The following interviews with Samuel Hazo were conducted by David Sokolowski in Pittsburgh,
Pa., on August 5 and 6, 1988 and March 18 and 19, 1989. Dr. Sokolowski wrote his doctoral
dissertation on the poetry of Hazo. The conversations were recorded and subsequently
lightly edited.
August 5-6, 1988.
Q: When did you begin to take seriously the writing of poetry?
A: I wrote poems in college and only one of them survives. Most of them were apprentice poems-poems that you write because a particular author influences you at the moment, or because you want to be published in a literary magazine. Ink is an intoxicating beverage. I was in the Marine Corps subsequent to that. I had a lot of time on my hands, and I began rereading poems I'd read first in college, and I realized that it wasn't just a hobby anymore-it was a way of getting me through certain days, certain times, certain problems I was just working out in the writing. I would say it was about when I was 23 or 24 years of age. I'd written poems before that but not for the same motives.
Q: You say you realized what poetry "meant." Could you elaborate on that discovery?
A: I've never been of the persuasion that poetry is something you do because you choose to do it. I think what Dick Wilbur said in an interview about a week ago when he was resigning from the poet laureateship is correct: "I just want to come back and play tennis and take care of my garden and wait for a poem to hit me on the head." A poem, if it's going to be any kind of poem at all, has to come and use you-hit you on the head. It also involves a certain reciprocity on your part. You may be wrestling with a particular subject that presents a dilemma to you or a paradox to you, or creates a mood for you, and suddenly a poem comes to you that subsumes that, and then you're writing something on which, for the moment, the focus of your life depends, and it occupies all your attention for the duration of its inspiration and your refinement of it. I could quote Frost to you: "A momentary say against confusion." That's what poetry is; it's a time when suddenly things come into focus, and you work under the imperative of some impulse, something you did not will into being, that came to you, and you must work it out in words that are just now coming to you, that are making you put everything that you have at that moment right on the line.
Q: Could you flesh out what you mean by a poem "coming and using you"? Doesn't the process involve some conscious choice?
A: I don't mean to give myself any special status by saying that because it's the same thing a student feels when in the course of his studies he feels drawn to one particular major. You arrive at it by exclusion. You know what you're not going to major in just as you know who you want to marry. The question's solved for you. It's in the way pre-dancers become so obsessed with dancing-that it becomes everything they want to do in this world. It's that kind of obsession-it takes hold of you in a way that you know is the only way for you. You can't imagine your life going in any other direction. And when you reach a point of real accomplishment in it, that's a special kind of happiness. It's the only way, in my view, in which excellence is possible. Take an undergraduate, for example. Let's say he knows he's very good at math, and he loves math. And some avuncular presence in the family says, "Well, why don't you major in something else, you know, where the money is?" And suppose he takes that advice and his first love is not pursued. He can never excel. He'll survive probably; he may fail. But if he pursues something he loves, even though he may get thin at times, he can't fail personally, and he can excel. If people do not permit themselves to excel, they never really know what the sweetness of life is; they never grow; they never have a cutting edge. When a poem "hits you," you go where the poem takes you as long as it has hold of you; I don't think you can resist. You can pretend you resist it the way the people who've taken the second choice pretend that, by saying, "Well, I wasn't that good at math." But they get to be 40 or 50 years of age and they look unhappy, and they begin going back and trying to rediscover where their life went wrong. So it's unavoidable; you have no choice except to do what only you can do.
Q: I think there are marked differences between your early and late poetry. How do you account for these differences?
A: In earlier poems I tended to write in traditional metrics. I found out somewhere along the line-I can't tell you where, although I think it was in a book of mine called Bloodrights-when I discovered that the iambic pentameter line and these various trimeter and other lines were not made for our language. These were the metrics of Greek and Roman prosody brought over into continental languages and then adapted to English. Anyone who has ever studied Latin prosody, Ovid or Virgil for example, knows that every pentameter line breaks. It's usually after the second or third foot, or very rarely, after the fourth foot. It's never a complete five foot exhalation of words. The most common break is a break after you have spoken three stressed syllables. Take Shakespeare's "They that have power to hurt, but will do none,/Who do not do the thing they most do show/Who, moving others are themselves as stone." Each line breaks up. My conclusion was that the normal length of expression for a human breath is three stressed syllables, no matter how many unstressed syllables occur between them. And it was in this sense that Hopkins, for example, in his theory of "sprung rhythm" was absolutely correct. He showed that in English you could have more than four unstressed syllables between stressed syllables. You could have five, for example. There's no foot for that in Latin or Greek or in the Latin or Greek prosody transposed into English. So I began to write poems in which every line contained three stressed syllables. And I continue with that and I'm comfortable with it because it comes close to the way I think and the way I speak. In the beginning I tended, like many poets who start writing, to be imitative of previous patterns. But you break out of that as everyone does. Take the very fine poet W. S. Merwin. His early poems are quite traditional; his later poems are much more open. You hear his voice in them resonantly, much more than in his earlier poems.
Q: Are there marked differences in theme between your earlier and later poetry?
A: I don't know if there's much of a difference. I think every writer comes back to certain themes in his life that he can't get away from, even if he wanted to get away from them. For instance, themes of family. The question of absurdity in life, where things happen that defy our choices constantly and stultify our plans. Death, of course. Not so much as a fact, but as a mystery. Why did Hemingway say that every great story must end in death? Why did he say that if there was no truth in it? There's a great deal of truth in it. You can't expect literature, which, as Aristotle said, imitates life, not to imitate that aspect of it. And it can happen at any time at all. You're never prepared. There's an old motto that says, "Death has no patience." That's true. I've written poems since our son was born that have a lot to do with that subject. How one generation succeeds another interests me a lot. And it should. But basically there are a specific number of themes that preoccupy me, that provoke me into poetry. And they're usually the ones I've just mentioned.
Q: You mentioned themes of family. What is the importance to your poetry of your familial relationships-those with your brother, mother, wife, and son? A: My brother and I have remained very close. And I think that anybody who has a brother or sister with whom there's a bond knows how valuable that is. I don't have to defend it or prove it or anything. It just is. My mother died when I was quite young, and I was raised by my aunt, whom I mentioned to you. Her presence in that part of my life was crucial. I admired her a great deal. She raised us on a pittance, really. And yet it was because of her belief in what education meant and what reading meant that I became interested in studies. My wife and my son and I share just about everything; there's no substitute for a family. So, in answer to your question, I've been blessed to have a family, and I'm grateful for it and I fight for it. It's a great source of not just happiness, but strength too, and what it means to be grateful.
Q: You speak at some length in your essay on Eliot in the Spring 1988 Renaissance on the "transforming power" of tradition in poetry. Do you consider yourself a poet as highly conscious of this power as Eliot was? If so, in what ways?
A: First of all, I don't think I'm as erudite as Eliot was. He was fluent in traditions,
particularly in French literature, in which I'm not as fluent. The importance of tradition,
however, is crucial. In his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," he establishes that
fact, in my opinion, once and for all for everybody. Nobody writes in a vacuum. As soon as
you use the language we call English or American you are in a tradition. Other people use it.
They've written poems in it, published books in it, and when you do it, you have to be able to
dine at the same table with Dryden or Donne or Shakespeare or whomever.
