You were born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1934. In your poem "My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer" you describe barns, a black bay, fields, bare stones. Is this the same landscape? Can you describe for us your earliest years?

The place I describe in that poem is actually a composite of the area around my aunt's old house in Glen Margaret, which is on St. Margaret's Bay southwest of Halifax in Nova Scotia.  Many of my earliest summers were spent in different towns along that bay, places like French Village, Hackett's Cove, Seabright, and of course Glen Margaret. It would take too long for me to describe my earliest years and I would probably misrepresent them as being far more idyllic than they were.  I was after all a boy and not an overly bright one and was not in the habit of assessing my experience as it unfolded.  All in all I would say that I had a happy childhood.  I was supremely absent-minded, a trait which I still possess though not to the same degree.  My parents were worried, fearing that my dreaminess would make me vulnerable to those who would take advantage of me.  I was tall for my age, very shy, very capable of spending long hours alone.

Your translations include two volumes of the poems of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a Brazilian poet. These links to Canada and Brazil bring to mind the poet Elizabeth Bishop, who lived for a time in both places. What are your thoughts about Bishop?

I admired Elizabeth Bishop.  I have always felt a deep kinship to her poems, a real closeness, probably because I instinctively understood those Nova Scotia poems.  She remains for me one of America's greatest poets.

I read that your father was a salesman on the move, and you spent your childhood in Halifax, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, and as a teenager you lived in Columbia, Peru, and Mexico. Do you believe all this relocation had an effect on your voice as a poet?

Yes, all that moving definitely influenced my poetry.  I seem to be a tourist on planet Earth.

I read that while growing up, your mother said you would become a painter. Is this accurate, and what about you as a child would lead her to this prophecy?

Well, my mother told me that when I was a year old she predicted that I would be an artist.  When I asked her how she knew, she said that it was in the way I stared at things, seeming to examine everything that came my way.  My mother's observation is of course a flattering one and one that was subsequently born out by my actually becoming a painter for a little while, but I can't see that a one year old looking hard at something necessarily means that a career as an artist is in his future.

Upon graduating from Antioch College, you attended Yale and studied painting with Joseph Albers. Then you turned to poetry. You have since written a book on Edward Hopper. In a poem in your book "Dark Harbor," you describe a place:

Where the people are plain, and fashions,

If they come, come late and are seen
As forms of oppression, sources of sorrow.
This is a place that sparkles a bit at 7 p.m.,

Then goes out . . .

This landscape is reminiscent of Hopper’s evocations of the American suburbs, furnished rooms, deserted downtowns. How has the exposure to painting affected your poetry?

That poem from Dark Harbor describes Salt lake City, or at least that was my purpose.  But I can see how it might remind one of Hopper.  I've always felt close to Hopper's paintings, close to their strangeness.

In 1960-61 you were in Italy studying nineteenth-century Italian poetry. Your 1995 Selected Poems ends with the poem titled in the name of Giacomo Leopardi, the great Italian poet. One might describe Leopardi a poet of nihilism, nothingness. Can you tell us how your poem "Leopardi" came to be?

Well, "Leopardi" was an attempt to pay homage to the great Italian poet. I used one of his poems, "The Evening of the Feast Day", as the basis for my poem. In fact my poem is really an adaptation of his infinitely greater poem. Soon after writing it I began to think that my poem was much too sentimental, too self-pitying to be any good. I wrote it in the days when I believed (somewhat mistakenly I think) that such disclosures as represented in "Leopardi" were what my poetry needed, that is, the more or less unmediated disclosure of feeling but was mediated. Calculated, in fact. False, might be the most direct way of putting it.

A poem such as this, in its plain language and what might be called its delicate negotiations with nothingness, is reminiscent of Robert Creeley, particularly the last stanza:

We have done what we wanted.
We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry
of each other, and we have welcomed grief
and called ruin the impossible habit to break.

And now we are here.
The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.
The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.
The wine waits.

Coming to this
has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.
We have no heart or saving grace,
no place to go, no reason to remain.

("Coming to This")

However, the cadence is different from Creeley, as is the use of "we." Have you ever met Creeley, and has his work had any effect on your own?

Yes, I have met Creeley.  I have admired his poems over the years and continue to do so, but I don't think his work has influenced mine.  I think the similarities, if they in fact exist, are coincidental.  We tend to walk on different sides of the street.  It may be the same street, but we notice different things.

We may be the first and only generation of people who can say when we first came to know poetry there were only print media; and now, there is the internet. What are your thoughts on the effect of the medium of the internet (with all its retinue of emails, e-zines, blogs, and online poetry workshops) on the craft itself?

I write longhand and then use a typewriter if I want to read what I've done.  That is, if I want to read it in type.  Only when I am sure I am done with a poem do I put it into the computer and store it among my documents.  I am not computer adept or as they say computer literate.  I use e-mail but am a very poor correspondent.  This is discouraging for those who would like quick responses to what they've written me.  I don't even check my regular mail every day.  I used to wait impatiently for the mail to arrive, now I don't even think about it.  I write in long hand and take my time.  I am a slow worker.  Also, and I've said this before, I feel that so long as my poem is in my own hand I am not really reading it.  I am hearing it.  As soon as it is in type, it is edging towards completion and I am reading it.  I try to resist ending a poem, or finishing work on a poem, prematurely.

You wrote the back cover notice for Louise Gluck’s latest chapbook "October." She is elsewhere quoted as saying, with regard to what is writing, that it "is not decanting of personality. The truth, on the page, need not have been lived. It is, instead, all that can be envisioned." How would you react to this statement?

I agree with Louise Gluck.  I usually do.  She is not only a brilliant poet, she is a wise critic.

On the back cover notice, you describe how she writes about the season of autumn, "which is not seen as redemptive." That characterization might also apply to certain poems of Paul Celan. What does the word "redemptive" mean to you, and to what extent is that act possible, if at all, in poetry?

I see redemption as the making up for a loss, a kind of compensation, a form of recovery.  It is also, in its religious application, deliverance from sin.  Atonement.

In your book The Weather of Words (New York: Random House, Inc. 2000) you said: "Perhaps the poem is ultimately a metaphor for something unknown, its working—out a means of recovery." Is recovery a form of redemption?

Redemption can be a form of recovery, as I have just said, but when I used the word I didn't mean it in the exalted, often inflated way that it is used.  It seems to me that it is all too frequently used to give poetry a quasi religious status.  The poet is romanticized into a Christ-like figure, apotheosized as a Redeemer.  When I used the word recovery in the sentence you cite, I meant the unearthing of something so hidden as to be nameless (until, of course, it is named).

Along the same lines, let me quote this section of your poem, "The New Poetry Handbook":

18 If a man lets his poems go naked, he shall fear death.
19 If a man fears death, he shall be saved by his poems.
20 If a man does not fear death, he may or may not be saved by his poems.

The format and the voicing of this piece seems ironically liturgical. I am reminded of the following opening section of the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas: "Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death." The word "saved" in your poem has a redemptive aspect, does it not?

It probably does..

Interview finalized December 2004