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Number 298
Fall 2006
Life Is Its Own Afterlife: A
Conversation with Robert Sward
KLIPSCHUTZ
Copyright © 2006 Poetry Flash
 Robert
Sward is a soft-spoken heavy hitter. Working just off center stage
for over fifty years, he has aged well, as have his poems. Not
a few of them, in fact, are indispensable. A citizen of both Canada
and the U.S., his just-published Collected Poems, 1957–2004
(Black Moss Press) has been nominated for the Governor General’s
Award. Other books among his list of twenty include Heavenly
Sex (2002), Rosicrucian in the Basement (2001) and
Four Incarnations, New & Selected Poems (Coffee House
Press, 1991). His poetry has appeared in a dizzying array of magazines
and anthologies throughout Canada, America and the U.K.
Born
and raised in Chicago, Sward served in the U.S. Navy in the combat
zone during the Korean War and attended the University of Illinois
and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on the G.I. Bill. After teaching
at Cornell University and winning a Guggenheim Fellowship, he
moved to Canada in 1969 to serve as Poet in Residence at the University
of Victoria, where he also founded a publishing house (Soft Press).
He later moved to Toronto to work as book reviewer and feature
writer for The Globe & Mail and the Toronto
Star.
Sward
produced four major broadcasts for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
including interviews with Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn MacEwen,
Leonard Cohen, John Robert Colombo and Earle Birney. Sward's nonfiction
book, The Toronto Islands, was a bestseller.
Moving
back to the U.S. to work as tech writer in Silicon Valley, he
embraced the Internet in 1987, and has published widely online.
In addition to a distinguished and peripatetic University career,
Sward has held a laundry list of jobs unaffiliated with academia.
He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches through the
extension program at UC Santa Cruz. This interview was originally
conducted in 2004.
KLIPSCHUTZ: As we speak, your Collected Poems
is in production. I can’t imagine what it feels like to
do a Collected…
ROBERT SWARD: At lunch recently a friend
and I were celebrating the publication, and he held up the cover—the
artwork—for a waitress to admire. She glanced at the title,
the dates and the photo and shook her head. She had trouble taking
it in. What was I doing in the restaurant celebrating my Collected
Poems, 1957–2004, if I was no longer among the living?
Interesting. And, well, there was a death involved, a psychic
death. And I had just turned seventy. The book was mine, and yet
it was also the work of a stranger, someone not entirely, but
subtly ‘other’.
For a variety of reasons I’d say it was one of the most
difficult things I’ve ever done, one of the worst experiences
of my life. And a blessing too, a gift…to have my publisher
suggest that I do such a thing and to have survived long enough
to be able to put it together myself.
KL: How did you assemble the Collected?
RS: I spent nearly six months sounding
and auditioning poems…lots of reading aloud. In retrospect
it seems strange because the final product, drawing on nineteen
earlier books, is chronological. It should have been easy: Pick
the best and put ’em in order. But the mechanics of selecting,
and of editing, was tied up with a lot of emotion. All the poems
and books came back to haunt me. There were some mortality issues
too, of course.
KL: To avoid confusion, and since you mention
“auditioning” poems, we should touch on the fact that
you think of it as basically a ‘Collected Selected’,
culled from several Selecteds, New & Selecteds,
and more recent work.
RS: Yes, that’s right. It opens
with a few poems from Uncle Dog, my first book, published in London
in 1962, and concludes with Heavenly Sex from 2002. And
I added poems that had been hanging fire and started others.
Again, it should have been easy. Fifty years of writing. No problem.
But it was a problem. I was just easing my way up to
my seventieth birthday and, as I say, I was brooding on the nature
of aging. What does it mean to devote half a century to writing
poetry—making certain sacrifices, for example, turning away
at crucial times from the needs of people I loved? Wives and children.
I found myself asking: Whom am I writing for? Whom am I selecting
for? And what will it mean to my children and grandchildren?
KL: Doubt creeps in…
RS: It does. From the thousand or so
poems I’ve written since the early 1950s these are the ones
I’d like to preserve. A thousand poems! What a way to spend
one’s life. And the vast majority of that lot are stinkeroos,
pure and simple. It was easy NOT to include these, the obvious
stinkers. But deciding which poems I cared a lot about, for all
kinds of reasons, that was harder. When I work on a new poem,
say, something that really engages my attention, I go through
something similar. But, imagine a brand new poem, new and yet
oddly familiar, made up of good and not so good shorter poems,
a longish poem, 228 pages, that’s been in progress for fifty
years—and I see The Collected itself as a single,
entire poem—well, it makes special demands.
And just before completing my selections, I experienced a pre-partum…pre-printum
‘disorder’. I was unable to write, unable to sleep—no
dreams, the imagination, such as it was, stopped functioning.
I’d heard of depression, but truth is, I knew nothing about
it, knew nothing of what it meant…couldn’t concentrate.
