My first question deals with these first 2 poems:

Poem for my grandmother, ninety-nine, not one hundred

I said a prayer for you
yesterday afternoon.

Waiting in the basement surgical center,
each bay screened from view
but not from audio, I tried to breath
like they taught me in yoga

five years ago, in a room full of mats on the floor
and one lone chair, because I couldn't bend
enough to matter.

Eyes closed, a rusty orange glow,
the voices of neighbors
waiting for anesthesia,

I found it impossible to clear away thoughts
of you in your room
or strapped to your wheelchair.

I must have prayed seven times for you then
as 1:30pm slid into two.

First, for your dying
to be peaceful
and then for the hope
that peace would be granted you.

Third, for your daughters,
that they would forgive you
for not dying sooner.

Fourth was that I would cry at your funeral.
And fifth? That there would be a funeral
with a large enough number to make your pride feel
your death was worthwhile.

Sixth, is a secret, I keep for myself;
and last, number seven,

that god gives you that mansion
and a glorious newness
of body and soul

that in this world, in the last hundred years,
you have not known but once before now.



I'm exhausted by the possibilities

I read Milosz, I see his calm hand
stroking the paper with his pen
in 1942, in Warsaw.

What does that mean?

I lay on the ground, gravel in my face,
boots kicking my head
25 years ago. I remember it not at all.

I was unconscious, soon to fall on my face
at the hospital when
I tried to leave through the swinging doors.

How did Milosz stay calm when he wrote of the war?
How do I stay calm, now 25 years
after almost being killed?

A man I never met, a cab driver, he saved my life
by calling on his radio to his dispatcher that night
and waiting until they arrived.

We never met?
Milosz, he met the ones who helped him survive.
He saw them get killed.

I am ashamed.
I am disconsolate.
Damn you Milosz!

My shame is what you saw
and what I didn't see.
In the court room, at the preliminary

hearing I testified. I remembered the shape
of the boots, their color, their snakeskin
leather.

I had been high on cocaine
when they had torn me from my car.
No one ever was sent to jail.

Nazis, some of them were killed.
Does this mean Milosz had his justice
as Warsaw in flames

burned at his knees, as the rubble
and the bombs
and the armored vehicles

were all destroyed?
I am so small.
He is so large.

Kenosis. The emptying out of the soul.
The great thing we call soul.
Mine is so small.

What do I mean?


My question is — As to these two amazing poems -- The first is about your grandmother dying. The second is about Milosz and you. The one seems to be speaking outside a small soul that is dying, and the other, about a short soul that knows yes, somehow, the length of eternity will come. Do you consider your tone more clinical, or heartbroken? Or strangely at peace?

I would say not heartbroken, but not clinical either. I would call it a pleading tone in both cases. A searching after what I know cannot really be answered.

My grandmother has led a difficult life, and has been a difficult person to love. She has alienated many of her grandchildren and made the lives of her two daughters a great misery, and yet in these last few years I have come to terms with her, or come to terms with what she has done to me. Call it forgiveness. She is expected to die soon and so will not live to make her 100th birthday.

Milosz is the poet I am reading the most right now. Every night before bed I read him from his collected poems opened at random. I have yet to find a bad poem.

What is the function of metaphor and do you ever use metaphor in your poems? Poets like Cavafy were noted for not using metaphor. By painting a "flatter" picture (think: Edward Hopper), some poets seem more serious, less flaky, by avoiding excessive flashy metaphor. Your thoughts on metaphor and do you use it or avoid it.

I don't think you can avoid metaphor, even in conversation, much less avoid it in poetry, if by metaphor you mean the larger, more inclusive definition of the term. All language is studded with metaphor, its just after a time we stop calling it that and instead call it secondary definitions.

In my poems, I rarely start with a conscious decision to use any particular metaphor. What I find most often is metaphor arising naturally, unconsciously, within the context of creating the poem. Sometimes a single metaphor will subsume the rest of the poem, so that the factual, non-metaphorical basis which is the core experience of what I try to write about gets lost. Hopefully that doesn't happen as often now as it used to do. Where it still does tend to take over a poem are the ones which have a political theme.

Of course, it could be that we are talking about two different concepts. I tend to see metaphor in the sense that a philosopher/linguist such as Lakoff sees metaphor, as an overarching framework for what language does, i.e., metaphor as the structural component of language. I'm not terribly knowledgeable regarding the meaning students of literature employ when they discuss the use of metaphor. I know it can get highly technical, but I've never felt the desire to wrap my hands around what they mean when they discuss it. I've come to poetry too late, and I'm too lazy to really delve deep into such matters. No doubt this makes me a weaker writer, but so be it.

