Every poet has influences. What has struck me in your work is how often you refer not only to other poets as influences, but to religious and philosophical figures and texts. Specifically I've seen numerous poems and prose/poetry works of yours that discuss Zen Buddhism, Jesus (specifically the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas) and Nietzsche. What is it about these figures and religious texts that you find so powerful, and how have they affected your own work and your theory of poetics?

 

Some have said Nietzsche is the best prose stylist in German. I have always liked reading Nietzsche because he writes arresting tart prose in short, sharp fragments or fractures and also, towards the end, around the time of Ecce Homo and his last letters, his text tracks out right on into his schizophrenic break, after which, silence. So you see a great prose stylist to right to the limit and beyond. The stuff at the limit shows things most don't live to see and report, Bataille might say. Nietzsche was a remarkably bad poet. His poetry is clunky and tin-eared. So one reason I like him is for how he is a great writer in one kind of writing — fragmentary prose — and a bad writer in another kind of writing — poetry. I like that idea of a writer being simultaneously good and bad. It stretches value conventions.

 

The Gospel of Thomas was lost until 1945 when a couple of Egyptian peasant men found it while scouring cliff bottoms looking for a special kind of soil that made good farm soil. They found a cache of scrolls that had been hidden away by an early Christian sect when the Romans were cracking down. In those documents is the Gospel of Thomas which has astoundingly beautiful short parables and aphorisms of spiritual lucidity and repeating some in the "authorized" Gospels, plus adding some new ones. It's like discovering a lost Jimi Hendrix song. Jesus was a great stylist of the parable with political and poetic inflections. Forget all the myths and miracles: he was a damn good poet, of the parable-aphoristical variety. He shows the link between spirit, vision and poet. The poet must be someone wholly of the spirit, wholly of the body, wholly real. The poet must be real. The Jesus of historical truth -- not the one who did dumb made-up mythological things like raise the dead, but the one who was a poor peasant with a gift for compassion, insight and parable -- is real. Anything real is a real influence.

 

Zen is a way of looking at things that undercuts and destroys logical and rational formulations and takes you right back to the beginning of the word, where the signifier/signified split begins, where "it" begins as Alan Watts might say. Zen koans are cool. Go look at the "Ten Bulls" series, especially the one that says "this heaven's so vast no message can stain it." What a wonderful way to describe loss of the sign, evisceration of the signifier, the signified, and the self, into no not a nothingness, but something vast and beautiful.

 

Poetry shouldn't be about poetry. It should be about the world. Poetry, first position, is a poem about life, about the world outside of poetry. Like a poem about a tree that is actually outside your window. Poetry about primary reality.

 

Poetry, second position, weaker, is poetry about not primary raw reality, but poetry about reality already once-absorbed by human consciousness, media and textuality. A poem about a TV show you saw. A poem about something you read.

 

Poetry, third position, weakest, is a poem about other poems. A poem about the poet writing his poem. A poem about poetry. Yech. That's bad, narcissistic, self-referential, dry, empty, dull. Usually. Of course there is no particular rule for poetry so who knows.
 

So anyway I figure, it is stronger for me to be using sources who were not poets per se, like Nietzsche or Jesus or Zen (second position) than sources who are just other poets (third position). Of course the best thing would be if my influences were not second-position influences like Jesus or Nietzsche, but rather, first position, like, say, the trees, a buttercup, the smell of car exhaust on a highway, sunset, a childhood memory, Jenni.

 

You have often stated that your poetic aesthetic or style can be described as one of presenting or describing (for lack of a better term) “simple reality.”  Is what you mean by that what you call your “first position” above, i.e., “a poem about life, about the world outside of poetry”?  And if so, what room is there in poetry for poems written as a response to other poets (by which I mean not direct responses to individual poems, but responses, competitive or sympathetic to another poet’s body of work – such as Milton wrote in some respects in response to Shakespeare, or Eliot in response to Whitman).  Can you write a simple reality poem and yet still be mindful other poets whose work you’ve read and absorbed?

 

There is and is not a "simple reality." There is a simple reality in the sense of that world right outside your car window which seems different from the world as it has been processed into poems. There is a simple reality in the sense of simple stuff, goings-on, events and happenings in your own life, poet, that you, for some reason, ignore all the time when you write your poems. Poets tend to ignore what is right around them. We believe ancient Rome has a mystique that the life right around us lacks. Of course our life will be an "ancient Rome" someday in the future, looked back upon by people in the future as something as old-fashioned, archaic, antique, mythology-infused and quaint as 2000 years ago looks to us.
 

