Conrad Neumann, a longtime member of the Friday Noon Poets group in Chapel Hill, died one week ago at the age of 85. Thinking about him (I am a latecomer to his circle of friends & admirers), I re-read notes from an interview conducted a few years ago for a book I was researching. I used those notes to write the following . . .
My Interview with Conrad Neumann
“You don’t leak poems.
They are not excretions!”
This is what Conrad told me during an interview for a book I
was researching a few years ago, a book about people who come to the writing of
poetry late in life. I had asked him
about his writing process, how his poems emerged. He straightened his spine and, with
characteristic impishness, offered up this quasi-scientific observation about
excretions and the creative process.
He was 83 years old at the time, moved more slowly, more
cautiously than he had just a few years earlier, when I met him at Friday Noon
Poets. We drank iced coffee at The Root
Cellar, a popular restaurant and deli shop not far from campus in Chapel
Hill. It was noontime and noisy. I had to shout my questions due to Conrad’s
impaired hearing. Which was a thing at
FNP—Conrad’s hearing, or lack of, that and the black box we passed around the
FNP conference table, a remote for his hearing aids. Nobody read or recited a word until that
gizmo was close by on the table.
Not that I did much talking beyond a few prompts injected
every so often into the middle of Conrad’s running monologue. The man had a lot to say. The interview proceeded along a series of
blind alleys and broad sunlit plains. It
was coastal, effluvial, layered with sediments of memory, scientific
observation, personal story, yarn and bright, arresting imagery. And a joke or two.
I wanted to know more about the parallels between the
scientific and poetic processes. He was
an academic and a scientist, an adventurer and a homespun New Englander. He’d launched the Marine Sciences curriculum
at UNC. “It never attained department
status,” he said, but it kept him in close intellectual contact with one of the
wellsprings of his long life. Conrad was
a geologist by training, earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in the
discipline, but one who’d grown up on Martha’s Vineyard, or, more precisely, upon
the Atlantic Ocean around Martha’s Vineyard.
It took the director of Woods Hole to convince Conrad in the 1950s to
take up the study of the sea’s geology.
Around us the lunch crowd buzzed and the cappuccino maker
hissed. He started writing poetry because
he had something to say after 40 years at sea or near the sea or with his nose
in a book about the sea. He took it up
because time had ceased to be a commodity, he told me, an endlessly renewable
resource. And memory is lyrical. Conrad threw that in, too.
Science and poetry share some ground. People at the next table listened in, I could
tell. In a university town, you’d think
such a statement might be ordinary enough not to get overheard. “It’s too broad to say that they both take
nature as their right subject—I mean, what doesn’t?—but they both ask big
questions, and they both fail to answer the big questions satisfactorily time
and again, which is what makes science and poetry such human endeavors.” Now that’s
a remark you probably don’t hear so often, even in Chapel Hill. But, he went on, both disciplines—“and they
are disciplines”—are creative; they live and die by inspiration. Their methods differ, but their ground is the
same.
Conrad grew up on Martha’s Vineyard without TV or even
radio. Or even fresh newspapers. He attended grade school there and worked his
first fishing boat there. In summers, as
today, the “summer people” came from Boston and New York. Always, there was local gossip of this
drunken Kennedy and that insufferable Manhattanite careening around the
island’s narrow, sandy roads in big convertibles ferried over from the
mainland.
His father, Conrad told me, was something of a ghost. He chased the painterly life in New York
City, returning to the Vineyard only now and again. Not surprisingly, he was very close to his
mother and spoke affectionately—well, passionately—of his grandfather, who
introduced Conrad to poetry. The man was
a fisherman and farmer, with not much of a formal education but a head full of
Longfellow.
Of course, Conrad recalled more than the Kennedys and
convertibles of his Vineyard days. He
remembered big hurricanes. He remembered
Dr. Traynor, a beloved high school teacher who read Conrad’s first poem—about a
wave. He remembered the stink of fish in
a barrel and on his clothes, and the treachery of wind at sea. And particular waves.
As he grew older, Conrad told me—and I wouldn’t have been
surprised by now to see the people at the next table taking notes just as I was
taking notes, fast as my pen could move—as he grew older and into the rigors
and demands and patience of hard science, he came to understand pattern, or
what he called “pattern recognition.”
“It’s the ability to envision the world literally, as it is, not as it
should be. That’s science,” he said.
“It’s seeing the associations of nature—how one thing or one process or one
action depends on another, fits into the pattern.”
That’s when I asked about the relationship between science
and the writing of poetry, and when Conrad said, as if explaining something
fundamental to a science neophyte, “You don’t leak poems. They are not excretions!”
For a few more minutes, he shared some funny stories about
drinking at sea, with shipmates, from an ashtray, and reciting bawdy
poems. He told me how he met his future
wife, Jane (in Bermuda, on a research ship).
“She was sea sick, and nobody wants anybody else around when you’re sea
sick. But I hung around anyway. She once met Robert Frost.” And then we finished our iced coffees. My writing hand ached. My head, too, from the non-stop free-association
and non sequiturs, like being sea
sick, I can imagine.
Post-Script
Conrad worked hard on his book, Up-Island Poems. Some might
say he obsessed over its selection, editing and publication, as a scientist
might obsess over the details of a field study.
It was also an obsession borne of time no longer being a commodity. When it came out, you could see immediately
the benefits of that obsession—it’s not cobbled together like just any
collection of verses. It’s a book, of poetry. It tells a lyrical story.
Looking through my copy as I write this memory of him, I
realize he didn’t sign it.
My loss. Forever, my
loss.
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