Southbound: Interviews With Southern Poets

Southbound: Interviews with Southern Poets

Ernest Suarez

University of Missouri Press

Southbound

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Southbound




Interviews with Southern Poets

By

Ernest Suarez With T. W. Stanford III and Amy Verner

University of Missouri Press • C O L U M B I A

AND

LONDON

Copyright © 1999 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 03 02 01 00 99 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Southbound : interviews with southern poets / by Ernest Suarez with T. W. Stanford III and Amy Verner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) ISBN 0-8262-1263-8 (alk. paper) 1. Poets, American—Southern States Interviews. 2. American poetry—Southern States—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 4. Poets, American—20th century Interviews. 5. Southern States—In literature. 6. Poetry—Authorship. I. Suarez, Ernest. II. Stanford, T. W., 1969– . III. Verner, Amy, 1974– . PS261.S519 1999 811'.5409975—dc21 99-37932 CIP ⬁ ™ This paper meets the requirements of the  American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

Text designer: Mindy Shouse Cover designer: Susan Ferber Typesetter: BOOKCOMP, Inc. Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Palatino, Frutiger, Sanvito

For my mother, Marta, who continues to give For Sargent Bush, Jr., for being who he is

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / ix INTRODUCTION / 1 JAMES DICKEY / 3 DAVE SMITH / 20 CHARLES WRIGHT / 39 ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT / 62 DAVID BOTTOMS / 85 T. R. HUMMER / 104 YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA / 130 BETTY ADCOCK / 144 RODNEY JONES / 166 JIM SEAY / 186 KATE DANIELS / 200 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES / 223

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Acknowledgments

T H I S B O O K W A S a group endeavor. I’ve known some of the poets interviewed herein for many years, while I met others for the first time when we did the interview. In every case, the experience was a pleasure. Thanks to you all for your generosity, thoughtfulness, and accessibility. There’s something that I would like to tell James Dickey: damn it, Jim, I miss you. We would often say that our friendship would last as long as we could each “hear thunder and see lightning.” I hope that you’re beholding many storms on the other side. Special thanks go to Matthew J. Bruccoli and R. W. B. Lewis. Our collaborations and friendship have proved invaluable. My discussions with Dick Lewis about poetry and the manuscript were particularly helpful. Kirk West, Warren Haynes, and the Allman Brothers Band helped me better comprehend the links between poetry and music, especially in the South. Dean Antanas Suziedelis of Catholic University has been a constant supporter, providing travel funds and inspiration. The Catholic University of America, the Library of Congress, and the University of Valladolid in Spain provided facilities and support. The catedratico at Valladolid, José María Ruiz, deserves special thanks for his generosity and brilliance. Thanks to Beverly Jarrett (Bev, you’re the best) and the rest of the team at the University of Missouri Press for their professionalism and helpfulness. Many of my students, particularly Felicia Pattison, Brother Rick Wilson, Katie Gough, and the members of the rock, blues, and ix

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poetry summer bus trip, deserve credit for keeping literature alive on and off the Catholic University campus. Many of the poets in this book took the time to meet with the members of the bus trip and to share with them their work and hospitality. Again, thanks. Talk and good times over the years with Chris Wheatley, Mike Van den Huevel, Jonathan Little, Phil Gould, Bill DeMastes, Tom Schaub, Steve Cushman, Lawrence Broer, D. Bill Kelly, Steve Wright, Mark Scowcroft, Virgil Nemoianou, Marco Antolín, Robert Kirschten, and Phil Levine also contributed to the making of this book. Finally, and most important, my love and appreciation go to my family, without whom all else is empty.

Southbound

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Introduction

T W O M O N T H S before winning the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Black Zodiac, Charles Wright asserted that currently there is “a really strong southern poetry assembling at the edges of everything.” The death of James Dickey in 1997 leaves southern poetry without a recognizably dominant figure. However, as Wright suggests, the abundant accomplishments of a talented group of younger southern poets— most of whom began publishing in the late sixties and the seventies— have become clear. This book of interviews seeks to present some of the voices who promise to keep southern poetry vital well into the twenty-first century. The guiding principle for conducting and revising the interviews was to let the poets express themselves as clearly and fully as possible. Each interview was done over two or more days. After the tapes were transcribed, we worked closely with each poet during the editorial process. The interviewer’s questions were pared down in order to detract as little as possible from the poet’s responses, while still moving the discussion in specific directions and providing guiding contexts for the reader. Although we contoured each interview differently in order to address the specific concerns of each writer, every interview explores the relationship between technique and subject and asks the writer to position himself or herself within the world of southern poetry in particular and of contemporary poetry in general. 1

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Two gifted young critics, Trey Stanford and Amy Verner, proved valuable collaborators for this book. Mr. Stanford assumed primary responsibility for assembling the bibliography, with Ms. Verner helping. Ms. Verner helped conduct the interview with Charles Wright and worked with me in putting together the introductions for each writer. Mr. Stanford and Ms. Verner also assisted in editing several of the interviews. Another talented young scholar, Sara Hosey, helped conduct the interviews with Kate Daniels, Betty Adcock, and Jim Seay. Ernest Suarez

Photo by William Mills

To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version of this work.

James Dickey

A T T H E A G E of thirty-five, James Dickey, in the poem “The Other,” wrote of building his body so as to “keep me dying / Years longer.” When I first met Dickey on August 8, 1989, in Columbia, South Carolina, he asserted, with both eagerness and desperation in his voice, “There is so much I can write, if life will give me the time.” An acute awareness of mortality and of its counterpart—the desire to create the illusion that death can be conquered—was never far from the heart of Dickey’s work, which is pervaded by thoughts of a brother who died before Dickey was born, the deaths of his parents and friends, the carnage he witnessed in World War II and the Korean War, and his own bouts with serious illnesses. 3

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The death of Dickey in January 1997 marked the passing of the last of a long line of influential poets to emerge from Vanderbilt University in the first half of this century. During his often spectacular and always controversial career, Dickey’s achievements were recognized widely. He won numerous awards, including the National Book Award, Poetry’s Levinson Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Melville Cane Award, the Longview Foundation Prize, and the Vachel Lindsay Award. He was twice named consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Dickey wrote a dozen books of poetry, three novels, two books of criticism, and several screenplays. He held the chair of Carolina Professor of English at the University of South Carolina from 1969 to 1997 and won several teaching awards. This interview was conducted during my stay with Dickey in August 1989. Following an evening with the writer and his family in Columbia, he and I drove to his second home at Litchfield Plantation on Pawley’s Island, where we remained for six days. A tranquil, remote, timeless atmosphere seeped from the lush grounds, a strangely meditative setting in which to interview a man whose art brims with vigor and sensation. With a tape recorder and a bottle of Wild Turkey to keep us company, we sat in the living room and talked, pausing occasionally to look out at a heron flying by or perching in a tree shrouded in Spanish moss. Although our nightly conversations sometimes continued into the early morning, Dickey was always up and striking the typewriter keys by seven or eight o’clock. On several occasions he bounded down the stairs to read me a scene or a line or a phrase that pleased him. Dickey was nothing if not passionate, engaged, and acutely aware of the possibilities life affords, as well as intensely disturbed—even insulted—at the loss of those possibilities when life ends. Suarez: You began to compose the poems that appeared in your first book, Into the Stone, about the time you met Ezra Pound. What would you say you picked out from Pound? Dickey: What I would call an extreme magical directness—that abil-

ity to take something which is factual and make a simple, highly imaginative statement out of it. Suarez: So you are specifying Pound’s use of the image?

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Dickey: Yes, a very clear, concrete, simply stated, and highly original, highly imaginative but simple quality. What I’m looking for in my own work more than anything else is a kind of deep simplicity. I was raised with the notion that as far as literary judgments are concerned, complexity is desirable. I. A. Richards or William Empson, for example, assert that more appetencies are satisfied with more economy by complexity. I don’t think so. I like the thing that comes like a lightning flash, that is vivid and momentarily there and intense and unmistakable and doesn’t require a great deal of ratiocination. When William Empson talks about a line of Shakespeare’s, like “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” he goes into this long peroration of all the things the mind calls up by means of this image of the birds—the fact that real choirs require sitting in rows with their own wooden benches like the branch a bird sits on and this and that and the other. The ingenuity just to conjure all that up is wonderful, but I get none of that at all—none of it, and I don’t want it. The point is that criticism can proliferate endlessly on the slightest text, or sometimes, by theorizing endlessly, even on no text at all. Unlike most people I know, I like to read boring books, and I’ve never read a more boring book than Empson’s Structure of Complex Words. It’s extremely boring, and yet he is a brilliant man, and he says some good things that even I can assimilate every now and then. But to spend one’s life doing that, or being in an area where that sort of activity is of a great deal of importance, is not to my liking at all. Thank God I’m at the age now where I don’t have to give lip service to anything. If my opinions are those of an aging jerk, then so be it! Suarez: Can you think of any of your own poems where you use the Poundian conception of the image? Dickey: Yes, though you can’t tell where Pound’s or Eliot’s influence

is going to be. It takes place on such a subliminal level that you can never really say that this is directly influenced by one or the other. I think Pound’s influence is deeper and more pervasive than anything I can directly lay a finger on. But I can pick out a number of lines of mine that have the kind of simplicity, the imaginative simplicity, that I learned more from Pound than from anyone else. One is from “Drinking from a Helmet,” where the soldier picks up the dead soldier’s helmet, which is filled with water, and looks inside

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it. He says, “I drank with the timing of rust.” I could look through my work and show you plenty of places where I think that happens. Suarez: I think that this conception of the image is the very core of

your work. Dickey: That’s the guts of it for me. The image and the dramatic

development—the dramatic aspect of what is actually going on in the poem. I think that too much poetry is being written about trivialities, with the attempt to pump up the triviality into something of consequence. But a triviality is a triviality. One gets a little tired of Blake seeing heaven in a wildflower and eternity in a grain of sand. That is all very well for Blake and very well for some poets some of the time, but not for all poets all of the time. When Adrienne Rich gives an account of a cockroach in a kitchen cupboard, it’s interesting momentarily, but one doesn’t really in one’s heart believe it’s that important. Suarez: Much of your poetry involves transcending the mundane world. Do you see yourself as a visionary poet? Dickey: Well, one doesn’t like to make such wild claims as that, but

any original insight that any poet has is in a sense a vision. But in the sense that Blake is a visionary poet, I’m not at all. I don’t really believe that I can see God sitting up in that tree yonder, you know. Or any of the things, any of the visions, that Blake said he saw or claimed to see. I’m sure he did. I hope he did. I would like to see something like that. Somebody said to Blake, “Now when you look at the sun do you see a disk about the size of a florin?” Blake said, “No, I see a great multitude of the heavenly hosts singing hosannas unto the most high.” Now, I don’t see that when I see the sun. It would be great if I did, but a visionary poet in that sense I’m not. Suarez: You place great emphasis on the poet as a “maker.” Dickey: Yes, I do. That’s something I firmly believe in. Suarez: In what sense do you see the poet as a “maker”? What consequences does “making” have for the world at large? Dickey: I don’t know how the world is affected by it. I don’t know

because in some sense it’s biblical. The Bible is always talking about the Lord working in mysterious ways. So does poetry, and you

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can’t chart those. I. A. Richards talks about appetency and about this response or that response called forth by these words and so on. That is an attempt to make a scientific discipline of something that is profoundly unscientific. Poetry is not really subject to such investigation beyond a certain very rigid border. For example, if in a poem I mentioned the word tree, what would you see? What would that call up in your mind? What is your tree? Suarez: An oak. Dickey: Wrong. Because the only tree, the archetypal, the Platonic

tree, is definitely a pine tree. You bring your life to the image, to create the image that the word suggests, and nothing can legislate that. Robert Lowell’s poetry is interesting because he is a powerful, tearing writer. I mean he can write like a streak, and all that desperate neuroticism has infinite ramifications. He can do a lot with it, but ultimately it comes back to him and his situation in life—his condition, his personality. And it is no good to say that Lowell takes on all this agony and grief for all of us. He does not take it on for all of us. He takes it on for himself; it is his life. It is not the life of twentieth-century humankind. It’s his personal life, and too much of that is wearing. You’re asked to give too much credence to it. Suarez: How would you say your work differs from that? Dickey: I’d like to think that it differs from it in opening out rather

than closing down on the pinpoint of one person. I like to give. As I once said in an essay on Ted Roethke—he does this kind of opening out—if you have heard wind, you have heard Roethke’s wind, but because you know about Roethke’s wind, the wind he has put down in words, the wind to you has another dimension—something creative and positive that accrues to you. You are deepened and expanded because of the words. Suarez: In “Approaching Prayer” you write that “reason” must be

slain for vision to occur. Is that essential? Dickey: Well, I don’t know if it is essential or not. But I think that there

are certain circumstances in a person’s experience where it is better to participate in the experience by means of simple gut reactions and not through reasoning. Not through intellectualization about

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the experience but to just be in it and feel what you honestly feel as a response. That is essentially what I mean. Suarez: Earlier you mentioned a conversation you had with Yvor

Winters many years ago where he called you an Emersonian because of your emphasis on directly experiencing things. Winters was very wary of that Emersonian doctrine. Dickey: I don’t remember the conversation perfectly, but it seems

to me he said something about my being essentially an American decadent romantic poet following Emerson. Yes, he was wary of Emersonianism. I hate to use such a loaded word, but Winters was a fascistic type who believed in order and the establishment of very rigid standards, largely determined by him. This is the stuff of dictators, is it not? To him I would compare a critic who is more flexible and who is willing to be wrong, like Randall Jarrell or John Berryman—somebody who is willing to say, “I thought this last year, but I’ve changed my mind.” I’ve changed my mind many times, and I think that is a privilege. If you lock yourself into your own doctrines, then you lose the flexibility of the moment-to-moment ability to respond. Suarez: Is that why you think Emerson was a greater man than Thoreau? Dickey: I think he is because he opens up more territory than

Thoreau. Thoreau is too much of a doctrine giver. Emerson is a presenter of possibilities. I like that. Suarez: Which, as you have expressed, is essentially the poetic enterprise. Dickey: It would seem to me to be so. Opening up possibilities.

Thoreau is too concerned with laying down the law about everything. Thoreau says some good things. That people lead lives of quiet desperation. Things about stepping to a different drummer. These are wonderful statements, great stuff. But honest reaction to experience, intuitive reaction—nothing is of greater consequence than that. Emerson had a curious relationship to religion, although he was at one point a Unitarian minister. His idea was that you could have a direct line to God. That you don’t have to go through the church or follow any dogma. That God comes straight to you like a

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ray of light—and so do you to him. I think that is fine. I don’t believe it. I would like to believe it, and I’m glad somebody said it. I’m glad he said it. Suarez: What do you believe? Do you believe there is any moral force governing the universe? Dickey: No, I don’t believe in that at all. I’m writing a long poem now,

“Real God, Roll,” where a father watches his son pumping iron and exercising on the beach, and he feels it’s all part of the whole thing, of the real god. The waves coming in, his death, his father’s death, the son’s physique are all part of the whole thing. The real god is what causes everything to exist, like the laws of motion. The humanization of God in the Bible I find absurd. I love the Bible like I love Greek mythology, though Greek mythology is far more imaginative than the Bible is. Suarez: In your war poems, like “The Performance” or “Between

Two Prisoners,” you never seem to take sides or make moral judgments. Dickey: I suppose in those poems there is an implicit moral stance,

I guess you could say. Obviously, I don’t think it is right for the Japanese to behead Don Armstrong, who was my best friend. Obviously, I’m against it. Anybody would be. Or in “The Fire Bombing,” which is based on a kind of paradox based on the sense of power one has as a pilot of an aircrew dropping bombs. This is a sense of power a person can otherwise never experience. Of course this sensation is humanly reprehensible, but so are many of the human emotions that one has. Judged by the general standard, such emotions are reprehensible, but they do happen, and that is the feeling. Then you come back from a war you won, and you’re a civilian, and you begin to think about the implications of what you actually did do when you experienced this sense of power and remoteness and godlike vision. And you think of the exercise of authority via the machine that your own government has put at your disposal to do exactly what you did with it. Then you have a family yourself, and you think about those people twenty, thirty, forty years ago—I was dropping those bombs on them, on some of them. Suppose somebody did that to me? It was no different to them. All of that went into “The Fire Bombing.”

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Suarez: Yet some people at the time, the mid- to late sixties, did not read the poem as an antiwar poem. Dickey: Well, you do yourself a disservice if you blink the real

implications of a situation like that. It is a poem about the guilt at the inability to feel guilty because you have proved yourself not only a patriot but something of a hero. You’ve been given medals for doing this. Your country has honored you—but there are those doubts that stay with you. You feel as a family man what all those unseen, forever unseen, people felt that you dropped those bombs on. You did it. The detachment one senses when dropping the bombs is the worst evil of all—yet it doesn’t seem so at the time. Suarez: The poem ends with the narrator still unable to imagine “nothing not as American as / I am, and proud of it.” What do you see as the meaning of those lines? Dickey: You are a patriot. You have fought in a war. You have fought

for freedom and risked your life not once but many times for the cause of peace and freedom. It might be a Pax Americana, like the Pax Romana, the Roman peace—imposed peace by force of arms. In other words, you be peaceful or we will blow your heads off. In our times we will atomic-bomb you. Even if that is the case, still peace is peace. If you have a home in the suburbs and a lawn to cut, you are able to have it because forty years ago you had to do something else when the world’s historical situation called for it. And you’re not ashamed of it no matter who says what. Suppose we hadn’t stood against Hitler? We would be in a different world. Suarez: What other historical events do you see as most significant for American culture? Dickey: I’m not a historian; I’m just an ordinary citizen. But I suppose

since the Second World War the whole concept of limited war, like Korea and Vietnam, has been the most important thing, because the balance of world power is involved. One hundred and fifty years ago a guy named Karl Marx wrote a treatise on economics based on the Hegelian dialectic. I don’t mean to be so academic, but—and this is changing—the world has been largely divided in two because of economic and political doctrines. We’re on the side of freedom, but for us freedom means capitalism. They are on the side—you can’t

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say oppression, but that’s what is the result of it—of, theoretically at least, equal distribution. The state dictating everything, including salaries, living quarters, food rationing, and the rest of it. Marx says everything is determined by the economic situation—everything, even the quality of the mind. I don’t think so. I think capitalism and democracy enable you to have more of that elusive quality called “freedom” in your life. Suarez: You wrote an overtly political essay, “Notes on the Decline

of Outrage,” which involved the civil rights movement. Dickey: Martin Luther King quoted from the end of that essay in his

speeches—that for white southerners “it can be a greater thing than the South has ever done” to discover that blacks are our “unknown brothers.” That was written back in the 1950s, which as far as the civil rights movement was concerned was practically prehistory. I took an awful lot of flak for that. I didn’t get a job I wanted with an advertising agency in Atlanta because the people were so rabidly pro-southern and antiblack. I came out for black citizens and said that if it took repudiating part of my so-called southern heritage in order for blacks to have an equal chance, I would do it—and I advised other people to do it also. Racism has ruined so many people’s lives, white and black. Donald Davidson was one of my teachers at Vanderbilt. Davidson was a remarkable man. He was in many ways one of the most humane, sensitive, and caring persons I ever knew—and intelligent, too. He was a man who had great gifts but who ruined his life—especially the latter part of his life, which should have been the most productive— over the question of racism. You could not imagine that a sensitive and retiring and responsible man like Don Davidson could have these fanatical beliefs about blacks. He actually deeply believed that the Caucasian race was demonstrably superior to the Negro race, and that the laws and ethos and mores of society should reflect that. He thought the laws shouldn’t militate against blacks—although that is inevitably the result of Don Davidson’s ideas—but that these divisions should be recognized, to use a favorite phrase of his, “for what they are.” Now, he wasn’t anyone who wanted to go out and lynch people or anything like that. His beliefs were quite sincere. He was in many ways a brilliant guy and a wonderful teacher. He had a great ability to communicate one-on-one with a student. He had

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scholarly knowledge and was quite a good poet—much better than he has ever been given credit for being. He was overshadowed by Ransom and Tate, and especially by Warren. He was in many ways a very worthy person, but you could not get him on the subject of race, or allow him to get on the subject of race, without everything degenerating. It just went bad, and when it went bad you didn’t want to be around him. He ended up allying himself with all these “white citizens” councils and the most dubious kinds of redneck racist groups. He spent his time and energy doing that; it was a terrible mistake. Suarez: What prompted you to write the essay? Dickey: I wanted to write it. It seemed necessary. Louis Rubin was

putting together an anthology of essays, South, and asked me to do something—anything that I wanted to do—and I chose to write about the racial situation in the South. Suarez: Why didn’t you do anything like that again? Dickey: Because I would then seem to be trading on it. I made all the

statements I wanted to make there, and if people wanted to know my opinion about the subject, they could go there. Suarez: You were later involved in and helped write speeches for both Eugene McCarthy’s and Jimmy Carter’s political campaigns. What prompted your involvement? Dickey: When I was in Washington, as consultant in poetry to the

Library of Congress, Eugene McCarthy became my closest friend. I felt he was a political leader that this country hardly deserved because he had a tremendous commitment to the life of the mind— especially to poetry. He was a poet himself, and some of his things are not bad. I became devoted to him: his cause seemed right because he wanted to end the Vietnam War and was a positive politician. He didn’t just condemn, but said we have to go forward—that we’re going to upgrade the whole national sensibility so that people can live more and have more of themselves. I loved the man. I think he stood for the right things. I wish he had become president. Jimmy Carter I loved because of the morality factor. I think he is a very kind man. Who else could have achieved the peace he helped manage to establish—even if some of it was just temporary—in the

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Middle East? We were really not that close, although I spoke at his inauguration. Suarez: Although you worked for McCarthy in the sixties, you

never wrote any anti-Vietnam poetry. What are your thoughts on the protests that were going on in the sixties? Dickey: Well, man is a political animal. As far as it concerns the poets

and writers involved in sixties protests, I would say two different aspects should probably be considered. First are the poets and writers who were acting as outraged citizens, who felt that Vietnam was a tragic mistake for this country and wished to speak out. All of that is really good, even noble. The other thing is the poets and writers who seized on this political and national crisis to aggrandize themselves because they could not earn recognition by means of their talent. You get up on the podium and start spouting forgettable poetry in the name of the cause. Poetry against death. How can anyone be pro death? It’s against slaughter; it’s against the killing of women and children by firebombing and so on. How can’t you be against that? You’re stacking the hand like a card game, stacking your hand in your favor. Who would be in favor of the slaughter of women and children? And yet the poetry that resulted from it is dead before it hits the page. It’s topical, and when the historic occasion that called it forth has passed, so has the poetry. It’s easy, it’s wonderful, it’s inspiring to have all the right opinions—and to put down words on a page that capitalize on those opinions, that identify you as being a right guy because you’re against death. You’re against torture—but that is just another version of being in favor of mom’s apple pie. Suarez: What do you think is the relationship between poetry and culture? Dickey: I would pin it down to our time because I’m functioning in

our time. I don’t know what it is in the various eras of history. Our age, the age of Marshall McLuhan, is an age dominated by the media. McLuhan believes that print will eventually be superseded by TV, and that words will no longer be printed but that there will only be spoken words, and that they will only be apprehensible by means of personal communication and by means of the electronic media, and that on that basis we’ll all be together in the global village. I think the poet needs to stand forthrightly against that notion because

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words themselves have enormous potency. Language is the greatest gift that mankind has ever received or has given to itself. Language has made everything else possible. One generation can build on the discoveries of the previous one. This makes libraries possible, and all the information that you need to know to build rockets, conquer cancer and polio, and so on. Language makes it possible for all the professions and the arts to go forward. Language. The word. In the beginning was the Logos. The most mysterious statement of human history is “In the beginning was the word”—not the thing—the word, Logos. The supreme custodian of the word, the one who uses it with the most eloquence, the most meaning, the most consequentiality, is the poet. The poet is the one who has the most command of the word and of all strata and substrata of language, of all meanings and all connotations. There is something in the human soul that will respond to that kind of use of language because it is our most precious gift. There is something that will respond to it no matter how rudimentary the intellect of the responding person. Through such use words can reach a person in a way that is particularly intimate and individual. My main disappointment in this culture that I live in is the low level of sensibility. D. H. Lawrence says somewhere, “I will show you how not to be a dead man in life.” Too many of us approximate the state of being dead in life, and the more mechanized a culture becomes, the more mechanical the people become. I believe there is value in feelings and in responsiveness and in the contribution of the imagination to those things. So many of our students are brainwashed. They don’t give a shit—that’s a favorite expression of our time. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t give a shit.” And they don’t. But I do give a shit. I don’t want to “come off of it,” I want to get on with it. Suarez: Do you feel that in other eras people did “give a shit”? In the sixties, for instance? Dickey: Yes, especially in the sixties. That shows us that there is an

underlying stream of available emotion that simply needs a channel. In that era the energy was funneled into social protest. In my novel Alnilam, all Joel Cahill has to do is appear and all that loose, wandering emotion in the young people focuses on him, and he becomes their channel. That is what made John F. Kennedy, for example, or Hitler, for that matter. These leaders provide people’s

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suppressed emotions with an image, a channel, to focus on. We all need that, and it is very inspiring in the case of great leaders and very terrifying in the case of sinister leaders. Leaders like Hitler, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon tap in on the same kind of emotion that enables someone like Lincoln or Washington or Jefferson to be a leader. There is a charismatic quality in the leaders who are focused on that is indigenous to them. Suarez: Aside from such a leader’s charismatic quality, do you feel

that the moral underpinnings of the leader’s message are arbitrary? Do you think that a negative leader like Hitler is just as likely to be focused on as a more positive figure? Dickey: I don’t think these things are completely arbitrary. For in-

stance, one thing these matters depend on is the historical situation at the time. But it does also depend on something that is basically fundamental in human nature that wants such things to happen. The reason that the people join the Alnilam conspiracy, that the plotters join up with Joel Cahill, is that they believe that he is initiating them into an elite which everyone wants to be in. It is like a college fraternity. A college fraternity is not based on what the word fraternity suggests; it is based not on brotherhood and inclusion but on exclusion. Suarez: Earlier you made the statement that you felt World War II was the last just war America was involved in. Why do you feel that way? Dickey: There was no enemy or villain in the Vietnam or Korean

War—no enemy as profoundly evil as Hitler. The supposed villain was collectivism. The communist state. But that doesn’t have the solidity of an actual figure like Hitler. The baleful fascination of that guy—I don’t think it will ever diminish. There are people in this country right now who are worshipers of Hitler. People don’t worship him only because of his political and military deeds, but because he represented some kind of mystical force that only occasionally shows itself. People, the human race, want some kind of inspired, charismatic leader. Whether it’s Alexander the Great, Caesar, Frederick II, Napoleon, Hitler, John F. Kennedy, or Joel Cahill, it satisfies some deep hunger in people that somebody has got hold of a truth and a way of life that they themselves cannot command.

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Suarez: Tell me more about that idea in the context of Alnilam. Dickey: Joel Cahill is that kind of a figure. Joel is the young college-

boy mystic raised to the nth power. He is a genius in an airplane. Even the instructors are afraid to fly with him because he’s so much better than they are. They don’t want to be humiliated by this guy who seems to have been born not in an airplane but as an airplane. The whole mysticism of the air, of flight, gives credence and weight to his political feelings. He’s someone everyone remembers. He is a Rimbaud or Shelley of the air. A Jesus Christ or Messiah figure that one would follow to the grave because one’s whole existence is justified by contact with this extraordinary person. Suarez: How does this relate to the things you say about poetry and the creative act in the novel? Dickey: I think the power of the word is great. Poetry makes plenty

happen. In Alnilam the figure of Joel Cahill has a powerful effect on people. Not only on people who love him and follow him, but also on the people who hate him but can’t ignore him. Part of his power is based on language. When he has the Alnilam plotters recite the lines from Shelley about the young charioteers drinking the wind of their own speed, the effect is hypnotic. This effect on the followers of Joel Cahill is made possible by means of language. “Drinking the wind of their own speed / And seeing nothing but the keen stars, / They all pass onward.” It’s the power of the words. Poetry is the ultimate; it has a powerful effect on people. It can have a satirical effect. Look at Pope. Pope says, “I stood aghast to see / They were not afraid of God, but afraid of me.” Now this is power. Auden be damned. This is power. Part of Joel’s power comes from the word, from language itself. Suarez: You equate Joel Cahill with Shelley at some points in the novel. Dickey: Yes, I do. Shelley is the ultimate beatnik. What a mind!

What a mind! I wish I liked his poetry better. I keep reading Shelley, but there are only a few lines of Shelley’s that I really care for. He is wonderful on the effects of the ephemeral qualities of air and light. The great type of Shelley image is that of a sunrise over the mountains.

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Suarez: But it’s Shelley’s personality that most interests you. Dickey: I love Shelley because he represents an extreme, like Joel

Cahill represents an extreme. He’s the ultimate youthful idealist with a great mind, completely unorthodox. Suarez: Yet he also has a potentially destructive side. I’m thinking of Joel Cahill. Dickey: Yes, there is also that side of him as well. He is an overreacher. Suarez: How does this relate to our culture? Dickey: There is something about the excessive that appeals to

people. Excess. As Oscar Wilde, a favorite of mine, says, nothing succeeds like excess. You look at movements—like the John Birch Society. Who is John Birch? Nobody knows that much about John Birch—and nobody gives a shit. He was a martyr—a martyr like John Kennedy. He has that charisma that comes down through successive generations. He becomes a legend. The greatest of legends in Western culture is who? Jesus. Now, I was talking to Jesus the other day. He’s a very good fellow—sympathetic, interesting, and something of a philosopher. But Jesus Christ had only the simplest of doctrines! The Bible is a desperate attempt by the human race, which is a product of the animal world. A dead dog crushed on the highway has the same organs as you. It’s got a heart, liver, kidneys, bowels, all that. It’s no different from you. All the difference is that you have evolved into something that can think of and conceive of the idea of God. A dog can’t do that. If I had a dog who had the notion of God, I would fall to my knees and worship. Well, the dog does not have the concept of God. We have the concept of God. Genesis says God formed people in his own image. But it’s actually the reverse of what Genesis says: we have formed God in our own image. As Bertrand Russell says, if horses had gods, the gods would look like horses. Joel Cahill speaks in parables. He talks about precision mysticism. What the hell does that mean? You don’t know what it means, and in the novel it’s not explained. Yet I intended to implant that in the reader’s mind. Precision mysticism. When you relate that to an airplane engine and to Joel’s relationship to flight, it takes on another meaning, but you’re never able to understand exactly what. The Alnilam plotters think it’s something that may be beyond anything

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that they have ever been able to perceive. That’s the fascination of Joel Cahill. He’s able to formulate these weird, strange, provocative, evocative notions. And he can get up there in an airplane and prove them—or what he does in an aircraft seems, to the Alnilam fliers, to bear out everything he talks about. Suarez: Does Joel have a specific political position? Dickey: No—only one statement. He says to his followers, “We’re

going to make it like it should have been at the beginning.” But you don’t know what that is. He talks about existence as seen from an aircraft, the great blue field and the purple haze and so on. My point here is that, if you have somebody as charismatic as Joel Cahill, his followers follow him toward his ultimate goal not despite the fact it’s vague, but because it’s vague. It’s like Tertullian’s proof of God. He says, I don’t believe in God’s existence despite the fact that it’s absurd; I believe it because it is absurd. The more vague and problematical the end of the Alnilam plot, the more fanatical the followers become. Suarez: Let’s switch gears. In your work you place great emphasis on the “creative lie,” creating an illusion that becomes, in your words, “better than the truth.” Can you relate this notion to the creation of your public personality? Dickey: I think I can. When we were out on the West Coast, a

university, I believe it was Oregon State, offered me one hundred dollars to read some of my poetry. My wife, Maxine, told me, “Jim, we need the money, so you have to do it.” At the time I didn’t even know if I had enough poetry to give an hour-long program. Although I had been a teacher, the idea of getting up to read my own stuff in front of all those people seemed unthinkable. But Maxine insisted. She said, “Jim, you get out there and you do this. Those people at Oregon State want to hear what you have to say.” Well, this was a monstrosity to me. I couldn’t imagine getting up there. I told her I would be paralyzed with stage fright and self-consciousness. She told me, “If you are a teacher and can get up in front of your class every day, you can get up in front of an audience. Just get up there and be yourself.” Which sounded fine to me until I began thinking, “Yeah, but what self, which one?” I had to invent a self. The twentieth century has produced two great invented selves: people who wished

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to become other than they really were and who wrote and acted out of the assumed personality. The first is T. E. Lawrence, who was a timid fellow who became a superman in warfare because he willed the personality that he wished to be. Instead of being a little, weak guy he became a military genius and a wonderful writer. But the self he was writing out of was not his real personality. The other person I think of is Hemingway. The real Hemingway was not the public Hemingway. The assumed personality. I have a great deal of that. Suarez: In what ways? Dickey: Because I’m essentially a coward, so therefore I flew with

the night fighters in the Pacific, or in football I hit the guy especially hard because essentially I was afraid of him. I think you must turn these things to your favor. Suarez: How does this work for you poetically? Dickey: Essentially I was a timid, Ernest Dawson type—a “days of

wine and roses,” decadent, late-romantic poet—so therefore I go for force and vigor. And it works. My assumed personality is working for me just as much as Lawrence’s worked for him or Hemingway’s worked for him. Suarez: Characterize that assumed personality for me. Dickey: That is easy to do. Very easy. All I have to do is turn it back to

you and ask what you have heard about me. That’s the assumed personality: big, strong, hard drinking, hard fighting. Nothing could be less characteristic of the true James Dickey, who is a timid, cowardly person. Suarez: I don’t think many people would agree with you there. Dickey: Well, maybe not, but you can’t fool yourself, so you spend

your life fooling yourself. The self that you fool yourself into is the one that functions. Isn’t that so?

Photo by Dee Smith

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Dave Smith

A D I S T I N C T I V E combination of formal discipline and emotional restlessness characterizes Dave Smith’s poetry, which continues to revolve around the landscape of his native Virginia, despite the fact that during the last twenty years he has also lived in Salt Lake City, Utah; Gainesville, Florida; and Montrose, Pennsylvania. Currently, he resides in Baton Rouge, where he coedits the Southern Review and is Boyd Professor of American Literature and Poetry at Louisiana State University. The heir among southern poets to Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey, Smith shares their compulsion to tackle fundamental questions concerning individuals’ relationships to universal processes. Like Warren and Dickey, Smith explores the aesthetic links between individual perception and the 20

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external world in an attempt to discover—and create—consequence and order. Working in historic Allen Hall, where Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks once ran the Southern Review, Smith was even busier than usual when I arrived on March 2, 1995, for a three-day celebration of Warren’s achievements. After about an hour of hectic activity, we closed the door and turned on the tape recorder. Smith quickly transformed from host and editorial dynamo to litterateur, a role that comes more naturally to him, but one to which he brings the same thoughtfulness and thoroughness that allows him to thrive as a teacher, a critic, and a mentor for younger poets. Suarez: In a relatively early piece, “The Spring Poem,” you use Louise Glück’s remark that “Everyone should write a Spring poem” as a catalyst to put forth your conception of poetry. The poem responds to Glück’s statement with the lines, “Yes, but we must be sure of verities / such as proper heat and adequate form. / That’s what poets are for, is my theory.” Has your opinion changed? Smith: When I wrote “The Spring Poem,” I was a little more smug,

as young people tend to be in what they know. At this point in my life, I am a little less sure of how much I know and how firmly I know it. But I don’t think I would change radically my opinion about what constitutes the basic virtues of poetry. I believe that feeling is the primary wellspring of poetry, but I also think feeling has to be trained; it has to be shaped. It must be made emergent from discipline. I don’t think feeling and artistic discipline are independent but rather codependent, the one really enhancing and making possible the other. That’s what the argument of any sonnet says. People who write sonnets tend to argue that they couldn’t have said what they said if they hadn’t had the form nudging them. I don’t take it that far, but I do believe firmly in the enabling capacity of form to realize the potential for feeling. Without feeling poetry wouldn’t interest me; I don’t know who it would interest. Regardless of how finely crafted or sophisticated the formal expression might be, if it didn’t move me, I would find something else to do with my time. Suarez: Your poems possess a narrative base, coupled with precise formal control. How do you negotiate the relationship between those two things? Do you decide on a form first?

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Smith: At least a part of me would answer no, but part of me would qualify the answer. I’ll try to say both at once. In some sense, I think the form chooses me. I don’t know prior to writing a poem what form I’m going to write it in. That is, whether it’s quatrains, tercets, stichic lines. Most often, I don’t know until the poem evolves, until it begins to manifest its chosen form. I think the poet learns to listen well to what the poetic experience seems to want to be. But having said that, surely I’m being a bit disingenuous and surely somewhere in the recesses of the imagination I am making choices. It just doesn’t happen that automatically you write tercets rather than quatrains. But usually I don’t, before the writing process, make those choices. In my new collection, Fate’s Kite, the poems are formally decided before the fact, however. I began writing thirteen-line poems with eleven-syllable lines. I have done that for almost every poem in the book. Clearly that wasn’t happenstance. One created another and another and another, and it became a form that I was comfortable working in for a while. It didn’t prevent me from feeling my way into other poems, which I’ve written parallel to that book but which I hope to complete for another book. I also think that there’s a certain essence of what happens to a poet that’s inexplicable, that’s even unsayable. It’s in our nature to try to explain some of the things we did and why we did them, as if rational consideration is behind our actions. But even the choices one might make in a rhyme or a syllable or a stress pattern or whatever, some of it just falls out. Maybe it happens to us out of biology. Maybe it happens to us because something happened to our greatgrandparents that we don’t know about. My sense is that there are these reverberant forces in our lives that we are but dimly aware of, if at all, and these have an effect on the things we think we’ve decided. So part of me thinks I do choose form, and part of me thinks that I don’t choose form. I’m never sure what I want to say about narrative. Southern poets are accused of having narrative in the way blacks were stereotyped as having rhythm. Blacks were quite properly distressed with that label. I think southern writers are a little distressed at having been told that they have narrative. Which is why Charles Wright would sit here and tell you he can’t write a story, which he very well can. Ellen Bryant Voigt would do the same thing.

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It’s a false distinction to argue that there are narrative poets and there are lyric poets. Now, this may reflect that I am more comfortable moving through space and time than some others are. If that’s so, then that’s so. I don’t require everybody to write as I do. God forbid. Nor do I want to write like everybody else. But I do require a tale, as Warren says at the end of Audubon. It would be difficult to cite great poets who did not depend on human tales to interest. I don’t know who they would be. I’ve heard people say Emily Dickinson. But I think Miss Dickinson is one of the great storytellers of all time. They happen to be small stories in structure, but they are still stories, and certainly stories of the utmost intensity of human experience. I would argue that anybody who writes more than two words is already engaged in telling a tale of some dimension. The next question is what kind of tale, how long, what elements are emphasized, etc. Consider my poem “Roundhouse Voices.” I could tell you what happens in that poem in about twenty seconds, but it would take me twelve minutes to read it properly. What’s the difference? The difference is language and what I have called orchestration. I like the way language loops in and out of linear narrative and asks you to care for things other than plot events. But that doesn’t remove it from a plot event. I don’t care for plotless writing. I am almost uninterested in language for language’s sake. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets have no interest for me. Poems which are purely lyrical, if such a poem could be said to exist, don’t interest me. Perhaps this is because I am passionately interested in the story every poem sets out to tell. I will accept the notion that form for me is narrative to the extent that the tale is serving some interest. But I’m far from interested in what literally happens when I’m writing a poem, or when I’m reading somebody else’s poem. It’s a combination of—I really want to say vectors—musical or lyrical vectors and narrational or plot vectors, but all of them working in a codependency. Suarez: What, exactly, do you mean by “orchestration”? Smith: Two things. I mean the exfoliation of imagistic constructs which reinforce each other in such a way that the reader is led to perception by repeating signals. This can be done by varying image patterns. In the first line one mentions a kind of bird; in the tenth line one mentions another bird; in the twentieth line or the second poem one mentions a nest. Some kind of pattern has developed

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which the reader comes to be aware of if not necessarily to focus on immediately. It could be repeated very closely, and you would call attention to it directly. I prefer to repeat it through variations which are tangential rather than immediate, and it becomes orchestration rather than exact repetition. The same thing, it seems to me, happens sonically, in phrasing, in stressing. My interest lies in a fairly heavy Anglo-Saxon language, particularly with a lot of stresses in a line. I think of it as a muscular quality of language. Suarez: The physical quality. Smith: Yes. I like that. It is my practice. First drafts tend to be much plainer, more idiosyncratically American speech. But they never quite please me, so I twist the language by shoveling in more stresses in the revisionary process. Over the years this has tended to conflate; it comes out more Anglo-Saxon now than it used to. I think there are those of us who have a taste for thickly textured speech, and there are those in the American idiom who don’t have that taste. If you have it, one of the ways you can create intricacy and interest in the workings of language is in the variations of stress and phrase and vowel and consonants. That’s the other side of the orchestration, the weaving, the looping. For me, far more effort goes into that than goes into what happens in the poem or why. I’m often not very good at why things happen. You couldn’t look at my poems, for example, as a guide to behavior. You wouldn’t go very far. But if you don’t mind a certain kind of sonic practice, then you might find my poems interesting. Suarez: Your poems tend to accent several emotions that are often at odds with each other. Smith: That kind of complexity is what I would vigorously like to have. It’s what I admire in other poets. I have said before, and have always thought, that what I write about is “obligations.” This is a Horatian ideal. I think mine is a poetry that pays attention to things done for which one feels some obligation toward change, and to things not done that should have been done. Also to things and to people for whom one feels the obligations of complex emotions. It tends to be an elegiac stance rather than an ode stance. But complex emotion is certainly not only the character of poems I want to write but the source of poems I want to write. Maybe it has to do with the nature of

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one’s own experience. In the course of my life poetry has often been the way that I could both record and come to some understanding of experience that otherwise was inaccessible to me. I mean inaccessible either to the understanding or to the knowing. I have a poor memory. It’s curious. Many of my old high school friends, who I’m more in touch with now than ever, have almost photographic memories of what we did. I don’t. But the more I write, the more I recover a depth of memory that they don’t have. And because I work to claim it, perhaps I can bring to the surface an emotional complexity that their memory for facts, details, evidence doesn’t encounter. Poetry is an act of recovering my own life. Literally, re-covering it in some sense. I think this goes to personality, insofar as I can speak of my own personality with any accuracy. All of us have opinions. There are people who feel I am extremely opinionated. I don’t see myself that way. I think, in fact, that I am mostly befuddled and uncertain about almost everything. It doesn’t, therefore, surprise me that some of the poems of mine that I like best are poems that wind up in a state of interrogation but no conclusion. Or if they wind up taking a position, it’s a position that the poem seems to be undermining or countering in some way. Warren talked about the necessity of a poem’s enacted experience. It took me a long time to understand this. I don’t remember the essay, but he speaks of the poem as a laboratory for, literally, human living. And he says that when he writes a poem, he wants to try human experience to see how the virtues that we say we believe in come out again. Right off the bat you must feel, it seems to me, things are going to come out the way you write them. That’s the way you see them. Yet, it doesn’t really work that way. Warren, when he talks about a poem as an enactment, is trying to suggest a neutral observer waiting to see what will happen given the forces that are at play with full power to reveal what he doesn’t know he’s going to reveal. Whether my poems work out that way or not, that’s how I want them to work. It’s inconceivable to me that you could ever write a good poem, as Milton does, knowing the answer: I’m going to justify the ways of God to man. He knows already what he’s going to say. It’s not a surprise. I don’t know where I’m going, or if I know, it’s only in the most ditheringly vague way. It’s not the arrival that’s important to me, but the quality of the journey. The journey is always fraught

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with uncertainty, with suspicion, with duplicity. All of which is an attempt, in the largest possible way, to establish some kind of scheme of values. I’ve somehow convinced myself that this is true. There was a time when the church that we all went to, whether it was Baptist or Catholic or whatever, said this is the way things are. We were raised to that, we accepted that, and we lived by that. But then, for whatever reason, we didn’t accept it any more. Or we resisted it. It doesn’t mean that everything it stood for disappeared, but it all got more complex. And when we talked about it or thought about it for ourselves within that experience, we tried to understand things that became increasingly mysterious to us. I’ll just try to illustrate it this way. One of my favorite poems is Philip Larkin’s “Church Going.” I think it’s the best of the Larkin poems, and it may very well be an anthem for contemporary generations. It’s about a man who goes into a church and loves everything that’s going on within it, although it’s empty, and although he has no stated sense of what it all adds up to. That sense of emotional drifting and disenchantment and yearning is very real to me. This is what leads me to the theme of obligation, the sense of trying to find within a scheme of a life enacted in verse some of the few things that matter. Richard Hugo used to talk about what he called the knowns and the unknowns. He said what he thought poets did was to work with all the knowns they could muster to try to discover a few of the unknowns. That’s pretty New Age talk. But it points to something of value in poetry. I do not say this is what other people should expect of poetry, but it is what I experience in poetry. Suarez: You’ve spoken about poetry’s ability to help you recover your past, yet you could not be called a “confessional” poet. Smith: I find that an interesting term. Robert Phillips, of course, wrote a book called The Confessional Poets. When I was in graduate school I read about “confessional poets” just like everybody else and, I’m sure, used the term. But I don’t think it really means anything. I have great difficulty understanding exactly what people are pointing at when they talk about the raw quality of human experience that confessionals write about. I believe Foucault says Christianity is confessional because in worship God demands the speech of secrets. It seems to me if you discount contemporary usage of idiom, idiosyncratic practices limited to contemporary writers, you wouldn’t

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find Donne was all that anticonfessional. I don’t understand, finally, what the distinction is. Everybody writes about his or her life. Some of us put less realistic and realistic-seeming details in than others. What we’re talking about is not the difference between facticity and art, but the difference between one person’s formula for assembling elements and another person’s formula—just a different compound, a different arrangement of particulars. The ultimate truth is probably Lowell’s truth, when he says that he’s writing a spiritual autobiography. That’s what Chaucer did. I think that’s what we’re all doing. The idea of confessional writing as something that is simply a recitation of unassimilated and unassembled personal facts is, I think, a misapprehension. I don’t think writers do that. Maybe some very immature ones do, but we wouldn’t be talking about those people anyway. We’re talking about people who matter. And if we’re going to do that, then I don’t know what confessional writing means. It’s one of those critical terms which is finally a baggage that outweighs its value. From the beginning, I wanted to speak to people’s lives. I work from the assumption, right or wrong, that whatever I write about, if it’s true for me, it’s also true for you. Or equally true for the tribes in West Africa or the man in Puerto Rico or the woman in Australia. The great writers are the ones who have illuminated moments of definition most fully for us. No one is capable of illuminating all the moments in the same way or with the same intensity. But in the greatest writers, you get greater wattage. You get greater intensity than with others. It can be argued that this is writing as mythmaking. I would only resist that term in the sense that mythmaking is lying. I don’t believe it’s lying. I believe we experience and we attempt to explore myths as a way of understanding what has transpired around us. This brings me back to what a poem does. A poem, by definition, creates a little life, a little conception of what a life in time and space can mean. This is a very simple, even fundamental thing to know. And if you know it, then you don’t have to know much literary theory because that says the same thing: we all live a life, and language changes that life. Language is the lens through which we see it. There are no good writers who don’t know that. It strikes me as very odd that academics have spent so many hours and lives and fortunes to discover this obvious truth.

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Suarez: I’m going to switch gears a bit. You spent many years living and writing in Virginia, and you’ve used rural and coastal Virginia as the setting for many of your poems. Now that you’ve lived in Baton Rouge for five years, has that impulse changed? Smith: No. I’ve thought about this. It’s clear that in my deepest sense

of self I am a regionalist. My sense of appreciation of what life means or could mean, whatever I know about life, stems from a sense of place, a sense of the ghostliness of meaning, in that place where the apprehension of meaning was attached to visible realities: an ocean for me always represented something. I never thought of it growing up; I never thought “there’s the ocean; it means X.” But when I’m not near an ocean, I don’t feel complete. I have what I would call a historical sense, a historical imagination. In the state of Virginia every rock, tree, river, creek, every physical manifestation is possessed of some kind of historical spirit. This is probably a very primitive kind of imagination, but it isn’t difficult for me to see a stand of trees outside Cold Harbor, and see in them the Battle of Cold Harbor, and men dying uselessly and violently and painfully. It isn’t difficult for me to see slaves standing before the auction block in Shocko Bottom in Richmond, nor to imagine the horror in a man’s breast as he sees his wife sold one way, his children another way, and to know there’s nothing he can do; he’ll never see them again. That kind of reality, ever tied to physical landscape, is not something I look for. It just is. I had this sense of place when I started to write, and I’ve never not had it. Interestingly, it is only somewhat portable to other landscapes. When I went to Utah, I found that landscape, maybe because of the austere mountains, congenial. I wrote some poems which responded to that landscape. But I didn’t continue doing it. Ultimately I went back to my own region, no matter where I lived. Since I’ve been here in Louisiana, which is physically, topographically, very like my native part of Virginia, I have written almost consistently of the Virginia landscape I lived in probably up to the age of thirty, off and on. That is not to say I haven’t written poems about Louisiana. Maybe there will be more as I grow older, but I suspect that the same coastal landscape which is mine by historic gift will continue to be what I write about. I once had a professor who said, “When are you going to stop writing about these swamp things?” Swamps didn’t particularly interest this man from Illinois, but you know, that’s what was given to me to write

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about. Swamps and the character of people made by that place as surely as the tides and winds determine what sort of trees and groves flourish there. I haven’t exhausted my swamps yet. Suarez: In many of your poems—for instance “A Tire Hangs in the Yard”—physical objects serve as psychological centers, psychological cynosures for emotions. Smith: Given that I am aware of this historical sense of the lifespirit in things and places, then it’s possible for me to believe in the livingness of almost anything and, conversely, to distrust the abstract. As I do. It’s not that I oppose patriotism and loyalty and love and virtue, and those big words. But I see them embedded in tires that hang from trees or reflected by old men sitting on porches and women washing clothes. I see the world, it seems to me, very much like the old lady in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Moose.” The woman riding through the Nova Scotia twilight doesn’t just look at the things she sees but into the light she sees in those things. I have a religious reverence for the natural world—though I think we can easily step over into New Age gunk here. The worst kind of poems are those which gush over nature’s glorious spots but fail to recognize the threat that reality always holds. No threat, no poem. The natural world will bite you in the ass before you know it if you’re not careful. But I do have a sense of this livingness, this historical life in things, and it’s very important to me to make the poems physical in precisely the sense that you describe. Suarez: You’ve written and spoken about another Virginia writer, Edgar Allan Poe, who was concerned with form. What’s Poe’s significance to you? Smith: That’s a tough question. Professor Daniel Hoffman has a wonderful book called Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe in which he says that many American writers begin with an enthusiasm for Poe which they think they’ll grow out of, and maybe for a while they do, but then they come back to him. Poe somehow speaks to us about what it means to be a twentieth-century spirit, while at the same time he retains, specifically in form but in some ways in his thinking also, a connection to the nineteenth century. He’s both backward looking and forward living, if I can use that terrible metaphor. Having been a student who walked past his dorm room on my way to class every

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morning, and having long been a moody young man who loved “The Raven,” like so many others, I had Poe always, it seems, in my consciousness, and I kept discovering him in ways for which I was unprepared. For example, I grew up in Tidewater Virginia. As a young child I spent time at Fort Monroe with my grandparents crabbing and fishing, and I didn’t know that Edgar Allan Poe had been a sergeant major at Fortress Monroe. But there he had been. I didn’t know that he did his last reading on the steps of the Hygeia Hotel at Fortress Monroe until I became something of a would-be scholar and began to read about Poe. Poe was always part of my consciousness and, I think, part of the American consciousness. Even T. S. Eliot recognized this, though he certainly didn’t care that much for Poe. But Eliot recognized there is that magic in Poe’s poetry that maintains its hold on us. With respect specifically to form, Poe is defiantly Old World nineteenth century. Poe thought that “The Raven” was, as we would say of dishwashing suds, “new and improved” form. He was wrong on both counts. It was certainly not new. And it was certainly not improved. My own belief is that Poe had probably a fairly pedestrian ear for metric form. But he had steeped himself in what he thought. It’s interesting to note that the writer who would change forever the sense of poetic form is the only American writer to attend Poe’s funeral, and that was Whitman. Poe didn’t have an inkling of what Whitman was already about, nor of Emily Dickinson. I think Poe wanted to hang on to a kind of orderly universe mirrored in his sense of metrical theory or metrical form. But inside that theory, his poems are trying to break through to the twentieth century. I don’t think he made it, but the fact of the struggle is apparent to people who continue to feel the power of “The Raven.” And they do feel it, in every language. That’s astonishing. That poem has been in print for more than a hundred and sixty years. No other American poem can claim that or can claim the number of foreign languages in which it has been published and read and admired. There is something in Poe that speaks to all American poets, but I doubt that many American poets would argue that he’s a very good poet. He’s not a poet’s poet, but he’s certainly, on the other hand, a poet we can’t live without. Suarez: Two poets that you have cited as influences on your work are Warren and Dickey. Do you see similarities between them, or do you see them as very different poets?

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Smith: I think Warren and Dickey are first of all united by coming out of a southern sensibility, a cultural commonality that is more pronounced in the South than in any other part of the country. That’s not to say a New Hampshireman and a Vermonter don’t have something in common, and very intensely in common. They do. But they might not have much in common with, say, a downstate New Yorker or a New Jerseyman, whereas the South is twelve hundred miles long and eight hundred miles wide at minimum, and the people in it generally feel more culturally in common with each other than with what’s outside of it. Thus Warren and Dickey, in lots of ways, had a common matrix to begin with. Their ancestral nation was defeated and dismembered and occupied. Additionally, they were educated to the same kind of literature, to the same kind of values, to the same kind of sense of destiny and lost past, and all that. They share a cultural heritage that is in many ways common, if not seamless. And there are other commonalities. They are both gifted and compelling story writers, tellers of tales. That ought not to be forgotten. They are both robust men who lived long and deep lives, very intelligent, intellectual lives, lives of the flesh and lives of the mind as well. There are also substantial differences. Consider this perspective: Warren published his first poems when Thomas Hardy was publishing his last. So he spanned the Modern age. Dickey is much more a true contemporary. The single most important difference is that Dickey is finally, as a thinker, a positivist. Warren is not. Warren always stops at the point of being unconvinced. He is a skeptic who yearns to believe. In every case with Warren, there’s resistance to what he called the single-answer system. No matter what it was. This accounts for a complexity of experience and emotion and vision which resists any kind of easy answer to anything. This resistance creates a tension in Warren’s work that I find credible. Dickey, on the other hand, has given himself, from early on, to a single answer, and that is essentially that the momentum of the natural world is the true force. You may contradict it, contravene it, resist it, but in the end, it runs over you. Dickey celebrates our part in the natural process. Not religiously speaking, but practically speaking, he accepts ashes to ashes. Warren doesn’t accept it, but he doesn’t not accept it either. That’s a huge distinction between them. I used to think they were two of a kind, but I don’t believe that any more. I think Warren is

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significantly and substantially darker in his vision of human reality than Dickey’s worst doubt. I don’t mean that Dickey doesn’t face up to the problems that human beings bring upon themselves. I mean that ultimately he is far less troubled by the dark nature of human experience, far less anxious that there be an answer other than that we live, we seek a certain joy, and we die. It might even be said that the difference is that Warren is desperate for enlightenment and Dickey doesn’t care about enlightenment in the literary sense of that word. That’s such a fundamental difference between them as to make almost trivial the argument that they’re two of a kind. I think Dickey has recognized this himself in the few things he’s written about Warren. He’s very astute, it seems to me, not only on others’ work but on his own work. Suarez: They both explore experience from every conceivable angle, an approach that in many ways typifies your work. Smith: That’s true of them. The poet takes anecdote in some direction that allows illumination to come about; otherwise, it would have simply remained gross anecdote. Certainly in that respect Dickey is one of the great American writers—Warren, too, although he’s less plastic in that sense than Dickey. Dickey masters poems of intensity of feeling. I could name a number of poems in which Warren does the same thing. But Warren accepted after a certain point that his poems were about himself, even the poems about Dreiser or the one about Flaubert, which is scandalously not about Warren. I think if Red were here he would say, “Well, yes, in some sense that’s about me. I’m in there with him.” I think Dickey has learned from that more than Warren has, particularly in the later poems, where it’s so hard to see the outlines of factual events in his life, even a set of problems like the Puella poems, where so much is veiled. I suppose someone could completely annotate the Puella poems, and we’d know who did what, where, when, and so forth. And I suppose that’s a scholarly value, but it’s of very little value to people who want to experience the poems as poems. Think how internal those poems are, and how little narrative exists, and yet you’ll never hear anyone say anything about Dickey except that he’s a narrative poet. Suarez: Comment on your own writing in relation to Warren’s and Dickey’s.

