AN INTERVIEW WITH C. K. WILLIAMS
Conducted by Lynn Keller
C. K. Williams recalls, in his poem "My Mother's Lips," that throughout his childhood his mother had mouthed his words whenever he attempted to communicate "something important." As recreated in the
poem, the evening in his adolescence when he asked her not to do so and for the first time felt himself having to find his own words and
go on speaking by himself -marked his entry into poetry as well as
adulthood. The poems that came to the lips of the solitary young man
continued the speech he had previously directed toward his mirroring
mother; they were efforts to reach within himself to "theblank caverns
of namelessness we encase." Yet the lines of the beginning artist were
also reaching outward toward an embrace of otherness; thus, at the
close of "My Mother's Lips," the poet speaks with the "sweet, alien
air against [him] like a kiss." In his published work, C. K. Williams
has pursued with ferocious intensity both the impulse to look deep
within his own darkness and the impulse to confront, as lovingly as
possible, the alien world, the situations and feelings of others.
His first volume, Lies (1969), is the most inward and obscure of
his collections. With strange, terrifying metaphors and a sometimes
thunderous but colloquial voice, Williams explores the bestial and subconscious impulses within himself. The twisted world of these surrealistic fables conveys the "moral terror" Williams experiences witnessing
the evil and destructive urges of all humankind. With IAm the Bitter
Name (1972), Williams opens his poetry more fully and explicitly to
immediate political events. Disjunctive and largely short-lined like the
poems of Lies, these lyrics rage bitterly against the insanity of recent
historical events.
The poems in With Ignorance (1977) differ strikingly from those
collected earlier. Prosaic, casual speech and a generously inclusive
0010-7484/88/0002-0157 $1.50/0
Contemporary Literature XXIX, 2
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C. K. Williams. Photo credit: Catherine Mauger.
manner replace the telegraphic cries of the preceding volumes. Long
lines permit the relaxed unfolding of personal memories and dialogic
meditations. The discursivenessof WithIgnorance and of the succeeding collection, Tar(1983), allows Williams space to explore the ethical
and intellectual complexities surroundingthe questions he poses. "Are
we commended to each other to alleviate our terror of solitude and
annihilation and that's all?" "[H]ow much of my anxiety is always for
myself[?]"These questions are voiced directly;others, about the origins
of brutality, the dangers of nostalgia, the possibilitiesof transcendence,
the powers of love, implicitly drive the poems. Only partially analytic
and propositional, Williams's questioning often takes the form of narrative and description. He interrogates a situation by recalling or
imagining its unfolding in ample graphic detail.
The subjects of his narratives are often saddening, sometimes
hideous or distasteful: a boy overhearing drunken neighbors fight, a
paraplegic Vietnam veteran losing his pants as he falls from his wheelchair, a dog with an intestinal blockage shrieking as he tries to defecate. They inhabit a run-down urban setting of boarded tenements
and glass-littered parks, where drunks lounge on the sidewalks and
long-time losers brag in bars. Sometimes they are stranded in even
more desolate country towns, America's"great,naked wastes of wrack
and spill." While Williams's stance is often the observer's, he manages
to watch compassionately without distancing himself as outsider. He
does not hold himself above any degradation. Yet he does not attempt
to claim others' experience as his own. Avoiding appropriations that
would be emotionally manipulativeor intellectuallysuspect, Williams's
portraitsof people who are impoverished, oppressed, broken, or nearly
broken do not pretend to speak from within that deprivation. Rather,
the poems suggest that seeing is itself a crucial political act in our
crowded world, for what we refuse to see we will not attempt to change.
Although the people Williams portrays are partially crippled by
holding in cries of anguish, they nonetheless embody small, essential
triumphs of the human spirit- and this qualified triumphis the emphasis of Williams's recent work. The paraplegic vet's companion determinedly tracks the figure of infinity even if the falling snow inevitably
obliterates that image; a has-been grocer continues to make his bed
and sweep his condemned apartment; models posing for pornographic
photos are imagined sharing a moment of tenderness. Thus Williams's
description of Jim Daniels's poetic achievement could just as well
describe his own: "He has captured and enacted the blind and sad
anguish of souls so trapped that they have ceased to know how to
WILLIAMS
159
speak even to themselves, but he has never lost sight of the remarkable dignity, humor, and spiritual resilience which at the end are what
redeems our passion and our hope."
In addition to the four volumes of poetry that had appearedbefore
this interview took place, Williams has published a translation of
Sophocles' Women of Trachis(1978) as part of the Greek Tragedy in
New Translations project edited by the late William Arrowsmith for
Oxford University Press and The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling.
