The Brooklyn Rail

In his endorsement of My Body: New and Selected Poems, the late poet-icon Gerald Stern said of Joan Larkin’s poetry:

Over the decades of writing, Joan Larkin has proved her mastery, whether the poem is mythic, elegiac, or biographical. Her honesty is overwhelming, but it is coupled with poetic cunning, gorgeous language and a rhythm and tone so precise and appropriate that it is—as in the great poets—transparent. I love reading her poems.

Though written in 2007, when Larkin had recently published the fourth of her six full-length books, Stern’s comments are a remarkably accurate assessment of her entire oeuvre. Never one to overwrite, most of her collections have appeared every ten years in a career that began with Housework (1975) and has been book-ended (for now) with the 2024 release of Old Stranger. This new collection is consistently fresh and on par with the poet’s finest work. Committed to craft and true to her vision, the best Larkin poems resonate at all levels at once. They are entirely free of strain and affectation.

Whether Larkin would agree is another matter. She can be rather self-effacing about her own achievements. Nonetheless, when asked to reflect upon her work, the poet offers illuminating insights about her process and practice.

My interview with Joan Larkin was conducted through email and phone conversations across a two-week period in July 2025. In 2012, she and I interviewed each other for a feature in the Huffington Post—an experience I still cherish, given her generous responses as well as her genuine curiosity about my work. This time around, the goal was to place her front and center. Certain names and subjects have resurfaced from that 2012 discussion. (Edna St. Vincent Millay and Muriel Rukeyser made welcome returns.) But her observations reverberate more deeply and urgently than ever before, perhaps because today such disarming honesty is a radical act. Larkin understands what so many of us who adore her and her work are still striving to learn: that through vulnerability one can source incredible strength. I salute her.

Tony Leuzzi (Rail): Hi, Joan! I am so thrilled you were able to set aside time to talk to me about Old Stranger. From front to back, this new book of poems is absolutely stunning, restrained yet direct, open, and subtly evocative. I cannot get enough of it. Ten years separates the release of Old Stranger from the publication of Blue Hanuman, your previous full-length book. While Old Stranger preserves so many welcome features of your style—particularly your clarity, warmth and formal ingenuity—this new work is no mere repeat of past achievements. As we begin our discussion, I thought I’d start with a broad question. What are some ways in which you see the poems in Old Stranger, composed across the last decade, as an extension of your abiding vision and aesthetic? What are some ways these poems differ from your previous work?

Joan Larkin: Though memory and autobiography are still deep resources for my poems, the story has changed, and so has the craft. Early poems with raw themes like rape, abortion, and alcoholism were often wrapped in received forms, a kind of armor that gave me permission to be as candid as I needed to be. I turned intuitively to rhymed couplets to write the “Blackout Sonnets”—rhyme made me bullet-proof. Later poems like the AIDS elegies in Cold River included litanies and lists that allowed for expanded length and a less exclusively inward focus. I had the privilege of hearing some of the great voices of the time, including Muriel Rukeyser, Allen Ginsberg, and Adrienne Rich. I mean voices literally—I can still hear them in my head, like great opera singers or speakers of a unique, powerful song language.

But my love of brevity and economy reasserted itself. Perhaps it’s the way I can still hear my father’s bluntness, my grandmother’s skeptical Yiddish wit, and my mother’s repressed outbursts—the family style was stripped down and could be brutal. Or perhaps it’s the anxiety of writing, the desire to get off the page as quickly as possible, that keeps me coming back to the sonnet—unrhymed and looser now. And though my perspective is still that of a feminist, I’m no longer seeing the past through the lens of pain. Maturity and the luck of a long life have brought some detachment from old stories. A broader perspective that can include appreciation and sometimes even humor—for example, in the opening poem, “Girls Department,” seeing my mother’s toughness and skill, not just her wish for my body to be more contained and conventional.

Rail: Old Stranger is a multi-referential title for this book. There is the poem with that title that opens section two, which also shares that title. The poem is ostensibly about a thin-bladed kitchen knife, whereas the poems in the second section tackle a number of themes and concerns, each rooted in deep memory. Then, there is the graphically alluring (and haunting) cover that features a Paula Modersohn-Becker self-portrait: this also suggests a tie-in with the book title. Why name the book Old Stranger? What are some ways this title may serve the reader as a guide through each section?

