No. ONE

RICHIE HOFMANN

Brooks Having connected through the magic of Instagram, we’ve known each other for a few years now, though we have met in the flesh only once, a couple of years ago in New York. But I feel close to you; I feel as if I know your heart. I felt that from the moment I first read your poems. We have such similar dispositions. In both your work and mine, desire and longing seem to be such driving forces.

Hofmann I think that’s right.

Brooks I don't know a lot about your upbringing, but I wonder if ours were similar in some way. I grew up in a loving, nurturing environment, but in a time and place where the me that was perceived by others and who I deeply, deeply knew I was felt so very much at odds with the kind of person others—my family, my peers, my church, my elders, everyone—obviously wanted me to be, hoped for me to be, and really insisted that I be. Masculinity and maleness were specific and narrowly defined, and as an effeminate gay kid, I knew and they knew that I did not fit within that definition.

Hofmann Yes.

Brooks As my work as an artist has developed and evolved, I have been able to investigate, define, and celebrate my own version of masculinity and maleness as well as my own ideas about sensuality and sexuality. The fact that I can do that still feels so new and powerful to me. In your work, I sense that same kind of reverence for experience. Does that resonate with you?

Hofmann Oh, it absolutely does. I sometimes look back on what I think of in a lot of ways as a happy and perfect childhood. I have a great family. I was very lucky to live all over the world as a kid. I was blessed to have siblings, and to still have relationships with them now. I feel like I had a very charmed childhood. But looking back, I'm sometimes shocked by the homophobia of the atmosphere, even in a liberal setting, even in a more or less tolerant setting. And I think you're right, it has to do with those expressions of masculinity that become expectations and the way that even from a very young age, I didn't fit them. And I think I always wanted to be elsewhere. I think it was a very productive experience in some sense, and I'm grateful I wasn't crushed by it, but I think it meant that I always wanted to be somewhere else. As a child, we lived in Munich, and that is probably the most defining experience of my life. My parents are American, but we moved to Germany when I was four. So my first memories are in Bavaria. I, of course, was alive before then, but I don't remember. I don't have a vocabulary for the memories that predate the Munich arrival. And being there, I was lucky to be exposed very immediately to history and art, which are just a part of South German culture in a way that is very different from the States. I don't think I would have had that exposure in the States. Classical music, which has been an abiding love in my life—specifically the music of Mozart which I fell in love with at age four—is still such an important part of my identity. It was all right there. There was a kind of continuity with the culture around it; it wasn't like an entirely privileged separate domain. It was kind of contiguous with everyday life in a place like Munich, the way maybe sports, for example, might be for other people in other places. It's just kind of an extension of the identity of a place. And I really longed to be in another time period. I always had that sense that I was supposed to be living in the 18th century, where that music was in the air, and where the chandeliers were being lowered and lighted. I just knew that's where I wanted to be. I had, of course, a very juvenile sense of what history was, and living in another time period would not have been glamorous or safe or comfortable or inspiring. It would have been utterly deadly in every way and deeply oppressive and hemmed in, but I had this feeling that I was in the wrong time, that I belonged somewhere else. So that exposure to the arts was so important to me.

Brooks How wonderful.

Hofmann I also had this weird experience because my parents were American, but I wasn't really American. I mean, I was by nationality on my passport, but as a four year old, I was able to learn to speak German very quickly compared to my parents who were in their late 20s, early 30s—whatever they were—and struggled with it. They also had this whole history of being American before they came to Munich that I was unencumbered by. And so…there’s maybe a way to read this as a kind of loneliness. I was kind of by myself as a kid: access to this language that my parents didn’t have, and I had this social life outside of the home because I went to school and it was an international school, so I was going to school with kids from many countries, and all of these kinds of lessons, and we were studying German, and studying piano, and doing all of that. I had this access to this other sociable side of life that I think also made me feel a bit distant from my parents. I felt somewhat alone. But I don't want to inflect it as entirely negative. I also think I felt grown up at a very early age because in some sense, the traditional boundaries between parents and children kind of got collapsed because of the crisis of living in another country. Even under happy circumstances, those kinds of dynamics collapse and in a way, we were closer because it was kind of our family there in this place where we weren't from and didn't belong, existing as a unit. And so I had all of these weird vectors of extreme belonging, extreme displacement, extreme closeness with my family unit as we confronted what it meant to be in this other place, but also kind of a real sense of being lost to my interiority as I cultivated an imagination—in English and in German—of what it would mean to live in another time, and what it would mean to be an artist, and what it would mean to engage in these sumptuous forms that just thrilled me in music, in architecture, and Rococo painting, and in all of these realms of feeling that I threw myself into as a child. None of that was a masculine way to be.

