Carol Moldaw: California Poets Part 5, Four Poems

Carol Moldaw (photo by Don Usner)

December 22nd, 2022

California Poets: Part V

Carol Moldaw

Four Poems

64 Panoramic Way

Like easy conversation,

rambling, obliquely angled,

the winding street traverses

the steep residential hill.

Stone stairs ladder-stitch

the street’s tiers; every few

rungs open on terraces,

windows glinting through hedges,

sunlight feathering grass.

At the first switchback,

pine needles tufted with dog fur

pad up the wide cracked steps

leading to a cottage and two

ramshackle shingle houses.

From the lintel of an illegal

basement apartment, magenta

fuchsia, silent bells,

bob and sag over a pot’s rim.

Higher, up wooden stairs

built over rubble, we climb

to the top deck. What was

our garden now grows wild

onions’ white flowers,

and butter-yellow weeds--

winter’s mohair throw

draping a bare mattress.

By late spring someone else

or no one will be bending

to pick cool herbs

like single guitar notes.

Something knots in my throat.

Indecipherable

decibels begin jackhammering

inside #D--our old address.

Black Sabbath? Iron Maiden?

I know our own records

by the first chord. Pounding,

we try the unlocked door,

and pick our way through

a year’s domestic fallout:

dropped clothes, album sleeves,

mattresses blocking entrances,

plates, cups, hangers, books.

I trip trying not to look.

Waving on the balcony,

an old guest, now our host,

offers us the view.

At this time of year,

no yellow beach roses

tumble the latticed railing,

no draft of honeysuckle,

no bees flitting near their hive.

Cars nose around the hairpin turn.

Looking past Berkeley’s hazy

flat grids, past Oakland,

you can see, as if you’ve flicked

a painted fan open, a striped

spinnaker tacking the wide bay,

three bridges, and San Francisco

shrugging off her damp negligee.

From So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems (Etruscan Press, 2010)

A Leaf’s Gravity

A man hired by the man who dredged the pond

documented twenty-six kinds of birds

at the southern bend of the Pojoaque River

early one April morning. Like the girl

who glided up to you in a tot pool

when your daughter was small, and peered at you

unseeing, reminding you, against your will,

or perhaps it was against your better judgment,

of a blind fish--as you mull over ways

to incorporate the subcontractor’s list

into a poem, you stare blankly,

first at the page, then out the window.

All month you’ve been watching flurries of leaves

catch in the sunlight as they flutter down.

Weighing “the gravity of a leaf” against

“a leaf’s gravity,” you don’t notice the drift

of your mind until, as in a newscast re-cap,

the rabbit is already writhing, tossed

from the wheels of the car ahead.

As before, you’re glad you aren’t the driver,

but angry too, because you’d seen the rabbit--

if you’d been in front you could have swerved

and saved it. Whether impotent anger

or relief came first, you’re not sure, and which

emotion is truer—stronger—you also can’t say.

Even now, you wish you’d stopped to bury it,

the way you buried your daughter’s Siamese kitten,

mauled by the dogs next door. Small calamities,

you know, compared to the world’s, some

of which you register before you glide away.

From Beauty Refracted (Four Way Books, 2018)

As Far as I Can Tell

A lidless idleness designed to mesmerize,

out of which hesitancy and reluctance

give way to calibrations minute but not

insignificant, day in, day out, rocked

by the tidal bed the shell it’s attached to

is attached to, complacent in its mantle

of unconscious soft tissue, it grows radially

as if from a sound wave’s central ping

or like a breath-fired ball of molten glass.

The irritant of particularity’s the seed

that starts the exacting earnest venture,

the salt inside consequent iridescence.

From Beauty Refracted (Four Way Books, 2018)

From the Roof Deck

From our temporary housing’s rooftop deck,

I watch seagulls court on the roof next door,

the male cawing, hopping, wings like exhaust flaps.

I’d never mistake him for a whooping crane,

but being amused is (almost) its own comfort.

From up here, I get how sharks can mistake

surfers bobbing upright on their streamlined boards

for seals, the black wetsuits glistening like pelts,

but to catch a glimpse of the 4th of July fireworks

I have to drape myself around the chiminea

and list over the deck’s edge. The display starts

with the sun, sizzling and sparking as it sinks.

No holiday required for those pyrotechnics.

Or for my burst of waterworks, now air-dried.

From forthcoming book, Go Figure (Four Way Books, 2024). First published in Poetry.

Interview

October 3rd, 2025

Californian Poets Interview Series:

Carol Moldaw, Poet, Writer

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Let’s begin with your latest work, Go Figure, released last year with striking watercolor art by Cecily Brown for the cover. You have already talked about the collection growing out of the titular poem, but were other titles circulating in your mind as you were developing the collection, and if so, how seriously did you consider them? 

