Although the Poetry Foundation works to provide accurate audio transcripts, they may contain errors. If you find mistakes or omissions in this transcript, please contact us with details.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Samuel Menashe

April 6, 2006

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Curtis Fox: This is the poetryfoundation.org podcast for Thursday, April 6. I’m Curtis Fox. On today’s podcast, a portrait of the poet Samuel Menashe. Never heard of Samuel Menashe? Not surprising, since for most of his career, he’s labored in obscurity. At least in this country. Part of the reason for that may be that the type of poetry Menashe writes is not in fashion. It’s very short, for one, and aphoristic. Think Emily Dickinson, but not quite so chatty.

In 2004, the Poetry Foundation awarded Menashe the first Neglected Masters Award, and with the Library of America, published a collection of his poems. Here’s a quick example of a typical Menashe poem. It’s called “Rue” and it’s read by Michael Stuhlbarg.

Michael Stuhlbarg:

(READS “Rue” by Samuel Menashe”)

For what I did

And did not do

And do without

In my old age

Rue, not rage

Against that night

We go into,

Sets me straight

On what to do

Before I die—

Sit in the shade,

Look at the sky

Curtis Fox: Today, we’re spending some time with Samuel Menashe to find out more about the type of man who writes that kind of poetry. Producer Emily Botein went to visit him in his cold water flat in Lower Manhattan.

(PHONE RINGS)

Emily Botein: To meet Samuel Menashe, be prepared to walk. First, you trudge upstairs, five flights.

Unknown speaker in background: Take it easy!

Emily Botein: Menashe is well aware that most visitors aren’t used to the stairs.

Samuel Menashe: Come into my parlor.

Emily Botein: Which is also the kitchen. Or is it? It’s hard to tell in here. The stove and the bathtub are in the first room you enter, but the half-size refrigerator and the huge grapefruit tree?

Samuel Menashe: It’s very ungainly. It takes up a lot of room, and

Emily Botein: It must be like seven

Samuel Menashe: I guess so. But it’s easier to take care of than a dog.

Emily Botein: There are fixtures in the front room filled with bright light and piles of paper.

Samuel Menashe: I moved into this flat when I was 31 years old, and I’m now 80. And I remember when my parents visited me here, they climbed up here, and they said, “It’s a hovel. It’s a fire trap.” My father said that. So I love to speak of my hovelesque existence.

Emily Botein: Hovelesque. Only a few minutes with Menashe, and the wording begins.

Samuel Menashe: You see, I work very closely with words. Every word counts.

Emily Botein: Samuel Menashe was born in Brooklyn, but he grew up in the Bronx and Queens. As a student, he memorized poetry. Carl Sandburg was a favorite of his. But he didn’t think much about writing it. Menashe studied biochemistry in college. He served in World War II, and he’s lived in Lower Manhattan—SoHo—for most of his adult life.

Samuel Menashe: Psychologically, I’m so stuck here. It hasn’t been painted in 25 years, because I’m afraid of bringing a painter in here, it’s so crowded, what would happen to the—you know, this just happened by accident. By the stupidity of not finding a decent apartment when I could have found one. But that’s how it is. I’ll give you one of my domestic poems.

(RECITES POEM)

At a Standstill

The statue, that cast

Of my solitude

Has found its niche

In this kitchen

Where I do not eat

Where the bathtub stands

Upon cat feet—

I did not advance

I cannot retreat

Emily Botein: With Menashe, the poetry just pours out.

David Yezzi: I’ve been at, I think, more than one occasion for drinks or dinner where Samuel has just begun reciting Baudelaire in French, or, you know, I mean, he really is kind of a poet head to toe.

Emily Botein: David Yezzi, executive editor of the New Criterion, met Menashe when Yezzi first moved to New York. He was waiting tables at the Boathouse in Central Park.

