Issue 130, Spring 1994
W. D. Snodgrass received one of his profession’s highest honors early on in his career when he won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, in 1960, for his first book of poems, Heart’s Needle. Yet the winning of this coveted prize brought numerous pressures and seductions. Snodgrass struggled with a writer’s block. His marriage fell apart. He lost friendships, due, he felt, to jealousy over his winning the prize.
Nevertheless, Snodgrass continued to write. Though in the past his poems often took years—sometimes eight, sometimes twenty—more recently he has become fairly prolific, in one case producing twenty-eight poems in twenty-four days. All told, his output of poems and essays has been impressive. Sixteen books of poetry followed Heart’s Needle, including After Experience, Selected Poems, and two collaborative books with paintings by DeLoss McGraw: W. D.’s Midnight Carnival and The Death of Cock Robin. In addition, Snodgrass has published six books of translations with an emphasis on Romanian and Hungarian folk songs: a book of essays on the writing process, In Radical Pursuit; and scores of uncollected poems, reviews, and essays. His life’s work, however, is The Führer Bunker, a cycle of poems begun twenty-five years ago and still in progress, written in the voices of Hitler and his henchmen and henchwomen. In a series of villanelles and triolets, Magda Goebbels explains why she killed her children when it was clear Germany was losing the war; Hitler describes his sexual obsessions; stripped of his command, Himmler tries to predict his future. Part of the cycle was published in 1977 as a work in progress, and the completed text is forthcoming next fall from BOA Editions.
In addition to the Pulitzer, Snodgrass has received numerous honors, including an Ingram-Merrill Award, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Academy of American Poets.
Born on January 5, 1926 in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, Snodgrass studied music before transferring to the University of Iowa writing program and discovering poetry there. He went on to teach at several universities, including Syracuse University, which he left in 1979, later joining the faculty of the University of Delaware, where he is now Distinguished Professor of Creating Writing and Contemporary Poetry. Winters, Snodgrass, and his fourth wife, Kathy, live in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where, Snodgrass says, away from the psychological confines of his “fatherland,” he writes more freely.
This interview was conducted in the fall of 1992, at Snodgrass’s summer home in Erieville, New York, and includes sections of earlier interviews. The conversation took place in his living room, which is decorated with colorfully painted papier-mâché Mexican dragons and paintings by the Mexican painter Ferman Rodriguez. Snodgrass sat in a large armchair, his back to a window overlooking an old apple orchard, sipping coffee, and frequently punctuating his conversation with his remarkable, rumbling laugh. The family dog, Buford, a terribly shy and insecure English mastiff, kept an uneasy vigil at his feet throughout the interview.
INTERVIEWER
When we first set up this interview, you explained to me that it would be difficult for me to find your books, even in the libraries. Why is that the case?
W. D. SNODGRASS
I’m not exactly the height of fashion.
INTERVIEWER
You were fashionable when you won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for Heart’s Needle.
SNODGRASS
Not really when I won it; maybe a little afterward. But it’s freakish that I won it. Whether you get prizes or not has nothing to do with whether you’re any good. It just so happens that the chief judge at that time, Louis Untermeyer, liked my work very much, and he gave it to me. But it cost him the judgeship. The following year he was forced out. There were really only two people who were in favor of me. One was Caleb Bingham, who published one of the most important papers in the South, and who was a real reader of poetry; most of the others were journalists who didn’t care about literature. But Louis Untermeyer was the man who really decided it. That year—I learned all this much later—the others decided it had to go for light verse. They had a kind of anti-intellectual and anti-artistic meeting and said: After all, light verse sells more than anything else. Bingham and Untermeyer said, We’re not here to decide who sells most. So I got it, but the following year it was given to Phyllis McGinley, which was horrifying; she used to write little silly verses for The Saturday Evening Post. The sad thing is that Ogden Nash didn’t have a book come out either of those years, because certainly he deserved a major award and never got one. Once I got that, of course, most reviewers praised the book to the skies. But then of course they held it against me. If they all praise your first book, you can be sure that they will then all attack your second book violently. That’s the way those things always go.
INTERVIEWER
How did you feel when you won it?
SNODGRASS
Actually my then-wife got the news; she was at home. One of the newspapers called up and said, Is this the Snodgrass that just won the Pulitzer Prize, and she said, Jesus, I hope so.
INTERVIEWER
So up until that point, had you wanted to become famous?
SNODGRASS
Of course. Although, that was not the primary target. You know, if you want to become famous, you write schlock. Crap. There’s always a market for that. The problem is, you would like to write the stuff you want to write and still get all the rewards of writing junk. You want it both ways. You want it all.
INTERVIEWER
What changes when you win a prize like the Pulitzer?
SNODGRASS
Well, before, you couldn’t get jobs, nobody would publish your stuff. Overnight that all changes. You’re being offered important jobs, everybody wants you for dinner, everybody wants you for bed—instead of friends, you have people who want to chalk you up on their scorecard.
INTERVIEWER
Did you adjust?
SNODGRASS
I went through about eight years of psychoanalysis in Detroit. My second marriage then broke up.
INTERVIEWER
How did the award destroy the marriage?
SNODGRASS
I don’t want to speak very specifically about this since it is a private matter involving others than myself. Getting such an award, though, is liable to work a major change in one’s life. The award itself was quite small at that time—five hundred dollars if I remember correctly—but, as I’ve said earlier, completely changed the tenor of my life. Such a change (whether for the better or worse) is liable to threaten a marriage. It’s like winning a war—former allies can then afford infidelities, jealousies, betrayals, demands, backbiting, nastiness, which the existence of external enemies helped to control.