Let's suppose that someone is an athlete and he runs the mile. Other people have run the mile.
You don't judge your success in running the mile in isolation. You judge it in relation to what
other people have done running that same race and pitting their same human energies against that
particular discipline over that prescribed period of time and distance. So there's a tradition
there. And I think that in writing it's similar.
There is a tradition you're involved in as soon as you put pen to paper. And unless what you
write is worthy, unless what you do is worthy to be considered with what has been done by your
predecessors, then you have a built-in form of either acceptance or exclusion in that very
concept of tradition. Individual talent alone is not sufficient. There are many talented people
in this world. If they know nothing about tradition and they think that just by virtue of their
talent they're entitled to be called whatever they're called, I think they're only half correct.
Q: Is there a particular tradition out of which you write?
A: There is only one tradition and that is the international one. If you are fluent in other languages, you can read poems in the original. None of us is fluent in every language on this planet. So you rely on the best translations that you can find. And that is the tradition. You can read poems in a Greek anthology; you can read Edmund Rostand; you can read Gothe, you can read the songs of Provence; you can read beautiful poems from the Arabic world; you can read the Hebrew poets of Spain. In other words, there's no limit. And you try to read them all. I think a writer has to be aware of as much as he can. You shouldn't limit yourself, for example, only to American writers or only to English writers. I think that's a very insular view of literature. Ezra Pound broke that case once and for all at the beginning of this century. He knew that American poetry, for example, was too derivative of English poetry. He called attention to poems from the Greeks, the Chinese, and from God knows where. He let all that air in so that you could never in any future consideration exclude these people, exclude these influences from American poetry.
Q: In your essay on Eliot, you also speak of Eliot's reaction against "personality" in poetry. Wouldn't Eliot, however, object to the personal subject matter of your poems and your liberal use of "I"? (Eliot 212).
A: Maybe when Eliot spoke of "personality," he meant what psychologists call the self. He meant, I believe, that you don't always write out of a sense of yourself-small "s-e-l-f." What would he think of Whitman, for instance, who wrote "Song of Myself"? It was his one poem. My view is that the self that Whitman was writing about wasn't his little personal self, little Walt Whitman; it was the self that he perceived as being in everybody. That's a different self. If a poet can touch that, if he can go from the "private" to the "personal," I think that's what he should do. Eliot himself did that. He created characters like Prufrock; he created personas in his poetry that did it for him. He believed in objective correlatives so that a name, a character, could evoke a feeling he himself was contemplating. I've written many poems where I am the second person, "you," when I mean "I." I mean the "I-you" that everybody can see. It's the you that's evoked when someone asks, "How do you start the car?" And you say, "Well, you take the key and put it in the ignition, you turn it, and then you put it in gear." It's all you, you, you, but you're speaking not of yourself but him and anybody else who's listening who wants to do it. So, my "you" or "I" in a poem is, I hope, interchangeable in that way.
Q: On the topic of your being a poet concerned with Christian themes, do you believe a distinction made by Romano Guardini can be successfully applied to your poetry-that your poetry is a celebration of "man created" rather than "man creating"?
A: Let's take the second part of that question first. When Guardini says that a writer's business is with man created, he means, as I interpret him, that an author's subject is the world as he finds it with man in it. A preoccupation with man creating can be awfully narcissistic, in my view. There are a few poems written by poets about their writing a particular poem. I don't know any poet where all of his poems, if he's a good poet, are all about writing a poem. If that's what Guardini means, then I hope I'm not the latter. Your values as a writer will come out in your writing and tell your reader what you are. I think Eliot says somewhere that he wants a literature not consciously Christian. Not somebody sitting down and saying, "I'm going to write a Christian novel," or saying, "Now I'm going to write the Great American Novel." That's nonsense. You write out of how you see things, and if it turns out that it impresses people as being somehow the sensibility of a Christian man or Christian woman, whatever they mean by that, so be it. I don't like to get involved in those distinctions because it creates problems that I've discussed critically in other places. The relationship, for example, between literature and belief. It applies to literary criticism as much as it applies to writing. What is the responsibility of a "Christian critic"? How does he differ from any other kind of critic? I can get into that, but it's not a subject that ever reaches a conclusion.
Q: In a related question, do you act when composing your poetry or do you get the sense of being acted through? I am thinking of your comments on this distinction in your essay on Jacques Maritain in the Summer 1982 Renascence (Maritain 229).
A: As I said earlier, if you are impelled to write, it's a reciprocal arrangement. You don't just sit there and wait for some muse to move your hand. You have to respond to it and cooperate with it. And once you do, it's a meeting of two, not passive, but active forces. It's wonderful when you're writing and the words just come to you from God knows where. That's wonderful. Sometimes the word doesn't come and you have to dig. I find writing the most exhausting form of work. When I'm working on a poem or when I finish a poem, I'm as dead tired as I can be-all the way through-I'm just beat. Unlike, for example, when you go out and work digging the yard. You come in tired, but your mind is still working at other levels. You could be studying history, thinking about politics or thinking about sports. But when you're writing a poem, your whole mind and everything about you is in the poem. It's in what you're doing, and, when you're finished, it's as if somebody has taken a sponge and squeezed it dry. You fill up again and start absorbing things again, but at that moment you're out of everything. It's all there in the poem. You've given it away. According to what they say, it must be much like riding a bobsled. Let's say you can take a turn at 72 m.p.h. If you take it at 71 m.p.m., you lose a second in the race. If you take it at 73 m.p.h., you shoot off the run. So, at that moment when you go around that turn at 72 m.p.h., your whole mind is on that turn. You can't think about anything else. You're all there. And with poetry it's always taking the turn at 72 m.p.h. until you abandon, not finish, the poem.
Q: Many reviewers have called you a traditional or conservative poet. Would you go along with this label?
A: I believe in restraint. If that makes me conservative, O.K., I'm conservative. I don't think they're synonymous. My view of writing has always been that it's not something where you "let it all hang out." It's best to hold back. Poetry by definition is an act of saying what can't be said. You hint at it. As Plato says, you speak by similitudes. Some people think they're expressing their feelings if they raise their voices. That doesn't mean you are expressing your feelings; that just means you're raising your voice, that's all. And with poetry, where the principle is basically less is more, always, then you try to reach a point in poetry where the language is so transparent that to the reader it's hardly there. The ultimate poetry, if you are the perfect poet, is silence. I have a recent book called Silence Spoken Here. And the whole principle upon which all of those poems are built is that silence is ultimately the only universal language. And a poem attempts to create that silence. If you are incapable of that perfection without the poem, then the poem helps you create that silence. After you read a poem, after you see a particular play, or after you hear a particular piece of music, you don't want to talk for a minute or two. You want to just enjoy the silence that the poem has created.
Q: Speaking of getting down to essences, your poem entitled "The Drenching," for example, is all about getting down to the essential self. Is that true? Please elaborate on what seems to be a prominent method and theme in your poetry.