David Yezzi: There was this man with kind of silver hair talking to a younger man at one of my tables, and they were looking at a little poem they’d clipped out of the New Yorker. And I just started talking to them about it, and I was introduced, this was the poet Samuel Menashe. And I had heard about him only a couple of weeks before. Somebody said, “Oh, if you like poetry, the poet you should really check out is Samuel Menashe.” And then I wound up running into him.

Emily Botein: Which maybe wasn’t so surprising. If you’re involved in the poetry world of New York, says Yezzi, Menashe, he gets around. He goes to readings, he gives readings.

Samuel Menashe: I recite. I don’t read. And I’m sometimes, there’s an attempt to entrap me. “Are you gonna any new poems?” I say, “Why? Do you know all the old ones by heart?” I mean, they’re constantly checking up on you.

Emily Botein: But if she’s such a fixture, how come his contemporaries, John Ashbery, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, Galway Kinell, how come they’re so much better known?

Samuel Menashe: I have a medieval image: they are abbots in monasteries, and visit each other, and I am a hermit outside the walls of the establishment.

Emily Botein: His tight, carefully crafted poems have won wide praise in the UK. But he’s had a hard time even maintaining a publisher in the United States.

Samuel Menashe: I don’t dwell on it. I mean, a beautiful day makes me happy. I’m not constantly consumed with the fact that I, I have been treated like an outcast, particularly in this country. But my poems are very concise. The struggle is against words, words, words. And I’ve had a hard time because I’ve been dismissed as slight, you know, they’re too short.

Christopher Ricks: Poems can’t be too short.

Emily Botein: Christopher Ricks, Professor of Humanities at Boston University, and a professor of poetry at Oxford. He edited Menashe’s latest book.

Christopher Ricks: Too short for what? I mean, too short to make one feel one has done a hard day’s work. Though the poet may have. The price paid for their being so short is, I think that people sometimes read too many of them at a run. Or at a trot. It then feels as if you’ve been having canapé or something instead of a square meal. If you eat it and stay with it and walk round it, and look at it from 360 degrees, there’s a lot going on in these glinting little things. I think it’s good not to sit down to read consecutively lots of pages of poems. And he writes beautifully about dipping, you know, “prows dip, nibbling.” And that’s what readers of books ought to do. You ought to dip and nibble.

Samuel Menashe:

(RECITES UNTITLED POEM)

A flock of little boats

Tethered to the shore

Drifts in still water

Prows dip, nibbling

Christopher Ricks: What he brings out well in reading, I think, is the kind of weight that goes with compactness.

Emily Botein: The work is compact. Menashe says making a poem is like sculpting an object from stone. He chisels away at his work. And he doesn’t stop carving, even post publication. When he was younger, he’d go home for dinner and tell his parents that he’d been working on a poem. “The poem?” his mother would ask, “How much shorter is it?” It seems he can’t help but do touch-ups.

Samuel Menashe: It’s as if I had sculpted a statue which remained in my studio, and I pass it one morning, and suddenly saw I could do some more work on the head and neck.

Emily Botein: Which is how he found himself looking back at one of his poems, “The Shrine Whose Shape I Am.”

Samuel Menashe:

(RECITES POEM)

The shrine whose shape I am

Has a fringe of fire

Flames skirt my skin

(PAUSES)

It’s, I guess you would call it a religious poem, but I’ll just skip to the last stanza. I suddenly discovered that instead of “I am,” I had the line, “Thus in my bones I’m the king’s son.” That ordinary colloquial contraction, “I’m”, was so ugly, so wrong, I caught that. And the poem had been unchanged for 20 years. I couldn’t understand how I possibly could have said, “I’m” instead of “I am.” Well that’s how I work. Yeah.

Emily Botein: So like, right now, is there one in your head?

Samuel Menashe: Uh, no, not right now. Now I’m taking too many medicines, trying to figure out which inhalator to take.

Emily Botein: After 80 years, health problems have taken their toll on Menashe. Prostate cancer, heart disease, asthma.

