Interview: Aaron Poochigian on Four Walks in Central Park

Aaron Poochigian is a poet, classics scholar, and translator who lives and writes in New York City. His many translations include Stung with Love (Penguin UK) — a translation of Sappho, and Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations” (forthcoming from W.W. Norton). His work has appeared in such newspapers and journals as The Financial Times, The New York Review of Books, and Poetry Magazine. His new book is Four Walks in Central Park: A Poetic Guide to the Park. Learn more at  aaronpoochigian.com.

1. If you had to describe yourself today in three words that go beyond titles or achievements, what would they be?

Experimental. I see the work that went into “Four Walks in Central Park” as a whole phase in my creative career that is now complete. I’m groping, through experimentation, toward whatever I’ll be doing next. Lately I’ve been playing around, for instance, with writing nursery rhymes for adults. Their rhythms and rhyme-schemes, I’ve found, bring readers back to the delight they took in poetry for children. I’ve also started working on an opera libretto. I’ve become more and more interested in writing for singers. Song lyrics play by different rules than poetry for the page, and I’m slowly learning what they are.  

Happy. My existential state ranged from depressed to despairing for a good two decades. I’ve finally pulled out of it. I’ve been what I can only call “happy” for six months straight. I don’t ever want to go back. I love the creative work I’m doing. I’m also teaching some classes on Ancient Greek poetry that I love. Life’s good.

Busy. I’m the busiest I’ve been in my life. I had a good long year when I was free to write my own poetry. Now I’ve got a lot of obligations—a translation, publicity work, ghostwriting work and teaching, all competing with my own poetry. Lately I’ve been going, going, going, all day long. I’m not complaining, but I’ve had to re-learn how to budget my time.

2. You’ve earned a PhD in Classics, an MFA in Poetry, and won major awards. When you look back, which moment felt like the truest “beginning” of your journey as a poet?

For most of my teens I wanted to be a composer of music. I went all-in and studied harmony, voice-leading and the ranges of the instruments in a traditional orchestra. Then, one day when I was eighteen, I was reading, in a textbook, the opening of the epic poem the Aeneid by the Roman poet Vergil. I didn’t yet know Latin but I sounded the words out, and everything changed—the sky got brighter, the grass blazed greener, and it became clear to me that I was to be a poet instead and learn to read poetry in Latin and Greek. All that went into getting the PhD in Classics was meant, in my mind, to show me what poets can do and what kind of poetry I was supposed to write. Yes, my career as a poet has had its vicissitudes, but I’ve remained true to that revelation. From talking to others, I’ve learned it’s uncommon that I’ve never had a time in my life when I was unsure what I was supposed to do with it.

3. You’ve spoken about your past struggles with addiction. What role did poetry and later, Central Park play in your healing process?

Yes, I abused and became addicted to cocaine during the COVID lockdown. I didn’t use it to party; I used it to write—sometimes for sixteen-hour stretches. One of the consequences was that I became isolated. My range of experience shrank to what was in my apartment and in the corner deli. I did write poems I wanted to keep during that sad time, but eventually my creativity started to dry up. I needed new experiences to stimulate new poems, so I resolved to go to Central Park daily and immerse myself in what I encountered there. All of that ended up as my book “Four Walks in Central Park.” I credit the park with giving me something to look forward to again and with coaxing me into habits that were healthier than the nasty one I’d developed.

4. Has the pandemic, with its strange mix of silence and isolation, changed the way you think about writing and life itself?

Yes. I used to take for granted my connections with my friends and the experiences coming at me through my five senses. The sterility of lockdown and the isolation that came with my addiction left me, ultimately, uninspired. I was scouring the bottom of a pot that was already scoured clean. I had to claw back toward living life with relish, toward savoring what was around me. The COVID years made me discover gratitude even for common experiences. When we finally got our lives back after lockdown, I was filled with an urge to live with relish and to be as present as I can be wherever I might be for whatever time I’ve got left. So, yes, COVID sent me back to my work and my life with a new gusto.

5. Do you see your career as a series of reinventions translator, poet, storyteller or as one continuous voice shifting shapes?