A: In "The Drenching" it's not until the speaker is drenched that he becomes a human being. Has that ever happened to you? In the rain, for example, you are fighting a little war with vanity and the preservation of your clothing, and then you reach a certain point where it doesn't matter anymore. You don't give a damn. You're soaking wet. Your clothes are shot. You look like hell and you accept it. Then you're yourself. You've seen this in gags where someone is very dignified, and then another person will come up behind him and throw a whole bucket of water on him. Or you see it in baseball locker rooms when a team wins the pennant. They are not really themselves until the champagne drenches them, and then they can just laugh about it.
Q: Then, when the self is pared down, to paraphrase a line from one of your other poems, the "nothing that is left is everything." Could you elaborate on what that's expressing?
A: At that point, then and only then, can the subject you're possessed by speak through you.
Let me give you an example. I heard one director, I think it was Bertolucci, say of Marlon
Brando that he is one of the few actors who has the ability to "destroy himself into a part."
So, when you see him on the screen as the don in The Godfather, the more you watch him, the
more he's the Godfather. The role has taken him over. But for that to happen, the actor has
to kill himself. He has to exterminate his personality. How many actors have you seen who
are always themselves in the role?
I think it's no different in poetry. I was reading a book by Garson Kanin a number of years
ago, and he went back to a time when Spencer Tracy was reading a passage from a movie to be
produced called Pat and Mike. He was just reading the script for the first time. Kanin said
that he didn't know when it happened, but at some point during the reading, Tracy became Mike.
With a great actor or a great writer you don't know when that purgation happens. But what
happens is that their own personality abandons them. They give themselves entirely to what
is at the moment the greater value. The same thing is true in the life of a student. They
say a real student is always ready to surrender himself, to surrender a present truth to
something that is a superior truth, to surrender a view he thought was correct until it's
suddenly proved incorrect. Then he yields to the truth. He doesn't persist in his mistake.
Q: W. H. Auden said that it is the poet's job to retain "the sacredness of language." What does this statement mean to you in regard to the poetry you write?
A: Let's begin with the question of accuracy. Many people think that language is not
important, that it's secondary. They say, "I'll hire a word man to take care of this for me,"
the way you hire a plumber or whatever. The fact of the matter is that language is how we
perfect ourselves as human beings. If it is true that what you write or say is supposed to
be as accurate a reflection of what's in your head or your heart as possible, then expression
is very important. Which means that words are very important, both in their accuracy when
used and in their degree of honesty. If you think that words are not important, imagine what
a black man felt when somebody called him a "nigger." Only a word? It wasn't just a word to
him. Words can be used to deceive. We had it in the Nixon administration. To confuse. To
lie. Government language is called "disinformation." That's a highfalutin word for a
flat-out lie.
Once you pervert language, like perverting sex, something very sacred to the human
personality is lost. And what happens is catastrophic. The result is that perversion is
catastrophic. "Might makes right." That's catastrophic. George Orwell's "newspeak" is
catastrophic. So, if poets do nothing more than remind people to clean up their act, to say
what they really mean, they perform a great public service in a community. But, of course,
they do more than that. In cultures that have a deep spiritual tradition, people listen to
poets more than they listen to priests, politicians, or anyone else. They listen to the poet
when he says something, because they know that he is touched. It's not just a question of
hearing their language beautifully used, but of having their eyes opened. In totalitarian
governments, why is it that writers are the first ones to be feared? They burn their books,
they exile them, they kill them, they imprison them. If poets are harmless, if words mean
nothing, why do they do this? The fact of the matter is that words mean a hell of a lot.
And these totalitarians know it. And by silencing the word, they literally put out the
eyes of the population. They blind the population. That's what they want.
The Israelis sent an assassination squad a number of years ago and assassinated a Palestinian
poet named Kamal Nassar. He was one of the most prominent poets of the Palestinians. And one
of the Israeli government's strategies vis--vis the Palestinians has always been to eliminate
the prominent spokesmen whether they are political leaders, poets, or whoever. They want to
keep them leaderless so that they can say, "We have nobody to deal with." When they went to
Lebanon and shot this man-they shot him right in front of his wife and daughter-one soldier
went with a pistol and shot him six times in the mouth. It was a symbolic killing, and all
because of the fear of the word.
Q: Much of your poetry seems devoted to alleviating such catastrophes through the healing power of love. Obviously, such catastrophes occur because of an absence of love. Would you comment on what you believe to be causes for an absence of love?
A: I think the biggest enemy of love is egotism. One of the things that is a proof of love
is the fact that love changes people. Resistance to that change by someone who is reluctant
to let go of his personality, by one who is reluctant to lose his life in order to find it,
whose egotism jails him in himself, is the primary enemy in my view. I think that people
who love and are willing to be changed by love literally create their lives all over again
daily. Once they think that their life is set in cement, as it were, beyond changing, then
that's an indication that their ego is becoming stronger than the presence of love in them.
That's the first enemy.
I think the second enemy is deception, particularly self-deception. The possibilities of
self-deception vis--vis love are infinite. Some people think that they are capable of loving
somebody without change, forever, and without sacrifice. They believe they don't have to work
at it. That's a happy romantic thought, but it's not true. In order to demonstrate the love
that you have for your family or your children or your mother, it's just not enough to say it.
There must be some kind of action, and it usually has to be something that is done at some
sacrifice to you. That's the proof of it. In the Christian religion the final proof of
love is to lay down your life for your friend. That's a big order. But it only shows the
length to which the sacrifice can be taken. There's supposed to be a simple test to prove
that love is differentiated from mere attraction or from obsession or from possessiveness or
whatever, and that is that at your most human moments you realize that somebody else's
life-the life of one other person-means as much to you as your own life means to you. Or, in
some cases, more than your life means to you. If you have a feeling that your love is close to
that, that's a pretty good proof you're a lover.
Then there is love in the Christian sense. Some people believe that involves a love of mankind.
Well, you can't love mankind. Love is always specific. You can't love an abstraction. One of
the primary themes in the New Testament is Christ's saying that you should love your neighbor as
you love yourself. Now what does that mean? He says you love God with all your heart, mind,
and soul. And then you love your neighbor as yourself. Let's leave the first one aside for
a moment. If you're supposed to love your neighbor as you love yourself, how do you love
yourself? That's the way to answer that question. You love yourself to the extent that you
make sure you're fed, you make sure your rights are respected, you make sure you're treated
fairly, you make sure you're protected, and you make sure you're clothed. You make sure of
a lot of things about yourself that are associated with things like need, justice, comfort,
even pampering. You also make sure you have some luxuries. You make sure you have some
leisure time. You make sure that you make out in your work. In the Christian persuasion
of things, you try to bring that to bear on at least one other person. You focus the kind
of concern that you have for yourself on one other person so that Graham Greene can say, in
light of that, that when you defend somebody else's rights you're defending your own rights,
really. You're not doing it for him; you're doing it for yourself, even though he's the
beneficiary.
Those are a few comments that I can make about love and the other thing which we were
discussing yesterday, which is that love is the most powerful force in human experience.
And, as I mentioned to you yesterday, the people you love who have died, you still love.
Death doesn't kill that. As a matter of fact, you often love them more. I would end by
saying that basically love's a mystery. I've never in any way cottoned to the persuasion
that love is a matter only of the glands or that love is a matter of fate or pure
inevitability-that it doesn't involve choice. It involves choice.
