonderful composer John Harbison would use in the party scene of his opera The Great Gatsby. I heard it as a madcap 1920s fox trot. He set it as a sultry beguine. But he didn't use it in his opera.
As you are a Pulitzer Prize winning music credit-- I am not surprised that you dedicated a poem to Paul Verlaine. Many composers put his work to music. Has your own work been put to music? Sometimes when I hear you read your poems-- I am thinking they could be songs.
Thank you! I knew that Verlaine poem because it's one of Debussy's greatest song-settings. Yes--a bunch of my poems have been set to music by composers I admire. It's so fascinating to hear how someone from a different artistic world responds to any of my poems. I once wrote a poem that I had hoped the wonderful composer John Harbison would use in the party scene of his opera The Great Gatsby. I heard it as a madcap 1920s fox trot. He set it as a sultry beguine. But he didn't use it in his opera.
OFFICER AND LAUGHING GIRL
“Who is this man? I can barely
make out his face in the window-glare.
A fierce silhouette. The glowing edge
of his floppy, broad-brimmed hat—
the Devil with a halo! His
red jacket on fire. An assault
of maleness; a mystery . . .
Does he see my terror?
—Or is he staring at the map
on the wall behind me? Or out the
open window? His impatient hand
on his hip, even sitting down.
What does he keep staring at? What
makes him stay?”
*
“Why doesn't she just drink her wine
and relax? She looks like she's
about to cry. I can see the tears
welling up. But no—her eye
is clear. Her hands on the table,
around her glass, palms up—ready to take
whatever is given . . .
What do I have to give?
—I could travel past the edge
of the known world, and never find
a pearl worthy of this smile
that sees right through me,
sees my darkness—
yet doesn't cease to smile.”
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