In July 2010, Karl Kirchwey (1995 Fellow) began his three-year term as Andrew Heiskell Arts Director for the School of Fine Arts at the American Academy in Rome. In an email conversation, Pamela Hovland (2006 Fellow) talked with Kirchwey about his return to the Academy, the influence his Fellowship year had on his work, his current reading list, and what he does when he cannot sleep at 3:00 AM in Rome.
It has been just over six months since you arrived in Rome to begin your three-year appointment as the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director. What was the biggest adjustment you (and your family) had to make?
We lived in New York City for many years, on the Upper West Side, but seven years ago moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia, where we now own a house with a garden. One adjustment, therefore, was to living in a city again (though the garden behind our Chiaraviglio ground floor apartment has a citrus orchard in it, which our garden in Wayne, Pennsylvania certainly doesn't have, and extends down to the Acqua Paola, while our garden in Wayne commands a view of a monstrous AT&T relay tower, even if, in certain lights, it looks like one of those lonely brick towers in De Chirico). A further adjustment, of course, is to living life at least partly in Italian. The Italians are extremely appreciative of any effort made to speak their beautiful and intricate language, but this is misleading: it is easy to speak Italian badly and quite hard, I think, to speak it well. It is a constant temptation to settle into the mostly Anglophone environment of the AAR, too. So learning to speak better Italian has been a challenge for me (and for my wife), even though I have studied French and Spanish and German—and even Italian—at different times in my life.
Your Rome Prize Fellowship year was during the mid-nineties. Who was here during that year that influenced you or that changed your work in some meaningful way? Did you collaborate with any of the Fellows?
The archaeologist Mac Bell was the Professor in Charge the year I was here as a Fellow in 1994–95. The Andrew Heiskell Arts Director position had not been created yet, and Mac did an amazing job of navigating among the scholars and the artists, powered in this by his own genuine interest in what everyone, including the artists, was doing. The work in my first two books of poems had been heavily influenced by Greece and Rome, and the archaeological walks and trips organized by Mac—we got as far afield as Naples, Sicily, and Tunisia—were surely as important to me as any of the work I got done in my study that year: indeed, the walks and trips inspired a great deal of the work in my third, "Roman" book, The Engrafted Word.
It seems to me that "collaboration" can be defined very broadly in a community, like the AAR, that so encourages communications among the scholarly disciplines and between scholarship and the fine arts. I remember conversations with classicist Tony Corbeill about the true nature of Augustus; with the landscape architect Gary Hilderbrand about buildings; with the artist Judith Shea, about the possibility of some work combining sculpture and text; and much else besides. But perhaps my most long-lasting "collaboration" was with Euripides, because it was in the spring of my Fellowship year that I conceived the idea of writing a verse drama in which the outlines of his play Alcestis (about the wife who dies in her husband’s place) would be recombined with the history of my parents’ marriage, and indeed with that of their generation, which was the generation of WWII. This verse drama, Airdales & Cipher, proved to be the work of ten years and an act of hubris, given my relative ignorance about playwriting.
What are the biggest changes in the life of a Fellow compared to the time you were in Rome?
Apart from the advent of the internet and web-based research and creation—which I think have tended to encourage a broadening of interdisciplinary interests—I think the main change has been in the environment provided to Fellows by AAR. I would say that, fifteen years ago, AAR was more focused on its identity as a closed community for scholarly and artistic work, with public programs as a kind of afterthought. I also think that in recent years, reflecting the broadening of academic and creative interests and specialties of our Fellows, the Walks program has become more diversified, less purely archaeological: though as I say, given my interests, the archaeology suited me just fine, during my own Fellowship year.
In addition, I think AAR has become a much more hospitable place for families with small children than it was fifteen years ago. My book The Engrafted Word was actually the result of two powerful experiences. One was Rome, but the other was parenthood. My wife Tamzen Flanders and I spent the fellowship year in Rome in the company of our then two-year-old son Tobias, and of course I was learning from him, too, all the time, and trying to understand what it meant to be a parent. My wife and I are living in Rome now with our fourteen-year-old daughter Elinor, who was not born at the time of my fellowship year, but who is now expert in the care of AAR’s younger generation!
What advice do you find you offer most to the Fellows who are there now?