(1983), in lovely limited edition from Burning Deck, which contains
twenty-four "poems from Issa." Williams's most recent collection of
poems, Flesh and Blood, won the 1987 National Book Critics Circle
Award. His translation of Euripides' The Bacchae is forthcoming.
This interview was conducted on November 21, 1985, in conjunction with a readingsupportedby the Wisconsin Union DirectorateIdeas
and Issues Committee and by the English Departmentof the University
of Wisconsin, Madison. Our thanks to them and to Professor Ron
Wallace for arrangements that made the interview possible.
Since you are here in Madison partly because you were the final
Q.
judge for this year's Brittingham poetry prize, I'll start with questions
promptedby your introductionto the book you selected. In introducing
Jim Daniels's Places/Everyone, you praise the volume's political
engagement. In Latin America and countries in extreme political turmoil, poets' voices have real political power. Do they have any here?
I'm not sure that poets in other countries have that much
A.
political power either, or not much direct power. In places like Latin
America and Eastern Europe, where there's a clear social emergency,
then the recourse to poetry becomes more common. In America, since
the Civil War anyway, one of the prevalent political tactics has been
for those in power to pretend that there is no emergency, even when
there clearly is. What we're going through in America now, with a
realignmentof class, of economic expectation, with a continuing unemployment and poverty problem, would in most places be considered
a sociopolitical emergency, but here we regard it as a wave in the economic cycle. I don't think, though, that poetry has much to offer in
a programmaticsense. Whetherpoetry has a particularpolitical agenda
isn't nearly as important as the fact that it promulgates by its very
essence basic human decency, basic values, and a sharedvision of community. When there is an emergency that people feel, or are allowed
to feel, is real, then they tend to go looking for poetry, for the solaces
it offers and for the heightened moral consciousness it presupposes.
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That's what happened during the Vietnam war, when first the college
kids and then many other people realized that poetry could speak,
and was already speaking, for them.
While it's obviously valuable, it can be awkward for someone
Q.
in the comfortable middle class to be proclaiming emergency or trying
to speak for the destitute and oppressed. Sometimes in your work you
bring to the fore a sense of the guilt experienced by the privileged and
by the survivors. That's the case in, say, "The Beginning of April"
or in some of your poems referring to the Nazi Holocaust. Do poems
help you deal with that discomfort of being relatively free and strong
and prosperous?
A.
Yes. That's an excellent question. I think I'm more radically
political than I ever was in terms of the intensity of feeling I have about
political issues now. At the same time, I have less sense of what a political program would be that would avoid the various shoals all the existing political systems tend to run aground on. In the sixties and the
seventieswhen there seemed to be the possibility for some activism- for
a way to really act, to go into the street . . . All the illusions we had
then, or maybe they weren't illusions, maybe they were just lost hopes
S... I suffered a great deal then from the feeling that I wasn't doing
enough. The real activists would say, "Put your body on the line,"
and I had no wish to do that. I went to the demonstrations and the
readings, but I didn't feel comfortable with that sort of activism, and
I still don't. I feel less lively guilt about it now, partly because going
to the streets would be like running around in circles, and secondly,
because I'm a little more certain of the function that poetry-what
I do spend all my time at- does fulfill. I'm more sure that there's a
task for the poet that doesn't involve putting down poetry and grabbing
a gun or grabbing the lecturn or whatever you would grab. But the
discomfort you speak of is still one of the main emotions I feel just
living in the middle class in America, especially living in New York.
If I ever leave New York, it will be because of the tensions I feel, the
discrepancy between my life and the life that I have to see around me.
And "I have to see" is the part that I often write about, because that's
the middle class emotion: watching people who are condemned to live
the way they do and feeling there's nothing you can do about it, especially at such a reactionary time as we're going through now.
Q.
A.
What political writers do you particularly admire?
I've been studying a book by Robert Bellah and his four coWILLIAMS
161
authors, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in
American Life. It's a wonderful book. Over the last five years I've
studied a lot of economics just to try to figure how the world works nothing systematic, unfortunately. I've read a lot of Albert Hirschman, who is a great economist; a book of his, Shifting Involvements:
Private Interest and Public Action, contains very good studies of how
people move politically, what makes them stay with an idea or an institution or abandon it. And now I'm readingmore - I'm startingTocqueville who I somehow never read and some of the people who Bellah
and his people referred to, notably Alasdair MacIntyre.
What about political poets or people who have written political
Q.
poems?
A.