CM: I am so grateful to Cecily Brown for permission to use that watercolor on my cover. I love it and feel that it expresses exactly what it is like to create art out of the images, knowledge, and experience swirling around in your head.

Once I titled the poem “Go Figure,” I knew I wanted that also to be the book’s title. I wrote it about midway through the manuscript. If a poem title is to become a book title, I want it to fit two criteria: that it be a poem that enacts the deepest themes of the book and that the title works in an overarching, encompassing way. The humor of the phrase “go figure” appealed to me, the Yiddish shrug. I liked that the word “figure” brought up the human figure and the idea of figuration. The poem itself is one of those that re-examine and transfigure the roles of maker and muse through a mutable “I.”

I had an earlier title, but I always thought of it as a working title and not an actual contender. That was Repurposing the Feminine. From the earliest poems I wrote, among them “Lessons” and “Argument,” I knew that the poems would critically engage with received ideas about what is and what isn’t feminine, what the female is allowed. But as a title, Repurposing the Feminine is too didactic and straightforward for my sensibility. I thought of shortening it to Repurposing, but that suggested an emphasis on found and recycled art that my poems don’t fulfill.

DG: At some point during the editing process of Go Figure you felt the need to shatter the distance that seemed to exist upon further examination of the manuscript. The book is a very intimate read—and yet at the same time absolutely relatable in the way it touches upon the universal human condition. Naturally, every collection contains some part of the poet, but do you feel this to be your most personal one?

CM: That is a really interesting question and I’m going to surprise myself by saying no, I don’t think it is my most personal book. All my books touch on personal matter, from young love, to the desire to have a child, the dissolution of a marriage, unrequited love, the death of a parents, adopting a child, raising a child. That said, I also want to make a distinction: while my poems operate on a personal level, this is not the same exact thing as being personal.

DG: Let’s continue with the use of the “I” here because although it does bring the poet closer to the poem, the I of composer doesn’t always represent the I of the narrator. Without mentioning specifics—and to maintain the collection’s mystery—would you say there are pieces in first-person that don’t so much reflect your own life but lives you’ve seen, are acquainted with, or maybe even know on a very intimate level? 

CM: It’s true that the “I” as I write it can diverge from my personal experience, but it rarely diverges from my observations and perceptions. The most comprehensive way for me to think about the “I” is to see whole poems--the language, the way they unfold, images and sound—as the most profound expression of the self. The use of the first person, the creation of voice, is one, but only one, part of that. The use of “I” is the part that declares most openly the poet’s affinity.

DG: Let’s discuss Go Figure in relation to your previous collections. You have talked about how writing Beauty Refracted was a very different experience from writing The Lightning Field. In short, the former is a collection trying to make sense of the world—to give order to events—while the latter is an ekphrastic poem inspired by Walter de Maria’s “The Lightning Field.” The impetus for writing Go Figure seems to be a combination of your interest in visual art and the need to understand the world. Would this be a correct assumption?

CM: First, I want to clarify: the ekphrastic poem, “The Lightning Field,” is only one part of the book The Lightning Field. Within that book, and among other poems, there is another ekphrastic sequence, “Studies in Pen and Ink,” an elegy, poems stemming from visiting Turkey, and poems stemming from the experience of waiting for and adopting a child. Beauty Refracted was similarly choreographed into sections and covered diverse ground. While much of it is a coming to terms with the then-recent death of my father, there are landscape and walking-based poems, poems that came out of a trip to India, and the long title sequence, which is a kind of mytho-poetic exploration of child-raising.

I’m not sure I can separate my interest in visual art from my need to understand the world. With Go Figure, it was paramount to me that no matter how relational—or how art-related—the subject, the “I” in the poems was first and foremost self-identified as a working artist, a poet. This isn’t apparent or explicit in each poem, but it informs my writing of them all. It was a subtle change in self-awareness, in the “I.”

DG: In addition to poetry, you have also written a novella, called The Widening. Could you describe the transition from verse to prose and have you considered writing more fiction?

CM: Etruscan Press brought out The Widening in 2008 and in 2028 they are going to reissue it, with an afterward by me and perhaps an introduction by another writer. As I mention in the afterward, the two halves of The Widening were written about ten years apart. Went I wrote the first half, I couldn’t approach the material in lineated poetry, and one of the first discoveries I made that helped propel the book was the vignette-and-observation-based lyrical paragraph. I really loved the way the form brought out a certain voice in me. And then when I wrote the second half, I loved having the form at hand. It made my time—fractured by having a young child—suddenly usable. Between halves, and after the novella was finished, it seemed natural to me to go back to poetry. I’d never felt that far from it. The Widening, as has been remarked, is short on plot, though I believe it has an arc. Plot has intimidated me since I was ten years old and the thought of it is one thing that keeps me from trying another novel. I have written a few short stories (unpublished) but don’t think I’ll tackle anything too long.

