Make sure you have a life outside of your work. There have been times when I worked so obsessively that I stopped hanging out with friends. When I toil away like that, I end up feeling drained, like I have nothing left to write about, like I’m scouring an empty and already clean pot with a scouring pad. After a particularly long period of overwork, I decided that, both for my life and my creativity, I needed to get out and immerse myself, purposefully, in sensory details. I started going to Central Park for “forest-baths” a few hours every day and experiencing as much as I could there. That “diversion” ended up inspiring me to write my book “Four Walks in Central Park.”
Books have the power to shape, influence, and change our lives. Why is that so? What goes into a book that can shape lives? To address this we are interviewing people who can share a story about a book that changed their life, and why. As a part of our series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Aaron Poochigian.
Aaron Poochigian is a poet, classics scholar, and translator who lives and writes in New York City. His work has appeared in such newspapers and journals as The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review and Poetry Magazine. His new book is Four Walks in Central Park: A Poetic Guide to the Park.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory” and how you grew up?
I grew up in Grand Forks, a fairly small town in North Dakota. It feels like it’s on the northern edge of the earth in the land of ice and snow. It was an innocent place, free of the temptations and dangers of the big city. I’ve always been ambitious, however, and, when I hit my teens, I realized I’d eventually grow out of it. I’ve been living in New York City for fifteen years now, and I attribute my move here to the fact that small-town life made me crave a metropolis.
My father was a philosopher and got a job as a professor at a university in North Dakota, and my mother taught English literature. For better or worse, my parents never put pressure on me to choose a practical career. For as long as I can remember, I’ve only ever wanted to be an artist of some sort. In my late teens, for example, I worked hard at becoming a composer for the traditional orchestra. I wanted to be Mozart.
When I was eighteen, I had a religious experience — I don’t know how else to describe it. I was looking at the beginning of an epic poem in Latin, the Aeneid. I didn’t yet know Latin but I sounded out the words: Arma virumque cano. They were like a magic charm. There was a sudden whoosh in my mind, and the sky grew brighter. The lawn at my feet grew greener. It became clear to me at that moment that I was to be a poet. For richer or poorer, that’s what I’ve done, day in, day out, ever since. I’m grateful that I’ve been able to survive on poetry. I know I’ve been lucky.
Let’s talk about what you are doing now, and how you achieved the success that you currently enjoy. Can you tell our readers a bit about the work you are doing?
I’m crazy busy right now. First off, I spend a good portion of each day working on short and hopefully potent new poems. My goal is to capture the grit and rush of Manhattan in memorable language. I couple meter and rhyme, the music of Shakespeare, with slangy, contemporary idioms. I’ve been told that the poems of mine that I deem successful, the ones I want to keep and publish, strike the reader as both something old and something new. Part of the reason I’ve achieved whatever notoriety I may have is a vivid sense of what I’m trying to do.
Lately I’ve also been devoting several hours each day to promoting my book, “Four Walks in Central Park.” It’s an immersive tour of the park in poetry. I think it’s my best work yet. I’m excited that there has been some buzz about it. I want to keep that going. I want everyone in the world to read it. When I was young and stubborn, I saw myself as a poet, an artist, only. I didn’t see promotional work as my responsibility. Then I grew up. One reason behind whatever success I may have achieved is that I’ve started seeing publicity as a part of my occupation. There’s a poet’s work, writing poems, and then there’s a poet’s career, which requires doing publicity. I take great pleasure in the act of writing. It would almost be enough on its own. Almost. But poetry, however private it may be when it is being written, is also a social medium. I need my work to connect with others, and part of that is making sure others read it.
I’ve also been putting the finishing touches on my translation of Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations” for W.W. Norton. That 1, 850-year-old Classic of Stoic philosophy is a full-fledged popular phenom. I was astounded to learn that well over one hundred thousand copies of it sold in 2024. Many people, including politicians, CEOs and athletes, swear by it. It truly is a fully functional guide to living. My translation is all but finished. The work I’m doing on it now is reader-centered. I’m doing all I can to make sure it’s the most inviting and exciting edition available.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Diligence: I’m proud to say that, ever since I became a poet at age eighteen, I’ve really put in the hours, day in, day out. I regularly work more than full time at my craft. Since it’s a labor of love, I tend to find the work stimulating rather than exhausting. I once had to spend a few days in a hospital to have my appendix removed. While I was there, I kept working on a new poem all the way up until the anesthetic knocked me out and the surgery began. When I woke up, I got right back to work and wrote through the haze of the pain meds. I finished the poem shortly before I was cleared to go home.
Openness to a Creative Mindset: Psychologists have been doing a lot of research on creativity lately. The general consensus is that it involves a combination of technical skill and being “in the zone.” Over the years I’ve come up with ways to cultivate a creative mindset. One method is like starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together. I first meditate on a subject that has struck my fancy. I let myself write down whatever words and phrases emerge. I then type them at random into a word doc. Next I juxtapose them in various combinations — that is, rub them together — until, presto, poetry ignites.