Brooks Not in a traditional sense.

Hofmann I have this memory of wanting a powdered wig so bad. That's all I wanted. I have this distinct memory of opening a gift—I don't know if it was Christmas or my Geburtstag or what it was—and just praying in that childlike way, praying that my parents had seen me fully and understood so deeply that what I needed above all was a powdered wig.

Brooks And did you get it?

Hofmann No, I never got it. But I have the memory of wanting it and the memory of just thinking, wouldn't it be amazing to be seen like this? I don't know if I articulated mom and dad, I really would like a Mozart-style wig. I had wanted them to read that in me. And maybe that's a fitting symbol for all of these strange, complex vectors of identity that I feel like I was sorting out at a very young age.

Brooks I have such a vivid memory of turning on the television—this would have been in the late 1980s, so I would have been somewhere around 10—and Elton John was on the screen. I later found out this was his concert Live in Australia, from 1987. I don't know if you've ever seen any imagery from this concert, but he is dressed as Mozart, in an enormous powdered wig. And I can remember being utterly mesmerized by this person who was passionately and skillfully making music. I don't think I was really aware of who he was or what he was singing, but the imagery and the emotion that emanated from what I was seeing was so powerful for me. I remember asking my mom who is that? And she said that’s Elton John. And I said—because I just thought it was amazing that this was obviously contemporary—why is he dressed like that? And she sort of paused and said, well, he's a homosexual. She said that in a way that was not meant to be derogatory; she was trying to find a way of explaining why this artist was being so flamboyant. For so long, in my head, I equated being homosexual with that kind of flamboyance and pageantry. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though it did scare me, and it felt somehow dangerous. It also represented a kind of singularity, a kind of independence. I don't think I wanted to wear the wig like you did, but I thought it was so cool.

Hofmann That’s such a beautiful story. It's so—I don't know—it resonates with me deeply, and it's so fundamentally weird.

Brooks It is weird, though weird doesn’t mean bad.

Hofmann Oh, God no. It's just so complex to me; I think that tension—flamboyant, and brash, and self-conscious, but also traditional—still seems so much at the heart of my complicated sense of self, at the heart of everything I make and do. I’m obsessed with the singular experience of intimacy and desire, and with the continuity of history. I was also thinking just now about art as a means of giving voice or empowering some sense of being able to be a self in the world, like you were invoking earlier. I was thinking about that and your mom’s use of homosexual as a word in your anecdote about Elton John. It reminds me that even in a childhood where I felt tolerated in the community to an extent, I also was labeled as a gay kid very early on.

Brooks Me, too.

Hofmann That was something everyone told me I was; it was not a process that I discovered on my own.

Brooks Everyone else…

Hofmann Knew it first.

Brooks It was the same for me.

Hofmann So before I had any real consciousness, before I even had any sense of sexual identity or even sexual feeling, I was already labeled as a homosexual person by everyone else, not just by other kids, but also teachers, and friends' parents. It was like a widely agreed upon phenomenon. And I've never thought about what poetry means in light of that. But I do wonder if there is some urge behind my work to assert some kind of originality or some kind of force or presence of self that maybe I didn’t have a chance to make as a child.

Brooks What a wonderful notion. I completely understand all of that. It was exactly the same for me. Everyone else decided who I was and what I was before I did, and what I was wasn't a good thing. Even people from whom I felt some sort of support or care saw this part of me that was either a horrible thing or at the very least problematic.

