The Outcast and The Central: A Conversation with A.F. Moritz
A Conversation between A.F. Moritz & Bret van den Brink
A. F. Moritz has written more than twenty books of poetry, most recently, Great Silent Ballad (2024), As Far As You Know (2020), and The Sparrow (2018). Moritz served as the sixth Poet Laureate of Toronto from March 2019 to May 2023. He also served for more than a decade as the Goldring Professor of the Arts and Society at Victoria University at the University of Toronto. Moritz has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, inclusion in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Ingram Merrill Fellowship. He is a three-time nominee for the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry (Rest on the Flight into Egypt, The Sentinel, and The New Measures). He was the winner of the ReLit Award for poetry in 2005 for Night Street Repairs. His collection, The Sentinel, a Globe and Mail Top 100 of the Year, won the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize. And Great Silent Ballad received the 2025 Al & Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize.
A.F. Moritz was interviewed by Bret van den Brink via a Zoom conversation in the spring of 2026.
Bret van den Brink, for Traces: From my understanding, you were born in the United States, but have been based in Canada, specifically Toronto, for some time – I was wondering if you could say something about how place impacts your poetry.
A.F. Moritz: Place is so important to anyone that it’s perhaps impossible to become fully aware of it. You can’t write the smallest poem without its being present. Even if unmentioned, it’s implicit. If you mention or are spurred by, for instance, somebody’s gesture in the street, the person’s whole world is “behind” what you write, just as your whole body is, whether you refer to these explicitly or you don’t. Place is even in the whole history of all the words we use, the way those words now have their particular shadings because of time and place, the way they exist now, in 2026, the way they are used here and a little differently there.
Place is a kind noumenon that spreads out from the poem and touches us in every thing, every phenomenon, of the poem, whether or not they are specifically about place. Compare enjoying the poem to enjoying yourself lying on the stream bank. Your heads on the ground, you look to the side and see a little distance, a stretch of water, some grass. The horizon’s very near, but you “know” without thinking of it that the whole earth is there: your town that the stream flows through, the bit of woods where you lie but can’t see much of, are wholly there, and everything beyond them that has to be there, or else they could not be.
Traces: What about “place” more specifically, particularly: for instance, that spot on a stream bank?
I grew up in Niles, Ohio, a small industrial town. It was a part of Big Steel when I was born in 1947 and in my childhood and adolescence, and then, by the mid-70s, it was the Rust Belt. The industry there had collapsed and even many of its ruins were being dismantled. The society there, which had always been full of conflicts and doubtfulness but was also proud and coherent, was also collapsing. Another important factor for me: growing up, there was absolutely no one I ever met who had the least interest in poetry – absolutely nobody ever. I was completely isolated as a poet till I got to university, and even then, because of my momentum of being completely isolated, I stayed completely isolated. It was the way I was. I kept poetry to myself. It took me a long time at university, years, years before I gradually admitted that I’d ever written a poem to anybody. […] I’m about the most isolated poet that I’ve ever heard of. I’m way more isolated than, for instance, Emily Dickinson was.
But I really, in a sense, loved Niles. You grew up in an awful place, and it ignored but at the same time tortured you, but at the same time, it had energy and splendor, and you owe it everything you are or have, including the good things. As a result, I’m kind of an aficionado of desolation. It’s almost as if my main calling card is to find beauty in ugliness, to find centrality in the most marginal, to find eminence in what is most scorned, ignored, devalued.
So, how does that affect me? I wrote a book called Mahoning, which is about my area. Mahoning’s the river that goes through it. I made the Mahoning into a character—a river, and at the same time, a person, a people, and their place, including the natural place and the made place, the society they had made there. Mahoning is a beneficent and injured and hard-to-marry beloved. It’s a place. And, that book really attempts to look at this place as absolutely essential. Some people say the center of the human universe was Pericles’s Athens. Some people say it was Jesus Christ’s Palestine. I say they’re all wrong. It was Niles, Ohio in the 1950s and 60s. This was the essential humanity, which had never been reached before and will never be surpassed. But it was a crummy place, too.
So I tried, with the help of an idea from a philosopher, a theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar – he wrote many thunderous big, long books. Well, I don’t mean to make fun of them, they’re great. But I took an aesthetic idea he has, of the gestural as symbolic and beyond-symbolic, as “incarnating” what it “indicates”, so that there is no difference between symbol, image, and “referred-to” reality. One of his examples, if I’m remembering correctly, is the idea of the slumping of Christ’s head in one of the Passion narratives. The idea is: in that one moment/movement is condensed death and life, defeat and triumph, misery and glory. They are not even “fused”, they are simply realized to be one and the same thing. I applied this to Niles and my life from and of the place. I tried to create an aesthetic method in that book which expression this realization of oneness beyond all fusion, this primordial oneness of the outcast and the central, the ignored and the essential, the scorned and what is truly glory.