Larkin: The poem “Old Stranger” began with an object that had—still has—a compelling, mysterious presence for me: an old, stained, irreplaceable kitchen knife I’ve had for decades and thought I’d lost during a move. Though I knew that this knife was more to me than just any knife and seemed to call for some elevated language (“rivets like moons of Pluto”), I wasn’t yet conscious of all it carried metaphorically. I was in a state of startled joy, discovering that I hadn’t lost this charged object after all. I was involved not in its various meanings, but simply in its thingness.

Still, I knew there was more; a poem has to be more than description. Maybe the word “blood” (in “draw / blood from meat”) was the door that opened me to another dimension. Kitchens are dangerous, and I’ve had plenty of accidents: burns, cuts, spills, energetic explosions of dropped glassware—everything changing in a moment. Something like that has happened for me in the midst of writing a poem, too. Control might come later, as I listen for a pattern of sound or rhythm and let go of what’s in the way of hearing that; but the plot is unpredictable.

In hindsight I can see that this book includes other poems that enter into story and deep feeling through a particular object, often with a dive into greater emotional intensity. But while I was writing I wasn’t thinking self-consciously about the process. I didn’t—don’t—know where a poem will decide to take me, or if there will even be somewhere to go. A poem isn’t an essay.

It was only later that I saw some of what lay under pressure at a depth: the way that I could experience opposing feelings, pain and joy, loss and restitution, in the same moment. And how language in poetry also has that capacity—how a word can contain its opposite.

The title came near or after the end of writing the poem. When “Old Stranger” surfaced from my subconscious, it felt both familiar—inevitable, even—and surprising. I could hear a voice (my father’s?) greeting me after an absence: Hello, Stranger. (That’s not, in fact, what he said to me when I returned home after having run away, pregnant, in my teens—more like what I wished he’d said, a greeting both affectionate and accusatory, more like “I’ve missed you,” than “How could you do this to me?”)

A still darker resonance I felt in calling the knife “Old Stranger” was the image of death as the grim reaper wielding a scythe—ever-present, inescapable, waiting to be greeted—who turns up when you least expect it.

So it felt right to gather poems about my father and brother for one section of the book, each an immense loss and at the same time a continual, powerful presence in my psyche. Grief, loss, and at the same time gratitude for what they gave me. Other sections coalesced around life in a female body, trauma, healing, and art and women artists, including the ekphrastic sequence written in response to paintings by Paula Modersohn-Becker, the brilliant German Expressionist whose tragic death at the height of her artistic power was a consequence of giving birth. I love her self-portrait as the cover for this book: the look of surprise and wonder, the materiality of the paint itself, the consciousness of herself as a maker—the face might be a mask she’s holding up—and behind it the beaded necklace, a marker of femininity. We can see the woman and artist in one image.

It’s no accident that my favorite kitchen tool is also akin to my writing practice. There’s power in limiting one’s options, and revision for me is often an act of cutting. And perhaps too obvious to say: I’m an octogenarian and a poet whose books have each come a decade apart. Discovering that there are still poems in me that want to be written and that my knife skills are still with me is something I wonder at and can celebrate.

Rail: What a full, clarifying response, Joan. I really get a sense of your process while writing the poem “Old Stranger.” Something you said here—“Though I knew that this knife was more to me than just any knife … I wasn’t yet conscious of all it carried metaphorically … I was involved not in its various meanings, but simply in its thingness”—aligns with my experience reading your poem “My Father’s Tie Rack,” which immediately follows “Old Stranger” in the collection. So much of “My Father’s Tie Rack” seems thoroughly invested in the thingness of those ties in the rack, which receive varied names: “tongues,” “man’s plenty,” “wild ache,” “Vishnu’s skin,” and the “Slick sheen of a greenblack snake.” In the thirteenth line of this unrhymed sonnet, you ask: “Which one went with him into the hole?” That question would be a more-than sufficient place for a poem to end. Yet, in a moment of inspiration, or perhaps in awareness of serving the sonnet form, you add another line: “Somewhere else: his belts.” I shivered when I read that line. So much is suggested there without direct statement. Of course, another poem could emerge about those belts, but your decision to end there tells me some things are unsayable, that the suggestion of violence “belts” conjures is too awful to be named. The poem left me with that “zero at the bone” feeling Emily Dickinson wrote about—a feeling I have had regarding a number of your childhood memory poems from previous books. In “My Father’s Tie Rack,” that feeling is so potent because you let the thing (the belt) remain a thing while also positioning it in a way that allows one to imagine beyond the poem its various names and uses, its full metaphorical weight. Could you talk a bit about the ways you balance what is made so vividly present through your attentions with what is made so palpable through its absence?