I would say the single conundrum facing every Rome Prize Fellow—a conundrum embodied in AAR’s current mission, the desire to provide both world-class cultural programs engaging with the cultural life of Rome and tranquility of a closed community, and by the Janus heads facing in two directions—is how to balance the inwardness and solitude required for artistic creation with the constant, even insistent invitation to engagement with the outside world offered by Rome and by Italy. In my experience, no two Fellows find the same balance, in responding to life at AAR, but all must find some kind of balance. Only Polonius was foolish enough to offer advice—but to suggest to Fellows that they give themselves some room to experiment with their lives here, or with the balance of work and life, is sometimes useful.
I believe you have a translation of Paul Verlaine’s book of poems due out soon. Are there other projects you are working on while at the Academy? And if so, how do you find time for that work?
For most of my life I have been engaged in jobs that allow no officially-sanctioned time for my own work as a poet. The Andrew Heiskell Arts Director position at AAR is no different. I try to write on weekends, when I can, and when my eyes pop open at 3:00 AM and I feel clear-headed. The middle of the night is of course a wonderful time for writing. I completed a sixth book of poems and the Verlaine translation before arriving in Rome. There was a strangeness and an emotional pressure to my return to Rome last July, after so many years, and in the company of Tobias, who is now eighteen. This resulted in a number of new poems, shortly after my arrival, that are now appearing in journals. I have also been working for a number of years on a long poem, Mutabor, which involves among other things the history of flight, photography, cinematography, organ-building, the architectural visions of Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc, and the Alpine landscapes of French Switzerland. A good-sized chunk of this long poem recently appeared in the magazine Little Star, whose editor, Ann Kjellberg, is both visionary and brave.
What are you reading while in Rome? And why?
When I first arrived last July, I was catching up, because of not having thought about Italy for a number of years, and so was looking at Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah and Tobias Jones’s The Dark Heart of Italy and Leonard Barkan’s Satyr Square as well as classics like Eleanor Clark’s Rome and a Villa. Slightly further afield there were Jonathan Harr’s The Lost Painting (researched and/or written at AAR), David Mayernik’s Timeless Cities, and R. J. B. Bosworth’s Mussolini’s Italy. Of course I am trying to read in Italian, and very much enjoyed the recent Farrar, Straus and Giroux facing-page translation of Valerio Magrelli’s Selected Poems. My wife and daughter and I are watching a lot of Italian movies, too, which helps with the language.
Have you discovered any memorable places in Rome you did not know about fifteen years ago?
During his time with me in Rome last July, Tobias was invited to join an archaeological dig supervised by Joanne Spurza at a third century CE bath complex in a remote corner of Ostia Antica. The site was in view of a loop of the Tiber River, so that the white superstructures of cabin cruisers seemed to loom over the ancient columns and mosaics. I remember Tobias showing me a cross-section of the hillside comprised entirely of silt, accumulated over the centuries during the regular flooding of the Tiber. A poem about Ostia Antica will be forthcoming in the New Republic before long.
To this place I might add ... the tiny church of San Benedetto in Piscinula (in Trastevere), with its genuine Cosmati pavement; and the complex of Santi Quattro Coronati, with its fresco cycle about Constantine and Saint Sylvester, and the extraordinary tranquilty of its cloister garden. Nor should I omit the Villa Aurora, erstwhile home of AAR, which, from its Priapic statue outside (which some have attributed to Michelangelo) to the infernal trompe l’oeil splendor of its Caravaggio ceiling fresco inside, is a palace of wonders, shared with the AAR thanks to the research collaboration between Andrew W. Mellon Professor-in-Charge Corey Brennan and the Principessa Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi.
Grazie mille Karl.
Karl Kirchwey is the author of six books of poems, including The Happiness of This World: Poetry and Prose (2007) and, forthcoming in April of 2011, Mount Lebanon (Marian Wood Books/Putnam’s). His translation of Paul Verlaine’s first book, Poems Under Saturn (Princeton University Press) is also forthcoming in April. His poems and translations have appeared in most of the major literary magazines in the United States, and his essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of grants from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations and from the NEA, he was director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y from 1987 to 2000. He is professor of the arts and director of the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College.
To read the announcement of Kirchwey’s appointment as Andrew Heiskell Arts Director, click here.