INTERVIEW FOR THE IOWA WRITER'S WORKSHOP NEWSLETTER 2007
What are you afraid of, in poetry?
O’Hara says: Don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial. All of those conditions are worth avoiding. Every loss of attention is a kind of death. And yet, on the other hand, some laziness is inevitable, even necessary. Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote a beautiful essay called "In Praise of Indolence"; he believed in it, as did Keats. It just goes to show that you have to pick wisely, in the buffet line of advice, and not to pile your plate so high you can’t finish.
What’s the difference between a young poet and an older poet?
A young poet is in search of a way of saying, a method or rhythm or tone which has energy and is weightbearing; a medium which can channel whatever comes along; this is a terrifically musical task which can be completed in many different ways. An older poet tries to recognize what she or he has to say, and then, what else. So one must always be afraid of arrested development, of loss of passion, of too much comfort. Likewise of bitterness. What changing truth are you the servant of, is one way to put it, though again there are a lot of different ways to translate that.
What are you afraid of, in poetry?
I guess my fear about contemporary poetry is that it might become a progressively more private conversation, a “coterie art.” Recently I read an essay by the critic Stephen Burt, who said that “poetry has become a ‘protected art form,’ like contemporary classical music”, an art requiring the sponsorship of charitable foundations, performed in salons for a private audience of knowledgeable people. He goes on to say that “This is not necessarily a bad thing’”!
What makes a poem worthwhile?
If there is an expressive necessity in the poem, there is a chance of it having value.
In other words, its necessary for care and linguistic facility to flow together at the same time. The happy accident gets exploited by the strong poet, gets augmented and arranged, framed, into the architecture of the poem. A dozen different poets would describe the process in a dozen different, set of terms., but that is probably what really happens.
I believe in the voice of experience, and in poetry that bears the smudge marks of having been in the human fire—time, failure, error, distress, loss, rage, attachment. I believe that the most joyful poem has to bear the logo of suffering, our sponsor.