Larkin: It was only in retrospect, after “My Father’s Tie Rack” was finished, that I saw how in describing that cascade of neckties I’d painted a kind of portrait of my father. Writing the poem had begun with my simply wanting to make a list of the ties I remembered. I wanted extravagant, voluptuous images. I thought of my father as glamorous, though I wouldn’t have used that word then. He dressed with 1940s style. The clothing might be subdued, but those wide silk ties were full of rich color and sensuousness that offset his crisp shirts and cleanly parted hair. He was handsome. He worked in movie theaters in Boston, among them the Paramount, a kind of movie palace that in those days offered a live stage show before the film, and he had met famous actors—so there was a kind of show business aura about him that the neckties embodied for me. As a very young girl I had a slightly illicit feeling about opening the closet door when there were no adults watching, and gazing and touching what to me seemed like works of art.

I didn’t know that the poem would begin to touch on larger questions about his life, its pleasures and yearnings, constraints and secrets. There were, and are, mysteries. He died of metastasized cancer at fifty-seven—my first shocking, unexpected death. Perhaps that led to my choice of the abrupt word “hole” and not “grave”: “hole” as the dreadful opposite of all that silk beauty of the ties. As you say, the poem could have ended there. What I want from an ending is two things that may seem contradictory (I’m saying “want” as if describing a fully conscious choice, rather than having an image suddenly come to me in something like a trance). I want an ending that locks down the sound stream of the poem (in this case the partial rhyme of “else” and “belts”), and at the same time I want to leave the poem open, so that, as you point out, it allows one to imagine beyond the ending. I never imagined writing more about “belts”—I even felt that saying it was a kind of transgression. And I don’t know if I would have understood that the poem needed that turn of the screw if the sonnet form had not asked me for a fourteenth line.

Rail: You use the sonnet form more than any other in Old Stranger. I counted no less than twenty-five sonnets in the entire collection, not including a handful of thirteeners that function as near sonnets. What interests me here is not just the frequency of the sonnet’s appearance but the manner in which you have extrapolated the form in such supple, pliable ways. In your hands, what some would see as a strict and forbidding structure becomes a powerful engine for a vast range of lyric and narrative poems. You often engaged the sonnet in previous books—most conspicuously in the magnificent sequence “Blackout Sonnets” from A Long Sound—but in Old Stranger, you do not tether yourself to rhyme, meter, or traditional octet/sestet groupings where the volta (turn) occurs in an expected place. In fact, one could read Old Stranger and not notice that so many of the sonnets in it are in fact sonnets. I myself only noticed because I am predisposed to look for them everywhere. So I was wondering if you could spend some time discussing your relationship to the sonnet and why the form is so prevalent in Old Stranger.  

Larkin: My love affair with the sonnet goes back to the 1950s. Finding Edna St. Vincent Millay, however that happened—her poems weren’t part of the high school curriculum—was simultaneous with my discovery of poetry itself. I was a volatile mix of teenage idealism, rebellion, and erotic fantasy, constrained by my family’s conventionality. The catastrophe that eventually led to my writing the “Blackout Sonnets” was yet to come. I inhaled Millay’s candor and passionate feminism, hardly conscious that I was also absorbing the rhythms and structure of the Shakespearean sonnet, fused with her conversational tone. I’d been taught only the bare minimum about prosody, but I could feel the tension between inevitability and surprise. Memorizing and reciting a Millay sonnet sequence earned me a public speaking award, and though I used the book prize money for editions of T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas—beginning to extend my sense of what was possible—my first roots were in the sonnet as a way to think and feel.

