David Rivard, Contributor Spotlight

Contributor Spotlight  Growing up in Fall River, Massachusetts, David Rivard had been forced to copy patriotic verse on the blackboard during detention, and until he was well into college, he continued to regard poetry as a punitive activity. Certainly he never imagined that he himself would become a poet -- one whose books have racked up some of the most prestigious awards in the field. Rivard's first collection of poems,
Torque, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the Pitt Poetry Series in 1988. His second book,
Wise Poison, published last year by Graywolf Press, won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. The Academy, besides giving Rivard a cash prize of $5,000, bought over six thousand hardcover copies of the book to distribute to its members, which made
Wise Poison, in relative terms, a bestseller.

How did a blue-collar kid from a New England mill town become such a respected poet? Rivard is perplexed about that himself at times. Born in 1953, he was raised among civil servants and dressmakers. His great-grandfather was the first Portuguese policeman in Fall River. His grandfather was also a cop, and his father was a fireman. His French-Canadian grandmother worked as a seamstress, as did most of the women in the neighborhood. The entire family lived in a triple-decker-grandparents on the third floor, great-uncle and great-aunt on the first, with Rivard and his parents and his brother and two sisters sandwiched in between.

As the oldest, Rivard was expected to go to college -- the first in the family to attend -- and then become a professional of some sort, a lawyer, an engineer, a doctor, any occupation that would represent a move up in class. For a while, Rivard cooperated. He had liked building models as a child and thought of becoming an architect. But in high school, he discovered an unfortunate fact. He stunk at math. He settled on anthropology, and at nearby Southeastern Massachusetts University, he showed enough promise to earn a full scholarship to graduate school at Princeton.

Along the way, though, a friend introduced Rivard to a different kind of poetry -- not the bland, stultifying compositions he remembered from Catholic boys' school, but something new, rebellious. He read books by the Beats, Gary Snyder, Wallace Stevens, and W. S. Merwin, and when he went to hear the latter at a reading, he became a true believer. "I fell in love with language," he says, "this idea of making a performance with just words." He began taking some poetry workshops, notably with Theodore Weiss at Princeton, and he realized immediately that he enjoyed writing. "For the same reason I liked making models as a kid, I liked making something out of nothing, something that had a shape, with a kind of architecture of language that informed and created that shape." This newfound distraction did not go unnoticed by his faculty advisor at Princeton, who finally sat Rivard down for a talk. He told him he had to choose between anthropology and poetry. "If you can't," the advisor said, referring to Rivard's
full scholarship, "someone else wants your money."

"It was a clarifying moment," Rivard recalls. "It made me very conscious about whether I wanted to be a writer or not, and that I would be taking a risk and sacrificing a lot in order to do that, so

I should take it seriously." He dropped out of Princeton, stunning his parents and worrying them to no end. "My dad's response was classic. He said, 'Well, you could take the fire exam. You could set up a table there in the firehouse and write your poetry. No one's going to bother you.' "

Rivard lived and wrote in Boston for a couple of years, supporting himself with editorial work for bilingual educational projects, then enrolled in the M.F.A. program at the University of Arizona in 1979. He studied with Jon Anderson, Steve Orlen, and Tess Gallagher, and among his classmates were Li-Young Lee, Tony Hoagland, David Wojahn, Ai, and Michael Collier. At first, Rivard wrote surreal, abstract poems, but his early efforts, he is the first to admit, were largely confused and unsuccessful. It wasn't until he discovered Philip Levine's work that he found a niche and began addressing life in Fall River. "I started thinking, Oh, this is a landscape that's familiar to me, this kind of working-class, industrial mill town, and here's a way to approach it. My sensibilities turned out to be different than Levine's, but he and Richard Hugo and James Wright gave me a way to write about the world

I came from."

A decade later, those poems about Fall River would comprise most of
Torque, as well as some of
Wise Poison. The new book, however, ranges farther afield, both geographically and stylistically, incorporating a more complex, ironic narrative that is funny, sly, at times angry, and occasionally self-recriminative. A poem like "Self-Portrait," for example, presents a series of brilliant associations, from a dead hornet on a windowsill, to a Hungarian engineer who bootlegs R&B records on old x-ray sheets, "so a diamond-tipped stylus could glide / the bluesy decrescendos, the riffs / and splintered eighth notes, of jawbone & hip socket," to wrecking a friend's VW in an attempted insurance scam, to an imagined kinship with another hornet, the one that must have escaped, "wings folded back, lost, but canny enough / not to give the feeling a name."

These days, Rivard has started to edge away from narrative toward a lyric poetry that is less about the consequence of events on character and more about "how life simply
is, that's all, just
is, the play of moods over the long day. Jon Anderson used to tell his students that a poem is a kind of self-confrontation, and so you say the hardest thing. I don't believe that as much anymore, because it tends to produce a psychological drama of the self, a judgmental, or critical, or moralistic sensibility, that I'm frankly tired of."

His personal life has influenced some of this shift. Now living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Rivard teaches at Tufts University and in Vermont College's low-residency M.F.A. program, and is
Harvard Review's poetry editor. He and his wife, book-jacket designer Michaela Sullivan, have a three-year-old daughter, Simone, and the poems in his half-completed third manuscript,
Bewitched Playground, have been affected by the demands of his busy schedule: "The new poems are about the imaginative space that I inhabit on a day-to-day basis. Up to this point, a lot of my poems have been structured as meditative narratives, and often reflected on past events from a present perspective. Now, they're very much located in the present. Having a kid has forced me to live in ways that seem much more improvised and unexpected. Since Simone was born, I don't know where I am half the time -- but it's a pleasurable confusion. Life feels a lot fresher, and I want that freshness, the surprise of it, in the poems."