There's a French writer, Denis de Rougemont, whose work I've translated in part, who has
written a magnificent book called Love in the Western World. It is probably one of the best
books in expository prose on love that's ever been written. He makes the point that
"romance" is the worm in the apple of western love. Even though romance is a natural part
of all love-there's a romantic phase in love-his point is that people who want to keep love
always at the level of romance and never permit it to grow into friendship or mature at all
kill it. They want things like excitement, adventure. Their view of love is characterized
by phrases like, "I didn't know what I was doing," or "It was bigger than both of us," or
"It was inevitable," or "It was fate." It's as if they had no choice in the matter. They
were pawns in the hands of eros. To me, that's the stuff of melodrama, because no matter
how overcome or obsessed people can become with love at a certain time, no matter how it
happens, there arises eventually the possibility of choice. And even the choice not to
make a choice at that point is a choice. So to conclude my comments on this, love, whatever
it is, is a mystery, which, when it happens to people, places upon them the choice of
sacrificing for it or dissipating it.
I recently listened to a singer named Julio Iglesias in an interview, and he was asked once
if he was looking for love. He made light of the fact that everyone thinks of him as being
a great ladies' man and said, "I'm really not. I'm just a skinny guy who sings." He was
asked if he was looking for love and he said, "You don't look for it, but when it finds you,
you fight for it." I thought it was a very profound remark on his part. You can't look
for it, but if it finds you, you fight to keep it.
Q: Finally, I have two questions concerning specific poems. First, in "To a Commencement of Scoundrels" you say you wish both yourself and everyone "hard questions." Could you name a few of those questions?
A: The full line reads 'hard questions and the nights to answer them." And then the second line is "the grace of disappointment" and the third is "the right to seem the fool for justice." One hard question is, perhaps, what should a person be doing to make his part of the world a little better? That's a hard question. I mean, not what am I doing, but what should I be doing? And don't just pass it off and say, "Well, I'll go on doing what I'm doing." What more can you do to stand for things that are worth standing for, to oppose certain things that should be opposed? Those are hard questions. Take, for example, institutions, universities, the government, whatever. I think all institutions at some point disappoint everybody. My view is, the sooner they disappoint you, the sooner you stop idolizing institutions. The sooner that happens the better. It makes you realize that disappointment is as much a part of our lives as fulfillment. And the final one about seeming "the fool for justice" occurs when somebody is ridiculed for taking a public position with regard to justice. Frequently, they are laughed at, they are scorned, and they're called fools. But I think that if you have the guts for it, it's a privilege to be called a fool for justice.
Q: In another poem, you have the line, "to rig, to draw up anchor and sail." The next line comes from another poem. "When I release/I know a place I've never seen." These lines reflect a consistent existential theme in your poetry. How would you describe that theme?
A: The first one is from a poem called "The First and Only Sailing." The line preceding
that is "You leave your yesterselves to drown without a funeral/You chart a trek where no
one's sailed before./You rig, you anchor up, you sail." You make a decision, as we talked
about earlier, and then you act on it. You act on it in terms of your faith in the decision.
You follow it out, and you accept the responsibility and consequences for what you've decided.
That's essentially what I mean. Life is a decision. Any psychologist can tell you that
people who are neurotic, psychotic, or deranged are always working toward judgement, and the
one thing people detest is not to make up their minds. Some who can't live with the tension,
for example, become deranged. And their minds keep tearing them apart. It's like a motor
that's lost its moorings.
The other poem that you mentioned in which the line appears, "I see a time I've known forever"
contains the following lines, "I know a place I've never seen/I see a time I've known forever."
That's a poem based on dj vu-the notion that sometimes you're in circumstances that feel
like a repetition of a previous circumstance. The poem is based upon a trip I made to Paris.
When I was in Paris I felt as if I'd been there before. Now, how do you explain that? I
can't explain dj vu. I've read a lot about Paris before I went there. But it's happened in
other circumstances, not just in Paris, where you're in a room that you've never seen before,
and it looks familiar to you. Or you see somebody you've never seen before, and you've seen
him before. At least you think you have. But the thing I'm really concerned about in my
more recent poems is the ability to focus on one thing. We talked earlier of this
business of living in the now. I've written a poem called "No is the Father of Yes" which
deals with that. I'll close with this poem.
I'm tired of living for tomorrow's
headlines, tired of explanations,
tired of letters that begin "Dear
patriot . . ." or else "You may
already be the winner of . . ."
I'm near the point where nothing's
worth the time.
The causes
I believe in rarely win.
The men and women I admire
most are quietly ignored.
What's called "the infinite
progression of the negative" assumes
if I can count to minus seven,
I can count to minus seven
million, which means the bad
can certainly be worse, and that
the worse can certainly et cetera . . .
Regardless, I believe
that something in me always was
and will be what I am.
I make each day my revolution.
Each revolution is a wheel's full
turn where nothing seems the same
while everything's no different.
I want to shout in every dialect
of silence that the world we dream
is what the world becomes,
and what the world's become
is there for anyone's re-dreaming.
Even the vanishing of facts
demands a consecration: the uncolor
of champagne, the way that presidential
signatures remind me of a heartbeat's
dying scrawl across a monitor,
the languages that earlobes speak
when centered by enunciating pearls,
the sculpture of a limply belted
dress, the instant of bite
when grapes taste grape.
The range
of plus is no less infinite
than minus . . .
I learn that going
on means coming back
and looking hard at just one thing.
That rosebush, for example.
A single rose on that bush.
The whiteness of that rose.
A petal
of that whiteness.
The tip
of that petal.
The curl of that tip.
And just like that the rose
in all its whiteness blooms
within me like a dream so true
that I can taste it.
And I do.
(Nightwords, 83-84)
March 18-19, 1989.
Q: You ended our last interview speaking of the self in relation to time. Specifically, you spoke of the theme of "living in the now." Tracing this theme, I think of your poems such as "Maps for a Son Are Drawn as You Go," "Living's How We Die and Vice Versa," and "The First and Only Sailing" in which past, present, and future time converge in a kind of eternal present. Is this a good way of describing how these poems work?
A: It's not so much that these three tenses could arise. There is such a thing as the
past, as I said earlier. It exists only in our interpretation of it. You talk about past
time because you remember it, and you can anticipate something like the future, which is the
present that is to come. But the only real state is the present. Even though it's passing,
it's the only state that reaches us through our avenues, through our senses, which in turn
affects our feelings, our thinking, everything. But there are times . . . moments of deep
joy or deep grief or sublimity of some kind, when suddenly the present moment becomes so
all-encompassing that it's all time in itself.
I'll give you a corny example. Last year during the World Series, Kurt Gibson came up with
two outs in the ninth inning. He couldn't walk. He barely made it to the plate, and he hit
a homerun that won the game. Anybody who watched that saw one man with just his own skill
transcend his circumstances, the condition at the moment. He transcended all the odds, all
the things that said this was impossible and created a moment that was more than just a
particular moment. And that lingered with the people so much that nobody wanted to leave
the stadium. There are moments like that that happen when the present overflows itself
and becomes all time. Is that a good example for you?
Q: I suppose I'm also thinking of the everyday level of insurance men, IRA accounts, investment plans, and what not. This urge to forsake the present for future.
