eInterview with Robert Wrigley
5/17/2014
Thanks for enabling me professor!
1. Many of your poems contain stories of you in the ‘natural’ world, particularly you and animals. You seem to have a deep compassion and desire for their succor. In Lives of the Animals, you rescue a tick from the toilet. In Art, you sit vigil for an Elk terribly tangled in barbed wire. In Sad Moose, you consider a mercy killing for a moose who—notice I say who—just moments before tried to kill you. But really, this world of animals you care for so deeply is our own, it seems, as we too are animals, afflicted by the same cosmopolitan suffering and melancholy as our “brothers” the ticks, moose, owls, snakes, dogs, and cats. Or so it seems in your poems. What is our relationship to these “lives of the animals”? Are we living our own? And how do you see your poetry as representing and engaging with this world and its inhabitants? How do they help the ‘sad moose, sad man’?
We’re animals, first of all. There’s a lot of resistance to that idea, from churchly folk, who, I assume, like to think we’re above the beasts of earth, sea, and sky—we’re a notch below the angels, I suppose. It’s a very good deal, being human, but I prefer to think of us as human animals. I love instinct as much as I love reason, and as a poet, I like to try to operate using both of those qualities. The very best things poetry does (all art does) can’t be attained using only reason.
What I envy about wild animals is their total ease within their own skins. Human beings are hardly ever that well-situated in their lives. What I love about poetry is that it provides me a way to reaching into the wildness inside as well as the wilderness outside—you can call that instinct, or even imagination, but the project is about trying to feel alive, to capture the essence of being alive, to recreate it in a poem, and thus to make readers feel it too.
As much as anything, I write a lot about animals because I’m surrounded by them. I live in the woods of Idaho and the woods here are full of critters, and I watch them and they show me things and offer me possibilities. I’m not sure a poem can help anybody or anything much. Although, every now and then, one will change somebody’s life.
I’d also say that the speaker in my poems is not necessarily me. It’s somebody who lives in me, or else it’s somebody I’m inhabiting for the purposes of the poem. Sometimes it’s me; sometimes it’s a complete fiction I’m allowed to be for a while.
2. Speaking of nature, many of your poems wrestle with its meaninglessness and brutality. “Perhaps what seems intentional / is simply part of the balance they exemplify” you write of the great redwoods in The History of Gods. In Church of Omnivorous Light, ravens wait to feast on the “course, inexplicable soul” of the character. As you grow older, do you see any meaning, purpose, and direction? Or are we simply seeing shapes in the clouds, when, in reality, the world is a cruel, deterministic system, bereft of meaning, its inhabitants ready to gobble our hearts in a heartbeat? What meaning does poetry retain / create in a world like that?
Well, what does a star mean? What does a tree mean? Meaning is over-rated. The problem is, poems are written in language, the same language we use to make laws, sell products, lie, woo, condemn, and praise. Language is the most complex instrument humans have devised, and therefore among the most difficult to use. We want to know what words mean, when they’re strung together.
Poems mean, but if what they mean can be reduced to a bumper sticker-sized “theme,” then they’re not very good poems. The meaning of life is living; the purpose of life is to keep going. Fundamentally, the only reason for living is the perpetuation of the species, for humans as much as salmon, Ponderosa pines, or viruses. The world isn’t cruel, it just is. People are cruel sometimes, though they are also selfless and beautiful, generous and deeply feeling. You don’t have to go through life acknowledging that life is a miraculous gift, but it’s always worked for me. The meaning of a poem is the poem itself. It means exactly what it says, and a little more.
Poetry is not a belief system; it’s a way of challenging all understanding, and via that challenge, it’s a way of enlarging experience and electrifying the imagination. It’s more of a disbelief system, a way of saying what can’t be said any other way. Another way of thinking about it is to say that poetry is the world’s oldest memory storage and retrieval system. If it’s remembered well, it’s because someone’s written well about it.
