Professor Bang discusses her unique career trajectory from sociology to poetry and how she produced one of her most recognizable works, a pop-culture laden translation of Dante's Inferno.
[MUSIC PLAYING] MAX: Welcome to the new season of Northwestern Intersections, a Northwestern Alumni Association podcast. We'll be talking to alums about their career paths and the lessons they've learned along the way. Our guest today is poet and professor Mary Jo Bang.
Professor Bang has an incredible career trajectory, going from Northwestern to work in medicine, photography, poetry, and now higher education. She brings unique perspectives on changing careers, staying curious, and finding your passion. We will dive into all of these topics and more in this edition of Northwestern Intersections. Professor Mary Jo Bang, thank you so much for joining us.
MARY JO BANG: It's a pleasure to be here.
MAX: Now, you've had such a unique path to your current position. And we'll return to that theme a lot in this conversation. Let's talk first about your education, though. What did you study at Northwestern, and why?
MARY JO BANG: I actually came to Northwestern, in a sense, as a transfer student because I had gone to the University of Missouri, in Columbia, for a year. Before that, I went to the University of Iowa for a semester. So I had these three semesters, and I actually also had a child. And I had gotten married after that year at Columbia, Columbia, Missouri. Then I had a child.
And I was working. I wanted to go to Chicago. I had some friends there. And so I went to Chicago, and I got a job at Northwestern as the secretary of the foreign student office. And there I was at a university. And I'd always wanted to finish my college education, but it was very difficult now being a single mother and having to work full time.
But the director of the foreign student office, a man named David Utley, I asked him whether there was any way I might go out and take a class during the day. And he said, of course. As long as you get your work done, you can take whatever classes you want.
So I kept taking classes. And David Utley thought that I should go to school full time. But I didn't have any funding. And he made an appointment for me to see the dean of students, who told me that I wasn't smart enough to go to Northwestern. And I was a bit crushed. And there was no two ways about it. He said it several times, that the students at Northwestern were smart, and I wasn't, And that I wouldn't be able to manage. And so that was that.
I went back and told David Utley. And he was very disappointed because he knew me a little better than Dean [? Doney. ?] I was able to borrow enough money to go to school, taking out student loans. And I began studying sociology. This is during the late '60s, early '70s. And it was during the Vietnam War era. So many of us were concerned with questions of social dynamics and social change.
And so I studied sociology. And one of my professors, Andy Gordon, gave me a job as a research assistant. And he was also very encouraging. He, unlike Dean [? Doney, ?] thought that I was smart enough to be there. With his encouragement, I finished my BA summa cum laude.
And then he wanted me to do a PhD in sociology. And so I applied, and I was accepted. I'll say something else about that experience, which was at one point, I went to the financial aid office, and that person told me there were many colleges that were much cheaper. Why was I borrowing all this money to go to Northwestern? Why couldn't I just go to one of the city colleges?
And I explained to him, I wanted this education. And I've never regretted that. My education there was amazing. And I can only assume that it's continued to be that high quality of teaching and learning and the student body. So I'm very happy that I went there. And it meant the world to me that those two men, David Utley and Andy Gordon, supported my work.
And I'm still friends with Andy Gordon. And I don't know what happened to David Utley. I didn't stay in touch with him. But I should get in touch with him and thank him because it started everything off. Nothing would have happened without that.
MAX: Well, his intuition was absolutely right. You've had a fantastic career as a poet, as a professor. But before you moved into writing and academia, let's talk a little bit about the sociology PhD. And then the transition into being PA, where did that come from in your trajectory?
MARY JO BANG: Well, as I said, I was accepted into the PhD program. But I only stayed for a year. And after a year, I left Chicago for a group in Philadelphia that was doing anti-war work. And I went there with my child and drove across country in my VW bus.
And then as the war ended, the Vietnam War ended, I realized I needed to rethink this idea of career. And the question was, did I want to go back and finish my PhD or something else? And I got a job while I'm trying to sort that out as a secretary to a pediatric hematologist. And I became fascinated by medicine.
And so I thought, well, maybe I should train to be a nurse practitioner. And she said, no, you don't need to do that, because you'd have to go through nursing program. Instead, there's this relatively new role called a physician assistant. And I got accepted into the PA program at Saint Louis University.
