Second Sight, poetry by Daryl Hafter
Interview by Ellen C. Schwartz
Daryl Hafter was born in New Jersey and grew up on the east and west coasts. She earned a BA from Smith College and later received a PhD in French history from Yale. She taught in the Department of History and Philosophy at Eastern Michigan University for 35 years, retiring in 2004. The poems in her new book were submitted to a contest run by the Finishing Line Press. Although they didn’t win the contest, the press wanted to publish them, along with the watercolors Daryl had painted to go along with them. The following is an interview I did with Daryl on May 13, after the publication of her first book of poetry, Second Sight (Georgetown, KY: Finishing Line Press, 2025). Daryl and I taught together at Eastern Michigan University for many years; we had a joint bat mitzvah in February of 2023.
Ellen C. Schwartz: Where did you grow up? Did that environment have any part in your writing of poetry?
Daryl Hafter: Yes! Like many other families during World War II, we moved to many places. I had already gone to six grammar schools by the time I got to high school. As an only child, I was always reading. When we landed in Seattle, it was an exciting place. My parents gathered an inspiring group of friends including librarians, writers, and a poet named Alice Frost (no relation to Robert). So publishing was always a goal for me.
We later moved to a utopian colony in New Jersey — rural and communitarian — called Free Acres. Close to New York City, in a time of much artistic and intellectual ferment, Free Acres was a place to which many free-thinkers, artists, and ideologues gravitated. It was an environment which fostered creativity.
ECS: When did you first begin writing poetry? What were your first poems about?
DH: I started writing in fifth grade. Even read today, those poems are not bad! They had punch, rhymes, and sass, about experiences and contradicting my parents.
ECS: Did you study literature in college?
DH: Some French literature and English classics. But not poetry. I felt as if all I needed to do was to read modern poets like T.S. Elliot and W.H. Auden. Sylvia Plath was in the class ahead of me. There was a poetry competition, and she won first place. I got second. Looking back, I think that was pretty good.
ECS: You are trained as an historian and taught and wrote about history for your whole adult life. How does your poetry relate to your other life as an historian?
DH: In both cases I am interested in the lived experience of people. History can be something of a religious enterprise: looking at human activity in society, their inventiveness, something divinely ordained. It is a fascinating endeavor, giving you the need to investigate deeply, explore how people managed, and to put that into context. As I was studying the French Revolution in college, I saw the people come to life. That visualization is the heart of history and poetry and the tie between them. In both cases my writing has become more spare, more direct, less jargon filled. And more visual.
ECS: What influences on your writing can you identify?
DH: Much influence came from my mentors in history. I have been my own mentor in poetry. I learned from reading modern poets like Auden (whom I heard speak at Smith). These poets wrote in blank verse. While both rhymed and unrhymed poetry is getting at the same thing, rhymed poetry is tighter, fitting into a framework. It restricts you as a writer, giving you discipline that can override meaning. I do like using internal rhymes; that is one of the things that distinguishes poetry from prose.
ECS: What are some sources of inspiration for your writing?
DH: First, nature; it must be a carryover from my days in Free Acres. Second, I also think religion is important, especially sermons. They expand the universe and show the world in its poetic form. And third, the Torah. At this point, I have come to feel that it is mine. This is in part due to my adult bat mitzvah (February 2023). The words of the Torah are fascinating and mysterious; they arouse questions and ideas to wrestle with.
ECS: Some of your poems consider happy events — your bat mitzvah, the dawn of a new year — and tragic ones — a friend’s loss of a child, another friend’s suicide. Is joy or sorrow more of an inspiration to write, for you?
DH: Both are. Something that moves you so the emotions and intellect are inseparable, speaking as one voice.
ECS: Which poem in the book is your favorite? Why? Which one do you consider the most successful? Why? Are they the same poem? If not, why not?
DH: The best, technically, is “The Old Ones.” It is imaginative and focused and has a message. My favorite is “the theological debate”; it jumps off the page, and deals in an unsolved way with a very profound dilemma. It is engaging, and seems to speak aloud because of its dialogue form. Other favorites are “The Happy New Year,” because of the imagery of the trees dancing, and “Learning the Torah,” which I wrote as I was preparing for my bat mitzvah.
ECS: What else would you like readers to know about you and your poetry?
DH: I have winnowed my poetry down to essentials. The descriptions need to fit the theme and make it deeper. The phrases should be clear and focused, not just decorations for their own sake. I guess I’ve come to the same conclusions about my history writing: no digressions to show off or muddy the point. Some people have said, “I’m not going to get your book because I can’t understand poetry.” But everyone who reads it is pleasantly surprised that they, themselves, enter into the poems, and see a new connection or perhaps confirm an old belief. I say, “Think of a poem as a thing in itself. You don’t say about a flower, ‘I can’t appreciate it because I don’t understand it.’”
The Old Ones
By Daryl Hafter
The old ones
live scattered through towns
buying bread and morning papers from the neighborhood grocers
and pacing out the small advantages that come to hand.
What have they to do with graves
placed close as bricks upon a wall
and tenements of gravestones bounded by an iron fence
that separates uncaring factories
from an oasis of the past?
The weighmaster calls:
Who has eighty? Who has ninety?
And the old ones flinch,
pretend they did not hear.
But he sees the telltale owning of that burden.
He calls them
and they find their path.
Frowning and resentful, they go where beds are laid,
each drawn to a narrow couch,
and on the mound sink down,
still muttering through sunken cheeks, their white hair wild with anger.
They lay themselves upon the ground,
and as their spirits filter through the earth,
the brown grains soothe their mouths’ complaints
and form a poultice for the brow like earth refining sugar,
and they can reconcile themselves to the snug berth.
Above,
tall gravestones shimmering with Hebrew words
shift slightly and accept another to the City of the Dead.
We look on and see that they belonged, not to us,
but to their generation
and their memories.