3. Like with the search for purpose and meaning, you have an ongoing love-hate relationship with God and religion. In Wanting God you write, “I confess, I thirst, and the rain / tonight is vinegar.” In Religion, you capture man’s cosmopolitan religious impulse reconsidered in later life. Yet, in Caffiene, your beloved Lily has killed “yet another songbird and has, the preachers insist / no Heaven, no hope at all, / and no reason but the flesh to go on.” All dogs don’t go to Heaven, says the preacher, and what are we all but canines standing tall on two legs? What are you current thoughts? How have past religious experiences affected your poetry? Do you see your poetry as religious itself, pointing to or creating higher, more sublime purpose and meaning, extending mercy and charity to our lesser-acknowledged siblings the beasts?
Poetry is my religion, insofar as it underpins my whole way of engaging with being alive. I never (well, hardly ever; sometimes in my dreams I’m a jazz guitarist)—I never stop being a poet. Everything I experience, everything I read, everything I see, feel, taste, smell, revere, or despise is something I might engage with in a poem. I’m just not very interested in faith or belief; I’m a lot more interested in knowing, in evidence. When I die, I’ll be dead. My only hope for something like life after death is my children and my poems. I have seen the magic in poetry. I don’t have to believe in it. I know it.
The fact is, I not only don’t believe in any god that organized religion has proffered, I’m pretty much hostile to the idea of them. They’re pretty much all men (or male, at least), which strikes me as more hilarious than sexist (men have way, way, way too high a notion of their own importance). And most of these mainstream “gods” are used to justify all sorts of atrocities and hatefulness, all manner of small-mindedness—even madness. I’m not sure I’m an atheist either. I have this feeling that “God” is the universe, a system so vast that it is beyond the possibilities of consciousness. Whatever it is, to think that it is human or that “we” are created in its image is a silly, deluded, and anthropocentric kind of superstition. God’s like me! I’m like God. Uh-huh. Sure you are.
The idea that we would have souls, while dogs or grizzly bears don’t have them, is silly to me. I’m not saying there’s no such thing as, or like, a soul; what I am saying is that the only things that put us in contact with the possibility of our souls are love, art, and wonder. I suspect the pure animal soul is a lot closer to the pure animal self; human beings need help to find themselves. Therefore religion, which doesn’t work for me. Maybe it works for others; I have my doubts. Therefore, also, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, story, drama, dance, which make me wonder if we can’t be angels after all. Even without god.
4. Many of your poems have such eclectic and vibrant characters! Lucy Doolin and Stump McCarriston. Christ Schuler and Katie O’Hare. Abner and Daisy May, Mrs. Evy Weeks, not to mention your cats Lilly and Lenore who are themselves interesting quirky characters for consideration. Even historical figures such as Rilke, Kant, Whitman, and Celan all take on characterization in some of your poems. How do you characterize? Are these characters based on real people? Entirely fictional? Somewhere between? Did Stump really shoot Lucifer? If not, how do you develop and explore characters in your poems?
Thanks for saying so. I love characters, real characters, both in life and in literature. What we all love about literary characters is that they allow us to look inside the workings of another human being, very different or very much like—sometimes all too like—ourselves. Characterization comes from action, deeds, and appearance. You have your characters do things, and what they do and how they do those things, makes them real. You have them say things, and that works the same way. You make the reader see them, and they become real in the reader’s mind. It’s very simple, how it’s done, but doing it and doing it well—well, that’s very, very hard. Similarly, it’s easy to see what has to be done to play a Chopin etude; you just play all the notes in the right sequence with all the right pauses, etc. But it takes an enormous amount of study and practice to be able to play Chopin on the piano. No different with writing. You have to devote you life to it. Most people don’t want to devote their lives to anything, except money.
My characters are true, but not necessarily historical, or even “real.” They’re the product of what my language tells me they are. Of course Stump shot Lucy. It’s right there in the poem. Rilke was a jerk, or so insisted John Berryman; he was a great poet, Rilke, but I would not have wanted him as a son-in-law. Berryman either, for that matter. Sometimes the characters in my poems are based on someone I know or knew, but mostly they live only in my imagination, and mostly they are brought to life only via my writing.