I was a mess. I couldn’t stand my own work; I was unable
to concentrate on anything, it seemed, including reading magazine
articles or the daily newspaper. What was that all about? To this
day I don’t entirely know.
KL: And you revised right up until the end.
RS: I write, and I revise, and I write,
and I revise. And I revise my revisions and then go back and revise
some more. What do I revise for? That the poems flow musically,
that they seem natural and un-revised. Simple, clear and straightforward
as possible. Especially with the monologues, the father poems,
the sequence I’ve been working on since 2001.
KL: Did you find yourself revising old poems?
RS: I know I am contradicting myself, since I’m fundamentally
opposed to poets, late in their careers, going back and…but
yes, I did revise. Years ago I learned that W.H. Auden, a poet
I regard as a mentor, went back and revised certain earlier poems.
As a reader that really disturbed me.
KL: Didn’t history play a little trick
on him? As I understand it, the original versions are the ones
most often reprinted.
RS: Yes, and some of Auden’s sumptuously
erotic, deliciously bawdy works, poems he never intended for general
consumption, eventually found their way into print and show us
another side to the man. Scandalous, scurrilous, bizarre…but
you’re also aware that the author was a genius—and
one of the most skillful poets of the last hundred or so years.
I was against it when Auden did it, and yet I could understand
Walt Whitman revising and revising Leaves of Grass up
to the end of his life. It’s a question of intention. Auden
had one intention—sanitize the work to reflect his later
political positions and beliefs. Whitman had another, to improve
the poem. An oversimplification, of course, but you get the point.
For
myself, I cut certain lines that seemed to obscure the work’s
intention. I spent the summer of 2003 revisiting every poem in
the book, working with enjambment, refining punctuation…challenging
the poem, what to leave in and what to leave out.
KL: In 1964, in the introduction to your first
U.S. book, Kissing The Dancer, William Meredith writes
about your style, its originality. Who were some of your early
influences?
RS: In 1956–1958, studying at
the University of Illinois, I read Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas,
Edith Sitwell, Eliot, Sandburg, Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings,
Pound, but also fiction writers like Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer,
Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger and others. Hearing some of these—and
Chaucer and Shakespeare—on the Caedmon spoken word series…hearing
poetry read aloud…I’ve never been able to get enough.
Hearing Thomas, for example, was a revelation. How could you listen
to Dylan Thomas and not become a poet or songwriter?
While
teaching at Cornell I met my dear friend Paul Blackburn, then
poetry editor for The Nation. Paul in particular was
an influence.
KL: Do I detect an influence from the New York
School, prominently Frank O’Hara, in some of your earlier
work?
RS: I like Frank O’Hara’s
work—and Kenneth Koch—but I’ve never been much
drawn to the New York School, though I do see some affinities—the
humor, the offhandedness, and openness of form, the attention
to visual artists…
KL: You broke into print at roughly the same
time as the Beats came on the scene. How did you feel about them,
generally, and Ginsberg in particular?
RS: I was impressed by the Beats—their
camaraderie and the fun they seemed to be having. Ginsberg came
to Iowa City in 1968, I believe, and gave a terrific reading.
He drew hundreds of people. The Iowa poets seemed unnerved by
him, mocked his work and the ‘look’ and gave parties
where one was expected to dress up in blue jeans, etc., and pretend
to be ‘Beat.’
I
met him briefly when he visited Iowa—was teaching there
at the time—toked on a joint with him. Ginsberg always seemed
to me to be Beat Mother Hen, the Nurturer in Chief, and also an
astute and effective publicist. Did you know that he worked for
an ad agency in San Francisco, doing Ipana toothpaste commercials?
The experience wasn’t wasted on him. In a sense he was the
brains behind the Beat movement, ambitious for himself and for
his friends. Nothing wrong with that—without Ginsberg’s
PR skills, I don’t think we’d be reading the Beats
as we do. It makes you think. If you’re gonna write and
want attention, some kind of readership, you’re probably
gonna want a group of like-minded friends, allies working in a
similar vein, plus someone who can act for you as Ginsberg did
for the Beats.
KL: Which leads me to the observation that you
have never been regarded by critics as a member of a group.
RS: Well, yes, that’s a bit of
a contradiction. I like hanging out with writers, painters, musicians,
but I’m also something of a loner, someone who has been
struck over the years at the readiness of fellow poets to join
with others and form ‘groups’. With certain obvious
exceptions—the Beats, Black Mountain—people tend to
think of poets as solo acts, moody outcasts, scribblers in the
attic. In my experience writers can be as cliquish, clannish and
snobby as Republican golfers, members of a country club.
It
has always struck me as unseemly for poets NOT to go it alone.
How could one be serious as a writer AND belong to a clique? I
used to think along these lines when I was a graduate student
at the Iowa Writers Workshop. I touch on this in my poem “Iowa
Writers’ Workshop—1958.”
