REVIEW AMERICANA

 

Spring 2024

Volume 19, Issue 1

https://americanpopularculture.com/review_americana/spring_2024/savoie.htm




JOHN SAVOIE

 

 

Conversations with Creative Writers: 

            Five Questions          

 

John Savoie was born in Illinois and grew up in Connecticut and Michigan. He earned degrees in English literature from the universities of Michigan, Notre Dame, and Yale. He has published critical essays on a wide range of topics including Homer, the Bible, Augustine, Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton, Frost, Dylan, and Saving Private Ryan. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Best New Poets, and Poetry in Motion. Sehnsucht is his first collection. Long ago in the last millennium, he taught in Gunma, Japan, for six years, and he currently teaches great books and poetry at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

We talked to John about his poetry collection Sehnsucht (The Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2024).


Your title Sehnsucht is not a common term. How did you decide on it? 

The manuscript developed under the working titles of "Body and Soul" and "Metaphysical," but the first was too common, the second too obscure and liable to be misunderstood. C.S. Lewis actually led me to sehnsucht, one of those evocative irreducible German terms. He calls it "an unsatisfied desire more desired than any satisfaction." That's it! I thought, the new title subsuming the prior emphases, and it has stuck. Desire can be a source of suffering, but it can also be a strong and beautiful life force. Sehnsucht makes us keenly aware of where we are and where we want to go. 

99 Poems is also an essential part of the title. The number is a nod to Dante. One of my couplets hardly compares to a canto, but my book, also in three sections, though not in his precise scheme, is at heart a Divine Comedy too, pausing just shy of Dante's full satisfaction. And yet sometimes 99 feels like more than 100. 

I am grateful to Press Americana for being open to longer collections. The contemporary trend toward short slight books puzzles me, almost as if it were an admission that quality cannot be sustained, or that no one really wants that much poetry. Besides, skinny books don't shelve well.


This is your first book, but you are not exactly a "new poet," are you?

I published my first poem back in the 1970s! As an undergrad, I had successes, including a Special Hopwood Award judged by Donald Hall. And then life got busy and complicated. I spent much of the 1980s and early 1990s focused on teaching in Japan. Then I enrolled in a Ph.D. program in literature. Neither Japan nor grad school were conducive to publishing poetry though they did greatly enrich my writing. I was fortunate to get a teaching position, but the tenure committee wanted literary criticism, not poems. Four children and a serious illness pushed a book still further away.

About twenty years ago, I finally assembled a manuscript and began to submit it to presses and contests. Year by year, I kept refining it. Though the process was often frustrating, I am truly glad that earlier drafts were not published. It has become a much better book. You see, there was no way over the mountain, but under it, no way through the mirky wood but by the peculiar path we came, and here we are.


Where would you situate your work in contemporary poetry?

I feel like an outlier. I never did an MFA. I don't network, almost stubbornly. The few mentors I've had have mostly passed away. I once got a journal rejection with the peremptory dismissal, "No one writes like this these days." I was deeply honored. 

There are some contemporary poets whose work I greatly admire: the calm clarity of Ted Kooser's midwestern pastoral; before that, Robert Bly's wilder pastoral lit with the dark light of duende; the fresh formalism of Dana Gioia and A.E. Stallings, which helps bridge my poetics to the beloved past – though I am only a semi-formalist. I could name dozens of poets I enjoy, or rather, their poems. It's the individual poem that matters first, sometimes the whole book, least of all the author's name. 

But really my prime influences, also my mystic audience, span the wondrous range of seventeenth-century poetry – Herbert, Herrick, Donne, and more. Their metaphysics integrate body and soul as well as anyone. Surprisingly perhaps, Basho is also a seventeenth-century poet, and haiku has always been a grounding force in my poetics and practice, whether as haiku itself or just its influence. Terse imagism well checks the tendencies to be too wordy or too clever. 


What is your personal favorite among the 99 poems? 

I like them all and how they play together. I have another hundred that didn't make the cut. I wanted poems that speak to each other and synergize, whether adjacent or sections apart. Maybe my current favorite is "8/6," because it gathers so many personal interests while addressing an important topic. It's a modern – rhyme dispersed – Petrarchan sonnet on the Hiroshima bombing. My Japanese professor in grad school, Father George Minamiki, who with no bitterness founded a school in post-war Nagasaki, would share fascinating asides on Japanese culture, including furoshiki and hinomaru

I think too of Kimata Sensei, my middle-school principal in Japan, who also taught history. He noted that in World War II dying soldiers did not typically shout "Banzai!" but more commonly cried out for their mothers, especially the boys. About twenty years ago, I noticed that the date of the Hiroshima bombing matched the ratio of the Petrarchan sonnet, and I thought, Now there's a volta to be turned. The passage of years, the dwindling of living memory, our own various literary and historical gaps, seemed to diminish the prospects for the poem I was long contemplating. Nonetheless, one day the full poem finally came together, decades in the making. Then a couple years later the film Oppenheimer brought the subject back to broader interest. 

I agree with William Logan that "Musée des Beaux Arts" is one of the few great poems of World War II, though the logistics are tricky. Auden completed his poem in 1938 before the war ever started. More so, even in 1945 a widow in Hiroshima would still not have known it. But the quiet power and uncanny relevance of his poem transcend simple chronology, and paralepsis made a way to slip the allusion into my own poem, which actually swerves quite a bit from his, but in a way that Auden himself, I'd like to think, would smile to see.


What do you hope readers take with them as they finish reading this book and reflect on what they just read?

Whether reading one poem or the whole book, may the reader take away a lingering sense of wonder. I suspect this is what most poets want, from Donne to Bly, for the reader to see clear and true, to feel more deeply, to sympathize, to smile, to marvel, to live intensely in the fleeting moment, here and now, even as one yearns and leans into eternity.


Readers interested in the poetry collection Sehnsucht can read the press release here and buy the book here.



 

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