A draft of the primary two pages of “Armed Cavalier.” Courtesy of Richie Hofmann.
For our collection Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve printed in our pages. Richie Hofmann’s “Armed Cavalier” seems in our new Summer season situation, no. 244.
How did this poem begin for you? Was it with a picture, an concept, a phrase, or one thing else?
As is so usually the case for me, the poem started as one other poem fully. I used to be engaged on a poetic sequence that interposed my translations of Michelangelo’s homoerotic sonnets with a number of brief, authentic haiku-like poems impressed by Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids. Each artists have been considering magnificence and torture. Mapplethorpe’s pictures are experiments in self-portraiture and bondage. In certainly one of Michelangelo’s sonnets, the speaker confesses that, with a view to be comfortable, he should be conquered and chained, a prisoner of an “armed cavalier” (the phrase puns on the identify of the thing of Michelangelo’s infatuation, Tommaso dei Cavalieri). Upon studying that phrase, I immediately wished it to be the title for a brand new poem that will specific the extremity of sexuality and the extremity of constructing artwork.
From the sonnets of Michelangelo, I wished to import a type of violence of rhetoric (not not like the dramatic conceits we discover time and again in Petrarch). The poems are so determined. Their ache is sculptural. From the pictures of Mapplethorpe, I wished to import a violence of picture. And the sense that all the pieces—flowers in a vase, classical sculpture, BDSM—is a part of a panorama of embodied magnificence. Finally, as I revised the poem, and reworked it into “Armed Cavalier,” I wished to precise the ferocity of feeling in each artists’ works, however with none overt ekphrastic framing.
Are there laborious and simple poems?
Sure. I really like the simple poems, poems that reveal themselves instantly, that really feel heard and merely transcribed and never labored over thanklessly. It’s laborious to like the laborious poems again. I’ve usually discovered, as within the case of this poem’s origin, that generally the very best revision of a draft is the writing of a brand new poem.
Was “Armed Cavalier” laborious or straightforward, then?
This was a straightforward one. As an train, I generally attempt to write in a type of frenzy, to combat in opposition to my tendency towards class. Writing rapidly, with out strain, permits me to come across concepts and emotions I wouldn’t discover acceptable or worthy or full sufficient in my regular, judgmental mindset. I’m making an attempt to let extra of myself in to the poems—extra ugliness, extra starvation, extra perception. That is how I drafted “Armed Cavalier.” I knew early on that it could be an essential poem for me.
Did you present your drafts to different writers or buddies or confidants?
I present most of my drafts to different poets. Quickly after I drafted this poem, I referred to as my poet good friend Christian Gullette and he helped me edit it into its remaining type: chopping some “vacationers,” as an illustration, and getting proper to the “galleries.” Later within the course of, I referred to as Kara van de Graaf and we agonized over two small however important choices: ought to a line learn “I don’t wish to” or “however I gained’t”? And will the ultimate line—with consideration to grammar but additionally to voice and music—learn “I sleep solely on this mattress now” or “I solely sleep on this mattress now”? Thank God for buddies who care about these items!
When do you know this poem was completed? Have been you proper about that? Is it completed in any case?
A poem feels completed after I can’t enter it once more. Every little thing falls into place, every line feels balanced and full, the shifts between traces and sentences really feel surprising but additionally everlasting and incapable of change. This poem is completed. I’ve to make one thing new. I’ve to be a unique poet.
Michelangelo, The Punishment of Tityus, 1532. Public area, by way of Wikimedia Commons.
