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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.
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