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Smith: Well, I don’t belong in a mix with those two. So I don’t really think about it that way. I’m going to say a funny thing to you: after a certain point in my life I wouldn’t read Dickey. And I didn’t read him until I did another essay on Dickey last year. Because he was so compelling to me, I would want to write like Dickey. Obviously he can do it better than I can. So I didn’t read him. I just resisted reading him. And I switched allegiances—this would have been maybe ten, fifteen years ago—switched allegiances rather firmly to Warren. Suarez: Around 1980, I would say. Smith: Yes. Because I found I could read Warren with the same kind of imaginative feeding, but I wasn’t echoing Warren as constantly. Unfortunately, what happened was after a certain point, I assimilated Warren so much I began to sound like Warren, so I had to leave his work as well. I stopped reading either one of them. I could tell you who I read, but I’d rather not. I think all poets have a kind of guide figure; Yeats has always been one that I read that way. Another way to say this in essence is that I graduated from both of them. I had to make my own language, to make my own sound. Your question concerns what I learned from both of them. I learned from Dickey what I think you learn from good fiction writers too, which is, you’ve got to get something happening, get on stage efficiently, make the action of interest, and make it have moment. Wait. And get off stage. He’s very good, particularly in the middle poems, about teaching you those kinds of things. I remember even little things that I learned. Richard Howard’s essay on Dickey taught me about what Howard called “The Gerundive Mode.” I wondered what in God’s name was a gerundive mode. Howard’s essay shows you how Dickey does more with the gerund form than any other poet. It is a window into Dickey’s formal approaches. I saw things that Dickey did that I’d never seen anybody do before. He fools around with adjectives and makes them adverbs or nouns. I mean he reverses roles of syntactic units, verbal units. That taught me much that I didn’t know. There are poems, unpublished apprentice work, that sound more like Dickey than Dickey. I’d like to think that what I take from him are lessons that enable me to find my own sound, not to sound like him. If I had come to Dickey with only the later poems, I wouldn’t have learned anything from him because they would have been too hard

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for me. I wouldn’t have understood what he was doing or why. When I moved to Warren, I learned a new syntax. I learned sonic devices, ways of pressurizing the experience in the poem, ways of making it syntactically and tensionally more interesting. I learned to write a language, whereas in Dickey I learned to write a drama. Probably I have no business characterizing myself this way, but I see myself as more like Warren than like Dickey. And I can say temperamentally I am more tuned to Warren’s harsher vision than to Dickey’s. Dickey’s more comfortable in the world than I am. Suarez: You are a very distinctive poet. Smith: It would please anyone to hear you say that. I’m especially pleased because so many people want to just lump us southern guys all together. You probably can also see the presence of James Wright, which is every bit as important as those two in there. Wright represents, more than either Dickey or Warren, the pure lyric, which I never mastered but I admired enough early on in the seventies and early eighties to write some of the poems. But if you follow Wright’s work, you know he went through his own troubles with lyric poems and came out on the end of writing longer tale poems. He never abandoned his own lyrical quality. But he moved in a direction he wanted with those poems, that are roughly speaking fifty lines and tend to have a tale that they develop, but with a very blunt, personal, lyrically emphatic language. I admired that. I could point to poems that echo it in books of mine. If I were reading anybody today who I could say I was being taught by, it would be Seamus Heaney. It’s the same lyrical quality. I’m not looking for answers in any kind of philosophical or religious or worldly sense. But there’s a pleasure in the sound of language that I see in Heaney that I like a great deal. I had that in Wright more so than anybody else. But you won’t find it, I think, at all unusual that Wright found the same thing in Warren that I found. He said so in his essay called “The Stiff Smile of Mr. Warren.” And he told me on at least two occasions that he thought James Dickey was the best poet in America. He was aware of Dickey’s abilities and appreciated them intensely. Suarez: Warren, Dickey, and Wright are all storytellers who remain attuned to language’s nuances, particularly in regard to sound.

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Smith: In the middle eighties, Stan Plumly wrote about something he called the “prose lyric.” I think he was after something good and said a very smart thing that Warren tried to say earlier in his essay “Pure and Impure Poetry”; it was the notion that the prosaic imperfections of the world ought to be somehow got into lyric poetry. The beauty of lyric language could be employed with the rawness and ugliness of human experience. Suarez: You just described your poetry. Smith: Perhaps. When Plumly wrote that, I thought he had named

exactly what some of us were after. From my point of view, in the late seventies I was one of the few people who were trying to write this kind of poem, which is a variation of the prose-lyric poem. People, as far as I could tell, thought that I was a little strange. It wasn’t the trend, it wasn’t what was fashionable. Then Norman Dubie was writing it, he saw my work, and wrote me, and we became very good friends. Since then, Robert Hass, C. K. Williams, and others have developed this type of poem. Larry Levis is another one who I think is a very fine poet. I don’t think there’s anything prosy about the form. Here’s where I would disagree with the cadres of verse arguers who want to say it’s really prose lined up to look like poetry. I think that’s quite wrong; that is wooden-headed. I think what’s prose in it is metaphor; that is to say, we are using the word prose to imply the rough, odd mixture of worldly experience that is in some way refined into form when it enters lyric language. But the language is not so refined or conventionalized that one could identify anything like pure poetry. Suarez: Thematically and sonically, you are aiming at what Trilling called “the recalcitrant stuff of life.” Smith: Yes, that’s right. That’s exactly what I mean. I’m not interested

in and not capable of thinking in the sort of editorial way that verse wants to mount. If you come at poetry from the point of view of loving the sound of language, but also loving the enactment of human experience, then you’re not looking to make a point. You do not seek lyric purity or a verse podium. You’re looking to somehow just engender, just be in the experience. I do not want to use the anecdote to somehow make a statement. It is not my ability to think that way. If people were to talk about whatever my philosophy is,

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perhaps there wouldn’t be any. I mean, there isn’t any recognizable point-by-point statement. I’m not a thinker in that regard. I don’t think Warren really was either. Oddly enough, we could argue that Dickey is a better thinker and a more consistent thinker than Warren in this respect. Thinker is a kind of curious word to use. But Dickey’s very systematic in what he thinks of the natural forces, etc., etc. In the essays he’s written over the years, he’s been very articulate about this, without needing all the buttressing that theory and speculation brings to it. Or even somebody like Ted Hughes, who’s a poet I admire. Hughes has all that anthropological buttressing. I don’t doubt that it’s there in Dickey. I don’t doubt that his vacuum-cleaner mind has got it. But you don’t see footnotes and this and that and the other with him. It’s just there. Suarez: You have also written a novel, Onliness. What is the relation-

ship of the novel to your poetry? Smith: The book actually began as a story about eight basketball players on a school bus. I can’t begin to tell you how I metamorphosed those into a shot-putter, or what happened to the guys on the school bus who were traveling around the South trying to play basketball. In any case, I became aware that I was parodying the southern gothic, grotesque tradition, and having fun doing it. And I couldn’t get it to end. It just kept getting bigger and bigger as another little tale would enter. I happened to be giving a ride to John Irving. The World According to Garp had not yet been published, but I had heard him read from it. We were talking about the way novelists write novels. I thought you started on page one, like Snoopy does, and went to page end, and that’s that. But Irving began to tell me the way he had done sections of Garp and had sewn them together, and then invented this and put that in there. At one point we turned to talk about madness. I forget the exact connection, but he said madness was catching, that it was infectious. When I heard him say that, I knew there was something bigger to my novel, and that’s why I hadn’t been able to end it. While I was having fun mocking things, I also wanted to say something about the madness of violence and people’s obsessions. In a curious way, I think that novel is the zany side of everything I write in poetry. It’s everything taken to the jokey extreme, but I

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couldn’t let it be just a joke. So it became about what would happen if you take an obsession far enough. The old man’s obsession with his mistreatment at the hands of the neighborhood people leads him to violence. But what matters to me finally comes back to the theme of obligation, so the big shot-putter winds up with an orphan child at the end. I think of it as a very positive ending. He takes on an obligation, and it seems to me that’s finally what that book is all about. If I am permitted a small philosophy, it is that life consists of one’s obligations, the handling of responsibilities. But insofar as Onliness is stylistically different from my poems, and I think it is, it’s because I was having such fun playing with Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner and Harry Crews and Jack Matthews and all the people I had read with such admiration over the years. I started another novel—I’ve started several, but one I really wanted to finish—about ten years ago. I haven’t been able to finish it, and I don’t know why. I ought to be able to write fiction, but it’s like a chore. I don’t feel the pleasure in it that poetry gives. Suarez: The poetry lures you. Smith: It really does. That’s a better word than pleasure. It does. I’ve talked to novelists about this, and they say that what they like is coming back to something that’s not finished, and it waits for them. I feel that is like I’ve got to go back to a job. I just can’t get it done. I had fun writing Onliness, but, on the other hand, I don’t feel that that’s where I properly satisfied my energies. If I’m ever to be remembered by any single reader for anything, I hope it’s for a poem. Suarez: What’s next for you? Smith: I have completed, if the current revisions hold up, a new collection of poems, primarily lyric, although there are four longer, more narrative-like pieces in the mixture. These are poems with connections to my earliest writing interests and are combinations of memory and idyllic speculation: a memory of an invented southern man fleeing the South for work, a memory of attending a Halloween costume party in Washington, D.C., during the time just after racial disaster in Selma, Alabama, a speculation about a woman whose marriage takes her from the South to the North and a peculiar madness, and a tale of lovers who survive a rogue wave on the Chesapeake Bay. As these poems suggest, this is my most southern

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book in some respects, if by that we mean only a heightened awareness of the continuous role of region in one’s conscious moments. And, oddly enough, I feel a strong pull to leave this awareness, to extend the ground of my subjects and interests, a pull that is certainly common to any writer—one which I think composes the tension in these poems. Perhaps that’s why I feel very tentative about this book, even to the title. I call it The Righting Moment, a phrase said to refer to the point at which a ship in danger of heeling over and sinking can begin to right itself. My sense has always been that poems are containers of energy, especially the positive will to change. That is, of course, what one finds in prayer, and poems are often said to be prayers. I don’t know that that is so, but I have little difficulty believing poems have, person by person, the ability to help us right ourselves. I would like to be, and I hope I am, a poet whose work balances a recognition of how vigorously bad life usually is with the genuine courage that Mr. Faulkner, in his Nobel acceptance, said is the writer’s gift to give. Beyond this, I have a new and selected poems in preparation, since the only such book I have in print is available exclusively in England. I am also working on another collection of essays concerning contemporary poetry and am about to begin a history of southern poetry, a daunting project but one of some importance to me—and especially now. In the last year we have seen the death of James Dickey, who I somehow expected might go on to the end with us, and the even more untimely deaths of Larry Levis and William Matthews. The last two were not only my friends, they were also colleagues in poetry whose careers mine paralleled. Who, more than a poet knowing that life is short, has greater cause to be keen about getting things done? I want to go on summoning the dreams that I can, those that are as yet unworded and unknown.

To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version of this work.

Charles Wright

C H A R L E S W R I G H T isn’t commonly thought of as a “southern poet,” largely because of his strong identification with Italian literature and painting. Yet he was born in 1935 in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, and raised in North Carolina, and the landscapes and memories of his youth permeate his verse. But Wright’s imagistic lyrics contrast sharply with Robert Penn Warren’s and James Dickey’s narrative emphasis, which has influenced many contemporary southern poets. Wright observes that “almost everyone who’s thought of as a southern poet is a narrative poet.” However, Wright candidly asserts that he wants to be considered a part of the South’s literary tradition. Wright feels that he, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and Yusef Komunyakaa “are the only ones who are doing the true tradition of nonnarrative, 39

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southern, imagistic, agrarian poetry.” Like Voigt, Wright studied with Donald Justice at the University of Iowa, where Wright earned his M.F.A. in 1960. While the lyric sensibility of Justice, Wright, Voigt, and Komunyakaa (who studied with Wright at the University of California–Riverside) differs from the narrative orientation of Dave Smith, David Bottoms, Betty Adcock, T. R. Hummer, Rodney Jones, and others, both groups are part of what Wright sees as a “flowering” of a “really strong southern poetry assembling at the edges of everything.” The following interview was conducted on January 30 and 31, 1998, at Wright’s home in Charlottesville, where he is Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Suarez: Your poems often focus on the interplay between the narrator’s subjective perception and the exterior world, particularly landscapes. To what extent are you trying to create an aesthetics of perception, perhaps something like what we see in Wallace Stevens’s poems? Wright: I’m not consciously trying to do that. If such a thing comes

about as a by-product, that’s another thing. But I suppose, more than anything else, I’m trying to convince myself that the way I perceive the world is the way that I should perceive the world, that I can recreate the exterior landscape into an interior landscape in which I feel comfortable. The exterior landscape is not always comfortable to be in, but it contains all the elements of comfort. If you can take it inside, if you can transfer it into your own perception, or being, then I suppose one could live more at ease in one’s life. I’m not consciously trying, as I say, to establish a mode of perception, or a way that everyone should look at the world. I am only trying to establish for myself a way that acknowledges not only an exterior world and an interior world, but an It which is a combination of the two. Suarez: Is Stevens a poet whom you’ve read? Wright: Stevens is a poet whom everyone has read. I have not read

him in the sense that I’m often accused of having read him. I’m not a Stevensian in ways that probably I should be, which is to say, maybe I should have been more influenced by Wallace Stevens than by Eugenio Montale and Ezra Pound and Hart Crane and Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who I think were influences

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for me. I have read Stevens; I admire Stevens. I find as I get older that there is more and more of old Wally in me than I thought when I was younger. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I tend to see the world more through language, through the experience of language, through the transformation of language, as I think he did, the older I get. And I seem to see the world more as a transformation of sentences that were handed down to me through the generations of writers. I tend to find myself trying to alter that language in terms of my personal perception. Yes, I read Wallace Stevens; yes, I admire the pants off Wallace Stevens. But I was not, early on, influenced by Wallace Stevens, although maybe the best influence is the last influence. Suarez: Do you see yourself as a poet in the Romantic tradition? Wright: First of all, I don’t see myself as a poet. I hope others might

see me as that. But I think Frost was right when he said a poet is something that other people call you. You don’t call yourself one. I try, through writing poems, to come to terms with myself. One, of course, wants to be thought of as a poet, or one wouldn’t write any poems, obviously. But I still feel that it is a kind of sacred trade, and I’m not sure that I have passed all the barriers yet for my working papers. I do think of myself in a Romantic tradition, yes, when I write my poems. I do think of myself as a Romantic as opposed to, say, a classicist. Suarez: Your poems often reflect a subject-object split. Wright: This is getting into a very spongy area. If I say I’m aware of

subject matter more than I am of the way I present the subject matter, that’s not true. If I say I’m more aware of the way I present the subject matter than the subject matter, that’s not true either. So I am aware of myself trying to come to terms with subject and object. Trying to come to terms with the what and the how. You’re always out there screaming, tearing your clothes off. But, yes, I like to see things in a diffused light. I like to think that there’s something alterable about what I see. Again to go back to the first question we talked about: if I didn’t think I could alter the world in terms of personal existence, and whatever it is that might be beyond any existence, then I don’t think I would be doing this in the first place. I would be working for Colgate-Palmolive-Peet and writing zippy advertising phrases. Or something like that.

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Suarez: To what extent is your poetry an attempt to understand the past emotionally? How do the objects that you focus on, the landscapes, for instance, serve as conduits, sources of mediation between memory and emotion? Wright: I don’t know. I suppose that, in a way, what you saw is what

you’ll get. And if your childhood was basically happy—certainly mine was—then you want it to mean a lot. I’m a visual person. I’m much more attuned to what I see than what I read, actually. I’m much more attuned to looking at paintings, for the most part, than just reading, per se, to be reading. That doesn’t mean the important books, but some people just read because that’s what they do. They just read. I don’t read a lot. My wife reads constantly. That’s the way Richard Howard is, too. That’s the way a lot of people I admire are. They just read. I don’t. I, on the other hand, walk around; I look at things, look at paintings, look at reproductions. I’m much more interested in the visual. So I’ve tried, over the years, to retranslate that visual sense into a more written result. And so, naturally, childhood comes into play because we are so much more aware of things when we are children because it’s all new. It’s all just discovered. That’s what made Rimbaud such a great poet. He was a child three or four years into the time of his mature writing period, so he had that incredible visionary newness from the age of fourteen through eighteen that most everybody else doesn’t have because by the time they get mature enough to write well, it’s gone, and they have to remember it. Nothing remembered is as good as the actual moment because you change it so much. Or it’s better, but it’s not the same thing; it’s not the same electricity, and that’s why Rimbaud is so fabulous, among other reasons. So earlier on I depended a lot on memory, and of course, as Rilke says, everybody has a subject matter, his childhood. You can’t say you don’t have subject matter; everyone has it. Now to what extent you use it, and how you use it, is up to you. He used it very well. I’ve tried to use it myself. As I get older, again, I find that I don’t write about memory so much. Or I write about memory in a different way, which is to say that memory is not as count-on-able as I once thought it to be. It is not as all-giving and sustaining and nourishing as I once thought it to be. There was a time when memory meant everything to me. And what you remembered, if you remembered it well, was

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the basis to all you were able to transfer or to translate into your waking current life. But it tends to loom alone on the horizon more often now than it tends to engulf me. Suarez: What’s the relationship here between reason, rationality, and emotion? Wright: I don’t know. I’m an emotional person, more often than

I am a reasoning person. In other words, I’m not a debater. I am someone who gets excited and carried away by the currents of what is being talked about. That’s why I always pray for a reasoned and articulate student in every class, so I’ll have somebody to argue with and he can do that part. Emotion is, of course, at the core of our romanticism. My mind doesn’t work in a logical, reasoning, narrative manner, for the most part. Therefore, I’m much more, as I said before, impressionistic. Things seem to work their way out, I hope, in a reasoned form, but not through clear steps of reasoning. They work their way through the poem by some kind of logical impressionism. In other words, there will be an imagistic logic to a poem as opposed to a kind of narrative reasoned discourse that leads from point A through point B to point C. I may go right from A to C to B to A right back to C. That sort of thing. But still, I’ll get there. My mind works synaptically; it just sort of jumps from one thing to the next, one synapse to the next, as opposed to some methodical step pattern. So I suppose one would have to say that emotion rules me, and I try to rule my emotions in the best ways I can, as far as language is concerned. Suarez: Your poems move from object to object, but the associations

tend to be emotional, rather than intellectual. Wright: But I think that they are rational, or emotionally rational,

if not intellectually rational. And that’s the distinction that I would want to make. Reason in itself, in my poetry, has no interest, holds no interest for me. Emotion is everything. Suarez: You’ve been called a spiritual poet. Do you see yourself as such? Wright: No. I don’t see myself as any kind of spiritual creature at

all. I suppose that what I’m trying to do is write a kind of quasispiritual autobiography. That’s what all my poems tend to accumulate toward, I think, and certainly what I have been working on for

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the last twenty-seven years now, this project that I’ve had underway since 1971. It’s three trilogies. One group was collected in the book called Country Music. Another group was collected in a book called The World of the Ten Thousand Things. And the last group will be collected in a book as yet untitled. As I look back on it, the whole thing does seem to be a kind of searching. A kind of movement, if not a narrative, an emotionally organized movement, in an ascending path. Suarez: What do you mean by “an ascending path”? Wright: Ascending path. Going upward. Suarez: Upward toward . . . ? Wright: Upward toward. Being a secular person, I don’t know what

it’s going upward toward. But the imagery seems to keep moving upward. The iconic book of my life is the Confessions of Saint Augustine. The idea of that book, spiritual confessions, has had a pretty controlling hand over my imagination for many, many years. In my own way, I try to reproduce that sort of movement, or that sort of confession, and what such confession has led my life to be. It’s not going to be the same thing as Saint Augustine, of course, because we don’t believe in the same things. I did have quite a religious upbringing, however, and so some of that has, obviously, had to wear off on me. And that’s okay, I don’t mind. But to say that my poetry is a spiritual poetry is, I think, problematic. Of course, in the long run, I would like to think that others might think that. Suarez: Can you relate any of this to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s notion of inscape? Wright: I like his idea of inscape, though he wasn’t the first one to

talk about it. All of the notions of the immediate perception of the essence of things, since the first religious man came down from the mountain, have been more or less the same thing. When Joyce talks about his epiphanies, when Hopkins talks about his inscape, when other people talk about their revelation of intellect at a given moment, when they first saw what a certain object meant to them, what a certain passage meant to them, when they saw a certain memory exfoliate into its full meaning, they’re all talking about the same sensation. And that’s what he means by inscape. It’s the essence of

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being of the object, the word, the whatever. And yes, I believe in that sort of thing. I believe in that sort of thing, and I believe in trying to get there through language. That impossibility. All revelation is intuition and just immediate knowing. . . . Therefore, you give yourself a job of work to try and tell those feelings. But then, of course, the only job that’s worth doing is the one which can never be finished. Yes, I was a great admirer of Hopkins, at first intoxicated by his language, as I think most writers are because you can’t believe that anyone could get away with all that and have it be so fabulous at the same time. And so nonimitatable. The more I read him, the more I saw what he was trying to get at and the more it seemed to me that his language got in the way. I have read some of the Ta’ng poets. They were, in their way, trying to get to the same essence of things by a different, much more simple, much more uncluttered way, and you think, well, that’s the way to do it. Then you find out that maybe there isn’t enough language to do it that way. And then you realize that there is no language that can do it, and so you just do the best you can with the language you’ve got. I think that inscape is good. I think it’s a valid enterprise. Actually, I wish I’d thought of the word myself, because I think that it is more exact than epiphany, particularly if one works in landscape and what things look like. The idea of the inscape of a thing as opposed to the landscape or the outerscape of the thing, or its seascape or skyscape or the particular . . . Suarez: At what point did you make a conscious move in the direction of the particular journey you’ve been on? Wright: I wrote a poem called “Dog Creek Mainline,” about a place

I grew up in at the age of six and seven in the North Carolina mountains, and that’s when I realized that Rilke was right, that I did have a subject matter. For the ten years before that I had been just writing poems—some of them were interesting, most of them not, none of them bad, none of them good. They were technical exercises. Well, everything I’ve written has been a technical exercise to some degree, I suppose. But then I realized that I wanted to tell my story. Everybody wants to tell his story. Some people have stories to tell; some don’t. If you don’t have a particularly fascinating one, then the work really begins, and you have to sort of make one up. And that’s what I had to do. I had to go make one up. And since I couldn’t tell it narratively, I was going to have to do it by accretion

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and by conjunctions of things with building blocks that made a kind of edifice. In any case, I can’t say that at that moment, in the fall of 1971, when I wrote “Dog Creek Mainline,” I knew I was going to write a series of trilogies, nine books plus a couple of codas and an introduction that the first one had. But I did know that I was starting on something that was not going to be finished for a while. I knew that it was not going to be a narrative journey; therefore, it can’t be like Piers Plowman or The Divine Comedy or something like that. It was going to have to be separate books where I hoped eventually I would see what form I was working toward, and then once I saw that it would start to coalesce. And that is more or less what happened after I finished the first group of books, Hard Freight, Bloodlines, and China Trace, which became Country Music. And I said, “Oh, this is a trilogy. It moves from here to here. Now, I wonder if I can write another one and then a third one, so that I get a series of pyramids that basically have the same structure but would be, instead of next to each other, superimposed, one on top of the other.” And so, that’s what I set out to do. But each book was separate, each book was individual. The ones that have the most linear connection to them are, I think, the last three: Chickamauga, Black Zodiac, and the one I just finished, called Appalachia. During the time that I was doing this, there were also technical matters—which I’ve talked about in other places—I was interested in doing. I was interested in making the poem as short and as tight and as complex as possible—which I think I finally did in China Trace, actually a book-length poem made up of forty-six tiny parts— and then trying to take the line of the poem and stretch it out as far as possible, which I finally did in a couple of books, collected and called The World of the Ten Thousand Things. I take the line as far as I could toward prose, still keeping it a line of poetry. So I squeezed it down and then stretched it out in those two groups of books. Then in this third group, I am taking the condensed form of the first trilogy and the long line of the second trilogy and combining them into the poems that I’ve been writing since 1988. Well, I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but I did know I was going to try to do something that was, if not singular, at least not plural. Suarez: I want to get at the relationship between technique and subject in your work. Your use of the line has changed at various

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points in your career, though your themes have remained fairly constant. Do different technical approaches, such as the varying use of lines, allow you to explore the material in a different manner? Wright: To a certain extent, yes. They obviously have to. The longer

line lets you linger a bit, lets you look at the material from different vantage points, lets you savor it a little bit more. It lets you think about things a little more. It lets you include more. One of the reasons I always said I couldn’t do narrative was that story didn’t really interest me. What’s interesting about a story is the telling of the story, not the point. I always want to get to the point. And in the poems— for instance, in China Trace, in short poems—you get to the point much more quickly than you do with longer lines in longer poems. Same point, different path to get there. With longer lines, say, you don’t go on the Interstate, you take the blue highway. You see more, you dawdle, but you’re going to the same place. They both have their pleasures. They both have their seductions. One of the reasons the last three books have shorter poems with the longer line is that my main interest is getting there, not how I got there. So, somehow, I’ve gone back to a tighter version of things, even though the line is longer. So the idea of the long line has changed somewhat for me, even though the central idea remains the same. Now, I’m not sure that experiencing more of the subject matter gives you a truer understanding of the nature, or the inscape, of that subject matter, but it’s a different way of looking at it. If you try to squeeze it down for ten or fifteen years, the natural thing is to want to open it up. That’s how it came about with me. After that it became more of an aesthetic than it was at the beginning, where it was an experiment. And now I think that the longer line with the shorter, compacted poem is something that I find unavoidably seductive. Suarez: But does the longer line alter the final point? Wright: No, the final point is the final point. Compostela is always

Compostela. You can get there by the main pilgrimage road, or you can go the long way through the Pyrenees and come back, but the final point remains the final point. Sometimes you like to take a hike in the mountains, and sometimes you like to go down the highway. The big thing about the spiritual journey is that you never get to where you want to get. You may get to Compostela, but once you get to Compostela you realize, “Oh, this is the starting point.”

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Suarez: In terms of the longer line, is there anyone that you feel an affinity with? Wright: Again, soggy terrain. I suppose I would have to say Whit-

man. I first got interested in Song of Myself, and its long, self-contained line, one long unit and then another long unit. I was not able to keep the line buoyant for that long myself, so I started to break it. I broke it rather than having it break under its own weight. Breaking the line is nothing new. A lot of people have done it. Pound did it; Jeffers did it. A lot of people have broken the line. However, I maintain that my broken line is still one line, while most other broken lines become two lines. It may be merely a difference in perception on my part. C. K. Williams’s long line is a rhetorical one. Mine is an imagistic one. Rhetoric is easier, I think, to keep afloat than a series of packed images, because images tend to separate themselves. The challenge of trying to keep a long, image-freighted line independent is still of some interest to me. I think that Ginsberg’s line, when he was really doing it well, in the fifties, is really quite strong. Part of his strength lay in his idea of the connections between words that would lock them together and keep the line up, not letting it sink under its own weight. When Ginsberg was good, he was pretty good and showed how the long line could be used. Whitman was the best at it. I was never a great Whitman fan, but it’s sort of like your question about Stevens. I read Whitman late, and I read him very limitedly. I read Song of Myself. I’ve read the other stuff too, but Song of Myself is the one I like. So I’m not Whitmanian; I’m not a Stevensian. I’m much more an Emily Dickinson kind of person. At one point I got the idea of putting Emily Dickinson into the long line, and that’s where the image-freighted long line came about, at least for me. So that’s what I’ve worked on ever since. Jeffers. The only interest to me in Jeffers is his double-pentameter line, you know, the twenty-syllable double pentameters. Actually none of the long-line people we’ve mentioned, except for dear, sweet Gerard, Father Hopkins, are great interests of mine as writers. Suarez: What about Warren? Wright: Warren was someone whom I liked toward the end of his

writing career, in Can You See Arcturus from Where You Stand? The old-age poems were fabulous; I just love them. I like the early stuff

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less; I’m not a great Warrenite. I’m not a great Dickeyite either after “The May Day Sermon”—which shoves me pretty much out of the southern pathway because, as we know, southern poetry is pretty much based on Warren and Dickey, all the narrative, long, and expounded people. Verner: Do you think of yourself as a southern poet? Wright: I do. Much more so than anyone else does, I think. I’m not

thought of as one mostly because I’m not in the narrative, storytelling tradition. And that’s okay. But I certainly think of myself as one. I mean, I’m a southerner; have been for generations. Verner: How do you differ from other recent poets from the South? Wright: There is an accepted line, and I think it’s a decent accepted

line, from Sidney Lanier, down through Warren, Dickey, Dave Smith, David Bottoms, and a few people like that. Almost everyone who’s thought of as a southern poet is a narrative poet, as I’ve been saying. There’s a real flowering, I think, of southern poetry now, a really strong southern poetry assembling at the edges of everything. Particularly with the generation right under me, you know, the half generation—Dave Smith, that group on down. I’m sort of in the middle, between Dickey/Warren and Smith/Bottoms, and that’s a good place to be if you’re not part of the narrative tradition. No one ever told a story in my family. My father spoke very little, and my mother didn’t talk much either. I didn’t have any old-hat uncles who told stories, so there you are. I was narrative-deprived from the cradle, and so I had to make up my own stories. At least, I think of them as stories. They all have story lines. There is an undernarrative that runs through all of my work, but my stories are put together differently in my poems from those that are considered southern. Suarez: What do you mean by “undernarrative”? Wright: That’s the story line that’s underneath the imagistic line

on the top. I discussed it once in terms of going through a series of tunnels on a train, then back out to the landscape again. You come out to the landscape and you see where you are and then you go back in the tunnel, then back out to the landscape again. And so on. The story line is what the poem is about, the journey you are reminded of each time you come back out to the landscape. And that’s always

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running underneath the imagistic examples, rhetorical examples, or the narrative tidbits. What goes on in the tunnels is something else and often more exciting and mysterious. Suarez: It’s not in the foreground. Wright: It’s not in the foreground. It’s very much, oh I don’t know

if you’d want to say that it’s backgrounded, but it’s often undergrounded. Like some electric wire. Suarez: I’ve read your poetry here and there for a few years, but reading it in a concentrated manner over the last few weeks, I detected more of a narrative than people have supposed. Wright: One of the reasons I think you can say that, perhaps, is

because you did read several things over a shorter period of time, so you see how the concerns are continuing ones. The concerns, what the poems are about, go on as you go from book to book. I would like to think that if one spent the time and took on more than just a poem or two, that he could see there’s a movement. Suarez: And there’s a definite consciousness working through different situations in poem after poem. There’s a narrative going on within that consciousness and the things exterior to it. I think what throws some readers off is that your poems aren’t filled with people, particularly in cause-and-effect relationships. There are cause-andeffect relationships in your poetry, but the cause and effect is the interaction between a consciousness making its way through these concerns and doing it primarily with this interplay between the internal self and the landscape. But there’s a narrative. Wright: I like to think that’s true. And it’s also true that there are

not any people in my poems. There’s a wonderful photographer named Josef Sudek, who just died recently. He had only one arm, his left arm, and he had a big stand-up camera. And someone once said to him, your photographs are always churches, or landscapes, or still lifes. Why aren’t there ever any people? And he said, well when I start out there are always people there, but by the time I get everything ready and I take the picture, they’re all gone. And that’s sort of the way I feel. The people are sort of there, but by the time I get through going through everything, the people are out and the concerns are left.

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Suarez: There’s a case to be made that Faulkner relies on narrative disruptions rather than narrative. Wright: Well, that’s true, but when he comes back after the disrup-

tion, it is still narrative. When I come back from my disruptions, it’s still an image. And a little understory that’s going on. I do think some of the other younger people, like Yusef Komunyakaa, for instance, are much more imagistically oriented than narratively oriented. Yusef writes this imagistic narrative that is rather popular at the moment, and he does it very well. But he’s somebody, I would think, who doesn’t fit naturally into the narrative mode, and Richard Tillinghast, I guess, does. I’m trying to think of people who aren’t usually singled out, but they’re all narrative people too. Suarez: Terry Hummer and Rodney Jones have those rhetorical flourishes. Wright: Yes, they do too. Suarez: Ellen Voigt is less narratively oriented. Wright: Ellen, Yusef, and I are the only ones who are doing the true

tradition of nonnarrative, southern, imagistic, agrarian poetry. Take me as a southern writer, please. Verner: Why is that so important to you? Wright: Because I’m from the South. My whole family’s from the

South. My mother’s from the Mississippi delta, my father’s from Little Rock, my mother’s family’s from northern Virginia. We’ve been in the South for hundreds of years. My great-great-great-grandfather was the last territorial governor of Arkansas and the first senator from the state. I grew up a southerner, and I will always be one. Verner: Do you see any similarities between your poetry and that of the poets of the Southern Renaissance? Wright: I admire Ransom very much. Ransom is someone I had

early on admired tremendously—still do. I think he’s a wonderful poet. I don’t find any real connection between my work and any of those people. I read them mostly after I had got going. I read Ransom during the two to three years when I was writing exclusively metrical poetry, trying to learn how to do that. For three years, I wrote nothing

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but rhymed and metered poems and discarded them all. Ransom is one of the great masters of the metrical line. Ransom, Frost, Hardy, poets like that; Stevens, of course. And I really liked his work. He was also a favorite of my teacher, Donald Justice, at Iowa. At the time most everything I knew was coming through Justice, as I’d never studied any poetry before. That was the first class I had had. And he got me onto Ransom, not by saying “go read Ransom,” but by talking about him. So he would be the one I would feel closest to, if only because I enjoyed his work so much. But I don’t feel as though any of them had any particular influence in my way of seeing things or my way of putting things down. Verner: My next question is about Warren. He’s a self-described

yearner who searches the self, the natural world, the stars for some sign of transcendental meaning. Could you compare your search for meaning with his? Wright: I do the same, in different language. Verner: Would you say that this yearning is part of what it means to be a southern writer? Wright: Well, I don’t know. I think that’s part of what it means to be

human. There may be more of a sense of that earlier on in the South and New England, as opposed to the rest of the country, because they were, they are, more religiously oriented. As I said, I grew up going to church all the time. And I think that past a certain age it becomes a matter of one’s being, of how one sees oneself vis-à-vis the larger world and the larger world beyond the larger world. So, yes, that’s southern, but it’s just human too. Verner: Could you distinguish between some of Dickey’s work in

the lyric mode and your own? Wright: I guess I wouldn’t think that Dickey and I were at all alike.

I would be much more like later Mr. Warren than I would be like Dickey. I like the poems in Buckdancer’s Choice, Helmets, Drowning with Others, and even “Falling” I have a certain fondness for, but “The May Day Sermon to the Women of Gilmer County” was where he lost me. That’s when he really sort of drew back, at least from my point of view, from what makes poems tick, which is a certain concentration and application of language, and his language got

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otherwise, which served him well in Deliverance. Deliverance was a wonderful story, a terrific book. But that was the kind of language he was moving toward in “The May Day Sermon.” He was starting to preach, and before that he was praying. There’s a big difference between preaching and praying. So, I like the earlier work better. Verner: Has Faulkner influenced your work? Wright: Faulkner was the only person I’d ever read until I got out of

east Tennessee and went as far away as North Carolina. One of the reasons I read him was because my mother used to date his brother Dean, the one who was killed in the plane crash, when she was at Ole Miss in 1931–1932. Faulkner was a famous writer and such a cause célèbre, and she thought a lot of him. So I heard a lot about Faulkner and Eudora Welty, who was her other favorite Mississippi writer, and I read both of them. I read A Curtain of Green when I was still in high school, and I read all of Faulkner before I got out of high school. I didn’t understand it, but I read it all. I read Faulkner and classic comic books. It was a great education. Verner: Have you gone back to him since? Wright: I haven’t. No, I never have. It’s sort of like trying to go back

to Thomas Wolfe. I tried to go back and read You Can’t Go Home Again. It was, to me, totally unreadable; it’s like rereading Lawrence Durrell. I had loved The Alexandria Quartet, and I once started reading Justine again, with all that terribly poetic prose. I couldn’t do it. I don’t think I would feel that way about Faulkner, but I haven’t ever tried. Faulkner is a great influence because I read him when I was so young. I read him early on and probably got the idea that there is no language that’s too much language. Then at the other end, maybe that’s why I liked Hemingway, because I had had so much Faulkner, and I craved some simplicity and serenity. Faulkner is a big influence in the perception of things, if not in the execution of things. Suarez: Black Zodiac seems like a self-conscious address of your

career-long technical and philosophical concerns. Did you conceive of the book in this way? Wright: I did; indeed, I did. I thought I would be as straightforward

and honest about what I had been trying to do, and was still trying to do, as I possibly could. That’s why “Apologia Pro Vita Sua” is the first

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poem, and “Desjecta Membra” is the last. It’s part of the last trilogy which begins with Chickamauga and which will end with Appalachia. My concerns continue to be the same concerns, but I could see Black Zodiac, Chickamauga, and Appalachia as a unit, and a reevaluation. It took me five years to write Chickamauga, and it took three years and four months to write the other two. I sort of got into a frenzy. And once I started confronting what I knew I wanted to say . . . Suarez: You wrote them concurrently? Wright: No. But it took three years to write two and five years to

write one. Of all the three trilogies, the latest is the most plotted in its movement. It mimics the same movement of Hard Freight, Bloodlines, and China Trace in the first trilogy. Chickamauga, Black Zodiac, and Appalachia is possibly too thought out, but there is a madness in the method. And, of course, a little bit of method in the madness. I very much wanted to say what was on my mind in these poems. In the journal form, for instance, people tend to say what they really feel. They do sort of “let it out.” That’s what Zone Journals was about, being as honest as I could about my relationship to the landscape and the world, and what was going through my head vis-à-vis each, at any given moment. Black Zodiac has the same sort of cathartic idea behind it. China Trace, Zone Journals, and Black Zodiac are the three books in the three trilogies that have the most truth-telling about them, I think, and I probably like them the best for that reason. Suarez: They’re the strongest books. Wright: I think they’re my three strongest books, but perhaps that’s

because I was trying to do more and say more in them than in the others. Not that I wasn’t trying to say something in the others as well, but, you know. Suarez: When will Appalachia appear? Wright: It’s coming out in November 1998. I have to write a little

coda to it, and then, eventually, I guess, in a couple of years, the final trilogy, as yet untitled, will come out. Then the three trilogies, at least in my mind, will have the overall title of “Tennessee Waltz.” Suarez: In the poem “Meditation on Form and Measure,” you write “measure is verbal architecture / and form is splendor.” Explain.

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Wright: “Measure is verbal architecture” is explainable in that the sound of words is something that’s pleasing to the ear. People call it music, but it’s not music. Any musician would say that it’s not music. It is a measure. It is a measured kind of movement that helps you feel the motion and emotion of the poems and moves the lines toward their desired end. Suarez: When you’re working on sonic patterns, what is your approach? Is it intuitive? Wright: It does seem to be intuitive. I work line to line, line to line.

Since I don’t do a narrative thing, you watch it as it hits your ear and you watch it as it hits your eye, and you see it and hear it take on shape and pattern. I do write in syllables. I count them all. And my two standard measures are the seven- and the thirteen-syllable line. Shorter lines group around seven, three, five, and nine syllables, and the longer ones group at thirteen, fifteen, seventeen, and nineteen. At nineteen it starts to get a little long. I do it because I know that English is not a syllabic language; it is an inflected language. Therefore, within certain syllable counts you will get certain sound patterns, just because of the nature of the language. If I organize the lines syllabically, the accentual patterns seem less predictable to me somehow. They seem more of a normal speech pattern, somehow just above speech, but speech. So if you move that around, then the combinations start to get, certainly not symphonic, but, at least, polyphonic. It’s the line movement. I would say there are fewer possibilities within the strictly iambic pattern than in another sort of accentual pattern that’s done on a syllabic base where the back and forth is more varied. Still you get, always, behind my lines the ghost of the iambic pentameter, as it’s just the nature of the language. Particularly if you have the longer lines. I seem to be working consciously and intuitively at the same time. After a period of time, I have settled upon a way of writing that I find pleasing to my ear. It took me about twenty-five years. After a while, the sound patterns become intuitive with the syllable count. You sort of know what you’re going to get. The trick then is to vary the timing enough with the dropped lines, the shorter lines, the longer lines, to get the polyphonic sound, as if it were without a predestined kind of containment. And I find that pleasing. But it’s not lawless. The rules are the rules of the ear. But after thirty-five years one

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starts to trust one’s ear. If you don’t trust your own ear, who’s going to? Suarez: Your poems often use images of resurrection, but there’s

usually no metaphysical transcendence. Instead, there’s a return to earth. In some poems, there’s even a physical return to dirt. As you say in the poem “Sentences,” “Heaven, that stray dog, eats on the run and keeps moving.” Transcendence doesn’t seem available. In other poems, like the poem “January,” you describe a type of reincarnation. Do you have a system of belief? Wright: No. I have a system of nonbelief. I would love to be a

believer. But I’m not. And that’s why everything always ends at the stars, at the heaven of the fixed stars. In fact, that’s the coda I’m working on now. It’s called “North American Bear,” and it’s seven poems. The great bear, the big dipper, and that’s as far as it gets. Suarez: You’re drawing near the end of the third phase of this project

that you’ve been working on since 1971. Can you compare the new book, Appalachia, with Black Zodiac and Chickamauga? Wright: Well, it’s shorter, if nothing else. They’re all one-page po-

ems. It mirrors, to a certain extent, China Trace in the trilogy of Hard Freight, Bloodlines, and China Trace—which is to say, it makes an upward movement at the end. I sort of wanted to write a Paradiso, but apparently I’m not capable of writing one, or I don’t have the necessary evangelical ingredients to write one. Therefore what I ended up doing was writing a sort of ersatz Book of the Dead. As you know, the Tibetan and Egyptian books of the dead are rather like guides, verbal amulets, little mantras, songs, whispered into the ear of the dying person to help him, the true believer, get across to where he is sure he is going. And I thought, well, I could do something like a secular Appalachian book of the dead. And so I have about six poems called “The Appalachian Book of the Dead” in this book. Also “The Appalachian Book of the Dead” is referred to in several other poems. And the movement of the book, of the imagery, is, I guess, relentlessly outward and upward. So in the same way that Country Music was a trilogy that was a kind of small-time inferno, purgatorio, and paradiso, Chickamauga, Black Zodiac, and Appalachia are a smalltime inferno, purgatorio, and paradiso. Purgatorio in the Divine Comedy seems to me, in some ways, the richest of all of those three books

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in that it is a combination of scraping the inferno off your shoes and having your eyes on the prize at the same time. I feel that way about Black Zodiac. It seems to me the richest of these three books, although it couldn’t exist, in my scheme of things, without the other two. Then again, everything is independent as well as interdependent in these trilogies, as I try to set them up. So that is the mirror I’m working on between the first trilogy and the third trilogy. The second trilogy, The World of the Ten Thousand Things, is a kind of palimpsest for the overall three. If I were taking all three trilogies to be an inferno, purgatorio, and paradiso then the middle one would be the purgatory—the world, the dust, the things of this world. Suarez: When you say that the third phase of this project is an ascension, what exactly do you mean by “ascension”? Wright: I suppose it’s, more than anything else, a figure of speech.

Unlike the pilgrim Dante, I don’t get into the celestial elevator and go up. The movement of the book, the concerns of the book, the horizons of the book, the outlook of the book, all tend to move from horizontal to vertical as opposed to, say, Chickamauga and, for the most part, Black Zodiac, which move from vertical to horizontal, downward instead of upward. Suarez: What do you mean when you say that? Wright: I mean what the book is grounded in, what the concerns

of the poems are. The concerns of the poems in Appalachia seem to be more “otherworldly.” Even though they may start here, they become “otherworldly.” There are poems in there based on the lives of the European mystics of the Middle Ages. Those poems tend to be more concerned with their relationship to what’s not there rather than what is, and trying to bring what’s not there into terms of what is visible in the visible world. That’s why I say it’s probably really a figure of speech because it’s a yearning on my part, more than anything else. It’s a deep yearning, a deep desire for something that’s beyond one’s control and one’s grasp, and beyond one’s comprehension. This is nothing new, obviously, but it is the movement my whole project has been tending toward all these years. Suarez: I think it’s more than a figure of speech because there’s an emphasis and a reach.

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Wright: Well, I hope so, of course. I don’t have the sure footing of

belief, that good ground for steady walking—I don’t have that. But I do have emphasis, I do have reach, if that counts. Suarez: What will you do next? Wright: I don’t know. I hope to write some more poems that won’t

be quite so obsessive about this sort of idea. Maybe it will drive me into prose. Who knows? But I hope not to stop. I hope to have an old age. One, I hope to have an old age. Two, I hope it’s like Mr. Warren’s and Thomas Hardy’s, in that it’s productive. Suarez: In the sixties you wrote a short poem called “The New Poem.” What was that a reaction to? Wright: Oh, that was a reaction to a couple of things. One, it was

a reaction to the idea that everything in the sixties was going to be different and make our lives different and was going to change everything. Two, it was a reaction to poems about the Vietnam War, that somehow they were going to make a difference. And they weren’t going to make any difference at all, you know. At least in this country they didn’t make much difference. And everybody was always talking about writing the “new poem.” “I’m going to write the new poem. This is the sixties, everything is thrown out, we need the new poem.” There was a lot of new stuff going on, there certainly was, and, as it turned out, a lot of productive stuff that was eventually assimilated. All the surrealists—the American surrealist movement that blossomed in the sixties—were eventually assimilated into the new body of American poetry and made it richer. Still, there was no new poem that was going to change everything. It would not be able to help us. So it was a youthful sort of gesture. It became the most anthologized poem I ever wrote. Suarez: It’s true. In many anthologies that’s the first poem that they have listed by you, but it’s certainly not a poem that’s typical of you. Wright: No, it’s very atypical. It was in a book called The Grave of

the Right Hand, a book written during a ten-year period where I was trying to figure out what I was going to do, and what I was trying to get started on. I tried all different kinds of things, and that was one of the things I tried. It was the “political” poem, but it was an antipoem.

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Suarez: How do you see yourself in relationship to the “poetic movements” that evolved in the fifties and sixties—Beat, Black Mountain, Deep Image, and others? Wright: I find myself outside all of that. I started writing poems

very late, when I was in the army, over in Italy. I was twenty-three when I tried to write my first poem, and then later, at twenty-six, I got into the University of Iowa by mistake because no one read the manuscript I sent. So I just enrolled and started going to school. That’s when I first started writing seriously. The Deep Imagists were coming on about that time, and the Beats had already happened, had already written their best work by the early sixties. The Black Mountain school was still going on, but even though Ezra Pound, the great hero of the Black Mountain school, had been the original cause of my writing poetry (because I had read a poem of his that I liked), that was not my interest. Suarez: Did you know Charles Olson? Wright: No, I never met him. I didn’t know anybody, actually. I

mean, eventually I came to meet people as I got older, but when I was young, I didn’t know anybody. I went from Iowa back to Italy as a Fulbright student and so, again, in the midsixties, was away from whatever scene there was. Then, when I came back, I started teaching right away. So there really wasn’t any time to go out and be part of a scene. If I’d have been ten years younger, I wouldn’t have felt the need to get a job because I would have been raised in the sixties instead of in the fifties. If you were raised in the fifties, after you got out of school, you got a job. In the sixties it didn’t matter; nobody had a job who didn’t want one. But I went to work teaching and stayed there the whole time, and I’ve been treated very well by the academy. Suarez: You’ve claimed that the best lyricists in the sixties were James Tate and Bob Dylan. I’m especially intrigued by your mention of Dylan. Wright: I think Dylan’s a great songwriter; I don’t think he’s the poet

that people try to make him into. I read somewhere that the British critic Christopher Ricks is doing a big study of Dylan as the major poet of the period. I don’t feel that way, but I do feel he’s the best

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songwriter that we have in this generation. There’s no doubt in my mind about that, and I love the lyrics of his songs, in the same way that I love the lyrics of Tate’s poems. They seem to be inventive and surreal in a way that was empowering and energizing in the sixties. Both of them were, each in his own discipline. Suarez: Who are the living poets with whom you feel the biggest kinship? Wright: Charles Simic is the one I feel the closest kinship with. Of

course, he’s a very imagistic poet. He and I have a lot of the same things our poems are about as well. Mark Strand is an old friend and someone whose work I’ve admired for almost forty years. I like Jim Tate, whom we just mentioned. I like Louise Glück. I like C. K. Williams, Jay Wright, Frank Bidart, David Young. I’m just talking about people I like in my age group. There’s such a huge generation below me, with Jorie Graham, David St. John, Larry Levis, who just died, all of these people, really wonderful poets. And above, I was always a great admirer of Merwin, James Merrill, Donald Justice, but I feel closest to, and I think it is natural to feel closest to, people you sort of came along with and went through all the things with, and that would be Tate, Simic, and Strand. Suarez: Are you going to write any more essays? Wright: Probably not, unless I have to. I don’t know why prose is so

hard for me. Probably because, as I said, I’m such an impressionistic kind of writer. But I might do some. As I said, if I ever finish this project, maybe I’ll be forced into prose because I don’t have anything else to say in poems. I hope not. Which isn’t to say that prose itself doesn’t have anything to say. It’s just different, isn’t it? Suarez: From reading your poetry, I think that you would have a gift for short stories. They could be like a Fellini movie. Wright: Fellini has been a big influence on me, I think. I never really

thought that much about it, but the way he puts his movies together is the way over the years I kind of put my poems together. Episodic is not quite right. It’s episodic in film and it’s, well, I suppose it’s slightly episodic in the poem too, but it’s not a linear episode; it’s a linguistic or imagistic episode. A group of things that come together to form a whole. And Fellini was the great master of this, as well

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as being the most visually interesting person. I started seeing his movies at the very same time that I started writing poems, in 1959, in Italy with La Dolce Vita. Suarez: My all-time favorite film. Wright: Yes, mine too. I’ve seen it eight times. I love it. Greatest

opening scene—the shadow of the cross going up the side of that building—great movie. It’s a great movie. Suarez: I’ve seen interviews in which you’ve talked about painting, but, given your emphasis on the visual arts, what about film? We’ve just mentioned Fellini. Are you drawn to film? Wright: I used to be. Like everyone, I used to watch a lot of movies.

Now I’m almost always disappointed in movies. Every time I go to one, I’m disappointed in it. And I don’t know why that is. Is it my advancing age, or the slackness of the movie? My guideline is, as soon as I see a fireball, I know it’s a movie I’m not going to like. I did see As Good as It Gets the other night; I thought that was good. And I liked Wag the Dog. I thought Dustin Hoffman was just fabulous. The last movie I really loved was The Commitments some years ago. I like Woody Allen. I like all of his movies, some better than others, but I think he’s terrifically talented. I liked Deconstructing Harry. I love that musical he did last year, Tell Me That You Love Me, whatever it was called. Fabulous movie. And I liked Pennies from Heaven some years ago with Steve Martin. That was great. But, for the most part, I don’t see movies much. Or at least not as much as I used to. Suarez: Has film had an influence on your poetry? Wright: Structurally, I think Fellini has. I hadn’t ever really thought

about it until right now, but I would guess so. Not only because I saw his films at that formative stage in my writing, but also that it was Italian, which was also very important for me. That was where everything happened to me—I started reading poetry, I started writing poems; the landscape of Italy entered me and has never gotten out. And the culture, the popular culture as well as the more serious culture, has been important to me. And Fellini and Antonioni and Mario Monicelli. All those people from the fifties and the sixties, those directors. I’m glad you brought it up.

