MiPO 2005

You’re known as a poet, although your most famous work, Letters to Wendy’s, is at least according to your descriptions, a novel, however poetic the prose pieces that comprise it are. In other interviews, you have described the impulses that directed you to write Letters to Wendy’s in what you call the “post-poetic” mode, one whose speaker is not quite as obliterated as that ‘self’ that often speaks in/from the poetic moment. Your newest book, however, will be a collection of essays. This won’t be a new form for you, but how would you characterize the speaker, mode, and directional impulse(s) of your essays? I assume there are obvious differences between your approach to poetry and prose and your approach to the essay, but are there any similarities or areas that overlap?

Allen Grossman, in Summa Lyrica, describes the moment from which poetic speech emerges in terms of a disabling of the autonomy of the will. I like that description, and I have used it to describe the difference between the more conventional poems I’ve written and the Letters. When I say the speaker of the Letters is post-poetic, I am saying that his very presence demonstrates that the autonomy of the will has been re-established, even if its re-establishment means to hold on to a sense of the failure it has weathered. The Letters are comical because they reminisce (either in celebration or in grief) the poetic moment; any text that reminisces upon the poetic moment is comical (though not always intentionally, of course). (The height of comedic reminiscence upon the poetic moment is Beckett.) As I wrote the Letters, I was aware, of course, of their comical aspect, but I tried to maintain, at the same time, the seriousness of the poetic moment. It took me awhile to figure out how to achieve this, or even to figure out that this was what interested me and what I wanted to do. I am a fairly witty person and can come up with funny things to say, and part of the Wendy’s project depends on this talent, but ultimately I came to understand that I was trying to do something more than be funny. The key to achieving this ambiguity, I found, was in understanding and making apparent the devotion of the narrator. To what was he devoted? To showing up, to being engaged with his own process, to the specificity that it is possible to expect or to reminisce, to the autonomy of the will. And I came to understand that this devotion is key because it—our devotion to the personae by which we manifest ourselves and make ourselves history—is precisely what is funny and dead serious at the same time. More often than not we laugh at a buffoonery from outside of it, as though there is an outside of it, which we presume ourselves to be the sovereigns of. But if a buffoonery is able to convey that there is nothing outside of buffoonery, no firm ground from which one can laugh at it, then the buffoonery itself is changed, and the sort of knowledge it allows for is changed. It ceases to produce practical knowledge and produces instead a sadder—dare I say a poetic—knowledge. I called "Letters To Wendy’s" a novel because I wished it was, I guess, at first (ah, to be a novelist!), and I suppose there are ways to define novel so as to include it, but more recently I’ve come to think of the Letters as more poetic than I had originally suspected. This may have to do with the point I’ve made above, but it has to do also with some work I did recently with writing in forms. As I did that work, and as I looked at poems students had written via formal exercises, I came to understand more keenly the real structure of poems, which is always three-parted. In part one, the poem opens up a scene of some sort. In part two, something happens, i.e. that scene is developed/complicated. Part two, while it is a developing and a complicating of the scene, provides the components from which a closure might be constructed. Part three is the achievement of that closure. Thinking about the Letters in this light, I came to realize how squarely they fit this description; their requisite brevity, I now realize, was attractive to me, and I loved writing them because I loved the challenge of having to be concise in 1. making an assertion or establishing a scene; 2. complicating that assertion or scene; 3. finding a satisfactory closure. As for the essays I’ve collected in the new book, for the most part they are a different matter because they have a quite different relationship to the failure of the autonomy of the will. I want to say that they have no relationship to it at all, but it is better to say that they have no emotional relationship to it. They are instead rhetorical, and they progress by way of logics. If they have a poetic aspect, I suspect it’s by way of their subject matter more than by way of their manner of engaging with that matter. But then I have thrown a pretty wide variety of texts into the book—some are quite conventional and earnest, some are quite satirical, and some are I-don’t-know-what. I think the thread that runs through them, the thing that inclines me to call them essays, is above all their intention, which is to make a point. Works of art—at least the most potent of them—do not seek to make a point.

