Interview with poet Richie Hofmann, 2025 Guggenheim Fellow

Richie Hofmann is a poet and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow. He is also the recipient of a 2025 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. He is the author of A Hundred Lovers (2022) and Second Empire (2015), and his work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker and The Paris Review. He currently teaches in the Humanities Core at the University of Chicago.

When did you begin to think of yourself as a poet? 

It wasn’t until graduate school (in English literature) that I thought writing poetry might be a serious part of my life. Up until then, I had wanted to be a scholar, to write books about poetry. I was lucky to take a workshop with Natasha Trethewey, and she was the model of a scholar-poet; I realized that there didn’t have to be a stark distinction between the writing of art and the writing of history.

When did others begin to see you as a poet?

I was lucky to be taken seriously by my mentors, who showed me the way. Everything I have is a debt to their generosity. I worship my teachers and hope to pay my debt to them by being a teacher myself.

What was the first thing you had published that made you feel really proud?

Publication is an uneasy process. Alongside feelings of accomplishment, one also feels a little exposed and embarrassed. I was proud of the first poem I ever published, called “Late Summer” in Literary Imagination when I was 23, and I also knew I had a long journey ahead to becoming the artist I wanted to be.

Do writers have a responsibility to the public or only themselves and their inspiration or ideas?

I think writers are responsible to their own fantasies and visions. Sometimes those involve public matters and sometimes private—but I don’t see a hierarchy between these two realms, if they are, in the end, in fact, distinct.

How would you define a poem? What makes it distinctive from prose or a song or anything else?

A poem is inexhaustibly interesting to me. It rewards reading and rereading over a whole lifetime. Of course, poems have a lot in common with other forms of literature – and songs, as well. But the older I get, the more I think that the kind of compression that poems require and enact is magic; they are endlessly elastic and contain whole worlds in lines and images. I can’t say how it works, exactly, but I feel its power, as a writer and as a reader.

Where do your ideas come from?

I am inspired by what I read—and from visual arts and music. I would say most of my poetry—even the most personal love poems—are also responses to art I encounter and am transformed by. The poetry of Cavafy, for instance, or Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Architecture and sculpture from the classical world. Solo piano. I am moved by the vastness of artistic constellations and humbled by the idea that my voice is a small part of an enormous chorus.

For many artists, it can be a struggle to know when a work is finished. How do you know when your poems are finished? How do you decide when to stop revising?

It’s a difficult question to answer, as it’s never quite the same from poem to poem. But like clay the thing starts to harden—and then it’s either of use or trash. Often, for me, the best revising strategy is to start a new poem entirely. After many versions and drafts, I will know the one worth keeping, if any!

If we a had a spectrum for poets and how they approach life, with Emily Dickinson on one end and Rimbaud on the other, where would you fall?

I love this question! I’m sadly not a recluse nor an enfant terrible. I am passionate and irresponsible in my way, but I mostly long for a quiet life of traveling, looking at art, eating delicious food and drinking wine, learning about languages and histories, and talking with friends and lovers.

You also teach, how does that relate to your work?

Teaching is my passion and true calling. Nothing excites me more than helping young and old people unlock some element of their imagination – or to help them see practical strategies for executing their artistic vision. Teaching, for me, feels no different from making my own poems. I see myself as a craftsperson and all problems of the poem (mine or others) as problems of craft with craft solutions.

I'm sure you get asked to comment on the significance of the arts from time to time. What is your go-to way of explaining the value of the arts to individuals and society? Is there another way you'd like to explain it, but don't often feel is the right moment to say it?

I can’t imagine a life not immersed in art—it is central to our humanity. I’m often asked to justify it, somehow, for committees and money people. But in the studio, the classroom, at the poetry reading, in the galleries, in the classical music concerts in the park, it needs no justification—everywhere I look, I feel wonder and connection, thinking and feeling.

You were just announced as a Guggenheim Fellow. Congratulations! How does that feel and what do you think it will mean for you, in terms of how you approach your work?

Thank you! I am truly honored by the fellowship, and the vote of confidence and belief in my work from my peers. In practical terms, it will mean I can spend another year working on a new poetry project, with some freedom from work to travel and research in the archive. In spiritual terms, it feels like I am entering, perhaps, after a long emergence, my middle career and my middle age.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers, of any kind?

The most important advice I’ve gotten is to cultivate your work, to give it priority and to give it the privilege of time; it takes time and commitment to make things. No one else is waiting for your art, or demanding it from you, so it must be a priority for you—even when life is busy and distracting.

What are some books that you love enough to recommend?

 I will recommend the work of four poets I have been teaching in a political love poems class: Gwendolyn Brooks, Eavan Boland, Adrienne Rich, and Solmaz Sharif—I am learning so much from their artistry and advocacy, and I am moved to think you might, as well.

 Interview conducted by Elizabeth Stice