Aaron Poochigian is an acclaimed poet and translator whose work bridges the ancient and contemporary worlds. His translations of Greek and Roman classics have earned widespread recognition, and his original poetry has appeared in prestigious publications including The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Times Literary Supplement. His latest work, “Four Walks in Central Park: A Poetic Guide to the Park,” represents a bold revival of didactic poetry—a form that teaches while it delights—bringing this ancient tradition into vibrant conversation with modern life.
In “Four Walks in Central Park,” Aaron combines his classical training with deeply personal experience, creating a work that serves as both a guidebook and a pathway to healing. The book chronicles four distinct walks through Central Park, each addressing a different condition of the soul: depression, disillusionment, exhaustion, and creative fallowness.
I recently had the chance to talk about his innovative book and creative journey. Aaron and I discussed the following:
1. What inspired you to write Four Walks in Central Park?
My intense encounter with the richness of the park was my primary motivation to write the book. Still, vast as it is, the park is not infinite. It has fixed boundaries, both on the map and in terms of what it offers. These limits were important in that they made a book which purports to capture the park as a whole doable. If the park were even larger and even more diverse, the possibilities would have been overwhelming, and I wouldn’t have been able to present it in a coherent manner. The attractions in the park are compressed by the park’s boundaries in the same way as my descriptions of them are compressed into the confines of the book “Four Walks in Central Park.”
Another impetus to write the book was a desire to write my own version of “didactic” poetry—that is, poetry that sets out to teach things. The Ancient Greek poet Aratus wrote a poem called “Phaenomena” that teaches the constellations. The Roman poet Vergil wrote “Georgics” to teach the reader how to be a farmer. The English poet Alexander Pope wrote, in verse, his “Essay on Criticism” and “Essay on Man.” I love those poems and wanted to do what they did, but for Central Park.
Third, I wanted to expand the range of what contemporary poetry does. When people today think of poetry, they think of lyric poems—that is, of strong feelings captured in relatively short bursts. There hasn’t been didactic poetry in English since the 1700s. I was eager to write “Four Walks in Central Park” because I wanted to show that the didactic mode was not outdated but perennially viable. I very insistently stuck to our own living idiom, the English of today, because, otherwise, the endeavor would have wound up being an exercise in creative anachronism—you know, like with the people who dress up like knights in shining armor and run around acting like they are living in the Middle Ages. I wanted to show that didactic poetry, however ancient its origins, can be vital in the here and now.
2. The book feels like a combination of a tour and a healing journey, with each walk addressing a different condition. How do these relate to your own experience?
In “Four Walks in Central Park” I tried to write literature that was part vacation and part exploration. It is meant to redress conditions from which I have suffered both in my creative life and my life in general: a depression that refused to see the value of new experiences; a disillusionment that rejected hope; overwork that left me creatively barren; and a fallowness that needed stimulation to coax ideas latent in me to the surface. I knew I was not unique in my ennui and thought that, in giving myself a refresher course in enjoying being alive, I could entice a similarly afflicted reader, the “you” in the poem, through the same process.
I worked to prove to my depressed self that there are sensory experiences out there that are well worth having. I fought off disillusionment with excited anticipation of what was waiting in the park around the next turn of the lane. I replenished my exhaustion and fertilized my fallowness by purposefully taking in sights, sounds and textures that would conjure the next phase in my creative life out onto the page. My daily visits to the park worked like revelations that coaxed me out of a sad and sorry state of mind. “Four Walks in Central Park” is, among other things, a record of my recovery from mental malaise (and a drug-addiction), and I tried to set it up so that it would have the same effect on readers who are suffering from the same or a similar condition.
3. There are so many wonderful instructions in the book to stop, look, listen, and reflect. What’s the overlying message — it’s not really about just being a tourist, is it?
The overall message of the book is that getaways and childlike play are what revive us. Rejuvenation comes from a movement backward, in relation to our age, toward purposefully frolicsome behavior. I wanted “Four Walks in Central Park” not just to embody but to enact that retreat for the reader.
After a long time working at my craft as a poet, I have come to realize that creativity isn’t the discovery of and adherence to rules but rather the unlearning of restrictions and inhibitions. It’s looking at the world with the candor and inventiveness of a child. The voice of the speaker of “Four Walks in Central Park” is that of a docent, a tour guide, but he is leading you-the-reader not through a dry, pedantic regurgitation of facts, but through Central Park as a fun house, a carnival of make-believe. He is leading you through a space like Alice’s Wonderland. Alice herself appears in the form of a sculpture in the park and in the form of a hero in the poem. I tried to let events unravel in the book in such a way that they trend, in Lewis Carroll’s words, “curioser and curioser.”
4. What impact do you want to have on readers who use this book to experience the park?
I am enamored with the Freudian concept of “regression in service of the ego.” It means “going backward” to childhood in the interest of one’s mental health. I wanted the book to promote purposeful childlike play in the reader. Poetry (and literature in general) move in that direction, but I made it a major theme in “Four Walks in Central.” It wasn’t hard to do so. The park itself, with its attractions for children and its veneration of characters in and writers of children’s literature, both encourages and exalts play. The park, in a way, wanted me to seize on that theme and run with it.
Play is what rejuvenates us. Play is what allows us to make the surprising connections that are the hallmark of creativity. So, yes, what I want readers to take away from the book is a mindset that has shed adult inhibitions and surrendered to the fertility of letting ideas frolic in fun and novel ways.
To learn more, visit Aaron Poochigian | poet and translator