Hofmann And life-threatening! Yes, even people who loved and cared for you believed that being gay was a very dark path. I was born in 1987 and lived in suburbia, so the discourse of AIDS was not something that really touched my childhood until later. I remember seeing the national tour of Rent, and even at that point, which had to be 1996 or 1997, AIDS was still an extremely taboo subject in the world that I was growing up in. It was not something that I was even really familiar with as a kid. But the watershed public history moment from my childhood was the murder of Matthew Shepard [1976-1998]. It was this moment when all of a sudden the stakes of this desire I had or my identity or way of being or even way of being perceived were just raised to life and death. In a way, I feel like I can think of my childhood as before and after Matthew Shepard. That was the moment where the window to the private realm was fractured and there was like a world outside it and a history that was could possibly catch up with me.

Brooks I was in college, but it had a very profound effect on me as well. It was terrifying. And somehow it felt so personal.

Hofmann I wrote a poem about it called Book of Statues. It might be my best known poem, which is strange.

Brooks I know the poem; it is beautiful. I also wrote a poem, a very simple haiku, which was published in my university’s literary journal.

Hofmann I conflate these memories in my head of Matthew Shephard being murdered with a school project I was doing about Renaissance male nude statues, which then became my next love. And, of course, I got there through the neoclassical elements of 18th century Europe. There was just something about classical sculpture and the depiction of the body, these sumptuous and incredible male nudes from antiquity and from the Renaissance that I just became obsessed with. I was doing all of my projects on this subject. And, seen from a certain angle, this was definitely a way togive scholarly cover and justification for looking at naked men all day long. [laughs]. I can see it that way now, but at the time, I took it very seriously, and the poem conflates those two memories and in a way that activity and the vulnerability of those bodies became darkly inflected for me in that period of my childhood.

Brooks I understand that so well, and it’s akin to what it was like when I was a kid, that it was just understood—mistakenly, of course—that to be gay was to have AIDS and to have AIDS meant certain death, so being gay meant death. That’s a heavy weight for a kid to take on, or to be assigned.

Hofmann Yes.

Brooks On the subject of death…in an interview on the Deerfield Public Library Podcast, host Dylan Zavagno was asking you about your book ‘a hundred lovers,’ which had recently come out, and you remarked that while the publication of a book is a cause for celebration, there is also something funerary about it, because the work goes out in to the world and it isn’t yours anymore.

Hofmann Oh, yes.

Brooks As someone who has, in the last few years, frequently prepared solo shows of drawings and paintings, I understand the duality of that experience. On one hand, yes, it's great to have the work seen or read, but on the other hand, making the paintings or writing the poems is really the indispensable part of the endeavor, and once they are out into the world they become something else, much like in your poem Book of Statues, which reads His body, icon / of loss, growing meaningful / against his will. As your work goes out into the world, you don't really know what will happen with it, how it will be received, and who will claim. It ceases to belong only to you, the artist.

Hofmann That's right.

Brooks I have a different sort of grief for some of my own poetry, as someone who has been writing for many years and who has had poems published here and there but has not yet had a book published. I have been lugging around this manuscript for a long time; some poems in the manuscript are twenty years old, and maybe they've been published in a journal, but some of them haven’t ever been read. Many poems have fallen by the wayside, of course, but the best ones hang on as the manuscript grows and changes. Your use of the word funerary really struck me because I am so ready for these poems to go have a life beyond me, and in a way I can’t let them go because they haven’t died or transitioned yet.

Hofmann Oh, right.

Brooks These feelings are so similar yet so different.

Hofmann Yes. What really is exciting and tantalizing and moving is the experience of being inside the poem while it's getting made. I'm sure that it feels this way for you, too.

Brooks Absolutely.