5. Characters aren’t the only vibrant facets of your poetry. Your language and subject matter are, in my opinion, just plain fun! In At the Beginning of Another War, you recount your adventures with a plaster phallus. In Sweetbreads, you fry up some bull testicles in ode to your mother. In Discretion, you play peeping Tom to Kim’s late night pee on a camping trip. Your language and lexicon are quirky and playful as well. The quirky, delightful viewpoint, language, and syntax of First Person, Bridge, and For I Will Consider My Cat Lenore simply made me smile, brought me joy, aside from any ‘deeper meaning’ in the poems. When you write, do you have as much fun as I did reading? How do you get yourself out of the serious, solemn “capital-P Poetry” mindset and write to delight, both for yourself and the reader as well? Is there even really this dichotomy of pleasure and profundity?
I always insist the poem ought to do at least one of these three things: delight; instruct; or wound.
Delight is first and most necessary. It can come from a great story, from highly skillful writing (rhythm, rhyme, syntax, image, figure, allusion, pun, and a whole host of musical effects, like alliteration and assonance, etc), from comedy, from making a reader experience something completely new or completely forgotten. It also comes from a sense that we, as readers, feel regularly, if we read a lot and read honestly: envy. The holy-crap-I-could-never-have-done-that sense. I love that feeling. I love to read something and that feeling of wishing, really wishing, I had written it.
Instruct means, to me, that the poem shows us a way of seeing, a way of thinking about, a way of almost-but-not-quite understanding something. It can make us see, as Yeats’ “Adam’s Curse” does, that love is both beyond our understanding and worth more than anything else. Poems teach us what we already know. Everyday life makes us forget the kind of essential things that poetry (and all art) insist on reminding us of. Much of the “instruction” we get from poetry cannot be, like meaning, reduced to a old wise saying. Much of the time we cannot say exactly what we have been taught by a poem, and that’s OK. Somehow, we’re aware that we have been instructed, and that our lives have been enriched by it.
Wound: I don’t think there’s a higher aim for the writer than to break the reader’s heart. A little. By this I mean a whole range of deep emotional responses: from tweaks to brief afflictions; from little sadnesses to profound aches. I like reading poems that affect me, that make me feel something.
Some poems, by the way, do one of these things, but the best usually do all three at once, to some extent. I always want to delight, and sometimes that’s enough. But if I can instruct too, so much the better. Wound, and I’m very happy indeed.
6. Your family seems to be a powerful impetus for your work. In What My Father Believed and Friendly Fire—one of my favorites, by the way—you wrestle with forgiving your father. In Appalonia, Coroners Report, and From Lumaghi Mine, if I’m interpreting them correct, you recount the brutal conditions of your grandfather’s work in coal mines. Poems like While You Were Out of Town and After the Flood are love notes to Kim. Your children appear all across your work as well. What kind of influence has having a family had on your poetry? A wife? Kids? What value do you see exploring family issues in your poetry? How is having a writer wife beneficial and difficult for you as a writer? How does Kim feel when she reads your newest book and realizes she was the object of your discretionary peeping?
Early on, there just wasn’t anything I knew better than family. Writing “about” family and about the central relationships one has with one’s family, is a way of beginning the life-long task of understanding the self. Yes, my grandfather (and his father and father before him, and so on, all the way to Wales, England, Austria, and Germany) were coal miners. My grandfather was, as they say, a “card-carrying socialist.” This makes him very interesting to me. He was a member of the Progressive Mineworkers—way closer to the Wobblies (the International Workers of the World) than to the United Mine Workers. To this day, I will not cross a union picket line, for two reasons: first, I love the history and the possibilities of organized labor; and second, I know if I were to cross a picket line, my grandpa would come to me in my dreams and tear me a new one. My father was a WWII Navy vet, and we had heated “discussions” about Vietnam. Although by the time I was discharged (on the grounds of conscientious objection, honorably), he and I were as close as we would ever were be. Now he’s very old—92, last month—and not well. Parkinson’s. He used to be able to make anything, a master woodworker. Now he can’t do anything, can really even communicate, and that’s tough to see. We haven’t argued since I was a young man faces the draft, and I would love to be able to argue with him now.