KL: And then the Beats blew into town…
RS: Yes, pretty much. The Beats referred
to the Iowa Workshop poets as “Corn Belt Metaphysicals,”
formalists engineering precious artifacts, gray-faced Ph.D. candidates
writing in the style of John Donne and George Herbert…with
scarcely a poem about Iowa and the Midwest, let alone work that
drew on the contemporary idiom. In that respect I suppose I had
the field all to myself.
KL: What were you doing that set you apart at
the Workshop?
RS: I wrote free verse, tended to avoid
rhyme and meter. Of course, too, I was something of a loner, versifier-as-recluse
and, truly, it’s no surprise I was odd man out. I was also
a veteran, older and more ‘serious’, if that's the
word, than my friends. Also, I seldom felt the need to include
references to classical mythology and the fountains of Rome. .
.or the relentless use of irony as a defense from, God forbid,
the risk of appearing to actually mean what I was saying. I drew
on what I heard and experienced, using the 1950s, 1960s idiom.
For some reason that annoyed people.
I
suppose I also took a perverse pleasure in going against the prevailing
fashion, Brooks and Warren’s New Criticism, the aesthetic
of the time. My friends in Iowa probably spent as much time reading
criticism as they did reading contemporary poetry and, for a while,
I was right in there with the worst of them.
KL: To get back to Ginsberg for a minute, has
your opinion of him changed? He’s a popular target now in
many quarters.
RS: Changed? Yes. I think even more
highly of him now than I did in the ’60s. People will be
reading him long after they’ve forgotten the name of our
current president.
Reading biographies of Ginsberg one sees how needy he was. At
the same time, one can’t help appreciating him for what
he was: Warm, intelligent, heartful and, for a poet, unusually
generous. Amazing—I truly wish I'd gotten to know him personally.
By the way, picking up on your earlier question about groups and
cliques, you don’t see that Beat Poet phenomenon, that Black
Mountain phenomenon, that academic Language Poet or New Formalist
phenomenon happening with novelists. There’s one Saul Bellow.
One Philip Roth. One Doris Lessing. One Margaret Atwood. One Norman
Mailer.
KL: Often I am hooked in by a poet through one
poem. With you that poem was “Barbecue.”
RS: I started “Barbecue”
at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and completed it at Middlebury
College in 1958.
KL: To me, it’s pure satire, young couples
in the dwindling twilight of the cocktail era, pre-counterculture—a
hilarious spoof of ‘Cheever Country’, but caustic—more
a frame of mind than a geography, though. A marital smorgasbord—
RS: Yes, it plays with a gathering of
hot, somewhat privileged, intoxicated individuals, young husbands
and wives…yep, a marital smorgasbord.
KL: What prompted the poem,
what shaped it—gives it that loopy circularity—kaleidoscopic,
dizzying?
RS: It was prompted by what I witnessed
of social gatherings my parents attended. It was prompted, further,
by the suburban academic gatherings I attended in Iowa City and
Bread Loaf, Vermont, in the late 1950s.
Earlier
I had seen my Russian-born podiatrist father and his podiatrist
friends slapping each other on the back when they met, drank and
hung out together. Because I saw Dad as self-consciously there
and, at the same time, not there, I wondered if he and
his friends—like Samuel Johnson who kicked a curb to ‘prove’
its existence to the English philosopher Berkeley—slapped
one another on the back to ensure the presence—at the party—of
the other. Anyway, I was struck by a certain disconnect between
the fun and games the people seemed to want—and the occasion
seemed to promise—and the self-conscious, desperate aloneness,
the private sorrow, the alcohol-fueled desperation.
“Barbecue”
is pretty tightly constructed. Much of what I wrote at that time
was in syllabics—syllable count, influenced by Marianne
Moore. A couple months of work. Henry Rago at Poetry
(Chicago) published it in 1957. The worksheets, if anyone is interested,
are at Washington University Library in St. Louis, Missouri. [Note:
“Barbecue” can be read at www.robertsward.com, just
click on “Poems.”]
KL: You’ve been married
a lot—and make no secret of it. Four times? Five? You’ve
lived all over and raised several families. It’s hard to
keep it all straight. In retrospect, what part has fidelity played
in how your life has unfolded till now?
RS: Fidelity—or more often than
not the lack of fidelity—messed things up. I have come to
agree with Robert Graves who says. “…the act of love
is a metaphor of spiritual togetherness, and if you perform the
act of love with someone who means little to you, you're giving
away something that belongs to the person you do love or might
love…promiscuity seems forbidden to poets.…”
I’ve
done some of my best writing when I’ve been faithful, solid
and secure in a relationship. I need conventional, nitty gritty
practicality in order to write, well, let us say zany poems, poems
that move and have a little joyous noise to them.
My
friend Lyn Lifshin feels the same way: “I also feel a single
relationship, not the turmoil of slamming and slithering back
and forth, is the best for writing.”
KL: “Sausalito Ferry Poem” finds
you feverishly penning your paramour—maybe one of your wives?—a
poem, and forgetting to get off the ferry. You end up waving goodbye
to her. She is unamused, even as you proclaim your love in the
poem you are writing—to her! Did that really happen?