There is on the other hand no "simple reality" at all. All reality is preconditioned by existing interpretive structures in the mind of which we may or may not have any conscious awareness. There are no facts, only interpretations. Between "actual reality" and the reality we sense and know come all the filters of sensation, social conditioning, bias, interpretation. There is no known actual reality. As reality becomes known to us it becomes processed by our minds. Knowledge is a form of processing, textual processing even. So Ryokan will say that original nature lies in "not-knowing." And Zen will twist you up to try to destroy tricks of processing, preconceptions.

If reality, as it is known to us, is reality which is already interpreted, then that means, reality as it is known to us is reality already in a sense turned into a text. So, to say one should not write poems about other poems, or about other literature, or about other texts, but instead, that one should write poems about raw pre-textual nature might be naive, given that reality, human reality, is already-interpreted, already in text.

In postmodern culture, media infiltrates the daily living space. If I spend a few hours every evening watching TV, then isn't it a natural choice of subject matter to write about TV? In that sense, I am writing naturally, about my actual reality, yet, I am writing about reality one step removed from real trees in a forest. Lets say I write a tree image taken from a tree I saw in a car ad on TV. That choice of imagery source is natural in the sense that honestly, I may see more trees on TV than I do in "real life." Note that my "real life" includes time spent watching TV. In this sense it is dumb to say that using the tree on TV is using "less real" subject matter than if I used a tree in a forest. The trees on TV are as natural to my situation.

I am sure there are people living in inner cities who have only seen forests on TV, and have never seen them "in real life." But the TV is part of real life.

Other poets, other poems, other writings, all of that, if it is part of the daily lived sensed fabric of my life, is, in a sense, as natural to my life as other stuff in my life. In this sense, if I choose some poem I read, as subject matter, for purposes of writing my own poem, this is no less natural than if I decide to write about a tree or about having supper with Jenni.

This progression shows how the idea of a "first position" which consists of reality outside of the poem, outside of poetry, may really be an illusion.

Certainly I am aware, as I am writing, of other contemporary or near-contemporary poets whose work I think explores openings that I would also want to explore. I like the work of Milosz because he writes meditational lyrics, he has clarity of image, and he experiments with the limits of poetry and prose. He wrote right up to the verge of death in old age this year. His late work has a granular quality to the image that might be related to how he was going blind.

A critic once said of the painter Monet, "he is just an eye, but what an eye." Sometimes I think of Ashbery, "just an ear but what an ear." I think in his poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" he blended his good ear for language with currents from his day job as an art critic. A lot of his poems to me seem like one piece after another cut out of basically the same swirly surrealistic fabric, tending toward monotony. Every once in a while he writes a mid-length lyric that revolves enough around a core for me to follow it. His poem "Myrtle" in The Best American Poetry 1994 is an example.

I like some Jorie Graham poems like "San Sepolcro" but a lot of her work to me gets to be pretentious as if her heavy hitter status started to go to her head and she actually started to believe she was the shit. Nobody should believe they are the shit. In poetry nobody should believe they are anything. Poetry dissolves anything. By the time poetry begins there is no anything. It might be nihilism, it might be pantheistic unity, but any individual vanity or belief in a fixed realizable value and establishment of self, any sort of human fame, gets burnt, demolished. Look at the back cover photos of poets, the sad pretension, sad primping, efforts to have, to be, a fame-image. Absolute fucking bullshit. Amazing to me how violent my reaction is to all that.

I like Emily Dickinson.

I like Emily D too.  And Milosz.  In both instances it is the voice in their poems that I find seductive, or the intelligence and the emotion that I imagine behind that voice.  I have any number of directions I want to go with my next question, but you’ve sparked my curiosity about likes and dislikes.  Which other poets do you like to read, and why do you enjoy their company?  And conversely, whose poems do you not like to read?

I like Jorie Graham's earlier works and her shorter poems. I think she does a good job of combining philosophical notions with lyric voice. She is good at a metaphysically seductive tone derived from Rilke. But her later work is just not as fun to read. And it is more pretentious. The local conditions a poet lives in are bound to affect his or her personality. If you are running the Iowa Writers Workshop like Jorie did that is bound to affect you. Think about young writers fawning and flattering because they want you to select their MS for a competition and they want to get an A in your class. Political machinations between the faculty members. It is bound to eventually warp your personality.

I like to read Milosz because he sounds humble and yet he too, Like Jorie, combines the lyric-meditative and the religious—Philosophical.

