Guilt Is Fecund: The Millions Interviews Frank Bidart

At 82, Frank Bidart remains one of the preeminent voices in American letters, let alone American poetry. He has won nearly every major prize awarded to poets, among them the Griffin Poetry Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award. For more than half a century, his poems have investigated the dualities of body and soul and love and hate through the exploration of both self and others. His work, as poet Craig Morgan Teicher put it for NPR, with its “relentlessly intense voice,” has over the years been distilled “down to an essential expression of need and desire, of how art, if it can’t save us, can at least embody and preserve us.”

On Nov. 3, after months of delays due to issues with the supply chain, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Bidart’s eighth collection, Against Silence. Our conversation, however, was held four months earlier, over a phone call that spanned the better part of an hour and a half. Bidart—generously, modestly, and, most of all, passionately—spoke with me about the sociocultural circumstances that inspired his latest collection, the difference between poetry of identity and poetry of the personal, his relationship with that titan of 20th-century American poetics, Robert Lowell, and the power guilt and memory hold over his art.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

The Millions: In 2017, you finally won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for a collection of your life’s work, Half-Light: Poems 1965-2016. In the collection were some new poems, including the fourth of your Hours of the Night sequence. What brought you to a fifth poem in that sequence, and to this next book, Against Silence, besides the obvious urge as poet to never stop?

Frank Bidart: That’s very important, the urge to never stop. There are at least two patterns that happen after one finishes a book. Either the barrel is empty and one has to wait for it to fill back up, or, if one is lucky, one starts out in some new direction, and one knows one can’t fulfill it in the context of the time one has to publish a book, so one puts it off.

That happened to me here. There was a poem I published in called “,” and it appeared in the issue the week that was inaugurated. It’s a poem that mattered to me tremendously, but I knew in my bones that it needed other poems around it. It needed to be fleshed out. It needed development. So I did not include it in my collected poems, which came out the following year. In other words, I had this poem that was the promise of other things, but was only that. It needed a world of experience and a lot of other writing to back it up, to provide an earth for it to settle on. In that sense,