Interview with Ace Boggess, February 2004
(The Adirondack Review)
The Dissolving Island is everything traditional about poetry publishing: flat-spined, modestly-numbered paperback from a university press. It marks the newest step in a career that has seen your work in many of most prestigious literary magazines. At the same time, however, you have not resisted publishing your work on the web, including as I recall, work as far back as early issues of The Cortland Review. What is your take on internet magazines and web publishing in general? How do you decide which online magazines work for you as a writer? Has web publishing helped your career or introduced you to other readers? What about your favorite online magazines?
I am a book person, and I like nothing better than to hold a new book of poems or a literary magazine in my mitts. Like other poets, I resisted what seemed to me the ephemeral nature of publishing on the internet. In the first place, I don't really subscribe to the notion that poetry writing is for everyone. At the same time I've given a lot of thought both to the nature of the worldwide changeover from analog to digital paradigms and to the nature of poetry as a metaphysical, as opposed to a material, manifestation of language use. In the first instance, it seems to me that one of the key differences between analog and digital is the fact that digital, because it samples gaps--emptiness--stands in elegiac relationship to that which it represents. Ironically, its greater "realism" is bought at this price, whereas analog, which means--in this case, the typewritten or printed page--adheres to some notion of grounding and tracing. The fact of the matter is, as poets have insisted from Horace to Shakespeare to Mandelstam, poetry is metaphysical, in the sense that the means by the which poems are disseminated may vary enormously. Whether it lies on the cold bed of the printed page, as pixels on the internet, or as memorized niches in the human Theater of Memory makes little difference to the fact of poetry. The classical boasts on behalf of the poem as the preferred memorial for memorable deeds and persons still seem to have an enormous warrant--in spite of the fact that the spirit of these boasts has been occluded by the coming of other, more conspicuously representational means--photography, movies, video. It's an illusion to think that accuracy of representation has anything to do with the quality of memorialization through praise and elegy. That feat can best be accomplished with the wholesale trading out of the representational for the metaphorical, the analogous for the metonymous, the personal for the public. This is all a fancy and unnecessarily complicated way of saying that poetry sits as well a the website as it does with the books of Alfred A. Knopf. The cybernetic and the metaphysical are, after all, just two ways of expressing the same thing.
Once I was able to think through my own objections to poetry websites, I realized that I might as well embrace them. Which is not to say that I send lots of poems to online magazines. As a matter of fact, all of the poems I've published online have, with one exception, been as result of solicitations. Still, I hope to send more of my own poems to online journals. Poetry websites, including the personal websites of poets, seem to me to be of enormous literary value, quite apart from their ability to be instantly ready-to-hand. In addition to the manifest literary (I want to say "printed," but of course they aren't printed) works, there is often the voice of the poet, and as broadband increases, we will also see an increase of images and video. Online poetry readings. Add to this the fact that the readership is potentially global and you have the possibility of a renaissance (of course every other art and discipline is no doubt thinking the same thing!). True, it doesn't "last," but poetry gains in the ability of shape-shift too, and this ability the internet provides. I was drawn to The Cortland Review initially because it featured the voices of the poets reading, as well as useful links, and it's still my favorite online magazine. I think it's done a creditable job of reaching an international readership. I know, for example that my poems have been read in Europe and Australia--and I'm a small-press poet. Imagine that. The internet, then, explodes our native provincialism--a good thing for American poets and anybody else, don't you think? Having embraced this technology, I have to add that I am nonetheless concerned that too much time in front of the computer screen detracts from a commitment to reading and following arguments through their complexities and depths. In fact, computers seem to legislate on some level against depths in favor of "surfing," with the superficial implications of that. My fear is that we could wind up with generations of people incapable of understanding how arguments work, how cases are made and reality described. It's a fear that's not just political.
In terms of your writing, your poems often fall into perfectly-carved, symmetrical stanzas and seemed to be evenly balanced as well between image and idea. Where do you begin a poem? With thought, scene, line? Do you often have some grander concept of what each poem should be, or is a piece more likely to develop as the story goes along? How do you know when a poem is finished? Are you an obsessive editor who keeps reworking until a poem is published, or beyond that? Or is there something that just tells you to leave it alone?
I'm glad that you think these poems so lapidary. I rather see them as only approximately responsive to the demands of form--or as lines impersonating rather than embodying the rigors of poetry. But I know that a lot of poets have anxieties about authenticity. It's the compliment the practitioner pays the art. The truth is that I rarely know what a poem is going to look like going in. It's only after the poem and I are well on our way that I begin to get an inkling of the kind of poem it's trying to be. I notice that my way of saying this implies that the poem has its own notions about coming into being and growth, and this is accurate. Language after all, as Brodsky always said, is greater than any of its practitioners and therefore reflects the lesser's relationship to the greater, whether we acknowledge it or not. Some philosophers tell us we have a "truth-tracking" mechanism; that is, we experience as intimations of rightness when we're onto something. I have a similar feeling about poetry. After all we don't write poems that are utterly bad through and through without intimations of caution--well, most poets of my acquaintance don't! Therefore the opposite must be true: we do know when we're onto something, and we try to capitalize on those moments and ramify their possibilities. The poem reveals to you where it needs to go, so to speak. In saying this, I am not saying the usual thing about language writing us, though that is true enough, rightly understood. Many poets, I believe, begin with pieces of a poem. I do, although I know there are other poets who begin with poems already finished in some important ways. I'm not one of them, although I sometimes dream whole poems. As for when a poem is finished, that's a serious matter because how we feel about the issue of "closure" tells us a lot, not only how our poems fit into our other discursive practices, but how we weigh in on matters of aesthetic sensibility. This, as I understand it, signifies something about the presence or absence of our ability to be home in time. I believe with Irish Murdoch that limited aesthetic wholes benefit the human psyche, contrasting the sense of satisfaction that comes with imaginative completion to the ragged ends of most lived experience. A poem ends for me when I sense its internal time signature--its rhythm--has been fully justified in actual time. It would be, of course, bad taste to overdo a poem.
Are there any rituals that you as a writer go through in a day before/after writing? Do you prefer some sort of routine for your writing? Or, more randomness?
Alas, I'm usually able to write only in summer because of my job as professor and lately department chair. But I do revise fitfully all during the year. I shouldn't complain too much, though, because in fact I can get quite a lot done in a short space. I have good powers of concentration when I have to rely on them. I have written complete collections in a few months. Last summer, for instance, I wrote a book-length sonnet sequence. I seem to be one of those people who can store up opportunities for poems and work on them subconsciously for months before ever committing anything to paper. When I do, the poems usually emerges quickly and whole--which is not to say finished. I do have routines, however. When I move into the writing zone, I have favorite places I like to write--actual spots, and I prefer writing outside. These habits do approach the levels of rituals, just as they do with athletes, but I think they are merely ways to cultivate a sense of receptivity, of attending to those issues and sounds trying to make their way to one's--unfortunately very limited and crowded--attention. Keats said that a change of clothes could affect one's output, and that's just a testimony to the power of auto-suggestion when a poem needs to be written. Because I usually write in stretches, I have to beware of anything that would compromise the scant time or any self-consciousness that would startle the Muse any more than she already is anyway. Hence these little rituals, which amount to time maintnenance procedures. One other thing: I prefer to sit in fields or on hills overlooking some unfolding landscape or to overlook water--not to seem Byronic, but because small spaces--like that of a study, however bookish, confine the imagination, in some respect. That's just a fact about me; it doesn't apply to anybody else. To tell you the truth, I wish I could sit at my desk and write poetry like a normal poet, but I find that arrangement--writer, desk, lamp, paper--cramping. I prefer to orient my page and myself to the elements--with all the associations of that, even though it means being subject to the vicissitudes of weather and the often discordant and distracting flow of life.
Writing about personal themes can straddle the line between greatness and the inane. Muske-Dukes was nominated for Pulitzer this year for doing that in Sparrow. At the same time, we editors and eager readers of poetry know that it tends to be the starting point for much that is rotten in Denmark. Quite a bit of The Dissolving Island reflects on very personal themes, including the death of a brother. How do you decide when a story is appropriate to tell, and if you have done it justice in the telling? How does seeing this book in print help you deal with the past? Does it stir up things that had settled? Does it release you as a sort of secondhand confession?
Number one, there is no such thing as closure--only forgetting. Therefore, in one important sense, a poem flies in the face of reality. Poems may provide thematic closure, but that's a lyric phenomenon. I can settle scores in a novel or win a battle that real life would never let me do. It's important to distingish between real and lyric accommodations, victories, and realizations. These model not life but our wishes and are thus necessary idealizations. I say necessary because they do an important job in accounting for the human resistance to the lives we must live, where contingency rules over order. We write about those things that are paramount in our lives--love, the deaths of loved ones, the subversive nature of time. This applies to Carol's book, which addresses what is perhaps the greatest blow a person can receive: the death of the partner who not only represents the loss of a love object, but also of one who took on supreme significance by having agreed to make his own life coextensive with hers. Quite apart from the loss of love, discontinuity threatens to cancel our ability to make sense. Thus to the elegy is always added the self-elegy. No wonder the book was nominated for every major prize. But there's something else that's at work here which bears on your frighteningly exact question, which is about limits. As Carol knew when David suddenly died and as I understood when my brother committed suicide, the personal has no natural connection to the interpersonal. What I mean is that, regardless of the "need" to find expression for grief, as though to find means to put it from us (symbolically, if not actually), this is a private matter. The very exclusiveness of the feeling precisely excludes other people. To turn, then, and to desire to entail others at the highest pitch of grief is perfectly inappropriate and as doomed to failure as are--at the other end of the spectrum--white-hot expressions of desire in a love poem to someone not intended as the recipient of these ardors. What you have to do is to convert the private to the public, private feeling into public discourse--even, or especially, poetic discourse. This means that the original impetus--the personal affront of death or the sudden surge of love must undergo transformation to a publicly held trust of meanings. In other words, private feelings must become public issues, and the only way for that to happen is for private feelings to exchange the emphasis on occasions--which is what the private and existential being, the sufferer and celebrant, wants--for thematic instances and limited wholes of expression--which is what the reader understands. Happily, language encourages this, and that's one of the reasons we have generally given assent to what has now become a cliché, namely, that language writes us. If it is true that language does anything of the sort, it's because language is a social tool, not the private alphabet of an autistic person. I take the elegy to be paradigmatic of poetry's ability to create communities of access. I also take this paradigm to elucidate what Emerson meant when he said all men stand in need of justification. To be justified doesn't mean to be comforted in grief or congratulated in elation, but to have secured a certain intelligibility with respect to one's own set of realities as these are understood in the context of a community.
Your wife, artist Jill Bullitt, did the art for covers of your last two books, including Island. Does being married to a fellow artist challenge you as a writer? Does it make for competition?
Artists have the advantage of not using linguistic materials as their means of expression. Hence the nature of their work tends to avoid one of the common circularities implicit in writing, when the language of expression is also the language of criticism--and, indeed, of most complex thought, for example. Artists work involves images that are tactile, not so abjectly grounded in abstraction. Having said this, I feel duty-bound to agree that painting is also a language--and therefore grounded in its own abstraction. Certainly the framework for creating meaning in painting is less familiar to most people. But because words are also used all the time by everyday people, consensus helps to create a shared sense of what words mean. From this standpoint, painting might be said to be even more abstract because the elements it uses--brush strokes, etc.--are at this point less familiar (i.e., separated from their everyday practice) to most people, than words.
While it begins at what I think of as a different kind abstraction than with poetry, painting deals in issues similar to the poet's--they are the issues common to the arts. Because painting allows you to concentrate on means, often self-consciousness is not the same kind of obstacle as it is with poetry--the potentially debilitating one that drew Baudelaire's attention (perhaps because of his own reflections on painting) and that he raised into one of the arch-themes of modernity. Painting also (like music) invites resistance to paraphrase, and I think of this as a plus. Jill and I have had innumerable conversations touching on these subjects. I'm afraid that I rather got her back up shortly after we met by insisting that because painting was non-linguistic, it wasn't what I call a language. She set me straight on that, and now we see pretty much eye-to-eye on most matters of aesthetics. One of the key things we talk about--and decry--is the decentering of painting from art, of art from culture, of poetry from literature and of literature from democratic culture. Jill has a much more sophisticated political background from mine, having worked as a progressive activist, and her insights concerning the social role of art have helped me rethink some of my long-held prejudices on the subject. Where we diverge is in my belief that just working as an artist is ipso facto political. She disagrees, or rather, she feels that argument is a bit of a cop-out. Which it probably is, inasmuch as it basically feeds the narcissism that says, "leave me alone and let me do my work," as the world crumbles. Having a second art in the house is definitely a plus, as far as I'm concerned. It shows you the extent of your ability to create resonances, and it constantly reminds you of the other roads that lead to the temple--a helpful reminder for a poet, who in his secret self too often scales what Shahid Ali called six-inch Himalayas. I feel no pressure to compete with her; nor am I sure on what grounds such a competition would be conducted. I have known of some friction between artistic spouses who share the same art-- but almost none between artists who practice different arts. When overlapping replaces coincidence, Cupid gets it right.