I can't read Rilke anymore, he just seems to blowsy and over-the-top, except for his French poems translated by A. Poulin available from Greywolf Press.

I can't really read Frost even though I did my undergrad thesis on his stuff. I prefer Dr. Williams. I like Williams for being so experimental and being willing to play, to fail. I love the Whitman edition by Gary Schmidgall from Stonewall Editions.

I like Mandlestam, the Penguin edition, translated by James Green. There are also cool translations of his notebook poems from Bloodaxe Press.

Most of the poets on the internet are too sloppy for me honestly. Or else their form is way too old-fashioned. I have trouble with the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets based upon the fact it is not that fun to read them, most the time. On the other hand I think that Billy Collins is a little bit too thin, populist and flaky.

I like Richard Sieburth's translation of Holderlin. That is a critical book for me, very important. Go read the introduction.

I like Guy Davenport's "7 Greeks" with nice clean Crisp versions of Sappho, Archilochos, Heraclitus. I love Simone Weil's "Gravity & Grace" and I think the fragmentary short prose pieces of Wittgenstein and Nietzsche are wonderful though Nietzsche was seriously mentally disturbed and had a terrible view of women.

I think Carolyn Forche is too pretentious. Stephen Dunn's Book "Between Angels" is very interesting for what it suggests in terms of new openings for American voicing and his follow-up books are interesting on-and-off, but there is also sort of a dry, lackluster tone that creeps into his stuff sometimes that I don't like.

If you ever go to a poetry reading or hang around an English department you can't help but physically feel the waves of nausea of the political schmoozing and ego trips that occur there. Plus you feel guilty for poking holes in those poets because of curse underneath all the posing, they are vulnerable human beings. But a lot of their political conceitedness and hypocrisy I have a real hard time forgiving. So I stay away from them.

Celan as translated by two women, don't recall their Names, the book is called "Last Poems," it is great, a better Translation, I believe, than John Felstiner's.

I think Jenni's poems are the work of a natural talent.

A poet like Maya Angelou does not have enough word for word force of formal interest to keep my attention. But her value has as much to do with bridging gaps and exposing poetry to lots of people in regular society, as it has to do with poetry per se, the poem as an artwork, as a "machine of words." (Williams).

I used to love Wallace Stevens. I think I've over-read him. I have not read his work for a long long time. He is one of those poets of whom it is death to try to imitate. He didn't get along with his wife. They lived in opposite ends of his mansion. He broke his fist in a fight with Hemingway once. He argued with Frost in Florida.

T.S. Eliot wrote an unforgivable letter to his mom once where he bragged about how he was soon to be the best poet around. His critical writings to me are boring and fascist. His poems are better than his critical prose. You really can't beat some of the stuff in "Journey of The Magi" for example.

Willie Yeats got a weird operation toward the end of his Life where the doctor did something like install monkey gonads, not kidding, it was meant to re-stimulate his Vitality, like primitive Viagra. He went and screwed around on his wife, he proposed marriage for the umpteenth time To Maud Gonne, and when she said no, he proposed to her daughter, who also said no. Everyone turned a blind eye while Willie had affairs and fucked around, and to this day his biographers politely write it off as the boisterous vitality Of the irrepressible poet. It isn't. It is bad news, betrayal.

Every poet has a dark side.

There are certain bits of Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, I will never cease to love. Shelley fucked over his young girlfriend so bad she killed herself, and Coleridge was a huge H addict. Keats lost a lot of belief in his own work once the critical reviewers of the day savagely attacked his first book. A friend reminisced that one day he saw Keats writing some stuff on the porch and then tucked it behind some books on the shelf like no big deal ? This was "Ode to a Nightingale." The best works are often done out of a situation beyond hope or belief. Like Chidiock Tichborne's "Elegy" written in the Tower of London lock down the night before his execution. Or John Clare writing poems both better and worse than those of his contemporaries while in an asylum. The "best" poems violate ingrained value categories at every limit therefore they are recognized In their own time as being "better" and also "worse."  Example, Whitman, whom even his contemporary Emily Dickinson refused to read considering him "scandalous." If Emily could misjudge Walt, just think of how badly we misjudge each other.

Your comment about the “political conceitedness and hypocrisy” of academic poets gives me pause. Putting aside for a minute what you meant specifically regarding their views or attitudes (which I think I can imagine for myself), this makes me wonder about the role poets play in our society, and particularly in our political society. In former communist countries and South American dictatorships, poets often assumed the stance of dissenters, or speakers of truth to the powerful, even if that truth was often wrapped in coded language to get it past the censor. In light of the current political climate in America, what role do you see for poets in terms of political dissent or commentary? Or is the whole discussion of this question meaningless when mainstream America is so anti-literary and ignorant or dismissive of poets and poetry in general?

