With Keith at home near Middletown, Connecticut, ca. 1966. Photograph by Walt Odets, courtesy of Rosmarie Waldrop.

I first heard Rosmarie Waldrop read when I was seventeen, visiting my elder brother at Brown. She was reading from what would become Reluctant Gravities (1999), the third book in the trilogy of prose poems later collected as Curves to the Apple (2006). I was utterly transfixed and utterly baffled. The sentences had familiar shapes—many had the arc and feel of logical propositions—and yet something strange and unaccountably beautiful had happened to them. Their vocabularies had shifted, often toward a more lyrical register, producing new arrays of music and significance while also somehow heightening my experience of grammar itself. In the nearly three decades since that first encounter, I have come to see that Waldrop’s experiments with found grammar—with taking sentences from, say, Wittgenstein, and then retrofitting them with new language—constitute an innovation on the order of Hannah Höch’s experiments in photomontage, or John Cage’s use of prepared pianos. On a warm day this past January, I took the train from New York to Providence to ask, among other things, how that breakthrough came about, and to piece together the genealogy of this poetic form.

Rosmarie Waldrop, née Sebald, was born in Kitzingen, Germany, in 1935 and migrated to the U.S. in 1958 to join Keith Waldrop, her soon-to-be husband and frequent collaborator, who was then a graduate student at the University of Michigan. After earning comparative literature degrees at the university, they spent a few years teaching at Wesleyan before settling in Providence in the late sixties. “In crossing the Atlantic my phonemes settled somewhere between German and English,” Waldrop has written. “I speak either language with an accent. This has saved me the illusion of being the master of language.” One continuity of her writing has been this alertness to discontinuity, to the fissures in a phrase or form. In A Key into the Language of America (1994), a poetic reworking of  Roger Williams’s 1643 study of the Narragansett language, she unsettles the colonial authority—masterfully undercuts the mastery—of the sentences she torques and splices and recombines into new configurations. In Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès (2002), Waldrop speaks of translating not only Jabès’s writing but “the silence behind it.” And carefully calibrated silences are everywhere in her work, including in the novel The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter (1986), a beautifully orchestrated counterpoint of personal and collective histories, of the silences within a family and the silenced of Hitler’s Germany.

Waldrop is at once a towering figure—she has written some twenty-five books and has translated more than twenty from French and German, including the work of Paul Celan and Jacques Roubaud—and an unassuming one, suspicious of the grand political pronouncements of the avant-garde and, despite her reckoning with historical memory, more interested in the aleatory than the polemical. To the generations of writers who have passed through their home, the Waldrops have communicated, through their art and example, that a total commitment to literature is compatible with—perhaps depends upon—not taking yourself too seriously, that a lifelong devotion to poetry should involve a sense of its absurdity (or at least of the absurdity of poets). 

This mixture of rigor and playfulness also characterized the Waldrops’ work as publishers. For more than fifty years, Rosmarie and Keith ran the legendary small press Burning Deck—a DIY operation (the letterpress was in the basement of their house in Providence) that became a vital conduit for new writing from several languages. My favorite Burning Deck books include works by Lyn Hejinian, Mark McMorris, Marjorie Welish, Dallas Wiebe, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, but every poet I know has their own constellation of enabling titles published by the Waldrops. If Burning Deck had an orthodoxy, it was openness. 

And I have only ever known the front door to the Waldrops’ house to be unlocked—you let yourself in, but to a different world. The house is so full of books it seems made out of books, there is a fascinating object or artwork wherever you look, including many of Keith’s collages, and yet the house is neither cluttered nor overly curated. It is a kind of Wunderkammer gently organized by the sensibility of  “the third Waldrop,” to borrow a phrase from Roubaud, who was naming the author of  Rosmarie and Keith’s collaborative poems, which are collected in Well Well Reality (1998). Rosmarie and I spoke over two days in her living room, where countless visitors have been given a stack of Burning Deck books and good wine; she remains perilously quick to refill your glass. In my memory, Keith was there beside the fireplace, listening. In reality, he died in the summer of 2023.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve said that you first turned to collage to get away from writing poems about your “overwhelming mother.” But when you looked at the collage poems later, they were still about your mother!

ROSMARIE WALDROP

Yes. 

