Jeff Carreira: Hello Nathan and thank you for joining me today. I would like to start our conversation by asking you to explain what it means to be a poet laureate.

Nathan Hassall: There are rungs of poet laureates. We have city, state, and national poet laureates. Essentially, a laureate is an ambassador for poetry in a given area. I’ll speak on the city level since I was the Poet Laureate of Malibu, CA. Each city is different, and each poet laureate role varies between cities. My main roles in Malibu were hosting and speaking at events, teaching programs in schools, and offering workshops to the community. Essentially, I helped promote public awareness of poetry.

Jeff Carreira: How does one become a poet laureate?

Nathan Hassall: In Malibu, you nominate yourself and the poetry committee votes based on the nominations. From there, it goes to the arts committee for final approval. This isn’t the standard, different areas have different processes.

Jeff Carreira: I find it interesting that we have poet laureates, but we don’t have something similar for other arts like painting, dance, or music. What is it about poetry that makes it feel uniquely appropriate to have ambassadors?

Nathan Hassall: I have thought about this, and I wonder if it’s because people aren’t typically as interested in poetry as they are in other arts. Simultaneously and perhaps paradoxically, I believe it also represents the important role poetry holds among the arts. Language is universally held by all of us, and poetry is available to everyone who has language.

Jeff Carreira: I once heard that in the late 1800s, poets like Percy Bysshe Shelley were essentially pop stars of their time. When a new poem of theirs was released, people would read it and talk about it. If we contrast that with the reception of poetry today we see a big difference.

Nathan Hassall: I think what’s interesting now is that poetry is popular online, and I know that Instagram is one of the vehicles in which a lot of poets distribute their work. The notion that poetry isn’t popular isn’t really true, especially if we look at social media. There are various ways that people are engaging with poetry. The popularity of poetry slams is a good example.

But I also think poetry requires patience. Do people want to sit down, read, and be challenged to think? Then there is also the question of whether poets are writing things that are accessible to a wider audience.

As you know, we live in a world where our attention is being pulled all over the place. We’re flicking through video shorts, we’ve got Netflix, we’ve got all these different media sources available to us, and through that, we have choices. Similar to meditation, poetry asks us to slow down. So when we’re in a world that’s moving so fast, are we willing to consciously slow down to savor something? To do the special work reading, writing, and listening to poems asks of us?

Jeff Carreira: I think that’s very true, and it brings me to the heart of what our issue is about. We are wondering if there is something special about poetry as an art form that makes it uniquely transformative because it’s not superficial. The way I experience poetry is that I have to allow the poem inside me to find out what the poem does to me when I read it. It’s not about understanding the poem as much as it is about being affected by it. I would love to hear you comment on that.

Nathan Hassall: I want to be changed by the poems that I read. And this happens at many levels. It can happen imaginatively, emotionally, and somatically (in the body). We read so much instructional prose, or engage in linear conversations where “A” leads to “B.” And that way of thinking doesn’t lend itself well to poetry. You have to allow the poem to present itself as best as it can to you and let go of the question, “What does this mean?” and allow yourself to make imaginative leaps. However, this isn’t to downplay the role of analysis. I love analyzing poems as well, but the first encounter—and this is so important when we teach poetry to kids—should be the joy of hearing or reading the poem. I always say, If you want to teach poetry to a kid, read the full poem first. It is the same with music. If you’re playing a song and you keep pausing it every 3 seconds, they won’t have a chance to dance. There’s no way to let it come into your body and be with it, to enjoy your own reaction to it.

Jeff Carreira: I watched a video of yours recently where you and your wife spent a week with The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. You both read the poem several times during each day, sometime together, sometimes individually. It struck me as a very interesting idea because you were giving the poem space in your life. Is that an experiment you’re continuing with?

Nathan Hassall: We will, as part of our “Living With” series, but we are not sure when we’ll do it next. Honestly, starting with The Raven was too ambitious: it takes 10 minutes to read, so it was quite a time demand. However, I want to show through these “Living With” videos that poetry can be fun, that you can be creative in how you read it, and that each new reading brings a different experience, which can change you. During our week with The Raven, I had the chance to read the full poem directly to a raven who was sitting on a metal fence post, and thankfully, it sat there the whole time. I kept trying to set the raven up to give me a 3-syllable caw, to echo the poem’s refrain of “nevermore,” but it didn’t comply. And I love that because I was trying to shape nature to my will, and it was humbling to encounter its refusal. And I think that may be the lesson of poetry. You can’t bend a poem to your demands because it has its own living energy. It’s up to you how you submit to it.

