Interviews | June 19, 2020
Interview: A Conversation with John Balaban
Joe Walpole
Joe Walpole: Your most recent book of poems, Empires, is very much concerned with the decline of what we may call the American empire. Is it a departure, a new direction, from your previous work?
John Balaban: The scope is different, but the direction has always been there. I’ve always been more interested in public issues than in personal complaint. What’s different in this book is that in the first part, the issues are largely global and cultural regarding the rise and fall of empires and those moments where a shift occurs that might not be perceptible at first, but nonetheless the change is complete and done. Sometimes the shift happens and we don’t know it. Other times, like the World Trade Center bombing, we know right away that something’s changed in our lives forever. And these things have gone on not just recently but ever since humans built empires. Empires have a youth and vitality to them and they have a maturity and then they start to decay. My notion is that ours is in that period of decay.
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