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U6 Contributors:

Padgett Powell, Diane Williams, Jonathan Callahan, Lito Elio Porto, Brian Evenson, Richard St. Germain, Ottessa Moshfegh, Paul Maliszewski, Rebecca Entel, Bonnie Nadzam, Luke B. Goebel, Daniel Rolf, Edouard Leve, Lorin Stein, Jason Schwartz, Brian Kubarycz, Amin Erfani, Julia Holleman, Shabnam Piryaei, Miguel Morales, Tom Laverty, Ian Lirenman, Michael Kimball, Joseph Scapellato, Peter Markus, Pamela Ryder, Tom McCartan, M Thompson, Aaron Burch, Anna DeForest, Matt Bell, Lauren McCollum, Vanessa Place, Katherine Manderfield, Will Clingan, Jordaan Mason, Alexis Almeida, Lynne Butler Oaks, Catherine Foulkrod, Danielle Blau, Kayla Blatchley, C.A. Harrison, Robert Lopez, Amber Sparks, Kate Wyer, R.M. O’Brien, Megan Giller, Marie Viljoen, Keith J. Varadi, Nina Buckless, M Sarki, Cooper Esteban, Rick Poinsett, Elizabeth Mikesch, Lincoln Michel, Matthew Kirkpatrick, Lauren Spohrer, David Hollander, Lara Candland, Nic Leigh, Robert Kloss

Preview of Unsaid Seven: Bird Hills, by Michele Forster

Bird Hills

By Michele Forster

Hemlocks laddered by pegs of broken branches.

Remnants of things I knew,

people I love, and can’t climb anymore.

The rings of this stump are the years I have lived.

Each pushing out from the one from before.

A shagbark hickory shingled by feathering bark.

Dead wood protects what is alive inside.

The burn of the forest allows the forest to grow again.

Fires break open what lies dormant beneath the floor.

I came to these hills to know myself.

I leave without a name.

Jack Gilbert, interviewed by Gordon Lish, 1962 (from Issue One of Genesis West)

POETRY IS THE ART OF PREJUDICE: An interview with Jack Gilbert

(Note: Originally transcribed from a tape-recorded conversation between Jack Gilbert and Gordon Lish, at Gilbert’s San Francisco apartment, July 18, 1962)

LISH: In your poem “Quality Is a Kind of Exile” you mention a lady asking what poets are like between poems. If the question were asked specifically about you and you had to give a prose answer, what would you say?

GILBERT: I’d be evasive. It’s the sort of question that can only make a fool of you.

LISH: But if you had to answer?

GILBERT: If I had to? Well, I’m a little like a mongrel dog, I guess. Not the sickly kind, or the savage or woe-begone kind. But the shorthaired, off-white type you still sometimes see trotting along in the city. Obviously on his own. The kind that survives.

LISH: Not a lap-dog?

GILBERT: Wait. Let’s not get this started off wrong, full of terse clever answers. It was my fault; that sounds pretty precious about the dog. I didn’t mean it like that, but it’s a hard question to answer quickly. I just mean that I’m not respectable. I’m thirty-seven years old and a kind of failure. I don’t really have an occupation. Most of the time I wander around looking at the trees. Or the concrete. And trying to understand and to have my life. And love. Kind of an urban Walden. I’ve never worked at a job more than six months at a time in my whole life. And most of those were in steel mills or washing dishes or selling Fuller Brushes. I’ve evaded all the adult responsibilities of marriage, a home, a car, a regular job, children, furniture, a bank account for emergencies, pipes, guns, and all the rest. While other people have been coping with their responsibilities as husbands and citizens and PhD’s, I’ve been off looking at the sea and trying to write a poem. Or living in the mountains. Or on the Lower East Side.

LISH: But you’re not part of the Beat Movement?

GILBERT: God, no! And I don’t go in for freakish behavior nor esoteric knowledge.

LISH: What do you conceive your world to be then? What audience do you write for, for example?

GILBERT: I suspect I’m like most poets in that I write with a vague audience in mind made up of a few friends multiplied and a bunch of heroes—most of whom are dead.

LISH: But certainly some poets have a more general public in mind?

GILBERT: Maybe so, but remember that the contemporary artist’s audience is not the same one aimed at by Edwardians and Victorians. One of the things that defines modern poetry is its separation from a general audience. Not because the poet wants it that way, but because what he wants to do pushes him beyond the scope of the bus driver.

LISH: All poets?

GILBERT: Well, just about all serious poets today are beyond the reader of good will who is inexperienced in current literature. It used to be there was usually something for anyone with a minimum education. If you listened to music, you could wait for the tune to come around again. Today you’d wait a long time. Or in painting, you could enjoy the way a lemon peel was imitated or be moved by the scene of a young boy saying goodbye to his mother before going off to the big city. You might not know anything about painting, but you’d remember when your boy Walter went off. In poetry you could enjoy the sense of beauty without any idea of the meaning—the lovely, hypnotic beauty-bath. But poets aren’t trying to do this anymore. Nor good composers, nor sculptors, nor novelists, nor architects. They are trying to do something different, and it involves the nature of poetry and the audience both.

LISH: What specifically is this difference?

GILBERT: In the old days, poets tried to create beauty, and to please. Most of them, anyway. Today, the major talents aren’t interested in creating beauty—not in the ordinary sense, and certainly not in the sense of providing recreation. Poetry before the First World War was usually an elevating experience taken dutifully after a good meal in the better homes; rather like going to church each Sunday to sit worshipful and empty-headed. Instead of providing instant-uplift or a passive sense of nobility, the poets now are trying to interest and disturb.

LISH: Surely this kind of poetry has been with us a long time.

GILBERT: I don’t mean it’s a new thing. However, I doubt if it’s ever been so predominant. And there is a difference between the serious art of today and art in the past in that our art is harder to misuse. You look at the painting elements in a painting today or you go home. You read contemporary poems as poetry, and actively, or you leave it alone.

LISH: I assume this would be your answer to the accusation of limiting your readers by the geographical, historical, mythological, and personal references in your poems.

GILBERT: It depends. I don’t believe in poems as cross-word puzzles—poems created as victims of the New Criticism. There should be a public level of the poem available to an educated reader who is willing to contribute a fair amount of thinking. On the other hand, there are some things you have a right to expect him to look up. Helot, for example, if he doesn’t know. But if a poem has too much of this, its function breaks down—becomes a game of scholarship.

LISH: Or of vanity.

GILBERT: Especially of vanity. Not always, though. Not all poets who go in for this sort of thing are trying to create the illusion of profundity by an illicit obscurity. Some are entirely sincere. Just as some of the surrealists are, or the word-manipulators, the logomaniacs.

LISH: Are you equating the pedant poets with the surrealists and the logomaniacs? Aren’t some of these people legitimately experimental poets?