A: I think everybody, whether he admits it or not, whether he engages in these deferred payment accounts or not, knows that that's all just a concession to fear. And every insurance man knows that. Every banker knows that. But in terms of a person's really deep feelings, he hungers to live in the present. Joy puts you in the present. Sexual love puts you in the present. Grief puts you in the present. Pain puts you in the present. Weigh those things that put you in the present-joy, grief, pain, love-against the subjectiveness of an IRA account, those things that push us into the future or make us escape into reminiscence or nostalgia and ask which ones are more important. Where does life exist? Does it exist in anticipation or postponement or does it exist in those things that I just mentioned?
Q: Joy, in a sense, can incite the most fear. Aren't we all sometimes afraid of joy because true joy brings with it the possibility and eventually the necessity of pain? I am thinking especially of those who try to give their lives this even sort of keel. They try to steer between pain, joy, grief, sorrow.
A: Well, good luck! I don't know anybody who can pick his griefs or his joys, do you? I mean, they happen when they happen.
Q: But that, I think, is precisely so much of what we see. The media paints a picture that we can by sheer will alone pick an appropriate time to grieve and a time to love and so on.
A: Well, that's silly. That's nonsense. To me that's the most superficial view of life that I can imagine-a mapped-out life. Anybody who's reached the age of reason knows that only a fool would plan things to a point where he based everything on his plan and thought nothing could interrupt it. "Only god can sink this ship," said the people on the Titanic. An iceberg sank it. The Greeks would have regarded that as the ultimate hubris. You know, if a man wants to go mad, all he has to do is guarantee himself something that only the gods could guarantee him, even if they were feeling generous. They're not known for their generosity. So I think that's nave. I really do. I think what is a much wiser though more difficult basis for life is what Unamuno on more than one occasion said-that you must have a tragic sense of life to appreciate life because in life the worst can happen at any time regardless of the disposition of the person to whom it happens. You adhere to values in a world that is governed by chance. The only way to understand that is finally to have a tragic sense of life. The good do die young not because they're good, but because they've contracted pneumonia, because they drowned, or because they stepped in front of a car.
Q: Because as you say in "The Drenching," you can die at any instant?
A: Sure you can. What human being can say with conviction that he'll be here five minutes from now? I hope I'll be here five minutes from now. I have a poem called "Who Promised You Tomorrow?" in my new book. Who promised you tomorrow? Tomorrow, I'll see you. But who promised you tomorrow? There are people in parts of the world who regard your saying "I'll see you tomorrow" as an irreverent statement. They wouldn't take it the way Americans take it.
Q: Breathing or breath forms a central symbol in your poetry in relation to your theme of living in the now. I'm thinking here of your poems "Torch of Blood" and "Reprieved." Would you care to comment on the variety of meanings this symbol carries in your poetry?
A: The best way to answer that is to refer to a poem in Silence Spoken Here called "No Fanfares, No Handshakes, No Salutes." Toward the end of that poem there's a small voice that says: "What is our bounty/but the permanent impermanence/of breath, a shared indivisibility, a gift." My meaning of breath is inherent in that line. It's something that all men share. It's indispensable to life and, finally, it's a gift. It has always impressed me that even in medical science breath is synonymous with life. What is synonymous? There are two things really-breath and blood are synonymous with life. Just living. They mean a lot to me.
Q: Another theme central to your poetry that we spoke of earlier is the creational aspect of love. Your poem "Child of Our Bodies" comes to mind here as a particularly beautiful expression of this idea. Would you elaborate somewhat on this aspect of love in regard to your poetry?
A: I think love seeks to express itself in deeds and actions. Of course, the procreation of a child is a deed, an act that love makes possible with two people who love one another. I also spoke about moments-those moments which transcend time. When our boy was born that was like a gift from higher up on to us. I've often wondered what it was; but that's it if you're looking for a definition of it. I think that love engenders beneficient action. Hospitality is an expression of love. Thoughtfulness is an expression of love. A gift is an expression of love. And those are all things that are associated with deeds. Teaching, in my view, is an act of love. It's sharing not just what you know but what you don't know. I mean it's a sharing of spirit of learning with somebody, as opposed to those people who think that a teacher is somebody who knows it all and shares it with somebody who knows nothing. There's a myth for you. That's not just a myth, it's a lie. Teachers are just older students. On a scale of things, they may know a lot less than their students. But the whole process is to show what you know and what you don't know, and that constitutes the scale of learning. Nobody knows everything and nobody doesn't know everything either.
Q: So by sharing what you know and don't know you invite communication?
A: Yes. It creates a spirit of trust, a willingness to compensate for what somebody else doesn't know. It creates a spirit of apprenticeship in the face of almost anything that daily life brings you. In my view, it's only in education that that is really formally possible. In other places you can be penalized for your ignorance. In education it's expected. Ignorance is why universities exist or why schools exist, in the same way that sickness is why medicine exists and crime is why law exists. If we knew it all, we wouldn't have to have universities at all or schools. I was thinking the other day of how long it takes to teach a youngster manners.
Q: A lifetime?
A: Sure. We spend the first third of our lives schooling ourselves in the minimum that we ought to know just to survive. We're not even talking about anything beyond the minimum.
Q: Would you elaborate on the statement you made in our last talk, "Poetry exists to create silence"? I'm also speaking here of what you say about this idea on the dust jacket of your volume Silence Spoken Here.
A: I think of Hamlet's last line, "the rest is silence." Horatio approaches him and Hamlet,
knowing that he's going to die, says, "I die, Horatio." And then he concludes that brief
passage by saying, "The rest is silence." And that has always struck me as a magnificent
statement. That beyond which we're able to understand and face in life-or in this case, in
the face of death-there are those times when your existence goes beyond words, where there
are no words to say what you don't quite know. And for me that's what poetry ultimately
aims at or even creates.
It's the silence after you read a poem that moves you, as the last part of Hamlet moves me.
You live for a moment in that silence created by those words about silence. And in some
cases the best lines in a poem are the ones that you hear between the actual printed lines.
It's what's evoked by what is there, the space between words or the pause between words or
the space between sentences. The breath, the time a breath takes, says more than what is
said sometimes. So that's the kind of silence I'm talking about. It's a silence that is
first of all created by experiencing a poem, and it's also the silence that we all live in
when we're thinking about something that has overtaken us and subsumes us in itself. We
know that it's more than we can ever understand, fathom, or grasp. We see a little of it.
And if we talk about it and think that we've said the last word about it, we know we're
wrong. It's only in the silence that we understand that it's there. Silence emphasizes
its existence, where a word would insult it.
Q: But you need the spoken or written word to create the very silence that you're trying to create, don't you?
A: I've said on another occasion that if we were perfect beings we wouldn't need language.
We'd know everything. One aspect of language is a way of coming to terms with what we almost
know. People say to children, "Tell me how you feel." And they try to fish out of that
silence in the child some kind of response that will help them diagnose what's bothering
them. Well, in some ways we're all children. If a poem takes hold of you on some particular
subject and you try to tell yourself what you're just now learning, that takes learning, that
takes language.
