Music and Mystery

Jill Bialosky interviews David St. John about his new book of poems, “Prayer for My Daughter.”

By Jill BialoskyMarch 14, 2025

• Poetry

DAVID ST. JOHN is renowned for poems of astonishing beauty, extraordinary depth, and passionate candor. A friend once described him as a magician in his astonishing ability to turn imagination into truth. This insight has stayed with me through the years as I have read and marveled over his poems. I’ve been reading St. John’s sly, magical, always moving and entrancing poems since his first astonishing collection, Hush, was published in 1976, when I first began reading contemporary poets as an English major at Ohio University. “Iris” begins, “There is a train inside this iris: // You think I’m crazy, & like to say boyish / & outrageous things. No, there is // A train inside this iris.” Suddenly, we are gripped, dazzled by the immediacy of voice and the slippery spinning of reality into beauty; we will go anywhere this poet takes us in poems that travel into the darkest and most truthful parts of being human.

Poem after poem in his latest collection, Prayer for My Daughter (2024), are tours de force of artful wizardry and seductive persuasion, as the poet looks back on his life with profound insight and startling illumination. How does a poet with an entire body of work behind him find the sustenance and courage to continue to reinvent and surprise with language so lithe it glides across the page as if on skates on a frozen lake? Let’s find out. It’s a great honor to converse with David St. John about his latest work.

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JILL BIALOSKY: Your book comes with a brilliant citation from Robert Hass, describing your verse:

It is […] full, almost past ripeness, of a floating, sometimes painful, sometimes wistful, intense, dark and silvery eroticism that feels as if it comes out of some cross between late nineteenth-century symbolist lushness—vague and specific at once—and the kind of ’60s and ’70s European film that talked about eroticism with a wistfulness so intense that it seemed experience and the melancholy recollection of experience were the same thing.

Wow! As I read the poems in this volume, I keep going back to his words “silvery eroticism.” It makes me wonder if that is what drives poetry—your poetry—and if you could comment on this.

DAVID ST. JOHN: It’s a passage from his review of my 1994 book Study for the World’s Body, where Bob Hass goes on to mention the influence of filmmakers on my poems and the fact that the character of the eroticism he’s describing is also a feature in their work. “Silvery” is a wonderful adjective as it captures the influence of the Russian Silver Age poets I love. I’m not sure if eroticism drives all poetry, but it has always felt to me like a current running though my own.

Will you tell me why you chose the beautiful epigraph by Yeats, “Once more the storm is howling,” for this particular book? I read it as an epigraph that could be used for many books of poetry because, at least for me as a poet, my poems tend to come from the aftermath of a howling storm in the mind that needs articulation through poetry. But I’d love to know your reasoning.

That phrase begins the opening line of Yeats’s own poem entitled, “A Prayer for My Daughter,” which my poem in some ways echoes. Yeats wrote his poem when his daughter, Anne, was only two days old, at the end of February 1919.

The timing here is important. The Irish War of Independence had begun in earnest in January 1919, just a month before Anne was born. Yeats knew that it would be a bloody civil war. He had no illusions about the cost of Irish independence. Yeats was living in his tower at Thoor Ballylee when he wrote “A Prayer for My Daughter.” On the one hand, he was remarking on an actual storm howling around the upper floors of the tower, where he and newborn Anne were, but of course he was also referring to the storm of political turmoil. This was also the time of Spanish influenza. Yeats’s wife, Georgie, had become ill with Spanish flu and pneumonia in the last months of 1918. Both she and Anne had been in danger of dying.

As I was writing the poems of this book—which emerged as a collection of elegies for friends and meditations on death and beauty, those most traditional of poetic anxieties—it seemed to me that my country also had been moving toward civil war.

The title poem is a beautiful articulation of a father’s love for his daughter, a poem that asks for forgiveness as well as granting a daughter her own selfhood. I hear that especially in these lines:

Where she’d grown singular & strong
In the solace of herself
While building her own Arcadia
As the prayer I might once have hoped
To send into the storm became
This belated song […]

It’s as if roles had somehow been reversed, and the speaker’s daughter had more prescient knowledge at one time in their lives than her father.

Yes, that feels to me the real lesson of the poem, as the speaker recognizes more and more the independence and wisdom of his daughter, as well as her profound influence upon him and his own life.

Why did you choose this particular poem as the title for your book? Did this poem come first? Do you see the poem as a prayer for all of us?

The book came first. When the poem “Prayer For My Daughter” appeared in The New Yorker, the response from other poets—and strangers—was unlike anything in my experience. A friend persuaded me that it had to be the title poem. I do feel it’s a kind of prayer for us all.