GILBERT: Of course. But I’m tired of the kind of experimental poetry we’ve been getting. I don’t say it’s not poetry. There isn’t any one correct way to write poetry. Poetry is a word like love: an endless confusion of different things all warped into one word because no vocabulary of discrimination exists. So I’m not saying my way of writing poetry is the way. But I am admitting my weariness with the great body of poetry which is nothing more than a curious manipulation of words, what Kenneth Tynan has called literary masturbation—a sterile effort to force words to breed. After one or two pages of surrealistic poetry my mind just stubbornly refuses to be polite. Wallace Stevens put it very well when he said that the trouble with surrealism is that it invents rather than discovers. It’s a kind of trick anybody can learn who has imagination. You just throw your mind slightly out of focus so everything seems different. Or better yet, you learn to set your mind wrong so that each item is mechanically related to an inappropriate neighbor. It’s great when you’re starting out in poetry and words are a kind of fascination. But how can a poet sustain an interest in this kind of thing. Wait a minute, I was just reading something by Samuel Johnson. Here it is: “The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight awhile, by that novelty of which the satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted.”

LISH: And yet your poetry isn’t devoid of experiment. For example, I’ve noticed in your poetry a peculiar distortion of line—as if the language were strange to you, new—especially this poem “The Poetry Line”.

GILBERT: All good poets today try to wrench the language, to freshen it. But my main concern with form is different. I’m concerned with how to make poems work. I think any group of my poems will show a range of solutions. Many poets have one or two ways to write a poem. The poem to them is like a cake-decorator where you put your different materials into the same bag each time and squeeze. The cake will be decorated differently each time, but the method is the same. My greatest difficulty is not finding subjects or language or conceits, but in finding the poem.

LISH: This would be a preoccupation with form rather than language then?

GILBERT: Yes, but obviously not form in the sense of sonnets or sestinas. In fact, I think the major esthetic problem in the 20^th century is the attempt to escape Form with a capital Fto form in lower case. At the beginning of the century with the idea of Art for Art’s sake, with the influence of Flaubert, with the distaste for a world in which falsification had become standard, many poets went in for what Yeats called technical sincerity. They found truth in an esthetic technology. Recently poets (and artists in the other arts) have become discontent with Form as an object. They no longer are content to create a pretty, well-made thing. They want to make a poem that extends beyond the museum of perfection. Often they don’t particularly care how it looks—if it’s shaggy or messy or incomplete or exaggerated—as long as it has the effect on the reader that the poet intends. In fact, he may deliberately include the anti-poetic in order to prevent misunderstanding. He doesn’t want the reader coming along collecting jeweled phrases. I’ve talked to a number of the best writers working today about this. Some at length, like Pound, or some just briefly, like Saul Bellow, and I’ve found over and over that they want to escape the inhibiting quality of Form as a hieratic, imposed felicity. They want to devise a form that allows them to do things. Pound expressed it by saying his greatest contribution to younger poets was enabling them to get things back into poems—to make historical references, for example. This recurring groping for an open form can be traced through the whole history of European literature.

LISH: But your poetry shows considerable concern with form in a more direct sense.

GILBERT: Sure. Any poet must be concerned with it. I would expect any poem of mine to meet all the tests of craftsmanship. And obviously form in this sense can never be separated from the other concern. And still, in some peculiar way, they are separate. No one has ever been able to say exactly how, but it is nevertheless true that a preoccupation with the formal construct produces a lesser poetry. Primary poetry deals with life. This is, of course, the most old-fashioned of positions. It has been repeatedly denounced by all the best modern critics like Northrop Frye, Warren and Wellek, Wimsett, and the rest. I always have the feeling they are annoyed that poems are written by people instead of being spontaneously generated out of the accumulations of books in the great solemn libraries. It’s an inconvenience. They remind me of the people who confuse technology with sex.

LISH: How does your attitude affect your poetry?

GILBERT: I am far more concerned with content than most poets, I think. I assume I manage all the technical elements adequately, of course. But usually my poems are caused by and impulse to communicate some part of my life rather than to please. I don’t want the reader to finish the poem and say how lovely it was. I want him to be disturbed. Even miserable. I don’t envy Spenser the slightest bit. I do envy the man who wrote Lear. And yet…it’s so hard to get it straight. At the same time I am always deeply concerned with the poem as a made thing. Always. Like something chopped out of stone that won’t weaken. But not as a decoration. Not a recreation. There are two kinds of poetry finally. The kind that gives delight, and the kind that does something else. Delight is fine. But in Lear or Oedipus there is something else. It’s a delight, too, but of a kind so different that it is misleading to use the same word. The first is recreation; the second change man. It is a grave misunderstanding to come from a performance of Lear concerned primarily with technical felicities. Ideally, one should cry at a good performance of Lear. If the critic can’t cry, he should be unfrocked.

LISH: Doesn’t this kind of approach set you apart from a lot of contemporary poets?

GILBERT: Maybe so, but an awful lot of the poems I see published remind me of the correspondence between Marx and Engels. Engels was always writing elaborate letters filled with ingenious, painstaking comments on Marx’s theories equating them mechanically with some current scientific thought. And Marx (or the reader) kept writing back, Dear Fred, please send the money.

LISH: But you go beyond just insistence on a relation to life in your poems. You seem preoccupied with moral values. Isn’t it true that most contemporary poets no longer accept the ideal of right and wrong?

GILBERT: Who knows? Surely it’s an exaggeration to say most. But it is true that a great many poets now shy away from this kind of subject in favor of a kind of genre verse. Partially I think this is the result of a moral paralysis that is current. But isn’t it also because they don’t have a sufficient motivation for writing? Isn’t a great part of poetry now being produced to support an established reputation? The poet is actually tired of poetry, but he must turn out poems to qualify for prizes, grants, and academic positions. What’s he going to do? He manufactures verse. And it’s a lot easier to deal with a small subject when you’re getting by on merely careful technique. And if he’s a man teaching at a university, as he probably is, and married to a wife he courted years ago, and has several quite healthy children…what’s he going to make his poems out of? He makes them out of books or he makes them out of the incidents of a normal, commonplace life. If he goes sailing off Long Island on Sunday afternoon and he wants to write a poem after dinner, he will probably write a poem about sailing off Long Island.

LISH: A small poem?

GILBERT: Oh, he’ll mention Charon at the end to make it seem big, but he is probably tired after a long day and he contents himself with making a respectable poem rather than trying to do anything to the reader. He’s unlikely to be what the Elizabethans admired so much, an over-reacher. You aren’t likely to get a big-boned poem straining its limits.

LISH: And you think this is the case with most poets today?

GILBERT: It seems to be true of most poetry today. Probably it has always been true of most poets. And it is only fair to say that all poets would like to write great poetry. It is also true, though, that if ninety-nine percent of the poets writing today stopped publishing, it would not be a loss. It might not even be noticed. We are in danger today of the kind of misguided tact that has so hampered modern British poetry. A kind of insidious conspiracy of courtesy. If there could be a truly unmalicious literary pogrom, it would do more for American literature than even making them publish anonymously. Or how about another way? You know how in the Congressional Record they have all those speeches that were never actually delivered in Congress? They save everybody’s time by waiving the reading and just print it so the people back home can see it and be satisfied their Congressman is making his voice heard. Suppose we publish a huge book called The Very Finest American Poetry of 1962? Everyone will waive the poems being actually published anywhere except in those thousands of pages of unreadable tiny print. And each poem who sends in something will automatically be issued a certificate saying he has published so-and-so many poems in 1962, and they have been declared to be the very finest of the year. It will be signed by all the right people. Then the poet can just turn this over to the head of his department when culling time comes around. The reward of promotion will be for the greatest number of certificates—and these will be given for assiduity, just as now. And he can get duplicates to send his mother, or to show his wife’s friends, or to send to the Fulbright and Guggenheim and Ford people. Or to have lying around when he has a girl up he’s trying to make.