In college I abandoned Millay, dismissed by a professor who shared the critics’ disdain for her popular success—not much had changed since John Crowe Ransom ridiculed her “deficiency in masculinity”—and armed myself with Marianne Moore. Later I went straight to the so-called confessionals; Dickinson lay as yet unexplored, buried in the library with the “American Men of Letters” series. A brief stint in grad school in Tucson in the sixties introduced me in person to Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley, guests at the fledgling Poetry Center. The poetics of the new American poetry had changed everything. Iambic pentameter was deemed inauthentic, and received forms were “anaemic & fraught with incompetence & unreality.” In the words of LeRoi Jones (not yet Amiri Baraka), “We can get nothing from England.”

I appreciated poems in open forms but couldn’t write them—I needed musical shapes—until the litanies I encountered in Ginsberg and Rukeyser offered a way to play with and against a pattern of expectation, lines accelerating and slowing while anaphora provided a steady, inexorable beat. This was a form I embraced in the nineties, a decade of elegies for friends dying of AIDS, my mother’s death, and a need to write more expansively about my own body, the house of grief and healing.

But sonnets, loose or strict, had been there all along, beginning with the unrhymed “‘Vagina’ Sonnet” in my first book, questioning who and what the literary canon excluded, and continuing with a 1980s crown of sonnets in rhymed couplets: the risk of exposure and the taboo territory of alcohol, date-rape, and shame required that rhyme follow rhyme without leaving room to think about what was being said. In truth, I’m still shocked by the rawness of those poems and can hardly bear rereading them. After the first time I read them in public—at Sarah Lawrence, where I was guest teaching—I ran to the parking lot and vomited.

There have been shifts—U-turns even—with each decade, as my relationship to myself, the world, and poetry keeps evolving. What’s left of the story has evolved, too; I’m not looking through the same lens as my younger self. Life is more interesting and more mysterious. Exploring all sorts of variations on the unrhymed sonnet, I’m grateful to be held by a few self-imposed “rules,” the primary one being my sense of the form as self-reflexive: the sonnet as a poem that turns and talks to itself.

I want to add something about the word volta, as your question includes a reminder that a traditional sonnet turns in an expected place, usually after the octave. I ask of a sonnet, if that’s what I’m writing, only that it have a turn. Going back to “My Father’s Tie Rack,” the poem turns and asks a question after building a portrait through a list of images. I liked the precarious engineering of that unequal counterpoise, and then turning again to suggest, in the fewest possible words, another counterweight.

Rail: I’m so glad you honored Edna St. Vincent Millay here, Joan. She was an enormous influence upon a generation of readers and poets-in-training. However, as you correctly note, she was dismissed by the old, sexist New Critics. They harmed her legacy, yes, but the extent of her influence can still be apprehended, and a whole new generation of readers can see her poems, and those sonnets, for what they are: honest, complex, and beautiful. I think those who were under the spell of the New Critics and others dazzled by the potent counter-cultural force of the Beats couldn’t handle Millay’s forthrightness, her disarming clarity and power. What seems “simple” is actually transparency, a language devoid of pretentiousness, free of masks, poses, and mythologies. One could say the same thing about your work! In a poem like the non-sonnet “All at Once,” which refers to an early miscarriage, the voice, your voice, is open, so unapologetically vulnerable. Only the coldest, smallest of hearts would judge or dismiss such a voice. You’ve been writing this way since the publication of your first book, suggesting that you already found a way to write openly and vulnerably without buckling from fear. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about what it was like for you developing as a writer in the sixties and seventies, and if you could discuss ways you began to trust your own voice as you offered readers glimpses of your vulnerability.