I’m struck by the beauty and clarity of language, along with the craft and attention of line in each poem in your book. Contemporary poetry seems to shift toward poems that articulate a story or experience as if that were enough, without enough attention to form and craft. Do you agree with this statement? How does a poem begin for you? How does it find its form?

Well, I always prefer nuance over argument in poetry. For me, mystery and music come first. Poems persuade by their music, not by their argument. A poem, for me, often begins with a phrase, a piece of verbal music. I like to return to open song forms that can be meditative and speculative, or to familiar song forms, like the sonnets running through some of my books. Some readers probably think of me as a late-style California singer-songwriter, an old-school Romantic lyric poet with angular symbolist impulses, and I guess I am somebody who—I imagine, anyway—performs the music inside of the poem instead of alongside the words.

The second section of your book is called “Elegies.” While the elegies feel personal—for example, the elegy for Mz Rox Steady and the past lover in “Your Face” and, in “Going Places,” perhaps the speaker’s younger self—this section seems, too, to be an elegy for a lost time, a lost place, a lost decade. I think of the poem “These Days,” for instance, where you echo the Jackson Browne song. Is it longing for the past, or a certain reckless living, that drives the poems in this section?

The elegies are addressed to and reflect real individuals. Several are set in specific times of my personal past. The poem for my friend Ralph Angel, a remarkable poet, wants to echo his love of Lorca. I wish Ralph’s translations of Lorca were better-known. The poem “These Days,” the title of which is taken from the amazing Jackson Browne song—written when he was 16—is dedicated to another friend, Liam Rector. The final poem in that section is in many ways stylistically removed from the others, in part because it’s my version of a famously “untranslatable” sonnet by Mallarmé, sometimes referred to as “ptyx.” I was hoping to use the deep friendship between Mallarmé and his friend, the painter Édouard Manet, as a mirror of my friendship with Larry Levis, in my own sketch of and elegy for Larry. In the “Elegy” section of the book, as you’ve noted, these poems sometimes reflect elements of a “certain reckless living.”

I love what you say about how you follow the music inside the poem when speaking about your process. I hear the music of mourning in the elegies of part two. I’m struck, too, by how welcoming the voice is in this section. It’s as if we’re hanging out with the speaker on M Street in “Going Places,” and watching the man being hit hard in “These Days,” feeling the terror of the punch and the agony of the speaker as witness. Is there a method you employ in your poems to create intimacy with the reader?

That’s wonderful. It makes me so happy to hear you say that. I wanted the poems in this section to be delivered with the colloquial ease of a speaker and subjects who have been friends, in the hope that this might also feel inclusive to the reader. I wanted a very intimate sense in these elegies that could feel, I hoped, companionable to the reader. This might seem odd, given the moments of severe loss and even violence, but it’s exactly that intimacy you describe that I’d hoped to make a current in these poems.

I’ve read “The Empty School House” again and again. It’s a haunting, incandescent poem. I keep coming back to those last lines:

Fragments of the whole
broken
across the surface of our world
ironed flat by curved conventions
& the mapmaker of these shifting memories we all carry wishing
for some rare defiance for the revision
of every fierce geology still wishing
only to be whole truly whole; whole truly & truly as before.

The empty schoolhouse becomes all of our schoolhouses: the blackboard, moldering books on the desk, the map pulled down. And I love the wish the poem makes to the reader at the end—to “wish us whole.” You reference “Bolinas Snapshot, 1969” underneath the poem’s title. I’m curious if this is a snapshot you took and whether it inspired the poem.

I’m curious how many readers might have had, in their own childhoods, the experience or memory of one of those extraordinary old canvas maps. They are thought of as ancient now, but they seemed to have been in every classroom of elementary schools for years. This is an elegy for one of my uncles, Dick Hassell, who taught for many years in the one-room schoolhouse in Bolinas, California. My uncle was amazing. As a college student one summer, he partied with Leonard Bernstein in New Mexico; then, as a young man, he joined the merchant marine, after which he took a job helping to crew and maintain Humphrey Bogart’s boat, Santana. In my 2004 book The Face, one of the poems relates a story about Bogart that Dick had shared with me. Dick Hassell was an absolute polymath, knowing the sciences as well as music and literature, and he began teaching in Bolinas, I believe, just after he worked as a bartender at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, and before meeting, and marrying, my aunt, who was a painter living in Marin and Sausalito. After Dick died, I found in one of my files a snapshot of the school and his handwritten description of his classroom. Bolinas was also the famed home of many wonderful poets in the early 1970s. I have, in my book The Last Troubadour (2017), a poem that’s noted as “Bolinas Snapshot, 1972.”