Photo by Thomas Victor

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Ellen Bryant Voigt

A T E N S I O N B E T W E E N precise formal control and intense emotion marks Ellen Bryant Voigt’s poetry. Born in 1943, Voigt grew up in the small town of Chattam, Virginia, where she devoted many hours to studying music. Voigt left Chattam in her late teens to attend the music conservatory at Converse College but eventually realized that she did not want to become a professional musician. Her subsequent experiences in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she earned an M.F.A. and studied with Donald Justice, gradually lured her toward a career in poetry. However, the years of musical training contributed to Voigt’s mastery of sonic patterns and helped nourish a lyric sensibility, which she still constantly tests by exploring the relationship between lyric and narrative modes. 62

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Since 1980 Voigt has resided in rural Vermont, a locale that allows her to enjoy the solitude to which she grew accustomed in her youth. The following interview was conducted at Voigt’s home in Lower Cabot, Vermont, on October 9–10, 1997. Suarez: How has your musical background influenced your poetry? Voigt: I think it’s everything. My notion of poetry is something like “truth set to music.” Poetry is a higher art, in my mind, because it can do many of the things that music can do, and then it does another thing, and the other thing, of course, comes from the words and the statement and the sense that is being added to it. I did nothing but music growing up; that was my whole life. I went off to study it seriously at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, which has a separate conservatory of music. I was barely seventeen and really didn’t know what I was doing. When I got there, I found out that in conservatory music, at least at that time (the early sixties), the main thrust of the education is to prepare one for performance; it is really to create an instrument. It doesn’t matter what your instrument is. Performance wasn’t the part of music that I liked, although I wasn’t aware of that. This insight came much later. It was also not the part at which I excelled. I was unusually good at sight-reading, I had a good ear, and I think I played with passion and expression, but I didn’t have much technique to speak of; I played with flat fingers. The first thing that had to be done to me was to get my fingers straightened out. I was supposed to sit in a little cell for hours each day, with an imaginary ball under my fingers, playing pieces at half tempo. This drove me absolutely wild. In the meantime, I was exempt from what I really did care about—courses in theory and harmony— and I took the only semester of composition offered. So I couldn’t envision a life of music other than performing and preparing for performance or teaching. Nevertheless, I continued studying music for about three years, during which I had this summer job in a resort playing junk music, background stuff while people eat and drink, stuff that people don’t really listen to. Somewhere in there a friend of mine showed me some poems; it was a great awakening, a lightning bolt. I don’t know how else to put it. I had no idea what poetry was. I went to a very small public, rural school, and I thought poetry was “the highway man came riding, riding, riding, up to the old inn door.” I had no use for it whatsoever. Suddenly, I was confronted

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with Rilke, E. E. Cummings, Yeats. It was astonishing. At that point I had finished my second year at the school of music, with no academic courses whatever. My brain was starved. Poetry was amazing. I just wanted to read more of it. I didn’t think of myself as a poet; I wrote some poems, but I really wanted to study it. Over the course of the next two years of college I studied less music and more literature, especially poetry, graduated from there at twenty-one, and went to graduate school at Iowa. Suarez: How did the experience at Iowa affect your poetry? Voigt: I went there quite by accident. I had wanted to go to Vanderbilt. My literature professors at Converse had all come out of Vanderbilt. They used to talk about Dickey, who was there when they were there. (He was an outrage, of course.) They were very much influenced by Ransom and the Fugitive poets, so once I had determined that I wanted to keep studying literature, the only place I thought of was Vanderbilt. I couldn’t imagine anyplace else. I went down there in March of 1964, walked under the magnolia trees, and went to Donald Davidson’s course on the lyric. I thought, “This is heaven; this is exactly what I want to do.” I also had an interview with the dean of graduate studies. We chatted, and I told him how much I wanted to come there, how I loved his university. He was glad to hear this. Then I asked him what my chances were for a fellowship, because I needed money. He said, “You have no chance at all.” I was rather stunned by that. I had changed my major very late but was graduating with 162 hours—was there some course I didn’t take? Oh, no, that all looked fine. Well, what about my GREs? Not high enough? No, that looked fine. So I said, I just really don’t understand. And he said: We don’t give money to women. You’d be a very bad risk. You’d come here, you’d meet some nice young man, and you’d get married. I insisted I wouldn’t, I’d swear, I’d sign a paper. But anyway, that was done. I thought I had ruined my life. But it turned out that I had one undergraduate professor who had not gone to Vanderbilt; he’d gone to Wisconsin. He said, “You know, Ellen, there are other places. There’s someplace out in the Midwest where you could keep writing your poems.” He took me to the library, and we looked up the University of Iowa. I’d never heard of it. I wrote off, applied, got money, and went. In those days it was

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a sixty-hour degree. You could do half of your hours “on the hill,” as they used to say, by taking literature courses, which is what I did. At the workshop, I was in over my head. There’s no question about it. The best thing it did for me was to show me where to find contemporary poetry. I still hadn’t read anything contemporary. I remember reading Donald Hall’s anthology. To be shown those books was really quite a wonderful thing. The first year was hard. There were sixty of us in poetry, which is what they still have. But that year we met all together, a workshop of sixty people, in a big old Quonset hut. Don Justice was teaching somewhere else that year. They had brought in George Starbuck; this was his first year of teaching. Paul Engle did the administrative stuff and the raising of money, but the two of them were running the workshop. It was a zoo. Then the next year Don came back. They divided it up into four workshops, four sections, and I worked with Don. Suarez: Did you publish any of the poems you wrote there? Voigt: I had even published a couple poems before I got there, a poem or two in the Sewanee Review and in Southern Poetry Review, I think. There were a number of people there who were starting little magazines, or knew somebody who was starting a little magazine, or knew somebody who was looking for young poets. Luckily, I had plenty of time between those poems and those that wound up in my first book, which was published in 1976. I finished the M.F.A. in 1966. I had long enough to write something else and outgrow my early efforts, which were really pretty bad. Suarez: What were those early poems like, besides bad and thin? Voigt: The ones I had written as an undergraduate are just a compilation of various excitements. A couple of weak Frostian sonnets, some E. E. Cummings management of typing—rather romantic, most of them, given to high drama, a little rhetorical. When I got to Iowa, Don Justice was writing the poems that appeared in Night Light. Syllabic poetry was very much the local rage. James Tate came the second year, in ’65, and wrote the poems that are in The Lost Pilot. Jon Anderson was there writing the poems that were in Looking for Jonathan. Although that kind of really pared-down surface was the complete opposite of what I had been doing or felt temperamentally drawn to, it seemed to me that I was there to learn, and the way

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to learn would be to try to do what others were doing well. So I tried to write very constricted poems. That’s how they felt to me, although that’s not fair in regard to others—I’m not saying that Donald Justice’s poems in Night Light are constricted, but they are very pared down. Suarez: Your best poetry tends to be lush. Voigt: That’s temperamentally closer to what I’m trying to do. But it was a great discipline to have learned to pare things down. Any time I put an adjective in a poem, even now, I hear Don Justice asking why it’s there. It’s good to have a check against your natural proclivities. I had many checks. I was still young and did not think of myself as a poet. It took me years after that before I started thinking of myself as a poet. I just wanted to study the stuff. I loved it. I was a reader. I wanted to be as smart a reader as I could be. Suarez: At what point do you feel that you started to find your own

“voice”? Voigt: After I came to Vermont in 1969. I finished at Iowa in 1966. We

stayed in Iowa City, and I taught down the road at Iowa Wesleyan. My husband was still in graduate school. We stayed out there for another three years, and then we got tired of being poor students, decided we would leave, and picked New England out of the air. I didn’t want to go back to the South, he didn’t want to stay in the Midwest, Vermont sounded gorgeous, so we applied around. He found a position at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. I was twenty-six. That was the first year I had ever not been in school and/or working; it was divine. We rented a little house on a road that went into the state forest; they didn’t plow our road past our house once the snow fell. Snow started falling on October the sixth, so we were essentially living at the end of a dead-end road. I wrote a great deal, and I felt that I was being bad, that those poems were not what poetry was supposed to be. But I wrote them anyway. I think that was the first time they felt wholly mine. Suarez: Be more specific. Voigt: I was writing overt presentations of emotional dilemma, if that doesn’t sound too abstract or too general. I’m sure I didn’t think of it that way at the time. There’s one about wanting to conceive a

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child, with a dead rabbit in it. There’s a prose poem about pregnancy dreams and a child in danger. I’m sure Don would have felt these things were immensely excessive. I thought they were excessive too. Suarez: So the very subject matter was a violation? Voigt: Not only the subject matter. My first book got a short review

from Helen Vendler that mentioned my “taste for the lurid.” I was using primary colors rather than shades of mauve and gray. The latter are very beautiful colors, and I love that restraint, but I’d been trying for about six years to write those kinds of poems, and I was no good at it. I needed more immediacy, more passion. Suarez: What’s the relationship of passion to your sonic practices? Voigt: I remember my piano instructor at Converse used to chastise me for liberties, that I would take liberties with Bach and so on. It’s connected to style, if you can talk about style in a first book that took about eight years to write. The first poem in my first book is a love poem in which nothing happens; it’s all high metaphor, extended figure. But it seemed to me something was happening, that it had a plot which revolved around sensuality. My poetry is connected to sensuality; it’s a pursuit of sensuality in subject matter, in surfaces, in sounds—rather than pursuit of the restrained, oblique, and ironic, which I love. If I could put in my vote, thank you very much, you know the muses up there have control of this, for what poems I would want to write, that’s the kind of poem. I admire it inordinately. But I’m not an ironic person. I have no irony in my makeup. I’m a Taurus. Suarez: Dickey told me that he read Ransom and enjoyed his poetry, but it showed him exactly what he could not do. Voigt: I’m sure he discovered that much earlier than I did. Because

I loved Ransom. I just adored Ransom. I thought for a long time one should emulate the thing admired. So it took me a while to get to where Dickey got, although in those early books Dickey was pretty successful at writing quiet, constrained lyrics. “Heaven of Animals” is about as gorgeous a poem as one could write—but in the middle books he changed the aesthetic. The short lyric was not going to contain those elements of excess that were clearly in his temperament.

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Suarez: Has your musical background affected the changes in your books? Voigt: Probably. I used to write almost entirely by ear. I would

hear the sound of something before I had the words for it. I discovered the extent to which I was doing this way late, somewhere between the second and third books, I think. A woman doing a class at the New School in New York, on revision, asked if I would come with a poem in several drafts. When I went back through manuscript material from the second book, looking for a good example, I was astonished to find that in early drafts I would have maybe one line, and then I would have only a scansion written in, then another line or two followed by more scansion. I was hearing the sound before I had the language to put into it. That’s very dangerous; anything will do if it fulfills that sound. I still do a safer version of that: I can’t write a poem that’s going to go anywhere until I hear a kind of prototypical line. With each book I have tried to change what the line might be. When I fairly self-consciously decided I’d try to learn how to do narratives with The Lotus Flowers, it was clear I had to have a more ample line. In narrative you have to move bodies around. You use time and space, so you get a lot of prepositional phrases—in the street, down the road, by the tree. They’re all anapests, and that much anapestic rhythm needs a longer line for it to accrue in. You try dividing that up, and it makes an awfully flat line. So I had to get myself to hear a longer, looser line, which I thought for a long time was very ugly. I didn’t like it; it seemed to me quite flat, but I stuck with the experiment, trying to learn something about narrative. Yes, I would say I make a musical decision before I make any other kind of decision about books and also about individual poems. If I can’t hear it, it just never gets written. I might work on it for a while, but it’s not ever going to come to completion. I know other poets work other ways and begin with image or begin in other places, but that’s what I have to have. That’s my donnée. Suarez: How has this affected your themes? Voigt: I don’t know. Suarez: You just mentioned that in trying to write a narrative poem, it seemed to bring about a certain type of sonic practice that was necessary. How about with specific themes? Is one particular experience more given to a particular sonic practice than another?

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Voigt: The answer ought to be yes. Everything in my head tells me, okay Ellen, the smart thing to do here is to say yes; it’s bound to be the case. Yet I don’t know that it is bound to be the case. I don’t think a whole lot about theme. We keep writing the same thing over and over again, despite ourselves. When I finish a book I always think, I’m never going to write about that again. I am really tired of sick children; then I end up writing about sick children. In a way, I try to fool myself by setting off to do something entirely different, but that’s subject matter more than theme, and there are particular structures that allow you to take up certain occasions, in which certain themes can be examined or in which certain subject matter can be explored. But looking back, even on a variety of structures and subjects and intentions, I find the same set of concerns, the same set of obsessions, no matter whether I’m exploring them in very short, tight lyrics or in narrative structures. What’s clear, though, is that the sonic arrangement creates the tone. Some tones are possible or not possible, given the sound that’s being developed. So the sonic implications are structural rather than thematic, although I guess I should ask you what you mean by “theme.” Suarez: “Theme” encompasses what you’re saying about obses-

sions, but I wouldn’t restrict it to subject. I’m wondering if different forms allow you to interrogate or use a subject in a different way. Voigt: That’s certainly true. You have to interrogate it in a different way. No question about that. But I have a hunch that it’s all the same thing coming back to you over and over again. The individual in conflict with the community, for instance. I keep writing about that. Suarez: What are your other obsessions? Voigt: Fate is a big one. What is it? The extent that we are driven by

what we think it is. Paradox: that’s a huge one. Those are the ones I keep writing about over and over again out of a predisposition to solve them. I feel things shouldn’t be paradoxical; that one thing should shine out as the truth and the light and the answer. To that extent I think of poetry as moral. Poems have moral centers, which try to get at truth. “Truth” seems like a large claim, but I believe it; that’s part of the drive. When I come up with two possible answers that utterly cancel one another out, that disturbs me. I don’t want that to be the case.

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Suarez: But that’s the tension out of which . . . Voigt: One writes. I know. That’s true. We know that the empirical

is not enough. We have a human hunger for something else. We have a human hunger to understand. So we go out into the world to observe. Then we see X, but what do we conclude about X? That’s the rub. That’s what you’re talking about when you pair romanticism and naturalism, free will and fate, in your essay “Toward a New Southern Poetry.” One can have this romantic, overarching notion of some sort of connectedness, like Warren’s spiderweb, or have the opposite, the sense that the material world is all there is, and there’s nothing that provides coherence or meaning or significance. How to come down on one side of that or another? That’s the thing that pricks one into writing. Suarez: Your sense of the contradictory sensations is very different

from many of the poets of your generation. Unlike much recent poetry, your work isn’t overtly political. Voigt: I’m a solitary person. I live way out here in the sticks. I’m out of the flow. I’ve been out of the flow for a long time. I’ve always been solitary, and mercifully exempt from many contemporary pressures. The circumstance of the poet in the culture is such an odd one. I don’t think it’s as bleak as what some people say: clearly, books are being written, books are being sold, books are being read. But the popular culture, and even the intellectual culture, possesses no regard for poetry. If one is exposed to that realization over and again, I don’t see how one could resist being political. The people who lived in this house in 1820 looked out of that door and saw pretty much what I see now. I feel very privileged that I’m not in a circumstance where I’m reminded of our culture’s attitude toward poetry. I’m reminded instead of things that last, the rhythms of nature. That has allowed me not to have to deal a whole lot with myself as a figure in history. I think other poets, particularly poets of my age and my generation, have had to do that. We came of age with those twin horrible dilemmas—civil rights and the Vietnam War—that we attacked fairly idealistically. The disappointments, the cold water dashed in the face of the idealism, created a political generation; it’s not surprising that has come out in the poems to some extent. It’s also come out in the schools of poetry, or ideas about poetry,

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or warring camps about poetry. If you’re feeling powerless, and unwanted, and unrecognized, and all of that, you turn against one another sometimes. Suarez: You’ve never connected yourself with any type of poetic movement. Voigt: No. I just haven’t felt a party to them. I have nothing against them, but I don’t know what any of those things mean. I don’t know what it means to be a “woman poet.” I don’t know what people mean by that, when they say a “woman poet.” When I sit down to write a poem, I’m just sitting down to write a poem like anybody else who’s sitting down to write a poem; it’s not a selfconscious element in what I bring to the table. I don’t think of myself as a neo-formalist, a southern poet, or any of those things. It’s not what I’m worried about. I’m much more worried about how can I look hard and clearly and render precisely. It takes all of what I’ve got just to do that. I don’t have anything left over for the other things. Suarez: In 1994 you gave a lecture at Mercer University on the subject of structural corruption. Voigt: When they asked me to lecture on narrative and the use of narrative in southern poetry, I thought, “Oh, spare me.” I mean, that’s what everybody thinks. You’re from the South, so you must have grown up hearing a lot of stories. I was resistant to that very topic, so I began listing the southern poets that I find really interesting, that I would want to talk about. I first thought of Ransom’s poetry; there is not much narrative drive there. I thought of Justice’s verse; no narrative drive there. Eleanor Ross Taylor’s poetry led me to the idea of deliberately “subverting” narrative, pretending to do a narrative, setting up a poem as if it were a narrative, but then ending up with what I called a lyric agenda. This took me back to Poe. Nothing happens in “The Raven.” In the past twenty years we’ve gotten befogged about what narrative is and what lyric is. To me the real difference is a structural difference; that’s the only thing that matters. A lyric poem can do all the things that Stanley Plumly associates with narrative values, can contain recognizable character, a recognizable setting, even a series of little actions. Think of “Western Wind.” But the arrangement of materials, the order in which materials are released

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to the reader, that’s my definition of structure. A narrative manages events and actions that happen in time and have consequence. The lyric tries to do exactly the opposite. The lyric says: Let’s freeze this thing. Let’s not let this thing move forward to its consequence at all. Let’s just stand right here at this spot and sing. That’s a different organizational structure and a different agenda. “The Raven” presents a lyric agenda. The “plotline” revolves around an increasing despair and anxiety within the speaker. Nothing else happens. The bird says, “Nevermore, nevermore, nevermore.” The guy says, “Tell me, tell me, tell me.” And none of it has any consequence at all. Suarez: Poe draws out the emotional state. Voigt: That’s right. Or the enactment of it. This strand has existed in southern poetry. Charles Wright is a lyric poet. So is Warren, a so-called great narrative poet. I’ve been studying Audubon again. It’s an amazing poem. The number of sections that are lyric in their structure is overwhelming. And the overarching framework isn’t a narrative; it’s a lyric framework. Who’s the real protagonist of that poem? Who’s speaking in that poem? Who’s the “you” in that poem? Who makes those large statements about history and time? Who says, “Tell me a story”? Whom does he say it to? Audubon is a handy surrogate. That long second section, which describes the attempted murder in the cabin, is narrative, but look at the other sections. How come there’s an airplane in this poem about Audubon? The only way we can have an airplane crossing over his head is if the poem is centered in a contemporary sensibility, a lyric agenda. Suarez: Within the poem the narrator often presents a large philosophical question, and other matters become subordinated to it in one way or another, though nothing is ever answered. Voigt: Nothing. What’s the bear doing there? Right there in the

opening section, why do we get all of this with the bear? That contributes nothing to story, nothing to ongoing narrative. Whether he saw a bear or didn’t see a bear, whether the bear tried to attack him or didn’t attack him, means nothing—it has no consequence in time. That’s just a little lyric. There’s the bear, there’s the bee, and he’s standing there before he sees the cabin. He leans on his rifle and thinks, “How thin is the membrane between himself and the world.” If this section didn’t exist next to the cabin scene, we would say, “Oh,

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this is a lyric poem.” And there are more sections like the one with the bear than there are sections of narrative enactment where things are happening in time. There are a few places where he could have created events in time, but he removes them out of time with either narrative summary or meditation. Suarez: How does this relate to Kyrie, in which you address the flu

epidemic of 1918–1919? Voigt: As a kind of reverse, or opposite. The sonnets are lyrics, but the book uses a loose overall narrative structure. The problem with that story is that it’s not an interesting plotline. A lot of people got sick, a lot of people died, some of the people got well. And its connection to time was part of the horror, because time “stopped” in the epidemic. Things were changing out in the world, with the war, but the circumstance of the disease didn’t change. Technically it did, coming in three waves of the epidemic as populations were reinfected, but individual events, deaths, were repeated over and over and over, and I thought that the best way to show that in the individual poems that each examine an individual event was with lyric. But you can’t ask a reader to stay at that same moment that long, that many times—it’s a level of intensity the reader will reject eventually. You have to give the reader some other kind of movement, and you can get movement out of narrative. I had written about thirty poems, thirty lyrics, and I thought that I’d learn something by trying to sustain a whole book of them. A few things seemed necessary. First, I needed some recognizable, recurring characters so that the reader will say, “I know who that is,” which would buy me some latitude for a chorus of other voices. Second, I had to enlarge the lens, the context, which meant bringing in the war. Third, I wanted some passage of time because, as I remarked, there was none within the individual lyrics. They all spoke out of a moment when somebody died, or escaped death; time is frozen forever on that subject. So I had to start the book earlier on the time line, to write some earlier sonnets, before the characters were aware of what was going on, and I also had to extend it beyond the epidemic, when danger had passed. Those were my three obligations. I didn’t see them quite as clearly as I do now, but I had some notion of them, so I created the soldier who writes home. He’s an immediate, formal device that helped me achieve all three objectives. As soon as he says “Dear Matty,” it

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sends a signal. Even if you don’t know much about him or who he is, you recognize this as the same guy. What he writes back about also accounts for time. It’s a pretty straightforward mechanism. He writes when he first goes off to camp, when he’s shipped overseas, when he’s wounded, when he’s about to be shipped back, all of which gives the reader a time frame. Suarez: The language retains a lushness, but it’s simpler than in the other books. Voigt: It’s as monosyllabic as I could get it. I wanted believable

voices, and I also wanted some way to represent the time period. I have a lot of relatives who lived through it, so I knew roughly the idiom and syntax. Syntax was harder than diction. The length of the unit and then the rhythms within the unit were tough. But I wanted to resist the figurative. I wanted to prevent the reader from scooting off into metaphor. I wanted to render the thing itself, and it had to be a contained, historical moment. I didn’t want the reader on page 2 to start thinking about the AIDS epidemic. Suarez: The subject itself doesn’t need any extra symbolism. Voigt: That’s right. It’s too huge, which is why we can’t comprehend it; that’s why it went out of memory. I wanted to make the book historically plausible. So I love when people ask me what kind of research I did. Suarez: What kind of research did you do? Voigt: There was none to do. There was really nothing out there

except an isolated magazine article or two, and one wonderful book by Alfred Crosby, but little else. I read military history. It’s not in there. More soldiers died of influenza than died of war wounds, but it wasn’t in there. Then I started reading fiction of the twenties. I figured, all these people lived through it, right? Either they had it, or they knew somebody who had it, or they certainly knew it was going on. They were writing about the war years, surely they would have written about the influenza pandemic that killed over twenty-five million people, all over the world. But very few of them did. Once I got close to finishing the book, I did do some primary research with the Vermont historical society. I read letters, newspapers, and journals to check the accuracy of details and the plausibility of the

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speech. But the question presumes that I had located these people’s histories and wrote them down, rather than that I made them up. Which pleases me: I made them up, but apparently I was able to make them convincing. That effort made the poems sometimes feel very flat to me. But that’s because I’m secretly a poet of excess. One of these days before I die maybe I’ll write a really excessive book; that’ll be my true book. Everyone will say, “Underneath she was really indulgent and excessive.” Suarez: Compare the last book with your other ones. Voigt: I need to come at things obliquely. In my third book, The Lotus

Flowers, I set out to learn how to do narratives. I had some elegies to write. Childhood doesn’t really end until the parents’ deaths, and once mine had ended, I had to write poems of exile, though I didn’t realize that until much later. I thought that I was just trying to write narratives, but all the narratives are set in the same location and relate to the same people. When I finished that book I was quite tired of narrative. I went into this sort of anti-narrative fit, in fact. It seemed that all narrative was a lie because it has to have an end, a resolution, and that isn’t what time is like. There’s no ending, no resolution. In my anti-narrative fit I wrote nothing but lyric fragments for about two years. I thought of them as “middles,” and I felt like a painter who goes out and paints the same haystack in different light. They were really exercises in tone. I was confronting huge, big, abstract subjects: truth, beauty. But I tried to come at them from a slightly different angle every time. The variations occur in voice. This was part of my ongoing effort to develop more irony. I have none. And that two years, making those sequences for Two Trees, was an exercise in tone that prefigures Kyrie. The difference is that with Kyrie there is a single large dramatic situation, an occasion of history that’s being looked at from the different angles. In Kyrie the different angles are the various characters and the variants on the single dilemma or peril. Again the big variant is tone. I would hear a line, like “Oh yes I used to pray,” and my job was to figure out who would have said that and under what circumstances during this awful time. I see those two books as very connected. Suarez: Clearly, you are technically proficient, yet poetry is an intuitive process for you.

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Voigt: That’s a contradiction, isn’t it? But I think that any musician would talk about music that way. The language arts are the only arts for which we don’t presume technique is crucial, and that it can be learned, and that you’d do well to learn it. Nobody would say, “Oh yes, I’ve whistled for twenty years, so I think that next year I’ll be a concert flute player.” It wouldn’t occur to you to say, “Oh yeah, I leap around the house a lot, so I think I’ll join the Joffrey Ballet.” You’d presume that there were things to be learned to enable the craft, and that’s my view about poetry as well. If you have nothing but technique, of course, you have nothing. If the dance works, we don’t see the sweat on the brow of the ballet dancer when he lifts his partner. By “art” one means the extent to which all the work that has gone into the making of it dissolves or disappears, so that the thing is transparent, as if it simply happened, effortlessly. The same thing is true in poetry. There are technical things that can be learned, and if you learn them, then you have more tools, more skills, at your disposal, more choices you can make when you’re pursuing this other essential thing that is murky to us. We don’t know enough about the brain to know where that comes from or what explains it; I’m not even sure we want to explain it. But if you’ve done all those years of practicing your scales, then you’ll be able to play Liszt; if you’ve never practiced any arpeggios, forget it. You don’t want the audience sitting out there and thinking, “Oh, look at that finger action.” Then it’s blown, there’s no music. Suarez: What are you working on now? Voigt: Poems of greater excess, I hope. It’s taken a while to get the

sonnet structure out of my head, to not think in fourteen lines. With each book, too, I like to explore some new territory. In order to get there I’ve had to have a different sound, a different line at work. After Kyrie, I needed to get away from the ghost of the iambic pentameter line. I’ve worked for about two years on one poem that’s fifteen stanzas, with each stanza running twelve lines. The first line and the twelfth line are pentameter, and everything else tries to push beyond that. I’ve also tried to work with a slightly more discursive structure. I’m against it, I’m against discursiveness; I try to stamp it out everywhere I see it. I don’t like it much in poems; it usually costs us an enormous amount of intensity and focus. But I also understand that we live in a discursive age, and I am persuaded by my betters that

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a greater inclusiveness is made possible by a slightly more discursive structure, so I thought I should try it. Meanwhile, I write very slowly. Very slowly; it takes me a year to get over finishing one book before I can start anything else. Then it takes me a year or two years or sometimes longer to figure out what the new thing is, and then I usually gather some momentum. Suarez: What’s the relationship between emotion and form? Voigt: We have a huge appetite for order; that’s part of the human animal. We love form of any kind. We just want it, and we want it to continue. Suzanne Langer says that all art is the providing of the form of the emotion. That’s the way she defines art, the form of the emotion. But I’m not sure that we have any agreed-upon notion of what we mean by form in poetry. I’m not sure even what you mean by it. Emotions are messy, interlocking, hard to articulate. Again, I think that Suzanne Langer is about as good on this as anyone that I have read. She talks about two kinds of apprehension. One way is linear; it’s processing information one bit at a time. That’s what language does. That’s what a syntax is. Right now, syntax is letting you forget every word that I say as quickly as I say it, so that you’ll get the gist of what it was I meant. So that’s linear. That’s going one thing at a time. But there’s another kind of apprehension of the world, and it’s simultaneous. If, for instance, you were to walk outside the door of my house and start across that road and almost get hit by a truck, all of a sudden you would process an enormous amount of information right at the same time. Not one thing and then another thing. Your brain wouldn’t work that way. You would register the truck, probably my dog lying there in the yard, the color of the leaves, your own panic, your own fear, and maybe that you forgot to pay the gas bill. All of a sudden, all this stuff, all of those little synapses, would be going at once, and what you’d get would be a total package. Adrenaline fires it. Studies have found that there’s a high association between memory and adrenaline. Much of what we think of as emotion pertains to a circumstance in the brain that’s infused by adrenaline, and probably some other things that we don’t even know about. This is a biochemical view of the human heart. Suarez: But something is causing the adrenaline.

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Voigt: Yes, something is causing the adrenaline. But emotions are complex and don’t come singly. Sadness is mixed with anger. We get several things at once, and that’s what makes them seem messy; it’s how the brain is managing information, and the information is coming from the body. Information comes from the senses, and what’s happening up there with the intellect goes on simultaneously. What we expect out of art is some sort of clarity that allows us to comprehend these simultaneous feelings linearly. In poetry, language can be processed one item at a time. But poetry also manages those elements that come in simultaneously. How does poetry manage that? Through formal devices. The possibilities are inherent in whatever the particular form is. In music, all sound, how do you bring in any linear elements? There are various things that can be done in terms of tonalities and duration that we can’t do in poetry. That’s what exists in the musical form. In painting, there are things that can be done with colors that we can’t do in poetry. In sculpture there are things that can be done with the palpable, the tactile, that we can’t do in poetry. What we can do in poetry is manage a dual rhythmic system. There’s the rhythm of the sentence, and there’s the rhythm of the line, and the relationship between the two. The latter is the chief one. That’s the main one. Suarez: I can see why your impulse is for lyric poetry. These simultaneous apprehensions are the stuff of lyric. Voigt: Absolutely. That is the stuff of lyric. Lyric can do it in every line. Narrative can’t do it in every line because there needs to be greater space for background, pragmatic information the reader has to have in order for the narrative to move forward. I’m not saying that narratives don’t have equal emotional power. All I’m saying is that they get at it in a different way. Suarez: But the lyric is more economical. Poe says that a long poem is impossible. Of course it isn’t. But it’s his lyric temperament that leads him toward that opinion. Voigt: Exactly. I believe in temperament. Your predisposition changes how you see the world, what things register. I already suspect I’m convinced that I’m going to fail at my current attempt to be more discursive because my mind doesn’t work that way. The same thing is true about the extent to which one can be comfortable

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writing narratives. Consequence must derive from a character who does certain things in certain circumstances. If it’s not connected to character, it’s something else, it’s melodrama, it’s fable, or allegory; a plausible narrative has to be connected to character, which means that one character has got to be differentiated from other characters, and you’ve got to be interested in such differences. The same thing with the discursive. It lacks the immediacy and intensity of the sustained moment, but what’s gained is the increased number of objects on which to meditate. If your mind works like that, you’re like Larry Levis. That’s how he perceived the world; that’s how he processed stuff. When you talked to him, he would go way around the horn and back and his poems are brilliant at those same discursive structures. But I don’t have that temperament. I think it’s connected to what I was saying about irony, which also requires distance and remove. It does not couple with earnestness; it does not couple with passion. And that’s not to make it a bad thing; it’s just to make it another thing. Suarez: Your poetry reflects a hearty appetite for physical nature but is imbued with a sense of loss, even with grief. The narrative voice enjoys the world and sees something within it that’s sparkling and positive, and yet the emotional tone contains a pang. Voigt: Yeah. It’s probably some sort of delayed naïveté. I don’t think I have a romantic sensibility. Suarez: I think you do. Voigt: You think I do? What makes you think I do? Suarez: As Warren would say, you’re a yearner. Voigt: A yearner. Okay, I’ll admit to that. But I think that it’s a . . .

I chastise myself for it; there’s no evidence in the world to support such yearning. I think that’s the disappointment that comes in again and again. The soul venturing out, ready to be instructed, ready to believe, and then it confronts the evidence. I feel that, at age fiftyfour, I should have learned better, given all of the evidence that’s out there. But I do hope a lot. Suarez: In his midsixties Dickey is looking at tide pools and thinking, “This may just be it.” At the end, Warren is still gazing at stars.

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Voigt: I know. We’re all just saturated by the King James Bible. We can say, well, we don’t have that kind of religious belief anymore. But it’s like nicotine. You make a place in your biochemistry for it, and then even if it’s taken away, you always want it. If you were brought up in the rural South, you were probably brought up with fairly stringent religious notions. Even when those no longer suffice, you want something to replace it. I believe a little bit in all the systems, whatever they are—tarot cards, numerology. I mean, anybody could convince me of anything. Fractals, for instance, and science is, after all, another system of belief. That’s why I love to read about the brain, or how the world started. They’re all systems of belief, one way or another. Once you’ve had one, even when that one gets eroded or destroyed, you want another one. Suarez: Who are the main influences on your verse? Voigt: For a very long time Yeats was important. Bishop, although I would make a distinction between influences on the poems and influences on the poet. I don’t know the influences of Bishop on my poems. I hope there are some there, but I don’t know what they are. But she had huge influences on me as a poet. There was a shift somewhere around the second book, The Forces of Plenty, that came about when I realized the extent to which I was writing by my ear. I made a huge shift in priorities and moved clarity up over resonance. Until that time a complexity of resonance was the main thing, even if it meant from time to time risking a loss of precision or a loss of clarity. After the second book that changed. I wanted clarity first, even if it meant some loss of that complexity or the mystery or the resonance. I trace that to Bishop. But I don’t know that there’s discernible influence on the poems. I learned a lot from Stephen Dobyns and C. K. Williams in my efforts at narrative. In the earlier books’ shorter poems, Louise Glück certainly was an influence. And I want to say Jarrell, maybe in trying to render emotion dramatically. Suarez: Many of the southern poets I’ve talked with have mentioned

Warren and Dickey. Voigt: They were certainly influences on the narrative book. Warren

more than Dickey. Warren also probably influenced Two Trees, particularly the use of the sectioned structure, the possibilities that arise from juxtaposition and alignment. Although I didn’t start that in Two

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Trees. There’s a similar structure in The Forces of Plenty, in a watershed poem called “Talking the Fire Out.” Before this interview, I tried to make a list of my poems that had some sort of southern landscape in them, poems involving events or people or circumstances from growing up in the South; poems about family, poems about community, the social circle, all that. Many of them use the third person (I told you I was trying to get away from there). The list of poems that use southern landscape is short—“Blue Ridge,” “Talking the Fire Out,” and “For My Father”—until I hit The Lotus Flowers, which is full of it. “Talking the Fire Out” was the watershed poem. In fact, it predicts The Lotus Flowers, although I had no idea of it until way later. Suarez: How so? Voigt: Before I looked up early drafts—you know when I caught myself scanning in composition—I would have sworn I had never written prose in my life. But the first draft of “Talking the Fire Out” is three pages of prose, a prose sketch. I wrote it in 1978, and it contained references to about half the things that I would write about in The Lotus Flowers. In 1978 I had a Guggenheim grant and no teaching obligations. I had children, but the Guggenheim paid for me to fix up a dry attic over the garage where I could hear what was going on in the house, but not very loudly, and paid for a woman who came here every day to take care of my children, so I could go up there every day and write. It was amazing. It meant I didn’t have to resolve things. I didn’t have to finish a poem. There was not that pressure to write one poem at a time and to see it all the way through and finish it. I was able to sustain longer a messier, contradictory stage in composition. I remember precisely how that poem evolved. It’s about a kind of folk healing, and it also had snakes in it. A year before I would have divided it up and made it two poems. I would have said these two things can’t exist in the same poem. But because I had every day to think about it and work on it, I thought, “Why don’t I see how I might get these two opposing things in the same poem, the danger and the threat of the snakes in the same poem with the healing.” It has little snippets of narrative, and it’s arranged in sections. I got that solution from Warren, I suspect, since everything I had done before was short lyric. Even the sectioned poem in Claiming Kin, the autobiographical poem about my sister and myself, is arranged as snapshots. “Talking the Fire Out” added little narrative snippets, like

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setting pebbles around in a ring, each pebble slightly different. And then The Lotus Flowers picked up some of the same subject matter and tried to do it in continuous narrative. Suarez: Warren and Dickey see things in terms of contradictions. So do you. Voigt: That’s interesting. I don’t think I got it from Dickey, but Dickey and I may have gotten it from the same place, wherever that was. Well, I can’t say that with any certitude. I read a lot of Dickey early on, and then I stopped reading so much of Dickey after Falling. The direction he was going in did not interest me. That was just before I started to take myself seriously as a poet, not just as a reader. After that I didn’t read much of Dickey anymore. Those longer pieces did not interest me so much. I didn’t read as much Warren after that either. Warren felt dangerous to me because of the amount of rhetoric in it. It seemed a direction I should not take. Maybe it was because of those years with Don Justice. That’s very possible. It could be that those felt like conflicting aesthetics. They certainly were conflicting aesthetics, but it was also something in me that made me think, There’ll be no discipline if you go in this direction. I felt there was a falling off in the later work of both Dickey and Warren. I read them quite young when they were writing their best work, and then when I was beginning to be self-conscious about it or trying to figure out an aesthetic, I wasn’t reading them. Suarez: This is an age where southern poets have blossomed, while

not even completely thinking of themselves as southern poets. Voigt: That’s somehow a key. There was a huge opening of influence in the 1960s. This is particularly true of poets in the South. Not all poets became stereotypical “southerners,” although that’s one way to react against a culture in which you feel exiled. You can literally act out that exile by moving away, or you can stay there and go to LSU and stand under the Spanish moss; either way, as a poet you’re apart from the culture you were raised in. Suarez: Many southern poets have had to work their way through contradictions and live with them. Voigt: Many of us suffer from shame of the origins. I think anybody who is my age or perhaps just a little bit older is bound to have felt

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it. How could you not feel it? How could you possibly turn on the TV and see what was going on in the civil rights movement and not feel absolute shame over it? At the same time, when you see some caricature of a southerner, you want to say, hold on, we’re all not like that either. But one thing clear to me was that I didn’t want to write stories about possums. It comes down to technique and craft. Doesn’t Warren say somewhere that technique is vision? Those two things are inseparable. Life moves forward. My parents died within two years of each other; their deaths close The Forces of Plenty, and their deaths prompted the third book, The Lotus Flowers, even though I didn’t think about that at the time. I was not at all focused on subject matter. I was entirely focused on craft. I had been chaffing against the restrictions of the first-person lyric point of view, particularly for a person who has an ordinary life, like I do, one that is inherently dull. I don’t mind writing as myself, but I didn’t want to write about myself. That’s the distinction that Robert Hass makes about James Wright writing from his life, rather than about his life. This may have been crackpot, but I always thought that narrative was a more social form in its intentions. So from the constriction of the first two books, I started writing narratives, or trying to write narratives, trying to tell stories, and I thought a way to learn how, a place to start, would be to see if I could record stories that I had heard. If I could record them, I probably would learn something about structure. This is what I was telling myself, right? So I began with a couple of stories my father had told many times. Those were the first narratives of the book. They also made me enter a landscape that, in retrospect, I see that I had scrupulously avoided. It’s quite stunning to me that I had not previously written about that vegetation and those trees and that spot. All this is connected to exile. Until both my parents died, it was self-imposed exile: I wanted to get out of the South. But your connection to the people in that place brings you back. Once the people are no longer there, that’s a different kind of exile; it’s no longer chosen, or self-imposed; it’s imposed from the outside because the connection has been changed. Suarez: So did your parents’ deaths change your relationship to the South? Voigt: Absolutely; it changed my relationship to my whole past. I think that many of us from the South grew up in one spot. We did not

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move around. My family moved from one little house to a slightly better house down the road, and that was it. I think that’s common among many southern writers. And that spot becomes the metaphor, provides the imagery of the childhood. I literally had to revisit my past because my relationship to it changed after my parents died. One of the ways that it profoundly changed is that I determine how much of it to retain. As long as you’ve got parents, you have to go home and visit, that’s the tie, that’s the thing that connects you to it whether you’re there or not. Once that’s broken, you have a choice, and you can choose to never go back there as long as you live, to take elocution lessons and get the accent out of your vowels, to renounce every trace. I had to go back over things I thought were settled in myself. The Lotus Flowers does that; it’s a book about childhood. Since my childhood was in the South, it’s also my most southern book, not only in terms of the landscapes, but also in terms of the people and in the large doses of narrative within it. Suarez: It’s amazing, though, how much your poetry is linked to the struggle between narrative and lyric. Voigt: Absolutely. It always has been. If you’re a writer from the South, then narrative is often what you think you ought to be doing, although it was never anything I particularly wanted to do. But narrative does allow most easily an exploration of those links between character and fate. Sooner or later, if you’re going to think about fate, you cannot avoid thinking about the individual will. Lyric refuses character. Lyric says it doesn’t matter what your character is, it doesn’t matter what you have done and how you would behave and what choices you would make, any of those things. They do not matter. Lyric comes out of the one thing we all have in common, which is the emotional life. Everybody feels rage and grief and tenderness. Lyric is always looking to erase the particulars that don’t illumine the shared condition.

Photo by Rachel Bottoms

To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version of this work.

David Bottoms

D A V I D B O T T O M S ’ S poetry confronts the decline of a metaphysical awareness in the modern world, a theme that often characterized John Crowe Ransom’s and Allen Tate’s work. However, while Ransom and Tate blamed scientific positivism for what they saw as modern humans’ paralyzing self-consciousness, Bottoms views the loss of primitive instincts, along with the limitations of a secular worldview, as resulting in the dissipation of people’s psychic and spiritual nature. For Bottoms the “poem can reveal something about the hidden things of the world, the vague or shadowy relationships and connections that exist just below the surface of our daily lives . . . poetry can provide an artistic and emotional connection to the less obvious undercurrents of the world.” Through his explorations of 85

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the tensions between primitivism and a need for the metaphysical, Bottoms has generated a complex body of poetry that often confronts the darkest dimensions of human nature. The following interview took place in Bottoms’s pickup truck on April 7–8, 1996, as we traveled from Atlanta to Macon to visit the Big House, the legendary domain of the Allman Brothers Band. Suarez: You won the Walt Whitman Award in 1979. What were you doing then? Bottoms: I’d been teaching high school for four or five years in

Douglas County, Georgia. It hadn’t been a good situation, and I was thinking about going back to school to work on a doctorate. Also, for several years I’d been writing poems and trying to place them in the magazines. I’d racked up around sixty since 1973, when I finished my M.A.—some in pretty good places, such as Harper’s and Poetry— and I’d chosen the best thirty or so and put together a manuscript. I sent it around to a few university presses, the University of Georgia Press and LSU, and it was rejected. Then a friend of mine, Gerald Duff, phoned and told me about the Walt Whitman Award, which is a first-book competition sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. He suggested that I submit my book because Robert Penn Warren was the judge that year. I thought it would be great if Warren just read my poems. I fiddled with it some and changed the title to Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, after a poem that had appeared in Harper’s—the original title was “All Systems Break Down”—and I sent it off. A few months later I got a phone call from a very nice lady, Mrs. Marie Bullock. She introduced herself as the president of the Academy of American Poets and asked if I was sitting down. I said, “No ma’am, but I can sit down.” And I did—on the side of the bed, as I recall. Then she said that Robert Penn Warren had chosen my book as winner of the Whitman Award. I was literally stunned with elation. I really don’t remember anything else about the call. Later on Warren wrote me a nice note about the book. He also wrote a very generous comment for the jacket. It was a hard decision for him, I think. There were several good entries, and well over thirteen hundred in all. Suarez: And Morrow published it the following year?

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Bottoms: Yes. At that time the Whitman book rotated between four publishers. It was William Morrow’s year. I was very excited about having a first book, an award, and a New York publisher. The award included a $1,000 cash prize. I don’t think Warren really knew what all of that meant to me at the time. The real prize was the boost it gave me out of my situation. I was unhappy with my life and in a rut I feared would only get deeper. On the strength of the prize and a first book I was offered a fellowship to pursue my doctorate at Florida State, which is what I did. Suarez: Is the manuscript that won the Whitman Award essentially the same as Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump? Bottoms: Yes. There were a few minor changes. I added a poem

called “The Copperhead,” which had come out in the Atlantic. I asked Warren if I could include it, and he was agreeable, of course. I think I made a few minor changes to a couple of poems in the last section. Nothing serious. So it was basically the same book that Warren selected. Suarez: Did you ever get to know Warren? Bottoms: Not really, no. We only exchanged two or three letters,

though he was very generous with young writers. I remember sending him a copy of a poem called “Under the Boathouse,” and he made a good suggestion. But that’s the only time I ever did anything like that. I didn’t want to annoy him with a lot of correspondence I knew he didn’t have time to answer. Later on, though, I did ask him for some poems when I was gathering a few for Atlanta Magazine, and he sent four or five good ones. “First Time” is the one I remember because I framed the signed manuscript and hung it in my office. Ironically, we only published one of the bunch before the whole staff was fired and I had to return them. A few months later a couple of them came out in the New Yorker and the Georgia Review. Suarez: You never met? Bottoms: No. I had two opportunities to meet him, but they both

fell through. The first was in the early eighties at Bennington, where I was doing a reading. Dave Smith had arranged to drive me over to Warren’s house, which was fairly close by, but as it turned out Warren

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was too sick. Several years later, Warren invited me to read at the Library of Congress. He was poet laureate then, the first actually. He was going to do the introduction, but he got sick again and couldn’t travel. He sent his introduction along, and one of the librarians read it. So I never got to meet him. That was a real disappointment. Suarez: Go back to “Under the Boathouse.” Do you recall the change that Warren suggested? Bottoms: It had to do with point of view. The poem is about a fellow

who dives into a pond and goes all the way down to the bottom, where he gets his hand caught on a fishhook that’s attached to something down there. Anyway, he’s caught and can’t tear loose, sort of hanging “Halfway between the bottom of the lake / and the bottom of the sky.” The line Warren suggested I change had to do with the moment when he’s somewhat mysteriously freed. I’d written something like “In the lung-ache, / in the blue pulsing of temples,” and he pointed out that the swimmer wouldn’t be able to see his own temples. True enough, though I hadn’t intended it exactly that way. Still, I didn’t argue. I changed it to “loud pulsing of temples.” Suarez: You and James Dickey were friends for many years. He

passed away recently. How would you assess his career and his significance to you as a poet? Bottoms: I had a long phone conversation with Jim a few days before

he died. He told me he was dying. He’d told me that before, but this time I sensed it would be soon. He was very concerned with my opinion about his place in American poetry. I told him what I’d always told him. Simply that he was the champ. He liked the sports metaphor, and, as always, I said that with a clear conscience. He was a giant in American poetry. The attention he continues to draw will probably depend on the political fads of the critics. But from my perspective he was the finest poet to come out of the American South. His combination of narrative gift and lyricism seems to me unequaled. Others might argue for Warren, and they’d have some powerful ammo to shoot. Ultimately, it’s probably a matter of sensibility and silly to weigh them against each other. They’re both extraordinary. But Dickey’s poetry, I think, has most influenced my own—his early work especially, and most especially in terms of the things he chose to write about. We had many of the

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same interests—fishing, hunting, bluegrass, and old-time country music—and we came from the same part of the country. He showed me the poetic possibilities of the region we come from. But I don’t think I write very much like Jim. Fred Chappell said once that in terms of style Dickey and I were just about as far apart as two writers could get. Dickey’s power, he said, was expansion and mine was compression. I think that’s a fair assessment. If you look at poems that are uniquely Dickey—say “The Firebombing,” “Falling,” “May Day Sermon,” “The Zodiac”—you see that expansive imagination fiercely at work. It’s almost as though the fullest degree of intensity must be wrung from each moment of the narrative. My best poems, I think— poems such as “Under the Vulture-Tree” or “White Shrouds”—tend to focus and compress the experience. My method, to me, seems closer to the method of James Wright in The Branch Will Not Break, which is still one of my favorite books—I’m thinking here of poems such as “A Blessing” or “A Dream of Burial”—or maybe to the Theodore Roethke of “The Meadow Mouse,” “Slug,” “The Pike.” Ironically, though, what I really love of Roethke’s is “The North American Sequence,” which may be built out of a sensibility closer to Dickey’s. I’m talking about that openness, that ability to touch every detail. Suarez: But occasionally you’ve experimented with longer poems. Bottoms: Yes, but my poems still tend to depend on focus and

compression. If you look at Armored Hearts, you’ll find very few poems that even run over sixty lines. And those are usually broken up into parts—for instance, “In a U-Haul North of Damascus.” This is essentially a strategy for controlling the narrative, for reining it in, so I think Fred is probably right. Mine is ultimately a sensibility that leans toward compression, the illuminated moment. Though Dickey wrote some beautiful shorter poems—“The Performance,” “Buckdancer’s Choice,” “Heaven of Animals,” and I could go into a very long list—his imagination and lyric gift were such that he could sustain the intensity of the poem for pages. My mind just doesn’t work that way, and I may be fortunate that it doesn’t. His talent simply dwarfed so many southern poets, particularly those of his own generation. Suarez: In what ways? Can you give us some specifics?

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Bottoms: Well, it’s not uncommon to hear southern poets say that

they’ve always felt like they were standing in Dickey’s shadow. This is understandable. He threw a wide and tall one, and it must have been a dark place to find yourself. I remember hearing Van Brock, my old professor at Florida State, say that when he first started writing poetry his approach was very similar to Dickey’s, but Dickey’s voice was so powerful that he felt he had to alter his own. Now think about that. His natural inclination was to go at the poem much as Jim did, but Dickey did it so much better that he felt he had to change. This denial of one’s own sensibility, one’s own natural way of writing, has to be something like creative suicide. I remember hearing a musician friend of mine, a pianist, say that after she heard Horowitz in concert, she felt like going home and taking a hammer to her fingers. That was something like the effect Dickey’s work had on other southern poets. Suarez: Let’s push off that for a moment and talk about method.

Can you describe what you try to accomplish in a poem? Bottoms: In the introduction Warren wrote for the Library of Con-

gress, he said that the world is always trying to tell us something. Or something to that effect. Suarez: I’ll read that to you. I have it here on the jacket of Under the Vulture-Tree. He says, “Underlying all his work is the simple and unusual conviction that the world we see is trying to tell us something.” What does he mean by that? Bottoms: Simply that the world tries to tell us its secrets through the

poem. The poem can reveal something about the hidden things of the world, the vague or shadowy relationships and connections that exist just below the surface of our daily lives. Or to say it another way, poetry can provide an artistic and emotional connection to the less obvious undercurrents of the world. I like that. I like to see poetry as a self-exploration of the personal that reveals through language the general patterns of human experience. I spend a lot of time in my classes discussing creativity and sensibility. I’m careful to tell my students that every writer who comes to class brings his or her own bag of prejudices. I have mine. Poetry, of course, means a lot of different things to different people, but for a long time I’ve been interested primarily in the way the poem works figuratively

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to reveal the universal through the personal. The meaning of the poem is always more than the sum of the literal meanings of all the words. We talk about the DHM—the deep hidden meaning— and how to get there through language. One element I emphasize from the start is narrative, what narrative can do for a poem simply because of what it is, simply because it carries with it so many of the basic elements of good writing. I like to use a little story about going out and buying a truck. A couple of years ago I bought a GMC pickup, and it didn’t have a radio in it. Radios aren’t standard equipment anymore. Well, that’s a drag. Narrative in the poem is like buying a truck with everything on it. You get a package—radio, air conditioner, power windows, all at the same time. If you buy the narrative package you get a lot of good stuff. You at least get some degree of clarity, some sense of time and space. This is no small thing. It forces an attention to physical detail, the concrete, and so provides a greater sense of immediacy. It also provides what I call a concrete level of meaning, a narrative surface. Students always want their poems to be deep, and I say, “Well, in order to have a deeper meaning, you at least have to have one meaning for it to be deeper than. Right?” That’s the narrative surface. In the narrative surface a good writer can embed various devices to spring the poem into the figurative, the DHM. Suarez: And this is done through language? Bottoms: Yes, through figurative devices: metaphor, simile, word-

play, association, whatever. But oddly enough there’s at least one other way this can happen, and that’s when the narrative itself becomes figurative, when the narrative structure of the poem begins to mirror archetypal pattern and myth. I talk a good deal about Carl Jung’s notions of archetype and the collective unconscious— this really fascinates me—and try to relate it to poetry. Take that poem “Under the Boathouse.” As I said, this fellow jumps into a lake and goes all the way down to the bottom, where he gets his hand caught on a hook and he can’t get loose. He looks up and sees his wife’s shadow floating on the surface “like an angel / quivering in a dead-man’s float.” Then, miraculously, he does tear loose and floats back up to the surface. So what you have mirrored here is simply an archetypal pattern—submersion, symbolic death, ascension, and rebirth. This pattern is what Jung calls the myth of the night journey,

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one of the oldest and most common patterns in Western culture. He cites as an example the Old Testament story of Jonah and the whale. We all know what happens there. God says to Jonah, “Go over here to Nineveh and preach to these bad people.” And Jonah says to God, “Well, you know those people over there are mean, and they don’t really like me. I was sort of thinking about taking a cruise.” So Jonah tries to sail away from God, and the big storm comes up on the water. The crew treats Jonah to a swim, the big fish eats him, and he goes all the way down to the bottom of the sea, a symbolic death. Jonah begins to see then that Nineveh isn’t such a terrible place after all. He has a change of heart. Then the great fish rises and spits him out on the other side, and he’s a new Jonah. Descent, death, ascent, rebirth—that’s just one of a number of narrative patterns that keep repeating themselves in the literatures of the world. Students are amazed when they’re confronted with this, and soon enough they begin to see how the narrative structures of their own poems reverberate in odd ways because they bang up against archetypes. Suarez: How much of this mirroring of the archetypal is a conscious part of the poet’s strategy? Bottoms: A good deal, I think. But fortunate things happen un-

consciously too. Most everyone reading this will be familiar with Seamus Heaney’s notion of the poem as dig, the poem as a type of personal archaeology. He talks about this best in an essay called “Feeling into Words,” where he says that the first time he ever wrote a poem he really liked, he felt as though he’d let a shaft of light down into himself. Well, the process of writing can produce some surprising and often intriguing discoveries. But the best thing that can happen for me is when the seed of the poem, the initial idea, is also the figurative device. I’ll give you an example. When I was writing “Under the Vulture-Tree” the first line that came to me was the last line of the poem, “with mercy enough to consume us all and give us wings.” I’d had a memory about an encounter with some vultures—on a fishing trip in north Florida—and I suddenly conceived of them as these “dwarfed transfiguring angels,” an odd way to look at a vulture, but with it came the figurative device, the play on the words consume and wings. The rest of the poem is simply a narrative architecture supporting that line. For me that one line is what makes the poem work. In “Sign for My Father, Who Stressed

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the Bunt” the same thing happened. The last line of the poem, “I’m getting a grip on the sacrifice,” was the first to occur to me. The play on the word sacrifice in the dual contexts of a baseball game and a father’s relationship to his son was the original idea for the poem. In my best poems, at least the shorter ones, this is what happens. The seed of the poem, the engendering idea, is the figurative device. About the worst thing that can happen is when I feel I want to write a poem about something and I don’t have that device. I must have hundreds of drafts that are interesting narratives in themselves but fail to make that figurative leap, to reveal the connections operating under the surface. So I’m always careful to tell my students that as important as narrative is to poetry, it is not everything required to make a good poem. We’re in a period now where narrative is hot again, perhaps as fashionable as the new formalism, but it can be equally as superficial. You can open up just about any magazine and find poems that are simply little stories broken up into twenty-five or thirty lines. They just lie there and never get beyond the literal. Perhaps this is why many poets—and some good southern ones such as Ellen Voigt and Charles Wright—are suspicious of the narrative. Suarez: Would you go back for a moment to “Under the Vulture-

Tree.” I heard you say at a reading that it was typical of the way poems come to you. Could you describe in more detail how that poem came to be? Bottoms: I was living in Tallahassee. This was around 1980 or so,

when I was doing my doctorate at FSU. One of my favorite pastimes was fishing, and there were some really beautiful rivers around Tallahassee. My favorite was the Wakulla. You’ll know exactly what it looked like if I tell you that back in the forties two of those old Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies were made there, along with a movie called The Creature from the Black Lagoon. It was almost like a jungle, this slow tranquil river flowing through a jungle. Anyway, I was out there very early one morning, just about dawn, I think, and I was in a little aluminum boat. Then I came into a bend and on the far bank the jungle opened up into a small clearing. It was very odd because right in the middle of this clearing stood one giant black tree, so black you couldn’t see light through it. It looked as though someone had taken a piece of black construction paper and cut out the silhouette of an oak tree and pasted it there. Well, it

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gave me a strange feeling, so I drifted in a little closer. Then the strangeness intensified because I could see that it was a fruit tree. It was speckled all over with tiny pink fruit. As I got even closer the feeling turned eerie. These things weren’t really fruit at all—they were heads, the heads of vultures. I’d come on a buzzard roost, and they were literally crammed into this tree shoulder to shoulder. Well, there’s some material. Years later, maybe four or five, I was living in Marietta, Georgia, and something jarred that memory. As I said, for some reason the notion of these vultures as odd angels came to me, and with that the wordplay on “consume” and “wings,” which fell into the last line. Suarez: Many of your poems are filled with wildlife. Bottoms: Animals fascinate me because the real world is the wilder-

ness. Everything else is artifice. By virtue of our consciousness we’ve separated ourselves from the natural world. No matter how many rivers we canoe down or how long we stay out in the woods, selfconsciousness is still an act of separation. We’ve lost our instincts and must depend on our rational faculties. Few other people care much about this, but poets and other artists often feel intensely the need to get back to some notion of the natural state. James Wright has his encounters with horses. James Dickey has his animals and violence. Think about that great poem “The Sheep Child.” Talk about a unique point of view. In the woolly baby, the sheep child, Dickey achieves this amazing reunion of the two halves of human nature—the rational and the instinctive—and, of course, the irony lies in the fact that this is so horribly unnatural the sheep child dies immediately. What a great line, “My hoof and my hand clasped each other.” Anyway, to put it simply, like many other poets I see animals as a conduit into the real world. Several of my very early poems deal with that. I’ll give you an example. I’ve always been fascinated with the notion of the triune brain, a concept I ran across in a Carl Sagan book called The Dragons of Eden. I forget who actually pioneered this research, but Sagan distilled it for the common guy, a thing he was very good at doing. Anyway, it’s the concept that the brain actually developed as three different brains, all of which are still there. The first is that little mass of tissue at the top of the spine, the R Complex or the reptile brain, which supposedly controls eating, sex, and ritual, and then on top of that formed the limbic

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or mammal brain, which controls emotion, and finally on top of that the neocortex, huge in comparison, which accounts for abstract thought and differentiates us from other creatures, which perhaps isn’t considered to be quite true any longer. Aren’t they figuring out that in some small way apes can actually abstract? At any rate, thus the attraction we often have for certain animals and the vague sense of recognition or affinity we may feel. It’s interesting to think that the attraction D. H. Lawrence feels for his snake at the water trough may have not only a mythological basis—he calls him a “king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld”—but a physiological one as well. Jung talks about the serpent in our abdomen. True, and we also have one in our brain. Seeing the snake jars some kinship in the R Complex, the reptile brain. The same thing happens to the persona in my poem “The Copperhead.” He becomes fascinated by this snake sitting out on a tree limb that’s fallen into a pond. He just wants to get closer and closer because something in him is drawing him to it, just as in the Lawrence poem the tension arises between his fear, a product of his “human education,” as he says, and a deeply felt affinity. Suarez: So this is where those animals poems in Shooting Rats came

from? Bottoms: Yes, the poems in the section called “All the Animal In-

side Us”—“Crawling Out at Parties,” “The Copperhead,” “Watching Gators at Ray Boone’s Reptile Farm,” and the rest. But the reptile brain is still essential to me, literally a part of me, and everyone else. Occasionally it still creeps out of the shadows when it recognizes a distant relative in the real world—most recently, perhaps, in the poem “In a Kitchen, Late,” which is in the new section of Armored Hearts. The conduit into the wilderness there is a cockroach. The persona is sitting at the kitchen table snacking on chicken, and he feels a roach in the hairs of his leg. Disgusting, true. But it becomes for him an odd connection to the darkness and the woods outside, to something he feels he’s lost. Suarez: What creatures serve as the most effective conduits for you? Bottoms: Snakes, turtles, alligators, rats, vultures. I tend not to be as

fascinated by the nobler animals, say Warren’s eagles or even James Wright’s horses, but I tend to run with the lower order. Neruda says,