I told you I was working on a poem on Vietnam. For years I wrote only one poem on that
subject. It was called "Battle News" and I wrote it almost out of shame. It was during the
Vietnam war when every day body counts would be listed in the paper, and I would read them
while I was eating breakfast. I would read the front page and there were pictures of Buddhist
monks setting themselves on fire, and I noticed one day that I ate breakfast while I was
reading that, and that it didn't bother me. And it bothered me that that didn't bother me.
So I wrote a poem called "Battle News"-it's in Blood Rights if I'm not mistaken. And it was
a way of showing that war brutalized not just soldiers, but even the civilian population.
Here I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the war had made me immune to what I should have
been sensitive to. So for a long time after that I kept wondering what Vietnam meant, and
this is the poem that came out of it. I was giving a poetry reading and I saw two
wheel-chaired men.
It's not the monument, said
as it is in its black silence.
It's not the films-a decade
late and safely critical.
It's not the books the generals
and senators keep writing
to exonerate themselves.
It's not the Presidents.
They said
what all the polls and teleprompters
scripted them to say.
It's not
the war we thought we'd win
for the right reasons but fought
for the wrong ones.
It's not
the country that was once
a headline that became a nightmare
that remains a contradiction
that will never die.
It's three
men under forty slouched
in wheelchairs in a classroom
five elections after LBJ.
Their t-shirts speak a lingo
that is theirs and history's-
"White Lightning," "King
of the Mekong Delta," "Eat
My Dust."
Parting, they aim
their powered wheels at promises
that used to be their lives.
The generation history pretended
they defended separates
before them like a sea.
(Unpublished at this time.)
That's Vietnam to me, that one brief scene of two paraplegic men operating those wheelchairs with a lever for the rest of their days.
Q: And that evoked what the silence within you wished to express?
A: What I'm trying to say is that I hope after you hear this poem you don't want to say anything. You're plunged into the silence of what suddenly Vietnam was, is, and always will be for us. If it can be evoked by just a few lines, fine. It's like the Picasso sketch shown to me-one line, and it's a woman. You know it immediately. And my point with regard to poetry is that poetry should be like that line. Picasso has one line in an otherwise empty space. That one line converts that space into a figure. The rest is just space.
Q: An unmistakable figure?
A: An unmistakable figure. And that's the genius of the artist-to do it with a line.
Q: Referring again to your Renascence article on Jacques Maritain's aesthetic theory, you say that the poet is motivated by love. Is your poetry motivated by love even when you're writing things you abhor, specifically, what happened to those two men? Are you conscious of this motivation while writing?
A: Hate is a bad check for poetry. You feel it intensely, but you go to cash it in, and it's always worth less than face value so that writing poems out of indignation and hatred or things of that kind-because they take themselves so damned seriously-you wake up the next morning and you wonder if you wrote them. Love is a slower burning thing.
Q: Take, for instance, the poem you just read. If you would have written that out of hate, say for what the war had done to those men, or maybe even hating those men out of how they made you feel, how would that have made your poem less than what it is?
A: Dick Wilbur has a poem about an SS officer, and in the last line he says, "Damn your eyes." And as much as I admire Dick-and I do a lot; I think he's a fine poet-I think that his poem is well-crafted anger. For this reason, it doesn't hold up for me as well as his other poems. It just does not. There were poems written when I was made about something or upset about something and it wasn't until that anger distilled itself into something that was permanently a part of me that that became part of the poem, and that it was able to survive the moment of its own creation. A lot of poems about the Vietnam War, for example, were written about that war for whatever reasons ended with it.
Q: That poem by Wilbur is an excellent example.
A: Yes, anger when it is hatred is a dangerous thing. When I talk to students, I say if you feel really angry about something and you want to go out and do something about it, go out and do it. Don't write a poem; don't let a poem carry it for you because it won't. Or maybe you should write a letter to the editor or something to get it out of your system. But a poem does not accommodate raw anger or hatred well unless it's part of something deeper. I think I quoted to you last time the famous curse that Robert Desnos-the French poet who dies in the concentration camp-wrote. What saves it is the ingenuity and humor of it. Let me quote the poem to you and you'll see what I mean.
Cursed!
be the father of the bride
of the blacksmith who forged the iron for the axe
with which the woodsman hacked down the oak
from which the bed was carved
in which was conceived the great-grandfather
of the man who was driving the carriage
in which your mother met your father.
(Desnos, 21)
That's a curse, but it's so brilliant that you forget it's a curse halfway through the curse.
Q: So one curses everything?
A: Yes, but does it in a way that makes you smoke so that it immediately becomes human. The pure hatred is gone from it. Cyrano de Bergerac does this time and again when he is putting somebody down. His venom and his loathing of a particular person is evident, but he does it with such skill that it becomes an art. He raises it to the level of an art. And that saves him.
Q: Hatred and power often seem to go hand in hand. In the hotel room before the interview, I was watching a documentary on John F. Kennedy which showed him giving his famous speech about power, and he said something like, "Power often controls men, but poetry brings us back to our limitations."
A: What Kennedy is saying in that statement is pretty much what I was alluding to earlier, that power, like hatred, sometimes simply becomes a lust. The classical definition of lust is that it is an excess. So it goes beyond its purposes when power exceeds authority, when it becomes an end in itself. Then it's gone beyond those things which can check it. Kennedy's comment was-speaking as President, by the way-that power by definition seeks to become more powerful. And people in power seek to keep power or to enhance power. It's a tendency. Kennedy's comment was that poetry, by reminding man of his real nature, saves him from the very thing that can corrupt him. That's what he means by "power corrupts but poetry cleanses." Because he says later on that poetry serves as a touchstone for our judgement.
Q: In your poem "Gauntlets" you ask "what makes me think that poems make a difference?" Why do poems make a difference?
A: Here we are, living in a society where poetry is hardly even read, where it's read by a fraction of a fraction of the population, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the population, and that makes you disgusted sometimes. You ask, "What makes me think that poetry makes a difference?" But then you're looking at it quantitatively when you look at it that way. The fact of the matter is you know it makes a difference because it's made a difference in your life.
Q: So, in a sense, you can't validate it to others?
A: Absolutely, but one thing that poetry has going for it forever is that a poem can't lie. I mean if it lies, if the poet lies, then in time the poem will sink and the lie will be revealed.
Q: What would you offer as an example?
A: Well, Shakespeare's Sonnet "Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediment . . ." goes on, "love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds." There's not a lie in that poem speaking of the real nature of love. But my whole point is that people and tenets of religion can change. Astronomical views can change. (At a certain point Copernicus succeeded Ptolemy.) But poetry, what Newman calls the autobiography of man, doesn't tell you what man ought to be or what he wishes he were, it's what he is absolutely. And it doesn't lie. The Greeks have a phrase, "Only poetry can heal the wound of death." Religion and time won't do it. Only poetry can do it. There are parts of the world when at the time of death someone will recite a poem on the deceased that has not been previously written, that has somehow been summoned from one of the mourners at the time. That does a lot. That goes a longer way than just ritual prayers that are recited over the grave for anybody.
Q: Turning to your own autobiography, what have been the decisive moments or turning points that you regard as milestones in your life?
