From the Homeless to Prisons and Beyond: Q&A with Bonnie Naradzay

“What I constantly wrestle with is how to write these poems.”

We recently spoke with poet Bonnie Naradzay about her new poetry collection from Slant, Invited to the Feast.

Several of the poems in Invited to the Feast offer a glimpse into your poetry sessions with the homeless in downtown D.C. How did these experiences influence your work?

I’ve been leading these sessions for years; consequently, I am motivated to search for poems by others that would lead to worthwhile conversations. Sometimes I find myself writing about these poetry session experiences—it’s a way to fix them in my memory. It’s also a time when I find myself more intensely alive, as I’m engaged with others in a group effort, a common endeavor. There’s a program called the Touchstones Discussion Project started by Howard Zeiderman, a long-time teacher at St. John’s College in Annapolis; it’s all about working with groups, including inmates in Jessup Prison, in Maryland, towards achieving worthwhile conversations about selected texts. I’ve participated in some of those training sessions.

Your poetry is a striking mix of erudite and down-to-earth—mixing classical fragments and forms with concrete, modern imagery. Could you tell us more about your educational background?

I earned an MA in English at Harvard in the late 1960’s; while there, I took a course taught by Robert Lowell. Then I went into the Peace Corps in South India; much else happened in my life; then in 2008 I earned an MFA in poetry from a University of Southern Maine low residency MFA program. I was able to complete it when my children were in college while I worked full time at the U.S. Dept. of Labor. In 2017, after retiring, I earned an MA from the St. John’s College (Annapolis) Graduate Institute. In my final semester (of four), I decided to create a journal for the Graduate Institute, which I named Colloquy. I have continued taking graduate courses (preceptorials) there. More recently I have taught semester-long sessions online on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and other subjects, including Gilgamesh and Don Quixote, through the Catherine Project, a volunteer project started by graduates of St. John’s College and its Graduate Institute.

Who are your greatest poetic influences?

Early on, I recall reading a lot of Robert Lowell’s poems, including his poem “For the Union Dead.” More recently, in addition to a large array of many other poets’ works, I’ve been paying attention to the work of Eastern European poets, including Miklos Radnoti, Milosz, and Adam Zagajewski. This is not definitive, though.

Invited to the Feast is your debut poetry collection at age 80. You also lead poetry sessions at Ingleside Retirement Community in Washington, D.C.—leading not only to a published anthology, but also to debut volumes by members of the community who were 99 and 101. What are your reflections on publishing your first collection later in life?

I had a manuscript from the time I graduated from the MFA program in 2008. I submitted it to various competitions while continuing to write new poems over the years and to switch out older poems. The poems cover so many areas and didn’t quite take on the shape of what you’d consider a typical manuscript these days, which tends to coalesce around a single theme. Meanwhile I was working full time and pursuing other projects, so I wasn’t single-minded about getting the manuscript published. I am so happy with Slant and with Greg Wolfe. I admire so many of the authors he’s published, especially Robert Cording, whom I studied with at a Glen West session one summer in Santa Fe!

With all the motifs at your fingertips in this collection—classical literature, homelessness, grief, travels across the world—how did you settle on Invited to the Feast as the title for your literary debut?

The title came from the final poem, responding to an Aurelius meditation; when I wrote it, I was thinking of the Caravaggio painting The Calling of St. Matthew. Afterwards Matthew invited Jesus to a feast at a friend’s house. (It’s hard not to think of The Last Supper as a feast as well.) With so many motifs in this collection, you’ve asked a good question: why this title? The other two Aurelius meditations, which end the first two sections, are very different in mood and tone. I think that I wanted to end in an uplifting way.

“Paradise in the Day Shelter” describes a group of people at a day shelter being struck by the poem “A Portable Paradise,” by Roger Robinson. Why did you choose this poem to open the collection?

I love this poem because of the responses from participants that day, which I remembered and jotted down right after our session. In a way, our group, which meets after breakfast at Miriam’s Kitchen, which serves up to 250 meals to the homeless every morning (in the basement of a Presbyterian church downtown in Washington, DC) formed a “beloved community” that morning. It was all a combination of Roger Robinson’s wonderful poem about paradise and of who happened to participate that morning and their marvelous responses to the poem. Each time I read it I can recreate that time in my mind. To me, it’s a joyous poem that fits the theme of being together and “feasting” in each other’s company. It also fits as the initial poem in the first section because I tried to start each of the three sections with poems about sessions with the homeless people—and to end each section with a poem on a Marcus Aurelius meditation. The orderliness of the beginnings and endings of the three sections gave me room to include poems with different motifs within them.

A few of the poems in this collection, like “Shurbaji’s Shirt,” take their inspiration from current events or news articles. How did you get started writing this kind of poetry? What is the role of poetry in commenting on the happenings of our own day?

Here’s a poem by Milosz and a brief reflection on the role of poetry for me:

You Who Wronged

You who wronged a simple man

Bursting into laughter at the crime,

And kept a pack of fools around you

To mix good and evil, to blur the line,

Though everyone bowed down before you,

Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way,

Striking gold medals in your honor,

Glad to have survived another day,

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.

You can kill one, but another is born.

The words are written down, the deed, the date.

And you’d have done better with a winter dawn,

A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.

Milosz wrote this poem in 1950, a time of political turmoil for him, since he soon defected from Poland after living through the Nazi destruction of Warsaw and then the occupation of Poland by armed forces of the Soviet Union. This poem, and Milosz, hold tyranny accountable.

About Milosz’s work, Alfred Kazin wrote that Western poetry tends to be “‘alienated’ poetry, full of introspective anxiety.” But because of the dictatorial nature of their governments, poets in the East tend to write of the larger problems of their society. “A peculiar fusion of the individual and the historical took place,” Milosz wrote in The Witness of Poetry, “which means that events burdening a whole community are perceived by a poet as touching him in a most personal manner. Then poetry is no longer alienated.”

Similarly, I myself feel it’s the poet’s job to write of the larger problems in our society. Otherwise I might feel as if I must put on blinders to write, the way a horse is made to wear blinders to work. What I constantly wrestle with is how to write these poems. In “Shurbaji’s Shirt,” I used information from news articles and wrote the poem in the “first person” because it seemed the best way to convey, with immediacy, the heartbreaking account of how the names were smuggled out of the Syrian prison.