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“It has never occurred to me to speak / with the genteel animals.” He wanted to speak with the serpents. I feel the same way. That same sensibility is developed much further in Roethke, and this must have been where I first encountered it. He loved what he called the “minimal,” the elemental, and in his greenhouse poems he even extends it into the plant world. But he has his animals too—slugs, mice, lizards, fish. His little poem “The Meadow Mouse” has always been one of my favorites. He calls it “My thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm.” Suarez: Do you see any connection between Roethke’s meadow mouse and your rats of “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump”? Bottoms: Indirectly, yes. That aspect of Roethke probably made a

poem like “Shooting Rats” possible. But my approach in “Shooting Rats” is not typical of the animal poems we’ve been taking about, which take an approach similar to Roethke, an approach through affinity, or in the case of “The Meadow Mouse” we might even say affection. This stance is a little more enlightened than the persona of “Shooting Rats,” who doesn’t see anything particularly cuddly about these rats at the garbage dump and feels only a vague and perverse similarity of fate. Nevertheless, Dickey told me once that I’d created about as much sympathy for a rat as anyone could hope to create. But this is reader sympathy, at the persona’s expense. Roethke’s attitude toward his meadow mouse is a recognition of kinship. In that recognition lie his connections with the spiritual undercurrents. Suarez: You see poetry as a means of reaccessing the primal. Bottoms: Certainly, but not only the primal world, the primal self,

in the sense that poetry is self-exploration, a journey into the darker and more dangerous coves of one’s own psyche. Suarez: What do you mean by “dangerous” here? Bottoms: Well, poetry can be dangerous in the sense that the poet of-

ten has to confront things about himself or herself—fears, impulses, desires, repressed memories—that may not be exactly pleasant. In fact, they may be ugly, troubling, and even very frightening. Let me explain that with a metaphor. Fishing provides a good one for writing this kind of poem. You’re out there alone in some cove in the little poetry boat, throwing out your lure—a good word here—and

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you’re casting down into the depths, the psychic depths. Of course, you’re going for the creative impulse, the stuff of the great poem— in our metaphor, you’re going for the seven-pound bass—but you don’t know what’s down there. You just have to be willing to cast out that Jitterbug or that Mirr-O-Lure or that Rooster Tail and take whatever hits the line. I see all of this again in relation to an idea Jung had about creativity, that the seeds of creativity are mixed into what he calls “slime from the depth,” that psychic slime where the ugliest and most animalistic aspects of our personalities reside. These are all those fearful things we’ve confined, repressed into our subconscious. But if you’re after the creative impulse, you have to be willing to wallow around in that. Or, coming back to our metaphor, you have to be willing to drag up whatever hits your lure—gar, copperhead, water moccasin, alligator. When we confront the lower beasts of our psyche, we can be in for a dangerous encounter. Suarez: Your themes don’t seem to have changed much over the

course of your career. If anything the poems may have gotten somewhat darker. I know that you are happily married now and have a beautiful five-year-old daughter. How do you account for that bleakness of vision? Bottoms: My friend Dave Smith wrote in an essay somewhere that

all poems are about two things—life and death. I wrote a little piece a few years later and said that he was at least half right—all poems are really about death. We talk about this a lot in my classes, and one thing I like to point out to students is a book that turns up in Woody Allen’s movie Annie Hall. Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are working on a relationship, a problem since he’s the typical neurotic New Yorker and she’s so sunny she wears flowers on her hat. Well, they walk into this bookstore. He’s just met her and wants to impress her, cue her in on everything that’s important to him and such, so he takes her over to the psychology section. He reaches up and pulls a book off the shelf and the camera zooms in. It’s Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Of course, it’s a pretty funny moment, but the first time I saw the movie, I was startled by that because I’d just finished reading The Denial of Death—a great book. Becker’s premise is that the only real truth in our lives is our death. It’s our one undeniable fact, nothing we can do about it, and Becker says that all the other aspects of our personalities are geared to deny it. They’re all lies. Of

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course, they’re very healthy and necessary lies. Otherwise we’d just step out in front of some truck. One of the best metaphors Becker uses to illustrate the nature of the personality is an onion. This onion represents the whole of your personality. You take it, put it down on the table, and slice it in half. The core is your death—the fact at the center—and all the layers built up around it are the various layers of your personality, all of your interests, your ambitions, the things you involve yourself in—I’m going to be a great poet, I’m going to be a great pianist, I’m going to be a great painter—the stuff that makes you believe in a future. Well, these things are only distractions, denials, lies. As life-affirming as they may be, they won’t save us from our one undeniable fact. Where are Whitman and Emily Dickinson? Where’s Vladimir Horowitz? Where are Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso? But here’s the point. These things, even though they are lies, are the material out of which we create art. This is the stuff from which we make poems and stories. So, in that sense, all poems are about death. At the heart, at the core, there’s always that fundamental truth. Even the sunniest poem has this kind of death shadow, this dark spot at the core. Suarez: In a recent review, Benjamin Griffith points out that many of

the new poems in Armored Hearts are more openly Christian in their themes than your previous work. Could you comment on that? Bottoms: Yes, I suppose he’s right about that. I’ve been concerned

over the last few years, maybe since the birth of my daughter, with the possibility of living a Christian life in our culture. So much in American life, at least in the popular culture, seems to mitigate against it. Perhaps this was always the case, but at forty-seven I seem to be getting more perspective on it. No, I don’t actually believe that. I don’t believe it was always the case. Things that were once relegated to the underworld are now mainstream virtues of pop culture. We’ve generally lost our ethical foundations. You don’t have to look further than the local movie theater or music store to see what virtues our culture holds in high esteem—violence, murder, rape, drugs, promiscuity, the general abuse of women. Of course, this view is very simplistic because I’m speaking so generally. Ours is a complex culture. Not everyone in America holds those values. But a significant number of people have developed a frightening tolerance of them, more than is healthy, and they generally have the advantage

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of fashion and fad. To make the situation even more perverse, among some folks—including many academics—traditional values are now thought to be deviant. The problem of the Christian in our culture no longer seems to be the task of converting the masses, which has become overwhelming, but the problem of survival without withdrawing entirely from the world. Suarez: How do these things relate to poetry today? Bottoms: Well, poetry is individual vision. Pure art has no moral

responsibility or agenda. But, generally speaking, poetry seems to me an antidote of sorts against much of our trouble—at least to the extent that it seeks to put us all in touch with our common humanity. Jung believed that in our rush to technology, Western societies lost touch with myth, and thus we lost our souls. I like to think of poetry, and all art, as the act of getting back in touch with the soul. The great difficulty in America is getting people to listen. Most folks are numb to the spiritual possibilities in their lives. As Ed Hirsch says in his poem “For the Sleepwalkers,” “We have to drink the stupefying cup of darkness / and wake up to ourselves, nourished and surprised.” This is no easy task, but there are a significant number of people in this country who have not been totally dulled by television and Hollywood. Here’s an interesting irony. Over the last few years, what has probably generated the most public interest in poetry is not a poem or a book of poems, but a film. I’m speaking of Il Postino, the film about Pablo Neruda exiled on a Greek island. It’s marvelous to see how this semiliterate postman’s encounter with Neruda opens up his life to the possibility of beauty and meaning. I’ll bet Neruda’s book sales have gone through the roof because of that movie. I hope so. I’d like to think that this could be the first step for many people who are thoughtful but still strangers to poetry. You’ll note, though, that it’s a foreign film. It was not made in Hollywood. American pop culture generally refuses to make its audience think, to confront meaningful issues such as values and faith. Oh, occasionally you’ll see a TV sitcom deal with some current social issue—gay rights or interracial relationships, the juicier the better—but how many prime-time programs have ever dealt with the problems of religious faith? Or have even suggested that anyone should think twice about such? Unfortunately, not many of our so-called serious writers even seem willing to deal with these questions, as though they were

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conveniently no longer relevant. The Greek poet C. P. Cavafy has a wonderful little poem called “The First Step” where he calls all poets “citizens of the city of ideas.” I like that. But we need to remember also that there is good citizenship and bad citizenship. To be a good citizen of “the city of ideas” a writer must act in a responsible manner. This requires honesty of sentiment and approach. It also requires that a writer not trivialize, not turn his or her face from the important questions. Suarez: Let’s use that to dig back into your own poetry. I remember in an early poem called “The Boy Shepherd’s Simile” you talk about a time when “believing was an easy thing.” Can you say something about the origins of that poem and what it tries to accomplish? Bottoms: I was raised in Canton, Georgia, a small town about fifty

miles north of Atlanta, and got my religious education at the Canton First Baptist Church. In the late fifties—when I was six, seven, and eight—my mother was superintendent of the Primary Department of the Sunday School. Every year, of course, they’d have the annual Christmas pageant—a manger scene on the front lawn—and when she couldn’t recruit enough boys to play the parts of Joseph and the shepherds, which was always a problem, she didn’t hesitate to draft me into service. For a boy that age, this meant a large dose of embarrassment—the indignity of being dressed in an old sheet, of having to hold a crooked stick and stand out in the cold beside a cow or goat, whatever animal could be dredged up off a farm, and also the horror of having all my friends come around with their Polaroids to take pictures that might be passed out at school. Children can find terror in the most innocent things. Anyway, the poem is spoken by one of these boy shepherds who is grown now and remembering those scenes. He’s simply asking why anyone would go through that. He says, “This was not a child or a king, / but Mary Sosebee’s Christmas doll of a year ago.” Just a doll. So what does this have to do with adoration and devotion? What does it have to do with worship? The answer comes then in the simile, “But it was like a king.” Whether or not the simile has any meaning depends, I suppose, on faith. Suarez: But you imply a contrast between the relative ease of a child’s faith as opposed to the more difficult faith of an adult. For the

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culture as a whole, is faith a more difficult question in the nineties than it was in the fifties? Bottoms: Probably. These times are less childlike, more cynical, more

permissive. But faith has always been difficult. Most everything in the world argues against it. Just take history. How could God have permitted the Holocaust? Or slavery? Or the suffering of the early Christians at the hands of the Romans? Or the slaughter of the Jews during the Roman occupation of Jerusalem? According to Josephus, during the first Roman-Jewish war, over three thousand Jews were crucified in one day. Our times, at least in this country, are not so generally bloody. But yes, faith is a difficult matter, and coming to terms with human violence is far from the only threat. Our current myth is science, and science denies completely the ability to know except through the methods of science. We don’t often talk about tension or conflict in poetry, at least not to the degree we discuss it in fiction, but conflict is important for creating intrigue in all art. What interests me very much are the poetic possibilities in the tension between the spiritual and the secular, what happens when these two realms collide, and the survival strategies faith seeks to employ. I tried to get at some of that in several of the new poems in Armored Hearts. Suarez: Is “The Blue Mountains” an example of that collision? Bottoms: Yes. That poem comes from a story about my wife’s fam-

ily. She’s from western Montana and was raised in a fairly strict fundamentalist church. The poem is about her niece and her niece’s husband, who also belonged to a fundamentalist denomination. Anyway, one night a deacon in their church had a dream that God was going to burn Portland because of its sinful doings. This was supposed to happen at a certain time, and so when the date got close this woman and her husband gathered their two year old, packed whatever they could into a van, and literally headed for the hills. Of course, Portland didn’t burn. God apparently spared it. Well, when I heard about this, I couldn’t believe it. How stupid, I thought, for these two kids—they were both very young—to leave their home and jobs and cart their baby off to the mountains. All to flee a nightmare sparked by someone’s bad Mexican dinner. But then as I started to write the poem, as I started to involve myself in the situation, I had a change of heart. The more I got into the thing, the more I liked them.

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Eventually, I started thinking, “Now, that’s real faith. I wish I had a faith like that.” I came to see it as a faith one could put to some literal use in the world. The poem ends, though, on a note of ambiguity, and I wanted that. In the last few lines they seem reluctant to talk about what appears to have been their folly, but they’ve discovered something too. What they like to talk about instead are the owls they heard in the mountains during the boat trips they took. What they’ve experienced, of course, can be read as metaphor. The owls in the distance are heralding out those narrow passes. Suarez: Griffith writes in his essay that your attention to “empti-

ness” reminds him of a concept Flannery O’Connor was attracted to in the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, namely “passive diminishment” or, as Griffith says, “the serene acceptance of inevitable loss.” Would you comment on this in relation to the later poems? Bottoms: I believe he was talking about that poem “Allatoona

Evening,” which I put at the end of the book. But what he says generally holds true for my later poems. I think what many are trying to do, especially in the last half of Armored Hearts, is find a gradual sort of working toward resignation and peace. Elizabeth Bishop says, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” but we all feel the tragic irony there. Christianity provides some help, of course, through a shedding of false ambition, which only creates in us anger and frustration. Poetry helps here also. That’s what “Allatoona Evening” is about. It’s an important poem for me in many ways, a poem that came out of many frustrations—about writing and teaching and other things— and I think the key lines of the poem are the ones that equate anger and ambition. The persona is out beside this lake at evening—he’s going fishing—and it’s a very peaceful scene, and suddenly he senses that the whippoorwills and the bats are telling him to lay down all his anger. “Lay it down, they say, your ambition, / which is only anger, / which sated could bring you to no better place.” That’s a powerfully healing thought for me. Even if all our ambitions, which are generally misplaced anyway, were realized, they could bring us to no better spiritual place than this one moment beside this lake with “these three stars soaking up twilight.” I like the ending of that poem as much as any I’ve ever written. Suarez: You said poetry helps us achieve this resignation. How does it help?

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Bottoms: Well, in a number of ways. For one, it helps us ask the right questions about our lives. Literature never solves any of the great problems, of course, but it does help us define the significant questions and, in this way, provides a focus that helps us avoid the temptations of the superficial. I don’t think that can be said about American culture in general, pop art I mean. I’ll give you one other way poetry can help too. Our whole lives are extended exercises in learning to accept loss. But as I’ve said before, literature can achieve a curious emotional bargain with death. Not that death negotiates very much. Still, a deal can be struck, good things may be wrenched from despair. Out of a good poem we can get understanding, resignation, empathy, even beauty. Occasionally in really fine poetry we may even find an aesthetic or emotional affirmation and transcendence. Suarez: What do you mean by that? Could you give us an example? Bottoms: Sure. I love a little poem by Warren called “After the Dinner

Party.” The narrative runs something like this. An old couple are sitting around their table late at night. The dinner party is over, the guests are gone, the fire is burning down in the fireplace. Everything about the scene suggests an ending of things. They talk of the past for a while, of their children who are away and building their own lives. It’s painfully clear that they understand the past is gone and that they can expect no real future. The woman snuffs out the candles, and they sit quietly in the last light of the fire. Then Warren writes: “Soon the old stairs / Will creak to a briefness of light, then true weight of darkness, and then / That heart-dimness in which neither joy nor sorrow counts.” Now what could be darker than that? What could be bleaker and more honest? No joy in the past or the future, no sorrow, no human emotion will stop their inevitable separation. Then the last line, “Even so, one hand gropes out for another, again.” An amazing affirmation—not of the past or the future, but of the only thing left, the moment. This is what real poetry can do, even against the inevitability of death. It can take the terrible, the frightening, the tragic, and transform it into something positive, something we might even call beautiful. Yes, I think that is a powerful help.

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T. R. Hummer

B O R N I N 1 9 4 9 , T. R. Hummer claims that “reading saved my

ass” when he was a teenager growing up in rural Mississippi. A self-described underachiever in school, Hummer read widely on his own, a lifelong habit that has provided an impetus for his poetry. He discovered a rationale for incorporating his varied interests in literature, criticism, music, history, and philosophy when Dave Smith introduced him to Robert Penn Warren’s work, particularly the essay “Pure and Impure Poetry.” Smith also compelled him to acknowledge his “givens”—farm life in Mississippi, the familial and social fabric of the deep South—as a source for his poetry. His first three books reflect these concerns in sequences of poems such as 104

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“The Rural Carrier,” which describes the day-to-day existence of a Mississippi postman. Hummer’s two most recent books shift away from an ostensibly autobiographical focus. In The 18,000-Ton Olympic Dream and Walt Whitman in Hell he expands his subject to address the composition of American national identity. After leaving the South for two decades, during which he served as editor of the New England Review and the Kenyon Review and as director of creative writing at the University of Oregon, he returned in 1997 as professor and senior poet at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. The following interview was conducted in Eugene, Oregon, on October 25–26, 1996. Suarez: Your poetry often fuses the intellectual—language that bor-

ders on the philosophic, at times even academic—and the emotional. How aware are you of that quality of your work? Hummer: Very aware. It seems increasingly second nature to me

to move back and forth between discursive poles—that movement appeals to me. I think it comes partly out of long consideration of Robert Penn Warren’s analysis in his essay “Pure and Impure Poetry” of the mingling of multiple rhetorical modes in an “impure” voice, as opposed to the attempt of “pure” poets to create a poetry all out of one thing. I started self-consciously trying to make the kind of moves you’re talking about when I had begun to think about the implications of Warren’s position, noticing then that other poets whose work I admired, Warren, obviously, but others too, made similar moves. I noticed it early on, for instance, in Wordsworth—let’s say in The Prelude, which is constructed of a vast sine wave of motion between narrative/dramatic elements on the one hand and rhetorical/philosophical elements on the other. The whole poem moves that way. The movements are huge, and it’s hard to see so large a structure. But after I’d read The Prelude through a few times, it became obvious to me that there was an “impure” motion in that poem. We tend to like the rhetorical parts of it less; contemporary poets, contemporary readers, respond more obviously to the narrative, imagistic, dramatic parts, and of course the parts that are overtly autobiographical. We latch on to those modes most readily. But I started perversely emulating some of the rhetorical elements in Wordsworth, and I think the effect that you’re describing came out of that train of thought.

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Suarez: Many of the poems in your latest book, Walt Whitman in Hell, have a theological bent to them. Hummer: Of course, I grew up, like many folks do, going to church

a lot, and in the South that means something in particular. Actually, my religious background, comparatively speaking, was pretty feeble. My family were Methodists, which is not exactly like being Pentecostal or even Baptist. It’s much quieter. I went to a tiny country church where most of the congregation were terribly, terribly old. So it was a very boring place to be, quiet and nonthreatening. I came away from my childhood experiences with religion bearing the usual scars and perversions, but also with the added benefit of having installed in my consciousness the sounds and the rhythms of religion southern style—in short, the music, which is the only thing I ever liked about church, even though the music in my church was very bad. Well, the music itself was great, it was just performed badly because nobody could either play very well or sing very well. Suarez: That’s a problem. Hummer: It is a problem. Nevertheless, the power of that music still

came through. It’s great music, and I still love it. I love gospel music and also bluegrass and that related part of the blues. It also lives deep down inside jazz. Part of my mind was fed from early on with that old music, the sound of it, the gnostic imagery of gospel music and blues, the Fountain Filled with Blood, the Love in Vain. That’s one of the reasons Gerard Manley Hopkins’s work was so appealing to me when I was first attaching myself to poetry. I could recognize its religious character, and I could set it aside—that is to say, I was never troubled by the overt religiousness of Hopkins, as many of my students seem to be. Hopkins’s subject is given; you don’t have to worry about it. What you attend to is the music, which is exactly what I used to do at church. I ignored what people were saying about God, but the music was powerful, and spooky too. All the mysteriousness—what Keats calls the Burden of the Mystery—lived in those sounds. Suarez: How has your reading in philosophy and literary criticism affected your poetry? Hummer: Most poets I know who are any good read enormously.

But in my own case I can say for sure that—maybe like a lot of other

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people who come into this universe of language, or just into academia or any other intellectual profession, from the working class—reading books saved my ass when I was a kid. Reading books, listening to music, playing music—those things together were a salvation to me. I’ve always felt that the realm of print was a foreign country that I didn’t own, but I could make forays into it like a spy. As I grew up in rural Mississippi, music was more obvious a second nature than books. It was more apparent that I could own and live in that realm. Texts were more surreptitious and more foreign. In school I tended to read books that were not assigned in class because I developed a perverse aversion and contempt for most of my teachers—for all kinds of stupid puerile reasons, and for some very good reasons too. Having carefully established myself as an underachiever in the classroom, I just grazed among books as best I could given what was immediately available. I was not heroic on that front. I think I’ve let that process of indiscriminate textual engagement get into the voice of my poems overtly—maybe more overtly than some poets like to—because to me it’s a tribute to that part of the mental universe I inhabited in those years when I was trying to discover who the hell I was and what kind of thoughts I could legitimately think. Suarez: At what point did you start writing the poems that went into your first book? Hummer: Which first book? I have two first books, you know. Suarez: I’m thinking of The Angelic Orders. Hummer: That was my dissertation at Utah. I published a chapbook

before that called Translation of Light. Technically it’s copyrighted 1976, though it actually didn’t appear until 1977. My daughter was born on January 28, 1977, and on the day that we brought her home from the hospital the copies of Translation of Light had arrived on the doorstep. It was a confluence. You don’t know that book, because it’s no longer available, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a very well kept secret. I prefer people not see it. It was really written under the spell of Yeats and Hopkins and Wordsworth, and it sounds like it. In any case, that was early work. The Angelic Orders was almost entirely written while I was in Utah in the late 1970s. Suarez: Describe the transition, then, from the poems in that chapbook to the poems in The Angelic Orders.

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Hummer: Technically there’s a huge difference. There is also a certain

kinship, but you have to follow a circuitous path. Translation of Light came out in 1977, but all the poems in it were written by 1974, actually, because it took the press a long time to publish the book. It was done all by hand, and the printer was not prone to work by schedule, so the book came out a lot later than it was supposed to. All those poems are very early work. Some of them, in fact, I wrote as an undergraduate, though mostly the book was written when I was a graduate student at the University of Southern Mississippi. It sounds more like Hopkins than like anybody else, though it has a Yeatsian thing going on too. . . . Suarez: Describe that sound, that Hopkins music as you under-

stand it. Hummer: It’s out of sprung rhythm. It’s out of a heavy attention

to accents. With Hopkins himself, that attention manifests itself as a radical transformation of iambic pentameter. I understood—or thought I understood—at some point what Hopkins had done with traditional meter, and I was fascinated by it. It was such a fully consistent and at the same time sonically radical way to conceive of a voice. I wanted my voice to sound like that yet not be Hopkins in terms of subject matter. I was not a Jesuit, and will not be, I suppose, in this life a Jesuit. I wouldn’t mind being one, but it’s just not one of my givens. My attention was much more on making the poetry have a certain kind of sound—a big sound—which actually served me later on when I learned how to modulate that technique and actually apply it to something. The poems in the chapbook mostly sound like Hopkins, but, in terms of concept, they are more out of Wordsworth and Yeats. What I wanted to write was mystical landscape poetry, and to use the rural material of my childhood. It’s Romantic poetry in that sense; it’s an essay in undigested Romanticism, and it’s extremely naive work, in part because it’s so uninformed by contemporary writing. The big difference between that book and The Angelic Orders is that in between I turned to reading contemporary poets seriously. Suarez: Who in particular? Hummer: I got one of the early editions of the A. Poulin Jr. anthology

Contemporary American Poetry and found out who was out there. I

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remember connecting with W. D. Snodgrass from the point of view of technique. I was working in form, and, of all the contemporary poets, Snodgrass seemed to be one of the most obviously technically proficient, though he’s not a poet I care for much now. From there I pursued various others—like Robert Lowell, whose early work I liked at that point fairly well. Then I stepped off into the Robert Bly thing for a while—I went through a phase of writing sappy surrealist poems influenced in the worst possible way by Robert Bly’s Leaping Poetry. It was a phase I had to go through. And he led me to many wonderful poets: Neruda, Vallejo, Lorca, Mistral, Transtromer. After finishing up a pretty low-key and quite conservative master’s in literature, I was completely in isolation, doing this on my own, figuring things out. Suarez: Where were you at this time? Hummer: I was in Jackson, Mississippi, working for the State Arts

Council. There, actually, I started meeting some poets, talking to people, learning what the life of poetry among the living is really all about. Then I arrived in Utah. Suarez: What led you there? Hummer: The short answer is I went to study with Dave Smith at

the University of Utah. Smith was just hitting the scene. Cumberland Station was just coming out—this was 1976. Working for the Arts Council in Mississippi was a nice job; it was pleasant; I enjoyed it— met lots of good people. But, as you can imagine, working for the state of Mississippi in the field of the arts is not a growth industry. My daughter was on the way, and I wasn’t getting huge raises, so I thought, “I need more money. I know: I’ll become a graduate student again.” Seemed to make sense at the time. I wanted to go into a writing program largely to get the credential, like a union card, to teach in a university. But in fact it turned out to be a profoundly transformative experience. Moving from Mississippi to Utah was admittedly strange. But Dave Smith turned out to be a powerful teacher for me. Suarez: How did you pick Smith? Or for what reasons? Hummer: Because of the poetry. He and I were publishing poems

in some of the same magazines in the early seventies, when he

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was still David Jeddie Smith. But then the poetry that was to be Cumberland Station started showing up in journals. I thought the poetry was suddenly larger and even more resonant and powerful. And, curiously enough, it turned out I had to go to Utah to come to grips with southern material as such. Being out of the South made it possible for me to write about it. When I was living in the South the last thing I wanted to write about was being there. Utah is of course physically wonderful and strange, particularly to somebody who hadn’t ever been in the West at all—the landscape had a powerful impact on me. But the impact in terms of the writing was to send my head back home. I was able to begin to use all the stuff, technically, sonically, musically, that I had picked up on the way, really for the first time—yoking it all together. Suarez: When had you begun writing poetry? Hummer: When I was an undergraduate. I had for a long time

thought I wanted to be a fiction writer. That was an idea that I got rather early on, maybe when I was in junior high. I got turned on like everybody else by Poe—not by the poetry, but by the fiction—and wrote stories. When I was an undergraduate I walked into a writing workshop to write fiction, but it was a workshop in which we were required to write both poetry and fiction, and I came out the other end writing poetry—because I found out I could do it. Suarez: And this was where? Hummer: At Mississippi State in Starkville, Mississippi. It was about

forty miles away from where I grew up. That was the university to which my family was attached by proximity—we all were sent there. It was close to home, and cheap; it was an agricultural and engineering school, which is what my family thought about when they thought about education. I didn’t finish there; I left after a couple years. Suarez: So when you took off from there, you knew that you wanted

to become a poet. Hummer: Yes, although what I really wanted to be was a saxophonist.

But the writing teacher I worked with at Mississippi State, whose name I can’t remember—a graduate of the University of Arkansas M.F.A. Program who later became a Christian auto mechanic, I

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hear—had been a saxophone player in his youth, and he set me straight about something. I wanted to be a musician and he wanted me to be a writer, and he said, “Look, if you had a choice, which would you rather be? Suppose in theory that you could turn into a really terrific musician or into a really terrific poet, which would you prefer? Would you rather be Yeats or King Curtis?” And when he put it that way. . . . Now, of course, I realize he stacked the deck giving me that particular choice; I was still innocent, for instance, of John Coltrane’s music, maybe the only sax player on the planet, good or bad, who was innocent of Coltrane. Maybe I’d rather have been Coltrane than Yeats. But at that point, I really did become serious. That seriousness was one of the things that propelled me out of that university. Suarez: You had found what you wanted to do. Hummer: Yes, and I began working very hard, at long last, in both

literature and philosophy. I went down to the University of Southern Mississippi, where there were more writers on the faculty. And there I met a fiction writer named Gordon Weaver who became very important to me. Gordon introduced me to real professionalism— he was, and is, the real thing. In those days he taught poetry as well as fiction, and when he taught poetry what he taught was form, traditional forms. Working as a poet with him I learned a lot about that kind of writing—which I then later had to deform, as it were. But when I was near graduating, Weaver looked at me and my writing and my record and said, “You should go to graduate school.” And I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Well, you can stay in school longer, and we’ll pay you for it.” So I said, “OK.” I had no clue what it meant. Suarez: Give me specifics about The Angelic Orders—what you were

trying to accomplish technically—and explain the difference from your version of sprung rhythm. Hummer: I was trying to achieve a certain kind of normalization of

voice. Finally. A “naturalness” of voice without loss of tension. I had resisted this when I was in my early twenties. By comparison with Yeats and Hopkins, much contemporary poetry seemed to me all too flat and “conversational,” or unmusical, whatever that means. In those days I wanted a different kind of music that was a purely poetic language. Thus Hopkins appealed to me, and later Rilke.

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Suarez: Even a lot of the early Lowell. Hummer: Yes, absolutely, early Lowell. Maybe my evolution was

something like Lowell’s—ultimately the desire to kick the stuffings out of one’s own poeticism, and to actually speak like a human being. James Wright became a heavy influence in those years, his insistence on the pure, clear word. But also, I guess, like Lowell I didn’t want to simply jettison what I had learned as a sort of musical technique either. I wanted to find a way to subsume it and make it less overt than it had been. Robert Penn Warren, therefore—Smith introduced me to Warren’s work. I had read Audubon before I went to Utah, but I don’t think I understood it. I hadn’t thought of Warren as a poet. But the gnarliness of Warren’s poetry came to appeal to me, his music that comes out of a combination of a deep sense of the English tradition coupled with a profoundly American speaking voice, and his way of allowing his poetry to be often very effectively rhetorical—that one could, in fact, actually have something to say in a poem as opposed to merely making a certain kind of noise. Suarez: What Warren work in particular? Hummer: The work that appealed to me the most in the late seventies

was the long work like Audubon, which I went back to with seriousness. But then other things in Warren, too, like “The Ballad of Billie Potts”: you know, that strange, loopy poem. And his very peculiar work from the 1950s, Promises. Also the work he was writing in the 1970s, those late books Being Here and Now and Then—that work appealed to me obviously on a level of both sound and subject. Here was someone who had done the nature mysticism poem in a real way, that existential power of landscape, particularly in his New England poems. Warren was like the universe. Dave Smith gave me two gifts as a teacher. First, he opened up the southern poets to me. I knew the southern fiction writers when I went to Utah, but I hadn’t paid attention to the southern poets. I wasn’t really interested in the South when I was living in the South. I was interested in getting out of the South. I was utterly uninterested in reading poetry about the contemporary South. Dave insisted that I return to my own material. He said, “Like it or not, these are your givens. Pay attention.” The other gift he gave me was his implacable

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seriousness about poetry. He showed me that if you’re bothering to write poems at all, why not go for broke, all the time? It matters; it’s worth it. Suarez: Were you reading Dickey then? Hummer: I also first read Dickey seriously when I was in Utah.

Dickey was an obvious person for me to turn to, but I had resisted him until, again, Dave Smith put him in my hands and said, “Read this.” I said, “I don’t like this guy,” because, like a lot of people, I knew Dickey mainly by reputation and not really through his poetry. But Dave said, “No, forget about all that; just read the poems.” And as soon as I did, I realized how brilliant they were, and how beautiful. The early work, particularly. Suarez: Did you have a conception for The Angelic Orders? Hummer: Not initially. I eventually had a concept. At first, I was

only trying to get beyond what I had done as a poet up to that time. And I wanted to engage my own material in a way that I had not previously done—my givens, which Dave Smith rightly insisted that I encounter. Suarez: Farm, family. Hummer: All of that. I was also trying to relearn how to write a

poem, to use anything and everything available to me—which is why many of the poems came out in forms. I had stopped writing in form, actually, some years before. When I created a mode of dumb surrealism out of Robert Bly’s Leaping Poetry, I jettisoned all the traditionally formal aspects of the work. Then, when I came to this desperate encounter with myself, I felt that I had to use every paltry thing I had at my disposal including, if it came to that, rhyme, for example; including what I had learned years before about sonnets, for example. Not because such formal techniques have any intrinsic virtue, but because I had learned it so thoroughly, and I needed all the knowledge at my disposal. At this point, I haven’t written formally for years and deeply distrust everything about so-called neo-formalism. But at that time, I needed any and all ammunition, so all of that figured in. Most of those poems were written out of a profound sense of desperation in the face of what I thought I was: a worthless failure. I thought that I had

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really better remake myself both as a poet and as a human being. The Angelic Orders was part of that process. Eventually I conceived of it as a kind of autobiography manqué. That book is heavily fictionalized, but I needed a form for it, and the form was that of autobiography—a common and obvious strategy, but there you are. Suarez: Comment on the transition between The Angelic Orders and The Passion of the Right-Angled Man. Hummer: The Passion of the Right-Angled Man I wrote when I was

in Oklahoma. It was written out of another kind of desperation: I wanted to get out of Oklahoma. I like the place, actually, in retrospect; I’m glad I lived there for a while. I learned a lot about my own resources, and a lot about America. But it was a hard time in my life. Suarez: You were teaching there—at what school? Hummer: Oklahoma State at Stillwater. I thought of the poems that

I was writing at the time as a direct outgrowth of The Angelic Orders. It was an immediate, direct evolution from an obvious autobiographical style to a deepened, more thoroughly fictionalized “autobiographical” style. Also, the tone and technique of that book are much influenced by the late poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, especially “The Moose.” I was enormously impressed by her subtle formal and discursive power. Probably of all my books I like that one the least now. I killed the angel I was wrestling with at that time, which means it was probably a fake angel. Suarez: I’m going to leap ahead a ways, and then we’ll be coming back. How was writing the latest book, Walt Whitman in Hell, different from those early two books? Hummer: Completely. I encountered a whole different universe of

ideas in the meantime—partly having to do with the received idea of selfhood. I lived in England in 1986 and 1987. Kenyon College sent me over with twenty students to be at Exeter University for that academic year. During that time, I discovered how much I am an American. I found it tremendously depressing. The first thing that happened when I got there was the Iran-Contra scandal. I found that situation completely baffling. The Guardian would come in through my mail slot very nicely every morning, as they do things there. I’d go down

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and get it, and there would be another story about the hideous mess that was happening back in the States. All the very nice people at Exeter would say, “Can you explain this to me?” And I would say, “I have no clue what this is about. It makes no sense.” I was completely wretched about it. Eventually I began to notice that, because I was not in the U.S.A., I had no immediate, intuitive understanding of what was going on. I had never seriously thought of myself in quite that way as part of a community. But I realized that indeed I was a cell in the body politic. It was part of what I was. And I was cut off from it, so I felt strange and I couldn’t connect. At the same time, I was given the job of teaching a course in Shakespeare. Well, it was not a real course in Shakespeare. It was a standard part of the curriculum for Kenyon students at Exeter; a course called “Shakespeare in Performance,” which simply consisted of reading Shakespeare and then going to see the plays. Anytime there was a Shakespeare play anywhere in the neighborhood, which in England is always, we’d read the play, and then we’d go to it. So I was thinking about Shakespeare. A trained monkey could have taught that course, but I was desperate to improve my education on the subject because I had to talk to my students about Shakespeare with at least a reasonable intelligence, so I was reading Shakespeare criticism also. And I kept running across references to a book I’d never heard of called The King’s Two Bodies, by Ernst Kantorowicz. Do you know this book? Suarez: No. Hummer: Renaissance scholars evidently all know about it. But it’s

only incidentally about literature. The main subject is Elizabethan jurisprudence. Kantorowicz’s thesis—or the historical situation that he’s unfolding—is that in Elizabethan law, and therefore also in Elizabethan culture, the king or the queen had literally two bodies. One was his or her own physical body, and the other was the nation. The nation was treated in law exactly as if it were the monarch’s literal body. For example, Kantorowicz describes a trial in which a man who committed suicide is the defendant, which is already weird enough. But they’re trying him to discover whether, in fact, they want to sentence him for committing a crime by virtue of having killed himself. In fact, the court found that he had committed

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three crimes: first was a crime against God, because it’s a sin to kill yourself; second was a crime against nature, because it’s against natural law to kill yourself; and, third, it was a crime against the king’s body, because it was as if the defendant had chopped off the king’s finger. Suarez: Robbing him of a possession. Hummer: Not a possession. Robbing him of a part of his body. It’s as

if a physical act of violence had been done to the king. So the suicide was found guilty on three counts. And as you might expect, the sentence was death. A very strange scenario, one I found foreign to my way of thinking on one level—but it resonated with me powerfully on another level. I thought, well, yeah, that’s why I don’t understand what’s going on back home. I am a little particle which has drifted away from its body. I’m a cell that has been sloughed off. I’m not part of the body politic anymore. And of course, having thought these thoughts, the obvious place to turn next was Hobbes’s Leviathan, which is a precise projection, in fact, of that “other body.” The original cover of Leviathan shows an etching of a giant who is towering over a landscape of little thatched cottages—an English landscape—and if you look closely at the figure of the king you suddenly realize that it looks from a little distance kind of pointillist; in fact, his body is made up of tiny people. He’s a big body made of little bodies. That’s the Leviathan. That’s the king’s other body, constructed of the bodies of his subjects. I began to try to translate for myself this idea into American terms. If Hobbes could project the body politic of England as a great big mean-looking white guy, what would the body politic of America look like? I couldn’t get an image of this. I spent a long time trying to figure it out. And also I then encountered, fortuitously enough, Michel Foucault, who thinks along similar lines. This is a crass simplification: Foucault says, in essence, that you could blow up all the politicians and it wouldn’t change a thing—the system would just go on without them because the power does not reside with individuals. It has its own shape. I began to conceive of the body politic of America as looking like a huge jellyfish of blue electricity, a science fiction/Foucault image that got stuck in my head. Suarez: What books of Foucault in particular?

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Hummer: The History of Sexuality and The Archaeology of Knowledge. Also, in a different key, Discipline and Punish. Tremendous books. I read him first in England that year; I was living in the house of a professor in the Exeter English department who was on leave; he had a terrific library. I read all of Virginia Woolf from beginning to end in his library; I’d read her before, but not whole. And I really fell in love with Foucault. I think that at his best he’s a tremendous thinker, though at his worst he’s just unreadable. All this material was hitting my consciousness and knocking it sideways. In the meantime, I was trying to write poems. And I was not having a happy time because I didn’t want to write tourist poems. I could set myself in the English landscape and write a poem about a tor, or about a castle, but shit, who wants to do that? I felt so out of touch with some part of myself that was American that I just didn’t know what to do as a poet. I began to notice that my instinct, or my habit, was to set up a poem in a certain definite way. Here is a speaker, a consciousness, who is somehow moving through a scene, walking or in a car or on an airplane, and the whole poem revolves around both the physical and the psychic progression of this character, this consciousness. And I thought, why do I do that? Every poem, this is how I start writing. I’m tired of this—that was my first thought. But my second thought was, no, that’s not good enough, just being tired of it is not good enough; you have to think about where this comes from. You have to understand it. Then it occurred to me that the center of consciousness of a poem, the way one conceives of it, the way one executes it, is as much a received thing as, let’s say, iambic pentameter or the free-verse catalog. If one is so steeped in a certain kind of rhythm, for instance, that one can’t conceive of a poem without that rhythm, then one is a slave to something. By the same token, if one is so invested in a certain image, a projected image of selfhood, of the nature of consciousness, that a poem cannot be written without that, then one is a slave to it. I began, therefore, to want to disturb my own fundamental assumptions. All this came together in thinking about the literal nature of the American leviathan, the body politic. If I don’t want to write a poem the presiding illusion of which is that it’s “me” speaking the poem, moving through a landscape having a thought, what do I want to do instead? Well, I thought, I would really like to tune into the brain

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of the other body. If I could get in my poems the consciousness of the “other” body, the meditation of the brain of the body politic, that would be truly interesting. Then my next thought was, “Ah, but Whitman has done that.” That is the “myself” of Song of Myself. It is that other body. It’s not Whitman. No individual could be the projected consciousness of Song of Myself. That’s just impossible. I’m sure he wasn’t thinking about it in this way; he came to it much more naturally, I’m sure, than I did. I had to come to it through this tortuous process. But this is what he’s up to. His ego doesn’t belong to him. It belongs to the nation. If indeed Whitman had that ego, he would be an egomaniac, but he doesn’t. That’s not him; it’s another kind of consciousness he creates in the poem. At least that’s the fiction, and certainly that’s the strongest reading. Anyway, Walt Whitman in Hell originated in that concern, that desire to make a different consciousness. Really, it starts with the previous book, The 18,000-Ton Olympic Dream. Still in England: the “Olympic Dream” poem comes out of the hideous feeling of being alone in that peculiar cultural way. I used to listen to the BBC on the radio; it was my way of trying to tune in to something, trying to get a voice from somewhere else and into my head. One night, feeling this hideous sense of depression gnawing my liver about Reagan, I turned the radio on and a voice said, “The 18,000-ton Olympic Dream is sinking.” My first thought was “Oh my God, what’s Reagan done now? What’s he done to the dream?” But it was about a ship, an oil tanker, the Olympic Dream, which had mysteriously sprung a leak in the Mediterranean and was slowly and undramatically sinking. That image of the sinking ship and the ugliness that may result from a leaking oil tanker became an objective correlative for all the thoughts I was having about the nature of things. That book marks a transition in my way of thinking about many issues. It was in the course of writing the poems in Olympic Dream that I noticed how I was repeating received patterns of consciousness, setting a scene and sending the narrator through it to think a poetic thought. I reacted against it immediately when I noticed it. A long poem, “Bluegrass Wasteland,” came out of the same background of thought. Suarez: We haven’t talked about Lower-Class Heresy. Hummer: It’s a bridge between the years I was in Oklahoma and

my time in Ohio. The title comes from Christopher Hill. I read his

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great biography of Milton, which is all about Milton’s radicalism. The phrase lower-class heresy comes out of Hill’s exegesis of Milton’s political/religious sources and how, in those days—and this is obvious, but Hill illuminated it for me—Puritanism was a radical working-class force. And this I began to compare to my own experience in church—Protestant, Puritan-inflected churches in the South where, of course, all of that had turned thoroughly conservative, xenophobic, segregationist—how the radical religious left turns into the rabid religious right. I spun out of that train of thought the two poems in the middle section of that book, one called “The Ideal” and one called “The Real,” which are the core of the conceptual makeup of the book. Both of them are arguments with the South, and with America at large; both are arguments about race and racism, and both are personal manifestos about those matters. Writing those poems was for me crucially important. I found ways to utilize directly such voices as John Winthrop’s out of the Norton Anthology, etc., etc., along with a voice that was more colloquial and “natural.” It felt right to me, as if within a conceptual frame I was able to incorporate a voice that had a good deal of flexibility, impurity, and from there I was able to take that flexibility further in other poems. Suarez: I can see how that could translate into Walt Whitman in Hell. Hummer: Exactly. From the kernel of a certain kind of dramatic/rhe-

toric impulse that rears its ugly head in Lower-Class Heresy, it’s a straight shot to Walt Whitman in Hell. There’s a stylistic distance, but it’s a development of the impulse. And The 18,000-Ton Olympic Dream is working it out. Walt Whitman in Hell is a series of experiments in altered centers of consciousness for poems. It’s as much an experimental book about that as somebody else’s work—as Hopkins’s say—might be an experiment in prosody. It’s about the prosody of consciousness. Suarez: Take me through a few poems. Hummer: The obvious one is the title poem. That poem took me

about five years to write. I came back from England and went immediately to Middlebury College as a visitor, to replace Sydney Lea as editor of NER/BLQ for six months; he was on a Guggenheim. In the fall of 1987, I trekked from Middlebury to Manhattan on the train, because there was an exhibit of Wordsworth material at the

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New York Public Library I wanted to see. Basically it was an exhibit of manuscripts. They had the entire handwritten manuscript of The Prelude. One of the versions, I forget which, probably the 1815— the whole thing was there. And a lot of other Wordsworth material; Keats manuscripts too, and a big portrait of Keats. And they also had paintings from the period and material about the science of the period. Wordsworth was the center, the lens through which they were revealing something about the nineteenth century, but other figures and other disciplines were represented as well. For instance, there was one corner where they had Wordsworth’s rainbow poem, the manuscript of “My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky.” And also that riff Keats does—is it in Endymion where he complains of science that it would dismantle a rainbow? Then there were some manuscripts produced by scientists who were trying to work out the optics of rainbows. And best of all, there was a batch of little pieces of paper on which Constable had practiced painting rainbows. These little fragments, just trash from Constable’s studio, on which he was experimenting with getting a rainbow to look right—all that in a space about this big. I was wandering around the library feeling utterly happy, very excited. Just a day or two before, I’d seen a poem by Philip Levine called “Keats in California” in, I think, the New Yorker. I looked up at Keats and I thought, Keats in California, no, Keats in New York, Wordsworth in New York, Shelley in New York. And then a little voice on one side of my brain said, “But where is Whitman?” Because Whitman wasn’t there. And another part of my brain, the rational part, said, “Oh, he’s here too; he’s in New York, always has been.” But then the perverse little daimon voice said, “No, he’s in hell. Walt Whitman is in hell.” And that was the genesis of the poem. So I went back home and wrote that down, “Walt Whitman in Hell.” I wrote the first three lines of the poem pretty much as they stand, and I had no clue what this was. It was a voice that had never come out of me before. I didn’t know what to do with it; I didn’t know where it was going. If it was going to be a poem about Walt Whitman in hell it probably had to be long. That was all I knew. But I was excited by it because I could tell that all my thinking about consciousness was producing something unexpected. This was a voice I didn’t recognize, creating a consciousness I didn’t recognize. And all the poems in Walt Whitman in Hell were written after that

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beginning, but mostly before I finished the title poem. It was as if each of the poems in the book was a foray in learning how to finish the long poem. I was doing consciousness experiments in order to arrive at the large consciousness that is the voice of that poem— which, by the way, is not supposed to be Whitman’s consciousness. It’s something else, the projected embodied consciousness of poetry itself. That’s what I was going for. Whitman stands as the exemplar of American poetry. Each poem in that book is, to my way of thinking, a special case. I hope never to write such a difficult book again. I mean difficult to write; I don’t know how difficult it is to read. It was a bitch to write. Suarez: Because each poem was, as you say, a special case? Hummer: In writing each I felt required to reinvent consciousness:

poetry consciousness. Each poem comes from a different place. At the same time, all of them are antechambers to the long poem at the end of the book. To give it a more tangible explanation, each poem is a soul in Whitman’s hell. You approach each, you give it goat’s blood, and it speaks. Suarez: There is a yearning for transcendence in your poetry. Hummer: I think the earlier poetry is more that way. In the later

poetry that’s all thoroughly ironized because I don’t believe in transcendence at all, if by that we mean anything Emersonian. I’m a subscendentalist, not a transcendentalist. I try to use the language of mysticism against itself. For instance, “The Antichrist in Arkansas” is a poem about the mysticism of racism. Some brands of racism are very mystical. What is the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, after all, except a sort of mystical brotherhood? It’s like the occult Knights of the Golden Dawn of which Yeats was a member. It’s the Burden of the Mystery again. They tell themselves they’re doing the work of God. I heard this sort of thing all my childhood, racism justified on biblical grounds. “Antichrist in Arkansas” is about the gnosticism of racism. Therefore it employs language directly out of the Gnostic Gospels and attributes the quote to the Little Rock Gazette. But the serious side effect is to say, here’s a mode of mystical consciousness that really is destructive. I did a lot of research on hell for this book—various infernal theologies. Hell’s a good thing to research because there’s a lot of

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information about hell. The only problem with hell as a research project is that you can’t get a grant to go there. I wanted one, but nobody would give me one. And I was already there anyway. But I read many books about hell, stealing from most of them, not just the Christian hell, but various hells from the world over—and Swedenborg’s hell, which is like no other. What a crazy man he was. Still, my personal favorite hell is the Greek hell because it’s so completely pointless. There’s no teleology, no system of reward or punishment, no notion of rehabilitation. The dead are just shapes; there’s nobody in there, except that, as the goddess tells Odysseus, if you take your bowl of goat’s blood down, and if you give them blood, they get back their lives for a little while, and then they remember. Suddenly they say things like, “Oh, you’re Odysseus, my son.” Because he can’t resist, of course, giving his mother some. . . . The central metaphor of the writing of the book was the story of Odysseus in hell. He has to go to hell because he needs to know something. It’s not a punishment; it’s an act of desperation. He has to talk to Tiresias. He has to talk to Agamemnon and to Achilles to find out what awaits him at his home. That image of the bowl of goat’s blood is not in the book, exactly. It gets mentioned here and there cryptically, I fear. A reader is not required to think about it. But for me as writer, that was the process-metaphor. It worked for me as I was writing the book, since the setting for the whole book is hell—which I found out is actually and ultimately a kind of memory. At some point I began to understand that hell is all about memory, a bigger memory than anybody’s personal memory. Suarez: How would that differ from heaven? Hummer: Ah. You don’t have to remember anything in heaven; all

you have to do is praise God. What you’ve done in earthly life is over with, erased—you have your club card; the rest is done. But in hell, if it’s a hell of punishment, you are required to remember what you did in life, that’s the whole point. Or if it’s the Greek Hades, your memory has to be made accessible to the living. But heaven’s not about memory; it’s about forgetting. The idea of hell is a way to keep alive some remnant of the dead. Even if they have to be punished forever, even if they have to suffer in order for the memory to survive. This idea becomes overt in Western literature in Augustine, in the Confessions, chapter 10. Augustine’s

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journey into the cave of memory is Odysseus’s journey into Hades. For Homer, souls in Hades are mindless, soggy creatures. They come flying at Odysseus like bats. For Augustine, those batlike souls become random images flying up from the cave of the deep mind. He goes there trying to remember something particular and says of those random memories, “With the hands of my heart, I wipe these things away from the face of my memory.” In Augustine it becomes clear that hell is a metaphor for memory. Suarez: The poems in Walt Whitman in Hell never relax. They are all

intense; they almost burn a hole through your head. Is that a quality you were aiming at? Hummer: Yes, it was a quality I was aiming at, and it’s also that which

I cannot sustain for the next book. Suarez: Where do you see your poems going next? Hummer: The poems I’m working on now are different again, and

I’m not entirely sure how to describe them because there really are not very many of them, so it’s something that’s just beginning to emerge. I do know clearly that Walt Whitman in Hell was too difficult to write. I felt as if I were reconceiving poetry from the ground up every time I started to write a poem, and if I continue to do that for the rest of my life, I’ll only write four more poems. I would like to write at least six more before I die. There are certain poets whose at least apparent process I envy greatly—like Gerald Stern. It seems to me as if Stern’s way of writing poetry is like breathing for him. Probably this is part of the illusion his great skill creates. It’s as if poetry is a great net that he can throw out over the side of the boat again and again. He throws it out once and he pulls up a mysterious fish. And he pulls it up again and there’s an old boot. And it doesn’t matter. It’s all Jerry, and it’s all his poetry. I find that wonderful. And enviable. I’m working toward an edgy multivalent style that will, in terms of process, give me that kind of flexibility. I began to realize the possibility in making a couple of poems that are compressed, truncated versions of the voices in Walt Whitman in Hell, but with a more journal-like quality, pressed into forms that are just a little over a page long, say, that make sudden almost irrational leaps in and out of voice—discontinuous, but at the same time consistent, I hope.

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Suarez: A poem in Walt Whitman in Hell that I especially admire is

“St. Augustine.” You’re obviously playing off the location and off of theological thought. How do you see the interplay between those elements? Hummer: I’ve never been to St. Augustine, Florida. The setting of

that poem is actually Miami. I went to Miami and was staying in the hotel described in the poem. I remember being completely delighted by the way everything looked from the thirtieth floor. From there, Miami was like a cartoon city because it was so busy. They were having a grand prix in downtown Miami—had blocked off streets and were having an auto race in the middle of the city. I could see ships, and I could see cars and helicopters, and I could see buildings, and then there were these damned huge birds flying around. I’d never been to Florida before. It was very exotic and wonderful and I liked it enormously. So: time passes. I wanted for a long time to write a poem about Saint Augustine, the theologian. I wrote his name down on a piece of paper, and the obvious pun, because I had Florida in my head, came to mind. So instead of writing a poem about Saint Augustine, I started writing a poem about Miami. But then because of this dumb pun, I was driven back into consideration of the Confessions, a book I love and hate. I don’t really have anything terribly profound to tell you about that except that I was playing around, and out of that play came a more dire voice about violence and confession. Suarez: What strikes me in your description is that the poem was coming out of delight first, and yet the poem hardly sustains that tenor. It moves into a much darker realm. Hummer: The night before I was in that hotel somebody had been

murdered out front. All that was in my head, both the delightfulness of the scene and the direness of certain human actualities. In writing several of the poems in Walt Whitman in Hell, I began by taking very literally things that don’t usually get taken literally. Many people believe that the function of poets is to create metaphors, which is true. But I am also convinced that an equal and opposite function of poets is to critique metaphors, to remind us that metaphors are slippery reworkings of the real—in fact, are technically lies. The poem “First Assembly of God” is based on such a perversely literal misreading. I

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used to visit friends in Binghamton, New York. You know how dark and dreary that part of the world is in the winter—it’s like being in a black-and-white movie. I’d always see a building downtown which had a sign, a neon sign, red, about three floors up, which said, “First Assembly of God,” and every time I saw it I would think, “So: that’s where they put him together.” That wretched pun led to the poem— which is, of the shorter poems in Walt Whitman in Hell, my personal favorite. The oddest poem that emerged from similar territory is “Apocatastasis Foretold in the Shape of a Canvas of Smoke,” near the end of the book. It’s a very weird poem which I think I don’t fully understand. It creates a landscape that exists nowhere. Almost all of the consciousnesses in Walt Whitman in Hell have grounding in some real landscape or some place or some situation that ultimately can be traced back to some “actual” source. Not that poem, though—it’s completely a fabrication. Suarez: So you just don’t know where it came from. Hummer: No, I do know where it came from. It came out of the

word apocatastasis; it came out of language. Apocatastasis is a word I had wanted for decades to use in a poem. Actually I had already used it in a poem once—the very first poem I ever published, which is a Hopkins tribute. The word figures in the very last line of the poem. I knew even at the time that the poem was not good. It was an experiment in voice, and has all kinds of weird diction in it, including the word apocatastasis. Ever since, I have carried that word around, thinking, “This is a hard word to use in a poem. If I could ever use this word successfully in a poem, I would be pleased.” I suppose most writers set analogous problems for themselves. It’s probably not very useful information for readers, but it’s part of how the process works. I think of three or four poems as linchpin poems, tent stakes for Walt Whitman in Hell. “First Assembly of God,” the “Apocatastasis” poem, “St. Augustine,” and maybe a couple of others that are staking out a certain kind of territory in which certain metaphysical ideas are demetaphorized and revealed in their material and dark aspect. They set out a perimeter that encompasses mysticism and the method of using mystical language against itself. In “St. Augustine,” for instance, Augustine’s Confessions is reimagined in terms of Foucault’s

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exegesis of confession in The History of Sexuality and also in a policestate sense of the word. “First Assembly of God” fell out just exactly the way I needed my poems to be at that moment, and much to my surprise. That poem was a breakthrough poem. I was still finishing The 18,000Ton Olympic Dream at that time, but already the seed of this new book was there. The first poem I wrote for Walt Whitman in Hell, chronologically, was “Confusion in the Drought Years.” I wrote that out of frustration with the poems that came in over the transom at the Kenyon Review, which I was editing at the time. The relentless sameness of many of those poems made me want to write something very odd. So I got a certain voice going in that poem, and I looked at it and thought, “Well, this is interesting. I’m not quite sure where this is headed.” I was clear on one point: I did not want to write a book of persona poems in the traditional sense. But if you start creating other consciousnesses, then what else is there? What else are such speakers if they are not, in the old sense, personae? But I didn’t want that. I wanted to dissolve that tradition as well. Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, for instance, is perfectly fine, but that’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted the response to be, “This is not a confessional voice, and it is not the traditional ‘disembodied’ lyric voice. But this is also not persona poetry. This is something else. I am entering a consciousness now that is really unfamiliar territory.” “Confusion in the Drought Years” didn’t satisfy me entirely on that front because it felt like a “regular” literary persona poem. I was after something radically different. “First Assembly of God” finally broke that down for me. “St. Augustine” came later. The consciousness of that poem is more clearly dissolved. You don’t have to worry about the nature of the speaking character, exactly. It’s not a dramatic character; it’s more of a freefloating consciousness. Suarez: What do you mean by “free-floating consciousness”? Hummer: So you’re calling me out on that? “Free-floating conscious-

ness” is not a good phrase. Strike that from the record. I was after an inexplicably disembodied, and yet convincing, consciousness modeled on Whitman’s in “The Sleepers.” I think of “The Sleepers” as a miniature Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s method of consciousness in this poem is very overt. The narrator

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is up late at night looking out the window; everybody else in the whole universe is asleep. Most of us would just say, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to be able to go into their bedrooms and see what they look like asleep, and then go into their dreams and see what that’s about.” But, of course, Whitman being Whitman doesn’t just say, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if . . .” He makes it so, turns it into a fait accompli. There you have a consciousness that just floats out and moves wherever it wants. It’s godlike in that way. Suarez: A mystical consciousness. Hummer: Ah . . . not really. It’s a mystical consciousness manqué.