RS: Hmm. I began the poem while living
on the Toronto Islands in Canada. The Islands are a fifteen minute
ferry ride from the Island dock to downtown Toronto. Something
like that did happen, but in Toronto. Why the Sausalito setting?
Because I wasn't able to finish the poem until I moved back to
the U.S. and, one day, traveled on a ferry from Sausalito to San
Francisco. That refreshed me, brought it all back. Of course by
then the wife in question had already left. As you might imagine,
there’s some self-mockery in the poem. I don’t know
about other men, but more than once my “paramours,”
as you call them, have complained, “Robert, you’re
not listening….” But I am listening. Just not always
to them. But really, what is the line between self-involvement
and productive dreaminess?
KL: Where does a poem come from? An idea? A line?
RS: All the above, tantalized by an
idea, say. John Torres, a sculptor I met at the MacDowell Colony,
spoke of how he intuited what form resided in a hunk of granite
or marble and had only to chisel and carve to release it. Poems
also come from lines. A friend of mine, washing dishes, remarked
on the ugliness of her dog, a Boston terrier, “He’s
so ugly he’s a psalm to ugliness.” That ended up in
“Clancy the Dog.” Wonderful! And from a review of
Andy Warhol’s movie The Sleeper, I got the line,
“The action runs left to right,” which led to my only
publication in The New Yorker, incidentally. Other poems,
like “Uncle Dog: The Poet at 9” come all at once.
It’s a great mystery, but once one has had the experience
of a poem coming like that, a gift that one could not have chosen,
one is forever changed.
KL: Well…I wasn’t sure if I was going
to bring this up, but since you mentioned two dog poems right
off, I will. You clearly have an affinity for dogs in your work.
“Uncle Dog” was the first poem in your first book,
and is still one of my favorites. I realize certain subjects or
themes move certain writers, and others don’t. But…on
behalf of cat lovers everywhere: Why no cat poems?
RS: Of course I have nothing against
cats. What can I say? I can take them or leave them. But I am
genuinely moved by dogs. Many dogs, even dogs I meet for the first
time, I get this feeling in my chest—not unlike
the feeling I have when I see a beautiful woman. I have this physical
sensation…That may be followed by sexual thoughts or sensations,
but the first sensation is inevitably visceral, heart-arousal,
I’d call it.
Further,
and forgive me for going off on a tangent, but my interest in
health food dates back to the late 1940s when, a teenager, I began
lifting weights and delved into the relationship between health,
body strength and diet. We had a dog at the time and, researching
the contents of one dog biscuit versus another, and the nutritional
value of dog biscuits versus saltine crackers and Campbell’s
soup, I began sampling dog food, biscuits. I would never consider
eating cat food. But having consumed some dog biscuits, well,
I felt I had a further understanding of dog-mind.
KL: Now that’s commitment! Practically
method writing. Since I mentioned one of your early poems, and
having just read your Collected Poems, I note in the
early sections especially, a lot of free association. More aptly
put, mental hop-scotching rather than verbal gymnastics. Something
along the lines of Bly’s “leaping,” but usually
without the darkness, the at times self-conscious imported ‘duende’.
Where
did you pick this up? From other poets? Is it how your mind works?
RS: Yes, I suppose I was doing this
when I first began writing—in the early ‘50s—and,
yes, it is the way my mind works. Also, because I tend to pick
up on ‘spoken word’, the way I hear—overhear—language
in conversation. Everyday talk strikes me as surreal, mental hop-scotching.
Also, I’ve known and lived with creative, intelligent women
with lively minds who seemed to have a capacity to think, let
us say, on five or six levels at once. There are people with one-track
minds, but the women I am thinking of may speak about a friend’s
looks and health issues, refer to a TV show, laugh and joke, think
of something we may need to get for dinner, allude to some sexual
matter, intimate secrets, life, death and afterlife matters…all
pretty much at the same time. These elements in my early work
are probably equally due to literary influences—Freud, Jung,
Pablo Neruda, Robert Bly. And I’ve also been influenced
by great comedians—Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Mort Sahl, among
others.
KL: Tell me a little more what it felt like to
be drawn to poetry when you were coming of age.
RS: In 1951, an eighteen-year-old sailor stationed
in San Diego, I used to hang out, when I could, in bookstores.
I had recently begun writing and was looking for places to send
my work. I wasn’t so much interested in getting published
as in getting a little feedback on the half-literate things I
was writing, awful poetry. Sending work out to Poetry
(Chicago) and Time Magazine—what did I know?—was
my way of knocking at the door of literature, of the ‘community
of poets’. In the military during the McCarthy era, writing
poetry was suspect, a form of subversion—a ‘commie’
activity, it seemed. So when I discovered Poetry magazine,
for example, I was really taken with it, and read my first copy
cover to cover, over and over. That was, I believe, my introduction
to William Carlos Williams.