Jeff Carreira: In his essay The Poet, the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson explains that in poetry, language is most alive. Poetry is where language is finding new expressions. Other ways of using language are fossilized because they become habitual. Poetry is always introducing novel ways of using language and new ways of understanding the world. I would also love to hear you speak about that aspect of poetry.

Nathan Hassall: I think Owen Barfield speaks about how using a word in a new context is kind of a gift to the general consciousness. And I see it as, you’re discovering gems within a word that you didn’t know existed. One of the ways in which poets love doing this is by “verbing the noun.” And yes, when Emerson was talking about language as fossil poetry, it applies to our now. Every word in this dialouge was once a perception that led to an utterance. One of the reasons I write poetry is to refresh language and, by doing so, refresh my relationship to things in the world.

Recently my wife, Rachael, and I decided not to do our usual evening walk—which we were doing every day for about 10 days in a local neighborhood—and instead I wrote a poem about all the different things we had observed, from a caterpillar at night munching on a dandelion, to walking past coreopsis plants over to a cliff that overlooks the Pacific, where the full moon was breathing silver light onto black water. I was writing metaphors for all the different things that we experience. I didn’t experience those metaphors in real time, but I created a new experience of those walks by turning them into a poem, rendering them into something that, I hope, will alight the imagination of another person.

Jeff Carreira: One of the useful things about language becoming fossilized is that we don’t have to think about everything freshly every time we speak about it. And for certain applications, that’s very useful. The other side of that is it tends to dull our experience of the world. And what you’re saying is that poetry can reinvigorate and re-enchant the world.

Nathan Hassall: In England, we say it’s raining cats and dogs when it’s raining heavily, and it’s so ubiquitous that we understand it means heavy rain. But if you stay with the language longer, and think more deeply about it, someone once saw it as an image of cats and dogs falling from the air. We speak metaphorically all the time, but we lose our ability to imagine the metaphors over time, and they become “dead”. Coming up with new metaphors allows us to resurrect the dead language of old metaphors. I use the term “poetic necromancy” to describe the act of taking a dead metaphor and reinvigorating it by examining it or expanding on it in ways that bring fresh life into them, to remind us that poetic language is present in how we speak all the time.

Jeff Carreira: You started a company called The Poetry Vessel. You also have an active YouTube channel of videos about poetry, The Poetry Vessel with Nathan Hassall. One of your intentions is to gather a community of poets and poetry enthusiasts online. What inspires you to want to bring poetry to more people? Why do you feel that poetry matters?

Nathan Hassall: I have so many reasons for doing this. One is that I know there are poets out there who yearn for community, who want to learn how to use language more effectively through the art of poetry. I have also seen the need to create a platform where people with a passing interest or curiosity in poetry can feel welcome, but also engage in the rigorous work of improvement. At poetry events I have hosted or attended, I’ve heard over and over that, in school, they found poetry boring. I’ve sought to help people rediscover a potential love that they lost through an early experience. As Malibu Laureate, I led a workshop called The Ripple Effect, and there was a 90-year-old man who would come in with his family, and he wrote his first ever poem in that workshop. And this told me that it’s never too late, and you never know when your hunger for the art might sprout. I think there is a hunger for this special use of language and its musicality, and I hope to provide a platform where people feel welcome to engage with the art and go deeper. All are welcome in the Vessel: all we ask for is an open mind and heart.

Jeff Carreira: I once heard that in the Romantic era, many people considered poetry the best way to express subtle philosophical or spiritual ideas because poetry always contains some ambiguity. You have to engage with poetry. And this gets back to what we opened with. I think some writing doesn’t demand much engagement because it’s just information, but the inherently ambiguous nature of poetry means you have to engage with it, you have to grapple with it in order to receive meaning from it. I would love to hear you speak about the ambiguity that’s inherent in poetry and why that has such a potentially transformative effect on our consciousness, on our way of seeing the world, and on our ability to express more subtle spiritual ideas.

Nathan Hassall: As a writer, you light a candle in your own imagination, and the goal is to light that candle in the reader or the listener’s imagination as well. The reader is a co-creator. Poetry invites your imagination to open up.

I think poetry has a spiritual quality because language can touch us through its invitation. If I’m telling you what you must think and feel and what a poem I wrote means, I am not speaking to your heart, or inviting you into an experience. I’m trying to dictate what that experience must be for you, which will likely close you up.

