Interview with Mark Wunderlich
by Ann Van Buren
Mark Wunderlich is the author of five books of poems, the most recent of which is MATEY, forthcoming from Greywolf Press. His other titles include God of Nothingness, The Earth Avails, which received the Rilke Prize, Voluntary Servitude, and The Anchorage, which received the Lambda Literary Award. He has published poems in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere, and his work has been widely anthologized.
He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amy Lowell Trust, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford University, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and elsewhere. He is Executive Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars graduate writing program at Bennington College in Vermont, and he lives in New York’s Hudson Valley near the village of Catskill.
Since 2017, Ann van Buren has been writing interviews for the Katonah Poetry Series. This conversation was shared via email.
Ann van Buren: Your poetry is beautifully crafted, tender, and beautiful. I’ve so enjoyed the interiority of your voice and its honesty. Your poems are lyrical and at times, they rhyme. I’ve also noticed that you write what looks like prose poetry. Can you talk about the prose poem? How would you describe a prose poem, and what draws you to that form? How do you find a shape for a poem? When you write poems that are in couplets, for example, does your first draft emerge in one block of text that you break up and do you shape the poem in subsequent drafts— or are there some pieces that emerge as prose poems while others come out in a different form?
Mark Wunderlich: Thank you for your questions and your careful reading of my work.
A line of poetry—at least for me—is not so much a syntactic unit as it is a proposition having to do with sound. They are called lines in the same way we refer to a line in a song, and I have always thought of poetry as being a form of music. I tend to compose poems line by line, not as a prose block that I then lineate. I do rhyme quite a bit, and rhyming is incantatory, it’s spell casting, and when I start doing it, I’m aware that a kind of lunacy is involved. Rhyming can be a little unhinged. There’s an element of high camp in rhyme too, sometimes, and I think my new work is far less interested in behaving than it used to be. So, I rhyme away!
I do love couplets, but the couplet is referring visually and historically to the elegy, which in the Classical tradition, was written in couplets of dactylic hexameter. I’m not doing that, but my poems in couplets are often affecting an elegiac tone, which is to say they are also poems about how to live in a world in which you will lose everything you loved.
As for prose poems, I do write them, but I don’t recommend them. Prose poems don’t have the advantages of light and good ventilation one finds in lineated poems, and they are often claustrophobic and uninviting. The key to a good prose poem is the sentence. You need good sentences—and you may need varied ones—to give the prose poem some texture and cadences. Mine have sometimes mimicked letters and were epistolary, and that helped me understand why I had chosen that form.
Ann van Buren: I’m particularly interested in your connection to place. You grew up in Wisconsin, but you sold the family farm to live most of your adult life in the Hudson Valley. Nonetheless, your poems are filled with recollections from your rural childhood and poems in The Earth Avails draw upon ancestral voices that go even further back. In this globalized world where our lives are mediated by virtual reality, how do you think our memories and sense of place are diminishing in their importance and how do you think they are more important than ever?
Mark Wunderlich: My great treasure as a writer has been my place of origin. I grew up in the rural Midwest, in another century, and in a time when Buffalo County, Wisconsin was largely a place passed over by art and literature. I had a childhood in which I could wander in woods and swamps and over fields, and there were always dogs and horses and livestock around, as well as the many wild creatures which everyone in my family was attuned to, watched, sometimes stalked, talked about and revered. I was expected to understand the cycles of planting, cultivating, reaping, breeding, slaughtering, etc. that everyone in this world understood. These cycles were also tied to holidays, to liturgy, to Christian doctrine. It was an isolated and isolating childhood, but it was also a stimulating and rich one, rich with vivid, unmediated experience, and as a child I was not spared either the beauty or the brutality of that world. It was a place where no one was indolent, where you learned many practical skills, and everyone worked, all that time. I also grew up listening to my elders as they told stories, gossiped, instructed, preached, and those rural voices with the particularities of a strong regional dialect continue to live inside me.
Your question seems to be getting at a notion of technology supplanting our connection to places. Maybe it does that for some people. The esthetic of our technological devices, for instance, is largely ugly and cold, but also hectic and heartless. We are outsourcing our memories and ability to retain knowledge to our phones, and unfortunately those devices and the very internet itself is controlled by some of the most hideous people on the planet. Our memories and sense of place are not diminishing in importance. They are being stolen by the people who have designed devices that we can’t live without now, and that are addictive. We have willingly put a funnel down our own gullets to swallow as much “content” as we can. Go to any park in the world and half the people will be looking at their phones instead of at the waterfall that is the ostensible attraction. Place and memory are just as important as they have ever been. We just have something interposed between us and the world all the time now, and those devices have colonized our minds.
By the way, I’m not telling anyone to get off their phone. You already know you should get off your phone. I’m an addict too. We tend to think lots of things are a matter of personal choice, and we just need the willpower to make something change. With technology we are up against something much bigger and more sinister than individual choice will ever solve.
Ann van Buren: In an earlier interview you talk about “the sacrifice of poetry and the life of a poet as a kind of Gesamtkunswerk, or complete work of art.” What are some of the sacrifices you have made for the sake of your art and what sorts of sacrifices do you foresee as necessary in 2025?
Mark Wunderlich: If I once thought I had sacrificed something to be a poet, I don’t think that anymore. Being a writer in the culture is the greatest thing I know. I am infinitely lucky that mostly I get to work with smart and interesting people. I get to travel. I get to write whatever I want, read anything I want. I don’t struggle. So much of what is good in my life has come to me through my work as a poet, and while I live a rather retiring life rusticating in Upstate New York, my imagination is allowed to roam free. I have never suffered one day on behalf of my art—writing is the single most pleasurable thing I know how to do. Okay, maybe the second most.
I’m not sure I want to continue using the word “sacrifice” here. You ask about how we may be called to action in 2025. Our civil liberties are under attack by a would-be dictator and his cronies. We’re going to have to head to the barricades over that before this is all over. Our right-wing regime is attacking higher education not just because they resent and fear the power those institutions have. They are also furious that our brightest young minds go to these institutions where they read bell hooks and Hannah Arendt, and realize Daddy is kind of a fascist. They want to change the culture. They also want Americans to be even more ignorant—especially of other functional democracies. They want us isolated from each other, afraid, vulnerable, malleable. We are going to have to fight to keep our cultural institutions alive and EVERYONE who values those organizations is going to have to support them financially and otherwise, or we will see them disappear. We are going to have to be very brave, show backbone, support each other, and organize. Those are all sacrifices, but there’s a great deal at stake. Nothing has been decided yet, however, and after decades of tedious people gassing on about whether or not poetry, or literature, or reading still matters—well, they matter. If they didn’t matter, no one would be banning books.
Ann van Buren: Spring is finding its way to the Hudson Valley. So many of your poems are about nature, animals, and rural life. What are your rites of spring, and what are you noticing today, that might find its way into your poetry?
Mark Wunderlich: What a sweet question! Well, I love rhubarb, and the little red-green fists of the rhubarb are punching through. I’ll be planting some things this year, or course, but really, I’m just waiting for the world to fully wake up. It’s been a nice slow spring so far, and I’m grateful it’s taking its time. Easter is coming, and I’ll bring forsythia into the house and force it to bloom, and decorate it for the holiday. I’ll make my ritual lamb cake. I never really know what’s going to find its way into a poem until I’ve written it down—that’s the beauty of it—never knowing what is going to turn up.
The Katonah Poetry Series is proud to present Mark Wunderlich at the Katonah Village Library on Sunday, May 4, 2025, at 4PM. The library is located at 26 Bedford Road, Katonah, NY 10563.