Book Review | ‘Talking All Night: The New York Poets – Interviews, Photographs, Letters’ by Mark Hillringhouse

In an interview with Mark Hillringhouse, poet Anne Waldman responds to a question about the literary scene with a quote that could apply to Hillringhouse’s entire new book, Talking All Night: The New York Poets – Interviews, Photographs, Letters. Waldman says, “the more poets you talk to, I think you’ll find it’s a much more open situation. Actually, a lot of overlapping amongst the so-called schools.”

Openness was, indeed, what I found as I read through the 16 interviews in Talking All Night: a great rush of ideas and opinions, hilarity and tragedy, anecdotes and antidotes, hobby horses and bête noir, with all of the conversations spurred on by Hillringhouse’s enthusiasm and his lively and intelligent questions.

The project began in earnest when Hillringhouse was a young aficionado reading books by the New York School poets while he worked as a clerk at Brentano’s bookstore in the early 1980s. As he attended poetry readings and workshops and sat in on poets’ classes, he more or less “created [his] own MFA.” A significant part of his informal graduate degree was interviewing the poets he admired, and what a stellar group they are. Among the luminaries in Talking All Night are John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Bernadette Mayer, James Schuyler, and Waldman.

Hillringhouse has also included several poets not normally associated with the New York School. W.S. Merwin, for instance, whom Hillringhouse interviewed at the suggestion of John Ashbery, is in the book not because Merwin is part of the New York School but because “New York was important to Merwin, and he lived in the city and taught at different colleges in the city, and gave poetry readings uptown and downtown.” And then there’s the formalist Howard Moss, included, reasonably enough, because “he was, in his position as poetry editor of The New Yorker for nearly 40 years, at the very epicenter of the New York literary world.”

Talking All Night is a wonderful book both for paging through, and for taking a deep dive into the work of a favorite poet. Each interview begins with an introduction that not only provides some of the highlights of the poet’s publications but also describes the typically book-lined apartments in which they live. And it is touching to see how much of a fan Hillringhouse is of the people he interviews. Not only does he know their work cold, but he nearly always brings copies of their books for them to sign.

Granted, the wide-ranging interviews occasionally go off in the weeds, as conversations inevitably will, but Hillringhouse is quite good at steering his subjects back on track, and he has a gift for eliciting more than casual profundities during the course of an exchange. Take, as just one example, this quote from the end of his interview with Gerald Stern: “Poets are witnesses, living proofs of the uniqueness of the individual soul, of the unforgivable sadness of its perishing, or its immortality. Their poems cry out against imprisonment. The more living the poet, the more unbearable the death; the greater the poem, the more it ransoms.”

Finally, it would be remiss not to point out that Mark Hillringhouse is also a superb photographer, and each interview is graced with a black and white portrait that captures at least some of the poet’s essence. There is suave Paul Violi shooting pool in a pool hall, and grumpy James Schuyler, he of the enormous eyebrows, frowning in his room in the Chelsea Hotel. Movie star-ready W.S. Merwin looks out from the roof of his Waverly Place apartment, and Barbara Guest, in profile in her West 4th Street apartment, looks as though she is gazing into the light of an oncoming poem.

Yes, Talking All Night is a significant literary historical document, but it’s also a fun read and, more importantly, a sympathetic window into the lives of the sort of creative rebels our country so desperately needs these days.

This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.