In many of my favorite poems of yours, a speaker is placed in or directed toward a particularly ‘pedestrian’ setting, say a Go-Go Bar, a fast food restaurant, a working class lounge. Plenty of writers and poets frequent and then celebrate (albeit in a patronizing way) such places. And there are, of course, the other kind, say like James Wright or Richard Hugo, to whom a literary relationship to such places signifies a kind of pride in one’s identity stemming from humble origins. But unlike these writers/ poets, your work addresses but never seems to indicate any particular relationship TO such places. That is, not only does the speaker in your work refrain from romanticizing or taking pity on such places and their inhabitants, ‘he’ also makes no direct claims to come from them. It’s as if the speaking ‘self’ is not directed from any one particular group toward such a setting. Is this in keeping with your explanation of the speaker in the poetic moment as “falling through” the security of ‘self,’ the security of someone with a personality, a particular status, a set of tastes and opinions? And if so, why situate such a speaker in these locations rather than, say, a school room? To what extent can the speaking ‘self’ in the poetic moment be extracted from a particular, historically-located ‘self’?

That was what the Letters To Wendy’s book meant to explore—that last question. And the answers it found varied. Some of the Letters, that is, are more comical, more resonant with the absurdity of the historical particulars, than others. The main thing that distinguishes the speaker of the Letters from the speaker of my poems is desire; the speaker of the Letters is desirous, and is situated wherein his desires are (to some extent, at least) satisfiable. The speaker of the poems—or I would prefer to say the voice of the poems—is not desirous; it speaks from after desire, telling the story of desire’s failure. Thus, the different relation to the scene that you’ve spoken of. I agree that my poems do not evidence a pride in the scene they speak of, or at any rate not the usual sort. I think that all poems are celebratory, but again, not in the usual sense—not in the sense that they mean to distinguish one scene from another. They are celebratory in that the autonomy of the will has been disabled… but this disabling has not achieved silence. They are celebratory in that they speak at all. If the scene of a poem is, at bottom, particular, then that poem has failed to do what good poems are able to do, which is to produce a sense of the site of scenes—the site of all scenes. Thus, when I am describing a go-go bar, I am doing so because that particular scene, for me, evokes the site of scenes—it evokes the scene that does not change, which is to say, the conditions in which our selves must dwell. Diving Into The Wreck is a great poem not because it evidences the identity or the lifestyle of a proud or humble diver; it is great because its metaphor works to describe the site of scenes. If I am drawn in my poems to working class scenes, this is probably because that’s where I’ve happened to live. Also, one might argue that, because the conditions in which we dwell are essentially cruel, it is more likely that poets will turn to scenes of particular cruelties to evoke those conditions.

I once heard you explain, at one of your readings, that Letters to Wendy’s is a novel, mainly because, as you explained, the letters form a kind of progression. I always understood you to mean that the speaker in the novel undergoes this progression. If you still feel this to be the case, could you elaborate on the kind of progression you have or had in mind?

I do not think that the Letters work in the way that good novels work. If the book works, it works over and over, not by way of narrative developments.

In 1996, you wrote an editorial in The American Poetry Review in which you responded to A.R. Ammons’s claim that ‘poetry is action.’ Your response seemed to argue that poetry is, in fact, the very opposite of action, that it presents itself as a moment of in-action, of hesitation before and questioning of any and all actions. I always understood this to mean that poetry is not activism, that it cannot afford to be limited to any particular kind of activism, political or otherwise. Now, almost nine years later, and given the urgency of the national, political climate, do you still feel that poetry cannot afford to venture towards the realm of action or toward exposition?

Yeah, I have still seen no evidence to make me believe that a poetry of action can be any good. I don’t see that this is a problem, though. Let’s say someone is attacking you, and you have a knife, a baseball bat, and a small sack of opium. You should use the knife and/or the baseball bat, and you should not lament the fact that you cannot use the small sack of opium at that moment. It has its own usefulness, its own time. I have turned to writing essays more often in these past ten years, I suspect, because of the worsening of the political situation. It may seem obscene to indulge in the arts while certain things are going on in the world, but I think that if we disallow ourselves the dignities of art… we are letting the terrorists—i.e. the current administration—win.

Interview finalized in October 2004.