My kids have handed me all sort of possibilities for poems. Kids do that. Little kids, in the front edge of language, are natural poets. Growing up, school, etc, kind of drive the poetry out of you. If you’re lucky, you can get it back.
Kim has never cared if I saw her pee in the woods; we’re all peeing creatures, after all, and the two of us are often together in the woods. We pee. Big deal. That just happens to be one of those things a poem can do: I had the character reveal it because—or so this seems to be true—after all the description that comes before, people are delighted by his admission in the end. All that description of what she’s doing, he was not supposed to have seen. There’s a long tradition of poems that offer an apology for something the poet, or persona, is not at all sorry for having done.
7. Anything else you’d like to add?
I write because I can’t not. It’s not only what I do, it’s become who I am. It’s how I deal with reality, dreams, aspirations, desires—you name it. It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done. That why I do it. That’s why I’m addicted to it. That’s why people get so caught up in making any kind of art: because it’s so impossibly difficult to do any of it well. But if you find that, now and then, you can do it well; if you do it well once or twice, then you just have to keep doing it. It’s a very, very special, intense, and satisfying feeling to be in it.
Sometimes I love beautiful sentences almost more than anything. When beautiful sentences are arranged on a grid of lines—as a poem—they can become something much more significant than, say, 140 syllables on a page, although that almost all a sonnet is.
I used to love “having written.” I loved the finished product, the completed poem, most of all. But somewhere along the way I began to love the process even more—not “having written,” but actually being in the throes of writing itself. Most of the time writing is like ditch digging. It’s difficult, frustrating; you are reminded regularly of our own inadequacy. But the longer and deeper you dig, the more you keep on keeping on, the more likely you are to arrive at a moment of transcendence. Those moments are worth all the toil.
5/17/2014
Thanks for enabling me professor!
1. Many of your poems contain stories of you in the ‘natural’ world, particularly you and animals. You seem to have a deep compassion and desire for their succor. In Lives of the Animals, you rescue a tick from the toilet. In Art, you sit vigil for an Elk terribly tangled in barbed wire. In Sad Moose, you consider a mercy killing for a moose who—notice I say who—just moments before tried to kill you. But really, this world of animals you care for so deeply is our own, it seems, as we too are animals, afflicted by the same cosmopolitan suffering and melancholy as our “brothers” the ticks, moose, owls, snakes, dogs, and cats. Or so it seems in your poems. What is our relationship to these “lives of the animals”? Are we living our own? And how do you see your poetry as representing and engaging with this world and its inhabitants? How do they help the ‘sad moose, sad man’?
We’re animals, first of all. There’s a lot of resistance to that idea, from churchly folk, who, I assume, like to think we’re above the beasts of earth, sea, and sky—we’re a notch below the angels, I suppose. It’s a very good deal, being human, but I prefer to think of us as human animals. I love instinct as much as I love reason, and as a poet, I like to try to operate using both of those qualities. The very best things poetry does (all art does) can’t be attained using only reason.
What I envy about wild animals is their total ease within their own skins. Human beings are hardly ever that well-situated in their lives. What I love about poetry is that it provides me a way to reaching into the wildness inside as well as the wilderness outside—you can call that instinct, or even imagination, but the project is about trying to feel alive, to capture the essence of being alive, to recreate it in a poem, and thus to make readers feel it too.
As much as anything, I write a lot about animals because I’m surrounded by them. I live in the woods of Idaho and the woods here are full of critters, and I watch them and they show me things and offer me possibilities. I’m not sure a poem can help anybody or anything much. Although, every now and then, one will change somebody’s life.
I’d also say that the speaker in my poems is not necessarily me. It’s somebody who lives in me, or else it’s somebody I’m inhabiting for the purposes of the poem. Sometimes it’s me; sometimes it’s a complete fiction I’m allowed to be for a while.
