Poetry for Students

226 Poetry for Students

You’re speaking of course about the last two

books, and again the subject of those poems dic-

tated the forms in which they were written. In “El-

egy for My Sister”, for example, I was struggling

with a very complicated set of issues, not the least

of which was: To what extent is my writing about

my sister’s suicide an appropriation of her suffer-

ing for my art? At the simplest level, who was this

elegy really for? My sister or me? And what did I

hope to gain by writing it? To eulogize her? To

console myself and our family? To bring some sort

of closure to her life, her death? To create a more

socially acceptable portrait of her for posterity’s

sake? As you might imagine, I was horrified by

those possibilities. And so, to answer your ques-

tion, circumstances demanded, or seemed to de-

mand, the least possible artfulness or flourish in the

writing, a subordination of all those things that

draw one’s attention back to the writer. I wanted a

certain transparency in the writing. I wanted a

reader to look past, or through, the words them-

selves. At the same time I wanted them to be sig-

nificant, to be mediated through the refining

instrument of poetry, for words are, after all, our

only real connection to the dead.

A number of your poems, it seems to me, ap-

pear to lend themselves to musical settings of the

sort the art song composer Ned Rorem does so well.

The first numbered lyric in “Elegy for My Sister”

stands out particularly in this regard. Are you

aware of some of your poems veering off, despite

their deceptively prosaic prosody, and resembling

a species of meditative lieder, as it were, in which

variations on themes are conceived as much musi-

cally as poetically?

I’m not knowledgeable enough about musical

settings to answer this question very thoroughly,

though I do feel a certain kinship with the notion

of a meditative lieder, as both a form and a process

of composition. One of the things that I admire in

Ned Rorem’s compositions is the scale to which

they adapt themselves, their refusal of what he

calls—if I’m remembering correctly—“the master-

piece syndrome.” And here, too, it seems to me that

we’re back in the terrain of the lyric, and, as such,

I’m not sure I make the same distinction you do at

the end of your question. To conceive a poem po-

etically” means, to my mind, to conceive of it

“musically.”

While no precise count was kept of the times

the theme and/or motif of “backlighting” is alluded

to in your latest volume, its recurrence would sug-

gest that things perceived as “backlit” figure

rather prominently in your lexicon of images. Does

this have particular meaning for you, or is it some-

thing that has more coincidental than real signifi-

cance in your work?

This hadn’t occurred to me, though of course

that doesn’t mean it’s either coincidental or in-

significant. I suppose memory is, by nature,

“backlit”—at least insomuch as it poses what’s rec-

ollected in the soft- or hard-edged light of the

past—and because it’s elegiac, the poetry of mem-

ory is going to have something of that backlit

character.

What are your views on creative writing pro-

grams, and their influence on contemporary po-

etry? Of late, as you are probably aware, critics

have begun to blame these programs for (what they

see as) a loss of individuality in American verse.

A loss of individuality in American verse? Who

are they kidding? Has there ever been a more indi-

viduated poetry in the history of the world? To think

that our poetry can somehow be characterized, for

better or worse, by reference to “creative writing pro-

grams” is either culturally naïve or intellectually ir-

responsible. From the Black Aesthetics of Askia

Muhammad Touré to the Steinian poetics of Charles

Bernstein, from the engagé of Adrienne Rich to the

dégagé of John Ashbery, from the canonical author-

ity of the Harpers Anthology of 20th Century Native

American Poetryto the defensive neo-classicism of

the New Formalists, from Miguel Algarin’s Voices

from the Nuyorican Poets’ Caféto the Cowboy tra-

ditions of Howard “Jack” Thorp and Bruce Kiskad-

don, from the hip-hop rhythms of rap to the

haphazard rhythms of the poetry slam.... It may be

more accurate to call it, not “contemporary Ameri-

can poetry” at all, but “contemporary American

poetries.” I’m of course familiar with the kinds of

complaints you mention—I’ve responded to them at

length in A Poetry of Two Minds,in an essay enti-

tled “In a Glass Darkly, Darkly”—but perhaps you

can tell me why it is such unsupported claims are

granted such automatic credence. You say, “Of

late... critics have begun,” but the truth is that these

complaints have been around for years, and regard-

less of how scrupulously and thoughtfully and vari-

ously they’ve been addressed, you can rest assured

that in a very short while they’ll surface again, ex-

actly as before, delivered to a welcoming audience

with the wide-eyed fervor of some journalist uncov-

ering a senatorial tryst. Why is that, do you suppose?

Can serious poetry regain the common read-

ers it once had?

Yes, of course it can, and it has, and anyone

who hasn’t noticed that is just not paying attention.

Portrait of a Couple at Century’s End