Who would you describe as your major influences as writer? Brodsky, obviously, but who else? Do you prefer poetry to other forms of writing when you read?
Joseph Brodsky was one of my mentors, yes. He taught me that poetry could, indeed it must, exist through agencies beyond its first appearances in print. I say must, because he knew in his exilic circumstance and felt the real possiblity--which became a reality--that his own life and the destiny of his poetry were likely to be very divergent, and that the poem's ability to survive was directly connected to the degree of its rootedness in metaphysics. Joseph's view was that all the facts we commonly group under the all-embracing rubric of "history"--were united in their discontinuity. Ironically, he came to this view as one who had long championed the strict--though ultimately impossible--one-for-one correpondence of translation. At the same time, he knew that we encounter most poems in languages other than our own through this most expedient of devices. But good ironist that he was, he also recognized a compensatory gain in the midst of such a loss: the translated poem stood in elegiac relation to its origin. This is similar to what I was just talking about when I said that the private must undergo a transformation to the public in order to stand for anything at all--most especially including standing for private or privileged utterance. Brodsky himself pointed this out in an essay on Cavafy, whose work is mostly read in translation. The key is to accept the virtual poem as one of the poem's destinies and so to collapse and old and bothersome distinction between the real and the virtual, the original and the copy--a distinction that makes no sense to me anymore. You are probably asking yourself what this has to do with my relationship to Brodsky, well, I often imagine how Joseph would respond to things in my world now. I think I have internalized him to the point that I can send his arguments off into further emanations and adventures he would not have imagined or have had the foolishness to consider! Joseph was thus very important to the development of my views on poetry and language generally. He was also a complete poet, in the sense that his practice and his life were seamless, as everyone who met him realized. He was a role model for artistic responsibility minus sanctimony, and he was the embodiment, for me, of wit and grace and camaraderie and selflessness. And sheer intelligence sprinting after an idea, then finally hyperventilating on itself.
I have had two other role models. My first poetry teacher was Carolyn Kizer, who remains a paradigm of literary professionalism. She stressed the a thorough grounding in basics and cultivated a love for the classical models, for international poetry, and for social and political astuteness. She taught us on the one hand about the sounds and tactile features of poetry and on the other about what she understood as the proper biases by which art and taste connect. She hated cant and was impatient with stupidity, but she connected something of the life of poetry with a backing of the underdog. Not surprisingly, she turned all of her students into feminists through her example. And she was--and is--justly famous for her example, which is that of a person living large and well. She inspired--I should say armed--her students against intimidations of all kinds--especially institutional intimidations--a valuable lesson for budding artists whose lives might otherwise be set on compliance. I had the pleasure of introducing her to Brodsky, by the way, and they took to each other's company instantly. She called him "Joe," when calling him "Joseph" seemed a guilty concession to American leveling. My last influence was the philosopher Richard Rorty. Dick brought me around to understanding language in a new way, and he challenged my understanding of Platonism as the only philosophy available to the poet by introducing me to Heidegger's concept of poetry as a model for an attendance on reality, rather than something that tries to accomplish an objective, linguistic or otherwise. Dick's American neo-pragmatic philosophy is directed against what he calls "power freaks," whom he identifies as Platonists, scientists, mind-body dualists, religionists, most political programs, and virtually all ideologies! To these he opposes a reverential (albeit vigorously secular) model of the poet attending to what Stevens called "the music of what happens." This model doesn't seek to know, to get, to use, or to "understand." Nor is it passive, in the conventional sense of that term. Examples from his arsenal include Whitman and Stevens, and his philsophy is as much a working out of the implications of Whitman's and Stevens' poetry as it is of Heidegger's and Dewey's philosophy. Dick Rorty shows how it is possible to find in art, ideas, politics, and psychology mutually supporting implications. He's also a wonderful prose stylist.
I read all kinds of things: books on philosophy and religion, science, general nonfiction, biographies, criticism, fiction, but I also read poetry every day. I can't imagine not doing it: it puts you in mind of other minds and imaginations working at highest pitch. Other writers have other pleasures, but the presence of this pitch is peculiar to poetry--with a few exceptions, like the novels of Philip Roth, for example.
Talk a little about how you see things such as philosophy or science intersecting with poetry, as they seem to do so often in your work.
Poetry and philosophy have much in common. However, in America the philosophical tradition has been largely academic and too technical for writers. In Europe--as indeed in South America--the tradition is different: writers and philosophers are on much better speaking terms. Emerson tried to move philosophy closer to the literary culture, inasmuch as his agenda included writing what would amount to a cultural declaration of independence to complete the political one of the previous century. Unfortunately, Emerson's wedding of philosophy and poetry, while congenial to Whitman, was anathema to the emerging philosophers of the academy, who preferred to base their systems where the action was--on science rather than poetry. We are still dealing with the consequences of that rejection. I have always favored the European premise of compatibility because it helps situate our disbelief next to our faith. It did strike me that there was something to be said for the fact that European poets have training in their thought-traditions, while ours have training in workshops devoted to technique. It seems to me that if poetry is ever to be the maker of myths and paradigms in this country it will need to take a hard look at the inclinations underlying its discourses. At any rate, doing so would be infinitely preferable to the continual lamentations of poets cursing the fate of poetry in America.
Finally, in 1994 I asked you how much of your own voice you put into translations of Nobel-Laureate Brodsky, and you said, "As much as the author would let me get away with." So, as a closing curiosity, what language would your work be best suited for in translation, and in what way?
In the 1920s there was an amusing gang of Soviet poets who maintained that the proper language for poetry ought to be math--for what was perceived as its--math's--chiseling effect on ambiguity, ambivalence, vagueness, and the like. I don't know if this ever amounted to a school. However, it seems to me that these qualities--ambiguity, vagueness, and so forth, more closely favor people in their messiness than do hypothetical, ideal languages. At the same time, people need such ideals so as not to be continually trapped by the grind and attractions of their messiness. I like to maintain what Brodsky called a "necessary ambivalence" in my poems because, as I told my friend the filmmaker Michael Roemer recently, what we say is often both the truth and bullshit--at the same time! What language wears such bi-focals? We know of some languages that are, for example, mired between tradition and modernity in their ability to confer names--Icelandic comes to mind. That's the kind of lanaguage I would like to be translated in.
Thanks for your time, David. Much success with the book.
Interviewed with Kevin Rabas, December 2003 on publication of The Dissolving Island
(BkMk Press)
KR. I was intrigued by the references to music and painting it this collection. I especially liked “Sketches of Spain” which mentions Miles Davis and has a reference to Spinoza, and I was wondering how
DR. . . . how I got those two people in bed together? I don’t know. I wrote that one out in California at a place called The Djerassi Foundation, which is a wonderful artist’s colony started by a novelist and chemist named Carl Djerassi, the husband, by the way, of Diane Wood Middlebrook, the biographer of Anne Sexton. While I was out there, I wrote a bunch of poems that were really the basis of this book. The Spinoza part is easy because I have a degree in philosophy so I work some of those philosophers in there from time to time--I don’t know why. It darkens it a little bit, I guess. It was one of those times when I was in a zone and did a lot of writing. Bear in mind, this is 1989--which shows you one thing about this book: a lot of the poems are older than they seem. My publishing career has always been out of sequence. This book was, in fact (I’m not sure this is something you want to put on a website) going to be published by three other publishers. And in each case the editor came to grief.
KR: Right I heard something about that. Yeah, that’s strange!
DR: I began to feel the book should have a warning like a cigarette pack. It’s like that movie about the video: you consider this book and you’ll drop dead in a week! In fact, the last guy did drop dead.
KR: Wow.
DR: Just before the book came out. So anyway, this is just merely to say that the book would normally have come out a decade before. But it doesn’t matter because in the intervening time I just worked on it, adding more stuff, taking stuff out, trying to make it stronger and leaner.
KR: Right, right.
DR: I think I succeeded. At least as far as I’m concerned, it wound up being okay. And so it really represents fifteen years rather than, you know, a few.
KR: Right.
DR: The music was the music I was listening to in California--like Miles Davis. I notice that a lot of artists--I’ve always liked artists: I’m married to one--because they seem not to live up in their heads all the time. They’re down in their bodies and they’re listening to good music, as well as eating good food.
KR: What does your wife do?
DR: She’s a painter.
KR: Oh, so that makes sense. There are all those references to painting.
DR: She did the cover of the book.
KR: I didn’t notice that. I just got a copy of the book the other day. I had to read it in proof.
DR: Well, that’s Jill’s painting.
KR: Cool!
DR: Yeah, it’s a nice one. She’s a marvelous painter. She was a finalist for an Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters this spring. She has a gallery here in Raleigh where she shows, and she’s taught around==at Duke and The University of Washington, and so forth. She’s quite accomplished. I always like artists, so I finally just married one!
[Laughter]
Plus I get free covers. Actually, this is our third cover together. All I do is go into her studio and look around and say, “I’d like this one for a cover.” I’ve got the next five books planned! If I live long enough, I’ll have all kinds of cool covers. But anyway, the painting in the poems gets filtered in through her. And the music--my father was a musician--an amateur musician, but he was quite good.
KR: What did he play?
DR: He played everything: trumpet, saxophone, piano, anything brass, anything with a reed. He wanted to be a jazz musician, but he got married, had me, and I stopped him from being a jazz musician. But he used to do things back in the‘40s and ‘50s with swing bands and so forth. The bands used to go through town, and they would pick up musicians. They had just a core of people, and then they would pick up five or ten local musicians and rehearse once, and then they’d play. My dad was always playing with these quite famous bands like, you know, Harry James and Tommy Dorsey--for a night or two. So when I was quite young I was turned on this to this world of music. I guess it’s a kind of secret homage to work music in that way. When I was in college I was majoring in English and Russian at the University of North Carolina. In fact, back in those days I was such a dilettante that I thought I could acquire even a third major--the be the first person ever to have three majors. And the third major would have been classical music--musicology.
KR: What did you say your other major was--English and philosophy.
DR: No, Russian. Philosophy came later when I went to graduate school. I picked up a master’s doing Wittgenstein just because, you know, he was interested in language.
KR: Yeah, I like Wittgenstein.
DR: He seemed amenable to poets and he’s not so systematic. He’s certainly not dogmatic, and he’s a great questioner of things, in his own way a person who finds resemblances between things. Plus he was always examining language very closely. At the time I got interested in philosophy, I noticed that poetry was changing. When I was first writing in school, we were all imitating James Wright, W. S. Merwin, though some of us were inclined to read Denise Levertov and Robert Creeley too. James Dickey was big. Certainly no formalists at all. I think Richard Howard was the first person who came along who made that seem plausible. I’m talking late ‘60s and early ‘70s. We were in the thick of confessional, first-person poetry--subjective lyricism--and very much backpedaling away from the remnants of the ‘50s when everybody was writing formal stuff. Because all our teachers started writing formal poetry, and then they went and started writing free verse some time between the late 1950s and early 1960s. It coincided approximately with the rise of rock music as the dominant social music. My teacher was Carolyn Kizer, and Kizer started as a formalist.
KR: I noted you did a book on Kizer.
DR: The first book, in fact.
KR: How did that influence your work?
DR: She was a good teacher. She was very strict. She was like my father, in fact. He was that way about music. She was that way about poetry: you don’t fudge; you don’t cut corners; you pay attention to details. You stay with basics: stay concrete and clear--all these things that sound so obvious until you try to write!
KR: Right!
DR: Certainly you have this urge to be significant-sounding, and of course these things are always committed and paid for by your language. They’re always done at the expense of clarity and good taste. It seems anyway--certainly for a young writer. No young people were writing formal stuff, and it took me a long time to come back around to that. Carolyn started out a formalist, and she always respected that. So when she was teaching she would use a lot of formal models. She was always talking about poets nobody thinks of now, like Rolfe Humphries--a poet and translator of classical Latin. He has a wonderful translation of the Aeneid. He taught at Indiana or someplace in the midwest. He was quite well known as a poet and a translator. Sort of like David Ferry is today, I guess. Robert Fitzgerald is another.
KR: Oh, yeah.
DR: And Leonie Adams, who was a quite a famous poet of the 1940s who was a sort of extension of Louise Bogan, a gnomic, classical poet, kind of Greek-sounding and rhyming. And of course Roethke, who was her--Carolyn’s--teacher, and who was basically a formalist who decided at some point to branch out and write free verse. This happened to practically everybody in the country, so when I started studying with Carolyn, we were in the thick of doing this first-person, free-verse subjective lyric poetry, more of less confessional.
KR: I guess that means . . .
DR: Well, we didn’t like the confessional part. But it meant that lyricism was identified with individual topics and individual destinies and individual voices, and you know, there was certainly nothing public there. Nobody had any pretense of being a Virgil--except Robert Lowell. But nobody read Robert Lowell--I mean young people didn’t. But this all by means of taking about philosophy . . .