LISH: Do you think these people who are involved in poetry to further their careers or who make mild poems out of trivial material are dangerous to the reader?

GILBERT: Mostly in being dangerous to themselves and other poets—in that they reduce poetry to something toilet-trained and comfortable. They pretend poetry is just like everything else, only fixed up funny. Like sex. Everybody understands now that sex isn’t really dirty. A little odd at times, but certainly nothing to be disturbed about. Like the sensible books on technique say. And it’s good for you. Rosy, reasonable sex. Well, it is dirty. And fantastically intimate. A kind of insanity. Of course, they often feel the same way about insanity. It’s kind of like the common cold now. And they can’t get over the secret feeling that their friend really knows, at the bottom, how silly he’s being. Someone once said to Blake that after all when he looked at the sun he saw a bright copper penny like the rest of us. Blake replied that when he looked at the sun he saw a choir of singing angels.

LISH: You feel the poets really don’t know the difference?

GILBERT: Who knows anything about poets? But I remember talking recently to a poet who teaches at the University of California who kept saying how it’s all nonsense to criticize professors for not having enough life in their poems. Take him for example, he said. One of his favorite things was to go walking up and down the main street of Oakland at night. Now I’m not making fun of him. He is quite intelligent and talented, and he sincerely believes he’s getting close to the brute reality of non-academic life walking up and down there in Oakland. It’s admirable that he wants to reach reality, but it scares me to think a man so intelligent can become so insulated that he isn’t even aware how far he is from the demon world of actuality.

LISH: What poets do you think are in touch with that demon world?

GILBERT: First let me take back that bit about the “demon world.” It sounds like the dark-world-of-unnamable-evil out of somebody like Huysmans or Lovecraft. And let me say that most poets have had contact with the world beyond the academy and domesticity when they were young or in the army or on their year tour of Europe. But how many of them have recently lived for any time really with hunger or corruption or danger or ecstasy or madness or the alien or romance or physical labor or poverty or anything? Or evil? Directly, I mean.

LISH: All right, but what poets do you admire?

GILBERT: In the world, or writing in English, or just in America.

LISH: Let’s say just American.

GILBERT: It’s hard to answer. I admire some things in many, many poets. You remember in The Lost Weekend how the guy is hurrying down the street full of ain and he sees a new book by F. Scott Fitzgerald in a window and he stops and crouches down to read what he can of the two pages that are half open? In the middle of his hurry and unhappiness? Well, I’ll tell you the people I’d crouch down like that to read. Pound and Eliot, of course. And Williams. And Frost. And Auden, if I’m allowed both him and Eliot. And Marianne Moore. Lowell and Duncan and Wilbur and Creeley. Shapiro and once upon a time Ginsberg. And Laura Ulewicz and Richard Hazley and Gerald Stern and William Anderson and Jean McLean. And others I’ll think of later. It’s a fine century for poetry.

LISH: Doesn’t that contradict what you were saying before?

GILBERT: I hope not. It’s exactly because I think we are in one of the great centuries for poetry that I feel so strongly. The last fifty years has been a golden age for English poetry. But it’s a constant race against being inundated with proficiency. We are in danger from a glut of mediocrity of an extraordinary high calibre. The problem is to write the poems that matter. Too many poets are concerned with poems as art objects. It’s a clever kind of juggling. It’s beautiful, and very difficult, and even admirable. But it mustn’t usurp the center of poetry. We will never get people like Chaucer or Villon or Dylan Thomas or Baudelaire or Blake or Homer or Sophocles or Shakespeare by making merely beautiful things. We’ll get them only from a poetry that is significantly involved with life. And I don’t mean domestic life. Certainly the poetry must also be technically competent, but the important thing is to exceed this. So many poets now seem to aim at the adequate poem rather than the important one.

LISH: Doesn’t this dearth of important poetry at the moment owe, in part, to the feeling of many poets that life no longer holds significant subjects? What do you, for example, consider significant material?

GILBERT: All the conventional subjects for poetry. Love, death, man, virtue, nature, magnitude, excellence, evil, suffering, courage, morality. What is the good life. What is honor. Who am I.

LISH: But isn’t that just the point? Aren’t the conventional subjects too confused and wearied from a surfeit of examination and the blurring of values?

GILBERT: That’s why poets shirk.

LISH: They try something more manageable?

GILBERT: Not only that, but they don’t have enough experience or involvement to try the other. It’s what I was saying before. Most of the poets are trying to earn a living and support a family. That usually means teaching school. And after a while, it means teaching school comes first. Poetry comes second. You meet very few poets whose lives are devoted primarily to writing poetry. The may love poetry, and respect it; they may be competent, well-trained, well-meaning, good people. But you don’t become a great poet in your spare time. Besides, nice guys seldom write exciting poetry.

LISH: But even if that’s true, doesn’t part of the reluctance to deal with large moral problems come from the complexity of the problems today—obsessed with relativism, wanting to be fair, to be objective? No longer understanding all of anything, especially the major values?

GILBERT: That’s true, but it’s exactly why poetry is crucial now. Poetry and the novel have largely taken over the function of philosophy for us. Philosophy is locked up in epistemology and can’t get out. No philosopher asks any more: What is the good life? What is justice? They deal with technical problems about cognition and even more with a kind of verbal paraphernalia. Poetry seems almost the only device we have for persisting at problems without their being mysteriously transformed into an abstract game. It seems almost our only escape from the blind alley of sophistication where comparative anthropology and psychiatry have led us, seeing that there are so many sides to any question that it is impossible to have convictions. Poetry is almost the only way we can escape from the vicious constipation of moral relativism. Because poetry is the art of prejudice. If prejudice is the inability to discuss a conviction calmly, then poetry is prejudice. Prose is rational and fair. It works out an idea and gives all the evidence. Poetry doesn’t. It doesn’t argue, it demonstrates.

LISH: Then you do see absolutes. That is out of fashion, isn’t it?

GILBERT: I think most good poets see absolutes, but they mistrust themselves because they think they’re not being fair. Well, poetry isn’t fair. Poetry, at it’s best, doesn’t try to be fair. Poetry is one-sided, and being one-sided, it can say what truth is. As the art of prejudice, poetry eludes the modern situation where everything seems true and nothing seems to matter very much. The poet has a way of thinking that, peculiarly, breaks through the ambush of qualification and gets to the other side where you so often can see the truth all along but can’t find your way through the jungle of intellectual ceremony.

