come through. He became an economist and the
government sent him around to different places
to work. When he got to retirement age he
decided he’d go back into the arts, or at least
into crafts, and he started making tables. And he
had people shipping him chunks of wood from
all over the world. We ordered a cherry dining
room table and a walnut coffee table from a tree
that came out of Pennsylvania; it had some kind
of rot that made very interesting patterns in the
wood. My present wife and I still use the cherry
table and we love it. It has a certain amount of
sapwood in it, and tiny black dots in places, and
some knots. I wanted all those, I didn’t want the
pure straight stuff. Anyway, it seemed like a long
line fit that subject somehow. And I thought, as I
wrote it (though I don’t think I started out with
that idea), that that was the way I’d like to write
poems: take material and let it season for ten or
fifteen years until it’s hardened, and then try to
make something out of it.
INT: Has Edwin Arlington Robinson, with
his disposition to write narrative lyrics, been an
important poet to you?
SNODGRASS:Yes indeed. I’m very fond of
‘‘Mr. Flood’s Party,’’ which is just marvelous,
and quite a few of the others. But I haven’t
read him very extensively. There’s a couple of
his very long poems which I read years ago
and admired a lot but haven’t gone back to for
some reason. The same way with Browning. It’s
been a long time since I read ‘‘Mr. Sludge, ‘The
Medium,’’’ although I loved it. Then there’s
‘‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’’ and poems like
that that must have had a pretty strong influence
on me, but I haven’t looked at them in so long I
don’t really know.
INT: What contact did you have with John
Crowe Ransom?
SNODGRASS:He used to come to Iowa
and give lectures, and he was the sweetest man
that ever lived. I sort of thought of him as my
grandfather, because his immediate children
were Lowell and Jarrell and those people, and I
felt like their baby. He did like one poem of
mine, much to my surprise; mostly he didn’t
like my stuff. He was so fond of indirection,
whereas I tended to be much more direct, and I
think that jarred him a little bit. But he was
wonderful, and I loved to hear him read. I just
wonder if his poems will ever seem so good to
people who haven’t heard him read. He had a
marvelous voice: very Southern, soft and
charming but, underneath, affectionately know-
ing and skeptical.
INT: You have a great admiration for the
work of Walt Whitman. What do you value most
in his work?
SNODGRASS:Oh, I suppose breadth of
emotion and breadth of identification.
INT: His ability to include almost everything.
SNODGRASS:Exactly. As a matter of fact,
at the end of this tour I’m doing a reading of
Song of Myself—well, of selections from—a
reading of the whole poem would be three
hours long! But that’s the kind of reading I
most like to do. It’s just wonderful to read that
poem out loud. Whitman really had an ear. A lot
of people that you’re supposed to like who are
said to be like him don’t seem to me to be like
him at all.
INT: I don’t think there’s anyone like him.
SNODGRASS:No, there isn’t. He’s just
incredibly gifted—above all, in the musical
sense.
INT: The music of a poem is really important,
isn’t it?
SNODGRASS:Absolutely. I’m inclined to
think that reading silently cannot really approx-
imate the poem’s full power. For me it is an aural
experience: no music, no poem. Some of Cum-
mings’s poems, the typographical doodles, for
instance, can’t be read out loud, and if you
can’t read it out loud I don’t think it’s a poem.
I think the voice and speech and sound go very
deep: even while you’re in the womb you’re hear-
ing people say things and you’re responding to
that, and you’re surely responding to your moth-
er’s heartbeat. For me, when that goes out of the
poem, the poem itself is gone.
INT: In your lecture ‘‘Tact and the Poet’s
Force’’ (In Radical Pursuit: Critical Essays and
Lectures,Harper & Row, 1975), you say that the
poet ‘‘takes some idea, ordinary enough in itself,
and represses it from conscious assertion, so that it
can spread into the details, the style, the formal
techniques’’ of the poem. And in ‘‘Finding a Poem’’
you observe how necessary it is for the poet to
write what he or she really thinks or feels in a
given situation. It’s very difficult, isn’t it, to
achieve a balance between tact and honest
expression?
SNODGRASS:It is indeed. There was a
great problem of that for Whitman, for instance.Heart’s Needle