KR: Yeah, right!
DR: Because later on, I realized in the 1970s--I was in my 20s--I was just starting out, I realized that there are these people in other places who are writing language poetry. I didn’t know what that was at first. I thought it was just gibberish--and I think it is just basically gibberish. But it was gibberish with a flag, a battle flag. And the message was that you guys had gone too far in your subjectivity without questioning what it means to be a subjective person. And so we’re going to show you the other side of language, which is to be completely material, to show you what nonsense it is to think that language could carry real transcendental meanings. At first I was puzzled, but one thing that struck me,though, was that poets and critics who talked in this way were deriving their insights from philosophy, but they weren’t primarily themselves on speaking terms with philosophers as such. And I thought if I could go behind the scenes and read the philosophy behind this, maybe I could get a better understanding and see if I was wasting, in fact, my time writing something that was going to be seen--that I was going to see--as worthless in a few years. It also was just a kind of consciousness-raising exercise. I don’t do it anymore, but I keep up. Later when I got to my doctorate level my teacher was Richard Rorty, and Dick was one of the foremost philosophers in the country. Well it turns out that his teacher was Allen Tate at the University of Chicago. He loved poetry, and the funny thing is that, although he is a left-wing guy, more or less a socialist, his teacher was a real cultural conservative. And he loved Philip Larkin. He felt he was just the cat’s meow. Of course Dick was in the business of talking about things that never come to an end. He’s very postmodernist in that he believes, as I do, that inquiry never ends. The buck never stops; you can always come up with another question. But these poets were able to bring a kind of a sense of closure within a small aesthetic space. And so that gave a satisfaction, I imagine, that he didn’t have access to otherwise. So that’s how the music gets in, how the philosophy gets in. If I hadn’t had those experiences none of that stuff would have shown up quite the way they do. I try to treat it really lightly because it’s so easy to murder a poem by filling it up with ideas, and it gets, you know, dyspeptic after a while. It doesn’t work. You still have to remember that whatever freight you’re carrying inside the poem, it’s still just a matter of language. That’s one of the things studying language philosophy taught me. When you come right down to it, it is just marks and noises, as Dick says. It’s just stuff on a page. It’s what my wife says about painting: subjects are nice and all, but really it’s about pushing paint around on a canvas. It’s about pushing words around on a page. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to trivialize it. I’m just saying that language comes first in order to make it a good poem. If they’re just good ideas, they don’t need your poem anyway. They supply ballast, but they can’t carry the poem. As a poet you can’t carry the poem with the notion that its ideas are so swell that it wouldn’t matter if the poem were a lousy poem, since the ideas keep it powered up. That will never happen.
KR: Right
DR: Of course, there’s Seamus Heaney, who had gotten very political, and he’s able to carry the politics because his language is so gorgeous. It’s not because his ideas are better developed or newer. That doesn’t make you a poet. Of course, having no ideas, it seems to me, makes you less a poet. On the other hand, having no content is a kind of content. That’s the thing about language: it’s able to equivocate. It adjusts itself to contradiction and doesn’t fall down because of it, wears it as a badge sometimes. You can’t do that in philosophy. It falls if there’s a contradiction, but in poetry, that’s cool--just be Walt Whitman!
[Laughter]
KR. I notice a sense of memory and loss in The Dissolving Island. Especially in a poem like “Sketches of Spain,” that ends with “The best days painted black/ that won’t come back.”
DR: Yes, that’s the Spinoza poem you mentioned, the one with Miles Davis and all that. It’s one of those California poems. Well, I think a lot about memory. It turns out that a lot of American cultural theorists think about memory these days too because the idea now is that people are historicizing memory, in the sense that memory is not just something that belongs to people individually--anymore than their identity does. It’s something that’s there to serve a purpose, and so the question is, what purpose does it serve? And cultural memory serves the purposes of validating the power structure, etc., as we have heard ad nauseum.
KR: Right.
The Gettysburg Address is a way for Lincoln to get his ideas across, to rewrite the Constitution to bring the Union back together and so forth. And so as a result of that we got Gettysburg and Civil War reenactments as a byproduct. But individually, the idea is that memory works in the service of something also; that is to say it’s not freestanding. I think it’s probably true biologically. You can’t imagine that the human organism would have a memory without application. It’s going to be in the service of something. It used to be thought it was in the service of transcendent things. And you know, maybe . . . There is something. Transcendence is a thing. But I’m interested in just trying to feel around to see how poetry intersects with memory altogether because poetry creates a public memory. It starts from private sources but ends up being a public memory. Private memories are no good in poems because people can’t share them any more than they can really share their dreams.
KR: Right, right.
DR: If you can make them public somehow. That’s always the trick, isn’t it? You start out with something that’s private, then take it out into the fairway of common, interpersonal discourse with folks you don’t even know. They have to have somewhere to hang their hat too when they read it. That’s why love poems are so interesting--because they downright not personal finally. They can’t be because if they were, you’d be excluded. You can never be the object of that love unless you are the object of that love. Something like that with memory too. What memory does is it ties us into time. We extend into the past; it also situates us to bear the future. So memory has something to do with strengthening the broadly cultural superstructure--which is to say basically the social bonds between people by getting them to recognize common pasts in some regards and to suggest the future isn’t that bleak because we can map it. We can’t predict it, but we can put it on a grid and say this is where it’s likely to be. By the way, I’m also interested in memory because it’s a kind of sometimes difficult and even debilitating thing that people have to deal with. We look at Europe and say those people are so tradition-bound, and we’re not. That’s an old Henry James trope. And everybody else! But there’s truth to it. When you live in Europe you live in time, and when you live in American you live in space.
KR: That’s neat.
DR: I think that’s true. Emerson basically cleared the path and made it safe for us to trade time and get space in return. It’s a straight trade. And so as a result, all our things have to do with space--going west, being on the road and on the move--all that stuff. Whereas if you go to Italy and France, it’s always about the past. You live in a house that’s five hundred years old. The problem though is that after a while you start to feel confined by the past. That means you’re being controlled by the dead. And after a while there something unhealthy about it.
KR: Hmmm . . .
DR: So if there’s so much of that that you can’t have original initiative, originality is discountenanced because it would go against the things that are already in place. And that means you’re being controlled by the long arm of people who are no longer drawing breath, and that’s a problem for me. Too much ancestor worship and worship of the past can be debilitating when it appears to become a kind of cultural necrophilia. That’s a problem for a lot of people, if they look at it that way. So, the memory theme really has to negotiate a way between wanting to provide or to think about the ways in which we connect up with the past and how we make the future. I was in Rome a couple of years ago at the American Academy. We have some friends there, and I remember having a long discussion with one of them about this very topic. He was very charming and cultured, but he was extremely uncomfortable with being Italian because he said he felt decadent. He said he felt that he was at an end--all this stuff had been done before. He felt the weight of all that past, and he felt quite lightheaded beside it. Felt quite inconsequential, I should say. And I think that’s a problem for real ambition because if you have real ambition you don’t want to feel inconsequential at the same time! You can’t tolerate that kind of contradiction. So memory comes up for me and goes between those two goal posts. When I get it right, on the one hand it’s an honoring mechanism, and on the other it’s the fear that you’ll honor it too much and it’ll start to control you. It’ll become a kind of Frankenstein’s monster.
KR: Right.
DR: Well, I wasn’t thinking all those things when I wrote these poems. But in retrospect that’s what’s there.
KR: I would imagine a lot of these ideas would come back. For example, the book is bound and published and you’re reading it. It takes on another form or something because of the sequence.
DR: Yes.
KR: A friend of mine is doing a workshop on the idea of the book and what it means to be a book.
DR: My wife and I have recently, because of an illness, started to disburden ourselves of things like books. So many books! She comes from a family of people who write books. Carolyn Kizer is Jill’s mother, so she had all these books when we got married back in 1995, and I had all these books. So we decided to get rid of the doubles. I realized that on the second floor of our house we have a little hallway where we had three rows of books on the floor about ten feet long and four feet high, and that’s a hell of a lot of books. What we decided we ought to do is get down to one row. We just finished filling fifteen boxes of books and we’re not even done with the hallway! Every room except the kitchen has a lot of books in it.
KR: Wow, yeah.
DR: We were packing fearlessly and at one point I told Jill as we were bending over, getting back pain together, I said I used to think the greatest thing you can do on earth is write a book. And I still believe it on some level, but when you look around you realize that your little, skinny book is surrounded by a sea of massive books, all very detailed. And we’re throwing them out! It really cuts you down to size!
[Laughter]
I think about that all the time--what it means to be a book. And I am pretty much of that Mallarméan party that thinks everything exists to be written down. Brodsky, who was my other teacher, used to always talk about how literature was a “substitute for life.” You can see why in his case because he didn’t have much of a life after a while, but you want to think you have another rail. You know, you have the rail of your biological life, but you have another life, which is your life in symbol. And that’s what your book is doing.
KR: Life in symbol?
DR: Yeah, and that symbol is growing (to use another metaphor) and taking on more consequences as you live and ramifying more as you work on the themes that are natural for you. I still think that even as I stand in the midst of all those books we’re giving away that are better than anything I’ll ever write. And we’re throwing away for goodness sakes, Chekhov and Henry James and Tolstoy. And I think to myself, wow, imagine all the people who’ll be willing to throw me away with the first sweep through the library!
KR: [Laughter] Yeah, I wouldn’t want to think about that! That’s a strange business.
DR: But I still believe, as a matter of principle, that writing a book of a great thing. I think it’s because when I grew up, we didn’t have a lot of books. We didn’t have any books--Reader’s Digest condensed books. My dad was a musician, not a reader, and my mother was not a reader. I didn’t really get into the habit of reading until I was in high school. And when I discovered what that was I thought it was really cool. As I say, I still do. My students are of another opinion, though. Well, some of them are impressed. They say, wow, you’ve written a book? What’s it about? How long did it take you to write? Kind of sweet questions . . . But to others it’s just a big yawn. I might as well have said I’ve put a new logo on my T-shirt. That’s how much it’s worth.
KR: That’s bad.
DR: Well it seems like the good reactions are either sophisticated reactions in which people think it really is good in some limited, well-defined way--like you do, for example and like I do. But a lot of people have the “gosh” reaction--which is also what happens when they come up to you and say, “Aren’t you the person I read about in the paper who just published a book? Wow, that’s really amazing!” They go overboard the other way. But in the middle are all these people who are frankly indifferent. That’s really the majority. That a problem all American writers face and poets face in spades because, Billy Collins aside, practically no one reads poetry. Unless they’re crazy or getting their MFAs. It puts the people who do read you in the slightly difficult, but aesthetically pleasing position, of overhearing what you have to say . . . There was a big fad--you must be aware of this--in the 70s of having poems that seemed aggressively interested in the reader: “You are walking down a narrow, deserted street . . .” You feel like there’s a hand coming out of the poem and grabbing you by the lapels and trying to pull you in. It always seemed to me that that wasn’t going to work, that the way to do it was to write a poem where we’re getting something by overhearing. It seemed to me that that was a great old trick. So if you write to the past people will listen that way, will overhear you. I haven’t figured out how you write for the future. You know, in really idealistic political times when people are smiling about the future (we haven’t done much of that lately), like in the 1920s in Russia when the Soviet Union was first established, it seemed all the writers were writing to the future because they thought the future was glorious and bright, and they wanted to let you know that they were in on the ground floor. Whitman does this too, of course in our country, but Mayakovsky had poems written for people a hundred, a thousand years from now, as though they’re the only fit audience. Of course you can’t get can’t away with such titanic confidence, verging on bombast, unless your humorous; otherwise it sounds like you’re just a puffed up jackass.
KR: I guess they were in a situation at a time when everything was too good be true, so they were writing to an even brighter time than that. I can’t really imagine that! You said Mayakovsky?
DR: Mayakovsky, yes. He was one of the big poets of the revolution. A wonderful poet, by the way. Kind of a cross between Whitman and Ernesto Cardenal. Of course now that the Soviet Union’s gone, Mayakovsky’s also gone, and that’s a pity. He was much better than the politics he was in. He actually committed suicide, as several of those guys did. He was very famous and so forth, but when Stalin came in he realized he was on slippery ground. He couldn’t do his barbaric yawp the way he used to do because Uncle Joe was watching every move. Also it turns out his girlfriend was sleeping with another guy.
KR: That didn’t help. Are there things you want people to know going into your book? I wondered for example about the title.
DR: The title’s not obvious. The dissolving island’s an idea I got once listening to a lecture on Shakespeare. The person who was talking referred to Othello as a “dissolving island,” a person as an hermetically sealed man who was being, like the Venice where he worked, systematically nibbled at along the edges. So his integrity was being nibbled away, or as he put it, dissolving, the way Venice itself is dissolving. I thought that was a good image for the ego. You start out being very full of optimism or full of some kind of ambition that hasn’t had any chance to correct itself, and as a result you can’t fit in in a social way until you’ve been able to recalibrate your size. You know, Kevin, what it is, is just a title about solipsism, about trying to realize no privacy can be redemptive, finally. All of our redemptions happen when we turn outward. Rather they’re the ones that really are saving. And so I wanted to start with that idea that the island doesn’t stay an island, and when it dissolves, presumably, it returns to the ocean. It’s naturalized that way and in fact disappears. What I was also thinking is that if your conception of yourself is an island, you need a new metaphor. You’re going to be happier and more mature. That was the idea. While the title is a Shakespearean title, there’s nothing in Othello the play that refers to a dissolving island as such.