Hofmann That is where you meet your own passion, and you meet your own intensity, and your own frailty and hatred of failure, and that loathing of your past self. It's where you confront everything that amalgamates to make the object. You and I, I think, both like objects, and that is the center of our work in some sense: making an object that has immediacy and perfection of surface. Whatever ideas you have for the piece are subordinate to the perfection of that object. I don't want to speak for you, but it's something I'm drawn to in your work. It's not like a conceptual game, it’s about the passion and intensity and perfection of the thing itself. These things stand on their own and they amalgamate your sources through self-portraiture, through historical rendition, and all of these time periods are collapsing, and these bodies are collapsing. And if there's any spontaneity in the work, it's from the coexistence of all of those floating elements that are harnessed emotionally to one another. That's absolutely how I think about poetry and making poems, and tethering experience to the page. That is where the tantalizing feeling is. Reading out of my own book is not tantalizing. No, that is a dead activity. You know what I mean?

Brooks I do.

Hofmann Just as an artist statement is not a tantalizing activity for me to write, though one has to write them fucking constantly in order to keep getting funding and all of that, so it's something we do. And people who are good at it get rewarded, but it has very little to do with that sense of being lost in the work. That's what I'm always trying to get back to. And moving from book to book to book, I always want to challenge myself and change, which is why I have to let go of the past. As painful as it is, my advice usually for young artists is that you won't miss it; just get rid of it and feel the presence and power of who you are now in this moment. I’m always trying to make that possible for myself as a writer. I think of myself primarily as a crafts person. As dumb as maybe that sounds, the problems that I am confronting are emotive and technical, and I'm constantly trying to think how do I do this in a way that gets it closer to my vision this time? I feel like I've been able to master a certain kind of poem, and then the challenge is how do I do this other thing? How do I change and learn more about who I am through technique?

Brooks Neither you nor I write a poem in order to have a book. You write a poem because you have to write a poem.

Hofmann Yes.

Brooks Although having a book is great. [laughs]

Hofmann Right; it’s a wonderful thing. But it’s not for me.

Brooks Of course not. You write a poem because you have to write a poem and because your observation, your experience, your expression overwhelms you to a degree that you have to make something of it. And the same is true for painting. Of course, I want to have exhibitions, and I certainly want my work to be seen, but that's not why I do it. I do it because I have to do it. I want to make these things. And while there are moments of ecstasy in the making, most of it is very challenging, but the challenge is part of the pleasure. If it were easy, it wouldn't be worth it.

Hofmann No, if it's easy, you're doing it wrong. I have students who are getting better and better at writing poetry, and they experience this every year, and it thrills me because it's true to my experience, which is that the better you get at art, the harder it gets to make it.

Brooks I totally agree, particularly with painting. I have learned so much in the last twenty years about oil paint. A few years ago a curator said to me—in a derogatory way—that I was “still learning to paint.” Well, of course. Any painter is always learning to paint. The more that I know, the more experience I have, the more I understand how the possibilities of the material are truly limitless. I think the same is true for language. There isn’t a threshold one crosses where your attitude becomes oh, now I know how to write any poem. That's not how creativity works.

Hofmann No, and the more you have in your body of work, the more you need to seek out new terrain, new shapes, new colors, new feelings.

Brooks Totally. And that seeking is the point.

Hofmann Yes. For me, it has to do with subject matter in part, but it also has to do with some kind of technical problem. Writing my first book Second Empire, I was just kind of flailing around. I was deeply digesting my sources from historical poets and contemporary poets. I was thinking about my identity. I was thinking about Benjamin Britten. I was thinking about Antinous. I was thinking about James Merrill. I was thinking about all the things I was thinking about and trying to make something work. In a hundred lovers, I was reading Guibert and I wanted to capture something of a diary-like feeling. I wanted the poems to feel dashed off and contingent and disposable, which I don't think is the vibe of my first book, so I wanted to experiment with that.

Brooks Oh, I love Guibert. Crazy For Vincent devastated me.