LISH: Somehow this seems a lot like the attitude of the Beat poets.

GILBERT: Well, it is true that one of the reasons the Beat Movement got so much attention (outside of their gift for publicity) was that their intellectual crudity helped them to break through the impasse of sophistication and establish some contact with subjects that mattered in a real world. Just as the Italian Renaissance was possible partly because the people in Florence were provincial. It could never have happened in Byzantium.

LISH: You say the beats were intellectually crude.

GILBERT: Yes, but that doesn’t mean dumb. Let me make it clear that I’m not attacking them. It’s pointless for people to keep kicking them now when the whole thing is in such disrepute. Five years ago, people in the universities hated the movement but were secretly fascinated. Now they are genuinely contemptuous and indifferent. It is useless to attack it or defend it now on doctrinaire grounds. It’s more important to evaluate it; not only fairly, but with knowledge. It was the most important literary movement of a quarter century in America. Why did all that talent and opportunity come to so little?

LISH: Why, then?

GILBERT: Mostly because of inadequate character and the repudiation of intelligence. Most of the poets in the movement are incapable of maturity. Any examination of the work of, say, Ginsberg and Corso (and Kerouac in prose) show a failure to grow. In fact, they are dedicated to the opposite. They apotheosize all the infantile qualities: impulsiveness, resentment of discipline, incapacity for self-discipline, short attention span with a consequent preoccupation with the moment, mistrust of authority and order, egocentricity, and all the rest. At first this gave their work the freshness and energy that’s usual when gifted children start out in any field: poetry, tennis, science, music, chess, whatever. But it also has a similar tendency to come to nothing. To predictably pass through a stage of exaggeration and a kind of hysteria, followed by bitterness, and finally a withered passivity. They are like those insects that get arrested at the larvae stage. I forget their name. They have all the parts, but they just don’t continue. If you want a case in point, read the interviews involving Ginsberg and Corso and Burroughs in the Journal for the Protection of All Beings. It’s sad and rather frightening to see people of such native talent ending up in such juvenility. And it’s not just in that one example. Almost anything they do now shows it. Look at Ginsberg’s piece in Pa’lante where he’s approaching middle age lost in a hopeless confusion of the most elementary philosophical problems.

LISH: And you say this failure of character goes along with the repudiation of intelligence?

GILBERT: Yes, in favor of some kind of intuition. I think intelligence has produced almost everything that is noble in man. Of course, when I say intelligence, I don’t mean just syllogistic logic. I mean the total capacity for perception and understanding available to man. Logic, intuition, gestalt, common sense, empathy, and all the rest. They want to rely on primitive, clumsy impulsiveness alone. Anyone who has lived where intelligence has been replaced by intuition (such as Apulia or Mexico or India) knows how quickly life becomes diminished to something close to the animal. These people feel more at ease in those conditions. They evade the complexity life really has; and they can escape awareness of themselves into sensation. When you realize how little these people like being themselves, you begin to understand why they want to escape consciousness.

LISH: But I thought the idea was to arrive at a greater awareness of the self. And to be more open to love.

GILBERT: They talk a lot about love, but they experience almost none. Neither for people nor the world. Their natural condition is unhappiness. And because they have so little genuine appetite for the world, they go in constant fear of boredom. That’s why they are quiet so little. After all, there is something radically wrong when you have to go to always more violent and stranger devices to get a response. A man who delights in the world isn’t so dependent on drugs and alcohol and novelty. And the sad thing is that even so they manage to squeeze our always less response. If you’ve been to any of their parties, you must have noticed how much it was like an hysterical woman straining for an orgasm synthetically. And the poetry is the same. Almost none of it stands up under rereading. In the first place, it all ends up sounding curiously anonymous. And in the second place, despite the cult of energy, all that violence of language and image seems curiously slack after six months. The poems just don’t wear well.

LISH: None of it?

GILBERT: Certainly some remains. Parts of Howl and Kaddish, for example. And besides, it depends on who you mean when you refer to the Beat Movement. It’s as Procrustean a word as academic. I certainly am not talking about Creeley or Duncan or Olson. And I think Whalen and Snyder will produce important poetry. But for the rest, if you travel around America, you find the reputations of five years ago washed up like great dying whales. And beginning to stink.

LISH: There’s that figure whales. Whales and elephants and Alcibiades. What precisely do you mean by whales?

GILBERT: You know without my telling you that no poet means precisely anything. It’s not a one-to-one relation. That’s allegory. It means a lot of things. For one, it’s the impossibly literal world. And it’s what you can’t reduce to the human scale. For me, trying to think about a whale, that endlessness down in that infinity of depth, in darkness, moving around—with a mind inside it…

LISH: Doing things.

GILBERT: Yes, and silent. I can’t make any adjustment to it. Like Lawrence said: “I said to my heart, who are these? / And my heart couldn’t own them.” He was talking about fish. And he says someplace else in the poem: “There are limits / To you my heart; / And to the one God / Fish are beyond me.” Whales in this sense, the sudden sense of the alien nature of the universe not translatable into human terms. But what particularly interests me is the sense of magnitude. It’s out of scale, and not just physically. It threatens my life, the formulations on which I operate. I have to redo my mind. There’s a poem by Rilke where he goes along describing a statue. All of a sudden, for no reason, he breaks off and says: You must change your life. When I think about whales, it’s the same in a way. Or elephants or love.

LISH: Or Alcibiades, evidently.

GILBERT: Or Alcibiades. He was the Golden Boy of 4^th century Athenian culture. Pericles was his guardian, Plato his teacher. A fine athlete, a brilliant general, handsome, marvelously intelligent, popular, everything. A summation of the Golden Age. And what happened? He went bad. He was vain, treacherous, selfish, sacrilegious, debauched, dishonest, and a traitor twice over. His aid to the enemy during the Syracuse campaign destroyed Athens. Just about the finest product of the most notable civilization man has accomplished, and it turned out like that. This haunts me like the whales. Like the irrational East haunted the Greeks. Like the irrational still frightens the French. It is so much the problem today. It is so often our most endowed people who go wrong—become corrupt, sexually distorted, criminal, mad. I don’t mean just because of irrationality, or course. You might just as well call it Evil as it has been so often called to simplify things. But whatever the name, it is clear that Cordelia has little relevance for us except as a lost Eden. What concerns our time is Goneril. That’s why insanity, homosexuality, and semi-criminality are so common among poets. These prevent him from escaping into the obliviousness of normal life. Especially in modern times, the poet often has a built-in inability to succeed, so he is forced to associate with whales.

LISH: And you intend to continue to live with them by choice?

GILBERT: Well, I’m not crazy, queer, or crooked (Ai! Is there any group I haven’t offended?)…anyhow, I don’t know about it being by choice. Certainly after this interview I’m not likely to be tempted by either the universities or the foundations. It’s a choice in that I prefer whales and love and the rest; but then Heraclides said a man’s fate is his character. In any case, I intend to go on wandering around having my life and watching for whales—willingly. And with delight.

LISH: One final thing. Before the Yale printing of Views of Jeopardy, you were almost completely unpublished and unknown, weren’t you?