KR: Well, this has been wonderful! I’m glad I got to talk to you!
Interview with Marianne Cotugno, Sept.-Oct., 2004.
The Mount Olive Journal
If you had to trace your poetic lineage, who would you say are your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents? Do you have any siblings?
I started out as a poet working in the tradition, which for me meant not the tradition of English poetry or anything of that sort, but rather of poets working under the influence of the New Criticism. Now the New Criticism, as your readers already know, exercised a profound influence on how students read poetry. Indeed, its influence has never completel evaporated: deconstruction was (and I will say "was") a kind of "close reading" designed to destabilize and undermine an author's magic routine, an insurgency much needed, in my judgment. But the New Criticism proper infused much of the practice of American poetry with the notion that depths were important and that surfaces were the shifting vortices that gave access to the depths. Note that there was such a thing as "depths." One of the legacies of postmodernism will have been a rejection of the importance of depths in favor of the play of surfaces--a legacy I would like to see discountenanced on the theory that if you reject depths, you reject meaning. But I am moving far away from your question . . . My teachers--and my teachers' teachers--were poets who took the tenets of New Critical thinking as orthodoxy. Carolyn Kizer was my first important teacher, a poetic parent, and via her, I was able to claim Theodore Roethke, Stanley Kunitz, and W. B. Yeats as ancestors. Coming via Great-Grandpa Yeats was a good thing, as his influence was more benign than that of the other icon, T. S. Eliot, whose influence, except in very linguistically indirect ways, was invariably pernicious. From these poets I learned to value precision of thought, economy of means, and eclecticism of source. I also learned to reject rhetoric (in the bad sense), all forms of literary narcissism, ideologically driven poetry, and emotionally inspired--as opposed to poetically inspired--language. Of course, you can look through my poetry and find all those things in full flower.
With Kizer I acquired numerous uncles and aunts of her genration: James Wright, W. S. Merwin, Ann Sexton, and so forth. But because Kizer was a poet of the west coast, I also had occasion to claim some of that aesthetic, at least in spirit, which was to say, in the spirit of anti-academic writing. Here I mean poets like Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov. Indeed, the whole west coast school of poets who proceeded from Ezra Pound have always been of interest to me, although I have my doubts about the poetry of Pound himself. Kizer also raised me to think in two other directions--that of classical poets, that is, poets who were interested in the classics like Rolfe Humphries and Louise Bogan, and those who were themselves, despite wide differences, something like contemporary Horaces: Leonie Adams, H.D., John Crowe Ransom, and so forth. Kizer was also an internationalist in spirit, which has its advantages, in that it opens one's point of view to other cultures and linguistic determinants, and it makes one aware of the importance of literature in translation--a necessary expedient that has not always gotten the respect it deserves.
Later in life I acquired other poetic relatives. Chief of these was Joseph Brodsky--an older brother. Whereas Carolyn Kizer was about what we might call the classical virtues of lyric poetry--and about the proper overseeing of its production, the poem, Joseph was about the imagination as such--as redemptive mechanism and about wit as its herald. Joseph thought that poetry was thought--understood in the best sense--accelerated to the sublime max. This means that his poetry, strangely like Blake's (and nobody, I believe, has suggested this connection before), hearkens back to an Adamic human being, one capable of immense vitalism . Nowadays this figure is either a term of shame, nailed to cross of sentimentalism--or an overreaching embarrassment incapable of coping with the inherent mediocrity of his species. Brodsky was able to show something of this person by demonstrating that the Adamic human's natural self-effacement in the face of egotistical erasures in no way disqualified him for "greatness," itself something of a Philistine compliment.
What makes right now an important time to live in North Carolina?
North Carolina has a rich literary heritage, owing to its vexed racial history, regional differentiation, and (lately) shifting demographics. The state is right now experiencing the shift from a tobacco and manufacturing culture to a service culture, and as its older character undergoes being overtaken, its legacy stands to feel the full brunt of erosion, as a result of the forgetfulness following in the wake of deracination. It is one job of the writer to keep the connections with the past in place.
You have lived in many places both here in the United States and in Europe. What "place" has had the clearest and most profound connection with your writing? Can you explain that connection?
"Lived" is too grandiose a term. I have traveled some and spent time in Italy and France, as well as in many parts of the U.S. Each of these places is like a Renaissance macrocosm connected to a microcosm in my mind. At the same time, each place has appealed to something in me on a more metaphysical level. For instance, Italy affects almost every visitor, and the country has had a profound effect not only on English literature, but on American literature from Hawthorne and James to James Wright, who opposed the unnattainable heaven of Italy to the received hell of southeastern Ohio--and thus constructed the cosmos in which his poetry finds resonance. I have also felt that the Italian layering of time seems a version of our human autobiography, but I have also sensed further that the Italians first understood the nature of metaphor in the way that we have come to mean it. They understood that poetry means translating the personal into the public, indeed, into the natural in a way that makes nature and culture interchangeable. In a poem, I refer to it this way:
And sea-as-si, that term of assent, that
agreement--so long in coming--to let
stones take the place of waves.
It seems on the order of the miraculous that it should be so that opposites can stand for each other, can stand in each other's place. But the Metaphysical poets began from this very premise. No doubt this was what drew Brodsky to the poems of John Donne when he was a young man locked in his Russian.
What interests does your poetry share with your nonfiction writing in Trailers?
I was invited to join in the Trailers project at a time when I was immersed in Emerson, and my essay there, I think, betrays my misunderstanding of this outsized bard to an unusually productive degree. I have always been interested in issues of "translation," by which I mean not only intramural problems having to do with literary translation, but in issues of a more Ovidian nature--in short the subject of transcendence, of "carrying over" altogether, about which we don't hear much intelligent discourse these days. Specifically in terms of Trailers, I argued that Emerson gave the green flag for Americans to give their assent to the notion that time and space were strictly equivalent dimensions. Thus, in the same measure as Europe had time--read history--we had space--read frontier. The trickle-down was that it would be "natural" to Americanize so basic a thing as one's domicile by translating it from a thing bound by time to one bound only by space--that is, from a site-permanent home subject to effects of its history to a trailer whose habitat was anywhere it happened to be transported.
Can you talk for a bit about why you chose the sonnet form for your cycle of poetry on the fire at the chicken processing plant in Hamlet, NC in Sonnets to Hamlet (Pudding House Publications, 2004)?
When I first started writing poems seriously, I wrote sonnets. This was when I was a student at UNC back in the late 1960s. I was doing this at Carolyn Kizer's instigation but under the influence of John Berryman, an influence I later came to repudiate to the extent that it kept me writing free verse for decades. When the Hamlet fire happened, I had been recently teaching nearby at St. Andrews College, and I felt I had to write about the tragedy. But at the same time, I felt strong cautions about bringing words to bear on such an enormity of pain and emptiness and to attempt to replace these with significance. It is one of the problems of elegy altogether. And then one day--I believe it was when I had completed the second of my cycles of Italian-inspired poems, that I realized I had completely drawn a circle around the territory my own concerns and was now back at the beginning, but in the more advanced, knowing, and perhaps sardonic way that Hegel and M. H. Abrams perceived. And so the solution fell into my lap: write about the Hamlet fire in sonnets. You see, the thing about sonnets is that their brevity resists monumentalizing, but their frequent deployment in sequences and garlands and the like allows for thematic and even dramatic development. The fact that Hamlet could appear in the title was serendipity but reminds one that sonnets are anything other than minor or extinct forms and that elegy is one of the moods sonnets specialize in. The nod to clasicism also took into account that part of the tragedy of that fire was the way in which it found the history and tradition of the areas--a history of racism, paternalism, political corruption, and poverty taking place against a background of redemptive promise. Now I've finished with the sonnet form for a while, although it would be probably more accurate to say that the sonnet form is finished with me.
The Dissolving Island seems very much concerned with the relationship between place or landscape and memory. Is this so? Can you describe this relationship?
Landscape and memory have an old alliance sanctioned and sanctified by the dimensions they represent: landscape-space and memory-time and by their connection in the human imagination. Yet our country shows the dangers that come when the connection is severed and mobility becomes all. What I want to do is to bear witness to the relationship--a poll-watcher, as it were, whose self-appointed job it is to record--and by recording insist, not only that this or that came to pass, but as a Greek poet writes, "that the meeting take place."
"Spaghetti" opens: "I had not remembered, but do now." Does the process of writing poetry help you to retrieve or to produce memories? Do you have any long-lost memories of North Carolina that you have recently remembered?
The human capacity for memory is one of those surprising, Adamic vastnesses that, like silence--its lining--that our noisy lives lead us to neglect. But memory is inherently redemptive: the meaning of the word itself indicates a refitting of the corpse with its limbs: what could be more redemptive than that? Memory resists death by finding new (and old) ways to make images persist, just as forgetting often resists death by untying us from potentially fatal encumbrances. I grew up in Durham. My memories of growing up in North Carolina are both, urbi and orbi, specific and referenced to large cycles. Lately, I have been remembering what it felt like to grow up in the segregated south, not just the separate movie entrances and drinking fountains, the back of the bus and all that, but the interactions and resistances of the races, whose economies were just as intertwined as their social worlds were mutually exclusive. It made for a vacuum that the economic didn't allow for a social context; it's a pain we still smart from. I have often heard that there was more social interaction during the earlier part of the century: my grandparents--no liberals--told me of that, and while ringed with social proscriptions, it was not the same segregation that greeted the south after the Second World War.
I know that you are documenting tobacco barns across North Carolina. What drew you to this project and what are your plans for the images you have taken?
My grandfather was a tobacco farmer, and I remember well a sense of mystery that attached to these structures, whose unadorned presentation betrayed no sense of prescriptive form and yet which seem somehow not unrelated to fashions of Protestant self-effacements. The tobacco barns provide a visual link to a bucolic past. As these markers come down, we lose sight--quite literally--of where we have been and of those who labored to clear a space for our time. Now with the shift, first to a different kind of barn, and second away, from tobacco farming, they take on the lineaments of homemade ruins. They are disappearing from the landscape, and one of my purposes is documentary: to record what and where they were. But another purpose is to meditate on ruins, just as poets have always done. Now, they don't do this to be morbid, but to test again and again the idea that the imagination proposes access to the past and future, in either case extending the human project beyond its life dates. In other words, it's finally elegiac, but far from ending on a melancholy note, elegy contains the kernel of celebration in recognizing the fuller potential, which is the potential of the Blakean Adamic man, a man still in our sights, in spite of the present. I fell into doing the photographs myself because I saw that the dimensions of the task of archiving all those barns were larger than I would feel comfortable asking another to do with me. It also suited my commuter status. I drive 60 miles to work, and there are plenty of blue highways between here and there. Many is the afternoon I have left work but skipped the Interstate route home. As a result, I believe I have seen--I mean really seen--more of the barns in eastern North Carolina than anyone alive. For better or for worse! My models for appropriate documentation are the German industrial photographers, Bernd and Hiller Becher. Their style, in black-and-white, shows mug shots, passport photos of towers, furnaces, warehouses, and so forth, which allow little room for the intervention of extraneous things beyond the most immediate spatial contexts. I have tried to present barns in this spirit, which is, I think, the spirit in which they exist today.
You frequently use paintings by your wife, Jill Bullitt, for the covers of your work. Do you choose the pieces? Does Jill? Is it collaborative? What prompts the choice?
One of the things that drew me to Jill was the fortuitous overlap of our intellectual and artistic backgrounds. Both our self-descriptions, as your first question hints, include the recognition that we are the further emanations of our artistic forebears: in her case, as a last-generation Abstract Expressionist; in mine, as a (postmodern) subjectivist with formalist tendencies! I've now used, I think four of Jill's pieces as cover art, and I have another in mind for my Selected Poems, coming out next year. I usually have the piece in mind, although Jill will make suggestions. She has not done anything to order, nor would I ask her to consider such a thing. As it is, her paintings and drawings are suggestive enough to encompass my concerns. And they're striking in their own right. We have some work coming out in Pembroke Magazine, a fine journal edited by Shelby Stephenson. Shelby took five of my poems and six of Jill's pieces for a portfolio. I thought it would be a case of dialogic interplay, in the usually lame way painters and poets present themselves. But Jill's work diverges and takes off on its own. So I'm afraid my use of her work does nothing to advance either her work or career. It does suggest that I don't mind hanging on the arm of a distinguished artist.
How do you see technologies, such as the cellphone and PDAs, changing our relationship to landscape? Do you see art reflecting, addressing, or even challenging those changes?