During the sixties I did most of my reading in that. There isn't
all that much in America, although there's quite a bit from other countries. No, that's not fair to say- I think for instance of Whitman, who
was a big influence on all American poets. When I first read him he
was a major political influence on me. Yeats, who is probably my
aesthetic model as far as making a poem, to me is a very important
political poet. During the sixties I read a lot of the Latin Americans
and Spaniards, as most poets here did: Neruda, Vallejo, Lorca,
Hernandez, Machado. And also during that period all the Eastern
European poets, particularlythe Polish poets, who were a very strong
influence not just on me but on the several generations of postwar
poets writing then. Milosz did a book called Postwar Polish Poetry
which was like a secret text only the poets knew about, and through
that we got into a lot of the Eastern European poets who have to live
in that state of emergency we spoke of before, and who tend to write
out of a much more direct sense of being in history and who have
a much more directaccess to history. They feel little compunction about
locating themselvesin historicalsituationsin their poems. There'ssomething in the American political character that makes us feel as though
we're being hubristic when we speak that way: again, except in emergencies, we tend to be shy about making the first person the real enactor
of history. Even somebody like Lowell who wrote a lot about historyand wrote wonderfully - except in a very few poems wrote almost as
a historian rather than as a poet who was the legitimate embodiment
of history.
What about Ginsberg? He's obviously in the Whitman tradiQ.
when I was reading your early works, the forward rush of
and
tion,
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some of the poems with their accumulation of surrealisticimages and
their black humor often made me think of early Ginsberg.
I admire Howl, I admire Kaddish, but I was never influenced
A.
by him. The concept of energy intrigues me. I remember once coming across a book of Charles Olson's, Reading at Berkeley. I was really
impressed with the force of the energy of Olson's language, and I
remember at the time brooding over that, trying to find out how he
had access to that kind of power. If there was anybody from that school
that I did get some of that from, it would have been Olson rather than
Ginsberg.
You mentioned Lowell. That makes me think of the confesQ.
sional and of your poem "The Gas Station." The speaker in that poem
asks some difficult questions about the confessional mode: "what am
I, doing this, telling this, on her, on myself, / hammering it down,
cementing it, sealing it in, but a machine?"The poem goes on to mention Augustine, apparently an allusion to the Confessions. Is a confessional writer a machine? And how do you place yourself in relation to that scene?
A.
It's funny, because when I wrote that poem I really didn't think
of it at all in that sense. Yet it obviously does refer rather overtly to
confessionalism, about which I have mixed feelings. I was a friend
of Anne Sexton's. She helped me get my first book published and was
a general source of support for me. But I was never a great fan of
the confessional stance as such. When you come down to it, there are
really only three confessional poets of any note: Sexton, Plath, and
Lowell.
You don't count Berryman?
Q.
I don't think so-somewhat, but really only in the "Dream
A.
Songs," and there he wasn't so much a confessional poet as a narcissistic poet. The great "Dream Songs," the first seventy-seven, were
hardly at all confessional except in very splendid, broad, abstractways,
but then when he kept going on the poems, they became quite self-indulgent. For me the confessional presents a great quandary because
Lowell over the last few years - or Bishop and then Lowell - in some
sense has been my technical model, to the degree that I've had to start
pulling away from him somewhat. But his unscrupulous use of his
own and other people's experience really troubles me. I recently read
some letters that were written to him- I think it was Bishop who wrote
WILLIAMS
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them - telling him that he really didn't have to do that and shouldn't,
and I would agree.' There are two issues to being a poet: there's the
issue of making or trying to make great poems (and certainly Lowell
did that) and there'sthe issue of being a poet (which is very mysterious
for a poet) and the fact that other people can value your very existence.
It's something you never believe in. You can never believe in it about
yourself, but at the same time you know that when you fall in love
with a poem there is something about the poet, too, that you love.
Last week I was with Galway [Kinnell]and we were talking about Rilke.
He said he had made the mistake of reading a biography of Rilke and
Rilke had been somewhat diminished in his eyes. With Lowell, then,
there is that question: was he in fact attending adequately to that part
of the poet's function, or was he misusing it in order to produce his
poems? The paradox is that you can write a poem about anything;
ideally that's what a voice is, it's being able to deal with anything. So
he was dealing with what was his truth, but ...
You mention Bishop. I did think very much of her work when
reading Tarbecause one of the ways you achieve a talky quality there
is through lots of interruptions- digressions and questions and parenthetical remarks- a strategy typical of Bishop.
A.
