about, but people were leaning toward freer
movement in their lines. Syllabics were a halfway
house. People had been trying to write some free
verse, of course, but it was still OK, and even
applauded, to write formal meters too. At the
same time, people were doing prose poems. It
was a good time; a lot of things were going on.
The syllabics you began writing, those that
appeared inThe Grave of the Right Hand, are
all either five-syllable or seven-syllable lines. And
your lines still have odd syllable counts.
Well, except for every once in a great while.
What is the appeal of the odd-syllable line?
For one thing, I like numbers. I graduated
from high school in ’53, college in ’57, and my
laundry number in college was 597... There are
all these odd numbers. But mostly it was to keep
it out of any kind of normal progression, which
is to say that if you have even numbers you’re
more likely to fall into tetrameter or pentameter.
Easier to keep it out—but still have the ghost of
it—with the odd, because you get an extra little
syllable. The seven-syllable line is still my ur-line
even now, thirty-five years later. And my seven-
syllable line will stretch to thirteen, another one I
like, or fifteen or seventeen, sometimes nineteen,
and then back down to as low as three or five.
But the seven-syllable line is the one everything
starts from—either goes forward from or stays
back from. I suppose that’s because once I
started doing that I really heard it in my head,
and I can’t get it out. Sort of like someone
learned pentameter and then did other things,
but when they come back without thinking to
what a line of poetry sounds like, it always
sounds like pentameter. Well, I didn’t have
that; I had the seven-syllable line, and it’s close
enough to formal meter that it pleases my ear. It
makes a musical sound, and even if you stretch it
and shrink it, you have this background of for-
mal meters to overlay your conversation on. Not
chitchat, but a conversational tone that keeps it
from being, you know, ‘‘What hast thou, O my
soul, with paradise?’’—the first line of ‘‘Blan-
dula, Tenulla, Vagula,’’ which I thought was so
gorgeous at the time. Still OK, but a little Vic-
torian. Pound was, as we all know, the last great
Victorian. He threw his body over the barbed
wire, and modernism ran up his back and over
into no-man’s-land. He was there, looking, but
he still got hung up on the wire the rest of his life.
Without him modernism wouldn’t have gotten
there, but I’m not sure he ever really caught up.
He was a great Victorian, just like Hopkins. That
has nothing to do with what you asked....
But it’s interesting, because both Pound and
Hopkins seem to have so profoundly influenced
your work.
I guess it’s sound patterns. I like sound. That’s
no secret, and Hopkins was so idiosyncratic and
so odd, inimitable, that you can really enjoy him—
or dislike him, I suppose, if you’re William Carlos
Williams and think he’s taking everything the
wrong way—but you can enjoy him without
guilt and without fear. Pound is somewhat the
same way. I haven’t read him in twenty, twenty-
five years. Everybody reads someone a lot in the
beginning, and whoever pulls you in sticks with
you. And you hope somebody good pulls you in
and not somebody bad—somebody you can’t get
rid of. So, yes, I was pulled in by an occasionally
great poet, someone who’s very interesting and
helped shape the way we look at things in this
century. I would rather have been pulled in by
Pound than by Eliot, even though I admire Eliot’s
poems, and I especially likeFour Quartets.But I
would much rather have been initiated by Pound,
because I think the possibilities for exploration are
larger. At least in my case, Pound would be expan-
sive and Eliot restrictive. But I didn’t have a
choice—I just happened upon Pound; that’s the
way it went. I feel fortunate.
The statement at the beginning ofAppalachia
bills it as the completion of a ‘‘trilogy of trilogies.’’
Hard Freight, Bloodline, and China Trace,
together with a prologue fromThe Grave of the
Right Hand,becameCountry Music;thenThe
Southern Cross,The Other Side of the River, and
Zone Journals, together with the epilogueXionia,
becameThe World of the Ten Thousand Things;
and nowChickamauga,Black Zodiac, andAppa-
lachiacomplete the last trilogy. What do you see
each of those sequences as doing, and how do they
work as a whole? You describe it as a sequence.
It’s an odd sequence. All three trilogies do the
same thing, and they have essentially the same
structure. Past, present, future: yesterday, today,
tomorrow. That’s just the guiding—well, it’s not a
thought—the guiding sound bite behind the first
trilogy, which actually went that way, I think.
Then I wanted to technically alter the way I was
writing the line in the next group, and I went on
other explorations. For instance, I tried to do
more narrative inThe Other Side of the River;I
did longer poems inZone Journals.AndIwanted
to bring in other kinds of business, like raising theWords Are the Diminution of All Things