(The Adirondack Review)
The Dissolving Island is everything traditional about poetry publishing: flat-spined, modestly-numbered paperback from a university press. It marks the newest step in a career that has seen your work in many of most prestigious literary magazines. At the same time, however, you have not resisted publishing your work on the web, including as I recall, work as far back as early issues of The Cortland Review. What is your take on internet magazines and web publishing in general? How do you decide which online magazines work for you as a writer? Has web publishing helped your career or introduced you to other readers? What about your favorite online magazines?
I am a book person, and I like nothing better than to hold a new book of poems or a literary magazine in my mitts. Like other poets, I resisted what seemed to me the ephemeral nature of publishing on the internet. In the first place, I don't really subscribe to the notion that poetry writing is for everyone. At the same time I've given a lot of thought both to the nature of the worldwide changeover from analog to digital paradigms and to the nature of poetry as a metaphysical, as opposed to a material, manifestation of language use. In the first instance, it seems to me that one of the key differences between analog and digital is the fact that digital, because it samples gaps--emptiness--stands in elegiac relationship to that which it represents. Ironically, its greater "realism" is bought at this price, whereas analog, which means--in this case, the typewritten or printed page--adheres to some notion of grounding and tracing. The fact of the matter is, as poets have insisted from Horace to Shakespeare to Mandelstam, poetry is metaphysical, in the sense that the means by the which poems are disseminated may vary enormously. Whether it lies on the cold bed of the printed page, as pixels on the internet, or as memorized niches in the human Theater of Memory makes little difference to the fact of poetry. The classical boasts on behalf of the poem as the preferred memorial for memorable deeds and persons still seem to have an enormous warrant--in spite of the fact that the spirit of these boasts has been occluded by the coming of other, more conspicuously representational means--photography, movies, video. It's an illusion to think that accuracy of representation has anything to do with the quality of memorialization through praise and elegy. That feat can best be accomplished with the wholesale trading out of the representational for the metaphorical, the analogous for the metonymous, the personal for the public. This is all a fancy and unnecessarily complicated way of saying that poetry sits as well a the website as it does with the books of Alfred A. Knopf. The cybernetic and the metaphysical are, after all, just two ways of expressing the same thing.
Once I was able to think through my own objections to poetry websites, I realized that I might as well embrace them. Which is not to say that I send lots of poems to online magazines. As a matter of fact, all of the poems I've published online have, with one exception, been as result of solicitations. Still, I hope to send more of my own poems to online journals. Poetry websites, including the personal websites of poets, seem to me to be of enormous literary value, quite apart from their ability to be instantly ready-to-hand. In addition to the manifest literary (I want to say "printed," but of course they aren't printed) works, there is often the voice of the poet, and as broadband increases, we will also see an increase of images and video. Online poetry readings. Add to this the fact that the readership is potentially global and you have the possibility of a renaissance (of course every other art and discipline is no doubt thinking the same thing!). True, it doesn't "last," but poetry gains in the ability of shape-shift too, and this ability the internet provides. I was drawn to The Cortland Review initially because it featured the voices of the poets reading, as well as useful links, and it's still my favorite online magazine. I think it's done a creditable job of reaching an international readership. I know, for example that my poems have been read in Europe and Australia--and I'm a small-press poet. Imagine that. The internet, then, explodes our native provincialism--a good thing for American poets and anybody else, don't you think? Having embraced this technology, I have to add that I am nonetheless concerned that too much time in front of the computer screen detracts from a commitment to reading and following arguments through their complexities and depths. In fact, computers seem to legislate on some level against depths in favor of "surfing," with the superficial implications of that. My fear is that we could wind up with generations of people incapable of understanding how arguments work, how cases are made and reality described. It's a fear that's not just political.
In terms of your writing, your poems often fall into perfectly-carved, symmetrical stanzas and seemed to be evenly balanced as well between image and idea. Where do you begin a poem? With thought, scene, line? Do you often have some grander concept of what each poem should be, or is a piece more likely to develop as the story goes along? How do you know when a poem is finished? Are you an obsessive editor who keeps reworking until a poem is published, or beyond that? Or is there something that just tells you to leave it alone?
I'm glad that you think these poems so lapidary. I rather see them as only approximately responsive to the demands of form--or as lines impersonating rather than embodying the rigors of poetry. But I know that a lot of poets have anxieties about authenticity. It's the compliment the practitioner pays the art. The truth is that I rarely know what a poem is going to look like going in. It's only after the poem and I are well on our way that I begin to get an inkling of the kind of poem it's trying to be. I notice that my way of saying this implies that the poem has its own notions about coming into being and growth, and this is accurate. Language after all, as Brodsky always said, is greater than any of its practitioners and therefore reflects the lesser's relationship to the greater, whether we acknowledge it or not. Some philosophers tell us we have a "truth-tracking" mechanism; that is, we experience as intimations of rightness when we're onto something. I have a similar feeling about poetry. After all we don't write poems that are utterly bad through and through without intimations of caution--well, most poets of my acquaintance don't! Therefore the opposite must be true: we do know when we're onto something, and we try to capitalize on those moments and ramify their possibilities. The poem reveals to you where it needs to go, so to speak. In saying this, I am not saying the usual thing about language writing us, though that is true enough, rightly understood. Many poets, I believe, begin with pieces of a poem. I do, although I know there are other poets who begin with poems already finished in some important ways. I'm not one of them, although I sometimes dream whole poems. As for when a poem is finished, that's a serious matter because how we feel about the issue of "closure" tells us a lot, not only how our poems fit into our other discursive practices, but how we weigh in on matters of aesthetic sensibility. This, as I understand it, signifies something about the presence or absence of our ability to be home in time. I believe with Irish Murdoch that limited aesthetic wholes benefit the human psyche, contrasting the sense of satisfaction that comes with imaginative completion to the ragged ends of most lived experience. A poem ends for me when I sense its internal time signature--its rhythm--has been fully justified in actual time. It would be, of course, bad taste to overdo a poem.
Are there any rituals that you as a writer go through in a day before/after writing? Do you prefer some sort of routine for your writing? Or, more randomness?
Alas, I'm usually able to write only in summer because of my job as professor and lately department chair. But I do revise fitfully all during the year. I shouldn't complain too much, though, because in fact I can get quite a lot done in a short space. I have good powers of concentration when I have to rely on them. I have written complete collections in a few months. Last summer, for instance, I wrote a book-length sonnet sequence. I seem to be one of those people who can store up opportunities for poems and work on them subconsciously for months before ever committing anything to paper. When I do, the poems usually emerges quickly and whole--which is not to say finished. I do have routines, however. When I move into the writing zone, I have favorite places I like to write--actual spots, and I prefer writing outside. These habits do approach the levels of rituals, just as they do with athletes, but I think they are merely ways to cultivate a sense of receptivity, of attending to those issues and sounds trying to make their way to one's--unfortunately very limited and crowded--attention. Keats said that a change of clothes could affect one's output, and that's just a testimony to the power of auto-suggestion when a poem needs to be written. Because I usually write in stretches, I have to beware of anything that would compromise the scant time or any self-consciousness that would startle the Muse any more than she already is anyway. Hence these little rituals, which amount to time maintnenance procedures. One other thing: I prefer to sit in fields or on hills overlooking some unfolding landscape or to overlook water--not to seem Byronic, but because small spaces--like that of a study, however bookish, confine the imagination, in some respect. That's just a fact about me; it doesn't apply to anybody else. To tell you the truth, I wish I could sit at my desk and write poetry like a normal poet, but I find that arrangement--writer, desk, lamp, paper--cramping. I prefer to orient my page and myself to the elements--with all the associations of that, even though it means being subject to the vicissitudes of weather and the often discordant and distracting flow of life.
Writing about personal themes can straddle the line between greatness and the inane. Muske-Dukes was nominated for Pulitzer this year for doing that in Sparrow. At the same time, we editors and eager readers of poetry know that it tends to be the starting point for much that is rotten in Denmark. Quite a bit of The Dissolving Island reflects on very personal themes, including the death of a brother. How do you decide when a story is appropriate to tell, and if you have done it justice in the telling? How does seeing this book in print help you deal with the past? Does it stir up things that had settled? Does it release you as a sort of secondhand confession?
Number one, there is no such thing as closure--only forgetting. Therefore, in one important sense, a poem flies in the face of reality. Poems may provide thematic closure, but that's a lyric phenomenon. I can settle scores in a novel or win a battle that real life would never let me do. It's important to distingish between real and lyric accommodations, victories, and realizations. These model not life but our wishes and are thus necessary idealizations. I say necessary because they do an important job in accounting for the human resistance to the lives we must live, where contingency rules over order. We write about those things that are paramount in our lives--love, the deaths of loved ones, the subversive nature of time. This applies to Carol's book, which addresses what is perhaps the greatest blow a person can receive: the death of the partner who not only represents the loss of a love object, but also of one who took on supreme significance by having agreed to make his own life coextensive with hers. Quite apart from the loss of love, discontinuity threatens to cancel our ability to make sense. Thus to the elegy is always added the self-elegy. No wonder the book was nominated for every major prize. But there's something else that's at work here which bears on your frighteningly exact question, which is about limits. As Carol knew when David suddenly died and as I understood when my brother committed suicide, the personal has no natural connection to the interpersonal. What I mean is that, regardless of the "need" to find expression for grief, as though to find means to put it from us (symbolically, if not actually), this is a private matter. The very exclusiveness of the feeling precisely excludes other people. To turn, then, and to desire to entail others at the highest pitch of grief is perfectly inappropriate and as doomed to failure as are--at the other end of the spectrum--white-hot expressions of desire in a love poem to someone not intended as the recipient of these ardors. What you have to do is to convert the private to the public, private feeling into public discourse--even, or especially, poetic discourse. This means that the original impetus--the personal affront of death or the sudden surge of love must undergo transformation to a publicly held trust of meanings. In other words, private feelings must become public issues, and the only way for that to happen is for private feelings to exchange the emphasis on occasions--which is what the private and existential being, the sufferer and celebrant, wants--for thematic instances and limited wholes of expression--which is what the reader understands. Happily, language encourages this, and that's one of the reasons we have generally given assent to what has now become a cliché, namely, that language writes us. If it is true that language does anything of the sort, it's because language is a social tool, not the private alphabet of an autistic person. I take the elegy to be paradigmatic of poetry's ability to create communities of access. I also take this paradigm to elucidate what Emerson meant when he said all men stand in need of justification. To be justified doesn't mean to be comforted in grief or congratulated in elation, but to have secured a certain intelligibility with respect to one's own set of realities as these are understood in the context of a community.
Your wife, artist Jill Bullitt, did the art for covers of your last two books, including Island. Does being married to a fellow artist challenge you as a writer? Does it make for competition?
Artists have the advantage of not using linguistic materials as their means of expression. Hence the nature of their work tends to avoid one of the common circularities implicit in writing, when the language of expression is also the language of criticism--and, indeed, of most complex thought, for example. Artists work involves images that are tactile, not so abjectly grounded in abstraction. Having said this, I feel duty-bound to agree that painting is also a language--and therefore grounded in its own abstraction. Certainly the framework for creating meaning in painting is less familiar to most people. But because words are also used all the time by everyday people, consensus helps to create a shared sense of what words mean. From this standpoint, painting might be said to be even more abstract because the elements it uses--brush strokes, etc.--are at this point less familiar (i.e., separated from their everyday practice) to most people, than words.
While it begins at what I think of as a different kind abstraction than with poetry, painting deals in issues similar to the poet's--they are the issues common to the arts. Because painting allows you to concentrate on means, often self-consciousness is not the same kind of obstacle as it is with poetry--the potentially debilitating one that drew Baudelaire's attention (perhaps because of his own reflections on painting) and that he raised into one of the arch-themes of modernity. Painting also (like music) invites resistance to paraphrase, and I think of this as a plus. Jill and I have had innumerable conversations touching on these subjects. I'm afraid that I rather got her back up shortly after we met by insisting that because painting was non-linguistic, it wasn't what I call a language. She set me straight on that, and now we see pretty much eye-to-eye on most matters of aesthetics. One of the key things we talk about--and decry--is the decentering of painting from art, of art from culture, of poetry from literature and of literature from democratic culture. Jill has a much more sophisticated political background from mine, having worked as a progressive activist, and her insights concerning the social role of art have helped me rethink some of my long-held prejudices on the subject. Where we diverge is in my belief that just working as an artist is ipso facto political. She disagrees, or rather, she feels that argument is a bit of a cop-out. Which it probably is, inasmuch as it basically feeds the narcissism that says, "leave me alone and let me do my work," as the world crumbles. Having a second art in the house is definitely a plus, as far as I'm concerned. It shows you the extent of your ability to create resonances, and it constantly reminds you of the other roads that lead to the temple--a helpful reminder for a poet, who in his secret self too often scales what Shahid Ali called six-inch Himalayas. I feel no pressure to compete with her; nor am I sure on what grounds such a competition would be conducted. I have known of some friction between artistic spouses who share the same art-- but almost none between artists who practice different arts. When overlapping replaces coincidence, Cupid gets it right.