She was a big influence on Tar. For about half the time I was
writing it, I was studying her work very closely. But I don't think it
was primarilyher talkiness that influenced me. I certainly was affected
by her subtle use of language rhythms, but I think that it was her purity
of vision that was more important to me: the absolute rightness of
her figures and the precision of her details. Also, the real analytic rigor
in her work: she does it so deftly that you hardly notice it. I was with
a well-known poet the other night who said he doesn't particularly
care for her. I was trying to read some poems to convince him - I read
that wonderful epistemological section of "In the Waiting Room"but he didn't really hear her, and I understood because I didn't either
for a long time. I felt just what my friend did: here's somebody using
ordinary language to talk about ordinary things and what's the big
deal? Then one day I was in the Boston Public Library with my son,
there was a pile of paperback books on a table, and I picked up - I
think it was Geography III- and just about fell over. I started reading and kept reading for three or four years.
Q.
'A letter Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Lowell protesting his use of Elizabeth Hardwick's letters in The Dolphin appears in Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography
(New York: Random, 1982) 422-23.
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Something else you and she have in common is your skill as
Q.
visual artists. I've seen your drawings in American Poetry Review and
then of course on the cover of the Issa book. Did you ever think of
becoming a visual artist?
A.
Too late. There are times I have regretted not being a visual
artist - because of the money, for one thing, and the involvement of
the body. Poetry is so much a mental activity that when things are
bad you feel as though your mind is just going to crack. You could
be like one of H. G. Wells's time creatures, this little white slug with
a brain. And painters aren't that. They work with their hands, their
eyes, their whole bodies. Actually when I started out writing poetry
I never had an inkling I would have done something so unlikely. All
my friends were architects, and if I had said something even more
unlikely, "I'm going to be a painter," they would have laughed me
out of the room. "What do you mean you're going to be a painter;
you have to have some skill," but I had as much, probably more skill,
actually, as a painter than as a poet.
Let's talk about your four volumes. There seems to be a
Q.
dramatic split between the first two and the second two. Would you
comment on whether you think that's true, and if so, what the essence
of that development is?
A.
It is true. I have talked a lot about this. I did stop and start
again for very personal reasons. I didn't stop for long, though it seemed
at the time long enough. I stopped and I started, and I started somehow with this new voice that allowed me to go on. I think if I hadn't
found a new voice, I would have stopped writing poetry.
One of the big changes that I see is in your approach to syntax,
Q.
and I'm curious about that. In some of the early short-lined poems,
syntax almost seems to be in control; it's the forward drive of the syntax
that carries the poem. But then in the later volumes you're controlling syntax and using it to burrow into your subject. Was that a conscious strategy?
I didn't think of it in terms of syntax; I thought of it in terms
A.
of extended intellectual units. The long line came first. I didn't really
know what I was doing when I started with the long line. I just started
writing it and felt that it was right. What I felt intuitively was that
I could deal with larger units of meaning than I had. Once you begin
to work with larger units of meaning, then syntax does become a greater
issue because the organization of the elements of language becomes
WILLIAMS
165
more important. It also then becomes one of the technical felicities
that you try to enact in the poetry.
It's not only your lines that are getting longer - your poems
Q.
seem to be growing longer as well. If you look, for instance, at the
long poems that end each of your volumes, "One of the Muses" is
by far the longest yet.
A.
Though my next book [Fleshand Blood] is going to be all eightline poems.
Oh, interesting! Even so, I want to ask you about "One of the
Q.
Muses." Most of the reviewers commented on how different it was
from the rest of the volume, how abstract it was in comparison to
the very grounded specificity, the physical nitty-gritty of the other
poems. How did you come to write "One of the Muses" that way?
I was trying to deal with a very fugitive emotional and mental
A.
state that required that kind of analytic approach. The whole poem
is the analysis of one emotion, in a sense, which is the emotion of
loss. I haven't really ever thought of it in secondary terms this way,
but I would say it's the emotion of loss, the problem of how we recover
from loss. What the poem says is that there's some sort of rupture
that allows us to recover from loss. I guess that trying to redeem or
account for or come to terms with that sort of experience required
a different kind of attack, and although the poem is much longer than
the others, in terms of experienceit really isn't. It'sjust that the experience took more time to get at. I wasn't sure whether to put it last in
the book. It isn't meant to be last the way the Anne Frank poem in
the first book is meant to be last because it's really a culmination, as
is "In the Heart of the Beast" in the second book. In fact, all the first
three books have last poems that are more extensive workings out of
the style, although they weren't necessarily written last. "One of the
Muses" was different in that it allowed me to let my style try things
it hadn't yet.