So I moved back to St Louis, and I trained to be a physician assistant. And I worked for 15 years as a physician assistant. I actually moved to, after finishing the training program, moved back to Chicago. And so I practiced in the Chicago area and remarried and inherited a son, a stepson.
And we lived in Evanston, very close to the university, so it was full circle. And one day, through the slot, the mail slot, there came a flier from Northwestern University. And they were offering a program for women, specifically, at night.
The first semester would be a choice of three classes. One was a history course. The second was a writing course. And the third was how to understand football so that you could enjoy watching it with your husband.
So I had always wanted to be a writer since I was, I don't know, seven, eight, nine years old. And so the problem had been I never had time to write. Being a single mother and working full time, there was just no time. And I thought, well, I've always been an overachiever in a class, and so here's the opportunity. I have a class. I know I'll do the work. And we'll see what happens.
So I took that class on writing, and I loved it. And so did many of the other women in the course. Because we then asked the teacher if we could take the course again. And she said, she wasn't scheduled to take the course-- I mean teach the course, but that she would meet with us in her home and give us a private class.
And so I think it was 9 of us chose to do that out of 18. So we did another semester with her, at the end of which she said, I've taught you everything I know. But you seem to work well together. Why don't you think about continuing to meet as a writing group. And so we did.
And out of that, different people published books and articles. And so that's how I started writing. And then my then husband was transferred to London. And in the meantime, I took a photography class at the School of the Art Institute. And now I was really excited about photography, as well as writing.
So when we went to London, I tried to find a darkroom so I could continue doing photography. But a professional photographer doesn't want a stranger coming in and using their darkroom. But I found a degree program at the Polytechnic of Central London, that would allow me to do a BA in fine art photography in two years instead of four because I had a master's in sociology, and I already had a portfolio.
So I did that. We lived in London for three years. I finished that program. And when I came back, I came back to Chicago. And I thought, well, what do I do now? So how could commodify this background in writing and in photography?
So I thought, well, I could become a professional photographer and just maybe do that part time and then write part time. But actually, when you start any kind of business, it's a full-time venture. So there wasn't really any time for writing.
But I started getting commissions from advertising agencies and design agencies and doing photography. And then there was a recession. This was now 1990. I decided that I wanted to go get an MFA in poetry.
MAX: This is exactly what we like to hear. I think it's cool for listeners to see someone who's really an expert in their field, but who didn't necessarily take that linear route. And it's great to hear about how all of those experiences still accumulated and brought you to where you are now. And I'm actually really interested in hearing about these translations.
I think a lot of people are familiar with literature and maybe even poetry. But translating is a totally different art. What brought you into that space?
MARY JO BANG: When I was at Columbia, I took two translation workshops. I read a poem by an experimental poet named Caroline Bergvall. And what she had done was she made a found poem by taking the first three lines of Dante's Inferno in 47 different translations. These were all the translations that were on the shelves of the British Library when she began this.
I thought to myself, all these ways of translating those first three lines, how would I translate the first three lines of Dante's Inferno? And I started playing with what it would be like to put it into contemporary English. Because nobody did that.
I was struck with two things. One is that there were no two translations alike. And then, even the ones that had been done very recently, all seemed kind of elevated and archaic. And it seemed to me that perhaps what people were doing was gesturing to the fact that it was an old poem, that it had been written in the 1300s.
But the English being used wasn't the English from 1300s. We really would have difficulty reading that, but the English of the 1800s or 1700s, thoust and canst. And that's alienating in terms of actually feeling empathically one with this character, who's lost their way in a dark forest, and the right path has been lost.
So I started playing around with that language, and it was a lot of fun. And after I made several translations of it, I thought, well, what about the next three lines? And then I thought, that was so much fun, why don't I do the whole Inferno, which is 34 cantos? I translated the Inferno. It was published in 2012.
And then one day, I thought, well, I wonder what purgatorio is like. Then, that took me, I think, six years. And I finished it. And I finished it right at the beginning of the pandemic. And so I was here by myself and nothing to do. And I thought, well, there is Paradiso.
And it seemed like there were a lot of hours in the day that I hadn't realized, because I'd always had that project to go to. And so I started Paradiso and actually, now have just finished it. And that was only three years. So now that will be published in 2025, and I'll be finished with The Divine Comedy.