Traces: Thank you. That “fusion,” brings Blake’s “double vision,” and so Northrop Frye, to mind. […] Are there any Canadian artists or thinkers, Frye or others, that you particularly enjoy, or who have particularly influenced your work?
AFM: Oh, yeah. Certainly!, Frye was very important to me – is very important to me. I think he’s a magnificent philosopher and critic. For me he’s a philosopher, though he is taken as a critic of literature because he mainly communicates his thought through response to literature. This procedure is what leads to the best though, the best philosophy. I like the way he looked at the Bible as a little library of about 70 pamphlets which, mysteriously, though written across about 3,000 years, all keep echoing and building on each other and referring to each other, and magically, they refer backward and forward – an idea of literature that Jorge Luis Borges was coming to, too, in the middle of the 20th century. It’s not only the past that influences the present, but the opposite.
I never met him but a personal aspect of my encounter with him does exist. I had loved Blake since I was 12 years old, when I began obsessively reading an ignored book that had come to a fancy book club an aunt of mine belonged to: W.B. Yeats’ famous 1930s anthology of Blake in a fancy blue-cloth gold-stamped edition. Then I arrived at university, and I soon encountered the book Fearful Symmetry by Frye. For about six months, I felt, oh, Frye is even more of a visionary than Blake! Then I regained my senses. But I loved and love Frye’s book. It’s had a great impact on me.
When I came to write my dissertation on the Romantic and Victorian poets, I followed a Frye-sort-of method, which was to do close reading, yes, but mainly to look at a sort of organic, over-times-and-periods unity of writers who were drawing on the past and reshaping the past to talk to their present. I associate this to Hegel’s idea that what acts at each moment is the total self, the total past, of the person up to that moment. This is an “of course” but it is also an essential poetic vision both for the understanding and the doing of poetry. It’s an essential reality.
Then I wound up in Toronto. And, where I lived, I would see Frye walking along the sidewalk, deep in thought, with a white plastic bag in his hand. Doubtless Mrs. Frye had told him to bring home some milk and bread from the Dominion grocery store there. And then, later on, I had office in Northrop Frye Hall, so I thought, oh, this is a providential circle being closed here.
But the other thing about Frye is that he knew he had genius, and towards the end of his life, I believe he began to become a poet in his own right. He had his idea of four types of discourse. […] The final one was the kerygmatic. […] The prophetic is the poetic. The kerygmatic is even beyond that, because that’s where God talks to and through us. It is rarely achieved. Well, I think in his own private writings, especially in his late notebooks, he was trying to write a kerygmatic writing. He felt he was doing so. He wasn’t just a critic anymore. If he ever was just a critic, he was now specifically trying to do what he thought was kerygma as a form of literature.
Whether one looks at brief utterances in the notebooks, or the many statements one is struck by in reading his critical works, Frye seems to me one of the authors who greatly exemplifies the extreme closeness between a profound prose aphorism and a profound brief lyric.
Traces: How does spirituality impact your work? We can say spirituality or religion, whichever you prefer. And how do artists from spiritual backgrounds or religious backgrounds impact it?
AFM: Spirituality is a central aspect of my poetry, so it more than impacts it. […] I think, one of the main things about modern intellectuality, at least of one stream of it, is the anguish over the loss of the hegemony of the spirit in the human concept of itself and its world. And the battle to restore the reality of spirit, which has entailed, often, a sense for a redefinition of it. How can what has traditionally been designated “spirit” be found and spoken today?
One of my favorite philosophers is Gabriel Marcel. He was an atheist up till the age of about 40, and then as the result of his thinking, he joined a church. He made this kind of progression. And, one of the things that he said in his attempts to identify a way to comprehend the reality of what seems totally impalpable and unlikely in a technological, empirical mindset and civilization – is that he regarded a lot of the critique of God in the 19th century as entirely proper. It really had destroyed a God that needed to be swept away, but it didn’t touch God at all.
Poetry [is], as it were, the better philosophy, the better theology, because poetry can and does say the ineffable by understanding how symbolism and rhythm and color and so on gesture to, indicate, sufficiently point to – insofar as humankind is capable of grasping – this other reality. This is one of the main subjects of my work. Let me just say one thing more on this.
The title of Wordsworth’s great poem referred to as “the Immortality Ode” for short is simply Ode, with the subtitle Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Okay – that subtitle in itself is a great poem. In a way, you don’t need any more than that. The first 3 words indicate one of the strongest, and I think, most central, truest efforts that exists in modern culture: intimations of immortality, as opposed to securely (almost arrogantly) asserted dogmatic, doctrinal statements of immortality, on the one hand, and equally dogmatic positivism and materialism on the other. Doctrinal statements are not worthless, but the modern human experience lies more with intimations of immortality. How do you establish the truth value and the reality for you, of the sense of immortality that you get and that is constantly contested, doubted? Well, I think this struggle is one of the major elements of poetry through the ages, from the most primitive times we know of. But it is, because of social and intellectual conditions, particularly sharp and crucial now.