Yet many of your works deal with some sort of fugitive emoQ.
tional state, and in them you found some nonabstractembodiment. You
have lines about that in one of the poems in With Ignorance: "Sometimes the universe inside us can assume the aspect of places we've been
/ so that instead of emotions we see trees we knew or touched or a path,
/ and instead of the face of a thought, there'll be an unmade bed,
a car nosing from an alley" ["Bread"].It seems to me that many of
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your poems that use memory are really giving some physical aspect
to a fleeting emotion or to some transitory psychological state.
A.
I think that's true, but I actually wrote the poems upside-down
from that: I used memory as the skeleton in which the events, "the
face of the thoughts," could occur. So in a way the memories are incidental; they're just devices. When the poems are called "memory
poems" I always feel a little squeamish because I realize I could have
written them in another way.
What is the relation between your titles and your poems?
Q.
Especially in your early work, sometimes I wasn't able to make a
connection.
A.
That's what Anne Sexton said too. Titles for poems just come
to me. I think in the first few books I was working so much with disjunction that sometimes what would please me would just be a title
that clearly seemed to have nothing to do with the poem but that I
knew really added on an unconscious level to the resonance of the
poem.
I want to ask you about the comic element in your work, and
maybe I can ground this in "Soldiers," the poem that you sent for the
broadside.2 When I first read the poem, Ron Wallace asked me what
I thought and I said, "I think it's spooky," and he said, "Oh, I think
it's funny." So we discussed where we got our views. Ron said, "He
takes this almost Jamesian nuance and blows it up until it's completely
ridiculous."And Ron was - understandably- chuckling over lines like
"My . . . hungry mouth hefts the morsels of its sustenance over its
firmament." But the lines Ron was chortling over were lines I found
chilling because a supposed presentness and hereness is presented in
terms of such abstraction that at the end when the speaker is saying,
"I'm here," there's really a denial of being here. It's as if the only way
to be sane is not to be here.
I'd like you to comment first on that poem and then more generally
on the comic elements in your work.
Q.
In "Soldiers," I meant to do both. I did mean the elements of
A.
the poem to be funny, but at the same time, what the poem is dealing
with is, as you say, chilling. The perceptionsin the poem are very tense,
2For Williams's reading at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Silver Buckle
Press produced a broadside of this uncollected poem.
WILLIAMS
1
167
almost unbearably so, but the mind in the poem deals so desperately
with the evident sadnesses there that the absurdity of the images and
the metaphors, and the comic element, became for me the most real
embodiment of the lengths consciousness will go to to retain "normality" in the face of anguish. As for the comic in general, it's a tricky
thing to talk about. People have mentioned to me that they find elements in the poems funny, but I've never really systematically tried
to put humor into them. The way I seem to come up with what later
can appear funny is more through a sort of exuberance, a delight in
what the poem can in the most unlikely way do. It's always nice that
it's noticed, but it feels as though I shouldn't talk about it too much:
I might spook the beast.
I think humor has been there all along in your work, but I'm
Q.
curious if it plays into the shift between the two pairs of volumes.
My sense is that there is almost a shift in your view of human nature,
or more accurately,a shift in emphasis:the murderousnessof humanity
is more a central preoccupation in the early books. That doesn't disappear-it's certainly still there in "The Last Deaths," say, the one
with your daughter watching television. But there seems to be a shift.
The epitome of the change might be a poem like "Floor," the pornographic post card poem, where the emphasis is on these unaccountable tendernesses and wondrous transcendencies. Where does your
humor fit into that?
I don't connect those with humor. I think there'sa lot of humor
A.
in the first two books. I think your perceptionis right about the general
trend of the books, but I don't think that would be where the comic
would be implicated.
One other thing in your development I want to ask about is
Q.
translation. I think your Womenof Trachisis very powerful. Do you
have anything to say about the affinities between your own world view
and Sophocles' in that play?
A.
When I was doing the translation I became fascinated with the
fact that the Womenof Trachisis really about civilization, about what
[Norbert] Elias called "the civilizing process"- the moment at which
we become civilized. Herakles is the pivotal figure; he's from the world
of precivilization, but he's the agent of civilization. He's the civilizer,
but he never really quite civilizes himself. I've always been fascinated
with that phenomenon as it occurs in the individual. Freud calls it the
relation between the id and the ego or the id and the superego. One
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of the constant themes of my adult consciousness has been the struggle
between instinct and reason, if you would call it reason and if you'd
call it instinct. I'm not sure either term in fact is adequate. In a way
the play is the enactment of the same drama. The other thing that
interested me was that when I was a kid my father used to tell me
bedtime stories when I was sick, and my favorites were the labors of
Hercules, and so when I began to do the play, it had a double meaning for me.
In discussing the choruses in the "Translator'sComments" you
make a distinction between music with its organic connectedness on
the one hand and poetry with its intellectual meaning on the other.
