Ellen Bass Visits the New Yorker Poetry Podcast

For the New Yorker's poetry podcast, hosted by Kevin Young, Academy of American Poets Chancellor, poet, and educator Ellen Bass speaks about one of her favorite poems from the magazine's archive, "Quahogs," by Frank X. Gaspar, then reads from her own poem, "Because." Kevin Young begins, "So the poem you decide to read for us is 'Quahogs,' by Frank X. Gaspar. Can you tell us why this particular poem caught your attention as you were looking through the archives?" Picking up there: 

Ellen Bass: I love this poem for many reasons. One of them is it’s so primal. It’s so visceral. It brings us into one of the most basic human experiences. And I feel like I’m having that experience when I read the poem. And I should say, just in case people aren’t familiar, the title is “Quahogs.” And quahogs, if you don’t know, are large clams.

Kevin Young: Excellent. Let’s hear the poem. This is Ellen Bass’s reading “Quahogs” by Frank X. Gaspar.

[“Quahogs”]

Kevin Young: So tell me more about this wonderful poem. I was thinking when you were reading it, you know, it’s worthy of note that you really capture, I think, the rolling quality. I mean, it feels like one big breath, but there’s something also for me about poetry in that it’s both a poem of discovery, but also a poem about poetry in some way, about the making of poetry, an ars poetica.

Ellen Bass: I’m so glad that you said that, because the more I was reading this poem and thinking about talking here, that’s exactly on my notes. What I wrote down, “ars poetica.” It does feel exactly like that process of writing a poem, of searching, of describing and describing until you come to something that you didn’t know you were going to come to. Exactly like that. And I love the music of the poem and the sound. And Frank Gaspar is a master of sound and really works through sound and moves the poem forward through sound. And that wonderful repetition, of course, of “it was for,” which is such a strange and wonderful way to start this poem.

Kevin Young: Right. Right.

Ellen Bass: You know, “It was for the wind as much as anything.” What, where? You know, we’re immediately, immediately in the experience and the way that that repetition just drives the poem forward and has that force of moving through the music of the poem I love so much. And I love how primal this poem is. This is something people have been doing for, you know, a thousand years. More. I don’t know how long.

Kevin Young: Millennia!

Ellen Bass: Millennia. Exactly. And the more I read the poem, the more I think about how it’s a poem without judgment. That there is adversity here and there. They’re cold and they’re hungry. And there’s a we in the poem. I’ll just stop. He’s not doing it alone.

Continue reading, or listen to their complete conversation, at the New Yorker.