I’ve always tried to cultivate as many various voices as I can find. When I translated the poetry of Sappho, for example, I wrote in literary “drag” as a female. When I translated Euripides’ tragedy “Bacchae,” I had to discover voices for wildly different characters, all with big emotions. Still, I wouldn’t call the voices I’ve found “reinventions” of myself—they’re rather discoveries of tonal places in me that were lying fallow. You know, waiting to be brought up onto the page. I think we’re all polyphonic—masculine and feminine, obnoxious and reserved, etcetera. For me as a writer, it’s been a question of discovering the voices latent in me and letting them have their say, no matter how wild they are and no matter how different they are from my day-to-day persona. The more voices, the better.

6. What first inspired you to write “Four Walks in Central Park” was it a single afternoon walk, or something that unfolded over time?

I started going to the park daily toward the end of COVID with the intention of having new, stimulating experiences. I hadn’t yet thought of writing a book about it. Eventually the impressions I recorded and all I was learning about the park and the countless species in it from books moved me to go for a book-length project. I realized that the curative effects my wanderings had for me might also console others. That’s why I set the four books up to redress the conditions from which I was recovering—stress, gloom, burnout and deflation. In “Four Walks in Central Park” the park is a place of play that leads to revitalization because that’s what it’s been for me.

7. You weave poetry, history, maps, and insider stories together. Why was it important for you to blend genres rather than just write straight poems?

I’m interested in expanding the range of American poetry by pushing it beyond its academic “preserve” and getting it in front of interested non-specialists. I blended maps and history with poetry to make “Four Walks in Central Park” a fully functional tour guide in the hope that people who don’t normally read poetry would discover, read and use it.

I also wanted to do what I could to expand the range of what people expect from poetry. When people think of it nowadays, they have expectations that it will come in the form of relatively short lyric poems. The truth is, poetry can do all sorts of things—including telling stories and teaching. It did all that and more in, say, Ancient Greece and Tang China, and I feel I should do all I can to revive its forgotten modes in America today. I dream of a future when many different kinds of American poetry are well-known contributors to a literary culture that speaks to everyone.

8. Central Park is one of the world’s most photographed and written-about places. What new perspective do you think your book offers readers?

“Four Walks in Central Park” does include the most popular landmarks—Bethesda Terrace, the Zoo and the Carousel. I hope, though, that the book encourages the visitor to appreciate the less popular attractions as much as the big draws. It helps readers, I hope, succumb to a meditative state that elevates even the incidental sights one encounters to objects worthy of attention—even common birds like robins and geese and animals like squirrels and chipmunks. The park is a world unto itself, a resort dimension. The perspective I worked to sustain in the book is that every detail a visitor meets with can take on personal significance and resonate both in the moment and in the future, outside of the park.

9. Forest bathing is often associated with remote nature. What does it mean to “forest-bathe” in Central Park, in the middle of Manhattan?

Yes, “shinrin-yoku,” or Japanese “forest-bathing,” is meant to take place in authentic forests, but Central Park offers the same birds and trees, the same sense of getting away from the stresses and deadlines of an exhausting life. What’s important about “forest-bathing,” regardless of the setting, is the intentionality behind it. Forest-bathers purposefully immerse themselves in greenery and what’s inside it and persistently pay mind to what is being presented to their five senses, whether it be the smell of fir trees or the mournful oboe-timbre of a loon.

Yes, the park is man-made, but I see it not as outside of nature but as nature concentrate. So, yes, I think forest-bathers can get everything they get from real forests out of the cultivated wilderness that is Central Park. I mean not just the forest attractions the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, the Ramble and the North Woods. The Lilac Walk and Pinetum, though less dense and expansive, were just as effective when it came to cultivating a meditative mindset.

10. The book feels like both a meditative companion and a celebration. What do you most want readers to carry with them after they finish the walks?

I would love it if the take-away for readers were an appreciative way of looking at the details of life. Yes, the overarching mode of “Four Walks in Central Park” is praise. Also, you’re right to call the book a “meditative companion.” The rhythms, rhymes and (I hope) vivid descriptions of the various attractions are meant to elicit a meditative state. Ideally visitors would both lose themselves in the park’s delights in the moment and keep them in memory as solaces when they return to the bustling grid of the city.