GILBERT: Before sending the manuscript to Yale, I had submitted poems to editors only twice in the twenty years I’d been writing poetry.

LISH: And now you have been nominated for next year’s Pulitzer Prize competition.

GILBERT: That’s true. And it makes me happy in a shamelessly uncomplicated way. To be nominated, I mean. I’m thinking of writing a poem, though, called “How It Feels to Be Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize Competition the Season Robert Frost Published His First Book in Fifteen Years.”

 

Gifts and Questions – An Interview with Anne Carson, by Kevin McNeilly

(NOTE: This interview was originally published in the Spring, 2003 issue of Canadian Literature.)

KM The first thing I want to ask you is about interviews. We’ve been seeing your picture on magazine covers, and you’ve been interviewed quite a bit recently; some of your recent books from Autobiography of Red to Men In the Off Hours have interviews in them.

AC You’d think that would discourage people. [Laughs.]

KM Do you think there is a poetics of the interview?

AC No, I think the whole form is a mistake. So I intended to undermine it before the event, but it didn’t work.

KM You still seem to be conscripted into giving interviews.

AC I do. I avoid most of them, most conscriptions, but the odd time I feel accountable. I’m not trying to make you feel sheepish. It just isn’t a form that I find very useful, because I end up lying. There is this pressure to say something moderately wise in every space and you know in ordinary conversation in the world wisdom doesn’t occur in every space. So it’s unnerving.

KM Many of your poems blend the colloquial with a kind of intensified language. You seem to shift back and forth sometimes between those two modes, is that fair?

AC That’s probably fair. I didn’t think of it that way, but….

KM You make an awful lot sometimes of certain kinds of colloquial language. Common speech becomes weighty in some of your poems. Where an everyday phrase like “this is mental” or something like that takes on an awful lot of weight. It seems like you’re exploring the weight of the colloquial, or what’s hidden in it.

AC Well I guess I don’t think of it as colloquial; I think of it as the floor and the walls. If you want to refer to the unconscious mind, you can’t do that in any very pretentious way without having it take over the narrative. So to find the plainest way to say “here we are in the subconscious” is important to the balance of the narrative.

KM A lot of critical acclaim for your work has come from the United States. I know you teach there, and live there, and I was wondering if you could address in some form or another the “Canadianness” of your writing. Do you see any national aspect to your work? I don’t necessarily need you to address the idea of cultural nationalism, but I was just curious because you’re currently nominated for a Governor General’s Award, and yet a lot of the acclaim for your work has come from the United States. Do you feel that crossover tension at all?

AC I’m not sure what tension you mean. Are we talking about inspiration of work or recognition of work?

KM How about both?

AC Well, inspiration of work comes from wherever I happen to be, but the paradigm that I take with me for registering perceptions is from where I lived when I was young. So I’d look for those kinds of light and rocks and smells and moods and maybe that would add up to a Canadianness of the mentality at some deep level. But I don’t consciously think about it.

KM I wouldn’t want to force it. I was just curious because your work has been published to great acclaim in the United States, and it seems as if Canadian critics are catching up.

AC Possibly. I don’t know why that happens. I was published there a long time ago, and had a following, but probably that’s because I taught there and I knew people there. And it’s a matter of who you bump into largely, and I don’t want to accuse Canadian culture of being slow, Lord knows . . . . But it’s a different scheme here, a different set of cliques. The world of writing is a bunch of cliques—so you get into a certain clique, and you meet those people, and that’s where it happens.

KM Well, what about something like travel or cosmopolitanism in your work? There are a large number linguistic frames of reference, historical frames of reference, different kinds of texts that you’re drawing on. You seem to work in a cosmopolitan framework, would that be fair to say?

AC Sure.

KM What about translation then? You mentioned yesterday in your talk [here at U.B.C.] that you like to translate badly. I think you were being a little ironic, but translation is involved in all that you do. Could you comment a bit of the poetics of translation? Do you think of yourself as a translator-poet, or of translation as having a poetic aspect to it, or as a source for poetry?

AC I like the space between languages because it’s a place of error or mistakenness, of saying things less well than you would like, or not being able to say them at all. And that’s useful I think for writing because it’s always good to put yourself off balance, to be dislodged from the complacency in which you normally go at perceiving the world and saying what you’ve perceived. And translation continually does that dislodging, so I respect the situation—although I don’t think I like it. It’s a useful edge to put yourself against.

KM It’s interesting to have an aesthetics of unpleasantness. You’d think that poetry would be pleasant.

AC It can be. I think you can move to a pleasant place in composition, the act of composition, but that’s not the place of thinking. It’s the downhill slope after thinking.

KM So a kind of tension that’s disruptive?

AC Yes, disruptive and strained tight.

KM Do you think of poetry as thought?

AC Yes, mainly.

KM This might be a point to ask you about the connections between your scholarship and your poetry. You’re both a professor and a poet, and I know that some would say that the academy is not the place for poetry, that it thrives outside of its critical interpretation. Others—perhaps your- self included—seem to find ways in which the critical or the scholarly and the poetic collude or intersect. How do you view that intersection?

AC I never found any trouble with it. People do make trouble out of that border, but I never found it a problem because I just practically don’t separate them. I put scholarly projects and so-called creative projects side-by-side in my workspace, and I cross back and forth between them or move sentences back and forth between them, and so cause them to permeate one another. So the thought is not that different. There’s a different audience I guess, but nowadays that’s less and less true. But the permeating, the cross-permutation is extremely helpful to me. Because actually the project of thinking is one in my head, trying to understand the world, so I might as well use whatever contexts are available. Academic contexts are available because they’re ready; they’re given by the world. You have to write umpteen academic articles to get tenure, and then creative vehicles you can invent. But they’re both equally useful.

KM Whom do you view as your audience?

AC I don’t know anymore. When I do readings, I’m often surprised at who the audience is: a lot of very young people and a lot of quite old people and a lack of a middle quite often. So I don’t know what that means. Besides age I don’t exactly have any definition of it. I think people are drawn to my work for all sorts of reasons, and there’s no demographic definition there. But I don’t find that I try to aim at an audience when I’m doing it.

KM Do you feel that the fact that your audience has grown substantially recently, and that Autobiography of Red is a best seller, has had any impact on how you think about writing?

AC I wouldn’t say so. It may be slightly liberating, in that I feel that I could do anything I want and people would at least look at it; they might not like it, but they’d at least look at it. Before you have some celebrity you can’t work in that confidence, and I think that’s a bit gloomy—so there’s the removal of a certain degree of gloom. But beyond that it doesn’t give me any specific schedule of what to do.

KM What I was thinking of too was the notion of audience itself. I read and really admired Economy of the Unlost, where you suggest that poetry for Simonides and Paul Celan involves a kind of economy, a kind of exchange, or a network—and a registering of, if not audience, at least of giving and of gift. Do you see poems as gifts?