KL: You have no doubt experienced many changes
in the public face of poetry, particularly in the outlets for
publishing. Any then-and-now observations on that score?
RS: In the 1950s, I could read The Atlantic
Monthly, Harpers, The New Yorker, Poetry, and some of the
academic quarterlies, and feel I was keeping up. In the 1960s,
it still seemed possible to read and submit work on a regular
basis, to keep up with all the major literary magainzes, though
there were two or three times as many as there had been a few
years before. Now, with publication, one is lucky to have any
kind of readership much beyond one’s own community. Writer’s
Market lists…well, let us say, more than one would
care to count, let alone have time to read.
KL: So life was simpler back then, even for a
poet…
RS: In the 1950s there was something of a two-party
system, the Beats and the ‘gray-faced academics’,
with the Black Mountain Poets a respected ‘third-part’.
Now you need a calculator to enumerate, let alone keep up with
the activites of various poetry slams, the Latino/Hispanic readings,
the Native American poets, the African-American and Hip Hop poets,
the Cowboy Poets, the Language Poets, the New Formalists, the
New College Poetics poets—to name a few—and, of course,
the blending and crossing over of one and the other…Yes,
there’s a proliferation, a balkanization of poets into smaller
and sometimes hostile groups. It would be useful if there was
a little more solid discourse, more willingness for people who
write poetry to risk saying in print what they say in private
about their fellow poets and the state of poetry.
KL: Younger poets are very concerned with ‘making
it’, whatever that means. You have been published widely
and regularly, but are not a household name. How important has
it been, and is it, to you to be ‘popular’, to be
a ‘player’, in the greater world of po-biz?
RS: Over the years I’ve come to value
my relative lack of popularity. It’s part of who I’ve
been and who I am. I may have been ‘noted’, as people
claimed, in the 1960s and ‘70s, but I believe I partially
disappeared from peoples’ radar when I moved to Canada and
began teaching at the University of Victoria. I lived in Canada
from 1969 to 1985, ten years in Victoria on Vancouver Island and
fiveyears on the Toronto Islands. In fact, I wrote a nonfiction
book, The Toronto Islands, An Illustrated History, and
that became a best-seller—anything over five thousand copies
in Canada is a best-seller!—and that actually felt good,
being popular. In a sense, I started all over when I moved back
to the States in 1985. I worked as a food reviewer (“Mr.
Taste Test”), an undercover Santa Claus, technical writer
and editor, community college instructor—yeah, academic
freeway flyer, etc.—and gradually got back into the literary
scene, writing, publishing and giving readings. Popular? Not really.
Truth is, I’m just lucky to be doing what I’m doing,
participating, a player still, if the term even applies, in what
Philip Levine calls the “little world of poetry.”
KL: Poems come into flower heard aloud, the page
has limitations. That said, I have become something of a skeptic
about today’s cult of the reading. What can a reading provide
that print withholds, and vice versa?
RS: In the 1950s and ‘60s I heard live
readings b Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Stephen Spender and Allen
Ginsberg, to name a few. It enabled me to feel the unique one-to-one
relationship between poet and poem—no intoning, no vocal
bullshit with the poet taking on his ‘now I’m going
to read you a poem’ voice. Like you, I’m a skeptic
about what you call the “cult” of the reading. But,
take Lowell for instance. His early poems seemed remote from my
own experience as the Jewish son of a podiatrist growing up on
the North Side of Chicago. It wasn’t until I hear him read
that his poems came alive for me. And I read “Prufrock”
scores of times without really hearing it. The truth is, Eliot
was a poor reader of his own work. He sounds depressed, his voice
is flat. Still, for me his Caedmon recording was a revelation.
Yes, there are poets who say readings are performances, ‘shows’
that have nothing to do with the ‘real thing’—what
appears on the page. The Iowa Workshop’s “cornbelt
metaphysicals,” as they were known in the 1950s, wrote for
the page. Fuck ‘em. Poetry is an aural art, and I don’t
know what a writer gains by hiding behind print. And remember,
“it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that
swing,” applies as much to poetry as to music.
KL: You lived in Canada for many years, and have
dual citizenship. Two recent books, and your Collected,
have come out with a Canadian press. Do they consider you one
of their own—a ‘Canadian poet’—or a Yankee
interloper?
RS: Nowadays, I think I’m accepted, at
least to a degree, though if you’re a real Canadian, you
live in Canada—unless you’re Wayne Gretsky [the hockey
player]. But I do have family there, my son, his partner and their
daughter. Let’s say I’m connected, yes, but not entirely
accepted. After all, I’ve lived in Santa Cruz since 1985,
and I know I wasn’t considered “one of their own”
when I lived in Victoria, B.C., the heart of English Canada. In
the 1970s newly arriving Americans were regarded with skepticism.