It’s manifestly a fabrication, in the end—a fabricated consciousness that is a manifestation of a human desire to know, a human desire to connect, to create in a stroke Nietzsche’s Dionysian world, where the boundaries between human individuals have fallen away and everyone is one consciousness. That’s really what Whitman was all about, you know. It’s very simple once you get to that point— from there you can see how everything in Whitman works, what the whole universe of Whitman is about. I desired for these poems a consciousness capable of that power of buoyancy, except that it must float in a world that’s more dire and dangerous and dark than the one Whitman usually imagines. Actually, the process of writing a number of the poems in Walt Whitman in Hell made me feel a little ill in the writing. As if the process of writing poetry had suddenly become totally disconnected from any kind of commonsense logic or any rules. I was completely in the dark; I had no idea what I was doing. Which I thought was the right way to be. I should be in that place. I should be suffering the slings and arrows of my own process. But it was very uncomfortable. It demanded giving up allegiances to certain aspects of narrative logic. But that wasn’t the core; that was just a symptom. What was really underneath was giving up allegiance to a certain kind of selfhood, a certain concept of the givens. Well, they aren’t what I thought they were. Suarez: Be more precise. Hummer: The problem essentially was this: how much possibility

have I cut off from myself—and not only from my poetry—because I imagine myself to be only myself, when, in fact, I’m not only myself?

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I’m connected, as everybody is, to many, many other selves and to a larger body of consciousness that is the shape of the whole, the gestalt, the mind of the leviathan, so to speak. Why, for instance, do I write my poems and not you? This is a stupid question on one level, though on another level it’s profound. Maybe part of the problem was that I wanted to write somebody else’s poems, or I wanted somebody else to write mine. So I began a series of thought experiments to see whether at least some of these barriers I discover in my own mind are objectively real or not. Some of them no doubt are quite real. Some of them can never be got past, and those are the ones you want both to honor and to be in horror of. But then there are others that are perhaps just ghosts. Maybe all you have to do is step through them, and they’re gone. At that point, I could recognize maybe three or four simply conceptual barriers around the perimeter of poetry, and the nature of voice, and the nature of subject, that didn’t have to be obstacles. They weren’t real. Then I ran into a couple of others that I kept thumping my nose against big time because they wouldn’t go away. Suarez: What are they? Hummer: Well, the fact, say, of being a white southerner who was

raised to be a racist. That’s part of my identity that has real, and possibly dire, consequences for my very humanity, not to say merely my poetry. I would like to just be able to conjure that one away. But I can’t. Because it’s a fact. Certain of the consequences are ghostly. But other aspects are quite concrete and real, and I can’t do anything about them. Adrienne Rich—from whose work, the essays in particular, I’ve learned an enormous amount—in her little introduction to her selected poems, The Fact of a Doorframe, says something like this: “The hard thing for the young woman who wrote the oldest of the poems here was to know that learning poetic technique was much easier than learning what to do with it.” She also says, “What I had to learn was that I was neither unique nor universal, but a woman in history.” That strikes me as a profound praxis, and very difficult for Americans in particular to assimilate. In this culture we are taught to believe that we are both unique and universal. And it just ain’t so. But then what we have to do is to be able to strip away what’s false from what’s true in that realization and discover what our real

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history is. On the one hand, this involves very obvious ideas: I was born here, and these are my parents, and these are the people who surrounded me. But it’s also the history of thought and of culture that underlies all that. And that’s much harder to understand. It’s much harder to see how it connects me to me. Suarez: Your assumptions about your assumptions. Hummer: Exactly right. Meta-assumptions. Those are harder to see,

and harder to understand. And harder to use, ultimately; harder to know the truth and the falsity of. Because it all begins to seem terribly abstract, while in fact those “abstractions” are among the most concrete realities we face. In writing Walt Whitman in Hell, I wanted to try to expose some of those realities. By now, I have become thoroughly agnostic, radically agnostic, not only in religious terms, but in every possible way. The first thing to do in the face of any encounter, interior or exterior, is to say, “Is this real? Is there really anything here?” And start from that point. Suarez: Do you still feel that way now? Hummer: Yes. But conditioned always, and contradicted always, by

the desire for a large mysterious music, which I hope always to have around me.

Photo by Don Getsug Studios

To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version of this work.

Yusef Komunyakaa

Y U S E F K O M U N Y A K A A ’ S knowledge and love of music and paint-

ing have heavily influenced his poetry. His poems are meticulously crafted “tonal narratives” that present series of highly concentrated images. Komunyakaa uses the rhythms of jazz and other types of music to help create a visceral relationship between the images, inviting the reader to enter into an emotional and intellectual dialogue with the poem. His poems shun the didactic and draw on a wide range of subject matter—family, landscapes, rural and urban life, race relations, sports, philosophy—to jar the reader by confronting him or her with new, and often contradictory, relationships toward experience. 130

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Raised in Bogalusa, Louisiana, Komunyakaa served as a military correspondent in the army during the Vietnam War. In 1994 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. He teaches at Princeton University, where he is Humanities Professor of Creative Writing. The following interview was conducted in my home in Kensington, Maryland, on April 8–9, 1998. Suarez: You’ve edited an anthology of jazz poetry. Comment on the relationship between music and your poetry. Komunyakaa: Sascha Feinstein and I have edited two jazz anthol-

ogies—The Jazz Poetry Anthology and The Second Set: The Jazz Poetry Anthology, volume 2, and we are preparing a third volume that collects jazz poetry from around the world to be published in 2001. In 1982, I was teaching at the University of New Orleans, and it was there that I began to think about the idea of compiling an anthology of jazz-related poems. William Matthews, Jayne Cortez, Gwendolyn Brooks—a couple of her early poems—Michael Harper, and others were writing poems that acknowledged jazz and the musicians who have distinguished this music. I never really thought about my own work as being jazz-influenced until I considered how we internalize the music we hear. My mother always had the radio tuned to stations in New Orleans; the radio served as a shrine. I was fascinated with the music since I had been hearing it from early on, particularly traditional jazz—especially Louis Armstrong—gospel music from such greats as Mahalia Jackson, and the blues, rhythm and blues— all of that was entering my psyche via the radio. I listened to country and western and came to realize its association with the blues. But this is in retrospect. Suarez: When did you start making connections between music and

poetry? Komunyakaa: In the late 1970s. When I was in graduate school at the University of California at Irvine studying with Charles Wright, I started to notice the appearance of jazz references in my poetry. I was also aware of my poems embracing surrealism. In a way, it was a return to what I found myself writing earlier. I didn’t want to graft the trappings of jazz to my own work. I wanted it to be natural, part of the process. I listen to all kinds of music: jazz, blues, folk, rock—the whole spectrum—gospel, all of that influences my work

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because I believe we internalize music and it becomes an overlay through which we filter so much. I can listen to Coltrane’s blues and then be caught up by Bob Dylan’s raspy voice on Blood on the Tracks. Language itself is music. Silence is also part of music; otherwise, we wouldn’t have modulation. Suarez: So you’re saying that in the late 1970s and 1980s you started moving toward musical patterns associated with jazz? Komunyakaa: Well, I think the musical patterns were already there, just below the surface of the telling, driving the need to create. The patterns weren’t conscious ones, but I do feel they were inside my psyche. Suarez: The same ones? Komunyakaa: Well, yes, I think so. I start to write by just listening

to language that comes back at me. The ear’s a great editor. So, yes, music inhabits me and I enjoy it, but only later, when I started thinking about the essence of music, did I realize its unconscious impact. I believe it’s associated with those earlier experiences listening to the radio. I notice how young children listen to music. They don’t listen with the head; they listen with their whole bodies. Suarez: It’s a physical and emotional experience. Komunyakaa: Yeah, that’s right. A whole experience that attempts to bridge the emotional and cultural elements. I think that early humans listened this way because their very lives depended on an alert response. Suarez: If music were primarily an intellectual experience, it wouldn’t have the same appeal. Komunyakaa: That’s right. It wouldn’t hit the same way. However,

the intellectual experience is also a bodily process, and physical awareness of music naturally includes a cognitive or meditative response. Suarez: What’s the relationship between musical rhythms and your conception of the line? Komunyakaa: I write from my own voice. Richard Hugo talks about the use of long and short lines influenced by swing music. I’m more

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interested in a line associated with a vertical trajectory that moves language down the page. At the same time, because of the images and line breaks, it invites in a sped-up meditation. I’m referring to poems where I use a very short line, and in that sense, perhaps, I am doing something akin to what some of the Beats did in the 1950s. It’s also natural to the American idiom—think of William Carlos Williams— to use the short line. I’ve also written prose poems. But even when I formulate a prose poem, it’s initially written in shorter lines, and then that structure is collapsed. Of course, here I’m thinking of lyrical narratives. I don’t worry about lineal narratives. What I think about, for the most part, is a narrative of tone, or tonal narrative that may focus on a central story, but it allows encountering others within it. Suarez: Can you be specific? Komunyakaa: I’ll go with a poem, “Blues Chant Voodoo Revival,”

which refers to the rituals of vodun from New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana. In the poem there’s also an emotional narrative unfolding. We know that, about the rituals. The same can be said about traditional blues. With this in mind, it’s easy to recognize that there’s a lot of innuendo within the context of the poem. Insinuation. The blues suggest that one talk around a subject or situation, but, at the same time, it’s what we bring to it and, in my case, what I bring to the poem. Of course, someone else may interpret the same poem differently. So, one person may see it as blasphemous, and another sees it as sacred or a song of praise. Suarez: Although some readings are more correct than others. Komunyakaa: Or a combination thereof. Yes. Suarez: What’s the relationship between your poetry and that of the

Beats? When you mention shorter lines, are you thinking of Creeley? Komunyakaa: I’m thinking of Creeley. I’m thinking of Bob Kaufman, whom we usually don’t associate with the Beats, but we should. He was born in New Orleans, started reading poetry as a merchant marine, and then ended up in San Francisco in the middle of that movement. Jazz enters into his work, even to the extent that he named his son Parker; that’s pretty committed. He edited a magazine called Beatitude, which many people think is the etymological basis for the term Beat.

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Suarez: What in particular within Kaufman’s work appeals to you? Komunyakaa: Jazz and how his poems are imbued by surrealism; the quirky, ironic, satirical edge of his poems also appeals to me. The fact that he can go inside an off-the-wall idea and emerge tying it to existential metaphysics. His commitment was troubling and challenging—how he could remain silent for eleven years, till the Vietnam War was over, said a lot about the depth of this talented voice in American poetry. I find myself rereading his Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, The Ancient Rain, and Golden Sardine. Suarez: When did you start reading poetry? Komunyakaa: I read Edgar Allan Poe when I was about eight or

nine. The first poem I ever memorized was “Annabell Lee.” Then I memorized James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation” and started looking at the Harlem Renaissance poets, especially at Hughes, Helene Johnson, Anne Spencer, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen. They were writing about topics that touched me deeply. I realized that a lot of their poems were satirical. Their verses were about my own existence, how I saw myself as a black person in America. That leads me to James Baldwin. When I got to Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name, I was mesmerized. I think I read that book about twenty-five times. My fascination had a lot to do with what the book was about, of course, but it also had much to do with the picture of Baldwin, with how he looked, and I could identify with him. I loved reading Shakespeare, the mystery and clarity in language, but reading Baldwin, there was an urgency that touched my life. I embraced the image of Baldwin. Suarez: What was important about the “image of Baldwin” for you? Komunyakaa: He definitely did not possess the typical look of a celebrity who appeared on the covers of most magazines such as Life, Newsweek, Ebony, Tan, or Bronze. He looked like an everyday citizen of my community. At this time, I was still daydreaming about constructing a greenhouse, but also the attraction to language became noticeable, in part because I was reading Notes of a Native Son and Go Tell It on the Mountain. Suarez: What led you to the Harlem Renaissance poets?

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Komunyakaa: I remember what was called “Negro History Week,” which meant celebrating figures such as Marion Anderson, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, James Weldon Johnson, Frederick Douglass—all interesting historical figures. Out of one of those weeks came my introduction to the Harlem Renaissance, particularly Langston Hughes. Hughes talked about the blues, which reminds me of when I was three or four years old, standing behind the radio, trying to touch those lit tubes to see where music came from. I grew up hearing my mother and grandmothers humming in the background as they scrubbed floors and cooked butter beans and baked cornbread. I heard them singing “Precious Lord,” “Amazing Grace,” all of those songs. Even though I was too shy myself, I celebrated the singing by listening. I was transported by the power of language, by the simple majesty of metaphor and music in the human voice. Suarez: Many of the poets whom I’ve spoken with have pointed to the music of the churches—the white churches and the black churches—as contributing to the rhythms of their verse. Komunyakaa: Yes. Within black churches, there’s a choral response, a call and response; the minister stands there rendering a syncopated oration to “amen” that comes in chorus or individually from the congregation: “Amen,” “Tell it like it is.” A kind of dialogue echoes all the way back to Africa. I admire such participation. That’s what poetry’s about. Poetry invites. Poetry is celebration and confrontation. It takes us to the oral tradition. And just attempting to encapsulate action and stasis through imagery propels release—this is celebration. Confrontation has everything to do with the power of words and what they mean. This is probably why Plato wanted to banish the poet from his ideal republic when he was addressing Euripides. Poets trouble the waters now and then. I’m not so much interested in making a statement as in provoking a question in the reader or the listener; that’s the confrontation. I think many political poems fall short because they’re filled with empty antics and gestures. Gwendolyn Brooks says “art is that which endures.” I am drawn to poetry that consists of images rather than of statements. Suarez: Your poetry is nondidactic; it’s an imagistic poetry of emotional combustion.

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Komunyakaa: What I want for the reader or the listener entering the poem is to become a cocreator of meaning. I don’t want the poem to talk to the reader or the listener, but to establish a dialogue. Sometimes there’s a dialogue within the privacy of one’s psyche when we’re not told what to think, or how to think, but imagistically guided toward feelings that are already within our grasp. One doesn’t necessarily have to know what it means, but he or she does have to feel something. It’s like music. There can be an immense clarity through sheer feeling. The ability to feel humanizes us, and often the music of language provides the connective tissue linking a variety of feelings. Suarez: Are you saying that images can be suggestive of things that

can’t be expressed rationally through language? Komunyakaa: Yes, images suggest and nudge us. I would like to

create images with an urgency that inspires the willing reader to go the distance and become emotionally or psychologically involved in the possibilities. Everyone brings something different to a poem. Take a phrase out of a poem and ask ten people, “What does this mean? How do you relate to it?” And perhaps you’ll get eight different answers. Imagery makes the meaning elastic, amorphous as an organism attempting to deny or defy its design. Suarez: How did you come to this conception of the image? Komunyakaa: I was particularly taken with how poets internalized surrealism and modernism. Particularly, I’m thinking of García Lorca and a few others. Suarez: Southern poetry has largely been associated with the poetry of the Southern Renaissance, with the verse of Tate, Ransom, and Warren. Komunyakaa: For the most part, “the Fugitives,” those southern agrarians, attempted to erase people like me from their idea of history. However, I read Robert Penn Warren’s Promises early on, and there was something in those poems that I saw as different from the official “Fugitive” literary sentiment. They captured a sense of place that seems somewhat more inclusive than John Crowe Ransom and much of Allen Tate. I was quite taken with some of the poems in Promises. The book was so different. I was also drawn to other

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contemporary voices such as James Dickey, as well as those associated with the so-called post–Harlem Renaissance, such as Melvin Tolson and Frank Marshall Davis. Robert Hayden is also one of my favorite poets. I still admire his dedication to a poem. The influence of French symbolism and history on “The Diver,” “Middle Passage,” and “Runagate Runagate” taught me what poetry could be. One has the sense that he was apprehensive releasing each poem into the world. I am impressed by his willingness to refine his lines, how he wanted every word to count. Perhaps poetry becomes an obsession, an obsession to get it right. For me, even after the poems are published, I’m still revising. It’s an effort not necessarily to make the poem into a literary construction or a conceit, but to make it correspond to the music within one’s self. Suarez: You just used the phrase “the music within one’s self.”

What’s the relationship between that music, which I think in some ways translates into form, and the content of the poem? Komunyakaa: Content is shaped by the music. There’s always editing going on, an attempt to control the perception of content. Music is one means of control. Why one person writes a very long poem about a certain topic and another writes a short poem about the same thing often has to do with a difference in music. I notice that repetitions often elongate the telling into a narrative, and shorter poems invite a lyrical pulse beat—a flash of imagery that distills the buried emotions. Suarez: Is consciousness of the music necessary to the writing of poems? Komunyakaa: Yes. The music lures the genuine poet who couldn’t imagine any other profession. Before I went to Indiana University, I entertained the idea of becoming a cabinetmaker because I wanted to control my time so I could write. If I were a cabinetmaker, or a factory worker, I would still be writing poems. When I understood this, it contained an instructive sensation. I don’t know why we don’t have more carpenters or assembly-line workers who are poets. Suarez: Poems like Phil Levine’s, although it takes an immense talent to write like Phil. But I have a suspicion that more people write. . . .

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Komunyakaa: Than they let on? Suarez: Think of how often a kid in the back of the class wearing a baseball cap, a kid who looks like he is not into poetry at all, shows up one day and says, “Hey, could you read these poems I’ve written?” Komunyakaa: That’s right. But the boy or girl doesn’t want to lose

his or her projected cool. Poetry springs from somewhere inside us, the same way that music or painting does. Art constructs a physical and emotional dimension driven by the rhythm of the heart. We live within a series of cycles—years, months, days, and so on. There’s something within the music and sonic patterns of language that we become attuned to, that we respond to. For the painter this is sometimes visible in the brush strokes. Suarez: You mentioned Dickey’s collection Poems, 1957–1967 as being important to you. What did you take away from those poems? Komunyakaa: I was reading them for attention to detail, a sense of place, but also the precise naming of things. I was raised in the South. I knew those names, the nuances of language, and there’s a power in the poetry. In his work there exists a surrealism or magical realism through circumstance in how things collide within his vivid depiction. The “Sheep Child” is birthed out of folklore and the imagination of rural people—moments of gothic modernism, perhaps more akin to Poe than Faulkner’s lush realism. “The Heaven of Animals” is one of my favorite poems by an American poet, but by all accounts I feel that I wouldn’t have liked the author, that we would have walked a path around each other or had a fistfight, even though that’s not my temperament. And of course, in Buckdancer’s Choice, I am aware of some stereotypical tropes and strokes on Dickey’s canvas. I was familiar with his territory, although I approached it differently. I grew up with the idea of hard work and a close relationship to the soil, dipping one’s hands into the earth. When I say hard work, I mean really hard work. I think about putting in miles of fence posts and that seems pretty relaxing compared to cutting pulpwood all day, picking up the crosscut, going into the woods at 5:00 in the morning and coming out past sundown. As a teenager, that was my summer job. It was very instructive. It taught me a lot about the body and what it could do; it also taught me to listen because, penetrating the woods, I listened to the singing of

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birds, the call of frogs, of insects, everything alive. There was a music deep in the forest that had everything to do with human existence; it linked me to the past and brought me to my ancestors, to hard work. I think it had a lot to do with my father, with his emphasis on the sacredness of labor. To him it was salvation. I began to question how much emphasis had been placed on work, and if he were speaking his own words. My father worked twelve to fourteen hours a day. But I knew rich people who didn’t seem to work at all. They had wealth and, as a matter of fact, even made money from my dad’s backbreaking work. I began to ponder these things, but at the same time, I didn’t want to second-guess my father or defy him. This was when I was about twelve years old, and I began to consider his life as a carpenter. Before that he worked at the sawmill. The first image of him I have is pulling a long steel cable that he hooked to logs. The logs were lifted into the air and then placed on the conveyer belt that ran up to the saws. I knew who actually cut the logs and brought the logs there. I thought about the boxcars that hauled the lumber away and where they were headed. I daydreamed myself away from Bogalusa. I began to envision Japan, Mexico, France. In my mind I took a barge and traveled to distant lands. Suarez: How does this relate to your poetry? Komunyakaa: This was the beginning of a dialogue within myself,

and perhaps that’s what poetry’s about. It raises questions. These events initiated a philosophical process which served as a conduit toward poetry. Poems aren’t truth set in stone, but at least there is an approximation of truths. We take the risk of witnessing. Human dreams are shaped by the screams and laughter in the imagination. Suarez: When did you start writing poetry? Komunyakaa: I wrote my first poem in high school. I raised my

hand. I thought I could write a poem for my graduating class. And then I almost slapped my hands over my mouth, thinking, “What did I say?” I agonized over this for about two weeks. I had been reading Tennyson. I had memorized passages from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and a few of his 154 sonnets. I still had never written a poem. I loved Langston Hughes but never dreamt of doing what he did with such finesse. So I volunteered for something that scared me. And finally, I just nailed myself to the chair and wrote a hundred

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lines of traditional-sounding poetry. I didn’t write poetry again for a long time. I kept reading. I took two poetry anthologies to Vietnam. Suarez: Do you remember which anthologies? Komunyakaa: Hayden Carruth’s The Voices Great within Us and Don-

ald Allen’s Contemporary American Poetry. I remember those anthologies as different from each other, but including some of the same poets. I took my first writing workshop in 1973 at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs with Dr. Alex Blackburn. He had been in England for fourteen years before arriving in Colorado Springs, where he taught a poetry workshop. I began writing there, and I’ve been writing ever since. I was a graduate student first at Colorado State University, where I completed an M.A., and then I went to Irvine in southern California in August and later received an M.F.A. in 1980. Suarez: When did you start writing the poems that appear in your

first book? Komunyakaa: Some of those poems in Lost in the Bonewheel Factory

were written before I was a graduate student. Suarez: You studied with Charles Wright. Komunyakaa: It was an interesting experience. For the most part,

Charles was forthright in his ideas about poetry and aesthetics, but he could also appear guarded in his response to poems by someone else. I had come there having read everything of his, such as Grave of the Right Hand and Dream Animals. I thought it was an entirely different voice from anyone’s. It didn’t even seem like an American voice. Perhaps the act of translating Eugenio Montale and Dino Campana also shaped the imagistic and musical presence in his work. Suarez: Both of you are very visual poets. Do you see any connection? Komunyakaa: There was a certain visual feel to my work early on because at one time I wanted to be a painter. Finally, I started to use a different material—language—to accomplish that. It was language of what I saw. Images are important to me. They are part of my thinking process. I think in images. At one time, I threw myself into the ocean of western philosophy—Kant, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hegel,

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Hobbes, and so forth. When I started thinking about philosophical paradigms and elaborate treatises, I began to see discourse in images, because much of the language is very abstract. I tried not to reduce the abstraction to images, but maybe heighten the language from abstraction to images. This enabled me to comprehend the philosophical precepts more thoroughly. So, yes, from the onset, I was drawn to Wright’s engaging patterns of images. Suarez: You wanted to somehow make the philosophical concrete,

or at least linguistically concrete, while retaining the suggestiveness that an image or an abstraction possesses? Komunyakaa: Yes, I think I had done that early on because I was so attracted to the language of the Old Testament. Lately, I’ve seen the Old Testament as a surreal text. Of course, elements of the fantastic also exist in mythology. Images dovetail until the psyche itself becomes a chimera. Maybe there’s a biblical magical realism when history collides with the imagination and mystery. Suarez: You’ve recorded a CD recently. What inspired you to do so? Komunyakaa: When Tony Getsug of 8th Harmonic Breakdown asked me to participate in his dream of bringing poetry and jazz together, I was momentarily excited. But then I thought about some of the failures from the 1950s, in particular a few of Kerouac’s attempts, and I hesitated. However, meditating on the possibility, especially when Tony mentioned John Tchicai and his ensemble, the idea came back to life. It was a pleasure to perform with John and the others at the Chopin Theater in September of 1997. This experience confirmed that there has to be rapport, and the poet has to respect the music just as musicians must respect the language of poetry. Everyone should surprise each other. Suarez: What are your current endeavors? Komunyakaa: I have the desire to let my poetry inform various works in progress—a libretto, plays, novels. When it comes to dialogue, I am not that interested in realistic scenarios. I’m more attuned to the idea that today’s streets are one huge theater. Every sidewalk is an elongated catwalk, an extended metaphor. I want to create characters in that real time and also outside the constraints of it. I believe that the most impressionable playwrights such as Beckett

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and Tennessee Williams remain close to poetry. A Streetcar Named Desire, Krapp’s Last Tape, or Waiting for Godot come to mind. I want to write plays that are tonal excursions, that propel us to the heart of possibility. I love good imagistic fiction. A lot of the fiction falls into the so-called canon, but also I like fiction such as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, José Saramago’s Blindness, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Paradise, or even an experimental short novel like H.D.’s Paint It Today. Suarez: What can we look forward to as far as new works? Komunyakaa: At this moment, because I want to challenge myself in order to grow, I am writing in several different genres. Short plays—“Goat” and “The Ending of a Mystery Novel.” Also, I look forward to the release of another CD, Thirteen Kinds of Desire, which is a collaboration with Pamela Knowles, who is an American jazz singer based in Australia. I wrote thirteen lyrics for her in 1995. The section entitled “Testimony” in my collection Thieves of Paradise was written for ABC in Sydney, Australia, where Sandy Evans has composed some spellbinding compositions into a ninety-minute work. It employs thirty musicians, eleven singers, and one actor. This piece is an attempt to lyrically portray Charlie Parker. Having recently compiled “Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems,” to be published by Wesleyan in 2000, I can now move on to other collections of poetry. “Talking Dirty to the Gods” is a volume of sixteen-line poems composed of four quatrains which explore a myriad of small, everyday phenomena that we tend to overlook, including the mythic, godlike personae who we often find ourselves submitting to. I am finishing a book-length poem entitled “The Autobiography of My Alter Ego.” The character, a white American Vietnam vet who happens to be a bartender, talks about his many observations, and in the process he spills a number of disquieting secrets that inhabit his psyche. When this veteran returns from the war, he rides Greyhounds and Trailways crisscrossing the country. It’s almost like he really doesn’t want to arrive. While he remains in this kind of limbo, he reads constantly. The bus becomes his university, and he’s exposed to the Odyssey, Greek stories, and Blake. He speaks out of a severe need, so he witnesses on behalf of his inner being, and this allows him to talk about things that many Americans usually avoid.

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What results is a lyrical confrontation, not so much with the reader, but within this character. He attempts to bring all the fractured parts of himself together, to make himself whole again. The only way he can accomplish this is to be forthright, and I allow him this privilege.

To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version of this work.

Betty Adcock

B E T T Y A D C O C K ’ S poetry presents a world that is simultaneously realistic and mythic, a fact that she attributes largely to having spent her childhood and adolescence in rural eastern Texas. Born in 1939 and raised in San Augustine, Adcock left the region at age eighteen and gradually embarked on a self-charted quest to become a poet. But her years in deep east Texas furnished her with material that she continues to explore. Adcock’s poetry displays a profound reverence for the untamed natural world and the intimacy of isolated rural communities. Largely self-educated, she was drawn early to Robinson Jeffers’s and James Dickey’s emphasis on the enduring qualities of nature, as well as to their use of narrative. Her family history, particularly the deaths of her mother when she was five and 144

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of her father in a hunting accident, provides a constant in Adcock’s work. Adcock’s poetry is devoted to the search for and the creation of meaning, while recognizing the limitations of that search. She has for the most part remained outside academic literary circles and has not followed the path taken by many other recent women poets, whose work centers on the politics of gender. She teaches at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. This interview was conducted on May 20–21, 1997, in Raleigh. Suarez: Like memory, poetry is a process of selecting and arranging experience. Describe the relationship between the imaginative and the autobiographical in your work. Adcock: I write more than one kind of poem. I write poems that draw very heavily on autobiography, and I also write poems that depart from that. Every poet draws on the autobiographical. I remember saying to a teacher once that I can’t make anything up because everything happens. This is true. I came from a very strange place in the world. My rural hometown and deep east Texas are very strange. There’s a wonderful photographer named Keith Carter who’s done two incredible books on the area. The first was called The Blue Man because there was a man who was blue. You couldn’t make up myths because they were all around you. The man was actually blue! I know no one believes this. Keith Carter didn’t believe it at first. The place was still like the nineteenth century when I was growing up. I remember ice being delivered for iceboxes; I’m not old enough to remember such things, but I do. I remember cranking the telephone and the operator saying, “Number please.” Progress missed my hometown for such a very long time. It still misses it. As recently as 1990, you couldn’t get Federal Express overnight there; it just couldn’t be done. Two days was the fastest you could get anything to that town, no matter how important! Suarez: One of your most recent poems, “Intervale,” attempts to

grasp your mother’s early life. Describe the relationship between that attempt and the poem’s form. Adcock: The poem is a product of two kinds of research. I really didn’t know my mother’s people or anything about her until I was grown. She was spoken of to me in generalities. My father was a

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very quiet man and didn’t speak much at all. He spent all his time in the woods hunting, which is one reason I respond so well to Jim Dickey’s poetry. I know what he’s talking about. But I set out and used part of an NEA grant (the first grant money I ever had) to go to Texas and look up every one of my mother’s seven surviving siblings, some of whom I had never met. I discovered that she was a singer of sacred harp music, and then I started to research that. So two kinds of research helped produce the poem. One was this very personal family search, and the other was research into the nature of the music, which I became fascinated by. It’s very difficult music; it utilizes a unique harmony and often sophisticated English poetry, but it’s uniquely American, and yet somehow lost to us. It seemed a perfect metaphorical handle for me to get hold of my mother. Peter Makuck, a poet friend of mine who taught literature in France, says the poem is like a roman comme recherche, meaning a circling around the subject, often characterized by an emptiness resulting from an attempt to exorcise or resurrect a subject. The attempt fails in that effort but succeeds as art. It is very flattering, of course, to have Peter characterize the poem in that way. “Intervale” circles around an emptiness in a doomed attempt at resurrection. In a sense that matches the fugal form of the music I’ve used as a handle to grasp my mother’s early life. I worked on the poem for ten years. I’ll start something very ambitious, and it’ll inch along. I read and read and work on poems in spurts over time. Then eventually it happens. It’s a matter of form and structure. I’m not someone who decides these things very well in advance. I ended up with a very clear plan, a clear architecture, but I had to find it. I had to write my way into it, which meant lots of drafts that I threw away, a lot of beginning drafts that never took off but provided ways of starting. I had to decide whether to use the voices in the beginning and whether to use the music in a stronger sense. Someone even suggested that perhaps the poem ought to be split into two poems: one about my mother and one about the music. I didn’t want to do that. Finding a way to integrate these things was hard for me. I originally wanted to make the poem mirror the form of sacred harp music. I wanted it to be a fugue. But I couldn’t do that. There was no way to do that. It doesn’t get done; that’s a musical form. So I ended with compromise. “Intervale” is a fourteen-page poem; for me that’s very long. Long poems just take a lot of time.

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Suarez: Like other poems you’ve written about your mother, “Intervale” also seems to involve a search for your own identity. The opening poem of your first book, Walking Out, starts with an epigraph from Anne Sexton: “A woman is her mother; that’s the main thing.” Have the dynamics of this exploration changed over the years? Adcock: Yes, I think so. With that first poem, there is a sense simply

of emptiness, of knocking and not being answered. Loss, vacancy, that’s what the early poems about my mother focus on: her not being there. That absence was the large hole in my life. Later, I learned that my mother had been something of a poet herself, that certainly she had loved poetry and had taught it with the kind of understanding that is rare in people in tiny towns in deep east Texas. Had I known her there would have been this commonality between us aside entirely from the fact that we were mother and daughter. I discovered this when I was about twenty-two. I was already writing seriously, as seriously as I could at that age. All I knew before was that she had been an English teacher. The later poems have more positive connotations. There’s an attempt to talk not only about the absence but about the presence of my mother in the world. The inability to get to it, but the fact that she was there, spurs an attempt to create the context in which she existed, a context in which I could also find myself because it touched on poetry, it touched on praise. It touched on all the things that sacred harp music came to symbolize for me, so I think there’s a change in the dynamics. I shouldn’t say this, but I don’t think I’ll ever write another poem about my mother. I think this is it. This is her poem; this is the poem I made for her. Suarez: The extended form probably contributed to your ability to flesh out more of those things. Adcock: Absolutely. I could use the music to fill in what I didn’t

know—to imagine her, to find a backdrop to imagine her against. The voices—that italicized section—are almost verbatim what was said to me. I didn’t have to do much to set it into workable lines because sometimes people speak almost in poetry. But I almost didn’t use that material. Then after reading Robert Penn Warren’s “Pure and Impure Poetry” I realized I wanted that impurity. I wanted those country voices.

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Suarez: “To My Father, Killed in a Hunting Accident” is a striking poem. In that poem you re-create his death and assert, “I have nothing to give you but this: guesswork and care.” Is that any different from the poems in which you deal with your mother? Adcock: Not really, except that I knew my father and I didn’t know my mother. I had to guess at him too because how well do we ever know our fathers? I had to guess at his death. I knew how he died. Attempting to imagine what it must have been like in the last moments, and that sort of thing, was very hard for me. That was a poem I also had to write and one that also took me a long time, though it’s not a very long poem. Interestingly enough, in my first book there’s a poem called “The Sixth Day,” which was written long before my father died. It almost prefigures his death, calling the hunting that he loved so much “the dream that kills, that keeps.” It took me aback, the connection between these two poems. But I suppose every poet writes about the deaths of his or her parents. In my case, the deaths were maybe a little more unusual. Suarez: You often seek out realistic details. Adcock: I have to know how things look and how they feel. James Dickey and I had a conversation once in which he said, “The poet makes the reality,” and I said, “The poet finds the poem.” Perhaps both, of course, but I tended to believe that if I went looking, the poem would just be lying there. For me, it is. Not that I don’t have to work very hard to chisel it out of whatever it’s embedded in. But, as William Stafford said, the world will give and give. Perhaps it’s necessary for some poets to feel that they do it all, but I don’t think I do it all. I really don’t. I wish I could; I could write like James Dickey if I did. Suarez: Has your southern background affected the ways you deal with family in your poems? Adcock: Well, we’re all stuck with our families, aren’t we? Especially down here. Family was everything where I came from. My family had been there forever. I’m a seventh-generation Texan, and there are not very many of those. We were there in 1820. In the same spot. The first six years of my life I lived in a house that had belonged to my great-grandfather. These are very old connections, and people

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were always trotting out the past. You were always being told you look like so-and-so, you laugh like so-and-so. When you got married, you married someone who was like so-and-so’s husband. There was never anything original. You were always just continuing something; you were always just an extension of something. Of course I rebelled against this, as every young person does, and certainly every poet does. When I first began to write, my whole idea was not to be a southern poet and not to write “like a woman.” I thought, “I’m not going to be southern, I’m going to be universal.” There are poems in my first book that are obviously trying on Robert Bly’s deep image. There are poems that are trying on any number of things, but then there are also poems like “Southbound” which show a very definite understanding of what my material is. I finally had to recognize what I had to say and what I had to write with. I hope my poetry goes further than my particulars, but you have to start with your material, what’s natural in your hands. Suarez: When I interviewed Terry Hummer he said that at first he didn’t want to be a “southern poet,” but that one of the great things that Dave Smith did for him was tell him that he had no choice. These were his givens. What are your givens? Adcock: For me the givens are a kind of wildness, a sense of the wilderness, because of where my South was. My South was not Atlanta, not by a long shot. There had to be, in whatever poetry I wrote, room for that sense of wilderness, encroaching wilderness, that sense of the fragility of the civilized and of the violence always hanging in the air. That was a given. Another given was a built-in cadence because I memorized so much of the Bible in Sunday school. I loved all of that; I didn’t care about anything but the sound of it. The sound of it was wonderful. There’s also the sense of family, the good and the bad. I wanted to escape east Texas fast, and I did. I was married at eighteen. I was trying to find a way out of Texas. Just as Terry wanted to escape. You have to get out before you can get back. You can’t see it as long as you’re there. I obviously could not have lived there or stayed there. I have a poem in my last book about having made that choice and about the fact that there’s always a trade-off. You lose something. I have a tremendous respect for people who till the soil, who can vegetables and make jelly, who do these things that I saw all around me. I would have been utterly dreadful

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at living that life. Terrible. But part of me thinks that’s what I should have done, and part of me misses it. Every now and then I get this notion to go and buy a farm in east Texas—leave North Carolina and go back. I almost do. But we don’t. Those are all givens, I guess. Suarez: To what extent are those givens broad enough that you feel a shared sense of community with other southern poets? Adcock: My family contained both kinds of southerner. There’s the southerner who came usually from Virginia, Tennessee, or North Carolina with money, slaves, and settled in very early Texas and amassed a great deal of land and did very well. Then there’s my mother’s family. They were Irish immigrants who came over after the Civil War and settled in east Texas. My mother’s grandmother was half Indian; these were very poor people. There were nine children in my mother’s family—she was the oldest. They lived on a fifty-acre farm. I have connection with two kinds of lives, and that’s been very important to me. I seem to need everything double. I need opposites. I do feel a connection with southern poets—men and women— simply because we do share this family, we do have givens that are alike. Even though east Texas is different from the deep South in a lot of ways, it is also the same in a great many ways. I have the same guilt. My ancestors did own slaves. I have the same problem with dealing with the black experience as I knew it. A question that’s becoming increasingly important for me right now is that when looking at history how much moral censure do we bring upon people who are not ourselves and not from our time? How do we confront those more recent ones who gave us birth and whose being we carry on, and whom we love? How do we judge their racism of the thirties, forties, fifties, and on up to the present? A reckoning must take place, a true reckoning, not an evocation of stereotypes. This has not yet been done by white southern poets. Not to mention white northern poets who might need to confront their own families, their own past. How do we do this? Will we, can we, do it? There are a great many difficulties here. I share those difficulties with every other southern poet. I share an interest in landscape and land that is perhaps missing in a lot of urban poetry. There are Atlanta poets who don’t have much in common with me, southern poets writing out of an urban experience that could be anywhere. I probably have more in common with, say, William Stafford, who’s not from the South, than I would

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with some urban poets who are, because I think that poets of a rural background have a different approach to poetry and to the world, really. But I read and treasure many kinds of poetry, including the work of urban poets. Suarez: Do you care for the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets? Adcock: No. Absolutely not! I have no idea what this is about. I believe in meaning. And clarity is useful! I see very, very gifted poets, like Jorie Graham, whose work has reached the point where I can no longer read it because I don’t understand it. I can’t read some kinds of poetry. But there are many, many poets whose work I like and whose work is very different from mine. I hope we wouldn’t be separated too much into male and female. I mean, you never hear the term men poets. People say he’s a poet; not he’s a man poet. But there’s the term woman poet. It’s always the same: “southern woman poet.” I wish there were a way not to have these categories, but, of course, there isn’t. Suarez: Such terms should be used in a much looser way, so that it’s not automatically regarded as a point of ideological demarcation. People are too complex. Adcock: That’s right. I’ve often tried to figure out why for such a long time there weren’t many southern poets who were women. Suarez: In fiction, there’s a great deal of achievement. Adcock: In the novel, the achievement is tremendous. In short sto-

ries, southern women were everywhere, winning the game. It’s puzzled me. I think there is a clear reason why they have been absent, until recently, in poetry, but I just haven’t found it. They also were not in academia. The poets were; that may have made a difference. Academia was fairly closed to women at the time, and that’s where poetry was growing, at Vanderbilt for instance. Laura Riding was writing poetry and knew the Vanderbilt group. But not many English departments had women professors, and so they were not part of academic groups. That may be a partial explanation. But southern women wrote extraordinary fiction. Suarez: You have resisted categorizing yourself. Today, many writers tend to identify themselves with a cause or movement. I was

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struck with your poem “To a Young Feminist Who Wants to Be Free.” Can you talk about that poem in this context? Adcock: There was a young, radical feminist in an English department in this city. She was sitting on my living room floor. She said, “Well, I don’t have to feel any guilt about slavery or about the horrors done to black people because my ancestors came over here with nothing but a potato in their pocket, and didn’t come until after all that was over, so I’m not part of it. I have my cause which is a different one, which is the cause of women.” My sense was that she was saying to me, “You have to take on that one, and I get to have this one.” I didn’t care for that approach at all. I thought a long time about that. The quotes in the poem are exactly what she said. It seemed to me that we are all responsible for everything. I don’t think the South is solely responsible for the racial situation in this country. My response was defensive to a certain extent, but it was also, “Look, I don’t want to be defined by any of this. We’re all in this boat together, like it or not.” It was a poem that took a long time to write. It was hard to write. Unless you’re Robert Frost, conversation is hard to get into poetry. Hosey: As in the poems about your mother, many of your poems

give a sense that there’s something missing. Do you see this search for whatever is missing in the world as a catalyst for poetry? Adcock: Yes. I think about what John Crowe Ransom said to me about James Dickey. When I was a very young poet I asked him what he thought of James Dickey because I was at that time awaiting eagerly for every Dickey poem that came out. Mr. Ransom said, “Mr. Dickey is a man who reaches often for God. And sometimes God reaches back.” I loved that. I don’t think I ever saw it in print, but he did say this to me at a party. I think most poets reach for God in some way. These days there perhaps are more poets who don’t. They may be reaching for cyberspace. Maybe that’s the next God. But I do think there is always something missing. Sacred harp music embodied that for me very well. You see, the triad is the traditional chord structure of western music, but in sacred harp singing, the middle tone of that triad is often missing, leaving an “open fifth” and a very stark effect. One of the lines in my poem about my mother and that music reads: “The sound of the missing, which is God’s.” I

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meant that two ways; it’s the sound of the missing God, and it’s also the sound of the missing, the dead, who belong to God. Probably my mother being missing is the key to this in my work, in some psychoanalytical sense. I think a sense of the missing opens out and becomes valid as another sort of search. Meaning is what poets are looking for and/or making, despite what our friends in the critical establishment, Mr. Derrida and the rest of them, would say about the endeavor. Hosey: In “Prophecy” you wrote, “Nothing has changed, really, we

whisper, / though all we trumpet is the changing stir.” And you end the poem “After Geology, After Biology” with “Now let us pray,” as if expressing the limits of any type of explanation of the world, of the world’s mystery. How is poetry limited in its attempt to explain? Adcock: Things stay as they are, but poets have to go further to get to what they’re reaching for. Maybe we can’t do it. In that poem the teacher is attempting to explain the majesty of the world’s mysteries without the creationism that we learned in Sunday school. The teacher focuses on the world of evolution and so on. But the kind of movement and upheaval that the individual person is going through now is one in which a person’s entire life is a motion where families are scattered, resources are scattered, and there’s the sense of “noplaceness.” The sense of moving at tremendous velocities with no destination is frightening. “Now let us pray” is a humorous way of saying that the modern condition is enough to make us go back to the old explanations. Hosey: Your poetry often searches for meaning in the natural world. Much of Robert Penn Warren’s poetry engages in that same kind of search. What are Warren’s influences on your poetry? Adcock: I didn’t discover Warren until I had been writing a long

time. I think it might even have been after my first book. I didn’t discover him as a poet. I knew his novels. My reading was unusual because I had very limited formal schooling. I read what I found. Somehow Tate and Ransom didn’t particularly connect with me, although there are poems of Tate’s like “The Swimmers” and many others I return to. Ransom was much too tight and fine. I like expansiveness. I like lushness, which is exactly what Warren had. When I found him, it was wonderful. I think Audubon is one of the great,

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great poems of all time. I love the poem. I love almost everything he did. He must have been an influence on me because I felt such a tremendous connection to him, but not early on because I didn’t know his poetry. Of course, he influenced so many people. I was influenced by Jim Dickey, who was influenced by Warren. It’s all a river. You just jump in. Hosey: Could you comment on the poem “Lines on a Poet’s Face”? Adcock: The poem is my homage to Warren. I met him at a reading at North Carolina State University, and his face was the most unbelievable map: lines and crevices and character. A wonderful, wonderful face. I particularly noticed these deep pockets under the eyes, and the big ears. I conceived of his face as a landscape. I wrote him about it to ask permission to use the lines from his poems that occur in my poem. He sent me a lovely little card saying that he couldn’t imagine anybody writing a poem on this subject, but by all means go right ahead. That was my one communication with him. Hosey: Robinson Jeffers’s poetry also influenced your work. Adcock: Jeffers was my poet. I breathed Jeffers in. I read everything that was ever written by him, read everything that’d ever been written about him. I wrote a hundred-page paper on his sources. Jeffers found enough meaning in the natural world. For Jeffers, the natural world was God. The world’s body was God’s body, and that was enough. That was never enough for Warren. He lashed out at it continually for not giving up a more human meaning to him. I would love to do a comparison between those two poets. I think they were on a similar track, and yet they were not. . . . In his essay on Jeffers, Dickey declares that Jeffers must be contended with. This figure’s too large to ignore, he says. Jeffers’s reputation was in the cellar for so long, largely due to Yvor Winters, which is one among many reasons I don’t like Winters. I talked with one very well known southern poet who said, “Who’s Robinson Jeffers?” I talked to another who said, “He was that Nazi, wasn’t he?” The depth of misunderstanding was just unbelievable. I don’t believe I’d have ever found Jeffers had I stayed in school. At the time I was in school, he wasn’t studied. I was actually told once—by a professor— that I couldn’t write a paper on Jeffers because “nobody reads him.” I found this poet, and had the sense that “this is my poet and nobody

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else really seems to know anything about him.” After a couple of decades, his reputation has begun to come back and he’s being seen as an important poet. I don’t know if other people will ever see him as the great poet that I think he is. He wrote some absolutely dreadful poetry, and some magnificent poetry. The point is how much do you try for. If Jeffers failed, it’s not because he didn’t try for something. If you stay with this little tiny thing, then you haven’t got very much, even if you succeed. Hosey: Who are the other poets with whom you feel a kinship? Adcock: Lots of them. They change and they come back and go away. Chronologically, I’d have to start with Keats, whose poems I discovered when I was about ten or eleven years old. The poems were very exciting and wonderful and totally incomprehensible, of course. I read them in a marvelous old leather-bound edition that had belonged to my great-grandfather. That was important to me. I sensed something particularly fine here, but without knowing anything about it. Later I remember discovering Carl Sandburg in the back of my eighth-grade reading book. In those days they had things called reading books that were full of short stories and pieces of novels. In the back there were the extra readings, lots of poems and other things. Sandburg’s “Chicago” was back there. I thought it the most marvelous thing I’d ever seen because it addressed something from my own time in ordinary language. I could understand the city of the big shoulders and so on. That was important to me. I was just a kid, but those things matter. I’ve always had a soft spot for Sandburg. I’m aware that his reputation is not strong, but that doesn’t really matter to me. In high school I discovered Dylan Thomas and D. H. Lawrence, and in college, Gerard Manley Hopkins. They were very important figures for me. I immersed myself in their language. I didn’t always understand much that was going on, but I loved the way it sounded, a little like the biblical passages I had memorized as a kid. I didn’t much care what they meant since they sounded so good. Yeats was important to me for a different reason. I found him later on; it was for a kind of stark thing he did. Thomas Hardy was a surprise to me. I didn’t expect to love his poetry, but I do. Frost, particularly the harsher poems. William Stafford was important to me—the hard mystery in Stafford’s works, dark mystery, something that people don’t often think of because he was such a kind, tranquil

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person. People don’t realize that his poetry, like Frost’s, is actually very harsh. Wilbur and Nemerov are both poets I have gone to again and again. And Roethke for language, alive with longing. I read everything he wrote and fell in love with the emotion. Fred Chappell wrote a wonderful series of books, Midquest, which have mattered a great deal to me. Here was poetry about a neglected and sad rural corner of the world, but what fire and elegance were made of that material. James Dickey was important to me for many reasons. His poems gave me permission to write about the South I knew. I loved the density of his language, the hypnotic grip of some of the poems, the extremes. I felt close to much (not all!) of his poetry, especially the early work, which carried the details of land and people, junkyards and animals, small deaths and large ones, and biblical renewal and praise. As Adrienne Rich’s earlier works like Diving into the Wreck gave women permission to write about concerns and subjects that had not been seen as good enough or important enough to make into poetry—and I benefited much from that permission as well—so James Dickey made it okay to include the roadside quilt, the grassblade harp, the deer in the pasture, and the glass jar at the freak show. The circle of contemporary poets from whom I have learned is large and contains more variety than might seem to be useful. I always did want everything—formal poems and free verse, message and lullaby, Whitman and Dickinson. I feel very close to Mary Oliver’s work because of her connection with the natural world. She’s almost a pure lyric poet. I discovered her work because Jim Dickey pointed it out to me. Dickey also pointed out Adrien Stoutenburg to me. She is absolutely brilliant. She died in ’64, and she was a wonderful poet; it was marvelous to find the work of two women that I connected with so strongly. There’s more than one thing to love. I don’t really understand what I do well enough to compartmentalize it. I wrote something down here that I would like to quote: Szymborska, the Polish woman who just won a Nobel Prize, has a little poem called “Some Like Poetry.” The last stanza reads, But what sort of thing is poetry? More than one shaky answer has been given to that question. But I do not know. And I do not know. And clutch onto it as to a saving banister.

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I love that. “I do not know. And I do not know.” Dave Smith says that he can’t really map out exactly what it is he’s doing or analyze it that carefully. I can’t either. Writing verses, words, has always been my way of being in the world. Suarez: You mentioned that Jeffers locates his God within the natural world. Warren is a self-described yearner who wants that something more. Where do you fit? Adcock: Some of each, I think. There are times when Jeffers’s vision seems so exactly right, and I write poems that very often reflect that. I don’t think people see it that much because I don’t write like Jeffers; it’s not a stylistic influence. It’s very hard to do that; you wouldn’t want to. I only want one Robinson Jeffers, with the ten-stress line, although I think C. K. Williams writes a line that’s based on it, though his content is much different from Jeffers’s. “Digression on the Nuclear Age” and “The Farm” definitely reflect Jeffers’s influence. Many of my poems attempt to confront, as directly as possible, what human beings really are; it’s not really pretty. Jeffers possessed a dark vision. That’s the thing Dickey criticized him for, that he didn’t live in the social house, he didn’t love people. I always thought Jeffers was right. On the other hand, Jeffers never would have written about many of the kinds of things that have interested me. I sometimes do satire and, occasionally, little funny things. There’s a place for many different kinds of poetry. Hosey: Many of your poems seem to value an earlier, simpler way

of life. When technology makes its way into your poetry, the poem seems to express some kind of problematic relationship between technology and progress. Adcock: I don’t like technology very much, although I use it. I just had an artificial knee put in, and I’m awfully glad they could do it because I can walk. So there’s technology and then there’s technology. I have to be really careful about this “simpler time.” I actually wrote a poem about that in Nettles called “The Farm.” “The Farm” is a warning to me not to kid myself that there was an idyllic world. The calf died; the child died; the man cut his leg off with his ax. The world was nasty and brutish. Life was short. But we are reaching a kind of overkill in the amount of harm we can do with our technology. Not just to ourselves, but to everything

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that lives. This is one of the things that drew me to Jeffers, his early understanding of what we were doing to the environment. His ecological consciousness in the twenties and thirties was totally ignored by the critics. Yet I don’t believe in idealizing. For example, there’s a tendency today to create a notion of Native American life that’s somehow idyllic and somehow more perfect. What that life really had was limits, and limits are a good thing. We’re losing sight of limits. It’s happening in literary criticism as well. These things are all tied together in my mind. I don’t know exactly how. But I don’t want to be seen, ever, as someone who is saying, if we could only go back, it would be wonderful. It wouldn’t be. It would be awful. But it might not be as awful as where we’re heading, if we don’t change. I remember Warren saying it was terrible to have to defend conventional warfare. That was at the time when the threat of nuclear warfare was everywhere. Those are the insoluble questions that poetry is able to encompass, if the poet has the talent. Wasn’t it Auden who said poetry is “the clear expression of mixed feelings”? Technology or no technology? I have mixed feelings. I hope they are clearly expressed. Hosey: Do you see any consistent philosophy emerging from your

work? Adcock: Consistent philosophy. It’s the adjective that’s a problem.

I really don’t, but my concerns cohere around certain issues. If you read Jeffers with a great deal of care, and I am aware of how hard that is to do because he wrote so much, you discover that he too had mixed feelings. That tension makes his work so powerful. That tension. I don’t know how you pronounce the Latin, but Catullus said odi et amo, “Loving thee I hate.” I think that’s exactly Jeffers’s approach to human beings. He was furious with humanity for being so solipsistic and for being unable to, as he said, fall in love outward with the larger world. I think that prescription still holds. I don’t think it would hurt us one bit to fall in love outward right now. My poems have a message, but it’s never dogmatic or ideologically predictable. Never. Someone has said that my last book is a bunch of sermons. I don’t see it that way. Hosey: Many contemporary poets have drawn on the relationship

between humans and animals as a source of their poetry.

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Adcock: People and animals are part of the fabric of the interwoven whole. As I said, my father was a hunter. We ate wild game as often as anything else. I grew up eating squirrels, rabbits, deer, pheasant— everything except possum! It was part of life. We weren’t that far, in that part of the world, from a time when my great-grandfather had hung bear meat in the smokehouse. There was still a sense that this was a living necessity. We didn’t go to the supermarket and buy everything already packaged. There was no supermarket where I was growing up. If you had chicken for dinner you had to kill the chicken. Everything was very immediate and real—death was real; birth was real; life was real; it was all there. There were no hospitals between you and it. I was with my grandfather on his deathbed. I saw animals born; I saw animals die; I saw hogs killed. For me that’s not brutality but a connection. We have a lot of very sweet souls today who are into New Age. They would never kill a living thing, but they haven’t thought about it real hard. It’s not the fact of the killing. I disapprove of the kind of hunting that often goes on now, in which it’s just a sport; it doesn’t mean anything. But once there was a tie between the animal’s living and your living. If the animal didn’t live, you didn’t live. If the animal didn’t continue to reproduce, you didn’t do well. The cow that lived with your family had a name. The dog was terribly important. Some people have said that dogs in east Texas had the same function that horses did in west Texas, which is really true. The hunting dog was of tremendous importance. My father had maybe eighteen foxhounds and a bunch of deerhounds and a lot of bird dogs, too. The dogs did a lot of work. Foxhunting of course was pure sport, but the hunters didn’t intend to catch the fox, and I’ve written about that. The whole idea was to chase the fox again another time. The whole idea was the music of the dogs, what the dogs could say, and how it could be interpreted by the guys sitting around the campfire maybe drinking moonshine. My father was really into that; so was my grandfather. I couldn’t help making the connections my poems make. My father was always bringing me little animals. Baby possums. Once he brought me an albino skunk, a very strange little thing. We had a pet raccoon and pet songbirds. And not because we were on a hardscrabble farm. We weren’t, but everything that was grown on our land was used. That was a context that I couldn’t help learning from.