Do you remember that? What do you see as the role of music in your
own work?
Q.
A.
Those are two different questions. I was speaking about actual
music, the fact that the Greek choruses were actually sung to music.
I've said somewhere how unfortunate it is that the only term we have
when we speak of what happens in poetry is "music." It all becomes
very confusing. The splendor of real music is its disconnection from
human experience, the fact that it is a totally human artifice, while
the music of poetry has to do just with its connectedness to our real
situation and plight.
In the poetic music of a play like that, the various metricalshifts
would have been significant for a classical audience, I assume- various
conventions would be associated with particular meters. As a modern
writer, you can't rely on that. What do you feel are substitutes? Does
that seem like an impoverishment to you?
A.
No, there is a different set of necessities, that's all. When you
really get into trying to translateanything, you realizeit's a pretty hopeless project. With something as grand as a Greek tragedy, the attempt
can seem pretty absurd. At the same time, you do it. You find rigors
of syntax and rhythm to try to make an equivalent for the formal
demands of the original. Greek verse is based on vowel length, ours
on stress patterns - the best you can do is approximate. Art is really
always a working out of various necessities, conventions, forms, whatever, and the freedoms of consciousness: you just try to keep enough
necessities going so that you're not oversimplifying.
Q.
In your commentary you mention the constraints of the translator's cultural and literary milieu, and this would certainly be one
Q.
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of them. What else were you particularly aware of as a constraint for
you?
A.
That part doesn't have so much to do with constraint. It's almost
a sense of squeamishnessbecause you realizethat you are really rewriting history. What happens in our minds in reading the play isn't what
happened in the minds of the Greeks. So every aesthetic decision you
make about the intensity of a word, the intensity of a moment, the
intensity of a scene and the reasons for it is an alteration of what the
Greeks would have experienced. I'm reading Robert Darnton, a great
historian, and that kind of shift is one of the things he takes off from.
Clifford Geertz, who is another favorite of mine, an anthropologist,
talks about the same thing, about how we have to do that. Darnton
uses as an example the interpretation of fairy tales. He shows how
Fromm and Bettelheim interpret "Little Red Riding Hood," and then
he goes back to the original and realizes that they're interpreting a
"Little Red Riding Hood" that wasn't even there. And so in a sense,
although they're pretending to say something about the universal and
timeless in the human soul, they're in fact wrong about the very people
who generatedthe story. When you go to something like Greek tragedy
you take that to heart. What are you doing here, daring to touch cultural monuments? But at the same time you know you're giving something to your own culture. Translation is a very shifty activity anyway, a little bit like grave robbing. The truth of the matter, though,
is that you end up with something, and hopefully it gets to the museum,
but you have ransacked and violated something too.
Where did you get your interest in translating Issa?
Q.
A.
I had loved the haiku for a long time. I was reading a translation of some and felt, "These are so silly." I realized these people are
really ransacking: they're ransacking both Japanese and English
because just trying to make a poem in English in seventeen syllables
is absurd, because a syllable means something different in Japanese.
So I said, "Well, I'll really make these into English poems," and I got
really going in it. Actually, I did them a long time before they were
published, and I was never sure whether to publish them. I did a great
many while I was writing With Ignorance.
Do you know Japanese at all?
Q.
A.
No, I just looked at existing translations. When I did the Greek
things I didn't have Greek either. I worked with a classicist and I would
get all the other versions I could, even a good French version. But
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with this I was just having fun. That's why I call them "Poems from
Issa." I don't even call them versions. They're not versions. They're
poems that take an image or an epiphany of Issa's and try to bring
it into being in American poetry.
How do you think being a translator has affected the rest of
your writing?
A.
I suppose not much after all, except that being so deeply exto
posed
anything has to affect you somehow.
Q.
What about your generation? You talked earlier about your
generation reading all sorts of people you wouldn't have been reading
if they weren't being translated. But do you feel that the activity of
translation, which has been so popular, has affected your poetic
generation?
A.
Poets have always been intrigued with translation, with bringing things across cultural boundaries. It's also a very, very complex
subject. When I was at Boston University, there was a professors' seminar in translation that I became very active in; they brought up all
sorts of people who were speculating and theorizing about translating.
I think the most interesting thing I realized is that there seem to be
periods in cultures in which the literature suddenly turns and begins
looking for its poetry in other languages. It happened in England of
course during the Renaissance, and it happened to us during the sixties.
It must have something to do with culture in crisis, with the feeling
that the resources of your own society have been used up, somehow.
I remember that there was a good period when I very rarely read any
poems that had originally been written in English. Everything I was
learning was coming from other poetries.
