Bookpleasures.com welcomes as our guest, Anahid Nersessian. Anahid received her Ph.D. from theUniversity of Chicago, and has taught at Columbia University andUCLA.

Her first book, Utopia,Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment was published by HarvardUniversity Press in 2015, and her second book, The Calamity Form:On Poetry and Social Life, by the University of Chicago in 2020.

She has recentlypublished, KEATS’S ODES: A LOVER’S DISCOURSE (Universityof Chicago Press).

Good day Anahid andthanks for participating in our interview.

Norm: There will bemuch written about Keats’s life and legacy on the 200th anniversaryof his death. How does your lived experience as an American woman ofIranian and Armenian descent complicate your understanding of thiscanonical poet?

Anahid:I had a very privileged upbringing in New York City, one ofthe most diverse places in the world, and yet, because of mybackground, I was constantly being told that the literature I loveddidn’t belong to me—that I needed to be British or European, andpreferably male, to be able to read and understand a poet like Keats.

Many years later, as anacademic, I still hear that message: people don’t expect someonewith a name like mine to have things to say about poems written twohundred years ago by white men. KEAT’S ODES  grew outof my experience of being an outsider to the English literarycanon—which, it turns out, Keats also was.

His family was workingclass, he didn’t attend university, and, as his critics never tiredof pointing out, he couldn’t read Greek. Keats and I have a certainkinship that way, but it’s lopsided; his poetry will always knowless about me than I know about it. The book doesn’t try toovercome that dynamic, but uses it to see Keats in a new, morecontemporary light, in a way that makes him accessible to people,like me, who’ve been told they won’t get it or shouldn’t wantto.

Norm: You write, "WhenI say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things thatcannot be gotten over—like this world, and some of the people init.” Can you speak to this sentiment?

Anahid: Besides hispoetry, Keats is famous for two things: dying young, and his loveaffair with a woman named Fanny Brawne. After he died, Brawne saidshe would never get over him, and by all accounts she never did.

In the book, Keats becomesa symbol for the kinds of things that are impossible to get over andthat, in some cases, we shouldn’t get over, like social injustice.Keats was well aware that the economic and political systems we liveunder make it very difficult to be a human being. He believed that apoet was someone who, by definition, just could not get over that—whocouldn’t forget for a moment how much suffering there is in theworld and how much of it is unnecessary.

The poet, in other words,loves humanity so much that he finds its present state of existencetotally intolerable. I’m not a poet but I agree: our lives shouldbe a lot better than they are. On a much smaller scale, we’ve alllost people we can’t stop loving. The book is about that, too.  

Norm: The book makesclear that Keats is more than just an object of scholarship for you.You've had a lifelong personal conversation with him about poetry andpain, activism and revolution, love and the sublime. At what pointdid you realize that Keats resonated so strongly with you, and how doyou anticipate he'll resonate with readers in the future?

Anahid: It was love atfirst read. I stumbled across Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne whenI was about eleven years old, and even though they were way too sexyand emotionally intense for me to really understand, I felt animmediate connection to this person whose voice was so lively, sopresent, so warm and also so funny and self-critical.

At this point I’ve spentso much time reading and thinking about Keats that he’s a part ofwho I am, and not separate from the other things I give my energy andattention to, whether that’s being a literary critic or politicalactivism. Poetry, and poets, really can change your life, but rarelyin a direct way; Marx loved Shakespeare, but reading Shakespearewon’t turn you into a revolutionary.

I think people will alwaysbe drawn to works of art that believe in the value of human life, andthat are passionately opposed to anything that makes life feel likeit’s not worth living. Keats is one poet among many who reminds ushow much more we deserve from the time we have. As long as we wantmore, Keats will be right there with us.

Norm: It's alwayssurprising to hear that giants of history or the arts died so young. Keats lived only into his mid-20s. How does this affect yourunderstanding of his work?

Anahid: One of the mostimpressive things about Keats is that his poetry got so good so fast.He started writing when he was about nineteen, and a lot of his earlystuff is pretty terrible. When he died six years later, he hadwritten not one, not two, but a solid handful of the most famouspoems in the English language, with lines—“A thing of beauty is ajoy forever” or “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that millionsof people have heard somewhere even if they’ve never read them.

The explanation, besidesraw talent, is that he worked extremely hard at being a poet. As ifhe knew his days were limited, he wrote all the time, from shortlittle songs to 4,000-line epics, and he was always upping the ante,trying to make each poem better than the last one and being carefulnever to repeat himself or fall into old habits. Of course, if he hadlived longer, his poetry could have gotten really bad again! Maybe heonly had ten or so great poems in him—which is a lot more than mostpeople.

Norm: What rolecan/should poetry play in times like the present, brimming with fearand trauma and an utterly debased political world?

Anahid:I don’t think anyone can say, with a straight face, that a poemcan change the world. Nonetheless, poetry has always been a vitalpart of social movements. It’s a very special kind of languagethat, because it tends to be highly compressed—both emotionally andrhetorically—can pack a very strong punch into very few words.

Sometimes those words arestraight-up slogans: think of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous lines,“We are many, they are few,” which have been popping up atprotests all over the world since the nineteenth century. But moreoften, I think, they function as reminders of the fact that we’renot the first people to object to this form of life, that thetradition of resistance is very old and very powerful, and that hopeis very powerful too.

Audre Lorde wrote thatthrough poetry “we give name to those ideas which are—until thepoem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.”If a poem can help us give shape to our desire for a more free, morejust, and less grotesque form of existence, it’s done a good thing.

Norm: How does yourscholarship of Keats and the Romantic poets color your view of modernpoets? What are you most excited about in contemporary poetry?

Anahid:What I respond to in the Romantics is what I respond to in anypoem: I want something original, provocative, passionate, and notafraid to put itself in a compromising or difficult position. Keatsis a great poet, but he can also be messy and a little embarrassing,and I’m excited by poetry that has that same kind of fearlessness.

Of course, I’m partialto work that has a strong political perspective. When TongoEisen-Martin says, “My dear, if it is not a city, it is aprison./If it has a prison, it is a prison. Not a city,” thatshould stop you in your tracks. The same goes for the poetry of SeanBonney or Raquel Salas Rivera.

Some people might say thispoetry couldn’t be further from Keats, and maybe that’s true—it’snot as if we should read contemporary poets because they remind us ofwhite men who’ve been dead for centuries. The point is, does thepoem make the world feel impossible in new ways? Does it force you toabandon an idea you had before, and challenge you to bring a new oneinto being? That’s what counts, ultimately. 

Norm: Thanks once againand good luck with all of your future endeavors