Traces: Thank you for that. I love the Immortality Ode. […] While reading Great Silent Ballad, I was fascinated by your poem, “A Flower Giving Names to Adam and Eve.” In Genesis and Paradise Lost, Adam gives names to the animals, and in the latter, Milton adds that Eve named the flowers. So, I was wondering if you’d say something about the ecological vision of your poem, and the significance of naming and being named for you.
AFM: To me, that’s a very important thing. […] When I think of giving names, I think of Blake’s famous painting of Eve naming the birds: you refer to Blake’s source in Milton. There’s a loving and productive interchange between man and nature: that’s the first and simplest way to say my poem’s sense. I’m concerned to show, on behalf of fact and truth, and in contradiction to modern analytical intellectuality, that, in fact, names are part and parcel of things – that they aren’t arbitrary human constructions, and that they’re not just ciphers we’ve constructed and that are best understood as a kind of tool or technology for communication. That is wrong.
The fact that things have different names, and many different names, in different languages, is a point in that poem. The narrator says, Eve and I will be out here in the woods or in the fields. We’re taking a vacation or a walk. We’re not profound botanists, and we don’t know all languages. We don’t know “the name” of this flower we admire, but for the time being we’ll “invent” one, just for while we’re here. But—or, so—the flower is giving us its new, its one-time, name for just between us and it. When we go back, we might look it up. We’ll get the botanical name, and maybe all the folk names for it, and we might get so interested that we’ll find out the name for it in Urdu, if it grows in India. And its name in Bulgarian, Swedish, and so forth. We’ll find out what people may have called it differently in our great-great-grandmother’s time. And these will each and all be names of the flower that the flower gave and that are part of it. The flower is a fountain of names. It’s a fountain of provocation, of creativity, and every name it creates for its true name, just the same as it creates seeds and leaves.
Traces: Thank you for that. That’s beautiful.
In the contents of your recent collection Great Silent Ballad, the first poem is titled, “As I Write Down My Songs.” The poem doesn’t have the title on the page on which it appears, and its first line reads, “as I write out my poems.” That relates songs and poems very closely. What does writing poetry mean to you, and how does song relate to poetry in your work?
AFM: I always insist that poetry is basically song. I love Wordsworth’s term, philosophic song, for his long poems. It brings together two things – the idea of chortling like a bird and the idea of being a human being with a great intellect and a great responsibility to the intellect. This is a natural responsibility, a human responsibility to nature, which naturally provides man with intellect. Just as nature created the tiger with claws and the burdock with leaves, it created humans the intellect. The intellect is a thing of nature, a human-natural thing. Nature needs to get something from humanity out of the intellect it has provided. In both senses of “needs”. Nature produced the intellect because it could not do otherwise: that’s what it needed to do, what it did. Nature requires assistance from the intellect to achieve its goals. I do not quail at the “anthropomorphism” of the last statement. Those terms are the ones that are precise to reality in this regard.
We have to be aware that we’re singing, and we have to try to form the song. The song is the fusion, or rather the primordial oneness, of intellect and feeling. Then, by entitling the poem “When I Write Out My Songs,” and then later, having it say (sing) “when I write down my poems,” I can bring out implicitly that the two statements are the same – that the making of the song very, very carefully at the poet’s desk, where getting it finally right may take years, is the same as the impulse, inspiration, moment of joy and rhythm and melody of the first appearance of the first phrase. Two ends of the same thing.
Another point about music. You might notice in the book you mentioned, Great Silent Ballad, that the name of the book contains has a term for a genre of music in it, a genre of music that is equally a type of poem. In that book, in many places, I quote popular songs, folk songs, art songs, and I’ve done this continuously in my poetry. Songs are really part and parcel of me. I know hundreds of songs, some of them going back hundreds of years. And I like to sing them to myself. I refer also to orchestral music, or music without words, but vocal music, especially, is central to me.
Traces: Thank you. When I was at your book launch for The Wren, one of the poems has the speaker at a mountaintop, and on the mountaintop, there’s a guitar. I’m recalling that correctly, right?
AFM: Yes, you are. He carries his guitar up the mountain to flee a burning city, and he stops while halfway up at a house that’s up there, a halfway house, you know. One of these little huts that is provided for travelers.
Traces: Would you say that the guitar is, for you, a modern version of the lyre, as it was for someone like Shelley or Stevens?