Larkin: In the 1960s I was still a poet in embryo. Married to a painter whose surname was Ross, I was Joan Ross for two years, an MA student in English at the University of Arizona—there were no MFA programs in creative writing then. One of my teachers, Barney Childs, an avant-garde composer and poetry editor of Genesis West, proposed that in lieu of a thesis I submit a manuscript of poems prefaced by an essay on poetics, and persuaded the department chair to agree. Unasked, he published one of my poems—a terse lyric with evidence of a musical ear but with content that I now think was trying too hard to sound like literature (the poem makes some strained pronouncements about “the heart” being “not cautious”). It surprised me to hear Barney refer to me as a poet—I wasn’t ready to call myself one.

I left Tucson and the painter husband for a fifth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side, which was then an affordable and exhilarating bohemia. A college friend helped me get work as a secretary at a gallery that showed the Abstract Expressionists championed by formalist critic Clement Greenberg. I met painters, sculptors, and musicians, but few writers. Though I enrolled in a class taught by New York Quarterly editor Bill Packard and later attended Isabella Gardner’s poetry workshop at the Hotel Chelsea, my mentality was still that of a student. I was a long way from finding my own voice or thinking of myself as a poet. Darkness descended when, shortly after my father’s death, I hastily married yet another painter, fifteen years my senior—not the first time I’d fallen in love with art and mistakenly idealized the artist. His mistrust, withering criticism, and possessiveness led me to burn my writing and quit the night class in short story writing I’d started taking with Grace Paley at Columbia. Now I was on my own with a child and with barely enough money for food. One of the few poems I saved from that period was an elegy for my friend Grandin Conover, who died by suicide. I got my second Mexican divorce, found a part-time teaching job, and focused on survival.

Second Wave feminism in the early 1970s brought a sea change. The painter Mimi Weisbord, whose daughter was in nursery school with mine, wanted me to come to her consciousness-raising group. I had pneumonia, but she insisted, and I went. I read Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “Käthe Kollwitz” and took to heart the lines “What would happen if one woman told the truth about / her life? / The world would split open.” I was ignited—angry and celebratory. I co-founded the collective Out & Out Books with poets Irena Klepfisz and Jan Clausen, and with Elly Bulkin edited Amazon Poetry, an anthology of poems by lesbians that included both May Swenson and Adrienne Rich. The poems that became my first book, Housework, poured from me. I danced in women’s bars, listened to women reading and singing in coffeehouses, and came out publicly in Ms. magazine in 1976. I ignored professional and personal risks and took heart from the strength of community.

The most eloquent spokespersons of the women’s movement were poets. I felt I had permission to say anything—which isn’t to say that my early training in traditional prosody was out the window, but that subject matter could be as raw and straightforward as I needed it to be.

Of course, those were beginnings, and there were “abandoned camp-sites,” as Stanley Kunitz calls them in “The Layers,” his poem about transformation over a lifetime. My writing in the decades since the seventies has evolved in ways I couldn’t have predicted, as has my experience of other poets’ work that sustains and challenges me. Poems are still showing me who I am, what has shaped me, and what I care about, and I love Kunitz’s “every stone on the road / precious to me.”

Rail: “One Fragment of 1980” (also not a sonnet!) is one of my favorite poems from Old Stranger. Here, in this autobiographical poem, you recall a moment from 1980 that you had forgotten until it returns decades later, an experience which compels you to write the poem itself. You attend a party where women pass lit joints, dance, and engage in a “shred of smiling talk” with another woman. Remembering this, you acknowledge how much you “owed—still owe” to the sense of community you experienced then. What I found so moving about this poem is its foregrounding of what some people might consider trivial or ephemeral—a moment in time, a moment comprised of impressions and brief yet vivid fragments of memory, imbued with so much emotional weight, so much personal investment. Several poems from Old Stranger possess these qualities. When you prepare a collection of poems for publication, do you sometimes wonder if certain poems are too personal or fragmentary to be shared or understood without some explanation or context that might diffuse the poem’s internal coherence? If so, what do you do in such cases?

Larkin: By the time I was ready to put together the poems contained in Old Stranger, I was concerned chiefly with whether they were strong enough to meet the standards of the reader I’d conjured in my head. From my friend and mentor, the late Jean Valentine, I’d absorbed the principle that what matters most is that a line be alive—even more important than whether or not it makes obvious sense. “What would Jean think?” is a question I still sometimes ask myself.