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Suarez: Like the work of Jeffers, Warren, Dickey, and other poets you’ve mentioned, your poetry often engages the natural world. But there’s a difference in your sensibility and theirs. There are many more interior landscapes in your poetry. Can you comment on that difference? Adcock: A woman is going to have more interiors. We tend to be

more likely to write out of these. I never wanted to be a separatist in the sense that Adrienne Rich and others have thought of this. I’ve never wanted to say this is women’s poetry and this is men’s poetry. On the other hand, I also know that when I write about a subject that men have written about, it’s my take. I don’t question this. I don’t sit around and worry about whether I’m being female or not, or whether I’m being feminist or not. But I do notice that my work often deals with subjects that are somewhat similar to those that southern males have dealt with but that my take on them is a little different. I don’t write a lot about children, for example, though I have a child that I love very much—she’s long grown up. I have a couple of poems for her, but that’s not my focus. Neither is a sense of oppression my focus. Suarez: Your allegiance is to poetry. Adcock: It is. That’s the way I feel. I am enriched by the poems of men and women. I don’t care if I ever meet the poets. They live on the page. Suarez: Let me switch gears. Beholdings and The Difficult Wheel seem

like a marked shift from your first two books. For instance, Beholdings contains poems that engage wide historical sweeps. The catalogs are almost Whitmanian. Was this a conscious move? Adcock: Beholdings was a conscious effort. The first half of the book

deals with the history of the area where I grew up. That place is full of things that can be interpreted, like entrails or bones! I’ve always wanted to be able to do something with that material. I had not been back to east Texas in ten years. After my father died, I didn’t go back. I didn’t have close relatives there. My father’s only living sister was in west Texas. I visited her there, but I did not go back to east Texas. When I went back in 1984 and interviewed my mother’s brothers and sisters across Texas, I also went back to my hometown. I had

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to stay in a motel because I had no relatives there. I went to the Big Thicket, which I had never before visited, although my father hunted there long before it was ever designated a wilderness area. They had to designate it a wilderness area to keep the timber companies from cutting it all down. I walked around; I looked at that world hard. I did a lot of research; I read all the old newspapers and looked at daguerreotypes and just got the feel of the place again. I wanted to do something that said some of the larger things I wanted to say, but using this material. Very little had been written about deep east Texas, in poetry anyway. The area is not the deep South; it’s not the West. It’s both and neither. It’s a very odd place. I wanted to get something of that in-betweenness and that doubleness. Deep east Texas was actually a center in Texas during the time of the Republic. My hometown had the Customs House. Everyone entering the Republic of Texas had to go through there, or go by sea through Galveston. Sam Houston lived there for a while. The first governor of Texas was from there. There’s all sorts of history there; that part of the world had gone through everything the rest of the United States went through but later and very quickly—the exact same history, suppression of the natives, a war for independence, the Civil War, all these things, but compressed into a few years. I ended up writing a series of poems that began with the glaciers forming the soils of that place and that ended in the 1950s, when I moved away. I thought, “Maybe I can’t sustain this for a whole book.” Then my husband and I went to Greece with the other half of my grant. I saw connections between Greece and east Texas, something I encoded in these poems. The poems at the end about Greece and the poems at the beginning about east Texas connect. I woke up on the Greek island where we lived, and every morning I heard roosters and donkeys and goats and all the things I grew up with. Even turkeys. I woke up and found myself bursting into tears. It was a deep recognition. I tried to make some subtle, playful connections as a good-bye to that island. Beholdings was definitely a shift. I had reached an age where I had more authority to say something about history. I have a poet friend who says women don’t write about history. I don’t believe that. Suarez: Can you apply Warren’s notion of pure and impure poetry to the section of historical narratives? You combine realistic details with passages that are lyrical.

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Adcock: That’s what I was trying for. I call it lyric narrative. Dave Smith calls it prose lyric, but it’s the same thing. I was trying for narrative, but I would never be able to write straight narrative as Jeffers sometimes did, which reads like a novel in verse. I couldn’t do that because I have too much lyric impulse, lyric necessity. I also feel a very strong narrative pull, so I wanted to see how far I could take that. It was a move that had to do with having reached an age where I was no longer afraid to try things. Maybe only a woman, or someone who’s sort of outside the usual poetic channels, would feel repressed about trying things. I don’t know. Or maybe it was just that I got to the point where I could do it. We only write the poems that we can write, after all. Sometimes you have the idea, but you don’t have the skill to bring it off yet. It may be years before you get the skill to bring it off. Patience is one of the keys. I have a long poem called “The Swan Story.” That poem took about ten years to write because when I got the idea for it, I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the skill to bring it off. Hosey: In “The Swan Story” and other poems, like “Walking Out,”

you use fairy tales and children’s perspectives. Adcock: I think the child’s perspective is important for any poet. Think of Jim Dickey’s poems, “The Summons,” “Buckdancer’s Choice,” “The Celebration,” and several others. These are some of my favorites, but they’re not the ones that people turn to immediately. But I turn to them again and again. Everything a child sees is fresh; re-creating that in a poem is as close as you’re going to get to the experience of finding something for the first time, whether it’s death or an elephant! I also wonder if part of it is that I don’t have a long and complicated literary education. It has been said of Anne Sexton that she lacked a literary education, so she used fairy tales as her framework rather than the usual literary references. I don’t know whether that’s true in my case or not. I was fascinated by fairy tales. I didn’t have very many books, and there was no lending library in my town, so I read fairy tales over and over. I had Grimm and Anderson, all of those things. They were not cleaned up and made sweet. Everybody died. One of my favorites was “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf,” a bizarre story in which a wealthy girl with a rich cloak was carrying a loaf of bread and she came to a mud puddle. She didn’t want to spoil her shoes, so she threw the loaf into the puddle

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and stepped on it. This was such an evil thing that she was sent immediately to hell. Then there’s a detailed description of hell. It’s quite a story. I have a poem about falling off a porch into a hydrangea bush. That’s my first memory of a real injury. It hurt like holy hell. That memory was strong enough that I ended up writing a poem about it. The child’s experience is pure, but not necessarily beautifully innocent. There’s plenty of evil in the world. Wherever I can find a metaphor that works, I’ll take it. “The Swan Story” was actually a very strange endeavor in which I internalized the story and played all the roles. I was the swan brothers, all of them; I was the sister. The problematic thing was the mother who was not there. In the story, the mother had died. That was probably the thing that brought me to it. The poem has been misread by some people who reviewed it, but one or two people have seen what I was doing, which was probably too complicated to have bothered with, but I loved doing it, and it let me be completely free to fly anywhere and do anything I wanted to do with the language, and be as lush and improvisatory as I wished to be. I love that; I like that kind of freedom. I’m no advocate of the plain style. Suarez: What was the source of the misreading? Adcock: Someone reviewed it and said it was the story of a marriage.

It wasn’t. It started with my talking to my husband and ended with my talking to him, but I was telling him the story, which was my story, going through adolescence and coming of age. It’s not a clear poem, actually. That’s all right. It’s okay for people to have to work a little bit, even if the source is a fairy tale. Suarez: You’ve also written a poem on Sylvia Plath that presents an

interesting perspective on her work. You end up sympathizing with Plath’s mother. What’s your relationship with Plath and her poetry? Adcock: I loved her gifts. The things she could do with language were simply marvelous, and I learned from that. I think that any woman who was writing in the sixties and seventies had to come to terms with Plath in one way or another. My poem was a way of getting her out of my system. I imagined what it would have been like to be the mother of Sylvia Plath. What grief that must have been because of Sylvia’s absolutely unchanging wish to die. What would

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that mean and be like for her mother? Then, Plath’s influence seemed more to do with her death than with her poetry. Her poetry might have been in the service of something besides her death. I admire her work and dislike her in about equal measures. I think the poem shows that fairly well. Her poems were exquisite, but neither art nor woman could find a future in those poems as they stood. Men often don’t like my poem about Plath, but women often do. I’ve read it and had women come up to me afterward and say, “I have thought about the same things.” One reviewer—a man—said there was absolutely no point in writing this dreadful poem. I’ve had a lot of negative reactions to it, which I knew I would get, so it didn’t really bother me. One of the main points I wanted to make was that Plath’s narcissism was so great that she could only see the natural world as reflecting her own emotions. She could never let it change her. She could only change it, which made the moon a paper moon. Well, this is all fine. You get to do this in poetry, but it went against my own sense that the world is something that has its own character, that it must be discovered, not made into a mirror. Suarez: Plath’s often paired with Anne Sexton. Do you see their poetry as similar? Did Sexton have an influence on you? Adcock: They both had an influence on me. There’s the poem in which I used an epigraph from Anne Sexton. It was an influence that didn’t last very long. Sexton left me things I’m glad to have, but I was headed in a different direction. I remember the first time I taught a contemporary poetry course. I grouped the women poets and called it “Woman Poets: Dead or Alive?” I dealt with the live ones on one side and Plath and Sexton on the other. I wanted my students— all young women at a women’s college—to see the energy for life that was present in so many women poets, whereas these two were getting so much more of the attention. Suarez: What’s your reaction to the state of contemporary criticism? Adcock: I try not to read a lot of it. I like very intelligent reviews of books by people who love poetry and want to talk about it. There are two kinds of critics: people who love and read poetry, and people who write large books on what poetry is, isn’t, should or shouldn’t do. As far as the reviewing is concerned, we need more stringent reviewers, and we need poets who will commit themselves

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to criticism. I say this, being unable and unwilling to do it myself. We don’t have the poet-critics that we had before. I would like to see poets reclaim criticism. Academics seem to want to throw poets out of the Republic. Today’s criticism has made a lot of careers and has made some academics quite wealthy. There’s a juggernaut going which feeds on itself. The theories spawn more theories. The prose is so turgid and awful. That abuse of language offends me; it actually offends me. I stay away from it. It’s not only literary criticism that’s affected; it’s imposed a kind of absolute relativism on culture that’s dangerous. I read the essays of Wendell Berry with a good deal of interest. What he says about language in the essay “Standing by Words” is perfectly wonderful. I would like to see us stand by words again. Suarez: How does all this affect contemporary poetry? Adcock: It has made it possible for people who write with no talent, none, to be published by major presses and praised by academics— for their attitudes. My main goal is to have students love poetry when they leave my class. I’m not trying to make them into writers; I don’t have that kind of illusion. They’re not going to be poets; maybe one in a hundred will do a little more of it. But they may write toward poems for the rest of their lives, which is fine. They may write very good journals or, as I tell them, write better love letters for having taken my class. But my gift to them, I hope, is that they leave as readers who are going to know why poetry is so important and difficult because they have tried it themselves. Perhaps none of us, least of all the arrogant critic, can claim poetry. We are all only trying for it.

Photo by Gloria Jones

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Rodney Jones

W H E N H E W A S a student at the University of Alabama in the late

sixties, Rodney Jones met Jim Seay, who taught creative writing at the university, and Everette Maddox, a fellow student whom Jones describes as a “street poet.” From Seay, Jones gained a deep appreciation of craftsmanship, while the brilliant and erratic Maddox supplied him with a sense of thematic inventiveness. Jones’s meticulously crafted verse delights in exploring the border between conversational speech and rollicking oratory, a combination that he uses to often approach his subjects in surprisingly unconventional ways. A longtime resident of small towns, Jones was raised on a farm outside Falkville, Alabama (pop. 700), where he attended the Church 166

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of God and had a grandfather who wrote gospel songs. This interview was conducted on December 12–13, 1997, at Jones’s home in Carbondale, where he teaches creative writing at the University of Southern Illinois. Suarez: Describe the differences between your first book, The Story

They Told Us of Light, and your second book, The Unborn. Jones: Early on I was enamored of the surrealists and of a poetry that made a great use of the unconscious mind. I was writing poems in which I enacted certain beloved patterns of language and poetry, but I was also seeking an organic ideal. In The Unborn, I was more conscious of what I was doing. I began to see a poetry of characterization. I don’t know that I really ever thought about a poem representing my life in the first book. In looking back on the poems in The Story They Told Us of Light, I realized that I wasn’t there in a full way. I wasn’t casting a large enough net. The dominant mode of the age seemed minimalist, and I needed a broader rhetoric and license. This broader license occurred to me when I stopped caring about immediate publication. In The Unborn, I attempted a poem of a more inclusive tone. A greater freedom of reference. Suarez: Cite specific poems. Jones: The first poem in The Unborn is called “Remembering Fire.”

It occurred to me that since we think of the last thing first in looking at history it would be interesting to make a narrative of an event in reverse. That very conscious ideal allowed a space so that any image could come in and I could more or less sing, and come to specific imagined details. I was able to create a frame which allowed for discursiveness. This became something of a formal ideal, and it sustained me throughout the book, in poems like “The Mosquito” and “The First Birth.” In the last poem of the book, “Decadence,” I tried to look at the poem as almost a mathematical set of different sorts of decadence, with various numbered sections. At the same time, this very conscious approach to material worked to free stranger imagery. My sense was that if a woman dressed up as a penis wanted to come into the poem, you let that woman come into the poem. Anything that pressed on the borders of the consciousness should be allowed into the poem. Suarez: What led to this change?

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Jones: My first marriage broke up, a marriage that I thought was going to last all of my life. Many of the structures that I had lived in suddenly proved to be artifice. Within two years, I had fallen in love and married Gloria, my present wife, who is Salvadoran. When we visited El Salvador, the country was at war, and both the poverty and beauty struck me deeply. The poems of my first book suddenly did not measure up. I also discovered two poets who changed my notion of the possibilities of form. Gerald Stern’s book The Red Coal was important. I was enormously impressed by Stern’s capacity to joyfully let anything come into the poem—the sense that his subject was relished in that miraculous way that was true to Stern’s feelings and to his sociability. Another essential book was C. K. Williams’s With Ignorance. I had been for several years experimenting with the long line of Whitman, Lawrence, and Jeffers, and Williams’s work encouraged me profoundly. All of these elements together made me care less for the idea of publication and more for poetry. Suarez: Did you write most of your first book when you were a student at the University of Alabama? Jones: I think one poem in that book goes back to Alabama. There may be more. A few were written while I was a student at Greensboro. Many were written when I lived in east Tennessee during my twenties. About the end of my graduate career at Greensboro, Louise Glück came there to teach, and she read a group of my poems and said, “It’s clear to me that while you possess the tools to be a poet, you’ve never written a poem because there’s not adequate emotional necessity; these poems don’t seem that they have to be written.” I battled with that idea through my twenties in the country and wrote hundreds of poems, none of which I was ultimately satisfied with. I read people I couldn’t seem to draw much from, but whom I respected a lot, Warren and Berryman, for instance. I remember always spending more time looking at their poems than my own, but desperately trying to get to a poem that I had to write. I spent much time looking out the window over a lake, trying to write, and then going to read a book, perhaps typing down a poem by Warren in prose, trying to determine what kind of prose was in poetry. Suarez: Did Warren’s influence help open things up?

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Jones: I think that the Warren after Promises, the disjunctive Warren, the Warren that James Wright describes as a stutterer, did help. Warren, as Wright points out, was a poet who was bearing a burden that threatened the eloquence of his poetry. There was the sense that what Warren was saying was of sufficient importance to make a dent in the fluency and the eloquence of the poem. The measures by which a poet may authenticate language differ from the fluency and the technical virtuosity that we usually think of as the provinces of the great poets, but a lot of the great poets earn their keep with moments of saying things that are conceivably “of the moment,” as opposed to the great flowing syntax, diction, mentality that signals “virtuosity.” Suarez: How does this apply to your work? Jones: In a perverse way. On one level, I believe that the ideal poem would be one sentence of a twenty-seven-year utterance that is ultimately believable, inclusive. But also I realize that people could not live with such a sentence; it’s one’s concern for others that creates art as much as one’s sincere efforts to look into the depths of one’s own being. You have to consider that there’s a possibility of kinship and entrance into the poem by someone who doesn’t necessarily know the language. You can’t quite make a poem in such a way that if you uttered it tremendously well, a dog would be pleased with the sound, but it is an ideal. Suarez: In Warren’s poetry there are many moments when, for instance, the narrator gazes at the night sky and considers the desire— the need—to explain and discover answers. But the narrator isn’t quite able to grasp the meaning and, at times, isn’t even sure that there’s any meaning at all. I see similar strains within your poetry. Jones: Well, it’s not necessarily a good thing. I think that rhapsodic yearning is always accompanied by some prominent disappointment or sense of tragedy. The great bravery of Warren and of all of the great poets is that they’re sufficiently cold not to make so much of that fact that their minds slump. Warren’s outward look always seems to be muted inward eventually. Then it turns in to the area of memory and to other stars, other nights, history, expectations, but he has a great expectation that fuels the appetite, the lyrical appetite of the poem. It’s genuine, it’s not artifice so much as the nature of his rather scientific intelligence.

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My poetry is made out of curiosity, by and large, and the good parts of the poetry are explorations of ignorance and an attempt to arrive at a conceivable myth where, I expect, uncertainty is the answer. My pleasure is in words, both in their sounds and in the sense that words might be true to both the exterior world which is, one assumes, a place where one will someday come to the ground, which is real, and also to that very narrow space where words are apprehended and believed. The measurement of that life, in a beautiful musical construct that has some harmonious relationship to one’s animal and elemental being, is as simple as I can make it. Suarez: What do you see as the relationship between that music, form, and emotion? Jones: Stevens said, “Music is feeling,” but I like to make a distinction. Music is pure form, every bit as beautiful and mathematical as the ocean, but human feeling tends to be tainted at the source. The purest cry is both evocation and signal, sound and sense. A poem is a battleground between these two, and in the great poems, sound always wins by a hair. The great poem is less about emotion than it is a characterization of emotion, a condition of being rather than a vehicle. All prosody is inadequate to express the complex delicacy of this characterization. If prosody accounted for the melody of language as well as meter, it might come close, but it could never be adequate. The music of the poem is the occupation of the poem by the part of the human being that doesn’t differ significantly from a frog. One’s sense of music is the deepest entanglement. If the music is arrived at without some honoring of the word, it’s bogus in a way that has nothing to do with poetry itself. The idea that Warren expressed to me, that I love, was that poetry was dependent upon one’s engaging a primary language, a language where one writes light and has in mind one light. That particular discipline of the imagination is necessary, the grounding of the music. The sense of the moment of language encountering a specific instance of space and time is to me intrinsic to lyricism and to drama. I want to write about life at the moment that it is lived. The poem, if it does not bear the truth of momentary revelation, no matter if it takes seven years to construct a sentence, is worthless. It’s outside of conceivable time. Suarez: Dickey said much the same thing about his work.

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Jones: Dickey had a greater desperation than I have. Perhaps a greater fear. In Dickey’s work, we never lose the sense that one could die or that one is in the act of dying, and this heightens the awareness. One is truly awakened. Dickey would think that my work was not realistic in that it was an instrument of terror, but I imagine that both Dickey and I are people who respect terror. We would share that, but we would not share the meaning of that. I don’t think that I have his natural wildness, his complete commitment to putting a poem in a place where there is a desperate search for the exit, and at a high speed. Suarez: You’ve mentioned that the first Dickey poems that you came to were his quieter poems, such as “The Leap.” Jones: Well, “The Leap” seemed to be about a real life and about an emotion that I knew. I came from such a small rural community in Alabama that it was difficult to imagine how the mythology and lore that I grew up with might pertain to literature. With Dickey, especially, and with Faulkner, I saw the people and the world that I knew. For many readers, these writers probably seemed exotic, but for me they were homeboys. “The Sheep Child” existed for me as local legend before I read the poem. In the same way, the great lyrical and rhetorical appetite of Thomas Wolfe existed in the longwinded prayers that I heard as a boy. It was essential to me to see this connection, because I tended to make writers otherworldly. When I first traveled outside the South, it was with Everette Maddox, and I remember we talked so much about poetry that, when we stopped in a truck stop in Indiana, I was looking around the truck stop for writers. I actually thought that, once I got outside the South, the country was inhabited solely by writers. Suarez: You grew up doing farming work in the South. Has that influenced your work? Jones: It has. Lyrical poetry depends upon an internal energy, on one’s alliance with a subject, on conviction. What’s a field in my poem could just as easily be a department store, but my field of perceptions begins in a cotton field with hoeing cotton and finding out how to draw a sundial and sticking a stick in the middle and being fifteen minutes from lunchtime and living through that eternal fifteen minutes of hoeing. It was such a slow, slow time out there in

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that field. All of these other perceptions are laid on top of that; the palimpsest begins there, and it’s arbitrary of course. Suarez: When you started reading poetry, what were you drawn to? Jones: Eliot was the first poet who was indispensable to me. I didn’t like poetry in high school. I liked Charles Dickens and Twain as a little kid. We didn’t have a television set until I was twelve, so I was reading pretty good authors in elementary school. And then I started reading Harold Robbins. Just looking for the filthy part. And I became a speed reader through my aunt who was a reading teacher, and she had me geared up to twenty-four hundred words a minute. Wow. But I was reading, looking for something like “rosy tits” to slow down and find a place where I could go off alone with my book. When I started reading poetry, I read a little bit of Frost, and as a freshman in college, under the influence of Everette Maddox, I started reading Thomas and Yeats and W. D. Snodgrass. Heart’s Needle was out. I adored that book. I liked Arnold a lot. I liked Browning a lot. About the same time, maybe five or six months later, I read Dickey and Lowell and Hart Crane. I loved those people. I couldn’t get into Williams, though I knew he was important. Stevens I knew I wasn’t supposed to understand, but I really liked a few of his poems. And then I started writing some fairly decent poems. I was nineteen and I published one in Shenandoah and one in, I think, Kansas Quarterly. Dave Smith took one for Back Door. I thought I was really hot. I was making bad grades in my courses, but I was beginning to publish. About the same time, I discovered drugs and went through a period of reading while ingesting LSD or smoking. I read the American surrealists. It was almost fatal to my poetry. Not that I don’t like surrealism, but it doesn’t seem to be my natural, primary strength. Anyway, I would get incredibly stoned and read The Oblivion Ha-Ha by James Tate or Dismantling the Silence by Charles Simic, or Mole Notes by Michael Benedikt or W. S. Merwin’s The Moving Target or The Lice. Suarez: What year was this? Jones: This would have been ’69, ’70, and ’71. It even occurred to me at some point to write a parody of the thesaurus. Suarez: Of the thesaurus?

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Jones: Yeah, to write a parody of the thesaurus. Also, I was very attracted to the idea of writing fake papers, making up the sources and making up the quotes, making up everything. Oh, it was just one inventive, zany idea after another. It could have led another kind of mind into a interesting state of being. But for me, it fell off. Suarez: Your work started to gain widespread attention with Transparent Gestures, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and other prizes. Do you see that book as a breakthrough? Jones: Well, every book that I’ve written has been a breakthrough for me personally. That’s not to say that it’s a breakthrough for the art. In some ways I feel a delight in The Unborn that I didn’t feel in Transparent Gestures, but, in retrospect, I knew more about what I was doing in Transparent Gestures, and it contains more poems that I want to go back to. The very hard thing about writing that book was that I discovered Milosz, who was writing a poem that I didn’t understand. His political stances in particular seemed of such a merciless temperament, such a refusal of the primal innocence that I had prized up until then. Ultimately, Transparent Gestures became a trial of poetry itself and, more specifically, of the imagination of goodness. Suarez: When you begin a book, do you start with a central idea that you’re going to write the poems around, or do the poems evolve one by one? Jones: Sometimes I write with a central idea, but I’ve never been able to stick to it. Ultimately I get to the point where I’m looking for sound. If I write enough poems, there’s no problem in putting the material together because it is of one mentality. The search for a book is a search for a tone. For me poems are explorations. They have to be fresh. Hugo suggests that Auden is so bright that his deductive examples have the fire of great narratives. Most of us, though, send our minds down for examples, and they go to K-Mart. They go to stereotypes. I don’t ultimately know if the essay exists inside a novel structure, as a conversation, or if the novel exists inside an essay structure, as an example. But I know that I cannot proceed by a plan without losing some sense of original fire. Suarez: Do certain sonic patterns lend themselves to certain types of subject matter for you?

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Jones: When I write, what I hear at first is sound, rhythms, cadences, and melodic possibilities, not words. Frequently, I’m contrary enough to go against the grain of subject, to treat the lyrical subject with the dissonant sound or vice versa, as in “Every Day There Are New Memos,” where I try to write about institutional despair as though it were a garden. This is an emotional issue more than a logical one, but I think that the fortunate framing of a fairly complex musical structure in an idiomatic setting is one of the keys. It is the sort of thing James Wright is really good at. He begins “Northern Pike,” “All right. Try this then.” This idiom gives him license to go into an artifice and a structure. The same is true for the beginning of James Dickey’s “The Sheep Child” or for Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium.” The problem is always how to talk in a way that will be believable in a poem. And if that matter is settled, then very frequently poems aren’t hard to write. They’re a joy. And if that is not the case, then the poem is more often than not a failure. Suarez: An original aspect of your work is its combination of lyricism, of rolling sonic devices, and accessible language. Jones: I love the formal elements of poetry, and I’ve loved the great masters from Eliot to Justice to Roethke to Thomas to Bishop to the best of Merwin and Kinnell. To me these are formal masters. People tend to look at Richard Wilbur, whom I admire greatly as a formal master, but there are a great number of free-verse masters of formality. I think of Robinson Jeffers in “Hurt Hawks” and “The Purse Seine.” I can’t think of any more masterful formal poems. Form has a kind of fetishistic function for me. If it arouses me, it works as a generator. The social meaning of the form—what a reader may take from it—is something utterly different. What I’m speaking of is a very intimate sense of how the poem is made, trying to find two-thirds of a measure in one part of a poem that matches the two-thirds of the measure in another part. There’s a musical nature of the improvisation of the theme returning and leaving and being mutated and evolving by repetition and variation. To a large degree that’s what it’s about. That and talk. The language has always been blessed when the common voice is able to come up through the poem. It’s there in Shakespeare, it’s there in Wordsworth, it’s there in Williams.

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Suarez: Let’s think about the matter of the sonic pattern, the music, and how the subject matter opens up into that music. If the sounds come first, as you’re saying they do for you, to what extent does the sound dictate the form and the dramatic situation? Jones: Well, those ideas make me think of the immense importance

of tone in a poem, that a poem is to some degree a consciously enacted trance, born from a tone and a rhythm. In “Cherry Log Road,” there is a kind of force field that Dickey finds in a junkyard, where, among other things, there’s all kinds of fresh, lyrical material. A linguistic buffet. So, just setting off on a loose motion through the junkyard and picking up the names becomes a great act of pleasure. A solo. There’s a momentum that starts going, and the focus is such that he’s looking around wildly, picking up parts. That’s what I envy of individual poems by Dickey: what anyone who is a poet would admire and love. For me, the tone is the skin of the poem, the thing that I must find a way to inhabit if I’m to live on the page. This phenomenon is most interesting when the fit takes a while. As an example, I began “Dangers,” which appeared in Transparent Gestures, in 1983, before I had finished The Unborn. I got down one line, “For the first, I was too reluctant, achieving by dribs and drabs. . . .” I could not develop that line for several years, but I trusted that it would lead somewhere. Four years later, that line began to grow a poem that seemed to me both a static characterization and a narrative of danger. More important, the making of the poem was an adventure finally, a momentary encounter that became, line by line, both the visualization of an accident and the enactment of a slower thought that had gone on for years. This seems the compositional truth of many of my poems. They are grounded in a slow, meditational theme, but they arrive finally at a momentary eventfulness of language, which cannot be charted. There are always moments when the tone wears out and has to be reconstructed from where it dies, but I don’t think we should deny a poem its flight, and the roll of flight, and just a freedom where expression is engendered. I don’t see that as open-ended at either end. Of course, the belief is that it’s open-ended when one is entering into it. It typically dies before the poem is over. But that’s the part where the poem’s a great poem. One links into something that is alive with the electricity of the body.

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Suarez: How about a poem like “Apocalyptic Narrative,” the title poem from your fourth book? Take me through the process of writing that poem. Jones: Originally I conceived of the book that became Apocalyptic

Narrative as a book of four or five distinctive voices, the sort of thing that Pessoa did. I arrived at the first draft of the title poem in one of those voices, a sort of hysterical postmodernist voice. This early draft was called “Laugh Track for the Apocalypse.” In that draft I was indulging a kind of campy dance around the idea of the use of apocalyptic imagery. Ultimately I couldn’t go with “Laugh Track for the Apocalypse.” I realized that I could not occupy that illusory voice that I was trying for, so I had to break it down. I had to consider the images at the end of the cold war and the frightening kind of apocalyptic images coming out of the religious right, as well as apocalyptic imagery of the young, kind of counterculture people who didn’t believe in a continuance of the planet. It was a slow thought, one that I had been having all my life. Maybe the world would not end in fire, as everyone in my generation must have suspected growing up with the atomic bomb. Perhaps AIDS would be a more likely paradigm, if not AIDS itself, then something that we had messed with and introduced in a way that would mutate us in some way. I thought that would be a more likely agent of transformation. All of these thoughts were occurring outside the poems, so I worked at each section of the poem on at least nine occasions where I took it through fifty or sixty drafts, a lot of it just to get it straight in my head. I was finally very proud of the beginning of the second section of the poem. But the poem was bound from the beginning, I suppose, to be a disappointment and a failure to me because the subject—which is just really our fascination and absorption with fear and our need for it and our love for it—was so much greater than I could ever imagine successfully pulling off. But I was delighted all the time I was writing the poem. I don’t know why I’m disappointed with it. Suarez: I don’t know why you are either. Jones: But I am. I felt when I was writing it that it should be better than “Sunday Morning.” Suarez: You’re part of a very strong community of poets that emerged from the American South in the 1970s and the 1980s. Do you

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see affinities between your works and those of other contemporary southern poets? Jones: The affinity that everyone speaks of is the narrative fascination, or the obsession with the past. I don’t know that that’s true. I would imagine that the deeper affinity would be the presence of the spoken word and the rhetorical tradition of the southern prayer— those elements that come out of the oral tradition—out of both Scotland and Africa. Yusef Komunyakaa would be in the same kind of territory of “speaker.” To some degree we are paying homage to the language, to the spoken language, whether it’s Andrew Hudgins’s iambs, or Dave Smith’s polyphonic phrasing. There’s almost an obedience to a fairly complex oral tradition. We tend to hear some fairly elaborate oratorical structures out loud in prayers and in sermons, and then the strength of the oral story, which may or may not be there in a lot of places, is still an affection for some of us. We’ve learned a lot of things from listening to people talk, even though not many people talk that way anymore. Suarez: You, Dickey, and Hummer like rolling rhetorical cadences. Jones: That’s right. It’s the heavy kind of tradition that allows Lowell to chuff like an engine through “Quaker Graveyard” and “Colloquy at Black Rock.” It’s an appreciation from word to word, the thickening of the vowel, the taking of the unaccented syllables and putting them somewhere else in the word, and then letting that language just thrash and collapse on itself. That’s a great presence in Dave’s work and in Ted Hughes’s or Lowell’s or Hummer’s, or a number of poets that I admire tremendously. The tradition comes out of people like Hopkins and, obviously, Dylan Thomas, but you go back and you see the same phenomenon with George Chapman. He’s got that sense. Shakespeare doesn’t have it; he can get thick, but in Chapman it’s really there, and you feel like it’s coming from the Germanic side, that it’s a fantasia or almost a lingering urge for another language. We all feel around for language in different ways. I admire a lot of David Bottoms’s imagination of language because his is truly very compressed, and it’s very lucid. To me, it’s akin to the work of Larry Levis. Bottoms doesn’t have a whole lot of a fantasy of language other than that, by God, somebody ought to be able to talk this way. It’s very economical at its best. I think that thing we admire about great poets—not just the poets of the South or the African American

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poets—is their taste for language and their sense of language and its shapeliness and the fact that the word may hold place in the mind, as a taste that becomes communal. Suarez: With those thoughts in mind, comment on Things That Happen Once. Jones: Whenever I finish a book, I seem to have to discover a reentry point, a fresh way of making the poem. I wanted to write a simpler book and to engage a different sound. There were a couple of themes that I became obsessed with. One was to investigate those events that take on mythological significance in a life. Events, like the event at the end of the poem called “The Cycles of Silence,” where a guy reaches down to get a drink that he’s just dumped in the ocean and realizes that it’s irretrievable, lost. Another obsessive theme was childhood itself. I am from a stoical, Protestant culture that rejects therapy and that believes strongly in burying the wound. I began to look at very early instances in my life, trying to identify how they might relate to present attitudes. The final obsession was with sexuality and hunger. I enjoyed the book immensely. I wrote most of the poems in the early drafts as musically as I possibly could, in prose lines. I wrote them in prose with musical attention, and I translated them into poems just because I wanted to do it in a different way. To begin with, I developed perhaps four hundred prose drafts. I usually am fascinated by things that are very difficult. My tendency has been to write like Dylan Thomas, three lines a day, make them god-damned publishable, and go to the next three, and try to create a poem, as though it were a film. But with Things That Happen Once I wrote entire drafts and just developed a number of them, and then when I started working on the drafts, my notion was that I would take the drafts one by one, working on the ones that seemed easiest to turn into poems. A few people have remarked on the differences between my books as though I had planned them, but the truth is that I have simply been unable to work the same way from book to book. Suarez: Why? Jones: For me poetry depends upon a sense of freshness. The com-

position of my books has been subject to different habits; Transparent Gestures is very different from The Unborn. The Unborn was a great freedom and enjoyment of language. Transparent Gestures was a more

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consciously constructed book where, by and large, I wrote the poems line by line. I didn’t give up on any of them. I could have composed them on a rock, I was so slow. In the middle of writing Transparent Gestures there was a poem called “My Daughter at the Space Museum,” which I had been stuck on for a long time. I thought maybe I could go back to an earlier draft of the poem and discover someplace where I’d taken a wrong turn. I looked beside my typewriter, and I went down through, I think it was, fifty-three drafts. I discovered that I had typed the poem fifty-three times making minor changes in phrasing and come to the same point. Finally, I broke it into another form, formed a slightly different voice, and the poem proceeded a little more rapidly. But by and large, it was that very conscious enactment so that when I got through the book, I was sick of writing that way. In the work that turned out to be Apocalyptic Narrative, I tried to just write anything bizarre that came into my mind, complete slashing drafts, just trying to blow it out and find some spontaneity. I created through that reckless endeavor a book that was almost impossible to revise. The book that I’m working on now, “Elegy for the Southern Drawl,” I’m constructing in many ways, working sometimes with pencils, sometimes with pens, sometimes on the computer. I’ll be working, stuck in one poem for a long time, and three or four poems that are better will spring off while I’m working on this one unsuccessful thing. And day by day, every day, sitting down and writing, writing some poems that seem like mathematical problems that are too difficult to solve, and others that are just poems that come very easily. Suarez: What do you mean by “mathematical problems”? Jones: Many times a poem will stop at a point where I don’t know what I think, and, very frequently, I’ll have imagined language beyond that point. How the hell do I get there from here? That’s where I tend to get stuck. I do not mean to overvalue logic or deduction, but there’s a place in a poem where the imagination of logic or deduction will not substitute for genuine insight. My habit is to think that I can get around it with craft and technique, but no amount of craft or technique, no anapestic or trochaic substitution, will do what a dream, or travel, or experience will do—it doesn’t work that way. The will can work its craft, but vision waits. You need to see something that you haven’t seen.

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Suarez: You teach writing workshops. How does the workshop experience relate to the process of composition that you just described? Jones: It’s a situation where many people begin to write and read

poems with the attitude of “what’s wrong with this.” I have students who seem to think that it’s a challenge to find what’s wrong with the poem. Workshops are very good, of course, for emphasizing very close attention to writing, or for discussion of poets; they don’t do much for character. And, what I’m finding as I go on is that a lot of my students who turn out to be better writers are people that I just have awful problems with because they are unteachable. I can tell them, “Obviously, you need to do this here. This is idiotic what you’re doing.” And they won’t listen to me. And I’ll think, oh my God, these people are never going to amount to anything. But sometimes that mule-orneriness or recalcitrance is a sign of character. Workshops are in some ways to be withstood. The great advantage to writers is they can hear things that stimulate them, that get them riled, that give them something to think about while they’re learning. Merwin said about Berryman that only once did he point out that there might be a better ordering of words, or something like that, in a line. My impression is that most workshops point that out again and again, and it’s often tiresome. Still, the passionate concern that happens in that environment is very good if the poet who is a student has the good character not to get drawn into a poem that is well-mannered and says essentially nothing we’d be interested in. It was my good fortune to work with several inspired teachers: James Seay and Everette Maddox at Alabama and Fred Chappell, Allen Tate, and Louise Glück at North Carolina. Of these five, I only had classes with Seay, who taught the fundamentals of poetry as well as I can imagine their being taught, and, briefly, with Tate, who tended to look at each student poem as an invitation to discuss the history of such poems. Fred Chappell and Everette Maddox were friends as much as teachers and, therefore, brought adequate ruthlessness with their genuine affection. I knew Louise Glück less well, and for a briefer period, but I am grateful to her for challenging me to go beyond the stylish crap that I was writing as a young man. Suarez: Do you plan on writing any fiction ever, or is poetry the way for you?

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Jones: I have about a three-hundred-page draft of a novel that I began five years ago. I worked on it for the better part of a year, but then I started to feel the poems drifting away. I have noticed that many of the poets who turn from poetry to memoirs or fiction have trouble coming back to poetry. Perhaps I was superstitious, but I feared that estrangement. As much as I enjoy the pace and volubility of the novel structure, I believe that poetry is the greater form. Suarez: Give me your assessment of the situation today in contem-

porary poetry. Jones: The situation has become so various that no one sees the whole of it. The list of the most outstanding poets of any generation would vary in any location of the country that you asked. Certain people are promoted, lifted up, and put into positions of being looked at as very important. As my friend Peter Davison has said, “Poetry is an imaginary business.” But in general, there’s not a critical atmosphere that will distinguish the truly outstanding work from the good work. There’s a tendency to substitute the exclusions of cliquishness for the exclusions of intellectual rigor. The poets who come out of the New York School see the necessity for an original transcendent aesthetic, a notion borrowed from visual artists. The people who look at poetry as an example of a poetics don’t tend to look at the poetry of a narrative excellence. The poets who are gathered into the group called the New Formalists don’t tend to celebrate the very formally accomplished work that is not written in conventional forms. In general, this has nothing to do with poetry. It has to do with the atmosphere in which we talk about poetry collectively. There’s been a blurring of hype and criticism. Many reviews seem to be couched in terms that would produce blurbs, which tend to be little billboards that are more important to the blurber than to the blurbee. Then there’s the really outstanding work of the poets who were born in the twenties, the people like Kinnell, Merwin, Wright, Ashbery, Rich, Dickey, Levine—I could go on and on, with truly outstanding poets. They began working in an era when the word was more important to the culture. The poets of my generation are the first poets who grew up with television, who grew up perhaps with a broader perspective, but not so much an appreciation for the texture of the language. My favorite poets, the poets I absolutely adore, tend to be the people like Lowell or Dickey or Kinnell or Rich who really have a capacity, I

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believe, to inhabit language more naturally, a language of a density and a compression. My personal god is probably James Wright. That’s not to say that he’s the greatest, but simply that my taste for him commands me to go back and assess what greatness is for me. He’s a poet that people don’t tend to think of on the model of Eliot as the grand poet. Perhaps we look for that great poet and we find the sort of international English-language poets like Heaney, Walcott, or Murray, incredibly gifted poets, who seem writ large on the high modernist scale. But the giantism of high modernism doesn’t seem to apply at this time. There doesn’t seem to be a single figure. There are noteworthy people who are slightly older than me. I think of Robert Hass or Louise Glück or Bill Matthews, who just died. Some of the early Tess Gallagher, or the middle Tess Gallagher, seems to me to be just absolutely necessary poetry to me, but by the same token I’m continually surprised by finding Eleanor Wilnor, Olena Kalytiak Davis, or Betty Adcock, or Patty Ann Rogers. Jorie Graham, who perhaps comes closest at this moment to being that People magazine poet, is a fine and flawed poet. I find heroic energy in her work, in the work of Larry Levis, in Paul Muldoon, and in the best of Albert Goldbarth, but I cannot distinguish someone who is of the stature of Eliot. At the same time, I find poems that I care about as much as I ever cared about Eliot poems. It’s just that we’re moving to a period to where we tend to look at the personality of an individual poet or a movement as opposed to the poem itself, and it would be much better for all of us if we looked at poems. Suarez: So, you’re saying that the movement has replaced the individual poet as well as individual great poems? Jones: In the mind of many people who read poetry. They want to talk about the phenomenon; they want to talk about where poetry is going to be in the year 2012. And the question would only be truly answerable if you tried to imagine where the poetry of people who appreciate Charles Simic or Charles Bernstein more than any other American poet is going to be. Even then you couldn’t predict it. Poetry has always grown out of the accomplishments of gifted, impassioned, and hardworking individuals, not out of tendencies or movements. I can’t make my love of poetry subsidiary to a theory of poetry; the fact that a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet might be great does not mean that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry is great. Or, if

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there’s a great narrative poet, it does not mean that narrative poetry is great. Perhaps because careers in poetry are possible in this era, people have tended to latch on to the theoretical prescriptions and make the poets subsidiaries of that. The same goes for the current fascination with gender and with the ethnic group. The Norton anthology editors, in identifying the most outstanding poets of my generation, have lately focused almost exclusively on minority poets, but this sort of reverse exclusiveness probably should not be taken too seriously. The identification of poets in groups tends to begin and end as a mode of commercial distribution. Suarez: So the poet becomes an example of something rather than the focus being on the quality of particular poems. Jones: Exactly. And that tends to be a principle of exclusion, which is, of course, unfortunate for the individual reader who becomes focused into any one particular vision of poetry and who wants to hold to any one particular vision of poetry. I run across people who love narrative poetry but who say, “I hate John Ashbery. His poems don’t make any sense.” There are great Ashbery poems. I think of “A Wave” as one of the great poems of our era. The fact that there are also poems of his that go wrong for theoretical reasons doesn’t undermine the fact that John Ashbery is a peculiar and extraordinary genius. A poem by Frank Bidart, who is a superb poet of characterization, is not to be judged by the same standards that we apply to a Galway Kinnell poem. We have to judge and appreciate poets for what they are doing rather than what they should be doing. It’s not just the poet who becomes subsumed in this sort of interest, it’s the poem, the poem itself. We need to get back to the poem on its own terms. That is the only way to do it, and enjoy it. It’s unfortunate, but there is a war for canon space going on. Poetry has too often been held hostage to educational ideology. Most of us are tied into educational mechanisms. Poetry can be in a book that teaches; but I don’t think that’s what poetry’s for. Poetry is for reading, not for learning how to be good. Poetry as a means of social engineering seems to be such a naive notion. Poetry is essential to the formation of individuals, but it is not a very important phenomenon to American culture. Suarez: We’ve seen this phenomenon for a while. For instance, it seems that many people have loved Ginsberg’s poetry because of what he represented and acted rather than because of his craft.

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Jones: That’s right. While Ginsberg wrote a few smashing poems, he mainly wrote promotions for a lifestyle and an attitude, which of course is an extrapoetic issue. Still, there are natural ways of reading poetry that don’t have to do with educational institutions or cultural identification or critical syndicates. New Criticism is not directly more interesting to me than Deconstruction, which is also an educational mechanism, although most of the thinkers who were referred to as “new critics” did ask people to look at the heart of the poem. The truth is that poetry belongs in a room, in a hand; the poem belongs and lives most fully in a private, not a public, space or a system. Suarez: Do you think that the situation found in many English

departments now has affected the way poetry is written and interpreted? Jones: For those of us who live in the environment, yes. Not always to a good end; it’s often a reaction to the theory. Frequently the subtext of theorists is that the individual is flawed, and that a piece of prose or poetry is a way of enacting something that is inherently self-serving or unconsciously emblematic of a less than benign social force. All of those things may help us, but they also may discourage us, and cause us to question everything we write, which is a great sadness for us. It’s unavoidable, but it certainly gets in the way of flight, of the encounter with our own inner lives and our attempt to express that. It complicates things or it bores us. And it may paralyze some people. If it does, it’s unfortunate. Suarez: What do you think is most positive about the contemporary poetry scene? Jones: The appearance of individual poems. This year a book called Black Zodiac by Charles Wright; the appearance of Sub-Human Redneck Poems by Les Murray; the appearance of individual poems year after year that demand to be paid attention to, that speak toward an individual consciousness on the planet, that do it with great musical artistry and variety, occasionally an absolutely lucid, clear poem by Billy Collins, or Chase Twitchell, or Amy Gerstler. There is a steady volume of moving poetry being produced now. The fact that a moving poem may be lost in a dross of poems that are so neutral as to be the kinds of things that make you want to say, “I don’t want

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to be caught in this, in reading things like this.” Poetry is something that is always very bad until it gets very good. Poetry is detestable if it’s not at least good, maybe even great. If it’s not great, it reinforces the idea that the people who write poems yearn and strive for that ideal which is unreachable. You can see why certain people who are very accomplished began to detest most poetry that’s produced. But ultimately, bad poetry is not very important; it falls aside. There’s work that will not necessarily endure in our institutions but that will endure within the individual. The best poetry is not, at this point, jangling on top of guitars. The poetry of our mainstream culture is not a great poetry, but there is a great poetry that’s being written, and that is important to a limited number of individuals, and I assume that will go on because poetry does something that no other art can do. Most of the things that poetry did well among the Greeks are being done pretty well by movies now. But there’s also something poetry can do that movies cannot do. Poems can suggest the inwardness of a human being and the inner life. You cannot show in a movie the inside of a human being except through the result of the communication that takes place externally. A poem gives you, I think, a vision. I believe that it will go on, that it will have varying periods of being more popular in a culture, but I do not know how people will look back at the extremely various poetry of this time. No one does, and there are limits as to how much Harold Bloom or Helen Vendler can do to control it. There are more poets working now than worked in all the periods simultaneously before 1955. So I don’t think it will be possible to look at this historical period and say, it’s represented by, oh, it’s represented by V. J. Sheshadri or Emily Hiestand or Albert Goldbarth. You could pick arbitrary figures, but if you’re really going to want to pick what’s fine, you’re going to run out of space. It’s just too big.

Photo by Bruce Roberts

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Jim Seay J I M S E A Y ’ S poetry is filled with landscapes, water, and wildlife,

while also containing a myriad of diverse allusions, spanning from the classical to the scientific to the popular. A native of Panola, Mississippi, Seay was deeply influenced by what he calls the “golden age of poetry readings” during the late sixties and the early seventies. From his early books—Let Not Your Hart and Water Tables—to his recent work in Open Field, Understory, Seay’s verse displays a lively conversational quality. Although most of his poetry is narrative based, in the nineties he has experimented with lyric modes. Seay has taught at the University of Alabama and Vanderbilt University. Currently, he is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina. The following interview was held on May 22 and 23, 1997, at Seay’s home in Chapel Hill. 186

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Suarez: Your long poem “Said There Was Somebody Talking to Him through the Air Conditioner” addresses how narratives are created. Seay: Yes, and it was a curious thing that from the very start, in the writing of that poem, the lines seemed to be reaching for a prose line. They didn’t want to stop and turn back in the way that verse typically does. Verse turns. The Latin tells us that. The line breaks, turns back to the left margin. Usually it’s a small field, the plowed row ends and turns back. But I found myself running the line out as far as I thought it would go without collapsing under its own weight. And so the poem turned out to be experimental for me, in a technical sense. In fact, the ground was so unfamiliar to me that, even years after the poem was written and published in a limited edition, I tried to break it up into shorter lines and bring it around to a poem that had a more familiar signature. But with the shorter line, it was manifestly not the poem I had initially set out to write. So I wrote “stet” in the margin beside my revisions—there’s an imperative that gives you a sense of power: let the original stand—and that’s the rambling poem with narrative ambitions that you’re referring to. Suarez: What was the genesis of the poem? Seay: The poem was prompted by a personal experience. In 1982 on a trip with my sons to my home in Mississippi, we were running late and didn’t arrive at my sister and brother-in-law’s farm until after midnight. As we turned off the highway onto the road going up to the farm, a man standing in the road flagged us down. I didn’t open the door, but I did roll the window down to see if I could help. The man said somebody was trying to kill him. He said there were three black men and a white woman with a gun and they were in his trailer trying to kill him. The desperation in his voice and face was genuine, but somehow the plot of his story wasn’t working for me. His trailer home was within sight of the road, and there were no lights on, nor any activity that I could see. Probably I shouldn’t have stopped on a county road that late at night, especially with my young sons along, but to have done otherwise would have gone against local custom and my own training in growing up there. I told the man I would get help. I would drive to my sister’s house and call the sheriff. The sheriff and his deputies came and questioned the man, searched the surrounding fields, and so on. During all of this my brother-in-law

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and I were talking to a man—Doty, I call him in the poem—who had heard the commotion and walked from a nearby store, which he owned and lived in. There was a lull in the conversation, and the store owner looked toward the deputies searching the field and told us there was nobody in the field, it was all imagined by the man who claimed to be in danger. He went on to explain that during the previous week the man had come to his room in the rear of the store and said someone was talking to him through the air conditioner in his trailer. The sheriff ultimately figured out that the man needed medical help. The parting image I had of him—sweating, gazing up at me from the backseat of the sheriff’s car and obviously still inhabiting that world he had described for me earlier—well, it was one of the most haunting images of human misery that I have ever witnessed firsthand. Thinking about the experience later—the grief of it aside—it occurred to me that the world which that man created in his own head is finally the supreme fiction. And I don’t mean notes toward a supreme fiction, to borrow Stevens’s title; I mean a flat-out lived-in fiction. The unbearable hurt of it is that the paranoid schizophrenic still has one foot in our normal reality, so to speak—still has to negotiate with our world while his other foot is planted firmly in that supreme fiction he has created for himself. By the way, I don’t pretend to understand Stevens’s poem, though I do admire that passage where the poet asks “What am I to believe?” and then goes on to imagine the angel in flight. I pledge to you that I did not have Stevens in mind, but it’s obvious that my airconditioner poem takes up the question of belief. There are so many proposed versions of the truth bidding for our belief—print ads, television commercials, editorials, “investigative” reporting, tabloid journalism, political campaigns—so much out there that is bidding for some degree of allegiance or participation, that it’s difficult for even a sane person to process it all. And that’s what made the man’s predicament so harrowing and poignant for me. That’s what set me to thinking about the stories we tell to ourselves and to each other and how our stories have various levels of authority and consequence. Hosey: I’ve been wondering about the poem’s conclusion. Do the

last lines indicate that it’s not what the story is that matters, but that a story’s being told?

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Seay: Yes and no. As Robert Penn Warren says in his Audubon poem, “Tell me a story, tell me a story of deep delight.” And so you’d hope the story is one of deep delight. But, yes, what matters is that there’s opportunity for any witness to be a participant in that narration, either as teller or as listener. And for a moment—this may sound escapist; it may be escapist—freed from the reality we ordinarily live in, there’s a possibility of finding another path through this troubled world. Or at least that was the potential I was trying to posit for the people in my poem. The danger, of course, is that the distinctions between those worlds begin to blur or that you allow yourself to enter a bad fiction. Suarez: In places the various stories the poem presents blur and

mesh. But finally it’s necessary to sort them apart. Seay: Indeed. Again, there’s Stevens’s question, “What am I to be-

lieve?” If all of the fictions get mixed, or the fictions mix with reality, and you’re unable to make the final sorting, you’ve got obvious problems. The speaker of my poem thinks of how fictions get mixed to the point that people take up guns and fire into restaurants, how an old man he knew and respected was imagining snakes in his room at the end of his life, how a couple who lived above his uncle wrapped aluminum foil around their legs for protection against the X-rays his uncle and the CIA were beaming at them. These are of course extreme examples of delusional thinking, but the speaker also considers the question of belief on an ordinary level. How the gentle and hardworking Bahamian he once worked with in the Everglades sent money back to his woman in the Bahamas, innocently believing she was coming to the States to join him, but she kept his money and didn’t come. And so on. What the speaker finally comes to is that simple—some would say naive—foundation of belief he works out and offers tentatively as an explanation to his sons: “I’d want to know how strong I believed the frail simple thing we let it rest on: / how you have to live in your own time and believe in the best people you can find.” Suarez: To what extent is it possible to get away from narrative? Dave Smith argues that it’s impossible. Ellen Voigt feels there are clear distinctions between narrative and lyric poetry. Seay: I find it very difficult to let go of narrative. From the very start my work has been grounded in narrative, but more recently I’ve

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tried to write something closer to pure lyric. The poem doesn’t have to tell a story, I try to tell myself. But usually for me a poem starts with an image, or set of images, rather than an abstract concept, and I typically end up telling a story by way of trying to understand that image I have in mind. If for no other reason than variety, I’ve experimented with getting several stories going simultaneously, with the hope that they can somehow be moved toward confluence. I’d like to think of that process as a kind of metaphor-making. That is, one strand of narrative finding its affinity with another. Suarez: So you’ll have several narrative threads and then you’ll basically truncate one and start another? Seay: Yes. Just drop it without any suggestion that the controlling narrative will eventually find a way of reinscribing it. Hosey: You mentioned that “Said There was Somebody Talking to

Him Through the Air Conditioner” is based on an actual experience. To what extent is your poetry autobiographical? Seay: I couldn’t quantify that. If you’re working from firsthand experience, the fundamental obligation, it seems to me, is to the emotional truth of the experience. Another fundamental we have to keep reminding ourselves of—and it seems simpleminded to bring it up— is that poetry isn’t to be read as strict autobiography, even if it’s marched out under that banner. Poetry has always been “confessional” to some degree. I guess that was a handy critical term in the sixties or seventies, but it’s misleading. Catullus and Sappho, for example, match just about anything you find in, say, Lowell and Sexton. Hosey: In the poem “On the Way” you show how common expres-

sions or songs move us through life and help us keep going. Seay: That’s a poem from the seventies, so I’ll have to cast my mind back a ways. As I recall I was in part trying to suggest something about a kind of ceremonial quality that can inform even the most ordinary daily routine—a paradox, of course, since the truly ceremonial is patently not routine. At any rate, ceremonies—particularly through the agency of their music and formalized language—give the assurance that you’re on the way, on the known path, spiritual,

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secular, whatever. And usually that’s where you want to be, not out in the dark wood. In my poem the daily journey with my sons to their kindergarten involves the calling out of certain landmarks, the singing of little ditties, the saying of sometimes goofy sayings, and so on. Along the way we see the railroad crossing, the dog pound, the house on the hill where we imagine someone up there sleeping. And naturally we’ve got to sing Frère Jacques—and naturally make a great to-do over the bell ringing—to wake him up. All great fun, but the ceremony requires some seriousness, so we get real solemn in the valley when we hang our heads over to hear the wind blow Down in the Valley. So it’s all part of giving each other assurance that we’re on the way, the right path, and we’ll get where we’re going. In addition the sons have awakened in the father a deeper sense of spontaneity—and a kind of rekindling of his own youth. All of which makes more poignant to him the knowledge that his sons will too be leaving that place of childhood in their time. Suarez: Many of your poems show a strong awareness of the passage of time. Warren did much the same thing. To what extent is Warren an influence? Seay: His poetry wasn’t a great influence on me. I had read All the King’s Men, of course, and had been duly impressed, but I didn’t really come around to his poetry until I read Audubon: A Vision, and that was a number of years after it was published, which was when?—in the late sixties? Until I read that book, sometime in the seventies, I think I had unfairly kept Warren in the category of fiction writer. Also there’s the fact that I never had much use for the poetry of the Fugitives, nor of the Agrarians who wrote poetry, and I had Warren’s poetry too strongly linked in my mind to those schools. I respected the intelligence and craft behind some of their poetry, but I never responded to it at the level a young poet needs to respond in order to take it to heart. Audubon, however, I took to heart. And I have the highest regard also for Warren’s later poetry. As for citing influences, my debts are in the generation after Warren: Dickey, Lowell, Wilbur, and Wright. Each new book of theirs was an event for me. Also I had the good fortune to be living in Virginia during the late sixties—which together with the early seventies was maybe the golden age of poetry readings—and there were any number of schools in the area that supported poetry and

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were active in the poetry-reading circuit. I would drive treacherous mountain roads at night to hear any one of those poets read, and that experience gave a tremendous impetus to my own writing and critical thinking. So those are the influences I’m most consciously aware of. And as strange as it may sound, Walker Percy’s work had a profound influence on me. In fact, you could probably make a case for his role as a kind of spiritual father—an unorthodox and whimsical one, I’m happy to say—to the writers in my generation in the South. Personally I look on it as providential that he came along and put his small table alongside Faulkner’s grand carpentry. Back to your question about Warren. Although I have great admiration for his work, Warren, so far as I can tell, was never a compelling influence, other than through his example as one gifted with enormous energy and talent, and one writing from the perspective of a native southerner torn with all the familiar conflicts. Suarez: How about Dickey? Seay: That’s difficult to fully assess. As I mentioned, I’m indebted to him. But just how much of his influence was owing to the fact that he was charismatic and a powerful physical presence is not exactly clear to me. It’s hard for me to separate the man himself— what I remember of his readings of the poems, our conversations, the difficulty in knowing when to believe him, his fabulous humor and ability as a mimic, and so on—separate all that from the poems as they exist alone on the page. Also Dickey worked the narrative line with great skill, and I was of course taken with that. And so it’s almost impossible for me to separate the man I knew from the poems. There are poems of his that I’ll continue to read, but how they’ll stand over time, I don’t know. I’d like to think that poems such as “Buckdancer’s Choice,” “Encounter in the Cage Country,” and a few others will last. At any rate, I came to a point early on that I knew I had to filter out Dickey’s spoken voice and not allow his particular rhythms to invade my own poetry. When he was barnstorming for poetry, though, it was a very contagious thing. One of his main contributions to American poetry, in my opinion, was the vatic energy he brought at a time when we needed to be reminded again of the dangers of the academy, the poem as jewelry, the Guggenheim-sponsored sojournin-Europe poem, and so on. But Jim obviously wasn’t the only one in those days who brought the fever to poets of my generation. I

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owe debts also to Jim Wright, and in different ways to Lowell and Wilbur. Of the latter two, Wilbur was more important to me. For one thing, Wilbur’s influence was on the page. It didn’t come from the force of his physical presence—though he is a superb reader and one whose wit and sophistication will charge up any conversation. But I didn’t need his spoken voice to appreciate the gift of his poetry. His technical brilliance has always been an inspiration to me. In fact, when I’m working in meter or rhyme, he’s one of the ideal readers I have in mind. How I imagine his judgment would be is part of how I finally judge my own poem. Suarez: Dave Smith and David Bottoms have both mentioned you as influences on their own work. Seay: Oh, my goodness. Could we register that on some kind of monetary conversion table? [laughter] No, I’m flattered and deeply honored. Suarez: Have you ever talked to them about this? Seay: No, I really haven’t. Wait, I take that back. After the publication

of my first book in 1970, I gave a reading at Mercer University. Years later David told me he was at that reading and it somehow provided certification to notions of his own about poetry—ideas about subject matter, the general texture of a poem, what have you. An interesting coincidence is that David and I both were fortunate in having had an exceptionally humane and inspiring professor, Ben Griffiths, teach us literature. I attended Mercer for a couple of years back in the late fifties, and Ben was my teacher in both freshman composition and the survey course in British literature—a wise and charming man with a kind of droll wit that won me over immediately. That’s a surprise, though, your mentioning Dave Smith’s comment about my work as an influence. I’ve always had the feeling that he respects my work, and indeed the respect is mutual. So I take his comment as a high compliment. I’m honored that he and David think of my work in that way. Suarez: Do you feel a strong sense of community with other southern poets? Seay: Not so much as when I was younger. Don’t misunderstand; I’ve always had a sense of community in terms of common cause.

