Richard Hoffman has published five books of poetry, Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Award from The New England Poetry Club; Emblem; and Noon until Night, winner of the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award for poetry, and his most recent, People Once Real. His other books include Half the House: a Memoir, the 2014 memoir Love & Fury, the story collectionInterference and Other Stories, and the essay collection Remembering the Alchemists. He is Emeritus Writer in Residence at Emerson College, and nonfiction editor of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices.
KMD: What is the significance of the title? What advice do you have for poets who struggle to find a powerful title for their collection?
RH: The title comes from a line in the opening poem of the sequence “Mundus et Infans,” the third section of the book, which explores the plight of children caught up in war and other violence throughout history. In that poem I envision these “people once real,” who have lost their lives to violence surrounding my childhood crib, whispering “same war, same war, same war.”
As a manuscript, the book had earlier titles; Same War was one of them. Another was In That Ravaged Country, from a line in a poem that did not make it into the book after all. Still another, Dues Now Due was a favorite because I spotted it first on a sign on the door of my local VFW; it seemed so deeply ironic in the context of Veterans of Foreign Wars! I think there were one or two others in the earliest version of the book, but I’ve forgotten them.
I have a hard time giving general advice to other poets. We are all trying to be faithful to our art one choice at a time. So much of what we do is trial and error. What we do is place a word or phrase and then see what is implied, what is suggested, animated by our state of mind, our politics, our responsiveness to the world. I think that includes titling poems and books. It’s really a wonderful kind of freedom.
KMD: I admire your ability to write effortlessly across genres. In addition to your work as a poet, you are quite accomplished as a memoirist. What can poets learn from prose writers about craft and storytelling?
RH: I wouldn’t say effortlessly!
An interesting question — one I’ve more often addressed from the perspective of a prose writer, offering a conference seminar called “Borrowings: What Can Memoirists Learn from Poets, Playwrights, and Fiction writers?” But probably the main thing prose writers can learn from poets is to distrust the language a bit more, to work against verbal resistance, to write for texture, not merely for storytelling. We have TV and film to do that. When I read a memoir or a novel or a short story I want to be engaged with the characters and their situations but I want also to be engaged with the play of language and the voice in my ear reciting the story. Many of our best memoirists are poets, by the way. But your question is about what poets can learn from prose writers. I hadn’t thought much about that. I suppose I privilege poetry above the other genres, not in a snobby way, but in the sense that poets, good poets anyway, are writing poetry whether they write in verse or prose. There are plenty of verses we wouldn’t count as poetry, and a great deal of prose that we do, or should.
I’ve also noticed that writing poems, paying attention to the properties of language, makes me a better prose writer, but it doesn’t work the other way round. At least for me. If I’ve been writing prose, as I was recently finishing the book of essays, I feel too wedded to the rhetoric of sentence and paragraph to move as freely as I want to in poems.
KMD: In addition to your achievements as a writer, you are a celebrated educator, serving as Emeritus Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College. What has teaching opened up in your creative practice?
Theodore Roethke wrote, “A teacher, I carry on my education in public,” and I try to teach in that spirit. I’m someone who is easily bored unless I’m learning something I don’t know, and I try to design my courses so I can share what I’m learning. I know, for example, that I quickly dry up if I’m not reading something engaging and challenging. My writing classes are almost always 60/40 reading/writing. What that sharing opens up for me is the possibility to enter the broader conversations of our historical moment, informed by what younger artists are thinking about and doing. It’s not too much to say it’s a sacred conversation. Roethke also wrote that teaching is the last of the professions to permit love. It’s hard work but it’s the most meaningful hard work I’ve ever done.
KMD: As editor of Solstice, can you speak to the value of literary citizenship and participating in a larger arts community?
RH: I’m with Grace Paley on this one: she sorted people into connectors and disconnectors, a useful idea, I think. Of course I want to be the former. For a number of years I was Chair of PEN New England where we were continually bringing people together with a reading series, live interviews with writers, awards and ceremonies, and community programs. With the novelist Helen Elaine Lee, I designed the PEN New England prison writing program, which is still going, although PEN New England, sadly, is not, PEN America having shut down its regional centers.
As far as editing goes, there’s a difference between curating and gatekeeping, and I will often work with a writer who has submitted something not quite ready, and try to push them a little bit to bring the work to its full potential. If I can honestly say, “I’d love to publish this. I think it’s important, but…” then I say so to the writer, and if they’re willing we take it from there and get to work.
The diverse community that has come into being after fifteen years of Solstice is an antidote to the stratification and siloing going on almost everywhere in American life. As nonfiction editor, I think of the essays we publish there as a conversation among various identities about one kind of liberation or another: political, economic, psychological, aesthetic.
KMD: What are you currently working on? What can readers look forward to?
RH: I am always writing a number of things at once. Some things are stir-fries, others are slow-cookers. I’m writing almost entirely poetry now. I guess that’s where I am in my life: only silence can answer my questions now. Poems poke at the silences, wake them via my need into some kind of language I can work with to better understand what’s trying to come into the world via that process.
There is a third memoir in the works, but it’s been sleeping for a good while. It may or may not ever get finished. I don’t feel compelled to finish it. What I have so far isn’t yet telling me where I need to take it. I have to trust that day will come. I can’t bully it. And if it doesn’t it doesn’t.
Just yesterday Eileen Cleary slotted my New & Selected Poems into Lily’s publishing schedule for March 2026. That will be enjoyable work, putting that together.
Thanks for these interesting questions, Kristina! Best of luck with your own work, and thanks for all you do for Tupelo and for our larger literary tribe.