Playfulness: Poets are lucky in that an essential element of their work is play. Sitting down to write poetry, for me, means cultivating a childlike state of mind. To hint at the necessity of this mindset, T.S. Eliot teasingly asks in his poem “Conversation Gallant,” “And are we then so serious?” I’ve always felt a tug toward uninhibited play as a grown-up and was excited to discover the Freudian concept of regression in service of the ego. It involves going back (“regressing”) to one’s childhood and engaging in kinds of play that many consider inappropriate for adults. I’ve found this backward journey healthy both for my mental state and my poetry. As one expression of this playfulness, I’ve lately gotten into writing poems that use the rhythms and schemes of nursery rhymes to talk about grown-up subjects.
What’s the WHY behind the work that you do? Please share a story about this if you can.
I think that poetry is different from prose in that, in poetry, the words, in addition to whatever they might convey, are also musical notation. The words and the sounds they represent should fully reinforce each other as they weave the meaning of the poem. I guess the purpose behind my writing, beyond the attempt to make something beautiful and unforgettable, is to show that the music of a poem’s words has as much significance as their dictionary definitions and figurative resonance.
I want to put every musical technique available into a poem, so I’m big on rhyme, alliteration (the repetition of consonant sounds) and assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds). I have a hard time understanding why they aren’t more often used in contemporary poetry. They go to set each line of a poem off as its own separate work of art. Poems that read like prose tend to strike me as bland. In T.S Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the lines, “Oh, do not ask what is it./Let us go and make our visit,” would be utterly unmemorable without the rhyme.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I was lucky in that I was introduced to the poet Tim Murphy when I was nineteen. He lived outside of town on an apple farm and didn’t work for the university. The evening I met him, he invited me up to the deck on top of his house. As we looked out at his orchard, he asked me to recite my favorite poem. I did my best to sonorously intone the poet W.B. Yeats’ “The Falling of the Leaves.” It starts, “Autumn is over the long leaves that love us/And over the mice in the barley sheaves.”
For years afterward I visited his house every Saturday, recited the poetry he told me to memorize and shared my early attempts to write my own. In retrospect, I realize that we were a good pairing because we both instinctually felt that poetry is as much for the ear as the page. He helped me ground my work in the oral and aural origins of poetry, that is, in, say, Homer who composed the Iliad for live performances and Shakespeare who wrote for the stage.
Awesome! Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. I’m an author and I believe that books have the power to change lives. Can you please tell our readers about “The Book That Changed Your Life”? Can you share a story about how it impacted you?
The book that struck me like a thunderbolt is Thomas Pynchon’s novel “The Crying of Lot 49.” It came out in 1966 and is one of the most memorable expressions of 60s counterculture. It taught me that you can surf the line between realism and the incredible and make every detail both fully symbolic and fully itself. The main character, Oedipa Maas, is my favorite in all literature because of her openness to every tantalizing possibility, no matter how far-fetched. She embraces the suspicion, even the paranoia, that the curious events of the novel foment.
“The Crying of Lot 49” taught me that literature, regardless of how “serious” it is, needs always to have an element of play, of fun. That revelation opened me up to an expansive approach to creativity. Literary possibilities I would previously have rejected because they seemed implausible were subsequently “in play” in the poems and stories I was writing. The book gave me wider reach and scope.
What was the moment or series of events that made you decide that you wanted to take a specific course of action based on the inspiration from the book? Can you share a story about that?
After re-reading “The Crying of Lot 49” in my early thirties, I was inspired to write my own novel. I had previously written only poems and have only ever thought of myself as a poet, so I decided to write it in verse instead of prose. As Pynchon mixes together different genres — mystery, the hippie novel and literary fiction — in “The Crying of Lot 49,” I did my best to make a mashup of action films, thrillers and epic poetry. What’s more, because reading Pynchon’s novel feels like playing a game, I decided to make the perspective of my novel that same as it is in “first-person shooter” video games. In those games you the player see the world of the game through the eyes of the hero. In my novel “you” are the main character, an FBI agent, and have adventures all over Manhattan. There is no way I could have written those two verse novels, “Mr. Either/Or” and the sequel “Mr. Either/Or: All the Rage,” if I hadn’t had Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49” as a model.
Can you articulate why you think books in particular have the power to create movements, revolutions, and true change?
Our day-to-day reality consists of uncurated and seemingly arbitrary events. Usually they strike us as random. Even when two events occur in what could be seen as a meaningful combination, we tend to regard that pairing as merely a coincidence. Sometimes, though, we see conjoined events not as coincidence but as serendipity, that is, as a meaningful combination. Say you are thinking about a person and a moment later that person gives you a call. That conjunction could be taken for a sign.
In a book the details presented are so curated by the author as to direct the river of meaning in a specific direction and toward a specific goal. The combination of them works to create an intended worldview. Literature is a controlled burst of meaning. When that spate strikes readers in a new way and with more force than they’ve been struck before, it shows them new possibilities and can change their lives. Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations,” for example, has changed my life and the lives of countless others because it so insistently focuses on our vices and what we can do to make ourselves virtuous. Every entry, every sentence, every metaphor keeps hammering self-improvement home. There’s nothing more perennially relevant than our desire to be better people.