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And it’s not that I’ve consciously pulled back; it’s just that I no longer feel the compulsion to, say, call up a friend at midnight and read a poem I’ve just finished. My friends and I used to do that when we were younger—so excited about a poem that we couldn’t wait on the mail. I still have friends whose advice I’ll seek. But the midnight calls are rare. Besides, there’s email now, though it’s a strange feeling for me when I hit Send and imagine my poem negotiating with a modem and then shrieking off through that cold fire of fiber optics. So, to answer your question, I guess that puts all of us in more of a global community. Hosey: Some of your poems are set outside the South. How have

your travels influenced your poetry? Seay: I didn’t do a lot of traveling in the early part of my adult life because I couldn’t afford it. As I mentioned earlier, I went to Mercer a couple of years. But then I had to drop out of college for four years to help my family. I worked construction, sold used cars, tended bar, the whole protocol of employment you usually read in the bios on the dust jackets of first novels. When I was finally able to get back to school, I went to the University of Mississippi, in my home state. After I finished there, I worked another year and then went to the University of Virginia, took out some student loans, and got my M.A. I taught at VMI for two years and completed my first collection of poetry. What I’m getting at, I guess, is that I just didn’t find the time to take off and go abroad. Actually it was not until I was in my midforties, after teaching at Alabama and Vanderbilt and coming here to Chapel Hill, that I started doing some limited travel. But once I got a whiff of it, I realized how well suited for it I am. I dearly love to wander around in foreign cities, visit all the tour-worn sites, drive off into the country, try in some vicarious way to enter the history of a place. My wife and I will drive a road until it literally ends in a field, looking for something like, say, the station in the west of Ireland where Marconi sent his first transmission, that wireless S that went out across the Atlantic and changed forever the way we talk to each other, or walking through the woods outside Peredelkino to get to Pasternak’s grave—that kind of romantic ghost tracking. I think my wife and I would travel just about all the time if we could afford to. There’s just so much of the world we haven’t seen. I wish I’d started when I was twenty. In fact, in my twenties, during the time I was out

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of college, I was working in Memphis and I decided I wanted to go to sea. Part wanderlust, part economics; I’d heard it was good pay. So I took the train down to New Orleans and tried to get into the seafarers’ union. I stayed down there a couple of weeks knocking around, trying to get them to take me in, but I didn’t know anybody and it was a very closed system. I thought, well, if not the sea then the Mississippi River, get on a riverboat. Same story, I couldn’t get into the union. So I had to return to Memphis, which was probably a good thing because soon after that I went back to school. I’m not sure I would have returned to college if I had headed to sea. Even then I wanted to write, and I’m fairly confident I would have come around to writing, but obviously it would have been very different. Conrad with a southern Anglo spin. I don’t think I’ve answered your question. I’ve written maybe a dozen poems that draw on my travels outside the States, and I’d like to write more. As I said earlier, part of the appeal of foreign travel, for me, is the promise of a chance to slip in the side door of history. For example, I’ve yet to visit Paris without an image in my mind of German soldiers walking the boulevards. And somehow my experience of the place is deepened. It’s not just this wonderfully Gallic city with a river giving it a Left Bank. It’s the Paris that survived the Nazi invasion. That’s not to neglect its larger history, which is certainly richer than that particular era; it’s just to say that it represents a piece of history that’s never been evoked for me elsewhere with quite the same intensity. Similarly, standing among the ruins of a medieval abbey in Yorkshire gives me the illusion that I’m not at quite the same remove from the spirit that built that place as I normally am. I guess I’m getting a tad too mystical again, like when I was talking about the narrative impulse. So, next question. Hosey: The experience of people who speak other languages has made its way into several of your poems. Has exposure to other languages affected your sense of language and how you use it in your poetry? Seay: I wish I knew more languages. The Romance languages in particular are music to me. What I mean is simply having that sound around me; I’m not fluent in any of them. But any of the European languages—the different rhythms, the different inflections, the different ways of putting consonants and vowels together—I can get

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drunk just sitting in a public place with that wonderful hum around me. To be able to speak fluently with the people you meet in other countries, that’s got to be a source of great satisfaction. Just about anyone can manage the basics—getting food and shelter and the right exit to Delphi or wherever. But to be able to hear the whole story of, say, this Cuban exile on the plane from Miami to Mexico City, that’s the gravy that’s impossible to get if you don’t have the language. It’s amazing, though, that somehow you can put a few words together, some sign language, some dates written on the airline napkin, a kind of charade game, and cobble together a brief history. How his raft finally drifted ashore in the Keys after two days without water and now he’s got his own business and is headed to Mexico for business. And pleasure. Then he’ll smile and ask the attendant to bring us two Dos Equis. Big joke, dos Dos! Usually that’s your signal in any language that you’re arriving at a better level of discourse. Humor. And booze. My Cuban exile is not in a poem, so to try to answer your question: no, I don’t have a sense of my language having been affected by exposure to other languages. But, as I said earlier, I do have some poems that draw on the experience in a more general way. My poem “Bridges,” for example, has a section that’s set in Prague. I became good friends with a Czech writer who had a residency fellowship in the south of France at the same time I did. I spoke no Czech, and he spoke only a few words of English. But we would take that and put a little French, a little German, together and walk along gesturing and pointing as though we had known each other for years. Usually before dinner we would walk along the Mediterranean to the casino, have a drink, play the slot machines, and then have to rush out and take a shortcut over the rocks along the shore to get back in time for dinner, like kids out playing too late. He was my father’s age, and so I told him about my father, my life in the South, how it differed from New York, and so on. He himself had survived Dachau, and he told me a little of that, but I didn’t press him. Later I went to Prague to visit him, and a section of the poem is set there, primarily on the Charles Bridge. I lost a glove in the city, and at the train station my friend—again in our cobbled language—told me I couldn’t make my way in the world with only one glove and therefore had to come back again to visit him so we could find it. How can somebody survive Dachau and still find that kind of levity? I wanted to get the lost

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glove in the poem, but it didn’t fit finally. Maybe a poem of its own. Maybe this one-handed guy. . . . Hosey: Many things that people wouldn’t consider poetic—Dukes of

Hazzard, rock ’n’ roll, cheese—find their way into your work. How does this reflect your conception of poetry? Seay: Poetry can accommodate just about anything that’s out there. From The Dukes of Hazzard, or whatever its ridiculous counterpart is today, to . . . whatever. How about glutamate receptors? My wife is a scientist. Molecular biology. Basic medical research. She was telling me recently about glutamate receptors and a study involving sea slugs and what scientists call long-term potentiation. Sounds like a self-help term, doesn’t it? But it’s a factor in trying to determine the molecular mechanisms of memory. Now that’s what I’d like to get in a poem. Some long-term potentiation! Suarez: What do you think is your best work? Seay: The new poems. You have to believe that what you’re doing at the time is better than what you did the time before. That’s not to say the new poems are everything I want them to be. One of my prime concerns always, particularly after my first book, has been to maintain the voice of the poem at a fairly level and seemingly casual register and yet still be capable of shifting into a tonal mode that hopefully echoes one or more of the received “voices” of poetic discourse—elegiac, odic, jam-fest, whatever. And I’d also like to achieve a kind of lyric valence I can’t quite articulate for you. But if I can’t achieve that, I guess I’ll stick with the haute colloquial I’ve tried to develop. Suarez: William Stafford’s work comes to mind in some regards. Seay: True, though I’m not a great fan of Stafford’s. As I’ve aged

I’ve not been able to read him with the same kind of appreciation I once had. Too often the voice of the poem—and I know this will sound strange, given Stafford’s seeming sincerity—but the voice often strikes me as forced. Sort of like a decent, considerate neighbor talking over the fence and then pulling out this prophet or medicineman mask. I’m not sure it’s a reliable voice finally. Maybe it’s that he’s trying too hard in the prophetic voice. Or maybe it seems willfully cryptic. I don’t know. But your observation is accurate as far as the

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good neighbor part goes. That part of the persona is expressed in a fairly level voice, and there seems to be a sensitive and alert mind at work. And a poem like, say, “An Event at Big Eddy” ought to stay around, though I know “Traveling through the Dark” is the one anthologists typically settle on. Suarez: When you put together a book of poetry do you usually have a design—thematically or formally—in mind? Seay: Not usually. In the air-conditioner poem I did—the idea of interwoven narratives, and the nature of belief. Otherwise I’m just working poem by poem. I’m not a prolific writer—more in the mode of, say, Don Justice or Eudora Welty, two writers I greatly admire— and I’ve found that by the time I get a collection together, it tends to represent a fairly discernible stage in my life. So to that degree the poems have a tonal affinity and probably a recurring focal point, but that’s not a formal design. Hosey: How have the new poems evolved from the earlier books? Seay: In the first book, Let Not Your Hart, I was operating pretty much

on raw energy. I had relatively little formal schooling in poetry. I look on those poems now, and in many ways they strike me as innocent—innocent in the sense that they engage with the world more out of eagerness and wonder than out of any sense of nuance or measured emotion. Certainly they’re not cautious, nor keenly aware of the potential for melodrama. To their credit, though, with regard to measure, a number of them are metrical—and rhymed as well—so it’s not like they’re altogether country mice come to town. But I do remember the writing of those poems was in many ways a mad rush into the thick of things. In my next book, Water Tables, I consciously tried to avoid repeating myself, and indeed it’s a different book in its overall texture, tone, what have you. Part of that change was probably owing to the cultural transitions of the time—all that we were going through as the late sixties segued into the seventies. So there’s a kind of dreaminess, a kind of marijuana haze, in much of Water Tables. It doesn’t have the particular ambient light I’d like. Aside from the poems about my sons and the ones dedicated to my friends, I’m not altogether pleased with it now. It’s not hard-nosed enough; it’s too soft in places, too fuzzy. But, as I said, there are poems in there that I’m still very fond of, and they seem to hold up—or

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at least they’ve been anthologized with some degree of regularity, particularly the Hogansville poem. Overall, I’m more pleased with The Light as They Found It and the new poems in my “new and selected collection,” Open Field, Understory. Your question is: how has my poetry evolved? The poems have mellowed out some. And I hope they’re smarter poems, more alert to nuances I missed when I was younger. And as I said earlier, I’ve attempted, especially in the newer poems, to achieve a different tonal quality in the voice of the poem, tried to key it somehow beyond the vernacular, and hope it manages to stop short of the mannered, the precious. It can stay in the music store all it wants; I just don’t want it hanging out in the jewelry shop. I like the idea, too, of trying to inscribe an underlying rhythm that plays along with the colloquial but can also break loose and make a run for the old high style. The glutamate receptors kicking in. That long-term potentiation. The mechanisms of memory. The little synapse that hooks poetry up with the best moments of its past.

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Kate Daniels

L I K E M A N Y southern writers, Kate Daniels has struggled with her relationship to the region. Daniels’s progressive political beliefs often conflict with conservative aspects of southern culture. At the same time, Daniels has gradually come to value many southern traditions, particularly the emphasis on community and oral culture. Daniels’s poetry suggests these tensions: her verse often centers on the dayto-day challenges of juggling motherhood, marriage, and work in a society still adjusting to the reality of many women’s lives in contemporary America. Influenced by Robert Penn Warren’s narrative emphasis and her conversion to Catholicism, in her most recent book, Four Testimonies, Daniels explores the consciousness of French philosopher and ascetic Simone Weil in a long narrative poem. 200

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Daniels lives in Nashville and teaches at Vanderbilt University. This interview was conducted at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., on April 17–18, 1997. Hosey: You were born in the South. Do you feel that living there influenced your poetry? Daniels: Yes, I was born in the South, in Richmond, and lived all my life there until I left for college in 1971. My father’s family was from North Carolina, the Raleigh area, and the tidewater farm area of eastern Virginia, Charles City and New Kent County. But my mother was British, a British war bride. She had been married, very young, to an American GI and transported to this country on the Queen Mary along with hundreds of other young British women who had become the wives of American soldiers. That marriage was an immediate failure, though, and she divorced that man and later married my father. Both my mother’s and my father’s families were working class. No one in the family had been to college, and many had never finished high school. So there were these two strains of background, language, values—my father’s southern identity and my mother’s English identity. Although my mother was glad to be in this country, she was not uncritical. I believe she was appalled by the Jim Crow racism she saw in the South in the 1940s and 1950s and appalled, as well, by the South’s anti-intellectualism, its kind of prideful provincialism. She always had a sense of herself, and of her children, particularly me, as better educated than others, smarter, more culturally and artistically aware. In many ways, she was openly disdainful of a lot of southern culture, and this made an impression on me. I felt a real conflict about whether I was southern or not. I adored my mother when I was a child. I specifically adored her differentness, and I wanted to be like her. I remember going through a period of absolutely hating southern accents. I was about ten. My family took a car trip to New York City to visit the World’s Fair, and I spent the whole time, once we got past Baltimore, trying to mimic those bland, middle-seaboard voices of the disc jockeys coming over the radio. And I used to love speaking in a British accent, like my mother and her sisters and friends in the British Wives Club. When I think about it now, I see clearly that my British background oriented me to literary texts, to things on the page. My mother read constantly, as did I. She memorized poems and recited them for us; sometimes

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she wrote her own. She always wanted to be a writer, herself. She distinguished between literature and junk reading. My father didn’t really read at all and had no interest in the arts. But he was a good talker, a good storyteller. He loved jokes and puns. He loved country music—hillbilly music, they called it then—all those sad and corny narratives set to twangy music. When I was growing up, I tended to be disdainful, like my mother, of the things my father liked. I identified more with the written texts she preferred than with the spontaneous oral creations of my father. In reality, however, I spent most of my first six years with my father’s mother, who was a real talker, a serious yakker. I wrote about her and the influence she had on me in an essay a couple of years back in The Future of Southern Letters. She talked all the time, always creating narratives, always moving toward closure. She had only gone through the eighth grade and did not read, except for the Bible. But out of everyone in my family, she had what I would call a literary understanding of the things I wrote. It amazed me that she could actually read my poems and understand them. She had no idea what a metaphor was, but she could point it out in a poem and talk admiringly about how it worked. In a way, she was “writing” all the time she talked, and I picked up on that definitely. That is still the thing that I adore beyond all sense and reason in the South—the talking, talking, talking about anything to anybody anywhere. Those slow sentences with the lollygagging vowels and the ellipsed consonants—love it. That’s the South, of course, but it’s my granny, too. In the South, talking and being talked to, I know who I am, where I am, and why I exist: to tell a story. So all of that is how being from the South has influenced my poetry. That my poems are narrative, tend toward colloquial language, and have strongly orchestrated closure all seems to me to be attributable to my origins and experience in the South. The poems I love the most and those I try to write are those that sound like voices talking more than anything else. Suarez: Who would be the southern poets who you feel had the

most influence on your work, if any? Daniels: Robert Penn Warren would be the one southern poet who

had the most influence on me—the lack of compression, the grandiosity of syntax, the very quirky speaking voice in his poems were all things that I found very appealing aesthetically and very

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encouraging personally. I always had a hard time with Ransom and Tate because of how highly formal, how self-conscious, their poems seemed to me. They intimidated me in a way, but also made me anxious: so boxed-in, so careful, so neat and tidy. Just the way that Warren’s poems, particularly the later poems, sprawled all over the page was really inspiring to me. There was a way to break out of jail! And because his poems sounded so different from everyone else’s, they became important to me as a model for an independent literary life. His poems convinced me it was possible to make poems from the actual materials and circumstances and cadences, etc., of one’s own actual life. So it was those stylistic aspects of form, more than the content, that really influenced me. I met Red Warren once, you know, in 1984. His wife, Eleanor Clark, who had been a friend of Muriel Rukeyser, invited me to visit them at their summer house in Vermont to talk about some biographical work I was doing on Rukeyser. He was just getting up from a nap when I arrived, shuffling around, serving sherry and feeding the dog. It was a disconcerting view, at first, of one of my literary heroes! But then we sat down to lunch on the screened porch, and he emerged! Almost eighty years old, ill, very weak in strength—but he was still there intellectually. His eyes were amazing. Like what I imagine an eagle’s eyes to be like, so intense and sharp. And his assessments and judgments of Rukeyser and 1930s and 1940s literary politics were incredibly astute. It was a highlight of my life to get to meet him. Suarez: What about contemporary southern poets? Daniels: Dave Smith, Betty Adcock, David Bottoms, Andrew Hudg-

ins, Charles Wright would be the ones I read and admire the most. I know, Ernest, you’d probably like me to say that James Dickey’s work has been important to me. But I’m ashamed to say that I have remained, over the years, almost completely unmoved by his poetry. I don’t know why. Since college, I have been trying to become engaged enough in his work to read all his poems, but I’ve failed. Isn’t it awful? It is awful. Now, when I go to Dickey, it’s to figure out what the problem is for me, and I still haven’t been able to. It’s almost as if I have a mental block. Sometimes I think I was irrevocably prejudiced against him by that essay Robert Bly wrote during the Vietnam War, indicting Dickey for writing “The Firebombing.” I can still get charged up reading that. That would be pretty much it for

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southern poets. I have to say, though, that it was the southern fiction writers, more than the poets, who have been important to me. Suarez: Who, in particular? And why? What aspects of their work

influenced you? Daniels: Faulkner was someone I read somewhat compulsively

when I was an undergraduate. Once I got onto him, I couldn’t stop for a long time. A lot of it was the sound, the way he kind of walls you in with incredibly textured language and emotional intensity. Maybe that’s not the right spatial metaphor. It’s not like being imprisoned against your will. It’s more like being held, being enclosed in an embrace. Flannery O’Connor would be another. I still read her. With her, it’s the ragged humanity of her characters, the ways in which she was so accepting of her characters, of their imperfections, their oddities. I love the way she sort of gathers everybody up. “They might be weird as all get out, but they’re mine, and I’m standin’ by ’em.” You know what I mean? That Catholic thing: look not upon our failures, but upon our steadfastness. Walker Percy I consider one of my favorite writers in this part of my life. But my relationship with his work seems a lot more complicated to me. Perhaps because he was younger than Faulkner, and lived longer than O’Connor, he writes about a different South. The part of his work that deals with race—a large part—is different, of course, because of that. I’m very attracted to Percy’s ability, as a white person, as a privileged white person, to talk about issues of race and racism, without apology, without embarrassment, and with profound intelligence, I think, and sensitivity. I admire that greatly, even though I’m often very uncomfortable when I’m reading him, always wondering how black readers, black southerners, in particular, might respond to his characters and some of the things that come out of their mouths. It’s a good discomfort, though. There’s been too much silence in the South. While there’s a lot of talking going on down here and always has been, apparently, it’s not always what we need to be talking about. There are terrible silences in the South, terrible, that need to be addressed. I think Percy’s work tries to address them. Suarez: Are there any other writers who have been particularly important to you? Daniels: Actually, Allen Ginsberg, who just died last Saturday. He was someone whose work was important to me early on. A lot of

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my identity as a writer originates in the fact that I was born into the working class, which is a population that is not known for producing many artists (although there are wonderful exceptions, of course). I don’t really know what it’s like for other people raised in the working class to emerge and to do something like what I do—write and teach poetry—but one of the problems for me was a feeling of a lack of entitlement, a lack of models—the very strong feeling that this was not something I was supposed to or even allowed to do. Even the feeling that my chosen work was not “real” work in some way. Add to that gender issues. I was telling Ernest today that the anthology I used in my undergraduate survey of American poetry at the University of Virginia in the early 1970s had no women in it. And that includes Emily Dickinson! So, all of those things made it feel like much more of a monumental task than perhaps it really was to contemplate becoming a poet. I was in college during a time of real social change for women. New opportunities seemed to be opening up every day. I was the first female student at U.Va. who was allowed to shelve books in Alderman Library. Nineteen seventy-three, I think it was. Because I was an English major, they put me in British and American literature, the PRs and PSs. And one day, I came upon a book of Ginsberg’s early poems, called Empty Mirror. They were written before Howl, but published after, I believe. Like so many of his poems, they were irreverent, profane, and of course they had all the graphic homosexual content. I was transfixed! In so many ways, they seemed to have nothing to do with me— loud, exuberant, homosexual Jewish guy with Communist parents and mystical, Blakean leanings meets mousy, repressed, workingclass Baptist girl from the south side of Richmond, Virginia, whose parents had just voted for Richard Nixon. But those poems blew me away. I remember very clearly thinking, “You can do that? You can do that in a poem?” And extrapolating—well, if he can do that, then I can write poems that don’t sound like the ones in the anthologies, even though I’ve never heard of a poet with a life like mine. It was massively important to me. It was my own little ScarlettO’Hara-in-the-turnip-field epiphany: by God, I’m never going to eat turnips/write constipated little rhymed and metered sonnets about idealized love again! Suarez: Let me ask you this. You’ve talked about Ginsberg, who is called a Beat poet. And I know you’ve done work on Robert Bly,

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who gets associated with Deep Image poetry, and so on. Critics have organized the history of American poetry largely around schools or movements. Of course, writers don’t always do this, but sometimes they do. Is there any particular group of poets you’ve aligned yourself with? Daniels: There is no actual group, but I feel a deep sense of connection with certain contemporary women poets. Suarez: In particular, who? Daniels: If we can still call Muriel Rukeyser contemporary, then her,

of course. And Adrienne Rich and Sharon Olds. And Carolyn Forché, too, but for different reasons from the others. Suarez: How so? Daniels: Because they were women writers who insisted on their right to bring specifically female content to their poems. And it’s important to me that Rukeyser and Rich began to do it when it was seen as a negative, limiting thing. To do so was to consign your work to the “lesser” realm of women’s or domestic poetry. That they had the courage to say that their own experiences, their own actual lives, were important, were worthy, were poetry—again, that was and continues to be very inspiring to me. You know that famous Rukeyser line from “Kathe Kollwitz”? “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” That pretty well sums it up for me. Suarez: And Carolyn Forché? Daniels: Well, I just admire tremendously the largeness of her vision, her courage in writing about public, historical events. Although there’s lots of poetry by contemporary American women that I love, I have to admit that I get tired of reading about romantic love and eros and waning eros. It sometimes seems to be just an updated version of the old caged nightingale tradition of women’s lyrics. Hosey: I would say that you, also, bring specifically female subject

matter into your poetry. How do you see this as relating to a male readership? Daniels: Well, I’m forty-three years old. I was part of that generation of women who considered themselves the contemporary women’s

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movement in the early 1970s. It is true that I feel that we live in a profoundly patriarchal, sexist, male-inscribed world still. In a way, your question is an example of that, isn’t it? Why should it even be an issue what we write about unless there is some underlying assumption that some topics are more appropriate or more poetically promising than others? What I believe is that to read about anything in poetry humanizes people. If women can read about war and be humanized by that, then I don’t see the problem with men reading about having babies and being humanized by that. It just seems such a ridiculous split. Does that make sense? Suarez: Yes. As a matter of fact, you answered that question very much the way we thought you would. It’s really the logical answer. Hosey: Talk about your method. If you could define your method . . . Daniels: My method? Hosey: Your method of writing poetry. Daniels: Well, that’s always a hard thing for me to talk about. My life is so chaotic, so unordered, that it sometimes seems as if I wake up every day to a brand-new world with no idea of what I’m going to need or know in that world for that day. Partly that’s due to having had small children in the house for twelve years, and partly it’s due to having moved twelve times in thirteen years, and partly it’s due to my husband’s job. He’s a collegiate tennis coach, and he travels nine months of the year. It’s very discombobulating, all the comings and goings, the leave-takings and reunions. It might be an easier lifestyle to adapt to if I was one of those writers who is very scheduled and disciplined. You know, three, four, five hours a day at the old word processor no matter what. But I’ve never been like that. I’m always involved with poetry in some way or other, but not always in the most obvious ways of just sitting down and writing. But I’m always reading, always thinking, always keeping a journal, always teaching poetry, which also helps me in my own writing in some ways. I decided years ago, while I was still in graduate school, actually, that I just wasn’t going to let myself be anxious because I didn’t have the same work habits as others. I hope there’s a certain eccentricity and eclecticism in all that I do that would extend to whatever method I have for writing poetry. But all that aside, poems almost always

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start for me with a line, what I think is a first line, although that doesn’t always turn out to be true. The older I get, however, the truer it is. Because I write a very narrative type of poem, the first line determines a lot about the poem that is going to follow—the voice and the tone—which tells me about the character, of course—and often even the setting will proceed from the first line. Although a lot of my poems now, particularly in Four Testimonies, seem to be pretty literary in conception, I tend not to have an organizing idea in mind before I begin. I abhor the idea-making mind in writing poetry. The mind that always has a specific, highly defined idea that it has also planned exactly how to execute. That mind, for me, is great during the revision process, but deadly during the actual process of composition. I see that a lot, of course, in students—invariably those who write the least successful and least engaging poems, poems that are inert and dispassionate. So I begin with a line, a voice, a character who is speaking out of a particular context. I guess I would say that the writing of the remainder of the poem involves developing the narrative context that the first line introduces or portends. Something like that. I tend to write fairly quickly. I think I used to write much more slowly, to be more Flaubertian and agonized. But I’m a selfconscious person, anyway, and I just couldn’t bear to be that way in my most private moments writing poems. So I just decided to do away with that part of myself when I was in graduate school. It helped that I was studying with Stanley Kunitz, who has great faith in the unconscious aspects of writing poetry. He led me into a way of thinking about my own writing process as related to the wringing out of a sponge. For almost twenty years now, I have worked that way—just trying to get out as much of a poem in progress as possible in the initial process, wringing out the sponge, over and over, until there’s nothing left. What’s on the page is often very messy at that point, ungrammatical, full of notes to myself about what I intuit might fit, blank spaces just scanned in where I can’t find the words but know the accentual-syllabic makeup. For years and years, I wrote on yellow legal pads, but then I switched over to the word processor, and now that’s what I prefer. I like to be able to write that fast. The faster I can write, the less self-conscious and hung up I am. I tend to prefer a very consistent line length in a poem, and since I’m a freeverse poet, the word processor helps with that, too. No more nasty surprises when you transcribe from the written page to the typed!

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Hosey: How much do you revise? Daniels: Lots and lots. But for both The Niobe Poems and Four Testi-

monies—I almost cringe to say this—it was almost as if parts of both books were dictated to me. And a lot of those poems sprung fullformed. They needed very little revision. That was true for The Niobe Poems, in particular. I was trying to write about the drowning death of my five-year-old nephew, to whom I had been very close. It was not working well at all. What I was writing was morbid, mawkish, just plain bad. And then one day, on a bus heading back to Northampton, Massachusetts, where I was living, from Dartmouth College, where I’d gone to give a reading, the myth of Niobe just popped into my head. I only remembered it very murkily. When I got home, I went to the art library at Smith College and read everything they had on Niobe. The poems started almost immediately. The myth was helpful in two ways. It gave me the narrative distance I needed to write about what I wanted to write about without being overwhelmed by the psychic weight of my own autobiographical involvement, and the story itself was, of course, a classical tragedy. So it gave me a narrative structure for the poems I was writing, even though the narrative of my life and of my poetry writing had been almost totally disrupted by the death of this five year old. So, once I got onto Niobe, the poems just sort of wrote themselves. Literally, I would wake up, the words would be going through my head, or I’d wake up with the realization that a certain poem needed to exist in the book, its title would be soand-so, and it would be located in such a place in the text. That’s what it was like. It was incredible. A similar sort of thing happened with some of the poems in Four Testimonies. The earthquake poem, “In the Marvelous Dimension,” and the suicide poem, “The SmashUp,” both started out as nothing but voices in my head, each one leading off with the actual first lines of those poems. Everything else developed from those first lines and what they let me know about the characters who were speaking them. “The Testimony of Simone Weil” also began that way. “I was born in Atget’s Paris” was the line that came to me, and that poem, too, unrolled from that opening. But the Weil poem took me longer to write than any other poem of mine—almost seven years. And it involved an incredible amount of research, so the process of writing it was different from that of any of my other poems.

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Suarez: Could you say something about the differences between The White Wave and The Niobe Poems? Daniels: Well, The White Wave is my baby book, you know. It’s really just a bouquet of what my editor and I considered to be the best poems I had written up until then. While I did wrench the poems into an overall form—the opening-poem-as-prologue, the poems of innocence/early life, and then the poems of experience— the shape of the book didn’t relate very well or very much to the poems themselves, if that makes sense. The shape came way after I had written the poems. In The Niobe Poems, as I’ve just said, the opposite was true. The shape of the book, of the classical tragedy that I reconfigured at the end, had everything to do with the poems I was writing. And although both books are tied to autobiography, the poems in The White Wave are much more straightforwardly, invisibly so. The myth allowed me to be more autobiographically covert in The Niobe Poems. That was my hope, or maybe my fantasy! Suarez: So between The White Wave and The Niobe Poems it’s the pain

of experience that necessitated the use of that myth? Daniels: I guess that would be a way to say it. But it was also this: that the death of a child is many things. But two things it certainly is are these: One, it strips you of language. You’re filled with the most catastrophic emotions of your life, but you have no language that will convey those feelings. The myth gave me a way to stop screaming and moaning and start talking apprehensibly. That was one thing. The other was this. Child death, when you think of it in fictional terms, is innately melodramatic. Actually, the word melodramatic doesn’t even get close to what it is. Bathos is closer. Maybe we don’t even have a word for it. So that was a problem from the beginning—how to write about this without going over the edge of the cliff by the middle of the first poem. I knew I wanted to get close, but I didn’t want to go over, didn’t want to betray the authentic sentiments of the situation by replacing them with sentimentality. I once read an interview with Robert Lowell in which he talked about the difference between sentiment and sentimentality, and ever since it has been an important directive for me. Because I want, perhaps more than anything, for my poems to be full of sentiment, full of powerful and authentic feeling, but never sentimental, of

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course, even when my topics—childbearing, babies, the death of children—might be regarded in the context of our literary culture as sentimental. Anyway, the myth, again, gave me a way to steer around the rocks of that danger. The poem by David Ignatow that I put in the book’s front matter, “Mother and Child,” was part of all of this—another directive. That poem just kills me. The first time I read it, I felt as if I’d just been stabbed in the heart. Ignatow articulated for me so powerfully the feeling of inarticulate grief. And he had done it with a few short, declarative sentences and two or three adjectives. That poem demonstrated what I was trying to do by using the myth of Niobe in my poems—to strip away all irrelevance, all embellishment, and just hand over a narrative that speaks for itself. Suarez: Why did you feel it was necessary to reconceptualize the end of the Niobe myth? Daniels: Because the end of it is such a bummer! What really happens in the myth is that Niobe loses everything—her fourteen children, her husband, her pride, and her happiness. She finally gives in to her grief, and to top everything off, she’s turned into a boulder and transported to a barren desert where she resides in that form forever, a little stream trickling from her, symbolizing her tears. She was alive, but dead. Well, that is what happens to some people when they encounter tragedy in their lives, but it doesn’t happen to everyone. That kind of catatonia is just one of the early stages of grief and bereavement, actually. And if you’re going to complete your journey from the encounter with death into life again, you have to move through all the stages in order to become reanimated. But Niobe of the myth didn’t go any further. As someone who went to graduate school in literature and as an English professor, I was well prepared to think about revising the end of the myth. So much of what has happened in literary studies during the past two decades has to do with new ways of looking at literature, at what has been passed down and how it’s been regarded. Now, of course, it’s nothing new to observe that women characters in literature and art, historically, have more often been objects than subjects acting on their own behalf. Niobe is a perfect example of that. She starts off being defiant and uppity to the goddess of her kingdom, Leto. “I’m a better mother than you are,” she crows. “You’ll never be better.” Even after Leto has killed her sons and her husband has killed himself, Niobe is hanging

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in there. “I don’t care. I still have these daughters, and they’re better than any old children of yours!” She’s so defiant. God, I love it! But then, of course, Leto sends Artemis to take the daughters, and it’s all over. I really couldn’t bear the end of the myth. I loved my nephew so much. All of us who had loved him were so shattered. It intensified my own grief to see the pain of so many other people I loved. For a long time, the book ended after what is now its third section. It ended with the pain, in a poem where these two corpselike figures are just lying on a bed. I sent it around to all my poet friends, and one by one they began calling and writing, “Are you all right, Kate?” I was in such pain myself, I couldn’t see that having the book take a nosedive into a quasi death scene wasn’t going to be a successful narrative structure for the book. Even though that’s the narrative structure of the actual myth, isn’t it? Eventually, I was able to understand what the end of the book should be, that I would have to write a new narrative to get out of it, to pass through death, back into life, albeit a new life. Hosey: At the end of The Niobe Poems, there seems to be an affirmation, as if one of the functions of poetry is to heal. Would that be fair to say? Daniels: Probably. Healing is a word I use a lot. I have done a lot

of work in what’s called health care arts. I was poet in residence at Duke University Medical Center in the early 1990s, and I held the same post at Vanderbilt Medical Center in 1995 and 1996. I still do work over there occasionally. What we do is seek to heal—rather than cure, which is what the doctors do. We’re using literature as an agent of healing, and there is, I suppose, some connection between that and my basic beliefs about poetry, and all art, for that matter. While I wouldn’t say that every poem has to be healing, or end in some uplifting, affirmative manner, I do believe that the process of art is a dynamic process that involves a number of different elements that pull the poet and the reader into engagement with each other. To me, real art is never static. I can’t bear art that just announces, “Isn’t this awful! Isn’t this terrible? What’s the point? Why go on living?” So much of twentieth-century art has done that. God, I hate it! That bleating about how bad everything is. That lack of imagination. My attitudes about this must have something to do with my religious belief. I’m Christian, a convert to Catholicism.

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How I think about my belief, my faith, my hope is two-part. It’s not just the brokenness—isn’t it awful?—but the wholeness on the other side, or the wholeness that preceded the brokenness, if you prefer that. Again, it’s dynamic—the move from brokenness to wholeness. At least, we hope that the brokenness can be resolved into a kind of wholeness. That’s the basis of Christianity, isn’t it? That hope. The other thing is that it’s hard to believe. It’s easy to give in and moan and groan with the others. The hard thing is to keep on playing your best, to stay in the game to the very end even if your prospects look really bad. Don’t gag, don’t choke, don’t tank, as my husband would say. Suarez: Has that had any influence on your work? Your religious

belief? Daniels: Yes, I think so. As I said, I was raised Baptist but converted

to Catholicism. Actually, my mother was Catholic, the daughter of an Irish Catholic. She went to Catholic school in England and all that. But then she came to this country and got divorced and married my father, who was Baptist, and as far as I know she never went to a Catholic mass again until my children were christened. I first went to mass when I was ten. I went with some friends, and I was just blown out of the water. For me at that time—it was a Latin mass— that was what going to church was supposed to be like. If I’d been a more assertive child, I might have demanded to be taken again. But I wasn’t that way, and I continued on in the Baptist church, becoming a bride of Christ at twelve, going to Sunday school, retreats, and camps in the mountains. When I was about fifteen, I stopped going to church altogether. And I didn’t start going again steadily until fifteen years later when my nephew drowned. My husband is the proverbial cradle Catholic, so of course being with him influenced me enormously. To become a Catholic, you have to go through a yearlong course in which you learn all about the history of the church and the beliefs and practices of the church. I actually did that twice, the first time in Baton Rouge (where Robert Lowell converted to Catholicism), where I didn’t finish, and then here in Nashville, where I made it. One of the main things you have to think about during the conversion process is your conception of God, and that has had a profound influence on my poetry writing and my whole notion of who I am and why I write. You can see it directly in certain poems.

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Certainly in “The Testimony of Simone Weil,” since so much of it is about her Catholic beliefs and the notion she held of a personally loving God. If The Niobe Poems is, in many ways, about a falling out with God, then Four Testimonies is about the shocking realization that although I was mad at him, he was never mad at me. Hosey: Maybe you could talk about the connection between Four Testimonies and your use of historical and contemporary materials. Daniels: At first, the book was called “The Testimony of Simone Weil and Other Poems.” That’s why all the epigraphs are from Weil. As I said earlier, this book started from the first line of this poem, Simone Weil’s voice saying, “I was born in Atget’s Paris.” I don’t really know why. I began reading Weil, very unsystematically, in the early 1980s. She was one of those writers whose books I often kept next to my bed and whom I ruminated about in the pages of my journals. But why the poem came to me, I don’t know. Eugene Atget, the documentary photographer who photographed Old Paris as it was disappearing, is the other character in the poem. When I began writing the poem, I knew, vaguely, that Weil and Atget must have overlapped each other in time, and that both lived in Paris, but that was it. Atget’s photographs have fascinated me ever since I first saw them at an exhibition in New York in 1978 or 1979. It wasn’t until I had written an entire page, the actual first page of the poem, that I saw why Weil and Atget were in the same poem. And then they became for me in the writing of the poem a kind of passionate couple, even though they never met, of course, and never would have. For me, there is some kind of correspondence between their visions, both so characterized by the void, by self-negation, by a kind of austere elegance. Atget’s photos image Weil’s thought, in a way. So that’s where all of that came from. I did years of research on both Weil and Atget, just gathering facts, looking at the images, reading the work. If there is any direct poetic influence, it would have to be Muriel Rukeyser’s “Book of the Dead” from U.S. 1, which she published in 1938. It was one of what she called her documentary poems, based on a corporate cover-up of unsafe working conditions at a silica mining operation in West Virginia in the early 1930s. In the poem, she used lots of documentary materials—newspaper articles, stock market reports, trial transcripts—and put them together in an original text that was a sort of riff on a papyrus that she had seen

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at the British Museum in the summer of 1936. The poem just blew me away when I first read it. It’s still one of my favorites. As far as “In the Marvelous Dimension” and “The Smash-Up” are concerned, both probably bear some impress of my passionate admiration for Frank Bidart’s poems, maybe in particular poems from The Book of the Body—“Ellen West,” in particular, in which he uses the actual diaries of Ellen West as a structuring device for the poem. Maybe even something like Warren’s “Audubon: A Vision” gave me the confidence, or the vision, to try something like these long, essentially dramatic pieces. I don’t know. As I said, it’s all about talking for me. And in this book, it’s all talking, but not just talking off the top of the head, I hope. I grounded the talking in historical event— the earthquake in northern California in 1989—or in some kind of specific social or cultural context. Suarez: One more thing about Four Testimonies. What about the sequence of poems called “Portrait of the Artist as Mother”? How did those come about? Daniels: In 1991, when my sons were five years old and nine months

old, we moved from Baton Rouge to Durham. My husband had accepted a head coaching position at Duke, and we decided, for a variety of reasons, to relocate. Just a month before we left, I had been put up for full professor in the English department at LSU. I loved my job there. I loved my whole life there. I still sometimes look back and wonder why we left! Anyway, we did leave, and in the space of a couple of months, I went from having a very full professional life to staying at home all day with an infant. My older son had started kindergarten, I didn’t have a job, my husband was at work and traveling all the time, and we had bought this big old house in West Durham that the baby and I just rattled around in all day. There was a breakfast room with open doorways that I used for my office. I was in there one day, sitting at the computer, trying to write a poem about something or other, and my baby boy, who was wildly active at the time—we used to call him He Who Is Lit from Within— crawled in and started going at it. I tried to ignore him, but finally he had his little hands actually up on the keyboard, mashing away at the keys. I was so frustrated I screamed, and then I just started incorporating what was happening into the poem. And then it was the proverbial lightbulb inside the head. I should write about this. I

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can write about this. So I did, but it’s a lesson I have to keep learning over and over again, that I can make poetry from the materials of my life. I think of those poems as being about identity—how do you hold on to yourself when circumstances compromise your sense of yourself, your beliefs about who you are. Suarez: The materials in those poems seem to include quite a bit of gritty, realistic detail. I was particularly struck last night when you read “Disjunction,” the poem about being in your office and having to express breast milk for your newborn daughter. It strikes one as a completely realistic scene, but it also offers an unsentimental view of motherhood, even though motherhood, as a topic, is often sentimentalized when it’s presented in poetry and fiction. Is this something that you were consciously working toward? Daniels: Oh, yes, definitely. I was very conscious throughout the

whole thing of wanting to present the sort of dirty underside of motherhood, the other side of that nauseatingly sentimentalized view that the culture just can’t seem to let go of. Suarez: Why is that important? Daniels: Because that’s it! That’s the brokenness, you know, that you have to work through with the incredible power of the love that you have for your children. It’s so hard to rear children well; sometimes, it just seems impossible. If you don’t have the love, you just get mired in the brokenness. You can become Susan Smith—strap them in the car and back them in the water. No one should ever underestimate the difficulty or the importance of being a mother. But, of course, we do all the time, don’t we? Suarez: Can you talk about what you’re working on now? It’s a book

of poems, isn’t it? Daniels: Yes, I’m working on a fourth collection of poems. I guess I’ve written about a sixth of the book, maybe more. It starts out with a poem called “Autobiography of a White Girl Raised in the South,” a very long-lined, talky, first-person piece. At first, I was going to call the book by that same title, but I’ve changed it to “My Poverty,” which enlarges the context for me and gives me greater territory to roam over. All the poems so far come at the issue of racism somehow or other, so it’s an intense book to write. It sometimes

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feels like I’m on forbidden ground. There’s a poem about interracial dating and another, called “For Doris Haskins,” about this little girl who integrated my seventh-grade classroom in 1965. I have never forgotten her. She must have been completely petrified, but we were petrified, too. All kinds of things are coming up as I write these poems. People like my family, who were lower-class whites, had virtually no access to black people in the 1950s and early 1960s. We didn’t have maids or gardeners, of course, and that’s how middleclass whites interacted with blacks. But for poor whites like us, the most access we had would be with the janitors who cleaned our schools, and things like that. I certainly did not have a conversation with a black person until 1971 when I went to college and one of my suitemates was black. It was so segregated that you really didn’t see black and white people out and about in the same places. In the consciousness and imaginations of white people in those days, blacks occupied a huge place. But in the real world, there was little interaction at all. So it’s that incredibly segregated, xenophobic world that I’m writing out of and about now in this book. You know, I was at the Holocaust Museum today—I’m still all churned up from being there. I don’t know if you can remember how it’s set up. In the section that deals with the liberation of the camps, there are these three television monitors running tapes of the liberation of three different concentration camps. One of them is Buchenwald, which was liberated by the Americans. Do you remember this? The American officer in charge made all the German citizens of the nearby town walk through the camp and filmed them as they were leaving. For the most part, the men are impassive, holding their hats in their hands, overcoats all buttoned up. But many of the women are weeping. One of them covers her face with a handkerchief and runs out of view of the camera. As I was standing there, I had the strongest urge to point at these people who refused to acknowledge what they were doing to other human beings, who conveniently put it out of their minds. J’accuse! is what I wanted to say, I guess. What the Americans made those German citizens do—acknowledge the evil they had brought about—made me think of all our problems in this country with race right now. In a way, it seems to me that affirmative action is a kind of indirect acknowledgment of wrongdoing, and that is good. The reactionary mood of white America now, though, is horrifying. Too many people seem to be putting their hankies up

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to their faces and either denying that there continues to be a race problem, or they’re claiming it’s not their problem. All of this has a lot to do with what I’m writing about. Suarez: Let’s switch gears a little bit, to get into some questions that are a little bit more autobiographical. When did you start writing poetry? Daniels: When I was five years old. I couldn’t actually write, but I dictated a story to my mother about my new red galoshes that I had accidentally gotten mixed up with those belonging to another child in kindergarten. I got a piece of construction paper, folded it up into a book, gave it to my mother, and dictated “The Mixed-Up Boots,” which she transcribed and I illustrated. I think my kindergarten teacher had suggested that I do it. And that, as they say, was that. I began writing soon after that and wrote throughout my childhood. Suarez: What inspired you? Daniels: Oh, God . . . Suarez: Anything? Daniels: You know, juvenile angst, romance fantasies, my pets. I was a hideously shy and unhappy child. Writing gave me some relief, I’m sure. I wrote plays for just about every holiday occasion and got my brothers and cousins to play the parts. I wrote poems for my parents for Mother’s and Father’s Day, I wrote valentines. I wrote out of the immediacies of my little world at first. But when I was in the fourth and fifth grades, I had two teachers who turned me in a new direction. My fourth-grade teacher was the daughter of a newspaper editor in New Jersey, and over one of the school holidays she went home to visit, taking a batch of papers we had written about a class trip to Colonial Williamsburg. He sent word back to me that I should become a writer when I grew up. That was enormously important to me, that validation from the outside world. Then in fifth grade, I was put in a small class of advanced fifth and sixth graders. That year I remember two things—writing a play for eight parts for Christmas for which I also made all the costumes, including reindeer horns out of coat hangers, and writing short stories based on pictures. The teacher used to pin up covers of the old Life and Look magazines and

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have us make up a story based on one of the pictures. I loved it. After that, I really began to write. Suarez: You went through creative writing programs at Virginia and

Columbia. Daniels: No, only at Columbia. Suarez: Oh, you didn’t do creative writing at Virginia? Daniels: No. When I was there as a master’s student, there was no creative writing program. Greg Orr had just arrived, and I got to take two workshops with him, but that was it. When I was an undergraduate, I was a regular English major. I took almost seventy hours of English, and that included lots of creative writing. Peter Taylor was there then—he was actually my adviser in graduate school—and although I never worked with him, I did get to study with John Casey, Alan Williamson, and Louise Glück. Suarez: There’s a lot of debate about poetry workshops and how helpful they are, whether the proliferation of writing programs is resulting in a type of canned poetry. You are a teaching poet. Where do you fall in the relationship between poet and university? Daniels: First of all, I—even more than you suggested in your question—am someone who has benefited enormously from creative writing programs. I went through a fine, wonderful program at Columbia, in the School of the Arts, from 1978 to 1980. I studied with Stanley Kunitz, Louise Glück, Joseph Brodsky, Edward Mendelson, who is Auden’s editor and teaches in the English department at Columbia, Amiri Baraka, and, for just a couple weeks, with Donald Justice. It was amazing. When I graduated, I immediately started to teach as a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Virginia. The M.F.A. program there got started the second year of my appointment, I think, 1981 or 1982. And I just went on from there. I was on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the mid1980s. I directed the undergraduate creative writing program and, briefly, the M.F.A. program at LSU. I was on the board of directors of the Associated Writing Programs in the early 1990s. I was poet in residence at Wake Forest University, and now I’m on the faculty at Vanderbilt University, where we are planning on instituting an M.F.A. program in creative writing. I also taught for two years in

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the low-residency M.F.A. program at Bennington College. It would be worse than untrue—it would be hypocritical—if I said I thought there was something intrinsically wrong with graduate programs in creative writing. And I really do not feel that there is anything wrong with these programs existing, to the extent that they do, and, for the most part, in the forms that they do. A lot of this must have to do with the increasing democratization of all art forms in this country and the way that that makes some people nervous. When I was in undergraduate school, there really was a feeling— at least at U.Va.—that there was a specific way to write poetry and specific topics to write about. For the most part, that’s just not true anymore. And even if someone thinks it’s true in the enclave of his or her community or writing program, all you have to do is get onto the Internet or take a look at some of the anthologies that are routinely used for teaching literature now. So much has changed. And once the message is broadcast that it’s a free society poetically, a lot more people are going to think it’s worthwhile to try to perfect their writing techniques and gain university credentials. I believe that’s part of it, but I also believe that the enormous popularity these programs enjoy has everything to do with the fact that we seem to be creating a culture for ourselves that is turning out to be the opposite of what we intended, that instead of creating a world of comfort and sustenance, we’re alienating a lot of people. So many people feel out of touch with other people and themselves. Enforced writing time that you’re paying for compels you to really listen to yourself and others. Spending so much of your time talking to voice mails, or punching in numbers on a menu, or dialing up a “chat” room to get some quasi-human contact is spiritually killing, don’t you think? I think that this world we live in has a lot to do with why many people go into M.F.A. programs. It’s to be heard, isn’t it? In terms of the effect on our literature? Well, the cream will always rise to the top, won’t it? The vast majority of people who go through these programs are not going to be writing two or three or four years down the line, after they graduate. The vast majority of them are not going to publish; they are certainly not going to publish books. The odds are always against you in writing. They know that when they go in—or at least shortly after the first workshop—so that is their responsibility. It is their dream; they are contending for something, and more power to them. If creative writing programs don’t improve the overall quality

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of poetry and fiction, they certainly do improve the quality of the readership out there, I think. Suarez: If you can, would you describe your experience with editing

Poetry East? Daniels: I would love to. Poetry East started in 1979 when I was in

graduate school at Columbia. At that time, I was married to Richard Jones, who is also a poet and now lives in Chicago and still edits Poetry East. I haven’t been in touch with Richard for a long time, so I can’t say that he would agree with everything I claim, but I hope he would. I guess we started the magazine out of a general sense of outrage, or protest, that we shared about the poor quality of publication outlets available for contemporary poetry. But I’m willing to admit that the outrage might have been about what we considered to be the poor quality (compared to our own!) of most of the poems we saw published in the literary magazines while ours were going unpublished. You know, your typical graduate school egomania. . . . We were huge fans of literary magazines and small presses, so we decided to start our own. I guess we had a romantic notion of it, and it was romantic, I admit. I wouldn’t trade anything for the experience now, but I would never do it again, either. It was very difficult, very demanding, very financially draining. While the rest of the boomers were laying in mutual funds for their retirements and putting down payments on charming old fixer-uppers that are now worth a half a million, we were writing checks for thousands of dollars to typesetters and printers and living in an unheated, rented farmhouse in Earlysville, Virginia, and going around in worn-out overcoats and shoes with holes in the soles. And none of that is any exaggeration at all. It was when Ronald Reagan was in the White House. If anything, there was a noble feeling to it. As the world was growing grosser and more materialistic, we were growing purer on our diet of poetry and art. I, at least, felt somewhat that way even if I sound ironic about it now. I shouldn’t speak for Richard on this, though. Suarez: Did it influence your own poetry at all, editing the magazine? Daniels: Well, you know editing a magazine really sharpens your language skills. It’s not, for instance, like teaching composition in

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college, which I think has a really detrimental effect on any kind of creative writing. But reading fairly decent poems that come in over and over, day after day, and having to learn how to do that quickly and accurately was actually helpful for me. Putting the issues together, ordering the poems and all that, helped me, I think, in becoming a better editor of my own poems and surer about the kind of poems I wanted to write. I was very young when I did this, you know. I hadn’t published a book yet and was barely publishing in magazines. It was educational and fun. Although it quickly became a pain because of the volume of submissions, it was also kind of exciting. Who the hell were all these people, where were they? Were they all those people you see driving minivans and watching TV and working in offices? Did they go home at night and write these poems? Were they Emerson’s Poet, essentially like everybody else, but possessed of this gift of vision? It was a kind of mystery that I liked a lot. Suarez: Is there anything that you wanted to say, Kate, that you wanted to be asked? Daniels: Well, I guess this is corny, but I’m just so grateful that you considered me enough of a southern poet to put in this book. There’s a way in which it takes people different amounts of time to arrive at different points in their development. For me, maybe because my mother was British and often condescending to the South, claiming my southern identity has been a long process. I would never have denied that I was a southerner, of course, but in many ways it was such an unconscious part of me that I didn’t think about it much at all during the years when I was beginning to write. I should have. I wish I had. This interview has given me a chance to make up to myself for being so slow to recognize what was important.

Selected Bibliographies

James Dickey For more complete listings of works by and about Dickey, see the bibliographies in Struggling for Wings: The Art of James Dickey, ed. Robert Kirschten (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), and Gordon Van Ness, Outbelieving Existence: The Measured Motion of James Dickey (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1992), as well as Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman, James Dickey: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), and the ongoing bibliography in the James Dickey Newsletter.