In 1951, I had volunteered for overseas duty with the U.S. Navy,
served in the combat zone during the Korean War, but was still
considered someone escaping the draft. I also looked like an American
hippie. In fact, I was an American hippie, but I was
there to teach at the University of Victoria—1969 to 1973—until
they decided my teaching methods put me at odds with the dominant
white South Africans in the Department and my poetry. . .well,
they called it “incomprehensible.” Some of it was.
And my teaching methods were controversial. That is, holding classes
at the professor’s house was considered risky, out-of-the
ordinary. So in a sense I left under a cloud.
Anyway,
I married a very earthy, Russian-Canadian from Montreal, Quebec,
lived in Canada with her for fourteen years, fathered two children,
Canadian citizens and, as Jack Foley suggests, I’m a citizen,
at heart, of both countries, both worlds, but I also inhabit,
as he says, “an enormous in-between.”
Canadian
poet Richard Stevenson recently wrote: “You’re a Canadian,
man! You committed the unpardonable sin of coming up here to live
and getting involved with us bush leaguers!”
KL: You were a publisher for seven years in British
Columbia. What was that like, being on the other side of the fence,
dealing with poets’ egos and idiosyncrasies?
RS: Ten years, actually, 1969 to 1979. Well,
I felt it was time to pay my dues, serve other poets, deal with
their egos and idiosyncrasies—as publishers had had to deal
with mine. I learned humility. As Coffee House publisher Alan
Kornblum told me, “Poetry has a shelf life somewhere between
yogurt and cottage cheese.” In short, I learned that while
you may not make money by writing poetry, you could count on losing
money, lots of money, if you publish it. I made two big sales:
I sold my house, and then I sold my car.
Our
publishing house, Soft Press, produced twenty-one books, including
a signed, handset, numbered edition of In The Clock Of Reason,
by William Stafford. I think we sold it for $5.95, and there were
people at the time that complained we were “overcharging.”
If
I had it to do all over again, I would. I paid my dues and learned
something about what it takes to publish a book. Anyone who is
serious about writing—poetry or fiction—should have
a year or two of training in book design and typesetting, preferably
old style, with lead printing type and high quality paper. And
I’m not excluding people who do desktop publishing.
KL: With notable exceptions, little is heard of Canadian
poets in the U.S. In his Lives of the Poets, director
of the Carcanet Press, Englishman Michael Schmidt singles out
Canadians for a special dig. He calls modern strains of English
language poetry “streets,” and writes: “Canada
(a short street, that…)”
RS: He ignores the fact that Toronto,
alone, according to The Guinness Book of Records, has
Yonge Street, “the world's longest designated street.”
It also has the world’s largest annual literary festival,
at Harbourfront, and readings pretty well every night of the year,
as my friend, Canadian poet John Robert Colombo points out. Some
short street!
KL: So is it chauvinism? Cultural imperialism?
RS: On the question of chauvinism, yeah, I think
there’s a lot of that in the States. Cultural Imperialism?
Absolutely! My Canadian friends believe this goes back to colonial
days, when both Canada and the U.S. were trying to throw off the
yoke of British Imperialism. In their view, the U.S. has continued
to think of Canada as a branch plant of England, and the tendency,
I believe, is for Americans to read British poets before they
read Canadian.
Arrivals,
the largest Canadian poetry anthology published in the U.S. was
edited by poet-critic Bruce Meyer back in 1985. To my knowledge
there hasn’t been anything like it since. Of course literary
isolationism doesn’t preclude Americans from competing in
droves for any available prizes. And Canadian poets tell me the
majority of the judges—as for the Griffin Prize—have
been from the U.S.
KL: And the 2004 International Griffin Poetry
Prize-winner was an American, August Kleinzahler [the 2005 winner,
Charles Simic, is an American born in Yugoslavia]. So get your
back up even more over this and tell me why this is a problem;
what am I, the American reader of poetry, missing?
RS: An entire literature! The list of world
class poets writing in Canada right now, or just recently expired,
is long, and includes George Johnston, Margaret Avison, Don Coles,
Earle Birney, Dorothy Livesay, Al Purdy, Gwendolyn MacEwan…
God
knows, it’s hard to keep up. Poets whose work I know or
whose reputations compel me to seek them out include Roger Bell,
Susan Musgrave, Marilyn Bowering, Ronnie Brown, Phyllis Webb,
Don McKay, Anne Szumilgalski (who did manage her first book with
Doubleday in the U.S.), Robert Bringhurst, Patrick Lane, Eli Mandel,
Alden Nowlan, Robert Kroetsch, John Newlove—many of these
names come from the sixties! And let’s not forget Canadian-born
Mark Strand, Elizabeth Bishop [who lived for a time in Nova Scotia
as a child] and that all-around man of letters, John Robert Colombo—author
of one hundred fifty books. This year we’ll see a two-volume,
folio-sized collection of 2,500 poems. One of the most prolific
writers in Canada, Colombo has produced forty books of poetry
since 1960.