Q.
It's easy to see the fifties as a very stifled time in poetry. Do
Q.
think
translation was a way to get out of a kind of deadened
you
modernism?
I don't know about that. I didn't really start writing until near
A.
the end of the fifties, so it would be hard for me to say if it was as
bad as they say. I was really by myself in the beginning, doing it on
my own. I didn't go to graduate school or anything, and I was groping
along by myself. My main poets were Rilke and Yeats; I didn't know
any other poets and for some reason I didn't feel compelled to read
the poetry that was around, until I began to meet other poets. Whether
the fifties were all that bad a time for poetry is another question. There
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were certainly some great poems written then. Maybe moving from
one stylistic period to another entails rejectingmuch of the poetry that
came before. Maybe it's just that we're always filtering out the bad
poetry in our vision of a period, and the combination of the shift
toward looser forms in the sixties and that filteringprocess made everything more dramatic.
Q.
A.
The word God appears in your work frequently.
Not so much now.
OK. But I was bewildered, as I read your work, by what this
Q.
God was.
A.
When I was working on my first two books, I felt as though
much poetry had a sort of conceptual politeness about it that seemed
to me to omit a lot of human experience. Of course this is one of those
egomaniacal things a young poet can say to himself - "Poetry is such
and such"- not even knowing half the poetry in the world yet. But
at any rate I did feel very intensely that the way we actually experience
concepts like God, soul, death has a much rawer tone and edge to
it than we generally acknowledge. So in those first books I very consciously tried to make a God who would be the kind of God children
experience,very simply and directly, with a kind of primitivenessabout
it. Adults perhaps can never re-experience God that way, as simply
Him, It, She, in a very direct sensual-mental apprehension, but that's
what I was trying for. There was another God in those poems, the
God of theodicy, the allower or even perpetrator of evil. I think that
God had a lot to do with my becoming aware of what the Holocaust
had been. In the best sense, the God I conceived of was descended
from some of Buber's ideas. God as something the collective human
soul experiences, God as what happens between our psyches, but I
think that the theodicy issue more or less overwhelmed that part of
it. I've written a poem about all this recently.
W. H. Auden has said that it's the poet's role to maintain the
Q.
sacredness of language. Does that mean anything to you?
A.
Yes, of course, that's what being a poet is, finally. You don't
think that when you start out. It's the kind of thing that someone who
is hard into middle age would come to, because when you're young
you think poetry has much more to do with experience, and language
is just the means you use to deal with experience. By the time you
have written a lot, you realize that really poetry is at base language
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enacting itself. You are the medium of enactment, which is both humbling and exalting; I guess that's what any experience of sacredness
is - the sense that you are being acted through rather than just acting
yourself.
When you were judging the Brittingham contest, why did you
choose Daniels's book, or, to make the question more general, what
do you look for in new writing?
Q.
A.
This book was an anomaly; it's a very odd book. It doesn't
really fit into any categories. The culling process at Wisconsin had
brought the selection down to about a dozen books, and there were
some very good books among those. There were some that had individual poems that were as good as or betterthan anythingin Jim'sbook,
and when I first read the book I almost dismissed it-it seemed so
simple-minded and so clunky. But I found it was the book I kept coming back to to read with genuine interest. I have not been systematic
at all in my poetry contest judging. I did one contest in which I really
wanted to pick someone whose poetry wasn't like mine so I could overcome my subjective limitations, and that wasn't such a good idea
finally. I don't think in that case I really picked the best book. So
it changes; you just try to be responsible to whatever you're feeling
about poetry and young poets at that moment. It's such a difficult
thing to be a young poet anyway - even if everything works out great,
it's difficult. But with Jim's book I was glad and also very relieved
at how many people loved it; everybody who saw it really liked it,
and I thought, "Well, it's not only me."
About the contemporary scene more generally, do you think
there's an avant-garde today?
A.
I think I've become a little dubious about the whole notion of
an avant-garde. We've somehow become used to assuming that what
happened around 1910, with Pound, Eliot, dada, etcetera, is the model
of the way cultural history happens, but I'm beginning to think that
the moment of the birth of modernism had more to do with historical
phenomena than cultural. The world had changed radically over the
decades before that; people were realizingit had, but we were still using
intellectual equipment that came from the eighteenth century, and I
think that it had become clear that the age of revolution and industrial capitalism, besides the development of modern physics and the
working out of the implications of Darwin, demanded a different set
Q.