I still love writing a certain kind of prose, though, and over the years I have written some pieces that I’m not sure what to call. Alongside essays on individual poets and poems and craft pieces that refer back to my own work, I’ve written pieces exploring my development as poet. Would that be considered poetic memoir? It’s all very poetry-centric but also revolves around individual and psychological development, which is something that interests me. I enjoy thinking analytically about emotions, as well as metaphorically. I think metaphor feels different and functions differently in prose than it does in poetry.

DG: Let’s return to poetry. You have talked about the importance of form—not only in Go Figure but as a driving force of your work in general. How do poems take shape for you? Do you start with the form and have it slowly create the message, or is it more a matter of putting down your thoughts and then organizing them in accordance with what you actually want to say?

CM: For me, a poem clearly takes shape through its form. Even that language, “takes shape,” reveals my bias. I may have an image, I may have a thought, or a set of sounds that provoke me, but after that the first and essential drive is to find the poem’s shape: the way the lines move, their length, or whether the line lengths vary, stanzaic shape. Then there are the other sonic patterning concerns—does it use any rhyme at all. The sounds in each poem play differently, I think, or at least groups of poems vary. Concurrently with concentrating, toying, with all that, words with meaning are being written, and the poem’s content is building. They really have to start building concurrently, and I find the way to have them concurrent is to start with shape and texture. Also, I find messages off-putting and tend to come at them sideways or let them sneak up on me. And I don’t think of them as messages. Rather, I think of them as meaning to be explored. The meaning really takes place in the exploration, in the poem chiseled out of it.

DG: There tends to be five or so years of separation between collections for you and the individual poems you’ve published appear in very prestigious magazines. Could you give an insight into your submission habits? Do you have a lot of pieces out at any given moment or is it more of a selective approach­?

CM: I’m a slow writer, so there’s never a lot of work to send out, only a little. I like to have 3-5 poems to send at a time, and if they are slow to be accepted than I might have new poems when the first batch comes back and I may mix the batches up. Basically, you have to go down your list of where you’d like the poems to appear, and you have to be open to opportunity—when it comes your way. When I was young, I trained myself to send poems out this way even though waiting to hear and getting rejections were both painful. You never quite inure yourself to it, but you get used to the irritation—the way, over the years, I’ve gotten used to a touch of tinnitus in one ear.

DG: Do you immediately revise a poem after it’s rejected or do you tend to send it out immediately?

CM: I try not to do this, but sometimes the first time I send a poem out is too soon. I’m excited and maybe it completes a batch I want to get back out there. But because it was too soon, it turns out that I keep working on it even though it’s out, and when it’s rejected it’s already in the process of being revised. When that’s not the case, I don’t revise because of rejection, unless an editor has noted something that makes me reconsider. All but one of the poems in Go Figure were in publications and some in multiple reprintings or translation.

DG: Another important component in your work is place. Though you’ve lived in Santa Fe for a long time, it’s Oakland where you were born. Though it’s generally the former that shapes the majority of your work, to what extent does your hometown, and California in general, affect the way you write?

CM: I don’t think I’ll ever get over the California I grew up in, but I haven’t written much about it in a long time. One poem in Go Figure, “Northern California,” was inspired both by my longing and by the fires. California both breaks my heart and heartens me. I was able to spend a few weeks there two years ago, and hope that some poems will emerge from that. The experience and the notes just need to sit and ripen before I can work with them. Does California affect the way I write? Interesting question. Most of my training was on the east coast, but I was informed by the Beats, by Kenneth Patchen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well, and first, also, by Robinson Jeffers and the artist Clyfford Still. The Clyfford Still room at the old San Francisco Museum in the Civic Center was my first experience of seeing a room filled with one artist’s art. I aspire to poetry that is equal to the shoreline, though my own is perhaps more in the nature of the lucid and rhythmically lapping tide pool than that of crashing of breakers on the cliffs. I’d like to recreate the smell of eucalyptus in a poem.

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

CM: I have a handful of post-Go Figure poems that I’m mulling over as I go through half-formed lines and notes. (“Post-whatever-was-the-last book” is always my first working title.) I’m also working on a prose piece about my mother’s complex influence on my writing, starting from when I was a young girl and examining how that changed over time. My reading hops around.

Author Bio:

Carol Moldaw’s 7th book of poetry, Go Figure, was published by Four Way Books in 2024. Her work has been featured widely in journals, including Harvard Review, Literary Imagination, The Massachusetts Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and Yale Review. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and teaches privately.