A: The death of my mother was a milestone because after that I lived with my aunt, and whatever I've done is attributable primarily to her. She was a great encourager and inspirer. She was not an educated woman, but she knew the value of education; she had a deep love for my brother and myself so that when we were just kids we always had, even after my mother died, a strong love behind us. That's the first. The second was going to Notre Dame. I can't explain that any further except that I really learned in terms of thought in general and literature in particular. I went to school to be a lawyer and decided at one point that I really didn't want to be one. And I haven't had a regret since. The third was getting married. Lucky, plain lucky. And the next was when our son was born which was, we both say, the happiest day in both our lives, more even than the day we got married. And another would be the forming of The International Poetry Forum just by a chance meeting with a man who had the funds to back up the idea. That pretty well made me decide to remain in a city where it's taken root and where it's a unique thing for a man to be able to do. And the last, I guess, would be the acceptance of my new novel by a pretty major publishing house. That's encouraging to me because I had always had faith in that book, and this kind of vindicated my belief in it. Those are some important things.
Q: What poets, writers have been especially important to you? In what ways can their influence be seen in your poetry?
A: I don't know about that. The influence is for someone else to find out about. But poets that I've admired are, and not necessarily in the order I'm giving them to you, John Donne. Donne is my kind of poet. First, he's a genius. He can write about anything and his mind doesn't pull in its horns. He doesn't change his way of thinking whether he's talking about a mistress, about God, about study, about lawyers, or about Martin Luther. It's John Donne, always the same person. Shakespeare I love for reasons I don't have to mention. He's a bona-fide genius without any peer in any language. Keats, primarily because of the great odes in which he says so magnificently that beauty and sadness exist simultaneously. And there's no divorcing the two because in saying that he points to the very reason why people are drawn to poetry and art. It [poetry] doesn't glory in the fact that beauty is temporary, but it states it so that you feel justified in feeling the way you feel about it. Wifred Owen I like mostly because of the actual sense of war that you get in his poems and because he was such a superb metrist. He did things in the few poems that he wrote in his life that no one could have done but him. I have great admiration for him. Hart Crane I liked for a time, but not so much any longer. At one time I was impressed with Hart Crane as a writer because he did things that weren't in the mainstream of American poetry. There are lines in Hart Crane that no one but Hart Crane would even attempt to write. Take the line, "Silent as a mirror is believed reality plunge in silence by" (Crane, 61). A line like that. And then he's writing a poem about a still life and how the apples in the painting are so real they're more than apples. And he ends the poem with, "The apples, Bill, the apples," and suddenly the apples just come to life right in the poem. Randall Jarrell, I think, is a magnificent poet. If I had to pick a poet that I've enjoyed reading over the past 34 years, it would be Randall Jarrell-more than Dick Wilbur and more than Robert Lowell. His poetry has an unmistakable voice in it. I mean he's a man who's incapable of petty, false humor. Like John Donne, there's a unified sensibility in him. I like cummings because I think he's irreverent and because he's the greatest romantic poet that we've had in this century. And he can write the most touching love poems to his mother or to his wife. And then he can write some of the most vulgar, beautifully vulgar poems. You know, "To lie between the breasts of Lil," whoever Lil was. This is getting back to a previous point I made. The lust of a cummings' poem is saved by the poetry of it, if that makes sense. I admire the scope of the talent of W. S. Merwin. I like William Stafford's poems a lot. And I like the poems of Linda Patsan, Naomi Shihab Nye. And I like Elizabeth Spires. I think Peter Makuck, the young poet teaching at East Carolina State, is a very good poet.
Q: And each of these has that unified sensibility that you mentioned in regard to Donne?
A: Yes, and the fact that they're accomplished poets, no doubt. Their language is their own. You can't imagine a poem by these people being written by anybody else, or even anybody else coming close to it. And they couldn't; their fingerprints are on them. I've read poems by poets who go to some workshop someplace. Their books come to the Poetry Forum sometimes. I read them and it's as if they've all been written by the same person. There's not a significant difference in the vision of such writers. Peter Makuck, for example, has a wonderful poem about a cat. He doesn't care for cats, but he likes this cat because he's gotten to like him. He didn't want to in the first place.
Q: So it's a felt reaction?
A: Yes, but he begins the poem by saying cats do not perform; they wait for you to perform. And the whole poem goes on in that vein. You know, when he calls the cat in, the cat comes in its own good time.
Q: Are there any trends or developments in contemporary poetry which you regard highly or sympathetically? Are there any which you regard with distaste?
A: I'm not aware of movements in modern poetry as such. I think the poems that I admire most are the ones that I've just told you about-those hewn out of the original talent of one person, and that he or she works at that until their mark is on it. They are the authority on themselves, and there's a direct connection between what they write and what they feel and what they live. The poetry that I have a contempt for-and I don't think it's poetry even though it's widely read and widely published-is a hermetic kind of poetry that is championed in some of the east coast institutions where there's a belief in language almost for its ow ke, and the connection with li s rudimentary if it exists at all. And I simply find that facile; I find it undeep. It doesn't say anything to me at all. And I think it's mischievous. I think that people who teach in colleges and other places and impress upon students that this is the only kind of poetry that's worth anything are doing a lot of harm. I don't have any respect for that at all. I don't care how brilliant the poetry may seem because many of the people who write it are quite well-read and intellectual; but it's intellect from the eyebrows up. It's not associated with the bloodstream a nd the heart and everybody else's feelings.
Q: A poet like Ashbery?
A: Well, yes, for me, but there are others. John Hollander is a poet like that. Would you buy his book? My answer is "no," I wouldn't buy his book.
Q: What is your attitude toward your reader? You so evidently enjoy saying your poems. Is it because the audience is then so immediate and its response can be seen?
A: To me an audience is you times ten times fifty. Your first audience is always you. As I said earlier, you write the poem and you're the first one who sees it and knows it. And then if you say it to a friend or somebody in the family, then suddenly you have an audience of one. But that audience is the second one. You are the first one. So you move outward to audiences. And then if you have an audience of total strangers, you've written something that goes beyond the audience of one or two. So my attitude towards audience, toward anybody who freely comes to hear me, is one not just of respect, but one of real affection. I am honored, and I try to do my best to make them not regret their coming.
Q: What is it exactly that moves you to write a poem-an idea, image, memory, event, character?
A: That varies. Sometimes it can be just two words that rub themselves together by accident. Sometimes, as in the case of the poem I read about Vietnam, it was just seeing those two men in the audience. It was a scene. Sometimes it's the rhythm of a particular line. Sometimes it's an evident irony that you see. It can be a memory, it can be a scene, it can be a mood.
Q: Given the chance, would you rewrite any of your poems?
A: Sometimes I've tried to go back and rewrite a poem. And it's never worked because I'm psychologically past the time, or whatever it was, that inspired me to write it. Sometimes you see a poem that's pointed out to you years later, where a word may be wrong. If that's "rewriting," then, yes, I'd like to replace a word here and there. There's one word in a poem that I wrote to my mother, who died when I was quite young. I found her diary many years later. I was a grown man then in my mid-thirties, and I wrote this poem after having read the diary through one night. (My aunt had given it to me.) By the time the morning had come I had been in her presence all night. At any rate, the poem begins, "Had you survived that August afternoon of sedatives . . ." She was given sedation because it was a hopeless case, and she was at home. She was up and coherent and all that went with it. But the word "sedatives" has been interpreted by many people who have read the poem as if my mother took her life, as if she gave herself sedatives, which is not true. So if I had a chance now I would use the word "medicines" instead of "sedatives." I would like that just to avoid the ambiguity. In instances like that I would, but in others I don't think I would. I would rather just leave them as they were made, and if there are warts on them, then there are warts on them.