Your view of South America may be slightly sentimental. Neruda was a fairly vicious operative at times. He was, at times, gross, fat, and vindictive because he wanted to preserve his image as a "Poet of the People" (who never had to work a farm job like the People. Some of his Stalinist communist cant is repulsive. You know he beat off to those figureheads. Which is alright I think. But why not talk about it? And Borges could have used counseling. He became semi-fascist, real right-winger in later days. Not to mention Ezra Pound. Who lived in a gated community down the street from Mussolini toward the end of World War II, oh and did I mention he had, like, two wives? And what about T.S. Eliot freezing-out his first wife into the madhouse? Politics is always fatally ambiguous. Power is not something that you can wear. And if Didi does nor recognize the majesty of the weirdness of this conceit, and publish it, exactly as-is — well you'all is just flat-out unimaginative. I mean let the kids have their say! their games! play "avalanche" sliding crushed ice from the fridge off the chair onto your face!

Jack, many poets have been profoundly influenced by their relationships with significant others in their lives. Elisabeth Barrett Browning is perhaps the most famous example. Since you and Jenni are both poets, do you feel your relationship with her (including your marriage), and with her daughter, has affected how you write or what you write about?

OK your last question. Nothing is too personal for me, are you kidding? Have you been reading my stuff the last couple years? My relationship with Jenni means everything to me. She is the light of my life. I fade into cliché when I think of her. The emotion overloads the circuitry of my language: my games fade back. She becomes fully real, fully realized -- i.e. vulnerable. A whole new worry confronts me: how in the world would I be able to withstand illness, death, anything that separates us. I do not know how I would. I have pretty much settled on quick suicide if something happens to Jenni. For most of my time as a poet I have been alone. The loneliness introduced various sadness and poisons and limitations into my psyche and my writing. For example my over sensitivity, tendency to attack, defensiveness, ego, etc. Like, say, the first few paragraphs of this interview answer. Jenni means I am not lonely. I really do not know of a better poet, and since to me poetry and personality are linked, the effect of her personality is very strong. I have changed for her. Every day when I see her, I just want to take care of her. Being around her lets me see into the heart of an actual, for-real writer, a poet for real. I have learned so much. Where her opinion differs from mine, I have to question myself. Plus she has natural love in her, which brings it out in me. She is genuinely happy. I can see she is happy. It is hard, sometimes, to see, to witness, genuine real happiness, like the child inside preserved in amber, coming back to life, forgetting the narrow scansion of adulthood. The breadth and purity and honesty of her happiness in our relationship warms and terrifies me. I become fearful of things that could take it away.

Being with her has resigned me to the strong odds that my writing is worthless. The strong odds are that anyone’s writing is worthless. You can look at this two ways. Either as a bad thing, nihilism, “why does all my effort go to naught” — or as a breathtaking freedom from value, freedom of value, as in Keats’ poem “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be.” At the end of the poem he watches all his dreams, love, renown, fame, swirl and dissolve over the edge of the world, and there is a grandeur in this, a uniquely human one, which however, is shared by animals, by plants, by Whitman’s Louisiana Live-Oak growing, “uttering” its leaves where no one is watching.

All fame is, is recognition by many eyes, many minds. But if we believe in the sanctity of the mind, one mind should be enough. And if we can follow Ryokan even a few footsteps, “no-mind” is even better.

I am glad I married Jenni. We try to make each day count. We love to hang out together. We are attentive to each other’s solitudes (Rilke talked about this). She can tell when I am getting too amped up, too evil, too weird. Like last night she forced me to stop writing. So I am answering this question this morning.

Once I was sitting in her car waiting for her to come back from an errand to a house trailer, and I was reading through her very first poems in an old spiral bound notebook. I was amazed by the purity and originality of the sentiment and imagery, even there, that early. She is a natural, raw talent. She has thoughtfully cultivated herself. Yeats said we should study our antinomies – seek to learn from, absorb, that which is Other, different from our starting-point. She started off hot and raw. So she went and read Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Gluck — cool, refined eyes. That has leaked into her poetry. She also is capable of narrative. She can write short stories. I can’t do narrative.