2. Speaking of nature, many of your poems wrestle with its meaninglessness and brutality. “Perhaps what seems intentional / is simply part of the balance they exemplify” you write of the great redwoods in The History of Gods. In Church of Omnivorous Light, ravens wait to feast on the “course, inexplicable soul” of the character. As you grow older, do you see any meaning, purpose, and direction? Or are we simply seeing shapes in the clouds, when, in reality, the world is a cruel, deterministic system, bereft of meaning, its inhabitants ready to gobble our hearts in a heartbeat? What meaning does poetry retain / create in a world like that?
Well, what does a star mean? What does a tree mean? Meaning is over-rated. The problem is, poems are written in language, the same language we use to make laws, sell products, lie, woo, condemn, and praise. Language is the most complex instrument humans have devised, and therefore among the most difficult to use. We want to know what words mean, when they’re strung together.
Poems mean, but if what they mean can be reduced to a bumper sticker-sized “theme,” then they’re not very good poems. The meaning of life is living; the purpose of life is to keep going. Fundamentally, the only reason for living is the perpetuation of the species, for humans as much as salmon, Ponderosa pines, or viruses. The world isn’t cruel, it just is. People are cruel sometimes, though they are also selfless and beautiful, generous and deeply feeling. You don’t have to go through life acknowledging that life is a miraculous gift, but it’s always worked for me. The meaning of a poem is the poem itself. It means exactly what it says, and a little more.
Poetry is not a belief system; it’s a way of challenging all understanding, and via that challenge, it’s a way of enlarging experience and electrifying the imagination. It’s more of a disbelief system, a way of saying what can’t be said any other way. Another way of thinking about it is to say that poetry is the world’s oldest memory storage and retrieval system. If it’s remembered well, it’s because someone’s written well about it.
3. Like with the search for purpose and meaning, you have an ongoing love-hate relationship with God and religion. In Wanting God you write, “I confess, I thirst, and the rain / tonight is vinegar.” In Religion, you capture man’s cosmopolitan religious impulse reconsidered in later life. Yet, in Caffiene, your beloved Lily has killed “yet another songbird and has, the preachers insist / no Heaven, no hope at all, / and no reason but the flesh to go on.” All dogs don’t go to Heaven, says the preacher, and what are we all but canines standing tall on two legs? What are you current thoughts? How have past religious experiences affected your poetry? Do you see your poetry as religious itself, pointing to or creating higher, more sublime purpose and meaning, extending mercy and charity to our lesser-acknowledged siblings the beasts?
Poetry is my religion, insofar as it underpins my whole way of engaging with being alive. I never (well, hardly ever; sometimes in my dreams I’m a jazz guitarist)—I never stop being a poet. Everything I experience, everything I read, everything I see, feel, taste, smell, revere, or despise is something I might engage with in a poem. I’m just not very interested in faith or belief; I’m a lot more interested in knowing, in evidence. When I die, I’ll be dead. My only hope for something like life after death is my children and my poems. I have seen the magic in poetry. I don’t have to believe in it. I know it.
The fact is, I not only don’t believe in any god that organized religion has proffered, I’m pretty much hostile to the idea of them. They’re pretty much all men (or male, at least), which strikes me as more hilarious than sexist (men have way, way, way too high a notion of their own importance). And most of these mainstream “gods” are used to justify all sorts of atrocities and hatefulness, all manner of small-mindedness—even madness. I’m not sure I’m an atheist either. I have this feeling that “God” is the universe, a system so vast that it is beyond the possibilities of consciousness. Whatever it is, to think that it is human or that “we” are created in its image is a silly, deluded, and anthropocentric kind of superstition. God’s like me! I’m like God. Uh-huh. Sure you are.