Q: Which poems do you expect to stand the test of time and why?
A: There are some that I hope will.
Q: Perhaps you would speak of those you like the most.
A: These just come to mind. I like "Maps for a Son Are Written as You Go," "Another Word for Time," "To All My Mariners in One," and "The First and Only Sailing." I like a poem that I wrote to my wife called "Long Distance Isn't." And I like a poem called "The Torch of Blood." These are poems that mean a lot to me, but I hope in writing them I go beyond just what they mean to me, so that they might mean something to other people, too. At least I've been told they do.
Q: Is it a coincidence that most of those poems involve family members?
A: Well, not all of them. I mean there's a poem I wrote that I showed to you about the first car I ever bought. I hope that poem hangs around because it's a kind of love poem about stupid males' love for their cars. At a certain time in their life they feminize their cars and fall in love with them. It's dumb but it's true.
Q: Do you view your work as having some kind of organic whole?
A: That's for critics to decide. I don't write anything that I don't have some deep f eeling about. And there are things that provoke me into that deep feeling on an ongoing basis. You've read my poems. There are subjects that I come back to, and that every time I come back to them they're there, fresh, waiting. Good as ever.
Q: You've led a very full life packed with numerous accomplishments. Is there anything, however, you regret not having done? And have there been things you have done that you would like undone?
A: I don't think there's anything I regret. I've learned from all of it, no matter what it was. Things that I wish I had not done? I'm afraid to say that I don't regret having done anything. It sounds complacent, as if I've done everything that can be done. That's not true. My wife, for example, thinks I should travel more. I don't enjoy traveling that much, so why should I? It's a displacement for me. I don't have the same attitude toward it that she does. She loves to travel. Geography is her book. And she makes friends easily and all that somebody who is a good traveler has to do.
Q: Is there anything left undone yet that you'd like to do in the future?
A: I'd like to be granted the time to go on doing just exactly what I'm doing. I mean I enjoy teaching, and I love to be with students. The Poetry Forum is a difficult thing to keep going. But I can't think of anything I'd rather do more than writing a poem when it hits me on the head and wants to be written, and writing something in prose that I want to write. To me that's it. Being with my own family and having friends. I don't want anything more than that.
Q: It seems like a lot. You can only do it because you love to do it.
A: I can't imagine not living that kind of life. I mean if somebody would offer me a job at a major university-Princeton, Harvard-I wouldn't go. I don't care what the salary is, I wouldn't go. If somebody offered me the presidency of a college, I wouldn't take it. It doesn't appeal to me, it doesn't attract me, it's not what I want to do. And the prestige means nothing to me. I teach in a small, moderately-size, Catholic university in the city of Pittsburgh-Duquesne University. It's not renowned by name like some of the schools that may have false renown. But I look around at the graduates-which is how you judge a university-and they are in positions of major importance in this city in the arts, in pharmacy, in business, in law, and in the judiciary system. And these are people I'm proud to know. How else do you judge a school but by the people it graduates? And I've met people from so-called name universities. I'm not impressed. You know they went there, and they didn't have to work their way through. Their parents sacrificed a lot to send them there. My point is that things that would have tempted me 10 or 20 years ago would now just be an annoyance to me.
Q: You and what you do have just become inseparable?
A: Maybe that's the case.
Q: Is there any concrete issue that engages your attention most in connection with events nationally or internationally?
A: There's one issue especially and that is the fact that, in my opinion, from now on-and it may predate my saying this by many years-I think around the world, the various vestiges of colonialism that exist, where there are people in power who subjugate other people, who oppress other people over whom they have economic or military control, will become intolerable. And I think that because of international communication-television and so forth-all of those governments who do it are doomed to failure no matter how many people they kill or how many people they oppress. They're fighting a loser's game in this century and in the next. And I think as long as we're around we will see these forms of resistance to that kind of oppression on an ongoing basis. Right now you see it in South Africa. You see it in the Middle East with the Palestinians. You saw it recently in Afghanistan against the Russians. And you see it quite violently in Northern Ireland. It's insufferable. People are just not going to be subjected like that anymore. They're willing to die first. So I'm very sensitive to that. I've always been that way. I'm not attracted to power in government. As a matter of fact it repels me. It makes me suspicious. I'm much more attracted to people against whom power is used.
Q: Where does literature come in for you in regard to this issue?
A: I don't have to tell you that literature, when it's put to the service of the cause, immediately ceases to be literature. It becomes what everyone says it actually is, and that is propaganda. Maybe propaganda for a good cause, but propaganda nonetheless. It can be propaganda for feminism. It can be propaganda for Soweto. But it's propaganda. Sorry about that. Good or bad it usurps the creative spirit that wants to support it, but that's not what I interpreted your question to mean. I'm for literature that has a political consciousness, since an awareness of man as a political being is vital. But I'm against a partisan consciousness that destroys the creative spirit.
Q: Then you make the distinction between poetry that's so one-sided it becomes propaganda, and poetry that centers man not just in one hemisphere but in a political hemisphere as well?
A: That's right. Take a book like John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. That book was written describing the conditions of the Okies, the migrants and so forth and the desperate poverty of their lives. I don't know and I don't care really what his intention was in that. But when you finish that novel you're overcome by the family, the Joad family and how circumstances had forced them to live just to survive. Now that novel had a great effect on the passage of legislation and alleviated the plight of those people. I don't think Steinbeck wrote it for that reason. It just happened to have that effect. We have an example in the case of Rushdie now. I'm sure he had no idea that if he wrote a book of this kind that he would offend millions of people and have a $10.2 million reward put on his head. Books that are written to help a particular political movement or whatever, are to me like those songs written to help certain movements. You hear them, but now they have the ring of datedness about them.
Q: So literature can't have as its core the intention of a cause?
A: I don't think so. I don't think that's the proper goal as a writer. The proper goal is to present some aspect of humanity, or what is called the human condition, imaginatively perceived by a man who is able to render it into language so that it's permanently recognizable. Unless it transcends a cause, it's going to be just fuel for the movement. That would be my answer.
Desnos, Robert. The Voice: Selected Poems of Robert Desnos. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1972.
Hazo, Samuel. Nightwords. Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1987.
. "Maritain and the poet." Renascence XXXIV, No. 4, Summer 1982, 229-244.
. "Standpoint Eliot's; Outlook Mine." Renascence XL, No. 3, Spring 1988, 204-223.
Fiction: Stills, The Wanton Summer Air, The Very Fall of the Sun, Inscripts.
Criticism: Smitherened Apart: A Critique of Hart Crane.
Essays: The Rest is Prose, The Pittsburgh that Starts Within You, The Feast of Icarus.
Translations: Transformations of the Lover, The Growl of Deeper Waters.
Editions: A Selection of Contemporary Religious Poetry, The Christian Intellectual.