AC Ideally. I think that the gift-exchange circuit is more or less broken down in our culture, simply because our culture is too big. When you’re writing a book nowadays for Knopf which is owned by Random House, which is owned by Viacom which is owned by the Bertelsmann brothers in Germany, the context is too expanded to grasp, whereas somebody like Pindar was speaking to twenty-five people he’d known all his life. An exchange of gifts is very abstract when you’re talking to an audience that might include people you’ll never even know about. So I don’t think in any real sense that it’s an exchange anymore, except in a reading situation. There’s something that happens there when you’re physically present doing a reading that’s an exchange, but the multiple copies going out to a zillion people, it’s hard to have a sense of that as a sensual and emotional experience, whereas someone like Pindar did have that, and felt the burden of it.

KM Perhaps in composition rather than in performance—do you feel that there is any gift-like structure when you’re writing a poem? Even if the material circumstance of audience—this kind of intimacy and community—is lost, do you still feel some sort of community, or does that idea of giving or of gift register in anyway during the composition of the poem?

AC I think the attempt to make sense is always involved in that exchange, and you can call that a gift. You don’t make sense for yourself; you make sense to tell someone else. So there is a social conscience present in that activity, but I don’t think that context is emotionally or psychologically anything like it was for an ancient poet, where he would be aware in a personal sense of the mentality of his audience, and he would respond to it.

KM Speaking of ancient poets, it was interesting to me in your first book Eros The Bittersweet that you dwelt on the concept of love in Plato in the Phaedrus, and what kept going through my mind was Plato’s expulsion of the ancient poets from the Republic because they were imitators, because of the problem of mimesis, because it’s erroneous or blind, and it’s interesting to me that you would want to look back to Plato for a poetic.

AC Well you don’t look to Plato for a poetic, you look to him for thought in general—he did that pretty well. I think that The Republic is a tricky text, and the whole thing is some kind of allegory, and I frankly think it’s an allegory in which he tried to make Socrates say the most outrageous things anybody could ever say about a city, in order to cause people to think back from that extreme image to a city in which they might actually live. I mean it’s a deliberate exercise in shocking, and it does shock, and it would have shocked his own audience to expel poets from the city. But he has a wiliness that’s important not to take simply. I think Plato is a place to train yourself in how to use thoughts; he’s not a person to quote for the opinions of his interlocutors.

KM Or to use them dogmatically.

AC Yes, or to ever think that it’s not fiction. He made them into dramatic fictions.

KM So Plato’s a liar, is what you’re saying.

AC Yes, and he would be the first to admit that. He’s making myths, and he calls them myths. For him it’s a poignant kind of lying because he’s trying to convey the truth of a person who actually existed who was Socrates, and Socrates wasn’t lying I think. But Plato is in the position of the writer. Socrates didn’t write anything, so he’s free of this dilemma of what you do with the lies that you’re telling when you come up against the truth of the world. Plato is stuck with that problem, so he deals with it in cunning ways.

KM Are lying and error another name for this in-between, that you seem to value? I think you call it desire. I don’t want to collapse all of those terms into one synonym, but….

AC Lying and error are the same word for the Greeks, which is interesting. That is, “to be wrong” could have various causes: you wanted to lie, or you just didn’t know the truth, or you forgot, and those are all one concept. That interests me, the bundling together and looking at the situation from a point of view of consequences and not motivation. I guess desire wanders through that area sometimes, but I wouldn’t call it identical with error.

KM I was thinking in this way because desire, at least psychologically, has an open-endedness to it, an unclosed-ness.

AC Yes, if it works, right.

KM I guess you can have misfires.

AC Or you can have desire that is consummated and then it ends. Desire is fun while it’s not ending. As soon as you get what you want you’re no longer wanting.

KM I know that many of your poems recently you’ve been calling essays, or you’ve been writing “lyrical essays” or “essay lyrics.” I know that the essay, at least as it’s framed as a genre, such as it is in Montaigne, is an open-ended form. Is it fair to say some of those poems are gestures at process or at attempt?

AC Well that’s what imitation is for the ancients. It’s simply a mirroring of the activity of the thought that you had at the time that you had it, and an attempt to make that activity happen again in the mind of the listener of the reader. Probably that’s always what I’m trying to do.

KM Is this why you say things like “irony is a verb” or “desire is a verb,” as opposed to the nominal. You point often towards process or to action or to performance.

AC Yes, performance, I think so. The ancient poets thought of the publication of a poem as the time of saying it, and the time of saying it is also the time of it being heard, and that’s the time when there’s an exchange of that action, that verb, whatever the verb is that’s being described. The verb happens.

KM Are you conscious of that kind of happening when you’re reading in public, or giving readings?

AC Yes, at some times. That depends on the context and the lighting and stuff, but sometimes if you can see people’s faces you have a sense of that.

KM I would want to name those moments “lyrical moments” or “musical moments.” I don’t know if you would agree with that. You just mentioned when we were talking about Plato the idea of myth or mythos, which is narrative form. You yourself have written narrative poems; if I’m not mistaken at one point in “The Glass Essay” you suggest that your voice is better at narrative than at lyric. How do you view the two poles of your work, the narrative structure that unfolds in time versus these moments of lyric intensity?

AC I think being successful at making lyrical moments is a musical ability firstly. That is you have to make it sound seductive; you have to draw the listener in to the sound so that he is irresistibly drawn into the sense, and I’m not good at that. I’m not musical. I make sometimes lines that have shape, but they tend to be pretty clunky. And I think that’s partly because of academic training and writing so much prose, but that’s also just innate—you have music in you or you don’t—so I can fight against that, but in the end I just won’t be a person who writes beautiful musical sonnets. That just won’t happen to me so I have to do the other thing, the narrative thing.

KM It’s quite interesting that you would admit to being non-musical, yet you would be currently working on libretti.

AC Well yes, it is of course, but how are you going to learn things you can’t do unless you keep trying? Anyway, in an opera the deal is that you write some kind of language and somebody else has to make it music. So it could be pretty bad on a musical level, and a good composer might still improve it into a lyrical effect. It was an exercise, writing the libretti, trying to be more musical, shaping things for the ear more than for the cognition.

KM You spoke here two days ago about women’s mysticism, and I know that the subject of The Mirror of Simple Souk [Marguerite Porete] is a mystic. Could you comment on—I don’t know if this connects to the sense of “lyric” or the musicality of language, but—on ties between the lyrical and the mystical; you called it “decreation” I think.

AC Simone Weil calls it that, yes. I think it varies a lot from mystic to mystic. In the ones that I’ve studied, some make an attempt to be musical and lyrical and use that as a point of access into the deeper insight that they wish to convey, and some don’t. And the woman who’s the subject of The Mirror of Simple Souls wrote almost entirely in prose, and actually very clunky prose, and I feel drawn to her for that reason, but every once in a while in the book’s 139 chapters of prose, she devolves into verse, and it’s mysterious to me why she does that. I’d like to know what kind of thought it is exactly that calls for verse music out of a non- musical person, and I haven’t got the answer to that.

KM Is that what’s drawn you to mystics such as Simone Weil—if you want to call her mystic—and others?

AC What, the clunkiness?