Hofmann Yes. The new book I’m writing is called The Bronze Arms. It comes out next year, and it's about childhood, which is something I haven't really written about, interestingly, in light of our earlier conversation about what it means to come of age as an artist and a gay person, and to reach past even a happy childhood in a world of threat. It centers around the near-death experience I had as a kid in a pool on the island of Crete. I remember walking around and being fixated in that kid-like way about the fact that none of the statues had arms. Now, of course, I understand this is due to the erosion and degradation of time and that extremities are more fragile compared to the torso and are easily knocked about over thousands of years or lost as the result of a shipwreck or whatever the cause may be. But as a kid, they were so uncanny to me. I thought they had made them that way. My juvenile historical imagination has already been invoked once, but I had these kinds of fixations on that. And the next day we were in the pool and I didn't have my floaties on, and I lunged from the wall; I don't know what I was doing. And the next thing I know, it's my father's arms that are pulling me out of the water, sparing me from death in this very fraught place, Crete, where they send the virgin boys to die. That is the center of the book, and I genealogize all these desires through that kind of experience.

Brooks Where in Crete were you?

Hofmann I don't know. It’s a place probably replete with German tourists.

Brooks I ask because I've been to Crete a couple of times.

Hofmann I don't even know. And in a way, the story has become so central to my life, it’s almost kind of mythological. I don't remember it, except I remember the retelling of it. I don't even remember the details, I just remember the stakes and I remember like what it felt like to be rescued. And I knew that to express all of this, I needed a new technique, because I can't write a diary-style book about this because this has a much more complex sense of time, whereas a hundred lovers, everything takes place in a single moment. Like, you smell the smell, and the lover is there before you, and then he's gone. There's that immediate, sensuous, misty moment. And in this next book, I needed time periods to collide and to be interchangeable, and to float in and out of one another. I needed to harness a more mythic atmosphere to the book somehow. So those were technical problems that motivated me; it wasn't just that I need to tell this childhood story, but that I have to find a poem that can accommodate the story. And for me, that's going to be a question of lineation. It's going to be a question of syntax and enjambment. It's going to be a question of fragmentation, a question of tone, an image. That’s what brings me to the page, again and again and again. I tell myself: you’ve mastered one thing as an artist. You've gotten really good at writing a certain kind of Richie Hoffman poem, and it will not serve you ever again. It worked once, and you were damn lucky that it did. But now, you're starting from some new place. You need a new shape. You know, I love beautiful porcelain tea cups, but you can't drink every kind of drink out of them. It just won't work. You need to forge a new vessel, and it needs to be bigger, and it needs to be colder, and it needs to feel a certain way on the lips and in the hand.

Brooks That’s a beautiful thought.

Hofmann Thank you. You draw it out of me! [laughs]

Brooks It’s obviously in there. [laughs]

Hofmann I’ve been thinking about your work Islands Are Not Forever, your large-scale continuous drawing. I didn't get a chance to see the exhibition, but I ordered the set of postcards so that I can see them all and see them up close.

Brooks Oh, thank you. Of course the work is better in person.

Hofmann Still, I’m grateful to have them, not having been able to see the work in the flesh. I love the way that that work of yours handles time. I don't know if temporality is even something you think about as visual artist, but I think it must be. The way that those pieces stage time and stage temporal experience, and the way those figures interact feels much akin to what I'm trying to do in this next book.

Brooks Absolutely, temporality is a huge part of what I’m thinking about when making that work, or really any work. It's interesting that you bring this up while we’re talking about childhood because the image of the boy in the first panel is me, from a photograph that was in my hometown newspaper in 1985. Summer kids playing in the hose, that sort of thing. Islands Are Not Forever is a project that I will continue to work on perhaps for the rest of my life, and each panel runs into the next. In that first panel, I’m standing in front of the Capitoline Wolf, borrowed directly from one of Herbert List’s photographs, and on the left side there is just part of an arm, which actually belongs to my neighbor and childhood friend Andy, who was spraying me with the hose. But even though that is panel number one, and there's nothing I made that came before it, neither time nor history began with me, of course, so I wanted there to be a glimpse of existence before me, though the viewer will never be able to know what it is completely. Just as I know that loss is something that is hugely important to your work, the same is true for mine. I had been thinking about these drawings as, among many other things, partly a record of accumulation, an amalgam of experience and influences and figures from history, figures from my personal life. All of that can be seen as just an increasingly growing pile of things. When I had the show last year at MARCH in New York City, so many people who saw the show were so complimentary about the work, which was wonderful, but everyone—many collectors included—kept saying oh, I don't want to break it up.