Who would you describe as your major influences as writer? Brodsky, obviously, but who else? Do you prefer poetry to other forms of writing when you read?
Joseph Brodsky was one of my mentors, yes. He taught me that poetry could, indeed it must, exist through agencies beyond its first appearances in print. I say must, because he knew in his exilic circumstance and felt the real possiblity--which became a reality--that his own life and the destiny of his poetry were likely to be very divergent, and that the poem's ability to survive was directly connected to the degree of its rootedness in metaphysics. Joseph's view was that all the facts we commonly group under the all-embracing rubric of "history"--were united in their discontinuity. Ironically, he came to this view as one who had long championed the strict--though ultimately impossible--one-for-one correpondence of translation. At the same time, he knew that we encounter most poems in languages other than our own through this most expedient of devices. But good ironist that he was, he also recognized a compensatory gain in the midst of such a loss: the translated poem stood in elegiac relation to its origin. This is similar to what I was just talking about when I said that the private must undergo a transformation to the public in order to stand for anything at all--most especially including standing for private or privileged utterance. Brodsky himself pointed this out in an essay on Cavafy, whose work is mostly read in translation. The key is to accept the virtual poem as one of the poem's destinies and so to collapse and old and bothersome distinction between the real and the virtual, the original and the copy--a distinction that makes no sense to me anymore. You are probably asking yourself what this has to do with my relationship to Brodsky, well, I often imagine how Joseph would respond to things in my world now. I think I have internalized him to the point that I can send his arguments off into further emanations and adventures he would not have imagined or have had the foolishness to consider! Joseph was thus very important to the development of my views on poetry and language generally. He was also a complete poet, in the sense that his practice and his life were seamless, as everyone who met him realized. He was a role model for artistic responsibility minus sanctimony, and he was the embodiment, for me, of wit and grace and camaraderie and selflessness. And sheer intelligence sprinting after an idea, then finally hyperventilating on itself.
I have had two other role models. My first poetry teacher was Carolyn Kizer, who remains a paradigm of literary professionalism. She stressed the a thorough grounding in basics and cultivated a love for the classical models, for international poetry, and for social and political astuteness. She taught us on the one hand about the sounds and tactile features of poetry and on the other about what she understood as the proper biases by which art and taste connect. She hated cant and was impatient with stupidity, but she connected something of the life of poetry with a backing of the underdog. Not surprisingly, she turned all of her students into feminists through her example. And she was--and is--justly famous for her example, which is that of a person living large and well. She inspired--I should say armed--her students against intimidations of all kinds--especially institutional intimidations--a valuable lesson for budding artists whose lives might otherwise be set on compliance. I had the pleasure of introducing her to Brodsky, by the way, and they took to each other's company instantly. She called him "Joe," when calling him "Joseph" seemed a guilty concession to American leveling. My last influence was the philosopher Richard Rorty. Dick brought me around to understanding language in a new way, and he challenged my understanding of Platonism as the only philosophy available to the poet by introducing me to Heidegger's concept of poetry as a model for an attendance on reality, rather than something that tries to accomplish an objective, linguistic or otherwise. Dick's American neo-pragmatic philosophy is directed against what he calls "power freaks," whom he identifies as Platonists, scientists, mind-body dualists, religionists, most political programs, and virtually all ideologies! To these he opposes a reverential (albeit vigorously secular) model of the poet attending to what Stevens called "the music of what happens." This model doesn't seek to know, to get, to use, or to "understand." Nor is it passive, in the conventional sense of that term. Examples from his arsenal include Whitman and Stevens, and his philsophy is as much a working out of the implications of Whitman's and Stevens' poetry as it is of Heidegger's and Dewey's philosophy. Dick Rorty shows how it is possible to find in art, ideas, politics, and psychology mutually supporting implications. He's also a wonderful prose stylist.
I read all kinds of things: books on philosophy and religion, science, general nonfiction, biographies, criticism, fiction, but I also read poetry every day. I can't imagine not doing it: it puts you in mind of other minds and imaginations working at highest pitch. Other writers have other pleasures, but the presence of this pitch is peculiar to poetry--with a few exceptions, like the novels of Philip Roth, for example.
Talk a little about how you see things such as philosophy or science intersecting with poetry, as they seem to do so often in your work.
Poetry and philosophy have much in common. However, in America the philosophical tradition has been largely academic and too technical for writers. In Europe--as indeed in South America--the tradition is different: writers and philosophers are on much better speaking terms. Emerson tried to move philosophy closer to the literary culture, inasmuch as his agenda included writing what would amount to a cultural declaration of independence to complete the political one of the previous century. Unfortunately, Emerson's wedding of philosophy and poetry, while congenial to Whitman, was anathema to the emerging philosophers of the academy, who preferred to base their systems where the action was--on science rather than poetry. We are still dealing with the consequences of that rejection. I have always favored the European premise of compatibility because it helps situate our disbelief next to our faith. It did strike me that there was something to be said for the fact that European poets have training in their thought-traditions, while ours have training in workshops devoted to technique. It seems to me that if poetry is ever to be the maker of myths and paradigms in this country it will need to take a hard look at the inclinations underlying its discourses. At any rate, doing so would be infinitely preferable to the continual lamentations of poets cursing the fate of poetry in America.
Finally, in 1994 I asked you how much of your own voice you put into translations of Nobel-Laureate Brodsky, and you said, "As much as the author would let me get away with." So, as a closing curiosity, what language would your work be best suited for in translation, and in what way?
In the 1920s there was an amusing gang of Soviet poets who maintained that the proper language for poetry ought to be math--for what was perceived as its--math's--chiseling effect on ambiguity, ambivalence, vagueness, and the like. I don't know if this ever amounted to a school. However, it seems to me that these qualities--ambiguity, vagueness, and so forth, more closely favor people in their messiness than do hypothetical, ideal languages. At the same time, people need such ideals so as not to be continually trapped by the grind and attractions of their messiness. I like to maintain what Brodsky called a "necessary ambivalence" in my poems because, as I told my friend the filmmaker Michael Roemer recently, what we say is often both the truth and bullshit--at the same time! What language wears such bi-focals? We know of some languages that are, for example, mired between tradition and modernity in their ability to confer names--Icelandic comes to mind. That's the kind of lanaguage I would like to be translated in.
Thanks for your time, David. Much success with the book.
Interviewed with Kevin Rabas, December 2003 on publication of The Dissolving Island
(BkMk Press)
KR. I was intrigued by the references to music and painting it this collection. I especially liked “Sketches of Spain” which mentions Miles Davis and has a reference to Spinoza, and I was wondering how
DR. . . . how I got those two people in bed together? I don’t know. I wrote that one out in California at a place called The Djerassi Foundation, which is a wonderful artist’s colony started by a novelist and chemist named Carl Djerassi, the husband, by the way, of Diane Wood Middlebrook, the biographer of Anne Sexton. While I was out there, I wrote a bunch of poems that were really the basis of this book. The Spinoza part is easy because I have a degree in philosophy so I work some of those philosophers in there from time to time--I don’t know why. It darkens it a little bit, I guess. It was one of those times when I was in a zone and did a lot of writing. Bear in mind, this is 1989--which shows you one thing about this book: a lot of the poems are older than they seem. My publishing career has always been out of sequence. This book was, in fact (I’m not sure this is something you want to put on a website) going to be published by three other publishers. And in each case the editor came to grief.
KR: Right I heard something about that. Yeah, that’s strange!
DR: I began to feel the book should have a warning like a cigarette pack. It’s like that movie about the video: you consider this book and you’ll drop dead in a week! In fact, the last guy did drop dead.
KR: Wow.
DR: Just before the book came out. So anyway, this is just merely to say that the book would normally have come out a decade before. But it doesn’t matter because in the intervening time I just worked on it, adding more stuff, taking stuff out, trying to make it stronger and leaner.
KR: Right, right.
DR: I think I succeeded. At least as far as I’m concerned, it wound up being okay. And so it really represents fifteen years rather than, you know, a few.
KR: Right.
DR: The music was the music I was listening to in California--like Miles Davis. I notice that a lot of artists--I’ve always liked artists: I’m married to one--because they seem not to live up in their heads all the time. They’re down in their bodies and they’re listening to good music, as well as eating good food.
KR: What does your wife do?
DR: She’s a painter.
KR: Oh, so that makes sense. There are all those references to painting.
DR: She did the cover of the book.
KR: I didn’t notice that. I just got a copy of the book the other day. I had to read it in proof.
DR: Well, that’s Jill’s painting.
KR: Cool!
DR: Yeah, it’s a nice one. She’s a marvelous painter. She was a finalist for an Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters this spring. She has a gallery here in Raleigh where she shows, and she’s taught around==at Duke and The University of Washington, and so forth. She’s quite accomplished. I always like artists, so I finally just married one!
[Laughter]
Plus I get free covers. Actually, this is our third cover together. All I do is go into her studio and look around and say, “I’d like this one for a cover.” I’ve got the next five books planned! If I live long enough, I’ll have all kinds of cool covers. But anyway, the painting in the poems gets filtered in through her. And the music--my father was a musician--an amateur musician, but he was quite good.
KR: What did he play?
DR: He played everything: trumpet, saxophone, piano, anything brass, anything with a reed. He wanted to be a jazz musician, but he got married, had me, and I stopped him from being a jazz musician. But he used to do things back in the‘40s and ‘50s with swing bands and so forth. The bands used to go through town, and they would pick up musicians. They had just a core of people, and then they would pick up five or ten local musicians and rehearse once, and then they’d play. My dad was always playing with these quite famous bands like, you know, Harry James and Tommy Dorsey--for a night or two. So when I was quite young I was turned on this to this world of music. I guess it’s a kind of secret homage to work music in that way. When I was in college I was majoring in English and Russian at the University of North Carolina. In fact, back in those days I was such a dilettante that I thought I could acquire even a third major--the be the first person ever to have three majors. And the third major would have been classical music--musicology.
KR: What did you say your other major was--English and philosophy.
DR: No, Russian. Philosophy came later when I went to graduate school. I picked up a master’s doing Wittgenstein just because, you know, he was interested in language.
KR: Yeah, I like Wittgenstein.
DR: He seemed amenable to poets and he’s not so systematic. He’s certainly not dogmatic, and he’s a great questioner of things, in his own way a person who finds resemblances between things. Plus he was always examining language very closely. At the time I got interested in philosophy, I noticed that poetry was changing. When I was first writing in school, we were all imitating James Wright, W. S. Merwin, though some of us were inclined to read Denise Levertov and Robert Creeley too. James Dickey was big. Certainly no formalists at all. I think Richard Howard was the first person who came along who made that seem plausible. I’m talking late ‘60s and early ‘70s. We were in the thick of confessional, first-person poetry--subjective lyricism--and very much backpedaling away from the remnants of the ‘50s when everybody was writing formal stuff. Because all our teachers started writing formal poetry, and then they went and started writing free verse some time between the late 1950s and early 1960s. It coincided approximately with the rise of rock music as the dominant social music. My teacher was Carolyn Kizer, and Kizer started as a formalist.
KR: I noted you did a book on Kizer.
DR: The first book, in fact.
KR: How did that influence your work?
DR: She was a good teacher. She was very strict. She was like my father, in fact. He was that way about music. She was that way about poetry: you don’t fudge; you don’t cut corners; you pay attention to details. You stay with basics: stay concrete and clear--all these things that sound so obvious until you try to write!
KR: Right!
DR: Certainly you have this urge to be significant-sounding, and of course these things are always committed and paid for by your language. They’re always done at the expense of clarity and good taste. It seems anyway--certainly for a young writer. No young people were writing formal stuff, and it took me a long time to come back around to that. Carolyn started out a formalist, and she always respected that. So when she was teaching she would use a lot of formal models. She was always talking about poets nobody thinks of now, like Rolfe Humphries--a poet and translator of classical Latin. He has a wonderful translation of the Aeneid. He taught at Indiana or someplace in the midwest. He was quite well known as a poet and a translator. Sort of like David Ferry is today, I guess. Robert Fitzgerald is another.
KR: Oh, yeah.
DR: And Leonie Adams, who was a quite a famous poet of the 1940s who was a sort of extension of Louise Bogan, a gnomic, classical poet, kind of Greek-sounding and rhyming. And of course Roethke, who was her--Carolyn’s--teacher, and who was basically a formalist who decided at some point to branch out and write free verse. This happened to practically everybody in the country, so when I started studying with Carolyn, we were in the thick of doing this first-person, free-verse subjective lyric poetry, more of less confessional.
KR: I guess that means . . .
DR: Well, we didn’t like the confessional part. But it meant that lyricism was identified with individual topics and individual destinies and individual voices, and you know, there was certainly nothing public there. Nobody had any pretense of being a Virgil--except Robert Lowell. But nobody read Robert Lowell--I mean young people didn’t. But this all by means of taking about philosophy . . .