MAX: It's so interesting to go from being a PA to a photographer to a poet and a translator. And you've clearly put a really unique spin on translation. And you're also known for putting a unique spin on your poetry, something that critics have called hybrid poetry, maybe difficult to place within a well-defined category.
In your own words, what makes your poetry hybrid poetry? Could you share a little bit about what that means to you? And maybe, what's your inspiration for your style?
MARY JO BANG: Well, I think that term hybrid is something that was used, and it's not as much used today. But it was used when there was a clear divide between experimental poetry and more what was called mainstream poetry, academic poetry, formal poetry, traditional poetry. There were many names for it, but that was the divide, experimental and this other, which was a more traditional lyric approach to poetry.
And what happened was a lot of poets like myself enjoyed reading that experimental poetry. And we learned from it, and we learned some of the strategies. And we thought that those would be useful for our own poems, where our own poems continue to have a lyric component.
And what I mean by that is an attention to sound, an attention to that empathic connection that happens between-- often happens between reader and the page. And so that hybrid was a way to describe people who had appropriated these devices, strategies, et cetera, from the experimental mode and incorporated them in their poems. So that's what that means.
In terms of my own work, long ago someone asked me, when I was a baby poet, and I didn't even have a book, but I had read my poems someplace. And this was a photographer who asked me, what are your poems about? And being put on the spot and not having had time to think about what they were about-- you just intuitively make poems-- I came up with that they were about the difficulty of being a human being.
And I think that that still applies, although that doesn't address all the formal qualities that I'm interested in. So I'm interested in sound patterning. I'm interested in the expressive use of sound. I'm interested in how to create a poem that is open enough, so that the reader can enter it and make something for themselves and that the reader can participate in the meaning construction and slant that meaning construction whichever way they want.
MAX: So we've talked a little bit about your work and your career trajectory. I want to hear maybe some advice that you might have for young people at Northwestern or just leaving college. What's your secret to staying creative throughout so many different life experiences?
MARY JO BANG: I don't think it's a matter of intent. You don't decide to stay creative. It's a certain compulsion. And I think, to respect that compulsion, a lot of times we doubt that anything can come of what we're doing. And so we dismiss it, and we dismiss it so much, that we don't do it.
So I guess respect that desire because you don't know what's going to happen. If it's a matter of sketching, or drawing, or painting, or writing, or making music, just-- I used to sometimes tell myself, well, go write a bad poem. Because I knew that if that bad poem was on the page, I could do something with it. So go make a bad collage. Go take a bad photograph, and then do something with it.
And I think it's very hard, once you leave college, and you have that full-time job often-- I mean, most often, one does have to. And then if you have a family or even a partner, there are other kinds of ends. And it's very hard to respect that desire that might be always present, but at odds with doing the laundry or at odds with going out with your partner or paying attention to your child. And I think to carve out something for yourself from that is difficult. But if you can, it can be very useful.
And then the other thing is to find other like-minded people. Because that's one of the things that was very useful about the MFA program. I had been working by myself. I'd been writing by myself.
That group I told you about originally, those nine or seven people, that was long ago. But I'd continued writing by myself for myself all that time until I got to the MFA program. But once I got there, I made friends with other people who wanted to be writers. And those are still my-- that's my circle.
That that's my artistic circle, and they continue to be the people I write for and with and to. And they read my writing, and I read their writing. And I read their books, and they read my books. And we share an excitement about the next thing or the last thing.
And I think you need that in life. I mean, I think community-- we're social animals. So community is really important and equally important in artistic ways to have others who are doing something like you and not working in total isolation. So if you can't go to some program, like an MFA in art, if you can find others, sometimes, even when I was in Chicago before I did the MFA, and I was doing photography, I would see a photographer whose work I admired, and I'd call them up and say, could I come and hang out at your studio for a day?
And some of those people, I became friendly with, and I learned from them. And again, they celebrated my small successes, and that was very important to me. So find a community, respect that desire to make something, and go make something. And it doesn't have to be fully realized. It might not be fully realized. And sometimes, that work, that raw work, is more exciting to viewers and readers than something more polished.
So it's just a matter of confidence. And those two things go together. The community gives you confidence. And then by making that work, you become a member of that community.
MAX: Now, I want to also ask you about poetry abstract, your poetry as a whole. I think a lot of people have gotten back into reading since the pandemic. And sites like Goodreads and even people using TikTok and BookTok has really generated a lot of interest around literature. But there's still this image of poetry as something that's a little bit separate, maybe a little bit more complicated, a little bit more academic.