of cultural forms. The artists were the first - as they often are, or
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always- to sense the culturaland emotional implications of it all. Once
you accept that that kind of world-revising moment is the model for
the normal evolution of art, though, you begin to create disruptions
and disjunctions in cultural history that are really grounded in nothing
but marketing, and you get all sorts of people simply proposing themselves as the avant-garde,with not much substance to their claim either
culturally or aesthetically. The Language poets, for instance, go to
great theoretical lengths to certify themselves as avant-garde,but when
you actually read their work, their connection to any kind of cultural
necessity seems really quite retrograde. Maybe I'm wrong, but I just
don't see any other instances of anything approaching an avant-garde
other than the birth of modernism. The romantic poets responded to
the French Revolution with a new kind of poetry, but it wasn't nearly
so radical in its formal shift as we like to think, and if what they were
doing was dismissed at first, that dismissal really had to do with
attempting to deny the consciousness they were enacting; the critics
hadn't moved into the new age with them yet.
Do you think being in a postnuclear age has meant any sort
Q.
of dramatic shift in consciousness?
A.
God, it has to. I don't know that I could trace it, though. Certainly we suffer from it terribly. When you look at what's happening
in New York in painting, with these young brutal painters, I suppose
it could be tracedto that - almost the rush to get something done before
extinction. The apparently rushed quality of the paint, the way the
paint is put on the canvas, is an expression of something that intense.
Whether it's happening in poetry or not I don't know. Or whether it's
happening anywhere I don't know. It might be that humanity has
finally come up with something so enormous that all you can do is
repress it; how can you possibly deal with your own extinction? And
when we do try, like that television movie The Day After, things
become absurd, and trivial. I seem to have contradicted what I said
a moment ago, haven't I?
It seems to me that a lot of your work carries an end-of-theQ.
world sense that may be associated with the Nazi Holocaust as much
as a nuclear holocaust, but it's very strong. I wonder whether the poet
reflecting on that is doing anything different for the reader than the
poet traditionally confronting mortality-or whether that's even
possible.
A.
That's a very interestingway to look at it. I don't know. I think
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that I write under this image, a compelling image. I have a poem in
my new book [Flesh and Blood] called "The Dream" about a dream
that I had when I was a kid about the atomic bomb, and I'm very
tempted to title my next book The Dream, even though it's only one
of 150 poems, just because you can say that in a sense we are living
a dream, the dream of our own survival. Writers generally are weird
about manuscripts, about unpublished work. I realized one day, "My
God, I've got thirty-five poems here and I don't have copies of them."
And then I had this image of an atomic bomb coming and blowing
all my poetry up. My God, what an absurd thought, what repression!
That's the level at which we can conceive it.
Q.
A.
Exactly. But there has to be some enormous cultural repression, especially when you have a madman in the White House. Clearly
you have madmen in both countries, but no sane person would say,
"Let's have Star Wars. Let's add a whole new layer of weapons onto
the weapons that are already going to kill us."
You are a poet very much associated with the urban scene, and
Q.
of course ours is a nation becoming increasingly urban. Do you see
that as something that is going to become more predominantin poetry?
And what do you think are the limitations of that? Or the strengths
of it?
A.
The strengths of it are obvious: the city is where our culture
happens. For good or ill, mostly ill, although that's not always so.
I don't really know that there are any limitations. The urban poet
always can leave and go to the land. On the other hand, the poets
who have stayed on the land, the poets who do write of the land, Gary
Snyder, Wendell Berry- I can't make a list - obviously do bring us
news that is still crucial for us. With Berry the news can be rather
dire: that the land is not what it used to be, that we are consuming
the land just as quickly as we consume people. But for me, obviously,
the urban matrix is absolutely necessary. When I was a kid I was a
nature freak; I wanted to be a cowboy and I wanted to live out of
the city. We lived in Newark and I was always trying to convince my
parents to move to the country; obviously they couldn't. The switch
in my attitudewas so radicalthat sometimes I wonder what happenedI think maybe I should try to go back to do a little more of the country
again, but somehow it never happens. And my wife is even more urban
than I am. She's Parisian, and she doesn't have any truck with anything but fleeting visits to "nature."
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It's not as if you turn to nature for some sort of celebratory
Q.
vision or comfort in your poems.
A.
No, I think the age of nature romanticismis over for us. Nature
pantheism, naturalmysticism, whatever.Except for isolated individuals
- Snyder would be one. At the same time, though, what people such
as Snyderand Berrydo for us is to remindus that there are basic human
necessities that can't be violated, that we are a part of nature, however much havoc we wreak with it. To go back to where we started,
it does seem as though we're in a time of great emergency in many
ways, in almost every way, and to speak with any kind of false nostalgia
about nature would be the ultimate joke we could play on ourselves.
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