INTERVIEWER

In what way was she overwhelming? 

WALDROP

She had ideas about what I should be like, and they didn’t fit. They were about etiquette some, but more about character.

INTERVIEWER

Did she have a job?

WALDROP

No. She had wanted to be a singer, and she hoped that if her kids could learn to play the piano, they could accompany her singing. That did not work out with any of us three.

INTERVIEWER

Was she talented?

WALDROP

I have no idea. I was just irritated by the whole situation.

INTERVIEWER

Was part of her difficulty attributable to the sense of a frustrated artistic ambition?

WALDROP

Very likely.

INTERVIEWER

Somewhere you write about your mother, very late in her life, bursting into tears and saying you had no grandparents. Did you know her parents?

WALDROP

No. There was a photo of her and her mother carrying me in a kind of carrier between them. I couldn’t have been more than three or so. But I don’t remember my grandmother. My mother quarreled with all her family—and she had nine siblings!

INTERVIEWER

At least she was consistent. Was she the dominant personality at home?

Waldrop, at center, with her twin sisters, Dorle and Annelie, 1939. Courtesy of Rosmarie Waldrop.

WALDROP

Definitely. My father couldn’t stand up to my mother in anything, except money. He made a big mistake by never telling her what his salary was, so she always suspected that he had more than he was letting on, and that he had a mistress who was getting most of it.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about your father.

WALDROP

He taught phys ed at the local high school. He read the German classics, which were in the house, and quoted Schiller constantly, without attribution. Once, when I was sick as a child, I started to read Schiller’s plays, and that was very amusing, because I recognized immediately all the things my father would say. He also read a lot about astrology. He was nominally Catholic, but really a pantheist. His Sunday devotion was to go out into the woods. 

INTERVIEWER

Is it true that one of your siblings thought of being a nun? What I know of them is from The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter, so I might be confusing fact and fiction.

WALDROP

That was Annelie. She entered the Carmelite order, a very small convent of only twenty-four nuns. Her novitiate was very difficult, partly because she couldn’t shut up and they had a rule of silence. She sometimes had to wear a piece of wood strapped over her mouth. When it came to taking her vows, the convent voted against her. Thank God. But it crushed her. She had this big ambition to become a kind of saint, to spend her life praying, and that she was refused was very hard for her. She became a crusading anti-Catholic after that. Kitzingen, our town, was partly Catholic and partly Protestant, and the schools were divided by denomination.

INTERVIEWER

Did you know any Jewish people?

WALDROP

I did not. Jewish people, for me, were the ones in the Bible. Though some kids of my age did have encounters. I’ve talked with an old classmate about this, whether he had met any, and he told me a story about a time another classmate challenged him to say “Heil Hitler” to a particular Jewish woman who was known to always go to some store pretty late in the day. So, Bitz, the guy I thought of as my friend, did it, not quite understanding what he was doing. The woman just said “Grüß Gott,” which is a religious greeting—“May God greet you”—and carried on. Later, when he became aware of what he’d done, he was very ashamed. 

INTERVIEWER

What are your first memories of the war? Was it something you were kept from knowing about?

WALDROP

Oh, no, because Hitler was on the radio the whole time. I have an image of my father, my mother, and myself sitting after dinner at the little table and listening to Hitler’s speech. I remember the hysterical voice—going up and up and up and up and becoming hoarse and breaking. I just remember that sound event. When his speech was over, there was the declaration of war. My mother said, “Our leader will take care of it.” 

INTERVIEWER

“It’ll be quick.” 

WALDROP

Yes. I think she bet on four weeks. My father joined the Nazi Party because he didn’t want to get fired, but then he was taken in by Hitler. He thought Hitler would do something for the not-so-rich people. Gradually he cooled a little, but he was taken in by the rhetoric.

INTERVIEWER

How old were you when Kitzingen was bombed?

WALDROP

It was in February 1945—I was nine and a half. 

INTERVIEWER

Do you remember being terrified? Or were you somehow oblivious to the extremity?

WALDROP

No, I was terrified, and so were the grown-ups from all five floors of the building, racing down to the cellar at the first sound of the alarm for planes approaching. What I remember is that I was trying to burrow into a heap of potatoes on the cellar floor. I just wanted to hide down deeper. The town was largely destroyed.