Hofmann How many panels were there?

Brooks Fourteen.

Hofmann One for each line of the sonnet.

Brooks Exactly. That is also all that would fit in the space. [laughs] As I was talking about this dilemma with people, I felt like I don't know how many times I can reiterate that this is a project that I intend to work on indefinitely, so, depending on how long I live, there will be, I don’t know, one hundred, two hundred panels, so there is no way the whole series will stay intact. Ideally, of course, it would be brought back together one day for a museum show. But in those conversations, I realized that I hadn’t fully understood my own work. As I said, I had been thinking about this work as some record of accumulation—and it is that—but actually the work is more attuned to loss, and it is the loss that is most important for me to emphasize. That's why the drawings are broken, and more pointedly, why some of the figures in the drawings are fractured. I want people to feel the loss because so much of what we live through is colored by loss. Even if you came into the gallery on opening night and bought all fourteen drawings, you’d still be missing something from before the first panel and after the last panel.

Hofmann Oh…that's why it's islands are not forever when the imagery suggests that islands are forever. It's a work of both accumulation and dissolution, of self, of memory, of history, of fragment. There are so many bodies and they are also lost, too, the minute they’re rendered on the page.

Brooks Yes, and some of them represent figures from history like Marlene Dietrich, who is, in some ways, lost because she's no longer living, and her body was buried in Berlin.

Hofmann And it doesn't look like it used to anymore.

Brooks Right. So she is lost, but then because she is preserved on film, she is also present in some way. And the other figures are friends, lovers, acquaintances, some of whom are still in my life, and some of whom are not, and maybe some who are moving in and out of my life, and some who will definitely never come back into my life.

Hofmann Yes, of course. And the title?

Brooks The title of that work is taken from a W.S. Merwin poem. I love his work. But after I had already titled these works, I had been reading—well, actually listening—to a Muriel Rukeyser record of her reading her work, and there’s a poem called Islands.

Hofmann Oh?

Brooks Yes. It reads:

O for God's sake

they are connected 

underneath

They look at each other

across the glittering sea 

some keep a low profile

Some are cliffs

the bathers think  

islands are separate like them.

So it reiterated that both things are true: islands are not forever and they are forever.

Hofmann Yes. Well, there is accumulation and now I’m thinking of accretion, and there is also, of course, Donne comparing men and islands: no man is an island. That seems to be so much behind the work as well.

Brooks Yeah, and actually that really relates to something I was thinking about relating to your work, which aligns with my work, which has to do with desire. The desire to connect with another being, with another body, with another man, to inhabit in a way, to possess in a way—not in the negative sense—

Hofmann But sometimes in the negative sense, too.

Brooks Yes. But no matter what, there is always a separation. There is always disunion.

Hofmann No matter what.

Brooks There's always, always a separation. That’s such a sadness, isn’t it? One of my most significant muses—or my most significant—I have never wanted to be inside someone, literally and figuratively, as much as I wanted to be inside him. And the feeling was mutual. But no matter how intense, and real, and overwhelming that feeling was, two beings can never truly coalesce. It can never be. The desire is insatiable.

Hofmann Yes. And then desire becomes its own figure to contend with. It’s always demanding you be together and you are together and apart and together and apart. It becomes its own kind of intoxication.

Brooks Yes.

Hofmann That’s beautiful. That's breathtaking.

Other Swans conversation No. Four

Richie Hofmann’s new book of poems, The Bronze Arms, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf. Hofmann is also the author of A Hundred Lovers(Alfred A. Knopf, 2022) and Second Empire (Alice James Books, 2015). His poetry has appeared recently in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Yale Review, as well as the Best American Poetry anthology. His honors include the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. The recipient of a 2025 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he teaches at the University of Chicago.