A book has many aspects, of course. For example, you have the writing style, the narrative tense, the topic, the genre, the design, the cover, the size, etc. In your opinion, what are the main, essential ingredients needed to create a book that can change lives?
As I see it, a life-changing book can be on any subject and in any genre. To write one, an author needs to have a vivid and/or novel vision and elicit wonder in the reader. There needs to be so much control over the literal details and their figurative resonance that the world of the author’s literary creation is astoundingly convincing. Readers also have a duty — they need to sustain an openness to the revelation that is the book.
Let’s take Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49” as an example. In that book everything may or may not be a sign, omen or symbol. Pynchon cultivates a worldview in which there may or may not be a vast conspiracy. A mood of paranoia pervades the book. His unsettling vision couldn’t be more fully realized. What’s more, Pynchon’s novel reached me at just the right time for a life-changing experience — in undergraduate school, when I was still discovering how to be wowed by literature. It changed me for good by showing me, with potency and vigor, a whole new way, a playful yet suspicious way, to look at the world.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started My Career” and why?
- Make sure you have a life outside of your work. There have been times when I worked so obsessively that I stopped hanging out with friends. When I toil away like that, I end up feeling drained, like I have nothing left to write about, like I’m scouring an empty and already clean pot with a scouring pad. After a particularly long period of overwork, I decided that, both for my life and my creativity, I needed to get out and immerse myself, purposefully, in sensory details. I started going to Central Park for “forest-baths” a few hours every day and experiencing as much as I could there. That “diversion” ended up inspiring me to write my book “Four Walks in Central Park.”
- Art is about connection. Confident as you may be in something you’ve created, you need to heed others’ reactions to it. You may be surprised to learn that there has been a disconnect. To give an example, I sent my poem “The Odds and Ends” to an editor, and he told me, bluntly, that it wasn’t done, that it wasn’t yet fully coherent as a work of art. After recovering from the sting of that response, I went back to work on it, and it ended up being much stronger — one of the poems of which I’m most proud.
- Have perspective when it comes to disappointments. There are poems I’ve been excited about that, upon publication, have ended up making a ripple instead of splash. Take letdowns like that in stride. They will be balanced out by happy surprises. Yes, poems I thought were great or whatever have been rejected by editors, but earlier this summer, for example, the editor of a journal I greatly respect emailed me out of the blue and asked if he could publish my poem “The Baby.” I’d never submitted it to him. He’d heard about a public reading I gave of it, and it so struck some members of the audience that they went on to talk it up to him. I got lucky.
- Diversify. “Find your voice” is common advice in MFA in Poetry programs. What I’ve found is that if you find only one voice — that is, a particular mode with its tone and range of relevant subjects — it can become a trap. What’s more, a given idiom is limited and can be exhausted. I’ve tried to find not just one voice, but voices, in the hope of never running out of fresh subjects and fresh ways of sharing them with readers. This range of voices in me has served me well in my writing for characters on stage. If I’d had only one poetic voice, the plays would have ended up being monotone.
- Don’t resort to “performance-enhancing” drugs. During COVID, I became addicted to cocaine. I didn’t use it to party — I used it to help me keep working for long stretches and to escape the tedium of lockdown. My addiction story has the usual trajectory: cocaine solved all my problems for a while, then I needed it to feel normal, then I needed it to keep from crying. It has taken me a few years to get my life back together. What I took to increase my productivity wound up making me spend hours a day in rehab.
The world, of course, needs progress in many areas. What movement do you hope someone (or you!) starts next? Can you explain why that is so important?
My personal literary movement is what I call the “Save Poetry” campaign. For decades now American poetry has belonged almost exclusively to Academia, to Literature departments and MFA in Poetry programs. Because the curriculum and pedagogy are very similar from one MFA program to another, much of the poetry that is generated in them is similar in style and tone. The accepted modes are limited. Also, because the standard wisdom is that the way to make a living in poetry is to get an academic job, poets tend to write for fellow academics instead of non-specialists. As a consequence of that, the audience for poetry has shrunk and shrunk. I do what I can to remedy that situation by reaching out to audiences outside of academia. My poem, “Choop,” for example, about making moonshine appeared in “Zymurgy,” the trade magazine for the American Homebrewers Association. I’ve also done dramatic writing to reach theater-going audiences. I dream of our country one day having a national literature that would include poetry that speaks to and is familiar to random people on the street.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I’m on Twitter @Poochigian and on Facebook as “Aaron Poochigian” (I’m the only person with that name). I’ve also made my whole most recent collection of poetry, “American Divine,” available for free at www.americandivine.net.
Thank you so much for taking the time to share with us and our readers. We know that it will make a tremendous difference and impact thousands of lives. We are excited to connect further and we wish you so much joy in your next success.
Poet Aaron Poochigian On The Book That Changed His Life was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.