Samuel Menashe: It was nip and tuck, I thought I might die before the book came out. I have a nice poem about getting old. I wrote it when I was merely middle-aged.

(RECITES POEM)

Salt and Pepper

Here and there

White hairs appear

On my chest—

Age seasons me

Gives me zest—

I am a sage

In the making

Sprinkled, shaking

Emily Botein: Menashe lives alone, (PHONE RINGS) but he’s busy.

Samuel Menashe: (IN BACKGROUND) Hello? Oh, hi (INAUDILE)

Emily Botein: He’s been to Los Angeles for a reading, and to Boston, too, where he was joined by Christopher Ricks.

Christopher Ricks: He was reading recently at Harvard, and reading extremely well and said that he would read a poem again if somebody wanted it read again. And then about two thirds through the occasion, his eyes rolled back into the back of his head, and he came at a great crash like a tree down to the floor. And quite frankly, we all thought that he had died, since 80 is a reasonable age at which to go. Having passed out, he got to his seat and said, “If anyone wants a signed copy, they better get it now.”

Samuel Menashe: I hadn’t come to Harvard—they wanted to take me to the emergency room. I hadn’t come to Harvard—it’s a high point in my so-called career—to be taken away in the middle of the reading. So they brought me some fruit juice and a few crackers. And I completed the reading. And we even went to dinner at the Harvard faculty club.

Emily Botein: Years as the hermit has led Menashe to be what you might call self-reliant. He’s resourceful. At his local bookstore, he’s not above some rearranging. He slides Ted Hughes over to give his own book a little more space on the shelf. And when he discovers a limited stock of his book, he gives his home number to the bookseller, in case the guy wants him to bring over the few copies he has at home. Menashe had hopes that these things would be taken care of. But he’s used to doing the grunt work. What poet isn’t? David Yezzi says yes, it’s wrong that Menashe received attention so late in life, but:

David Yezzi: The fact is is that despite the recent resurgence in interest in poetry and this kind of wave of popularity that poetry is enjoying, that it’s still possible to be a poet in this country and be unknown.

(DOOR CREAKING OPEN)

Emily Botein: So why not enjoy the day? Christopher Ricks imagines Samuel Menashe as a kind of flâneur.

Christopher Ricks: A serious sort of stroller of the streets and observer of strangers. Not in some dark Baudelairean way, but in a happy, amiable, what used to be American way.

Samuel Menashe: (RECITES POEM) – He has a strange belief in the stroll and leads himself forth each day, stopping and wandering with no goal as if man were born to smile, not prey, he knows that grace will grace God

(LAUGHS) That’s one of my early poems. And I was called a flâneur.

Emily Botein: And most days, Menashe still takes the five flights of stairs.

(FOOTSTEPS) I’m the oldest person in the house.

Emily Botein: He heads out,

Samuel Menashe: It’s a beautiful day. Oh my god.

Emily Botein: often to Central Park. A friend describes the park as his living room.

Samuel Menashe: What a day! Dazzling.

Emily Botein: Or at least for a walk in the neighborhood.

Samuel Menashe: I have nothing to add to this day. I’ll go out on the pier, and an old friend of mine, we’re admiring the sunset, and she said, “You should make a poem.” I said, “No, the sunset is enough! You don’t have to make a poem.” To receive the beauty of this day is a great privilege. The day is enough. Is it not?

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Curtis Fox: That portrait of Samuel Menashe was produced by Emily Botein. Tomorrow on the poetryfoundation.org podcast, in the spirit of Samuel Menashe, we’re going to hear more short poems, by John Updike, the emperor Hadrian, and an erotic Sanskrit poem that is guaranteed to make you blush. If you’re enjoying these podcasts, please let your friends know about it, and please review it on iTunes or in your favorite podcast directory. Also, let us know what you thought of this program; email us at [email protected], or you can leave a voice message at 718-857-1821. The music used in this podcast is from The Claudia Quintet. For the poetryfoundation.org podcast, I’m Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)