KR: Yeah, right!
DR: Because later on, I realized in the 1970s--I was in my 20s--I was just starting out, I realized that there are these people in other places who are writing language poetry. I didn’t know what that was at first. I thought it was just gibberish--and I think it is just basically gibberish. But it was gibberish with a flag, a battle flag. And the message was that you guys had gone too far in your subjectivity without questioning what it means to be a subjective person. And so we’re going to show you the other side of language, which is to be completely material, to show you what nonsense it is to think that language could carry real transcendental meanings. At first I was puzzled, but one thing that struck me,though, was that poets and critics who talked in this way were deriving their insights from philosophy, but they weren’t primarily themselves on speaking terms with philosophers as such. And I thought if I could go behind the scenes and read the philosophy behind this, maybe I could get a better understanding and see if I was wasting, in fact, my time writing something that was going to be seen--that I was going to see--as worthless in a few years. It also was just a kind of consciousness-raising exercise. I don’t do it anymore, but I keep up. Later when I got to my doctorate level my teacher was Richard Rorty, and Dick was one of the foremost philosophers in the country. Well it turns out that his teacher was Allen Tate at the University of Chicago. He loved poetry, and the funny thing is that, although he is a left-wing guy, more or less a socialist, his teacher was a real cultural conservative. And he loved Philip Larkin. He felt he was just the cat’s meow. Of course Dick was in the business of talking about things that never come to an end. He’s very postmodernist in that he believes, as I do, that inquiry never ends. The buck never stops; you can always come up with another question. But these poets were able to bring a kind of a sense of closure within a small aesthetic space. And so that gave a satisfaction, I imagine, that he didn’t have access to otherwise. So that’s how the music gets in, how the philosophy gets in. If I hadn’t had those experiences none of that stuff would have shown up quite the way they do. I try to treat it really lightly because it’s so easy to murder a poem by filling it up with ideas, and it gets, you know, dyspeptic after a while. It doesn’t work. You still have to remember that whatever freight you’re carrying inside the poem, it’s still just a matter of language. That’s one of the things studying language philosophy taught me. When you come right down to it, it is just marks and noises, as Dick says. It’s just stuff on a page. It’s what my wife says about painting: subjects are nice and all, but really it’s about pushing paint around on a canvas. It’s about pushing words around on a page. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to trivialize it. I’m just saying that language comes first in order to make it a good poem. If they’re just good ideas, they don’t need your poem anyway. They supply ballast, but they can’t carry the poem. As a poet you can’t carry the poem with the notion that its ideas are so swell that it wouldn’t matter if the poem were a lousy poem, since the ideas keep it powered up. That will never happen.
KR: Right
DR: Of course, there’s Seamus Heaney, who had gotten very political, and he’s able to carry the politics because his language is so gorgeous. It’s not because his ideas are better developed or newer. That doesn’t make you a poet. Of course, having no ideas, it seems to me, makes you less a poet. On the other hand, having no content is a kind of content. That’s the thing about language: it’s able to equivocate. It adjusts itself to contradiction and doesn’t fall down because of it, wears it as a badge sometimes. You can’t do that in philosophy. It falls if there’s a contradiction, but in poetry, that’s cool--just be Walt Whitman!
[Laughter]
KR. I notice a sense of memory and loss in The Dissolving Island. Especially in a poem like “Sketches of Spain,” that ends with “The best days painted black/ that won’t come back.”
DR: Yes, that’s the Spinoza poem you mentioned, the one with Miles Davis and all that. It’s one of those California poems. Well, I think a lot about memory. It turns out that a lot of American cultural theorists think about memory these days too because the idea now is that people are historicizing memory, in the sense that memory is not just something that belongs to people individually--anymore than their identity does. It’s something that’s there to serve a purpose, and so the question is, what purpose does it serve? And cultural memory serves the purposes of validating the power structure, etc., as we have heard ad nauseum.
KR: Right.
The Gettysburg Address is a way for Lincoln to get his ideas across, to rewrite the Constitution to bring the Union back together and so forth. And so as a result of that we got Gettysburg and Civil War reenactments as a byproduct. But individually, the idea is that memory works in the service of something also; that is to say it’s not freestanding. I think it’s probably true biologically. You can’t imagine that the human organism would have a memory without application. It’s going to be in the service of something. It used to be thought it was in the service of transcendent things. And you know, maybe . . . There is something. Transcendence is a thing. But I’m interested in just trying to feel around to see how poetry intersects with memory altogether because poetry creates a public memory. It starts from private sources but ends up being a public memory. Private memories are no good in poems because people can’t share them any more than they can really share their dreams.
KR: Right, right.
DR: If you can make them public somehow. That’s always the trick, isn’t it? You start out with something that’s private, then take it out into the fairway of common, interpersonal discourse with folks you don’t even know. They have to have somewhere to hang their hat too when they read it. That’s why love poems are so interesting--because they downright not personal finally. They can’t be because if they were, you’d be excluded. You can never be the object of that love unless you are the object of that love. Something like that with memory too. What memory does is it ties us into time. We extend into the past; it also situates us to bear the future. So memory has something to do with strengthening the broadly cultural superstructure--which is to say basically the social bonds between people by getting them to recognize common pasts in some regards and to suggest the future isn’t that bleak because we can map it. We can’t predict it, but we can put it on a grid and say this is where it’s likely to be. By the way, I’m also interested in memory because it’s a kind of sometimes difficult and even debilitating thing that people have to deal with. We look at Europe and say those people are so tradition-bound, and we’re not. That’s an old Henry James trope. And everybody else! But there’s truth to it. When you live in Europe you live in time, and when you live in American you live in space.
KR: That’s neat.
DR: I think that’s true. Emerson basically cleared the path and made it safe for us to trade time and get space in return. It’s a straight trade. And so as a result, all our things have to do with space--going west, being on the road and on the move--all that stuff. Whereas if you go to Italy and France, it’s always about the past. You live in a house that’s five hundred years old. The problem though is that after a while you start to feel confined by the past. That means you’re being controlled by the dead. And after a while there something unhealthy about it.
KR: Hmmm . . .
DR: So if there’s so much of that that you can’t have original initiative, originality is discountenanced because it would go against the things that are already in place. And that means you’re being controlled by the long arm of people who are no longer drawing breath, and that’s a problem for me. Too much ancestor worship and worship of the past can be debilitating when it appears to become a kind of cultural necrophilia. That’s a problem for a lot of people, if they look at it that way. So, the memory theme really has to negotiate a way between wanting to provide or to think about the ways in which we connect up with the past and how we make the future. I was in Rome a couple of years ago at the American Academy. We have some friends there, and I remember having a long discussion with one of them about this very topic. He was very charming and cultured, but he was extremely uncomfortable with being Italian because he said he felt decadent. He said he felt that he was at an end--all this stuff had been done before. He felt the weight of all that past, and he felt quite lightheaded beside it. Felt quite inconsequential, I should say. And I think that’s a problem for real ambition because if you have real ambition you don’t want to feel inconsequential at the same time! You can’t tolerate that kind of contradiction. So memory comes up for me and goes between those two goal posts. When I get it right, on the one hand it’s an honoring mechanism, and on the other it’s the fear that you’ll honor it too much and it’ll start to control you. It’ll become a kind of Frankenstein’s monster.
KR: Right.
DR: Well, I wasn’t thinking all those things when I wrote these poems. But in retrospect that’s what’s there.
KR: I would imagine a lot of these ideas would come back. For example, the book is bound and published and you’re reading it. It takes on another form or something because of the sequence.
DR: Yes.
KR: A friend of mine is doing a workshop on the idea of the book and what it means to be a book.
DR: My wife and I have recently, because of an illness, started to disburden ourselves of things like books. So many books! She comes from a family of people who write books. Carolyn Kizer is Jill’s mother, so she had all these books when we got married back in 1995, and I had all these books. So we decided to get rid of the doubles. I realized that on the second floor of our house we have a little hallway where we had three rows of books on the floor about ten feet long and four feet high, and that’s a hell of a lot of books. What we decided we ought to do is get down to one row. We just finished filling fifteen boxes of books and we’re not even done with the hallway! Every room except the kitchen has a lot of books in it.
KR: Wow, yeah.
DR: We were packing fearlessly and at one point I told Jill as we were bending over, getting back pain together, I said I used to think the greatest thing you can do on earth is write a book. And I still believe it on some level, but when you look around you realize that your little, skinny book is surrounded by a sea of massive books, all very detailed. And we’re throwing them out! It really cuts you down to size!
[Laughter]
I think about that all the time--what it means to be a book. And I am pretty much of that Mallarméan party that thinks everything exists to be written down. Brodsky, who was my other teacher, used to always talk about how literature was a “substitute for life.” You can see why in his case because he didn’t have much of a life after a while, but you want to think you have another rail. You know, you have the rail of your biological life, but you have another life, which is your life in symbol. And that’s what your book is doing.
KR: Life in symbol?
DR: Yeah, and that symbol is growing (to use another metaphor) and taking on more consequences as you live and ramifying more as you work on the themes that are natural for you. I still think that even as I stand in the midst of all those books we’re giving away that are better than anything I’ll ever write. And we’re throwing away for goodness sakes, Chekhov and Henry James and Tolstoy. And I think to myself, wow, imagine all the people who’ll be willing to throw me away with the first sweep through the library!
KR: [Laughter] Yeah, I wouldn’t want to think about that! That’s a strange business.
DR: But I still believe, as a matter of principle, that writing a book of a great thing. I think it’s because when I grew up, we didn’t have a lot of books. We didn’t have any books--Reader’s Digest condensed books. My dad was a musician, not a reader, and my mother was not a reader. I didn’t really get into the habit of reading until I was in high school. And when I discovered what that was I thought it was really cool. As I say, I still do. My students are of another opinion, though. Well, some of them are impressed. They say, wow, you’ve written a book? What’s it about? How long did it take you to write? Kind of sweet questions . . . But to others it’s just a big yawn. I might as well have said I’ve put a new logo on my T-shirt. That’s how much it’s worth.
KR: That’s bad.
DR: Well it seems like the good reactions are either sophisticated reactions in which people think it really is good in some limited, well-defined way--like you do, for example and like I do. But a lot of people have the “gosh” reaction--which is also what happens when they come up to you and say, “Aren’t you the person I read about in the paper who just published a book? Wow, that’s really amazing!” They go overboard the other way. But in the middle are all these people who are frankly indifferent. That’s really the majority. That a problem all American writers face and poets face in spades because, Billy Collins aside, practically no one reads poetry. Unless they’re crazy or getting their MFAs. It puts the people who do read you in the slightly difficult, but aesthetically pleasing position, of overhearing what you have to say . . . There was a big fad--you must be aware of this--in the 70s of having poems that seemed aggressively interested in the reader: “You are walking down a narrow, deserted street . . .” You feel like there’s a hand coming out of the poem and grabbing you by the lapels and trying to pull you in. It always seemed to me that that wasn’t going to work, that the way to do it was to write a poem where we’re getting something by overhearing. It seemed to me that that was a great old trick. So if you write to the past people will listen that way, will overhear you. I haven’t figured out how you write for the future. You know, in really idealistic political times when people are smiling about the future (we haven’t done much of that lately), like in the 1920s in Russia when the Soviet Union was first established, it seemed all the writers were writing to the future because they thought the future was glorious and bright, and they wanted to let you know that they were in on the ground floor. Whitman does this too, of course in our country, but Mayakovsky had poems written for people a hundred, a thousand years from now, as though they’re the only fit audience. Of course you can’t get can’t away with such titanic confidence, verging on bombast, unless your humorous; otherwise it sounds like you’re just a puffed up jackass.
KR: I guess they were in a situation at a time when everything was too good be true, so they were writing to an even brighter time than that. I can’t really imagine that! You said Mayakovsky?
DR: Mayakovsky, yes. He was one of the big poets of the revolution. A wonderful poet, by the way. Kind of a cross between Whitman and Ernesto Cardenal. Of course now that the Soviet Union’s gone, Mayakovsky’s also gone, and that’s a pity. He was much better than the politics he was in. He actually committed suicide, as several of those guys did. He was very famous and so forth, but when Stalin came in he realized he was on slippery ground. He couldn’t do his barbaric yawp the way he used to do because Uncle Joe was watching every move. Also it turns out his girlfriend was sleeping with another guy.
KR: That didn’t help. Are there things you want people to know going into your book? I wondered for example about the title.
DR: The title’s not obvious. The dissolving island’s an idea I got once listening to a lecture on Shakespeare. The person who was talking referred to Othello as a “dissolving island,” a person as an hermetically sealed man who was being, like the Venice where he worked, systematically nibbled at along the edges. So his integrity was being nibbled away, or as he put it, dissolving, the way Venice itself is dissolving. I thought that was a good image for the ego. You start out being very full of optimism or full of some kind of ambition that hasn’t had any chance to correct itself, and as a result you can’t fit in in a social way until you’ve been able to recalibrate your size. You know, Kevin, what it is, is just a title about solipsism, about trying to realize no privacy can be redemptive, finally. All of our redemptions happen when we turn outward. Rather they’re the ones that really are saving. And so I wanted to start with that idea that the island doesn’t stay an island, and when it dissolves, presumably, it returns to the ocean. It’s naturalized that way and in fact disappears. What I was also thinking is that if your conception of yourself is an island, you need a new metaphor. You’re going to be happier and more mature. That was the idea. While the title is a Shakespearean title, there’s nothing in Othello the play that refers to a dissolving island as such.