MARY JO BANG: Well, I think that people are intimidated by poetry because they don't understand the underlying-- the seed of it. The poetry that I think is most difficult for people is that poetry that doesn't have a through line where you're telling a story. And that's what makes people anxious, is give me it straight. They'll think, why are you messing it up? I don't understand what's going on here.
But there's actually a pleasure in not being totally certain. There is a pleasure in being able, then, to play with that language, play with that situation, and see where it takes your mind. So you know it's associational. It's there are words that make us think of other things.
And the best way to read poetry is to be curious. Why is the poet doing this instead of being straightforward? And oh, I see. Those two words go together. And then that pleasure of putting those words together and seeing how they spark, when you make the connections, it's more exciting than just being told a story.
MAX: So a few final questions for you, Professor Bang. You've had an illustrious career not only as a writer, but also as a professor. What are your current projects, and what's next on your schedule?
MARY JO BANG: Well, I'm still working on getting Paradiso ready for publication. I'm revising the cantos. I'm writing the matter, which is the introduction and the translator's note. And then at the same time, I'm writing poems that will be another book of poems.
I actually have a book of poems coming out in a few weeks. It's called A Film in Which I Play Everyone. But because those poems finished a year ago, I'm now writing the poems for the next book of poems. And those poems all have to do with women named Mary. And they're all acrostic. So each one has an artwork paired with it.
And so I began seeing artwork to do with the Virgin Mary and that would incite a poem and provoke a poem. And then at some point I exhausted the Virgin, and now I'm writing poems about other Marys and Mary Shelley, for instance, and Mary Queen of Scots. And the other day I found a riddle online. What is a Mary plus a Mary? The answer is a summary. And so that became the next title, which is a lot of fun.
And then I realized there's a flower called a marigold. And so that's a title. So I'm having a lot of fun just using this one little idea of Marys and finding some interesting artwork as well.
MAX: The Mary plus Mary one took me a minute. But I appreciate it. I appreciate the pun. That's fantastic. And before we close, are there any Northwestern shout-outs that you'd like to give?
MARY JO BANG: One of my former students, S. Yarberry, is now working on a PhD on William Blake. And I'm so delighted. And of course, I've already shouted out to people who were there during my tenure. And all of these people, all of these teachers, were so instrumental in giving me a model of what kind of teacher to be and what kind of scholar to be and what kind of person to be. And I'm so grateful for those years.
INTERVIEWER: If you could sit down for coffee with one writer in history, who would it be?
MARY JO BANG: Well, because I don't speak German or Czech, it would be hard to talk to Franz Kafka. But if I did speak one of those languages, it would be Kafka. Since I don't, maybe it would be Emily Dickinson, although she was so reclusive. I don't know that she would sit down with me.
MAX: What do you think Dante would have to say about your current translations? Would you ever want to sit down and talk to Dante?
MARY JO BANG: I have worried long about what Dante would think. He would respect the fact that I've tried very hard to be rigorous and that I have kept his name alive for an extra minute towards his 15 minutes of fame and extended it a little bit. Because there were a lot of readers. A lot of young readers are very intimidated by the very idea of a book written in the 1300s. And particularly, if the language is stilted, it gives the message, this is not for me. This is not of my moment.
And I've tried to make it seem as if it was or is of our moment because it is. It's timeless. And that's why it's lasted. It's really talking about what it is to be a human being and all of the difficulties of that.
And even though Inferno, for instance, is about-- well, all of them are about what happens after death. I don't think that's really what he was talking about. He's talking about how to be a good human being now. Yes, there is this risk of afterwards. But the fact is that the punishment of after is a result of how much damage you do now. So stop damaging the social fabric, so that you'll benefit, but also, your memory will benefit.
And everywhere he goes, he's asking people, who were you on Earth? And how did you end up this way? And it's all about how you're remembered.
MAX: Well, Professor Mary Jo Bang, thank you so much for joining us. And guests, join us next time for the next episode of Northwestern Intersections. You can find Professor Bang's work listed on the soon to be released Alumni Authors Catalog, launching after September 15, 2023, at northwestern.edu/catalog. Additional episodes of Northwestern Intersections can be found at alumni.northwestern.edu/intersections or through your favorite podcast service.
