PODULARITY

 

 Michael Hofmann: Selected Poems [29:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“It’s almost as though my poetry is an extended passport application… It’s an attempt to be naturalized. I think I’ve failed to be naturalized and therefore there is this German residue about things. It’s something I feel haunted by…”

I’m delighted that the first poet to appear on Podularity is Michael Hofmann. I’ve known Michael for several years and greatly admire his work as a translator, but his poetry has been a comparatively recent - and very pleasurable - discovery for me.

George Szirtes, reviewing Michael’s Selected Poems in the Guardian recently, said of his work:

A Michael Hofmann poem is now a rare, strange, much valued item. Strange because, at first glance, many of the poems seem no more than frayed notes concerning a mood between depression and despair; but then something in that fraying catches at you, either some odd shift in register, or maybe just a sense that as your eyes are blithely passing over the words suddenly a hole has opened up beneath them and you are falling through the language, into a world of cries.’

In the programme we talk about Michael’s relationship with the German and English languages and how he moves between the two; his relationship with his late father, the German novelist, Gert Hofmann, which forms the explicit or implicit subject matter of much of his poetry:

‘these two men meet up to divide the world between them and this is how it goes: my father gets prose in German and I get poetry in English, and we each go away feeling happy’

and his fondness for depicting interiors, which in his poetry appear as:

‘one’s exoskeleton, the place where one hangs one’s trophies or displays one’s wounds’.

In the course of the podcast he also reads several pieces from his recently published Selected Poems.