The
big difficulty is distribution. The Literary Press Group distributes
some Canadian books in the U.S., including many of the poets just
named. You may have to special order others from the publishers
or Amazon.com, but it’s worth the effort.
Look,
most Americans aren’t even aware that north of the border
there are two independent literatures, French and English. There’s
not a lot of translation or communication between ‘the two
solitudes’. On top of that we have our U.S. education system,
which is an underfunded mess and, particularly at the elementary
and high school level, pretty xenophobic.
When
we turn to Canadians they tend to be the ones with international
reputations—usually for prose. Michael Ondaatje, Margaret
Atwood, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen and Mordecai Richler.
KL: And most recently Anne Carson, much of whose
work I find puzzling, and chilly, intellectual. The scholar in
her seems to be wrestling with the poet, and for my taste too
often gets the upper hand. But, flashes of brilliance, surprises.
What’s your take on her?
RS: I admire “Tango II” from The
Beauty of the Husband, and I like it that those who comment
on her work are themselves driven to write poetry in order, it
seems, to do justice to what they are reading. That says something
admirable about her reviewers and something admirable, too, about
Carson. She’s been called a philosopher of heartbreak, and
I can see why.
And
as well known as she is, even some of her early books
are hard to come by in the U.S. Most poetry is published in small
editions (500 or so copies) by small literary houses with a staff
of two or three part-time people. The result, in Canada, is that
many of the country’s best poets, unable to find a slot
with a larger firm, go begging for an audience even in their own
country.
KL: But wait, I was at a book fair in Seattle in the fall
of 2002 promoting—if you can call it that—my most
recent book, and some Canadians were there. I met James Bryner,
the Literary Press Group rep, and spent the better part of two
days trading quips with two publishers, Richard Olafson of Ekstasis
Editions, and Brian Kaufman of Anvil Press and subTerrain
magazine. They both had the time-honored litany of small press
woes to relate, but I also noticed they carry sizeable lists of
poetry. And from what I gather, they receive subsidies—the
kind of money small presses in the U.S. haven’t had from
government for maybe fifteen years now. I don’t know about
audience, but poets seemed to be getting published, and
in handsome editions.
RS: The key word here is ‘audience’.
It’s great to be published, but how does that translate
into readers? I’m all for Canada Council’s generous
subsidies…God bless them. I’ve benefited from those
subsidies myself. Ten of my twenty books have been published in
Canada. But Canada’s a huge country and some publishers
are content to be minimalists. They’ll do the book,
put out something resembling a catalog, and not worry much about
distribution. That said, yeah, thank God for Canada Council and
the poets we have…even if we have to scramble to learn about
them—and find some way of buying their books.
Then
there’s the question of reviews…and the tendency of
poets, in print, to be kind to one another. That’s the tendency
in the U.S., but it seems even more so in Canada. Few people are
willing to rock the boat, say what they’re really thinking.
KL: If one can generalize, what is the Canadian
take on Canadian poetry?
RS: My Canadian friends concede that there’s
a flatness to the Canadian voice that isn’t enticing, but
at the same time—as Bruce Meyer points out—“you
can do a lot with flat.” Canadians haven't done enough to
export their work, either through readings or through foreign
editions. Quick, name six Canadian poets. Okay, time’s up.
Also,
Canada tends to be twenty years behind in terms of literary waves.
My friend Bruce has been a New Formalist since 1987 when, he says,
Richard Howard put him onto it. The first New Formalist anthology
is scheduled to appear in Canada later this year, Bruce says.
Bear
in mind that, compared to Canada, the U.S. poetry scene is huge.
Two or three readings by a foreign poet in Canada—at Toronto’s
International Festival, for example—and everyone knows who
they are. Canada may be physically larger than the U.S., but the
community is small enough for that to occur. Anyone who's read
at Harbourfront knows this is true.
Canadians
are doubly at risk because they're civilized and polite and yet
have to contend with this giant attack dog to the south. Yet,
as Bruce Meyer puts it, “I would hate to pin the label of
chauvinism on anyone. Let's just say Canadians are a shy people
who don't realize their own value and keep their light hidden
under a bushel.” Which is true. God bless them.
KL: For the adventurous reader, who are some
of the younger Canadian poets to seek out?
RS: One is the gifted Montreal poet Robyn Sarah,
author of A Day’s Grace and Questions About
The Stars. I read with her recently in Toronto, and her work
is fresh in my mind. She’s been singled out for praise,
too, by the critic David Mason in The Hudson Review.
I’m
not sure what “younger” means, but poets young or
new, new because we haven’t yet heard of them…the
list would include: singer-songwriter Robert Priest, Toronto poet
laureate Pier Giorgio Di Cicco (a priest), hockey-playing anthologist-poet
John Lee, Marty Gervais, Ronnie Brown, George Elliott Clarke,
Richard Stevenson, Stephanie Bolster, Julie Roorda and Bruce Meyer
who, with several of the others, has been to the U.S. and read
here. My friends in Canada mention dozens of poets scarcely known
in the U.S.—Borson, Friesen, Safarik, Zwicky, Noble, Moure,
Brand, Donnell, Thesen, Thompson….