Every writer has to fight their own separate private battle against their personal conception of their own weakness as a writer. In several non-poem things you have written, I have seen you allude to your own perceived weakness as a writer. Where does this sensation come from, and is it a good or a bad thing?

Is it a good or bad thing? I don't know.

As for where the feeling comes from, that could be the result of dealing with depression, my daughter's anxiety disorder, my disability. Or it could be that I really do not think my writing is worthy of consideration, that in an objective sense, I am a writer of limited gifts.

I'm just not certain. When I was a lawyer I prided myself on my writing skills, but I've never been as confident of them in the creative writing area. I believe I have strengths as a writer, but they are limited strengths. And when life is depressing, it is easy to focus more on one's weaknesses, don't you agree?

When I first started writing poetry I was praised quite a bit by some people, and excoriated by quite a few more. I used to have a reflexive defensiveness to any criticism of my poems, because I have always tied my identity to my achievements, and when you cannot work, when you suffer on a constant basis, when you sit home alone most of the day, forced to focus on the most mundane decisions, you grasp for something positive anywhere you can find it. For me writing poetry assumed that position in my life.

We are an achievement oriented society, and my childhood family was and still is very achievement oriented, but not necessarily in a healthy way. Achievements by one child were held up as a way to ridicule and criticize the other siblings to the point that there was a great deal of self loathing and bitterness among us. We were made to feel guilty by the accomplishments of our brothers and sisters to the point that it marred our relationships and in some cases marred our personalities permanently.

I think I will always carry within me this feeling that I am a failure in life. It's a feeling I've fought against my entire life with varying degrees of success.

So my writing, for me, is always viewed through a highly personal and critical lens. Sometimes the lens is clouded by my despair, sometimes it is capped to push the criticism of others away, but its always there. Rarely do I feel I can judge my work honestly, or see it for what it is. This is something I struggle with daily.

The viewpoint I've tried to adopt is one of acceptance, that I will never know how good or bad I write, that it is foolish to worry about it. The writing itself is a joy to me, and it provides me a purpose in life, and that should be enough. I need to eradicate from my consciousness the idea that I should be achieving some greater goal through my writing.

When I do that I am happy with it.

Does that answer the question?

Why is the writing a joy to you? Is there a difference between joy and happiness? Is there a difference between happiness and pleasure?

Joy is ephemeral, it has a short duration. Joy is an ecstatic feeling. Ecstasy is by its very nature transient. In the process of writing I experience joy.

Happiness is a condition. Implicit in that definition is the concept of duration. Happiness is not a momentary, fleeting sensation, but a state of being which arises from the experience of pleasure over time. It can involve both ecstasy and lesser forms of pleasure such as contentment.

Why is writing a joy? I can't answer that. Why is anything we like to do joyful? It just is.

For some painting a picture is joy, for some creating a new culinary delight is joyful. I think that any expression of the creative impulse, no matter the medium, elicits joy in the maker. Perhaps it is coded in our DNA, just as spiritual emotions seem to be so coded. Who knows?

Your poems often allude to disturbing personal content which, I gather, happened some time ago in the past. Yet the tone of the poems is always extremely understated and objective, emotionally. The result is that I have a hard time connecting the dots between the speaker of the poems who seems so sober and in control; and the persona in the poems who seems to have gone through wild and terrible experiences.  Is there a distance between the speaker, who writes today, and the persona, who suffered, yesterday?

Yes.

Well that was a short answer! New question: Our generation may be unique in that we lived the first part of our writing lives pre-internet and now this second part post-net. Younger poets never knew a time before the internet. What effect if any has the net had 1) on your writing, and 2) on poetry in general?

But it was a yes or no question.

Let's just say the person who suffered all those crazy times is long gone. Or at least I can see no prospect of reviving her, which all things considered is to the good. I was very unhappy for most of those years, and very drugged up, and not quite sane.

I'm too physically ill to be that crazy again, and I have to take care of my children. And in truth it is the two of them who have brought me the most happiness in my life.

Pre-net or post net? I stopped writing for a while from early 80's until about 2000. Creatively writing, that is. When I did write as a teenager and a young adult I wrote short stories in long hand on lined, three binder note book paper. I don't even know where those are. I had saved them once, except the pornographic stories which I probably destroyed.

As a lawyer I started doing drafts of memos and briefs etc. in long hand but eventually switched to the Dictaphone for most things. But that's a very different type of writing, very left brain, analytical and not intuitive.

All my poetry has been on the net with the use of computers and word processing software. That's really the only way a two finger typist like myself could get by.

