“I am 84 years old and began being a poet full time when I retired at 77.”
– John Maynard
John, thank you for joining us. To begin, could you introduce yourself in your own words, describe what you do, and share what you are currently working toward as a writer?
I am 84 years old and began being a poet full time when I retired at 77. Before that, my duties as a professor at NYU and my academic writing took up most of my energies. I have completed six books of poetry and have had five of them accepted for publication so far. I have maybe four or five left to edit and pull together. The poetry is written already.
One of your recent poetry projects unfolds through repeated encounters over time rather than a single event. How did that structure emerge, and what did it allow you to explore that a shorter or more isolated poem might not?
The work, Armando and Maisie, now published with Kelsay, developed out of my daily dog-walk routine in Central Park. As I came to know Armando, who lives in the park, I started capturing his observations and my perceptions soon after we talked. Eventually, I saw the succession of poems that emerged would work well as a longer poem.
The poems focus on everyday meetings in a shared public space. What drew you to treat those moments as material worthy of sustained poetic attention?
I really liked the discussions Armando and I had and wanted to capture them along with his relationship to my dog Maisie, a golden doodle.
Without summarizing the book, how would you describe what holds its poems together from beginning to end?
There is the progressive unfolding of my relationship with Armando and understanding of his unique life choices. Overall, there is a plot of his relationship to Maisie and her eventual death.
The work observes relationships between people, animals, and place. How do you approach writing about connection without turning it into explanation or sentiment?
A good question: in these poems, I was able to locate observations about connections in details of my visits and specifics said and seen, so they seemed to emerge naturally.
The work observes relationships between people, animals, and place. How do you approach writing about connection without turning it into explanation or sentiment?
Here, I think the element of time was a discovery I made, as I indeed worked in time. The flow of time comes easily from my successive positioning with Armando and Maisie over quite a number of years—a kind of diary of a connection.
Your background includes long experience as a teacher and editor. How did those roles influence the discipline, pacing, or restraint visible in this poetry collection?
From many, many years teaching wonderful poems to students, I have been aware in my own writing that readers should be given clear enough language to take in the poem; and then they should be given freedom to work with the language in developing their own readings. (I wrote a book on readers.)
The book reflects a phase of writing that came later in your career. What changed—internally or practically—that allowed this work to take shape when it did?
Practically, I had the time to work out my poems as I wanted them. Internally, I was increasingly open to the wisdom in other people of all walks of life, perhaps from enjoying the complexity of my students and their very diverse talents.
When writing poems grounded in real encounters, how do you decide what belongs on the page and what should remain private or unspoken?
In these poems, there was always something salient in our discussions or my observation that day that formed itself into a poem, so other concerns were then subordinated to it.
What do you hope readers take away from spending time with this book, not as a message, but as an experience?
Certainly as an experience: I lead them into the complexities of human and animal relations in a deep and obscure wood of Central Park’s natural Ramble. I hope they find their own individual way through what I give them, not as directed by me but as they explore for themselves in the spirit of my own explorations.
If you were to write your bio in your own words, what would you say? Looking ahead, what kind of long-term impact would you like your work to have?
My story is as follows: I am Professor of English Emeritus at NYU. I have published five nonfiction books, including three with Harvard and Cambridge, and many articles, and I have done a great deal of editing, including co-editing a journal with Cambridge for 26 years. I won the Thomas J. Wilson Prize of Harvard University Press for a biography. I was awarded a Guggenheim and also an NEH Grant; recently I was given an Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who’s Who. I am listed on Wikipedia (John R. Maynard). I am a member of PEN. My website is johnrmaynard.com.
During most of my adult life, I wrote some poems and planned to write more. As I neared retirement, I found time to write many more poems. I have been editing them for book publications for the past three years and now have six completed books, of which five have been accepted for publication—two out and one or two more to come this year.
Quite simply, I believe in poetry as the finest way of communicating in written form, still connected to its oral origins. I hope to bring this old media back most vigorously in the lives of people, now and later. I believe my poems have something to say worth others reading and hearing.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“Quite simply, I believe in poetry as the finest way of communicating in written form, still connected to its oral origins.”
– John Maynard
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