11. Central Park has inspired countless artists and writers. Which voices from the past echo for you most strongly when you walk its paths?

It’s funny. Central Park shows up in great literature, in famous novels like “The Great Gatsby” and “Catcher in the Rye” and in a high-brow nonfiction essay by no less a writer than Henry James. But the voice that has most stuck with me is that of the notoriously god-awful poet William McGonagall. In his poem “Jottings of New York” he writes with giddy enthusiasm about the statues on the Mall, the rowboats on the Lake and the first iteration of the Carousel. Again and again as I was writing “Four Walks in Central Park,” his voice pushed me to try to sustain wonder at all that the park’s attractions have to offer. McGonagall challenged me to be as enthusiastic as he was about all he saw.

12. You’ve translated Sappho and Marcus Aurelius. Do you feel their ancient wisdom connects with the quiet lessons you’ve found in the park?

Yes. Sappho’s lavishness taught me that it’s ok to be extravagant, to go for the grand passions. So it is that even the quiet scene of meditation at Wagner’s Cove in “Four Walks in Central Park” reaches for a big revelation. I hope it gets there. Sappho has influenced me and stayed with me more than any other poet whose work I have translated.

There’s also a strong parallel with Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations” in the book in that a speaker, the tour guide, is addressing a “you,” the reader. In most of his notebook entries, Marcus Aurelius is also talking to a “you.” Though it was originally another aspect himself, readers can’t help but take it as referring to themselves. Both books sustain a conversational intimacy with an addressee as they teach what they teach. In the book I try to cultivate a close friendship between the two characters. The “you” is portrayed as the speaker’s old pal from childhood.

13. Your collections (“American Divine,” “Manhattanite,” “The Cosmic Purr”) often mix the cosmic with the everyday. Do you see this book as part of that same exploration, or a departure into something new?

That’s a great question. Yes, if my poetry collections all have something in common, it’s that the poems in them try to capture epiphanies and other sorts of numinous experiences. “Four Walks in Central” does, on occasion, go to the divine—in the description of the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, for example. Still, the book is a departure from my poetry collections in that it’s large-scale and programmatic and purposefully grounds itself in sensory details. It’s also different in that it’s didactic, that is, it “teaches” things. The docent, who speaks as the “I,” gives the reader not just the history of the park and facts about it but, I hope, a whole immersive way of being in the world. Rather than trying to leap up to the divine like the poems in my previous collections, the poetry in “Four Walks in Central Park” is happy to stay down on earth-level and admire what’s there.

14. Looking back at everything struggles, triumphs, translations, poems what do you feel most grateful for right now?

I’m most grateful for the poetry that struck me like a revelation when I was young and that has stuck with me throughout my life. I push myself to read new work, but my instinct is to go back to work I know well and try to see new nuances in it. The poetry of W.B. Yeats, for example, and of John Milton. I know a lot of their work by memory, but I still find myself returning to their words, both on the page and read aloud to me through Audible.com. They are my oldest friends and, as far as I can tell, have infinite depth. It’s a bit of cliché to say that the books you read become your friends forever, but it’s an accurate cliché. Poems I discovered with delight when I was young are among my oldest friends.

15. And finally, what’s next on your horizon: more poetry, more translations, or perhaps another urban landscape waiting to be written?

I’ve decided that Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations” will be my last translation. I think I’ve done enough and gotten everything out of translation work that I’m going to get. I also won’t, I think, go back to the “tour guide” mode again. I did that in “Four Walks in Central Park” and feel another such work would be redundant. Yes, here I am trying to figure out what I’ll do next. It will, I hope, be unlike anything I’ve done before.

For now, I’m trying to write lyric poems in which there is a fully reciprocal relationship between the sound and the sense. Right now I’m reaching to write poetry in which every syllable, every consonant and vowel, has its own special meaning in a greater gestalt. I think poetry is different from prose in that, in poetry, the words, in addition to whatever they might convey, are also musical notation. So, in a way, with my new sonic emphasis, I’m going back to my adolescent desire to be a musical composer. I want to make music with words.

Aaron Poochigian’s Four Walks in Central Park is available now on Amazon – check it out.