I. Primary Works Books

Alnilam. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987. Babel to Byzantium: Poets and Poetry Now. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968. Bronwen, the Traw, and the Shape-Shifter. San Diego: Bruccoli Clark and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Buckdancer’s Choice. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1965. The Central Motion: Poems, 1968–1979. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983. Deliverance. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. 223

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Drowning with Others. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1962. The Eagle’s Mile. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990. The Early Motion: Drowning with Others and Helmets. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981. Exchange. Bloomfield Hills, Mich.: Bruccoli Clark, 1971. The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead, and Mercy. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970. Falling, May Day Sermon, and Other Poems. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981. God’s Images: The Bible, a New Vision. Birmingham, Ala.: Oxmoor House, 1977. Helmets. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1964. In Pursuit of the Grey Soul. Columbia, S.C.: Bruccoli Clark, 1978. Intervisions: Poems and Photographs. With Sharon Anglin Kuhne. Penland, N.C.: Visualternatives, 1983. Into the Stone and Other Poems. New York: Scribner’s, 1960. Jericho: The South Beheld. Birmingham, Ala.: Oxmoor House, 1974. Night Hurdling: Poems, Essays, Conversations, Commencements, and Afterwords. Columbia, S.C.: Bruccoli Clark, 1983. Poems, 1957–1967. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967. Puella. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982. Self-Interviews. Edited by Barbara and James Reiss. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970. Sorties. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971. Southern Light. Birmingham, Ala: Oxmoor House, 1991 Spinning the Crystal Ball. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1967. The Strength of Fields. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979. Striking In: The Early Notebooks of James Dickey. Edited by Gordon Van Ness. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. The Suspect in Poetry. Madison, Minn.: Sixties Press, 1964. To the White Sea. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Tucky the Hunter. New York: Crown, 1978. Two Poems of the Air. Portland: Centicore Press, 1964. Wayfarer: A Voice from the Southern Mountains. Birmingham, Ala.: Oxmoor House, 1988. The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1945–1992. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992. The Zodiac. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

225

Essays

“Dickey on Melville.” [Chap. 4, originally entitled “The Pale Horse,” of Dickey’s master’s thesis, “Symbol and Image in the Shorter Poems of Herman Melville.”] With an introduction by Ernest Suarez. South Carolina Review 26 (spring 1994): 114–26. “The Energized Man.” In The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey, edited by Bruce Weigl and T. R. Hummer, 163–65. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. “For Richard Hugo.” Corona: Marking the Edges of Many Circles 3 (1983): 16–17. “Give-Down and Outrage: The Poetry of the Last Straw.” Southern Review 27 (spring 1991): 430–37. “The Imagination as Glory.” In The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey, edited by Bruce Weigl and T. R. Hummer, 166–73. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. “Lightnings, or Visuals.” James Dickey Newsletter 8 (spring 1992): 2– 12. “The Suspect in Poetry or Everyman as Detective.” Sewanee Review 68 (October–December 1960): 660–74. “Warren’s Poetry: A Reading and Commentary.” In Southern Renascence Man: Views of Robert Penn Warren, edited by Walter B. Edgar, 81–93. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.

II. Secondary Sources Books

Baughman, Judith S., ed. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Documentary Series, vol. 18, James Dickey. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1999. . Understanding James Dickey. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985. Bloom, Harold, ed. James Dickey. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Bowers, Neal. James Dickey: The Poet as Pitchman. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985. Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. Pages: The World of Books, Writers, and Writing. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1976. Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Judith S. Baughman. James Dickey: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. Calhoun, Richard J., ed. James Dickey: The Expansive Imagination, A Collection of Critical Essays. DeLand, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1973.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Calhoun, Richard J., and Robert W. Hill. James Dickey. Boston: Twayne, 1983. De La Fuente, Patricia, ed. James Dickey: Splintered Sunlight. Edinburg, Tex.: Pan American University, 1979. Elledge, Jim. James Dickey: A Bibliography, 1947–1974. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1979. Glancy, Eileen. James Dickey: The Critic as Poet; an Annotated Bibliography with an Introductory Essay. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1971. Kirschten, Robert. “Approaching Prayer”: Ritual and Shape of Myth in the Poetry of A. R. Ammons and James Dickey. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. . James Dickey and the Gentle Ecstasy of Earth: A Reading of the Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. , ed. Critical Essays on James Dickey. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. , ed. Struggling for Wings: The Art of James Dickey. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Lieberman, Laurence. The Achievement of James Dickey. Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1968. Suarez, Ernest. James Dickey and the Politics of Canon: Assessing the Savage Ideal. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. Weigl, Bruce, and T. R. Hummer, eds. The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Wright, Stuart T. James Dickey: A Bibliography of His Books, Pamphlets, and Broadsides. Dallas: Pressworks, 1982. Essays

Due to the great number of essays on the work of James Dickey, as well as the number of excellent bibliographies listing them, the editor has decided to exclude such a list from this selected bibliography. Interviews

“A Conversation with James Dickey.” Shenandoah 18 (autumn 1966): 3–28. By Carolyn Kizer and James Boatwright. “Craft Interview with James Dickey.” New York Quarterly 10 (spring 1972): 16–35. By William Packard. “An Interview with James Dickey.” Contemporary Literature 16 (summer 1975): 286–300. By David L. Arnett.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

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“An Interview with James Dickey.” Eclipse 5 (1966): 5–20. “An Interview with James Dickey: The Poet as Novelist.” Texas Review 17 (fall–winter 1996–1997): 128–34. By Ernest Suarez. “Interview with James Dickey.” Contemporary Literature 31 (summer 1990): 116–32. By Ernest Suarez. “Interview with James Dickey.” In Struggling for Wings: The Art of James Dickey, edited by Robert Kirschten, 65–77. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. By Robert Kirschten. “James Dickey.” In Craft So Hard to Learn, edited by George Garrett, 81–87. New York: Morrow, 1972. By John Graham. “James Dickey.” In Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 5th Series, edited by George Plimpton, 199–229. New York: Viking Press, 1981. “James Dickey.” In The Writer’s Voice: Conversations with Contemporary Writers, edited by George Garrett, 228–47. New York: Morrow, 1973. By John Graham. “James Dickey: An Interview.” Per/Se 3 (spring 1968): 8–12. By Francis Roberts. “James Dickey: Interview.” Unmuzzled Ox 2 (1975): 77–85. “James Dickey and Dave Smith Talk about the South.” BBC Live Broadcast, July 21, 1994. The Voiced Connections of James Dickey: Interviews and Conversations. Edited by Ronald Baughman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. Reviews

Aronson, James. Review of Self-Interviews. Antioch Review 30 (fall– winter 1970–1971): 463–64. Bennett, Joseph. “A Man with a Voice.” Review of Buckdancer’s Choice. New York Times Book Review, February 6, 1966, 10. Berry, Wendell. “James Dickey’s New Book.” Review of Helmets. Poetry 105 (November 1964): 130–31. Burnshaw, Stanley. “Star Beasts of Intellect and Madness.” Review of The Zodiac. Washington Post Book World, November 21, 1976, 1. Connell, Evan S. Review of Deliverance. New York Times Book Review, March 22, 1970, 1, 23. DeCandido, GraceAnne A. Review of God’s Images: The Bible, a New Vision. Library Journal 103 (January 15, 1978): 154.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Evans, Eli N. “The South the South Sees.” Review of Jericho: The South Beheld. New York Times Book Review, February 9, 1975, 4–5. Gunn, Thom. “Things, Voices, Minds.” Review of Drowning with Others. Yale Review 52 (October 1962): 129–38. Reprinted in Struggling for Wings: The Art of James Dickey, edited by Robert Kirschten, 58– 59. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Harmon, William. “Herself as the Environment.” Review of Puella. Carolina Quarterly 35 (fall 1982): 91–94. Reprinted in Struggling for Wings: The Art of James Dickey, edited by Robert Kirschten, 44–48. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Heilbrun, Carolyn. “The Masculine Wilderness of the American Novel.” Review of Deliverance. Saturday Review 55 (January 29, 1972): 41–44. Jones, Malcom, Jr. “When a Predator Is the Prey.” Review of To the White Sea. Newsweek, August 30, 1993, 24–25. Reprinted in Struggling for Wings: The Art of James Dickey, edited by Robert Kirschten, 60–61. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Kalston, David. Review of Sorties. New York Times Book Review, January 23, 1972, 6, 24. Kennedy, X. J. “Joys, Griefs, and ‘All Things Innocent, Hapless, Forsaken.’ ” Review of Helmets and Two Poems of the Air. New York Times Book Review, August 23, 1964, 5. . “Sometimes It’s the Sound That Counts.” Review of Drowning with Others. New York Times Book Review, July 15, 1962, 4. Kostelanetz, Richard. “Flyswatter and Gadfly.” Review of The Suspect in Poetry. Shenandoah 16 (spring 1965): 92–95. Leibowitz, Herbert. “The Moiling of Secret Forces.” Review of The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead, and Mercy. New York Times Book Review, November 8, 1970, 20, 22. Lieberman, Laurence. “Warrior, Visionary, Natural Philosopher.” Review of To the White Sea. Southern Review 33 (winter 1997): 164– 80. Macaulay, David. Review of Bronwen, the Traw, and the Shape-Shifter. New York Times Book Review, March 8, 1987, 31. Maloff, Saul. “Poet Takes His Turn as Critic.” Review of Babel to Byzantium: Poets and Poetry Now. Washington Post Book World, June 30, 1968, 10. Meredith, William. “A Good Time for All.” Review of Poems, 1957– 1967. New York Times Book Review, April 23, 1967, 4, 46.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

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Morris, Harry. “A Formal View of the Poetry of James Dickey.” Review of Poems, 1957–1967. Sewanee Review 77 (spring 1969): 318–25. Reprinted in Struggling for Wings: The Art of James Dickey, edited by Robert Kirschten, 33–35. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Peters, Robert. “The Phenomenon of James Dickey, Currently.” Review of The Strength of Fields. Western Humanities Review 34 (spring 1980): 159–66. Reprinted in Struggling for Wings: The Art of James Dickey, edited by Robert Kirschten, 36–43. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Review of Alnilam. Playboy 34 (August 1987): 25. Rooke, Leon. “Sergeant Muldrow Finds Transcendence.” Review of To the White Sea. New York Times Book Review, September 19, 1993, 14. Steinberg, Sybil. Review of Alnilam. Publishers Weekly 231 (April 17, 1987): 65. Strange, William C. “To Dream, to Remember.” Review of Buckdancer’s Choice. Northwest Review 7 (fall–winter 1965–1966): 33–42. Reprinted in Struggling for Wings: The Art of James Dickey, edited by Robert Kirschten, 16–23. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Suarez, Ernest. Review of The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945– 1992. James Dickey Newsletter 9 (fall 1992): 24–29. Tillinghast, Richard. “James Dickey: The Whole Motion.” Southern Review 28 (autumn 1992): 971–80. Reprinted in Struggling for Wings: The Art of James Dickey, edited by Robert Kirschten, 49–57. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Turco, Lewis. “The Suspect in Criticism.” Review of The Suspect in Poetry and Helmets. Mad River Review 1 (spring–summer 1965): 81–85. Reprinted in Struggling for Wings: The Art of James Dickey, edited by Robert Kirschten, 24–28. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Untermeyer, Louis. “A Way of Seeing and Saying.” Review of Poems, 1957–1967. Saturday Review 50 (May 6, 1967): 31, 35. Reprinted in Struggling for Wings: The Art of James Dickey, edited by Robert Kirschten, 29–32. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Zweig, Paul. “Bel Canto, American Style.” Review of The Strength of Fields. New York Times Book Review, January 6, 1980, 6, 17.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Dave Smith I. Primary Works Books

Blue Spruce. Syracuse, N.Y.: Tamarack Press, 1981. Brown Shoes. Richland, Wash.: Rattlesnake Mountain Press, 1989. Bull Island. Poquoson, Va.: Back Door Press, 1970. Cuba Night. New York: Morrow, 1990. Cumberland Station. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Dream Flights. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. Drunks. Edwardsville, Ill.: A Sou’Wester Supplement, 1975. Fate’s Kite: Poems, 1991–1995. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. The Fisherman’s Whore. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974. Floating on Solitude: Three Volumes of Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Goshawk, Antelope. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Gray Soldiers. Winston-Salem, N.C.: Stuart Wright, 1984. Homage to Edgar Allan Poe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. In Dark, Sudden with Light. Athens, Ohio: Croissant, 1977. In the House of the Judge. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. Local Assays: On Contemporary American Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Mean Rufus Throw Down. Fredonia, N.Y.: Basilisk Press, 1973. The Morrow Anthology of Younger Poets. Edited by David Bottoms and Dave Smith. New York: Morrow, 1985. New Virginia Review Anthology Four. Edited by Dave Smith. Richmond, Va.: New Virginia Review, 1986. Night Pleasures: New and Selected Poems. Newcastle, Eng.: Bloodaxe Books, 1992. Onliness. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Photograph of a Confederate Soldier Standing on Rocks in the James River at Richmond. Winston-Salem, N.C.: Stuart Wright, 1982. The Pure, Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright. Edited with an Introduction by Dave Smith. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. The Roundhouse Voices: Selected and New Poems. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

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Southern Delights: Poems and Stories. Athens, Ohio: Croissant, 1984. Three Poems. Dorset, Eng.: Mir Poets/Words Press, 1989. Traveling Photographer. Lincoln, Nebr.: A Prairie Schooner Portfolio, 1981. Essays

“Assays.” In First Person Singular, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, 175– 89. Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1985. “The Big Wink.” James Dickey Newsletter 5 (spring 1989): 27–30. “Cornering the Southern Poem.” Poetry Ireland Review 43–44 (autumn–winter 1994): 78–88. “Edgar Allan Poe and the Nightmare Ode.” Southern Humanities Review 29 (winter 1995): 1–10. “The Electric Horse: On Sylvia Plath.” In Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage, edited by Linda Wagner-Martin, 268–76. New York: Routledge, 1988. “Griefs and Grievances: The Way Things Go.” Midwest Quarterly 17 (January 1976): 192–200. “He Prayeth Best Who Loveth Best: Robert Penn Warren’s Now and Then: Poems, 1976–1978.” American Poetry Review 8 (January– February 1979): 3–8. “An Honest Tub.” In In Praise of What Persists, edited by Stephen Berg, 222–38. New York: Harper, 1983. “Hunting Men.” Sewanee Review 97 (fall 1989): 543–55. Reprinted in Home Ground: Southern Autobiography, edited by J. Bill Berry, 188– 98. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. “In Search of the Real Thing.” In Contemporary Autobiography, 7:155– 69. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1988. “In the Company of a Fisherman: Richard Hugo’s Poetry.” Slackwater Review (summer 1978): 164–71. “Introduction.” In The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright, edited by Dave Smith, xi–xxviii. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Excerpted and reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, 28:469–72. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1986. “Introduction: Cornering the Southern Poem.” Special Issue of Southern Review 30 (autumn 1994): 643–49. “Introduction: On Regionalism.” New Virginia Review 4 (fall 1986): 11–14.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

“James Dickey’s Motions.” South Carolina Review 26 (spring 1994): 41–60. “John Crowe Ransom and Captain Carpenter.” In Touchstones: American Poets on a Favorite Poem, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini, 241–46. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1996. “A Kinsman’s Signature.” Quarterly West 23 (fall 1986): 165–72. Reprinted in James Dickey Newsletter 3 (fall 1986): 13–19. “Making a Statement.” In Introspections: American Poets on One of Their Own Poems, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini, 246–50. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997. “The Muse in Peril. . . .” Prairie Schooner 49 (summer 1975): 178–84. “Notes on a Form to Be Lived: Robert Penn Warren’s Or Else.” In Homage to Robert Penn Warren, edited by Frank Graziano, 33–55. Durango, Colo.: Logbridge-Rhodes, 1981. “Passion, Possibility, and Poetry.” In Poets Teaching, edited by Alberta Turner, 173–91. New York: Longman, 1980. “Robert Penn Warren: The Use of a Word Like Honor.” Yale Review 74 (summer 1985): 574–80. Reprinted in Poetry Society of America Newsletter. In SPAN (U.S. Information Agency Journal for Spain). In Bangla (U.S. Information Agency Journal for Bangladesh). In Contemporary Literary Criticism Yearbook 1985, 268–69. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1986. “Sailing the Black River.” In American Poets in 1976, edited by William Heyen, 342–63. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976. “A Secret You Can’t Break Free.” Washington Post Magazine, July 6, 1986, 4–12. Reprinted in A World Unsuspected: Portraits of Southern Childhood, edited by Alex Harris, 210–34. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. “Speculations on a Southern Snipe.” In The Future of Southern Letters, edited by John Lowe, 143–54. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. “The Strength of James Dickey.” Poetry 136 (March 1981): 349–58. Reprinted in The Imagination as Glory: Essays on the Poetry of James Dickey, edited by Bruce Weigl and T. R. Hummer, 152–62. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1984. In Contemporary Literary Criticism, 47:91–93. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1988. “That Halting, Stammering Moment: James Wright’s Poetry.” In Ironwood 10 (1977): 111–30. Reprinted in The Pure Clear Word: Essays

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

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on the Poetry of James Wright, edited by Dave Smith, 175–95. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. “Thirteen Assays for Poetry.” Seneca Review 13 (1982–1983): 129–42.

II. Secondary Sources Books

Weigl, Bruce, ed. The Giver of Morning: On the Poetry of Dave Smith. Birmingham, Ala.: Thunder City Press, 1982. Essays

Bawer, Bruce. “Dave Smith’s ‘Creative Writing.’ ” New Criterion 4 (December 1985): 27–33. “Dave Smith, 1942– .” In Contemporary Literary Criticism, 22:384–90. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1982. “Dave Smith, 1942– .” In Contemporary Literary Criticism, 42:345–57. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1987. DeMott, Robert. “Dave Smith.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, 5:253–61. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1980. Reprinted as “A Poem Is a Kind of Country: Sacrament and Geography in Dave Smith’s Poetry.” In The Giver of Morning: On the Poetry of Dave Smith, edited by Bruce Weigl, 7–17. Birmingham, Ala.: Thunder City Press, 1982. Ditsky, John. “Listening to Blue: The Poetry of Dave Smith.” Ontario Review 13 (1980–1981): 73–80. Gardner, John. “On Dave Smith.” Three Rivers Poetry Journal 10 (1977): 6–9. Haislip, John. “ ‘Flood, Salt Debris, Relief’: The Poetry of Dave Smith.” Sou’Wester 2 (spring–summer 1974): 56–64. Hummer, T. R. “Dave Smith’s Homage to Edgar Allan Poe: ‘Pushed’ Time and the Obsession of Memory.” In The Giver of Morning: On the Poetry of Dave Smith, edited by Bruce Weigl, 75–87. Birmingham, Ala.: Thunder City Press, 1982. Kent, Robert. “Between Wild Dreams and Tame Realities, and Elsewhere.” Parnassus 4 (fall–winter 1975): 195–205. McFee, Michael. “Into the Big Leagues.” Parnassus 9 (fall–winter 1980): 63–110. Nielsen, Aldon L. “Nostalgia and the Racial Epiphany.” CLA Journal 39 (December 1995): 195–207. Phillips, Robert. “Poetry Chronicle: Some Versions of the Pastoral.” Hudson Review 33 (fall 1981): 420–34.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Stitt, Peter. “The Sincere, the Mythic, the Playful: Forms of Voice in Current Poetry.” Georgia Review 34 (spring 1980): 202–12. Vendler, Helen. “The Mind’s Assertive Flow.” New Yorker, June 30, 1980, 96–105. Reprinted in The Giver of Morning: On the Poetry of Dave Smith, edited by Bruce Weigl, 61–68. Birmingham, Ala.: Thunder City Press, 1982. . “Oh I Admire and Sorrow.” Parnassus 5 (spring–summer 1977). Reprinted in her Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets, 289–302. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. In her The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, 413–25. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Weigl, Bruce. “The Deep Well of Celebration: Dave Smith’s Goshawk, Antelope.” Poet Lore 75 (spring 1980): 44–50. Reprinted in The Giver of Morning: On the Poetry of Dave Smith, edited by Bruce Weigl, 69–74. Birmingham, Ala.: Thunder City Press, 1982. Yenser, Stephen. “Sea Changes: On Dave Smith.” American Poetry Review 11 (January–February 1982): 32–35. Interviews

Audiotape. Library of Congress. Washington, D.C. April 13, 1983. “Dave Smith: Interview and Poems.” Writers in Virginia. Broadcast on stations in Richmond, Norfolk, and Roanoke, 1989. By Ben Cleary. “Heroes of the Spirit.” Graham House Review 6 (spring 1982): 48–72. “Interview with Dave Smith: On Cuba Night.” New England Review 14 (fall 1991): 149–61. By Calvin Bedient. “An Interview with Dave Smith.” Contemporary Literature 37, no. 3 (1996): 348–69. By Ernest Suarez. “James Dickey and Dave Smith Talk about the South.” BBC Live Broadcast, July 21, 1994. New Letters on the Air. Kansas City, Mo. Broadcast on PBS, September 9, 1988. “The Poem as a Moral Act: An Interview with Dave Smith.” Sam Houston Literary Journal 2 (November 1977): 64–74. By H. A. Maxson. Reprinted in The Giver of Morning: On the Poetry of Dave Smith, edited by Bruce Weigl, 52–60. Birmingham, Ala.: Thunder City Press, 1982. “Reading and Interview.” Audiotape. East Tennessee State University, 1984.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

235

Videotape. Michigan City Public Library, Michigan City, Ind. Broadcast on Michigan PBS, November 15, 1986. Reviews

Brainard, Dulcy. Review of Fate’s Kite: Poems, 1991–1995. Publishers Weekly 242 (October 23, 1995): 64–65. Everett, Nicholas. “Lessons of Art.” Review of Night Pleasures: New and Selected Poems. Times Literary Supplement, April 30, 1993, 23. Hummer, T. R. “The Heroics of Clarity.” Review of Local Assays: On Contemporary American Poetry and The Roundhouse Voices: Selected and New Poems. Kenyon Review 8 (spring 1986): 113–22. Johnson, Don. Review of Cuba Night. Southern Humanities Review 25 (winter 1991): 99–101. Phillips, Robert. Review of Homage to Edgar Allan Poe and Dream Flights. Hudson Review 34 (autumn 1981): 420–30. Review of Floating on Solitude: Three Volumes of Poetry. Virginia Quarterly Review 73 (summer 1997): 99. Stitt, Peter. Review of The Roundhouse Voices: Selected and New Poems. Georgia Review 39 (winter 1985): 849–63. Swiss, Thomas. “ ‘Unfold the Fulness’: Dave Smith’s Poetry and Fiction.” Review of Dream Flights, Homage to Edgar Allan Poe, In the House of the Judge, and Onliness. Sewanee Review 91 (summer 1983): 483–501. Vendler, Helen. Review of Cumberland Station. Yale Review 66 (March 1977): 407–23. . “Southern Weather.” Review of Cuba Night. New Yorker, April 2, 1990, 113–16. Weigl, Bruce. Review of The Roundhouse Voices: Selected and New Poems. TriQuarterly 64 (fall 1985): 245–58. Young, Vernon. Review of The Fisherman’s Whore. Hudson Review 27 (winter 1974–1975): 611–14.

Charles Wright I. Primary Works Books

Appalachia. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. Black Zodiac. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997. Bloodlines. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975.

236

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Chickamauga. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995. China Trace. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1977. Country Music: Selected Early Poems. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982. The Grave of the Right Hand. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1970. Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews, 1977–87. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988. Hard Freight. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. The Other Side of the River. New York: Random House, 1984. Quarter Notes: Improvisations and Interviews. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. The Southern Cross. New York: Random House, 1981. The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems, 1980–1990. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990. Xionia. Iowa City: Windhover Press, 1990. Zone Journals. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988. Translations

Campana, Dino. Orphic Songs. Field Translation Series. Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 1984. Montale, Eugenio. The Storm and Other Poems. Field Translation Series. Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 1978. . Motets. Iowa City: Windhover Press, 1981. Essays

“Charles Wright.” Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, 7:287– 303. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1988. “A Chinese Garland.” North American Review 273 (September 1988): 38–41. “Homage to the Thin Man.” Southern Review 20 (autumn 1994): 741– 44. “Improvisations: Narrative of the Image (A Correspondence with Charles Simic).” Gettysburg Review 8 (winter 1995): 9–21. “Improvisations: With Father Hopkins on Lake Como.” Field 43 (fall 1990): 10–18. “Improvisations on Form and Measure.” Ohio Review 38 (1987): 20– 24.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

237

“Improvisations on Montale.” Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 27 (fall 1982): 46–54. “Improvisations on Pound.” Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 33 (fall 1987): 63–70. “Miseducation of the Poet.” Gettysburg Review 6 (winter 1993): 73–84.

II. Secondary Sources Books

Andrews, Tom, ed. The Point Where All Things Meet: Essays on Charles Wright. Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 1995. Essays

Agena, Kathleen. “The Mad Sense of Language.” Partisan Review 43 (1976): 625–30. Bond, Bruce. “Metaphysics of the Image in Charles Wright and Paul Cézanne.” Southern Review 30 (winter 1994): 116–25. Reprinted in The Point Where All Things Meet, edited by Tom Andrews, 264–73. Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 1995. Butterick, George F. “Charles Wright.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1982, 389–400. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1983. “Charles Wright.” In Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, 62:447–50. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1998. Collins, Floyd. “Metamorphosis within the Poetry of Charles Wright.” Gettysburg Review 4 (summer 1991): 464–79. Costello, Bonnie. “The Soil and Man’s Intelligence: Three Contemporary Landscape Poets.” Contemporary Literature 30 (fall 1989): 412–33. Crenshaw, Brad. “Charles Wright.” In Critical Surveys of Poetry, edited by Frank N. Magill, 7:3146–54. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, 1982. Hix, H. L. “Charles Wright and a Case of Foreshortened Influence.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 18 (January 1988): 4–6. Jarman, Mark. “The Pragmatic Imagination and the Secret of Poetry.” Gettysburg Review 1 (autumn 1988): 464–79. Lake, Paul. “Return to Metaphor: From Deep Imagist to New Formalist.” Southwest Review 74 (autumn 1989): 515–29. McClatchy, J. D. “Reading.” In White Paper on Contemporary American Poetry, 26–44. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

238

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

. “Under the Sign of the Cross.” In The Point Where All Things Meet: Essays on Charles Wright, edited by Tom Andrews, 72–85. Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 1995. McCorkle, James. “Charles Wright.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, 165:267–82. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1996. . “ ‘Things That Lock Our Wrists to the Past’: Self-Portraiture and Autobiography in Charles Wright’s Poetry.” In The Still Performance: Writing, Self, and Interconnections in Five Postmodernist American Poets, 171–211. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989. Reprinted in The Point Where All Things Meet: Essays on Charles Wright, edited by Tom Andrews, 110–44. Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 1995. McGuiness, Daniel. “The Long Line in Contemporary American Poetry.” Antioch Review 47 (summer 1989): 269–86. Perkins, David. “Against ‘Civilization.’ ” In A History of Modern Poetry, 561–62. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Perloff, Marjorie. “Charles Wright.” In Contemporary Poets, edited by James Vinson and D. L. Patrick, 947–48. 4th ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. St. John, David. “Charles Wright’s Country Music.” Foreword to Country Music, xiii–xxi. 2d ed. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1991. . “The Poetry of Charles Wright.” In Wright: A Profile, 53–65. Iowa City: Grilled Flowers Press, 1979. Stitt, Peter. Uncertainty and Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. Upton, Lee. The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1998. Vendler, Helen. “Charles Wright.” In The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, 388–97. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. . “The Transcendent ‘I.’ ” New Yorker, October 29, 1979, 160–74. Reprinted in her Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets, 277–88. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. “Wright, Charles, 1935– .” In Contemporary Literary Criticism, 6:578– 79. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1976. “Wright, Charles, 1935– .” In Contemporary Literary Criticism, 13:612– 15. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1980. “Wright, Charles, 1935– .” In Contemporary Literary Criticism, 28:456– 60. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1984.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

239

Wright, Stuart. “Charles Wright: A Bibliographic Chronicle, 1963– 1985.” Bulletin of Bibliography 43 (March 1986): 3–12. Reviews

Baker, David. Review of Chickamauga. Poetry 168 (April 1996): 33–47. Bedient, Calvin. “Slide-Wheeling around the Curves.” Review of The World of the Ten Thousand Things. Southern Review 27 (winter 1991): 221–34. . “Tracing Charles Wright.” Review of The Southern Cross. Parnassus 10 (spring–summer 1982): 55–74. Hoffert, Barbara. Review of Black Zodiac. Library Journal 122 (April 15, 1997): 85. Hosmer, Robert Ellis, Jr. Review of Black Zodiac. America 177 (1997): 24–26. Longenbach, James. Review of Black Zodiac. Nation 264, no. 14 (1997): 27–30. McClatchy, J. D. Review of The World of the Ten Thousand Things. Poetry 158 (August 1991): 280–96. Muske, Carol. Review of Black Zodiac. New York Times Book Review, August 31, 1997, 11. Seaman, Donna. Review of Black Zodiac. Booklist 93, no. 16 (1997): 1377. Stewart, Pamela. “In All Places at Once.” Review of The Southern Cross. Ironwood 19 (1982): 162–66. Van Winckel, Nance. “Charles Wright and the Landscape of the Lyric.” Review of Zone Journals. New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 12 (spring 1990): 308–12. Vendler, Helen. Review of Chickamauga. New Republic 213, no. 6 (1995): 42–45. Young, David. “The Blood Bees of Paradise.” Review of The World of the Ten Thousand Things. Field 44 (spring 1991): 77–90.

Ellen Bryant Voigt I. Primary Works Books

Claiming Kin. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1976. The Forces of Plenty. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983. Kyrie. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. The Lotus Flowers. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987.

240

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World. Edited by Gregory Orr and Ellen Bryant Voigt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Tropics. Limited Edition Broadside. Northampton, Mass.: Gehenna Press, 1970. Two Trees. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Essays

“Image.” New England Review 13 (spring–summer 1991): 254–68. Reprinted in Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World, edited by Gregory Orr and Ellen Bryant Voigt, 221–39. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. “In Defense of Lyric: Point of View.” Southern Review 29 (April 1993): 239–58. “Judge’s Comments” [Narrative Poetry Competition]. New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 13 (fall 1990): 85. “Kyrie.” In Introspections: American Poets on Their Own Poems, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini, 294–98. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997. “A Moment’s Thought.” In Facing the Lion: Writers on Life and Craft, edited by Kurt Brown, 66–83. Boston: Beacon, 1996. Reprinted in Southern Indiana Review 3 (1996): 87–103. “More on the Leonore Marshall Prize.” In The Day I Was Older: On the Poetry of Donald Hall, edited by Liam Rector, 192–93. Santa Cruz: Story Line Press, 1989. “Narrative and Lyric: Structural Corruption.” Southern Review 30 (autumn 1994): 725–40. “On Tone.” New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 12 (spring 1990): 249–66. Reprinted in Writers on Writing, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini, 248–62. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1991. “Poetry and Gender.” Kenyon Review 9 (summer 1987): 127–40. “Rewarding Rich.” Review of No Traveller, by Richard Howard; Nurture, by Maxine Humin; and Time’s Power, by Adrienne Rich. Chicago Tribune, July 9, 1989, sec. 14, p. 6.

II. Secondary Sources Essays

“Ellen Bryant Voigt, 1943– .” In Contemporary Literary Criticism, 54:428–34. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1989.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

241

Hoagland, Tony. “About Ellen Bryant Voigt.” Ploughshares 22 (winter 1996–1997): 222–25. Kennelly, Laura B. “Ellen Bryant Voigt.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, 120:307–11. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1992. Nielsen, Aldon L. “Nostalgia and the Racial Epiphany.” CLA Journal 39 (December 1995): 195–207. Reviews

Brainard, Dulcy. Review of Kyrie. Publishers Weekly 242 (April 24, 1995): 66. Gibbons, Reginald. Review of The Lotus Flowers. TriQuarterly 71 (winter 1988): 225–27. Harris, Peter. Review of The Lotus Flowers. Virginia Quarterly Review 64 (spring 1988): 262–76. “History Overheard.” Review of Kyrie. Shenandoah 45 (winter 1995): 95–98. Jenkins, Paul. Review of The Lotus Flowers. Massachusetts Review 29 (spring 1988): 97–135. Pope, Deborah. “A Litany in Time of Plague.” Review of Kyrie. Southern Review 32 (spring 1996): 363–69. Rosenberg, Liz. “Life Made Whole, Losses Manifest, Moments Noted.” Review of Kyrie. Boston Globe, December 24, 1995, p. 38. Vendler, Helen. Review of Claiming Kin. Yale Review 46 (spring 1997): 407–23. Wier, Dara. Review of Two Trees. Southern Review 28 (autumn 1992): 981–94. Wright, Carolyne. “Pain and Plenitude: First and Second Books by Maria Flook and Ellen Bryant Voigt.” Review of Claiming Kin and The Forces of Plenty. Literary Review 30 (fall 1986): 118–26.

David Bottoms I. Primary Works Books

Any Cold Jordan. Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1987. Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 1995. Easter Weekend. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1990. Rpt. New York: Washington Square Press, 1991; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.

242

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

In a U-Haul North of Damascus. New York: Morrow, 1983. Jamming with the Band at the VFW. Austell, Ga.: Burnt Hickory Press, 1978. The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets. Edited by David Bottoms and Dave Smith. New York: Morrow, 1985. Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump. New York: Morrow, 1980. Under the Vulture-Tree. New York: Morrow, 1987. Essays

“Jim Dickey on the Bank of Lake Katherine.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1997, 145–46. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1998. “The Messy Humanity of Randall Jarrell: His Poetry in the Eighties.” South Carolina Review 17 (fall 1984): 82–95. “Note on the Structure of James Seay’s ‘It All Comes Together Outside the Restroom in Hogansville.’ ” Notes on Contemporary Literature 7 ( September 1977): 6–7. “Turn Your Radio On: The Spirits of Influence.” Southern Quarterly 37 (spring–summer 1999): 85–92. “Witnessing for the Worldly Mystic.” James Dickey Newsletter 3 (fall 1986): 6–9.

II. Secondary Sources Essays

Baker, David. “A View of Poetry.” New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 6 (winter 1983): 332–50. Brock, Van K. “The Exiles of Poets.” Sun Dog 5, nos. 2–3 (1985): 178– 87. Claspill, Kelly. “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump.” Quarterly West 16 (1983): 182–87. “David Bottoms.” In Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, 22:51– 52. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1988. “David Bottoms.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism, 53:28–34. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1991. “David Bottoms.” In The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, edited by Ian Hamilton, 61. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Griffith, Benjamin. “A Retrospective Look at Poems by David Bottoms.” Southern Review 32 (autumn 1996): 812–19.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

243

Hill, Robert W. “Warbling with the TV in the Background: David Bottoms in the Suburbs.” Southern Quarterly 37 (spring–summer 1999): 80–84. Lott, Rick. “David Bottoms.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1983, 186–93. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1984. Moffat, Yolanda. “A Poet of Experience.” Tuesday Magazine, March 26, 1985, 2–3. O’Briant, Don. “Poet in a Changing Landscape.” Atlanta JournalConstitution, April 17, 1988, sec. J, p. 1. Probst, Robert E. “Reader-Response Theory and the English Curriculum.” English Journal 83, no. 3 (1994): 37–38. Rholetter, Janie Wylene. “ ‘Stubborn Sounds’: Younger Poets of the Contemporary South.” Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1991. Risser, Lynn. “David Bottoms.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, 120:31–36. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1991. Russ, Don. “ ‘Up toward Light’: Resurrection, Transfiguration, Metamorphosis, and Evolution in David Bottoms’ Armored Hearts.” Southern Quarterly 37 (spring–summer 1999): 66-72. Simpson, Louis. “Facts and Poetry.” Gettysburg Review 1 (winter 1987): 156–65. Smith, Jeffrey. “David Bottoms: A Southern Poet’s Search for Meaning.” Atlanta Weekly, August 19, 1984, 10. Stitt, Peter. “David Bottoms.” In Contemporary Poets, Dramatists, Essayists, and Novelists of the South, edited by Robert Bain and Joseph M. Flora, 84–90. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1995. Suarez, Ernest. “Contemporary Southern Poetry and Critical Practice.” Southern Review 30 (autumn 1994): 674–88. . “A Deceptive Simplicity: The Poetry of David Bottoms.” Southern Quarterly 37 (spring–summer 1999): 73–79. . “James Dickey and David Bottoms: Interpreting Influence.” James Dickey Newsletter 13 (fall 1996): 10–16. Interview

Rider, Eddie Lee. “An Interview with David Bottoms.” Chattahoochee Review 12, no. 1 (1991): 79–89.

244

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Reviews

Berger, Charles. “Laurels.” Review of Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump. Poetry 140 (April 1982): 35–50. Cass, Michael. “Danger and Beauty: David Bottoms’ In a U-Haul North of Damascus.” Southern Review 20 (1984): 743–45. Drew, Bettina. Review of Under the Vulture-Tree. Library Journal 112 (May 15, 1987): 87. Ellis, Steven R. Review of Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems. Library Journal 120 (July 1995): 84. Hafner, John H. Review of Easter Weekend. America 163, no. 10 (1990): 251. Hemesath, James B. Review of Easter Weekend. Library Journal 115 (February 1, 1990): 105. Kirby, David. “Waking Up the Neighbors.” Review of Any Cold Jordan and Under the Vulture-Tree. Sewanee Review 96 (winter 1988): xxxvi– xxxviii. Lott, Bret. “Believing the Story: Three Recent Novels.” Review of Any Cold Jordan. Michigan Quarterly Review 27 (summer 1988): 516–24. Mesic, Penelope. “In a U-Haul North of Damascus.” Poetry 143 (February 1984): 295. O’Brien, Dan. “Brother Hoods.” Review of Easter Weekend. New York Times Book Review, February 25, 1990, 34. Oresic, Peter. Review of Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump. Minnesota Review, n.s. 17 (fall 1981): 140–41. Parisi, Joseph. Review of In a U-Haul North of Damascus. Booklist 79, no. 17 (1983): 1129. Review of Any Cold Jordan. Publishers Weekly 231 (March 6, 1987): 104. Review of In a U-Haul North of Damascus. Library Journal 108 (April 1, 1983): 748. Shetley, Vernon. Review of Under the Vulture-Tree. Poetry 152 (May 1988): 100–101. Stitt, Peter. “To Enlighten, to Embody.” Review of Under the VultureTree. Georgia Review 41 (winter 1987): 800–813. Taylor, John. Review of Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems. Poetry 169 (February 1997): 286–88. Weigl, Bruce. “Towards a Fine Scrutiny of Experience.” Review of In a U-Haul North of Damascus. Poet Lore 78 (winter 1984): 242–50.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

245

T. R. Hummer

I. Primary Works Books

The Angelic Orders. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. The 18,000-Ton Olympic Dream. New York: Morrow, 1991. The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey. Edited by Bruce Weigl and T. R. Hummer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Lower-Class Heresy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. The Passion of the Right-Angled Man. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Translation of Light. Stillwater, Okla.: Cedar Creek Press, 1976. Walt Whitman in Hell. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Essays

“Against Metaphor.” In Bread Loaf Anthology: Writers on Writing, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini, 86–97. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1991. “An Audience.” Manoa 2 (spring 1991): 85–93. “The Best Hour of the Night.” Review of The Best Hour of the Night, by Louis Aston Marantz. Kenyon Review 6 (summer 1984): 114–23. “Dave Smith’s Homage to Edgar Allen Poe: ‘Pushed’ Time and the Obsession of Memory.” In The Giver of Morning: On the Poetry of Dave Smith, edited by Bruce Weigl, 75–87. Birmingham, Ala.: Thunder City Press, 1982. “Days the Bear Eats You: A Choice of Testimony.” In Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry, edited by Warren Schlesinger, 44–52. Columbia, S.C.: Bench Press, 1990. “Ex Machina: Reading the Mind of the South.” Southern Review 31 (winter 1995): 114–38. “Impure Form: An Introduction.” Kenyon Review 12 (spring 1990): 1–10. “Introduction.” With Bruce Weigl. In The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey, edited by Bruce Weigl and T. R. Hummer, 1–10. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. “Laughed Off: Canon, Kharakter, and the Dismissal of Vachel Lindsay.” Kenyon Review 17 (spring 1995): 56–96.

246

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

“Recent Poetry: Never as in Life.” Western Humanities Review 40 (spring 1986): 69–82. “Revenge of the American Leviathan.” New England Review 13 (spring–summer 1992): 9–33. “Revising the Poetry Wars: Louis Simpson’s Assault on the Poetic.” Review of People Lived Here and Best Hour of the Night, by Louis P. Simpson. Kenyon Review 6 (summer 1984): 114–23. Excerpted and reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, 32:382–84. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1985. “Robert Penn Warren: Audubon and the Moral Center.” Southern Review 16 (fall 1980): 799–815. Reprinted in Modern Critical Views: Robert Penn Warren, edited by Harold Bloom, 167–82. Chelsea House, 1978. “Roethke and Merwin: Two Voices and the Technique of Nonsense.” Western Humanities Review 33 (winter 1979): 273–80. “ ‘Sen-Sen,’ Censorship, Obscenity, Secrecy: Slapping the Face of the Body Politic.” New England Review 13 (fall 1990): 9–26. “The Thousand Variations of One Song: The Influence of James Dickey.” James Dickey Newsletter 3 (fall 1986): 9–12.

II. Secondary Sources Essays

Bugeja, Michael J. “The Poetry of Passion: Proclamation for T. R. Hummer.” Quarterly West 19 (fall–winter 1984–1985): 67–74. “Hummer, T(erry) R., 1950– .” In Contemporary Authors, 128–95. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1990. Jones, Roger D. “T. R. Hummer.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, 120:151–56. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1992. Interviews

“Connecting with the World: An Interview with T. R. Hummer.” Cimarron Review 71 (April 1985): 53–61. By Phil Paradis. Reviews

Cotter, James Finn. Review of Lower-Class Heresy. Hudson Review 41 (spring 1988): 225–32. Looney, George. Review of The 18,000-Ton Olympic Dream. Prairie Schooner 66 (fall 1992): 119.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

247

McDowell, Robert. Review of The Passion of the Right-Angled Man. Hudson Review 38 (winter 1986): 681–94. Ullman, Leslie. “Solitaries and Storytellers, Magicians and Pagans: Five Poets in the World.” Review of The 18,000-Ton Olympic Dream. Kenyon Review 13 (spring 1991): 179–93.

Yusef Komunyakaa I. Primary Works Books

Copacetic. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984. Dedications and Other Dark Horses: Poems. Laramie, Wyo.: R. M. C. A. J. Books, 1977. Dien Cai Dau. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986. The Jazz Poetry Anthology. Edited by Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa. 2 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, 1996. Lost in the Bonewheel Factory: Poems. New York: Lynx House Press, 1979. Magic City. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1992. Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Premonitions of the Breadline. Irvine: University of California Press, 1980. Thieves of Paradise. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. Toys in a Field. New Orleans: Black River Press, 1986.

II. Secondary Sources Essays

Aubert, Alvin. “Yusef Komunyakaa: The Unified Vision—Canonization and Humanity.” African American Review 27 (spring 1993): 119–23. Baca, Stacey. “CSU Prof Knew Student Great Poet.” Denver Post, April 17, 1994, sec. A, p. 8. Conley, Susan. “About Yusef Komunyakaa.” Ploughshares 23 (spring 1997): 202–7.

248

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Dericotte, Toi. “The Tension between Memory and Forgetting in the Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa.” Kenyon Review 15 (fall 1993): 217– 22. Fabre, Michael. “On Yusef Komunyakaa.” Southern Quarterly 34 (winter 1996): 5–8. Gotera, Vicente F. “ ‘Depending on the Light’: Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau.” In America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman Jr. and Lorrie Smith, 282–300. New York: Garland, 1990. Jones, Kirkland C. “Folk Idiom in the Literary Expression of Two African American Authors: Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa.” In Language and Literature in the African American Imagination, edited by Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, 149–65. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992. . “Yusef Komunyakaa.” In Dictionary of Literary Bibliography, 120:176–79. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1992. “Komunyakaa, Yusef, 1947– .” In Contemporary Authors, 147:264–66. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1995. Larson, Susan. “A Homecoming.” New Orleans Times-Picayune, November 12, 1995, sec. D, p. 1. Quindlen, Anne. “Poetry Emotion.” New York Times, April 16, 1994, sec. A, p. 21. Ringnalda, Don. “Poems ‘Whittled from Bone.’ ” In Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War, 136–71. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. . “Rejecting ‘Sweet Geometry’: Komuyakaa’s Duende.” Journal of American Culture 16 (fall 1993): 21–28. Stein, Kevin. “Vietnam and the ‘Voice Within’: Public and Private History in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau.” Massachusetts Review 36 (winter 1995–1996): 541–61. Walker, Jeffrey. “A Man of His Words.” Los Angeles Times, April 13, 1994, sec. E, p. 3. Weber, Bruce. “A Poet’s Values: It’s the Words over the Man.” New York Times, May 2, 1994, sec. C, pp. 11, 18. “Yusef Komunyakaa.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism Yearbook 1994, 190–94. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1995. “Yusef Komunyakaa, 1947– .” In Contemporary Literary Criticism, 94:216–49. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1997.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

249

Interviews

“An Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa.” New England Review 16 (winter 1994): 141–47. By Muna Asali. “Jazz and Poetry: A Conversation.” Georgia Review 46 (winter 1992): 645–61. By Robert Kelly. “ ‘Lines of Tempered Steel’: An Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa.” Callaloo 13 (spring 1990): 215–29. By Vicente F. Gotera. “Seeking Surprises: An Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa.” Black Scholar 27 (spring 1997): 72–73. By Durthy A. Washington. “Yusef Komunyakaa: Still Negotiating with the Images.” Kenyon Review 20 (summer/fall 1998): 5–20. By William Baer. Reviews

Aubert, Alvin. “Rare Instances of Reconciliation.” Review of Dien Cai Dau. Epoch 38 (1989): 67–72. . “Stars and Gunbarrels.” Review of Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. African American Review 28 (winter 1994): 671. Collins, Michael. “Staying Human (Yusef Komunyakaa).” Review of Magic City and Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. Parnassus 18–19 (1993–1994): 126–50. Dericotte, Toi. Review of Copacetic, I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, Dien Cai Dau, Magic City, and Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. Kenyon Review 15 (fall 1993): 217–22. Engels, John. Review of Magic City. New England Review 16 (winter 1994): 163–69. Finkelstein, Norman. “Like an Unknown Voice Rising Out of Flesh.” Review of Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. Ohio Review 52 (1994): 136–39. Gotera, Vicente F. “Killer Imagination.” Review of Dien Cai Dau. Callaloo 13 (spring 1990): 364–71. Gwynn, R. S. Review of Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. Hudson Review 46 (winter 1994): 741–44. Waniek, Marilyn Nelson. “The Gender of Grief.” Review of Magic City. Southern Review 29 (1993): 405–19.

Betty Adcock

I. Primary Works Books

Beholdings. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

250

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

The Difficult Wheel. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. Nettles. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Walking Out. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975. Essays

“Certain Gifts.” American Arts 11 (May 1980): 8–9. “The Creative Process: Poetry.” North Carolina Historical Review 56, no. 2 (1979): 202–5. “History Overheard.” Review of Kyrie, by Ellen Bryant Voigt. Shenandoah 45 (winter 1995): 95–98. “The Homeplace by Marilyn Nelson Waniek.” Obsidian II 7, no. 2 (1992): 137–42. “James Dickey: Man Made of Poems.” James Dickey Newsletter 3 (fall 1986): 2–5. “Permanent Enchantments.” Southern Review 30 (autumn 1984): 792– 808. Review of Ribbon around a Bomb, by Lucinda Grey. Southern Poetry Review 35, no. 1 (1995): 72–74. “Six Soloists.” Southern Review 32 (autumn 1996): 761–77. “Tributes: Betty Adcock” [for James Dickey]. In Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1997, 139–40. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1998. “Tributes to Fred Chappell.” With Sam Ragan, Shelby Stephenson, Clyde Edgerton, and Sally Buckner. Pembroke Magazine 23 (1991): 77–89.

II. Secondary Sources Essays

Bugeja, Michael J. “Elements of Time.” Writer’s Digest 77, no. 7 (1997): 10–12. Chappell, Fred. “Rich with Disappearance: Betty Adcock’s Time Paradoxes.” Shenandoah 45 (summer 1995): 58–75. Oliphant, Dave. “Coming Home to Texas: The Poetry of R. G. Vliet and Betty Adcock.” Pawn Review 8 (spring 1984): 105–21. Sale, Richard B. “Betty Adcock.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, 105:3–10. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1991.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

251

Stephenson, Shelby. “The Turning Fabric of Betty Adcock’s Poetry.” Pembroke Magazine 26 (1994): 64–68. Walsh, William J. Speak So I Shall Know Thee: Interviews with Southern Writers. Jefferson, N.C.: MacFarland and Co., 1990. 1–11. Williams, Mary C. “In Quest of Identity: Betty Adcock’s Poetry.” Pembroke Magazine 26 (1994): 57–63. Reviews

Aldan, Daisy. “Beholdings.” Library Journal 113 (September 1, 1988): 171. Allen, Frank. “Beholdings.” Small Press 7, no. 1 (1989): 55. Garrison, Joseph. Review of Walking Out. Library Journal 101 (January 15, 1976): 342. Guillory, Daniel L. Review of Nettles. Library Journal 108 (September 1, 1983): 1708. Gwynn, R. S. “Poetry Chronicle.” Review of The Difficult Wheel. Hudson Review 49 (summer 1996): 341–51. Peat, Isie. Review of Beholdings. Southern Living 24, no. 2 (1989): 72. Ramsey, Paul. “Image and Essence.” Review of Walking Out. Sewanee Review 84 (summer 1976): 533–41. Review of Walking Out. Choice 13, no. 1 (1976): 64.

Rodney Jones

I. Primary Works Books

Apocalyptic Narrative and Other Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Going Ahead, Looking Back. Knoxville: Southbound Books, 1978. The Story They Told Us of Light. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980. Things That Happen Once. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Transparent Gestures. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. The Unborn. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1985. Essays

“Dimension and Authority.” Missouri Review 11 (summer 1988): 162– 76.

252

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

“The Large Vision: Fred Chappell’s Midquest.” Appalachian Journal 9, no. 5 (1981): 59–65. “Some Notes on Everette Maddox.” New Orleans Review 20 (fall– winter 1994): 20–38. “Stafford and Scarbrough: In the Contemporary Sense.” Black Warrior Review 5, no. 1 (1978): 99–108. “The Vision of a Practical Man: James Wright’s Above the River: The Complete Poems and The Heart of Light.” Parnassus 16 (fall/winter 1991): 216–41.

II. Secondary Sources Essays

Blades, John. “Poet Shares Apocalyptic Vision at Heartland.” Chicago Tribune, February 9, 1995, sec. 5, p. 5. “Jones, Rodney, 1950– .” Contemporary Authors, 133:200. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1991. Summerlin, Tim. “Rodney Jones.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, 120:169–72. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1992. Interviews

“Rodney Jones.” In Fighting Words: Words on Writing from 21 of the Heart of Dixie’s Best Contemporary Authors, edited by Bill Caton, 62–71. Montgomery, Ala.: Black Belt, 1995. By Bill Caton. Reviews

Dobyns, Stephen. “Will You Listen for a Minute?” Review of Transparent Gestures. New York Times Book Review, September 2, 1990, 5. Downing, Ben. “Disciples of the Homely.” Review of Apocalyptic Narratives and Other Poems. Parnassus 19 (fall/winter 1994): 195– 211. Evans, David Allan. “Soliloquy.” Review of Transparent Gestures. American Book Review 12 (July 1990): 30. Harris, Peter. “Poetry Chronicle: Varieties of Religious Experience.” Review of Apocalyptic Narratives and Other Poems. Virginia Quarterly Review 71 (autumn 1995): 656–73. Schultz, Robert. “The Accurate Poem.” Review of Transparent Gestures. Hudson Review 43 (spring 1990): 138–46. Skipper, Louie. “The One Clear Unspoken Sign: Four Young Poets.” Review of The Unborn. Black Warrior Review 12, no. 2 (1986): 103–20.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

253

Jim Seay

I. Primary Works Books

Let Not Your Hart. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1970. The Light as They Found It. New York: Morrow, 1990. Open Field, Understory: New and Selected Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Water Tables. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1974. Essays

“Heroes.” Antaeus 73–74 (spring 1994): 71–76. “James Seay on William Faulkner’s ‘That Evening Sun Go Down.’ ” In Books of Passage: 27 North Carolina Writers on the Books That Changed Their Lives, edited by David Perkins, 173–79. Asheboro, N.C.: Down Home Press, 1997. “Our Hands in the History of It.” Antaeus 68 (spring 1992): 63–69. “The Southern Outdoors: Bass Boats and Bear Hunts.” In The American South: Portrait of a Culture, edited by Louis D. Rubin, 118–28. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. “A World Immeasurably Alive and Good: A Look at James Wright’s Collected Poems.” Georgia Review 27 (spring 1973): 71–81. Film

In the Blood. By James Seay and George Butler. Videocassette. New York: Dutchman Co., Central Park Media, 1990.

II. Secondary Sources Essays

Bottoms, David. “Note on the Structure of James Seay’s ‘It All Comes Together outside the Restroom in Hogansville.’ ” Notes on Contemporary Literature 7 (September 1977): 6–7. “Seay, James, 1930– .” Contemporary Authors First Revision, 29–32:620– 21. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1998. Interviews

“An Interview with James Seay.” Notes on Mississippi Writers 5 (1972): 35–55, 57. By John Carr.

254

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

“An Interview with James Seay.” Southern Quarterly 28 (summer 1990): 99–115. By William Walsh. “James Seay.” In Craft So Hard to Learn, edited by George Garrett, 58–63. New York: Morrow, 1972. By John Graham. “James Seay.” In The Writer’s Voice, edited by George Garrett, 167–82. New York: Morrow, 1973. By John Graham. Reviews

Allen, Frank. Review of The Light as They Found It. Library Journal 115 (August 1990): 113. Bell, Vereen M. “The Purchase Lost: The Poems of James Seay.” Review of Water Tables. Southern Review 11 (October 1975): 933– 36. Brainard, Dulcy. Review of Open Field, Understory: New and Selected Poems. Publishers Weekly 243 (December 30, 1996): 61. Collins, Floyd. Review of The Light as They Found It. Gettysburg Review 5 (winter 1992): 146–61. Huddle, David. Review of Water Tables. Georgia Review 28 (fall 1974): 535–40. Jacobsen, Josephine. Review of Let Not Your Hart. Poetry 118 (June 1971): 166–69.

Kate Daniels

I. Primary Works Books

Four Testimonies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Muriel Rukeyser: A Life of Poetry. New York: Random House, 1988. The Niobe Poems. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988. Of Solitude and Silence: Writings on Robert Bly. Edited by Kate Daniels and Richard Jones. Boston: Beacon Press, 1982. Out of Silence: Selected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Edited by Kate Daniels. Evanston: TriQuarterly Books, 1992. The White Wave. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984. Essays

“The Demise of the ‘Delicate Prisons’: The Women’s Movement in Twentieth-Century American Poetry.” In Profiles in TwentiethCentury American Poetry, edited by Jack Myers and David Wojahn, 224–53. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

255

“Ireland’s Best.” Review of The Lost Land, by Evan Boland; Selected Poems, by Medbh McGuckian; and The Yellow Book, by Derek Mahn. Southern Review 35 (spring 1999): 287–402. “Muriel Rukeyser and Her Literary Critics.” In Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers, edited by Margaret Dickle and Thomas Travisano, 247–63. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. “Porch-sitting and Southern Poetry.” In The Future of Southern Letters, edited by Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe, 61–71. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

II. Secondary Sources Essay

“Daniels, Kate, 1953– .” Contemporary Authors, 124:102–3. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1988. Interviews

“Interview with Kate Daniels.” Iris 25 (spring–summer 1991): 59–62. By Lisa Russ Spaar. “Interview with Kate Daniels and Philip Levine.” Vanderbilt Review 11 (spring 1995): 121–44. By Craig Watson. Reviews

Boruch, Marianne. Review of The White Wave. Ohio Review 36 (spring 1986): 123–32. Fay, Julie. Review of The Niobe Poems. Kenyon Review 13 (winter 1991): 203–10. Filkins, Peter. Review of The White Wave. Iowa Review 17, no. 1 (1987): 156–70. Grosholz, Emily. Review of The White Wave. Hudson Review 37 (winter 1984–1985): 647–59. Jarman, Mark. Review of The Niobe Poems. Gettysburg Review 2 (autumn 1989): 705–9. Kumin, Maxine. Review of The White Wave. Georgia Review 39 (spring 1985): 169–81. Overmyer, Janet. “Forms of Loss.” Review of The Niobe Poems. American Book Review 12 (March 1990): 22. Review of The Niobe Poems. Virginia Quarterly Review 65 (autumn 1989): 137.

256

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Spaar, Lisa Russ. Review of The Niobe Poems. Iris 25 (spring–summer 1991): 63–65. Sweet, Nanora. Review of The Niobe Poems. Minnesota Review 34–35 (spring–fall 1990): 148–50.

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Ernest Suarez

E R N E S T S U A R E Z, Associate Professor of English at Catholic Uni-

versity in Washington, D.C., is the author of James Dickey and the Politics of Canon: Assessing the Savage Ideal (University of Missouri Press).