AFM: That’s right. It is the lyre. With of course the difference of feeling that our culture—Liona Boyd, Chet Atkins, Elmore James—has added to the sense of the instrument. It’s an instrument friend, an instrument traveler, that accompanies the poet. We think of the psalmist – “play for me on the psaltery, the 10-stringed instrument”.
We know that some instruments of ancient singers were essentially harps, and the harp too is like a guitar. Open strings – strings available to your hands. And, there’s the tradition of the blues man, someone like a Woody Guthrie or a Charley Patton. Or those who made that life a sort of mythology: Bob Dylan or the many other poet-musicians of the “folk revival” period. Even the rockers who have to plug in yet still have this idea of the free-wandering hero of the guitar. ‘I wander from town to town doing my show. I’m a kind of a vagabond minstrel.’
There’s a poem in Great Silent Ballad that centers in guitars, “Folk Blues,” which is about an old blues man. He and his old friends, also blues players, are accustomed to get together and beat on their guitars, to admire the tricks of each other’s fingers. Then they would talk a little, take a drink, go silent, stare across the shimmering water to think, and thought nothing for a long time—sitting there on the Natchez side, looking across the Mississippi. That book is filled with little quotations, references to music, quotations from lyrics here and there.
Traces: Thank you for that. I suppose, now that The Wren has been mentioned, it’s a wonderful way to transition to my last question. You’re releasing two new works: a poetry collection, The Wren, and the translation of Eternities by Juan Ramón Jiménez ...
AFM: Eternities, yes. We were just talking about the guitar as a lyre, so let me see if I can’t quickly find the lyre in here.
Traces: Oh, marvelous.
AFM: Here it is. And it’s called, “With the Lyres of the Dream,” “Con Las Liras Del Sueño.” You’ll like this. The one thing it might be good to know about the poem in advance: “Moguer” is the name of Jiménez’s hometown.
I BEAUTIFIED my aspiration
with the lyres of the dream
and set out on my road to the world above.
And I found myself with the stars that,
seated on the azure stairs,
sway their legs, never ceasing,
like branches, in the Edenic air.
Among them, the unforeseen
depths were interchanging
their lights and their forms
in a succession impossible to define,
like the high swells of the seas
in the eternal afternoon sleep of Santiago.
I had arrived, and they, with their feet
kicked me in the soul
and fell down laughing;
and they threw me, screaming
with a crazy chatter of broken glass,
back into the tangled
day of Moguer impossible to wake up.
That’s the lyre. You soon leave the lyre behind. As the result of your efforts at beauty, you go up to the supernal, and you get kicked back down into reality. You have to learn the blues.
Traces: Thank you for that. I was wondering if you could say more about your hopes for the two projects, and how your work as a translator relates to your work as a poet?
AFM: It’s a big topic, so just let me choose one aspect, the short poem. The Wren is a little bit different for me, because it’s all very short poems. Translating Jiménez is one of the things that finally released me to do those, and to do a whole book of them.
I’ve always written short poems, and I have various English models for the short poem: English and American poets of all eras wrote them, and I always loved the Imagist movement that emphasized them: Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and so on. From my early twenties I was deeply in love with the early work of Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo. So, I’ve never been alienated from the short poem, but I felt it was not a principal métier for me.
I wanted to start translating Jiménez with his work of the period from 1915 to about 1935, when he wrote a great number of very short poems. Along with the Imagists and Ungaretti, Jiménez one of the chief creators of the early 20th century’s free verse revolution, in which the tiny, succinct, non-metrical poem was so big a part. Translating Jiménez must have caused it to gradually seep into me. Now, my poems don’t resemble Jiménez’s – they’re of a different type, but the length is somewhat similar.
I regard Jiménez as an extremely great poet. In English, if you look rather hard, you can find quite a few translations of him. But they haven’t been prominent, and for the reason that almost none of are consistently good. There are a few beautiful examples, but not a book you can read with thorough confidence. My goal would be—I don’t know if I can achieve it—to translate and publish a number of his books, as Edward Snow has done with Rilke. Jiménez is a poet of similar stature and importance. To me, he’s one of the – I don’t know – 10 or 20 principal writers of the 20th century in the European languages. A very important and very great poet.
So, I love his work, and that’s probably the main thing. I’m always fed by and challenged by his ideas, and his forms of verse, and simply the nakedness of poetry in his work—the powerful deep-going calm, the “dynamic ecstasy”, as he called it.
Bret van den Brink is a literary critic, amateur poet, and dabbler in theology. Some of the sundry venues that have featured his scribblings include Notes and Queries, Radix Magazine, Traces Journal, The Robert Graves Review, [spaces], The Merton Annual, and Christian Courier. He co-hosts the podcast Mandatory Media, and he is currently a PhD student in English at the University of Toronto.
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