The idea that we would have souls, while dogs or grizzly bears don’t have them, is silly to me. I’m not saying there’s no such thing as, or like, a soul; what I am saying is that the only things that put us in contact with the possibility of our souls are love, art, and wonder. I suspect the pure animal soul is a lot closer to the pure animal self; human beings need help to find themselves. Therefore religion, which doesn’t work for me. Maybe it works for others; I have my doubts. Therefore, also, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, story, drama, dance, which make me wonder if we can’t be angels after all. Even without god.
4. Many of your poems have such eclectic and vibrant characters! Lucy Doolin and Stump McCarriston. Christ Schuler and Katie O’Hare. Abner and Daisy May, Mrs. Evy Weeks, not to mention your cats Lilly and Lenore who are themselves interesting quirky characters for consideration. Even historical figures such as Rilke, Kant, Whitman, and Celan all take on characterization in some of your poems. How do you characterize? Are these characters based on real people? Entirely fictional? Somewhere between? Did Stump really shoot Lucifer? If not, how do you develop and explore characters in your poems?
Thanks for saying so. I love characters, real characters, both in life and in literature. What we all love about literary characters is that they allow us to look inside the workings of another human being, very different or very much like—sometimes all too like—ourselves. Characterization comes from action, deeds, and appearance. You have your characters do things, and what they do and how they do those things, makes them real. You have them say things, and that works the same way. You make the reader see them, and they become real in the reader’s mind. It’s very simple, how it’s done, but doing it and doing it well—well, that’s very, very hard. Similarly, it’s easy to see what has to be done to play a Chopin etude; you just play all the notes in the right sequence with all the right pauses, etc. But it takes an enormous amount of study and practice to be able to play Chopin on the piano. No different with writing. You have to devote you life to it. Most people don’t want to devote their lives to anything, except money.
My characters are true, but not necessarily historical, or even “real.” They’re the product of what my language tells me they are. Of course Stump shot Lucy. It’s right there in the poem. Rilke was a jerk, or so insisted John Berryman; he was a great poet, Rilke, but I would not have wanted him as a son-in-law. Berryman either, for that matter. Sometimes the characters in my poems are based on someone I know or knew, but mostly they live only in my imagination, and mostly they are brought to life only via my writing.
5. Characters aren’t the only vibrant facets of your poetry. Your language and subject matter are, in my opinion, just plain fun! In At the Beginning of Another War, you recount your adventures with a plaster phallus. In Sweetbreads, you fry up some bull testicles in ode to your mother. In Discretion, you play peeping Tom to Kim’s late night pee on a camping trip. Your language and lexicon are quirky and playful as well. The quirky, delightful viewpoint, language, and syntax of First Person, Bridge, and For I Will Consider My Cat Lenore simply made me smile, brought me joy, aside from any ‘deeper meaning’ in the poems. When you write, do you have as much fun as I did reading? How do you get yourself out of the serious, solemn “capital-P Poetry” mindset and write to delight, both for yourself and the reader as well? Is there even really this dichotomy of pleasure and profundity?
I always insist the poem ought to do at least one of these three things: delight; instruct; or wound.
Delight is first and most necessary. It can come from a great story, from highly skillful writing (rhythm, rhyme, syntax, image, figure, allusion, pun, and a whole host of musical effects, like alliteration and assonance, etc), from comedy, from making a reader experience something completely new or completely forgotten. It also comes from a sense that we, as readers, feel regularly, if we read a lot and read honestly: envy. The holy-crap-I-could-never-have-done-that sense. I love that feeling. I love to read something and that feeling of wishing, really wishing, I had written it.
Instruct means, to me, that the poem shows us a way of seeing, a way of thinking about, a way of almost-but-not-quite understanding something. It can make us see, as Yeats’ “Adam’s Curse” does, that love is both beyond our understanding and worth more than anything else. Poems teach us what we already know. Everyday life makes us forget the kind of essential things that poetry (and all art) insist on reminding us of. Much of the “instruction” we get from poetry cannot be, like meaning, reduced to a old wise saying. Much of the time we cannot say exactly what we have been taught by a poem, and that’s OK. Somehow, we’re aware that we have been instructed, and that our lives have been enriched by it.