Jeff Carreira: I have published a number of poetry books. Some of these, like Illusions of This World by Tejal Tarro whom I also spoke to for this issue, are written as someone goes through an awakening or healing process. The poems are a way of processing or understanding what is happening. The poems become a record of a transformative process and when someone else reads them, they might initiate a similar process in the reader. I’m curious to hear you speak about poetry in that sense, as a transformative vehicle.

Nathan Hassall: I think some poets are spiritual cartographers who record their experiences in poetry. Although that is not true of all poets. I also believe in what Kathleen Raine said—that she thinks that the only experience the poet has in the poem—regardless of what the poem contains—is in the writing of it. I find this powerful because no matter what you are writing about in poetry, the writing is its own experience. In the writing, you can be surprised by something in you, maybe from your unconscious, or maybe it enters from outside, and this strange new thing appears in the writing: you are surprised. Through surprise, a transformative change can occur within you.

Jeff Carreira: I write mostly non-fiction, but I also write fiction. And I started writing fiction because an American philosopher named Richard Rorty believed that fiction was a better vehicle for the transmission of subtle ideas because ideas could be presented within a story that allowed for an emotional impact. In my fiction characters sometimes don’t do or say what I thought they would. They behave differently than I anticipated. My question is, where does that come from?

Nathan Hassall: I liken it to dreams. Recently, on a camping trip in St. Ives, Cornwall, England, we were near a cliff edge during a thunderstorm. I was reading a book about lucid dreaming and it explained that we should never ask our dream characters about where they came from. That night, I had six or seven lucid dreams, and I asked every dream character about their origin. They all looked at me, faces turning somewhat demonic, and told me something along the lines of “that is not something we ask here.”

When you’re writing fiction, there is a similarity to the psychodrama of your dreams. And, when I write fiction—which is only occasionally—the characters come alive in my head even when I am not actively writing. They have their own conversations with each other, and sometimes they address me. They have their own, autonomous existence, their own wants, desires, and needs.

Jeff Carreira: This makes me think of my favorite poet, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. I have published an anthology of Pessoa’s work that is also featured in this issue and I find him quite mesmerizing. He wrote under about 175 different heteronyms, which he spoke of as actual beings that wrote through him. They had names and histories, and they interacted with each other by writing letters. Pessoa, along with four of his heteronyms, are widely considered to be excellent world-class poets with very different styles.

The book I published was translated by John Pedro Schwartz, and I spoke with him for this issue. He did something interesting with his translation because he retained the meter and rhyme of the poems in translating from Portuguese to English. I am curious to hear your thoughts about poetry translations.

Nathan Hassall: I’ve read plenty of poems in translation, and I like trying to sound out the original words as I read them. I’m glad you brought up meter and rhyme because, if I look at Rilke, for instance, he is often translated into free verse, but in German, you will find his poems written strictly in rhyming couplets. So I wonder in translation what we are retaining from the original, and what is a new creation. What do we lose in the process of translation? Not everything in one language is directly translatable into another. Some translators try to be more invisible—capture the essence of the translation—while others, let’s say, take more creative license in their translation. Coleman Barks, with Rumi’s work, and Robert Bly with his translation of many different poets, are both known for being extremely liberal in their translations.

Jeff Carreira: Pessoa did a lot of translating from different languages into Portuguese. By his own admission he was fairly liberal in his translation. He believed there is a spirit to a poem, which is what you’re trying to convey. The words in a different language may not convey that spirit in the same way. This brings up the question, what is a poem? Is a poem the words? Is a poem the meaning? What is a poem?

Nathan Hassall: Etymologically, the word “poem” comes from roots that mean “a making”, but that’s not always a satisfactory answer because it’s so broad. Your prose writing is poetry at that level as well. It’s so tempting to refer to Emily Dickinson when she says, I know it’s a poem if I feel like the top of my head’s been screwed off. Can we define what a poem is, or can we only poeticize it? People send us poems that we read on The Poetry Vessel Podcast and I choose to read things that I feel attracted to, but I’m fully open to my idea of poetry being broadened by something new. I think every poem is a deepening or an expansion of the definition of poetry. Another thing that Owen Barfield said is that poetry needn’t be poetry to its maker to be poetry to its reader. When I was younger, I used to read a lot of popular physics books. I don’t know how much I understood them, but the language was always so enchanting. I find this in lots of different disciplines. You can always be phenomenological and poetic in the way you read a text, even if it is an academic study, an essay, or a popular science book.

Jeff Carreira: Absolutely. It seems in any art, whether it’s dance or painting or anything else. The art is in the relationship between the artist and the piece and then the piece and the viewer or reader. Something in that interaction is poetry.

Nathan Hassall: I couldn’t agree more.