An interview with Willem Lange, author of A Dream of Dragons
Ib Bellew: Of the poets you admire — Frost and Service, Tennyson and Lear, and Kipling for that matter — who inspired you most to put pen to paper and with which poems or ideas?
Willem Lange: It’s so long ago now, it’s hard to say. My mother was a lover of poetry and gave me several collections of chestnuts – one of which, Best-Loved Poems of the American People, I cherish today, though it’s disintegrating – full of variously amusing, provocative, and inspiring poems. Many I would now consider bathetic, though as an adolescent I was inspired by them. Some still grab me, like The Arab’s Farewell to his Horse. The same summer I wrote Dream, I also wrote The Petrifaction of David Noreau, a goofy imitation of Robert Service, internal rhyme and all. I came later to Frost, and only slowly recognized his sensibility as mine, though turbocharged and beyond me as a writer. I love Frost most of all for his ability to focus on little details – the ice falling from birches onto the frozen crust below; the bereaved mother looking out an upstairs window at her husband digging a grave for their dead child – and making us stop to see and feel them.
Ib Bellew: The importance of the little detail is important to Charles Simic too. He once wrote that “This is where the poets come in. In place of the historian’s broad sweep, the poet gives us a kind of reverse history of what, in the great scheme of things, are often regarded as ‘unimportant’ events, the image of a dead cat, say, lying in the rubble of a bombed city, rather than the rationale for that air campaign.” I think Dream of Dragons plays on that theme throughout and uses a small boy and a boat to bring in all the emotion of immigration, of arriving, of being American in a way, or am I inflating your sail a little too much?
Willem Lange: Mm, yes, I think you are. Though the best storyteller I’ve ever known, an old Adirondack guide [named Bill], had (I see in retrospect) that gift of using the tiny detail – the smell of a hand lotion, the lash of a branch across a cheek – that was absolutely captivating. He always began with things you knew well, or wanted to believe you did, and then took you along with him on the story. His description of a big, mangy old bear sow rooting in his can dump one night; his frightened assistant, Frank, holding the five-cell flashlight over Bill’s shoulder so he could see to shoot; and the light (and Frank) disappearing as soon as Bill shot, while the bear growled and ran in circles through the cans looking for what had hit her. He told me the story almost 60 years ago, but it obviously made an impression. There were many others.
Ib Bellew: Name some poems you loved as a youth.
Willem Lange: Ulysses, Journey to Ithaca, Charge of the Light Brigade, Ballad of the Northern Lights, Bill the Bomber, Gunga Din…I am moved by the thoughts and actions of men in desperate straits. Cyrano “My panache!”
Ib Bellew: Were you ever enamored of Bob Dylan or talking of bathos of country western singing? Were you an odd man out, still liking Tennyson and Kipling rather than T.S. Eliot and Auden?
Willem Lange: Bob Dylan, no; I was busy raising kids and teaching when he was coming up, and couldn’t play the chords he used, anyway. Country and folk music, yes; I loved it – but more the old-timey stuff, like Jimmy Rodgers, Hank Snow (who named his son Jimmy Rodgers Snow), Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Burl Ives. Yes, I was kind of odd man out, anyway, because I read poetry at all. None of my friends would have known Eliot from Marshall Petain (or cared). We were all about camping, tramping, climbing, folk and square dancing, and whitewater canoeing.
Ib Bellew: Back to Tennyson and company: In Dream, I think you combine many of these poets’ different strengths: evocation of the natural world, epic allusion, the pace of ballad, moral and ethical issues. What else do you share with them?
Willem Lange: Dream, I think, builds on what you mention, but adds the old Scandinavian sense of doom that awaits even well-favored men who turn aside from, and put aside, the dreams that motivated them as young men.
Ib Bellew: You describe in your preface how the subject arose but can you expand on how you conceived the poem before you actually went off into the woods and wrote it down?
Willem Lange: I have no idea why or how it started. I was only two months into recovery from the traumatic end of a relationship I had considered lifelong, so my nerves were a little on edge. When I heard Marty’s story, I just grabbed it – just as I did, decades later, Favor Johnson’s. I didn’t have to go off into the woods. We were already in the woods, living in a big wall tent near the quarry. The tent was very homelike inside, with, among other conveniences, a desk and chair and my typewriter.
Ib Bellew: Had you written any poetry before?
Willem Lange: Yes, I’d been writing various terrible verses since about the age of four. Occasionally one found its way into an anthology. I’ve written very little overt poetry since then, but try instead to expand my prose into a metaphoric haze that I hope will produce the same subjective reaction.
Ib Bellew: Do you find it easier to bring out that “subjective reaction” in prose now rather than verse?
Willem Lange: Yep. Verse is a lot more work, and I find that it’s no longer natural for me. It also implies a serious, sober sensibility that I don’t possess; almost every thought or insight I have seems to have an ironic counterpoint. Dream is an exception, and it frightens me to say, “Here it is.”
Ib Bellew: When did you first come across the Icelandic sagas?
Willem Lange: Sagas…I don’t remember. But Dream did impel me to learn more about what I was trying to do. Some years ago I audited a freshman seminar at Dartmouth (Professor Gaylord) that was really helpful in understanding the sagas – Norse, Icelandic, and Teutonic.
Ib Bellew: You learned to sail in pulling boats, I think, and have stuck to coastal sailing so far. Judging from passages in Dream of Dragons, you hanker after a real deep water sail? Did you fancy The Old Man and the Sea?
Willem Lange: None, thank you. I favor a slow time, coasts and harbors and people, like Cavafy:
When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
I did like Old Man and the Sea a lot, though. It’s almost poetry, but verges on being mannered: Hemingway writing like Hemingway. But that’s about as close to deep water sailing as I want to get.
Ib Bellew: Tell me a little about your actual experience of Scandinavia. Did you go and see a Viking ship in the museum in Oslo?
Willem Lange: I have no ancestors in Scandinavia, except as the Norse imprinted a lot of northern Europe. My folks were Reformed Christian peaceniks from northern Germany who came here to avoid the Franco-Prussian War. But yes, I have been to Norway, as the leader of a tour group. Among other things, we did visit the Viking Museum and its fantastic ships, as well as Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram and Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki. I would go again in a heartbeat, but this time I’d ferry down to the Shetlands and Orkneys, across to the Faeroes, and on to Iceland, which I also found fascinating.
Ib Bellew: What was your longest epic voyage?
Willem Lange: In a pulling boat, from Hurricane island down East to Machias, Cape Wash, and Grand Manan. In canoes down over a dozen Arctic rivers, the longest over 200 miles to salt water. There were a few epics in there now and then.
Ib Bellew: Thank you for letting us publish your epic. As you say, “Here it is”. I am sure your readers will love it as much as we do.