She has a strong personality and doesn’t put up with a lot of emotional or mind-game bullshit, so that is prevented in our relationship. She likes to have her solitude, her writing or Sims-building time, each day, so that gives me my space, too. We never fight. We are both fairly innocent when it comes to “the necessities.” I mean, we try to keep the apartment sort of clean. We try to teach the dog not to shit on the floor. We go to the supermarket sometimes, to Wal-Mart. That’s pretty much it. She helps me deal with stuff that happens at work. That is a great blessing. She is a great blessing. Even if the afterlife didn’t exist, I would have to say “yes” to this world, since Jenni is in it. And one may well have to say, or, one may be free to say, “yes,” with no moorings, bearings, securities — yes?

Also, your observation about potential solipsism, in one of your questions, was pertinent. I worry about that a lot. A lot of the situation of poetry has to do with "talking to oneself" or "talking to a wall." The poet circles with interiority which fleshes itself out into text. However, in so doing, does the poet ever honestly contact the Other? Or, to adopt Rimbaud's formulation, is the poet the Other? When I write, say, a poem, who am I saying it to? The imaginary audience? Myself? Others who are really just proto- or pseudo-Others inhabiting my fantasies? Some critics of Rilke talk about how the tone of his poems is like an insinuatingly intimate voice, like a voice speaking from you with the intimacy of a lover, or even your own inner mental voice inside your own mind -- does this have something to do with it, this quest for interior intimacy? When I speak from deep inside myself, does that ever mean I speak from deep within yourself? What is the magic spark from writer to reader? Is writing just generation of simulacra? Is this all solipsist? What is acceptable and unacceptable solipsism? For example, Whitman's expanded I, expanded extensive Self, in/of his poems. Is that just a very subtly artificed solipsism, artfully obscuring the actual situation of the man, a lonely closeted gay guy and hack newspaper reporter? There is always a separation, isn't there, between the voice of the poem and the voice of the poet as a regular person outside of the poem. Even if this separation, this distance, is due to nothing more than the strictures of purity and beauty and artifice that lift the poem into recognition, there is still something bothersome about it. We want a unified text. We sense a unified field. We deeply sense that all is one. A visitor to Holderlin in his insanity said that Holderlin had scrawled on the wall above his bedstead, in the greek, "All is One." Is it? Is every poem a rupture of our underlying text? I am suspicious of poems that sound more elevated, uppity, in their tone of voice, when compared to our logical posit of what the poet really sounds like, outside of poetry. To me, that chasm reeks of hypocrisy. I want poetic language not to be elevated or refined or lifted somewhere above ordinary language, but rather, to be more ordinary, in the sense of, more heartfelt, more open to direction, ambiguity, more real.

Would you like to be a child again? Are you still, today, a type of child in a way? Is that good or bad for your poetry?

One cannot be a child again. That would be a denial of history. My history is my body. My body ages. My mind is part of my body. My mind ages. The body is divine, is the soul. (Whitman). Henceforth, there must be something precious in this aging. Something diminished is presence. What was merely potential, yes may have been extravagant, but let’s focus on what’s here. Take off the movie focus, scrub the gel off the lens, let me see your face in regular daylight, no makeup. If he does not love you now he will never, then. She looks at him. Would she want him to just be a child? Something monstrous in this use of the word, “just.” And yet. She needs to pay the rent. She would like his help. She needs him to not be too insecure, not to be incompetent in the face of reality, its strictures. When the diagnosis comes back bad, she needs his support, not his screaming. A child would either not understand, or scream. So he must be grownup now. Not for his sake so much as hers: which is the sacred tenet of being grownup: focus on others. Grownup in order to have children – so child might still be possible. Of course, though, all is one. So I want the child in myself. Would like to be the child. Yet how do I know that it’s a real child as opposed to some bathetic harlequin romance fable of a child, a cliché child-figure, the unobtrusive children of after school specials? They tortured frogs you know. Yes they did, and they stole his underpants. They did some unmentionable things. First they believed strongly in Santa. Then he sort of decayed in their minds. Now they are grownups. Go figure. Well they might as well write poetry. Maybe that might help them. “You need to be like a child.” (Jesus). I.e., have continuity, human remembrance, of the past, of its otherness which is always changing, which is always you. Respect the difference of childhood. Not just to remember childhood, but to still be honest to oneness, to still be one. To still be becoming. For children are becoming. To be there, and flourish, and not to judge. The child accepts the flu shot the same from a black or white doctor. To the child, the appearance of Kaposi’s sarcoma, looks as bright, as mysterious, as sad, whether it appears on the forearm of a gay or straight person. Judgmental divisions make adults far more childish than children ever were. A child can squeeze through the eye of a needle. For a child is sight.