KL: Many poets have dry spells, writer’s
block. Carl Rakosi famously stopped writing for thirty years—to
raise a family—then picked up right where he had left off.
What is the longest you have gone without writing a poem?
RS: My driest time came in the late 1980s when
I was fed up with freelancing, chasing assignments, chasing subjects,
chasing people to get paid. I badly needed money and found work
writing software user manuals in Silicon Valley. Sitting in a
windowless cubicle in Santa Cruz off Mission Avenue on Highway
1, I had to learn UNIX and XENIX and a whole new way of being.
I worked in the tech writing area of the engineering department,
and, to my surprise, many of my co-workers turned out to be story
and science fiction writers. The truth is, they were writing,
but I wasn’t. I was just trying to become a competent tech
writer. I had no juice left to write poetry. No poems for a year.
We
parted on good terms, but in truth I was fired for having “too
literary a style” for software user manuals. But, as I’ve
said elsewhere, I left a passionate devotee of computers.
KL: Robert, you’ve been writing since the
1950s. With your Collected Poems due out, what’s
next?
RS: I’m preparing for a series
of readings in Canada and the U.S. And working on a new collection,
“God is in the Cracks, A Narrative in Voices.” I’m
fortunate these days. Black Moss has been good to me, has invited
submissions, which allows me to think about writing in a new way,
one poem at a time, yes, but sequences, books…instead of
paying contest fees and spending valuable time sending out manuscripts
as I did in the past, for fifty years.
As
for the new poems, they’re mini-dramas, one-scene plays,
dialogues, monologues, having to do with the father-son relationship,
a continuation of what I’ve been doing since Rosicrucian
in the Basement. And talking dogs, too. There’s imagery,
yes, but the images arise through the characters themselves, including
the dogs—and the poems call for a certain ‘sound’,
a peculiar ‘voice’ that is, and at the same time isn’t,
my own.
KL: After all these years, when you sit down
to write, what still gets you excited?
RS: Everything. Everything about the next poem
that got me excited fifty years ago still gets me excited. It’s
all really one work and, in a sense, I’ve never stopped,
and, at the same time, I’ve never finished the ‘next
poem’. Truth is, friend, I’m right back at the beginning.
KL: That’s good to know. It makes me feel
a little better.
RS: Free verse or not, they’re
still verse, still music. There’s a tension between what
I am striving for, and the reality, the falling short. It’s
the interaction of at least two elements, often contradictory.
Podiatry, for example—my father’s profession—and
metaphysics, or the way in lovemaking a woman loses her voice
and becomes luminous, seems, just as the breathing turns heavy,
to sprout wings, moist…fragrant…sweaty. That excites
me, and something similar happens when the writing goes well,
the muse insisting words be spelled correctly, that the poet attend
to every last detail or, as I’ve heard her say more than
once, “Shut the fuck up.” Even so, it may take years
to get a poem right.
And,
friend, it doesn’t come easy. I’m an anxious person,
addicted to suspense. Is it going to happen… Is it even
going to come close to happening? Does it matter…? Did I
remember to wash my hands before sitting down at the computer?
You’ve heard it all before, I’m sure. It’s a
game. It excites me. What can I say? I love the game.
LIFE IS ITS OWN AFTERLIFE
Podiatrist Father:
“Enough already. Mourn,
mourn
all you want…
What good will it do?
Truth is, I feel great, son. Never better!
“So what if I’m invisible?
So what if I’m dead?
You don’t need a body to be a mensch,
a
man of substance.
Ach, but with a body at least
you’ve got some privacy.
Without a body you can’t conceal anything.
“There’s more, son,
and
bad news for you.
God, —this will surprise you—
when you die one of the first questions He asks is,
‘Did
you marry?’
Turns out after God created the world, the rest of the time
He spent making marriages.
So a couple, when they meet, it’s bashert,
‘it
was meant to be.’
That’s so… that’s how
together
they fulfill their destiny.
But divorce, that they don’t allow.
So you won’t be coming.
But
thank God
for
what you’ve got.
What are you missing? Not much. There is no afterlife,
not
really.
That’s right, son.
Life is its own afterlife.”
Copyright © 2005, Robert Sward.
A San Franciscan for over twenty years, klipschutz (aka Kurt
Lipschutz) is the author of three poetry collections: Twilight
of the Male Ego (Tsunami Inc. 2002), The Good Neighbor
Policy, and The Erection of Scaffolding for the
Re Painting of Heaven by the Lowest Bidder. His poems have
appeared in anthologies and periodicals throughout the U.S., including
Poetry, as well as in Canada, the U.K. and Ireland. His
journalism includes interviews with Carl Rakosi and August Kleinzahler
and critical appreciations of Harvey Pekar, Denis Johnson, Charles
Potts, and Bill Knott. He is a part time scrivener in a law office.
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