KM Yes, or the attempt to see, or to hear.

AC Possibly, no. I think I was drawn to Simone Weil for other more philosophical reasons. She is the person who invented this term “decreation,” and that for me was a point of insight into other mystics I wanted to look at. But Simone herself has a very troubled relationship with language and with the beauty of language, and I think she’s always trying to resist the lyric impulse, to actually reduce all the thought she has to as close to scientific as she can make it. She would have liked to write mathematical equations, I think, and leave it at that. So she is kind of a counter- example.

KM Given that your most recent book is called The Beauty of the Husband and that you intersperse it with quotations from Keats . . . .

AC He’s good at the music.

KM You’ve talked about clunkiness; how can you talk about beauty in poetry? Some would argue that beauty as a concept has disappeared from the critical landscape, and others, Elaine Scarry for instance, are trying to recover the beautiful.

AC I don’t think it has disappeared for me, and I don’t think for the people who are buying poetry books it has either. I think the beauty of an art object is part of the gift that you give to the receiver, the listener, the observer, to make it worthwhile for them to spend whatever time of their life they spend trying to understand it. That makes sense to me, because that’s the way the Greeks think of it—perhaps it’s not a modern way—but for the Greeks the word for “the beauty of a poem” is a term that can also be economic, a term we would translate as “grace.” So it means both the beauty that someone’s face has, or that a statue has of the lines, or that a poem has, or music, but it can also mean the surplus value that a gift has, the value over and above monetary exchange because it’s given for free. And I think that way of thinking of beauty makes sense to me. It’s a mechanism of insight, but it’s a mechanism of insight into what people need to receive from an artist when they’re trying to understand her art.

KM I would expect that the title of The Beauty of the Husband refers to the famous line from Keats—”Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—but interestingly the quotations you intersperse in the text from Keats are mostly marginalia, little-known works, cross-outs, corrections. Why did you make that choice?

AC Just ornery. [Laughs.] I like the sentence about beauty as truth, but it falls on the ear of a modern hearer with a tired thump because we’ve heard it so many times. You can’t think into something you’ve heard that many times, I don’t believe, unless it’s thrown at you from a wrong angle. And reading a lot of passages of bad Keats gives you another angle. But they’re bad in an interesting way; I think when you take a bad text and break out a part of it—they’re not any of them complete passages—the little part of it seems to me shiny in a way that provokes thought. And when you know that it’s Keats you’re willing to respect it enough to think what the shininess is about. If it were just some other guy from Keats’ milieu writing that badly you probably wouldn’t give it a second thought. So I wanted to use some kind of drawing-in mechanism that was traditional, but not beautiful in a conventional way that wouldn’t register because it was so ordinary or well known, and also some kind of cultural monument. I wanted to have a little bit of pretension scattered throughout the thing to undercut the whole project of trying to describe beauty.

KM Perhaps this connects to ideas of error or mistake, but if your thinking is drawn to sites of revision and of correction, and of re-making, is there any relationship between that and what I take to be your own notion of “voices in process” or voices in poetry that discover themselves, rethink themselves, or revise themselves as they go? You have second and third drafts of poems throughout Men in the Off Hours.

AC I’m not sure where that comes from. There’s a mistrust there of the surface. Possibly it’s scholarly hesitation, because the texts that I deal with in classics are most of the time incomplete, emended, full of mistakes, conjectured, and so on, and you learn to kind of resist the surface in dealing with classical texts, and if you transfer that to your own work, then there’s no reason to trust the first version you put on the page—it might be wrong. You could emend your own work, and it’s interesting to think of what you’re emending towards, when you emend your own work, what came before the thought in what you thought was the first version, or the true original version. You can dig through your own original version, I don’t know what that would be, but prior opinion.

KM In your criticism, as I’ve read it, there’s a kind of archeological interest. But it’s spun in a different way, as I think you pointed out yesterday, than a philologist might spin it, where instead of looking at a fragment and trying to reconstruct it, you take the fragment as a finished poem and then read it in its fragmentary nature. That strikes me as an interesting and also rather strange kind of critical enterprise. What makes you want to take the fragment as a kind of poem?

AC Well why wouldn’t you? Because a fact is a fact, there it is.

KM As we have it?

AC As we have it, yes.

KM Is it because it registers the entropic nature of the historical—that things have fallen away?

AC Maybe, partly. The space itself is seductive; the space of not knowing has always been seductive to humans. But I think more bluntly it’s just that I enjoy facts, and the fact of the matter with a fragment is that it’s mostly gone, so you might as well confront that, engage that.

KM You say at the end of Men in the Off Hours that “crossouts sustain me now,” and I know this has a personal context for you—in an essay on the death of your mother—but in what sense are crossouts sustaining?

AC Well, I think that visually the way that’s printed there you can see the Virginia Woolf lines, you can see the words through the crossout, and I very much like that fact. The crossout is supposed to be the cancellation of an idea, and the idea remains uncancelled—you can read it right through the line. That seems to me perky, that they keep punching through our attempts to cancel them. And that perkiness of ideas themselves is sustaining, is hopeful.

KM That crossout from Woolf seems to provide a visual structure for the other epitaphs in Men in the Off Hours. Is that so?

AC No, actually the model for the epitaph was Simonides because I was working on the economy book at the same time, which has a chapter on epitaphs. So the form began to interest me, writing an epitaph for things that actually can’t die interests me.

KM So were the verse forms themselves also derived from Simonides?

AC Yes, the shape in Greek is a hexameter and pentameter line, so six beats then five beats. So I just tried to make long and short lines. But in the classical form the hexameter and pentameter lock together in a way that’s very interesting but that doesn’t come across in English, so I tried to make the idea in the lock analogous to that. I don’t think it workedmost of the time but it was interesting to try.

KM Some of the epitaphs and some of the other poems are very visual, andI know that you’ve got a sequence of captions or commentaries on Edward Hopper, and I’m wondering about the ekphrastic in your work. Do you conceive your work in any visual sense?

AC Oh always; I mostly think of my work as a painting.

KM Ut pictura poesis?

AC No, not capturing what’s out the window. But making it like what Mallarmé talks about, using words so that you create a surface that leaves an impression in the mind no matter what the words mean. It’s not about the meaning of each individual word adding up to a proposition; it’s about the way they interact with each other as daubs of meaning, you know as impressionist colours interact, daubs of paint, and you stand back and see a story emerge from the way that the things are placed next to each other. You can also do that with language.

KM The epigraph that you attach to that sequence from Hopper, “I hope it does not tell an obvious anecdote for none is intended.”

AC No story intended, no narrative intended.

KM This is interesting because you cast yourself often as a poet who’s oriented towards narrative, and yet there’s a kind of withdrawal from the narrative.

AC I think I was trying to withdraw from the project of narrativizing the paintings, which is what they first of all demand of any viewer: you see the couple sitting in the café at three o’clock in the morning and you think of the story. And I believe that’s the last thing he wanted to have people do to his paintings, but everybody does it anyway. And I did in those poems, so I wanted to put his point of view in there to be fair, but he lost.