No subject matter seems to me too personal—I may have broken that barrier for myself with the “Blackout Sonnets,” long ago. But by the time I was writing the poems in Old Stranger, my focus had shifted, and I was no longer telling guilty secrets. I think I can say that the impulse was more songlike and less narrative than in my earlier poems. I wanted both to go deeper into interior life and to respond to the outer world, including what other artists had made and where those made things took me.

I learn so much from close reading and rereading of others’ poems, and I’m grateful when an astute reader—you’re one of the most discerning!—is alive to all the choices a poet makes in bringing a world into being. But I also know how rare that kind of attention is on the part of readers. I’m sometimes astonished, listening to my students looking everywhere but in the text for a poem’s meaning, as if the poet has deliberately withheld it. In a generative workshop I’m currently teaching, a student last night protested about Rukeyser’s poem “Orgy” that she—the reader—needed more information and more erotic detail. “Who are these people, anyway?” she asked, frustrated at being given only “the first woman,” “the second one,” “the man,” “she,” “he.” Few others at the table seemed to hear what’s embodied in the poem’s slow, inexorable beat, or to appreciate the syntactical inversions that evoke strangeness, or to feel the continuing tension of what’s left unsaid when the poem ends with an ellipsis instead of a period.

I don’t want my poems to be obscure, and trust my friend and longtime first reader, Anne Marie Macari, when she finds a line vague or unclear. But I don’t think of poetry as a medium for transmitting information. The image rules. Explaining makes the poem a second-hand experience instead of an encounter.

While I don’t want to burden the poem itself with explanations, I’ve usually included a few brief notes at the end of a book, such as the source of a historical reference (like Vikings stranded at Maes Howe), or language I’ve taken from another poet (like Eleanor Ross Taylor’s “odd-legged” or Dickinson’s “emphatic thumb”). And, too, when I read in public, I often introduce a poem with a few words of context, as listeners are likely to be encountering the poem for the first time without seeing it in front of them. But I want the language and music of the poem, with or without footnotes, to bear the emotional weight.

That said, “One Fragment of 1980” is a poem that might have been clearer if I’d added a few words of context. The memory that led me to write the poem decades later included my acute discomfort at being at a party where everyone was smoking pot. Newly clean and sober, I was grateful for a moment of conversation with another sober woman—the one person in the room with whom I could be entirely myself and at ease. In writing the poem, I missed an opportunity to make the speaker’s circumstances unambiguous, perhaps by an addition to the title.

Rail: You’re assuming your poem may have needed to be clearer, but I think the misunderstanding rests with me. Based on what I have gleaned from several of your other poems, and from a number of interviews you have given over the years, I assumed you were sober by 1980, although my understanding of that term is influenced by many of my now-sober friends who still smoke pot! So, the pot-smoking in the poem did not resonate with me as a problem for the speaker. I didn’t consider the different levels of sobriety.

Larkin: Ah! We call that California sober—alcoholics who quit drinking but still smoke pot. Sobriety, for me, has always meant no self-prescribed mood-changers.

Rail: Joan, you have been an absolute delight to converse with these past few weeks. You gave so much of yourself here. We at the Brooklyn Rail appreciate this. We know your readers will, too! Before we end our discussion, I am wondering if you could share with us what projects—writing or otherwise—that you are working on or will work on soon?

Larkin: In a few days I’ll be heading for an artist residency for the first time since before COVID struck. It’s almost a year since Alice James Books published Old Stranger. Over months of giving readings, teaching, inventorying papers and shipping them to an archive, moving house, packing and unpacking what’s on my bookshelves one more time, and stripping away what I no longer need to carry, I’ve gotten to know Old Stranger more deeply and to understand where in me these poems come from.

I’m probably not done with the sonnet—a form that for me is never old news—but I’ve been sensing the beginning of something new. I’m not going to jinx myself by sharing specifics, but I can say that I don’t want to write the poem I’ve already written, nor live the life I’ve outgrown.

I love thinking of Kunitz’s affirmation: “No doubt the next chapter / in my book of transformations / is already written. / I am not done with my changes.”