I keep returning as well to the line in the poem that mentions “and nights of seven stretched bodies,” until it clicked that these bodies were continents on the map and not actual bodies. It’s remarkable how the map becomes both the map of the world and the map of our lives. How a poem manifests transformation is a mystery. Were you aware in writing the poem of its transformative powers or did it occur unwillingly?

I wondered if I could create a kind of healing in the poem—worldly, personal. I worked to get right that moment when the reader realizes the world is made whole when bodies come together, on the map and in our lives. The nature of that kind of wholeness seems transformative to me.

Your poem “Of Beauty” is an ars poetica. In the poem, you reference mystery and storytelling “without a certain objective / reality, and the beauty of image & flair for the magical,” among other signposts. Was this intentional? I also hear echoes of Keats’s “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” especially in the last lines of the poem. Was this intentional? Is “Of Beauty” in conversation with Keats’s poem?

Very much. Keats’s fingerprints are all over that poem, but I hope it feels, too, like my own reckoning with a personal past.

In part three of Prayer for My Daughter, called “Requiem,” all six poems are made without punctuation. I read them as one long litany and marveled at the way these poems all articulate the making of art, whether through music, song, sculpture, or poetry, along with, in some instances, the lives of their makers. A “requiem” can be a token of remembrance as well as a musical composition for a mass, and a mass for the souls of the dead. Why did you call this section “Requiem”? Did you mean for the poems in this section to speak to each other? What connections are you making between art and the life of its maker?

The six poems in the “Requiem” section are linked by style and, at times, their slightly breathless anxieties. I think of them as nervous meditations, meant to echo those fears of erasure and mortality. Except for the first of these poems, which is dedicated to my longtime friends Howard Norman and Jane Shore, these poems, too, are elegies. The poems in “Requiem” reflect friends living in a capacious but spiritually and artistically fraught world. These are poems of private loss but with, perhaps, a different public resonance. I think of these poems as a more formal requiem, beyond the intimate losses of the “Elegy” section.

I referred to Robert Hass’s citation earlier in this interview and want to return to it about part four of “The Sketchbook.” Hass writes that your poems evoke a fusion of symbolist poetry with European art films of the 1960s and ’70s. As he put it: “Mallarmé and Eric Rohmer, perhaps. Or Rilke and Michelangelo Antonioni.” The “Sketchbook” poems—four of them—tell a story of a failed love affair between two young artists, a dream sequence that builds with the intensity and power of a film. Every word is perfection. It’s a marvel of craft and vision, as the series captures the sorrow of lost love distilled through memory. Do you see this series as being in conversation with filmmaking or storytelling? I’d love to know what inspired the series.

I first had the idea for this four-part poem when I was living in Rome in the 1980s. I’d tried many, many times over the years to write it and always failed. I’d had a decent draft of the first section for some time, but it was only about five years ago that I felt able to do something stylistically that was allowing me to make the kinds of shifts and transitions I’d been looking for. It’s absolutely a conversation with filmmaking and about art. Those two lovers/artists join a somewhat older filmmaker in making films. I’d hoped to write a long poem that a reader experienced as being enacted in a truly cinematic way, with that fluidity of film and the simultaneity of scenes across shifting temporal landscapes. Sorry, that sounds so pretentious. I’m just hopeful the reader moves through this story of the three figures with some pleasure. Romances often involve three, not only two, figures. I was curious to see how the story of these braided lives played out across the years. I love the films Jules and Jim (1962) and Going Places (1974), both with three-cornered relationships. I was also hoping this poem would allow a passage through time that might feel slightly unresolved and indeterminate, a little more Antonioni, in its mystery.

I’d like to end with these lovely lines from “VII Prayer for Morning”:

we’ve been told
How unwise to think of touching any
Constellation of regrets or embracing the familiar lies
Lacing our myths across the dome of the sky
Even this sad science of night at times denies how late
in our lives love took us by surprise.

Prayer for My Daughter journeys from regret toward love and reconciliation as the poems recount or create the myths of one’s life. Do you see poetry as a form of mythmaking?

There are so many powerful modes of storytelling, of course, and myths give us particular frames and focused lenses through which to consider those oscillations, disparities, and triumphs of a life. I believe that poems help us to create and better understand the stories of our lives, yet the poems I love most—by others and my own—remain earthbound and deeply human even while their speakers are stealing glances at the myth-lit stars.

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David St. John is the author of 12 collections of poetry, as well as a prose volume, Where the Angels Come Toward Us (1995). He is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at USC.

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Featured image: Photo of David St. John by Stephanie Diani.