KM They’re very nominal though; I know that a number of the Hopper poems focus on things and on tangible language, which seems not necessarily to mitigate against, but perhaps to move in a different direction from the verbal, performative aspects of language. Do you see any connections between this kind of nominalizing, this very physical sort of language, the visual, and something that is a little more temporalized, like the verb?

AC Well I think that the verbs there come at the bottom in the Augustine quotes, which are all about time and about time disappearing; a whole sequence of Augustine at the bottoms of the pages is a verb, it’s one verb: time goes. But the paintings are still there, and they’re full of objects. If you try this, if you want to make a poem about a painting, you have to talk about objects; that’s what’s in it. Even if it’s abstract, you have to talk about the paint as an object.

KM So why introduce the contrast with Augustine at the bottom?

AC Where I studied the Hopper paintings overall, his whole output, he seems to be trying to paint time. There’s really nothing else in them, no other questions in them than “what does time feel like?”

KM You called that last poem in that sequence—the only one without Augustine—”The Glove of Time.”

AC Yeah, that’s my own sort of pasted-on response to the whole experience of looking at Hopper. It also has a line from John Ashbery in it, which you may recognize, so it was my attempt to understand John Ashbery.

KM His interest in painting?

AC No, more his way of using language, which is painterly, but in a cognitive way he’s just dabbing together chunks of raw idiom, and coming up with some surface that’s supposed to evoke real life. And in a weird way it does but it is also out of your grasp every minute.

KM Mark Vessey, a colleague of mine who studies Augustine, looked up the quotations you added at the bottom of the Hopper sequence and was wondering why you chose the particular translation you did, which is a nineteenth-century one.

AC For the elegance. I wanted it to register on the ear differently than the Hopper, than the above.

KM So it’s a kind of archaic language?

AC Yes, a little bit. I wouldn’t say archaic: anachronistic rather.

KM There’s a quotation I quite like from Economy of the Unlost—it’s the first line, actually, in the note on method that you attached to the beginning of the lectures—where you say “there’s too much self in my writing,” to which I think you then offer some corrective. For someone who writes confessions and autobiographies, it seems both important and curious that you would worry over there being too much self. I think at the beginning you mention that it’s a sort of scholarly reflex. How can you talk about an autobiography without too much self, or confessions without too much self?

AC You can’t, and that’s why it’s a problem.

KM So it’s a question of the problem, rather than . . .

AC Rather than what?

KM I don’t know. [Laughs.]

AC I don’t see anything it can be other than a problem. Too much self could never be a satisfying situation or something that one was at ease with.

KM You could argue that much of your writing is fairly abstract, or fairly textual, since it deals with translation and other writers, and yet in Men in the Off Hours you have what are clearly biographical pieces on Akhmatova or on other writers, and in the appendix you clearly refer to events in your own life. In the blurbs you attach to the ends of your book—I don’t know if you’re responsible for these—but the only information you tend give is “Anne Carson lives in Canada,” so you tend to be quite reticent about life, and yet the lived and lived experience seem to insinuate themselves into your work.

AC Well there’s a difference between inside and outside the book. I think inside the book is a territory where subjects that one can’t exactly control arise, needing to be expressed. Outside the book, the cover, the interviews, is an area where one struggles to have a degree of control. I think it’s not really in my hands what I end up writing about as subject matter inside.

KM Is writing—inside and outside—an exertion of control?

AC I think they’re equally chaotic. The only control I can exert is to keep my photography, biography, and blurbs off the cover—which is a struggle. But inside I don’t feel much control; I don’t think writing is an effort of control. It’s an effort of collaboration with whatever insights are available there.

KM A number of your collaborators throughout your writing career have been women; can you talk a little bit about the politics of gender, or the emergence of fairly clear and strong female voices in your work?

AC Well I have to have that don’t I? That’s who I am. Actually I think I’ve collaborated with men as much as women.

KM I know Eros the Bittersweet essentially starts with Sappho, and Men in the Off Hours, despite the title, begins with Virginia Woolf and Thucydides but moves from Sappho to Woolf, to Akhmatova or to Catherine Deneuve.

AC Yeah, but there’s Artaud and Hopper. I think it’s balanced. If you want to talk about “bittersweet eros” you have to start with Sappho because she started the phrase; that’s just logical. I don’t know, it doesn’t seem . . . I don’t see a question there.

KM Perhaps I’ll edit that out. A lot of your work has been about pilgrimage. How would you view the pilgrimage? I was thinking about “The Anthropology of Water,” and then . . .

AC It’s a good question. I don’t know exactly how I view it now. At the time, I did the pilgrimage in Spain to see what it would be like to do a pilgrimage, and then I saw what it was like, and I think, I didn’t quite get it. There is a form, let’s say, called pilgrimage, which I participated in without really understanding what it was. So maybe that means it’s still an interesting question, but I don’t know what the question is, to me.

KM Is there a theological aspect to your work?

AC I suppose there’s a theological aspect in being human. I think it’s one of the things you have to decide what you think about, at some point in your life. God, you just have to bring your forces to bear on that. But I don’t feel I have any particular insight to offer on that topic, I just come back to it as one comes back to one’s shoes at a certain point in the day—there they are.

KM You make God speak in Glass, Irony and God, but that God doesn’t particularly seem like a theological being; he seems very everyday.

AC I guess it’s a groping. “The Truth About God” is a groping into ways one could ask the question. They’re pretty picayune, I think, just little threads of ways. It’s not a main highway into the question, but I don’t think I’m a person able to build that highway.

KM Why go there then?

AC Well just because it remains questionable. I just can’t get past it.

KM Given the interview structure, then, it sounds like you prefer questions to answers.

AC In general, yes. I think that’s pedagogical.

KM To pursue a question rather than give an answer?

AC Giving an answer closes a door, and in teaching you never want to do that. You want to stand in the doorway and make some interesting gestures so they’ll come in, but you never want to push them in and slam the door. They won’t learn anything there.

KM Do you think of poetry as pedagogical, as a form of teaching?

AC Well I think of being human as a form of teaching. Everything one does is a way of saying “so far this is what sense I’ve made of being me, you can think about it if you want to.” If that takes the form of writing, then the writing becomes pedagogical. But I think that’s just an offshoot of being alive as a human. You have to tell who you are.

In The West

Revery and Attention – “Every moment we expect the spell to break . . .”

“Voici des fruits, des fleurs, de feuilles, et des branches . . . “

Claude Debussy–Ariettes Oubliees
(lyrics by Paul Verlaine)

“C’est L’Exstace”
“Green”
“Spleen”

Gabriel Faure–Melodies

“Apres un Reve”
“Nell”

“This curious state of inhibition can at least for a few moments be produced at will by fixing the eye on vacancy. . . . Monotonous mechanical activities that end by being automatically carried on tend to produce it. . . . The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into confused unity, the attention becomes dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us. . . . But somehow we cannot start. Every moment we expect the spell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it.”

–William James, Principles of Psychology, 1878

Bleak Is Beautiful

Bb Major 9

Unsaid Was In The Recording Studio