KR: Well, this has been wonderful! I’m glad I got to talk to you!
Interview with Marianne Cotugno, Sept.-Oct., 2004.
The Mount Olive Journal
If you had to trace your poetic lineage, who would you say are your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents? Do you have any siblings?
I started out as a poet working in the tradition, which for me meant not the tradition of English poetry or anything of that sort, but rather of poets working under the influence of the New Criticism. Now the New Criticism, as your readers already know, exercised a profound influence on how students read poetry. Indeed, its influence has never completel evaporated: deconstruction was (and I will say "was") a kind of "close reading" designed to destabilize and undermine an author's magic routine, an insurgency much needed, in my judgment. But the New Criticism proper infused much of the practice of American poetry with the notion that depths were important and that surfaces were the shifting vortices that gave access to the depths. Note that there was such a thing as "depths." One of the legacies of postmodernism will have been a rejection of the importance of depths in favor of the play of surfaces--a legacy I would like to see discountenanced on the theory that if you reject depths, you reject meaning. But I am moving far away from your question . . . My teachers--and my teachers' teachers--were poets who took the tenets of New Critical thinking as orthodoxy. Carolyn Kizer was my first important teacher, a poetic parent, and via her, I was able to claim Theodore Roethke, Stanley Kunitz, and W. B. Yeats as ancestors. Coming via Great-Grandpa Yeats was a good thing, as his influence was more benign than that of the other icon, T. S. Eliot, whose influence, except in very linguistically indirect ways, was invariably pernicious. From these poets I learned to value precision of thought, economy of means, and eclecticism of source. I also learned to reject rhetoric (in the bad sense), all forms of literary narcissism, ideologically driven poetry, and emotionally inspired--as opposed to poetically inspired--language. Of course, you can look through my poetry and find all those things in full flower.
With Kizer I acquired numerous uncles and aunts of her genration: James Wright, W. S. Merwin, Ann Sexton, and so forth. But because Kizer was a poet of the west coast, I also had occasion to claim some of that aesthetic, at least in spirit, which was to say, in the spirit of anti-academic writing. Here I mean poets like Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov. Indeed, the whole west coast school of poets who proceeded from Ezra Pound have always been of interest to me, although I have my doubts about the poetry of Pound himself. Kizer also raised me to think in two other directions--that of classical poets, that is, poets who were interested in the classics like Rolfe Humphries and Louise Bogan, and those who were themselves, despite wide differences, something like contemporary Horaces: Leonie Adams, H.D., John Crowe Ransom, and so forth. Kizer was also an internationalist in spirit, which has its advantages, in that it opens one's point of view to other cultures and linguistic determinants, and it makes one aware of the importance of literature in translation--a necessary expedient that has not always gotten the respect it deserves.
Later in life I acquired other poetic relatives. Chief of these was Joseph Brodsky--an older brother. Whereas Carolyn Kizer was about what we might call the classical virtues of lyric poetry--and about the proper overseeing of its production, the poem, Joseph was about the imagination as such--as redemptive mechanism and about wit as its herald. Joseph thought that poetry was thought--understood in the best sense--accelerated to the sublime max. This means that his poetry, strangely like Blake's (and nobody, I believe, has suggested this connection before), hearkens back to an Adamic human being, one capable of immense vitalism . Nowadays this figure is either a term of shame, nailed to cross of sentimentalism--or an overreaching embarrassment incapable of coping with the inherent mediocrity of his species. Brodsky was able to show something of this person by demonstrating that the Adamic human's natural self-effacement in the face of egotistical erasures in no way disqualified him for "greatness," itself something of a Philistine compliment.
What makes right now an important time to live in North Carolina?
North Carolina has a rich literary heritage, owing to its vexed racial history, regional differentiation, and (lately) shifting demographics. The state is right now experiencing the shift from a tobacco and manufacturing culture to a service culture, and as its older character undergoes being overtaken, its legacy stands to feel the full brunt of erosion, as a result of the forgetfulness following in the wake of deracination. It is one job of the writer to keep the connections with the past in place.
You have lived in many places both here in the United States and in Europe. What "place" has had the clearest and most profound connection with your writing? Can you explain that connection?
"Lived" is too grandiose a term. I have traveled some and spent time in Italy and France, as well as in many parts of the U.S. Each of these places is like a Renaissance macrocosm connected to a microcosm in my mind. At the same time, each place has appealed to something in me on a more metaphysical level. For instance, Italy affects almost every visitor, and the country has had a profound effect not only on English literature, but on American literature from Hawthorne and James to James Wright, who opposed the unnattainable heaven of Italy to the received hell of southeastern Ohio--and thus constructed the cosmos in which his poetry finds resonance. I have also felt that the Italian layering of time seems a version of our human autobiography, but I have also sensed further that the Italians first understood the nature of metaphor in the way that we have come to mean it. They understood that poetry means translating the personal into the public, indeed, into the natural in a way that makes nature and culture interchangeable. In a poem, I refer to it this way:
And sea-as-si, that term of assent, that
agreement--so long in coming--to let
stones take the place of waves.
It seems on the order of the miraculous that it should be so that opposites can stand for each other, can stand in each other's place. But the Metaphysical poets began from this very premise. No doubt this was what drew Brodsky to the poems of John Donne when he was a young man locked in his Russian.
What interests does your poetry share with your nonfiction writing in Trailers?
I was invited to join in the Trailers project at a time when I was immersed in Emerson, and my essay there, I think, betrays my misunderstanding of this outsized bard to an unusually productive degree. I have always been interested in issues of "translation," by which I mean not only intramural problems having to do with literary translation, but in issues of a more Ovidian nature--in short the subject of transcendence, of "carrying over" altogether, about which we don't hear much intelligent discourse these days. Specifically in terms of Trailers, I argued that Emerson gave the green flag for Americans to give their assent to the notion that time and space were strictly equivalent dimensions. Thus, in the same measure as Europe had time--read history--we had space--read frontier. The trickle-down was that it would be "natural" to Americanize so basic a thing as one's domicile by translating it from a thing bound by time to one bound only by space--that is, from a site-permanent home subject to effects of its history to a trailer whose habitat was anywhere it happened to be transported.
Can you talk for a bit about why you chose the sonnet form for your cycle of poetry on the fire at the chicken processing plant in Hamlet, NC in Sonnets to Hamlet (Pudding House Publications, 2004)?
When I first started writing poems seriously, I wrote sonnets. This was when I was a student at UNC back in the late 1960s. I was doing this at Carolyn Kizer's instigation but under the influence of John Berryman, an influence I later came to repudiate to the extent that it kept me writing free verse for decades. When the Hamlet fire happened, I had been recently teaching nearby at St. Andrews College, and I felt I had to write about the tragedy. But at the same time, I felt strong cautions about bringing words to bear on such an enormity of pain and emptiness and to attempt to replace these with significance. It is one of the problems of elegy altogether. And then one day--I believe it was when I had completed the second of my cycles of Italian-inspired poems, that I realized I had completely drawn a circle around the territory my own concerns and was now back at the beginning, but in the more advanced, knowing, and perhaps sardonic way that Hegel and M. H. Abrams perceived. And so the solution fell into my lap: write about the Hamlet fire in sonnets. You see, the thing about sonnets is that their brevity resists monumentalizing, but their frequent deployment in sequences and garlands and the like allows for thematic and even dramatic development. The fact that Hamlet could appear in the title was serendipity but reminds one that sonnets are anything other than minor or extinct forms and that elegy is one of the moods sonnets specialize in. The nod to clasicism also took into account that part of the tragedy of that fire was the way in which it found the history and tradition of the areas--a history of racism, paternalism, political corruption, and poverty taking place against a background of redemptive promise. Now I've finished with the sonnet form for a while, although it would be probably more accurate to say that the sonnet form is finished with me.
The Dissolving Island seems very much concerned with the relationship between place or landscape and memory. Is this so? Can you describe this relationship?
Landscape and memory have an old alliance sanctioned and sanctified by the dimensions they represent: landscape-space and memory-time and by their connection in the human imagination. Yet our country shows the dangers that come when the connection is severed and mobility becomes all. What I want to do is to bear witness to the relationship--a poll-watcher, as it were, whose self-appointed job it is to record--and by recording insist, not only that this or that came to pass, but as a Greek poet writes, "that the meeting take place."
"Spaghetti" opens: "I had not remembered, but do now." Does the process of writing poetry help you to retrieve or to produce memories? Do you have any long-lost memories of North Carolina that you have recently remembered?
The human capacity for memory is one of those surprising, Adamic vastnesses that, like silence--its lining--that our noisy lives lead us to neglect. But memory is inherently redemptive: the meaning of the word itself indicates a refitting of the corpse with its limbs: what could be more redemptive than that? Memory resists death by finding new (and old) ways to make images persist, just as forgetting often resists death by untying us from potentially fatal encumbrances. I grew up in Durham. My memories of growing up in North Carolina are both, urbi and orbi, specific and referenced to large cycles. Lately, I have been remembering what it felt like to grow up in the segregated south, not just the separate movie entrances and drinking fountains, the back of the bus and all that, but the interactions and resistances of the races, whose economies were just as intertwined as their social worlds were mutually exclusive. It made for a vacuum that the economic didn't allow for a social context; it's a pain we still smart from. I have often heard that there was more social interaction during the earlier part of the century: my grandparents--no liberals--told me of that, and while ringed with social proscriptions, it was not the same segregation that greeted the south after the Second World War.
I know that you are documenting tobacco barns across North Carolina. What drew you to this project and what are your plans for the images you have taken?
My grandfather was a tobacco farmer, and I remember well a sense of mystery that attached to these structures, whose unadorned presentation betrayed no sense of prescriptive form and yet which seem somehow not unrelated to fashions of Protestant self-effacements. The tobacco barns provide a visual link to a bucolic past. As these markers come down, we lose sight--quite literally--of where we have been and of those who labored to clear a space for our time. Now with the shift, first to a different kind of barn, and second away, from tobacco farming, they take on the lineaments of homemade ruins. They are disappearing from the landscape, and one of my purposes is documentary: to record what and where they were. But another purpose is to meditate on ruins, just as poets have always done. Now, they don't do this to be morbid, but to test again and again the idea that the imagination proposes access to the past and future, in either case extending the human project beyond its life dates. In other words, it's finally elegiac, but far from ending on a melancholy note, elegy contains the kernel of celebration in recognizing the fuller potential, which is the potential of the Blakean Adamic man, a man still in our sights, in spite of the present. I fell into doing the photographs myself because I saw that the dimensions of the task of archiving all those barns were larger than I would feel comfortable asking another to do with me. It also suited my commuter status. I drive 60 miles to work, and there are plenty of blue highways between here and there. Many is the afternoon I have left work but skipped the Interstate route home. As a result, I believe I have seen--I mean really seen--more of the barns in eastern North Carolina than anyone alive. For better or for worse! My models for appropriate documentation are the German industrial photographers, Bernd and Hiller Becher. Their style, in black-and-white, shows mug shots, passport photos of towers, furnaces, warehouses, and so forth, which allow little room for the intervention of extraneous things beyond the most immediate spatial contexts. I have tried to present barns in this spirit, which is, I think, the spirit in which they exist today.
You frequently use paintings by your wife, Jill Bullitt, for the covers of your work. Do you choose the pieces? Does Jill? Is it collaborative? What prompts the choice?
One of the things that drew me to Jill was the fortuitous overlap of our intellectual and artistic backgrounds. Both our self-descriptions, as your first question hints, include the recognition that we are the further emanations of our artistic forebears: in her case, as a last-generation Abstract Expressionist; in mine, as a (postmodern) subjectivist with formalist tendencies! I've now used, I think four of Jill's pieces as cover art, and I have another in mind for my Selected Poems, coming out next year. I usually have the piece in mind, although Jill will make suggestions. She has not done anything to order, nor would I ask her to consider such a thing. As it is, her paintings and drawings are suggestive enough to encompass my concerns. And they're striking in their own right. We have some work coming out in Pembroke Magazine, a fine journal edited by Shelby Stephenson. Shelby took five of my poems and six of Jill's pieces for a portfolio. I thought it would be a case of dialogic interplay, in the usually lame way painters and poets present themselves. But Jill's work diverges and takes off on its own. So I'm afraid my use of her work does nothing to advance either her work or career. It does suggest that I don't mind hanging on the arm of a distinguished artist.
How do you see technologies, such as the cellphone and PDAs, changing our relationship to landscape? Do you see art reflecting, addressing, or even challenging those changes?