So the effect that the net has made for me is that I write poetry now at all. I doubt I would have ever written poetry if the net didn't exist. I met a woman friend at a political forum and she was a poet, mostly rhyme, tetrameter, and she suggested I give it a try and so I did for fun. Then I started posting poems at one of the poetry forums she had linked to. I never bought a poetry book until long after I had started writing and posting poems for those forums.

So without the net I wouldn't be doing this at all I suspect.

On poetry in general? I'm not smart enough to answer that question. I sense the biggest change is that it has democratized the process of writing poetry, opening it up to far more people, especially people who had not pursued English Lit as a major. To that extent, I think it gives a vast alternative space away from traditional venues for people to write poems, communicate about them, and get recognized for their poetry. Since I'm basically anti-elitist, I see that as a positive result.

"Let's just say the person who suffered all those crazy times is long gone. Or at least I can see no prospect of reviving her, which all things considered is to the good." But isn't that precisely what you do in your memory-poems—revive her? I mean, the voice of recollection is always at least partly the voice recalled, isn't it?

Yes, but she is revived in memory only, and handled with memory's tools. I am not that person, even though that life style is still a seductive one. There are still moments I wish to re-live the highs, the abandonment of reason, the utter recklessness of those years, but that is a self-destructive urge and I recognize it as such. But there is a glamour and a romance and an allure in the darkness of night, don't you agree?

"I have to take care of my children. And in truth it is the two of them who have brought me the most happiness in my life." Could it be said that the happiness that your children bring you, and that kids bring good parents in most cases, is related to the sense in which the child is closer to the source of poetry than the grownup is?

Closer to the source of poetry? I don't know what you mean by that. There are so many facets to the happiness that I glean from my children.

I see myself as a child in them, and I have this vast overpowering desire to protect them, and when they suffer it triggers my suffering. When they are joyful, silly, their innocent delight inspires me to forget experience for a while and share that joy with them. And when I can calm them after fear or sadness, there is this sense of being finally useful, more useful than any other time in my life.

And then there is something that is so visceral, when you hold your daughter or your son, their scent, the strength of their grip on your back, the wetness of their cheek perhaps, their touch, that is beyond recognition, and what it unleashes in me is so — I don't know how to put it, but so immediate and present, that you lose sight of your own ego when it happens. It's like nothing.

Parenthood is a long slow march with those you love from innocence into experience of the world, and the world is both terrible and beautiful, no?

In Milosz, sometimes you see poems where he seems to express a fairly traditional Christian faith; in others, he seems skeptical and resigned to nothingness. Where do you come out? Does poetry strengthen your faith, break it, or both?

Poetry expresses my faith. Faith is not certainty, it permits doubt, even anger, even despair in some cases. What is it that Jesus said on the cross? How many others have said those same words, or something similar, over this last century do you suppose?

There are moments in which I express anger at God, or bitterness, as well as moments of thankfulness in my poems. What remains when all of these emotions are peeled away is an intuitive sense that the mystery I feel, that many people of varying religions and beliefs have felt, is a reality which, though beyond my comprehension, is no less true than the reality I experience through my senses.

I was raised as a Lutheran, a Missouri Synod Lutheran, and though I feel very little for the people who persist in that sect, which I believe to be harmful and deceitful, I still embrace the words and teachings of Jesus as they have been made known to us. That is my cultural entrance point into what theologians call God-talk. I don't pretend that others cannot find a way through some other portal, or that my way excludes all others. In that sense I am far from a traditional Christian, or at least far from what traditional Christians have become, tied to dogma and literalism as they are.

For me, poetry is one way to have a dialogue with God, to express my spiritual longing for God, and also the sense of universal union which I have experienced on a few occasions. In the way a mystic might recognize, I see poetry as a path to the experience of the divine, and not just for me but for all poets. I see that in you especially.

Tell me that when you write you don't feel part of something larger, more inclusive, even if the words you write are inadequate to fully encapsulate that experience. I think you can find God through the poetry of Dr. Seuss and through the poetry of Bukowski, though perhaps you might not recognize it as such. Faith is a large subject in my view.

I want to say one final thing, your last thought about Milosz being resigned to nothingness in some of his poems. Some theologies posit that God is "nothing", that this fact is the central tenet of all religions: that God is the great emptying out and that death returns us to our original state. I don't see that expression about God as necessarily one of resignation, though it can be. For me, it is only one possible explanation for this mystery, the answer for which is essentially unavailable to us in life.

In my view, faith should be a guide in life, not an assurance of particular beliefs about what happens after life. Those who use it that way, to dampen anxiety, to provide certainty, they are expressing the ultimate hubris with respect to what we, as material creatures, can understand about God. In my opinion.