Wound: I don’t think there’s a higher aim for the writer than to break the reader’s heart. A little. By this I mean a whole range of deep emotional responses: from tweaks to brief afflictions; from little sadnesses to profound aches. I like reading poems that affect me, that make me feel something.
Some poems, by the way, do one of these things, but the best usually do all three at once, to some extent. I always want to delight, and sometimes that’s enough. But if I can instruct too, so much the better. Wound, and I’m very happy indeed.
6. Your family seems to be a powerful impetus for your work. In What My Father Believed and Friendly Fire—one of my favorites, by the way—you wrestle with forgiving your father. In Appalonia, Coroners Report, and From Lumaghi Mine, if I’m interpreting them correct, you recount the brutal conditions of your grandfather’s work in coal mines. Poems like While You Were Out of Town and After the Flood are love notes to Kim. Your children appear all across your work as well. What kind of influence has having a family had on your poetry? A wife? Kids? What value do you see exploring family issues in your poetry? How is having a writer wife beneficial and difficult for you as a writer? How does Kim feel when she reads your newest book and realizes she was the object of your discretionary peeping?
Early on, there just wasn’t anything I knew better than family. Writing “about” family and about the central relationships one has with one’s family, is a way of beginning the life-long task of understanding the self. Yes, my grandfather (and his father and father before him, and so on, all the way to Wales, England, Austria, and Germany) were coal miners. My grandfather was, as they say, a “card-carrying socialist.” This makes him very interesting to me. He was a member of the Progressive Mineworkers—way closer to the Wobblies (the International Workers of the World) than to the United Mine Workers. To this day, I will not cross a union picket line, for two reasons: first, I love the history and the possibilities of organized labor; and second, I know if I were to cross a picket line, my grandpa would come to me in my dreams and tear me a new one. My father was a WWII Navy vet, and we had heated “discussions” about Vietnam. Although by the time I was discharged (on the grounds of conscientious objection, honorably), he and I were as close as we would ever were be. Now he’s very old—92, last month—and not well. Parkinson’s. He used to be able to make anything, a master woodworker. Now he can’t do anything, can really even communicate, and that’s tough to see. We haven’t argued since I was a young man faces the draft, and I would love to be able to argue with him now.
My kids have handed me all sort of possibilities for poems. Kids do that. Little kids, in the front edge of language, are natural poets. Growing up, school, etc, kind of drive the poetry out of you. If you’re lucky, you can get it back.
Kim has never cared if I saw her pee in the woods; we’re all peeing creatures, after all, and the two of us are often together in the woods. We pee. Big deal. That just happens to be one of those things a poem can do: I had the character reveal it because—or so this seems to be true—after all the description that comes before, people are delighted by his admission in the end. All that description of what she’s doing, he was not supposed to have seen. There’s a long tradition of poems that offer an apology for something the poet, or persona, is not at all sorry for having done.
7. Anything else you’d like to add?
I write because I can’t not. It’s not only what I do, it’s become who I am. It’s how I deal with reality, dreams, aspirations, desires—you name it. It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done. That why I do it. That’s why I’m addicted to it. That’s why people get so caught up in making any kind of art: because it’s so impossibly difficult to do any of it well. But if you find that, now and then, you can do it well; if you do it well once or twice, then you just have to keep doing it. It’s a very, very special, intense, and satisfying feeling to be in it.
Sometimes I love beautiful sentences almost more than anything. When beautiful sentences are arranged on a grid of lines—as a poem—they can become something much more significant than, say, 140 syllables on a page, although that almost all a sonnet is.
I used to love “having written.” I loved the finished product, the completed poem, most of all. But somewhere along the way I began to love the process even more—not “having written,” but actually being in the throes of writing itself. Most of the time writing is like ditch digging. It’s difficult, frustrating; you are reminded regularly of our own inadequacy. But the longer and deeper you dig, the more you keep on keeping on, the more likely you are to arrive at a moment of transcendence. Those moments are worth all the toil.