|
Number
287
April/May 2001
The Poet as
City Planner:
An
Interview with Robert
Pinsky
TONY BARNSTONE &
SHAWN FITZPATRICK
Copyright
© 2001 Poetry Flash
Robert Pinsky is one of America's foremost
poets and critics. Poet Laureate of the United
States from 1997 to 2000, during which time he
appeared regularly on PBS's Lehrer News Hour and
promoted his Favorite Poem Project nationwide. He's
published six books of poems, including his new and
selected, The Figured Wheel, and his
recently published collection Jersey Rain.
He's published several critical books, Landor's
Poetry, The Situation of Poetry, and
Poetry and the World. The second of those
books, The Situation of Poetry, has been
particularly influential, arguing that it's time
for American poetry to step beyond the Modernist
and 'neo-surrealist' image-bound writing to make
use of discursive and narrative techniques and to
broach the "abstractions" proscribed by Pound and
Williams. Pinsky, himself, has brilliantly done
that in poems like "Shirt" and "The Figured Wheel,"
from which his selected takes its title. He's also
worked as a translator, co-translating Czeslaw
Milosz's The Separate Notebooks with Robert
Hass and the author and, more recently, doing his
own fluid, luminously intelligent translation of
Dante's Inferno, approximating Dante's terza
rime in rhyme-rich Italian with English near and
slant rhymes. Pinsky's most recent prose book is
The Sounds of Poetry, a kind of anatomy of
the art, sparked through his own very special eye
and ear.
SHAWN FITZPATRICK: In your book The
Sounds of Poetry you break down poetry into its
simple, mechanical action of "words as air exhaled
from the body," thinking about what poetry is at
the most basic level. On the other hand, much of
your poetry is a complex web of allusions to the
Bible and mythology, and of at times multiple
voices combined in one poem. What changes do you
find taking place in yourself when going from the
mechanical and the simple to the complex in
poetry?
ROBERT PINSKY:Your navigational
compass, as far as I am concerned, is your voice:
how the voice---in a quite literal way---sounds to
you as you say the words of the poem. You navigate
by the sense of elegance or penetration or
attraction or mystery in the rhythms, the way the
consonants and the vowels fall or the sentences
reach across the lines. That's your guide, and
that's what you sail by, and then all of your own
history---which is to say all of human history:
that is the ocean. So, when you're alluding to the
landlord of your apartment, to Hermes, to Maxwell
Smart in Get Smart, to the Tang Dynasty, to
the St. Louis Browns... that's all part of the
ocean. Parts of the ocean look familiar; some parts
have lots of critters swimming underneath or
microscopic things within that might be bewildering
or strange. I also admire writing that is
transparent----there are poems by Williams, for
example, whose transparency I admire--but that
oceanic opacity is part of reality too.
SF: How does that ocean of experience
come into the actual writing of the poem? Is it
selective parts of the ocean that come into play
when you are writing?
RP: You don't know what you might
need in order to accomplish your journey. In trying
to get the movement of a poem, like a
gesture--pointing somewhere or going
someplace---you might need any of that vast range
of possible materials. It might be Shiva's consort
Parvati---who is a beautiful young girl, yet also
the death goddess---it might be all the different
varieties of banana---there are the commercial ones
that they sell at the supermarket---there are ones
that taste like strawberries; there are fat ones;
there are skinny ones; there are citrus-tasting
ones. I don't know what my association was right
there, but the mind starts to think about different
incarnations of the goddess, different incarnations
of the fruit. So what's the reality? What's the
form of it that makes this still the same thing?
You don't know what your mind might find in its
need to accomplish a significant movement.
TONY BARNSTONE: The extraordinary
thing about quite a lot of your work is the sense
that you have access to the whole ocean---to all of
language, all of human history, all of personal
history and all of literature---and not just to a
pool. That somehow in poems like "At Pleasure Bay"
and "The Refinery" you're giving yourself
permission to leave the body, pass from life into
death and then back into life again, and further
back through the web-work of language, and even
through genealogy. This seems to me like it is some
kind of penetrating imagination, or maybe a
visionary ability. Do you see yourself in the
Ezekiel-Christopher Smart-William Blake line of
visionary writers, or do you see it as a different
sort of thing? And did this come with your
development as a poet, or have you always had this
ability in some form or another?
RP: Possibly it helps to be a
provincial. I have had---from when I was quite
small---a perhaps visionary sort of ability to
treat whatever microcosm I was in as if it were the
universe. I grew up in a tight neighborhood in a
small town where "the woods" were a kind of waste
space between two blocks, just a few acres. "The
woods" behind my house were like a continent to me.
Every path in them had a sort of historical weight
and significance, and when I read about Robin Hood
or the Knights of the Round Table, I pictured
myself as one of those figures, and I pictured the
woods as that terrain: Sherwood Forest. You know
that song, "Give My Regards to Broadway?" My mind
was very cloudy regarding whether that was the
large Broadway in Manhattan, New York, or Broadway
in Long Branch, New Jersey, where my grandfather's
bar was called the Broadway Tavern. So, the
macrocosm always seemed available to me in some
rather (in a way) stupid part of my mind. I
couldn't distinguish between the importance of the
mayor of Long Branch and the president of a
country. The microcosm of Long Branch was so vivid
to me, and my own family's role in it was so vivid
to me that I took a kind of global or universal
view. The mysteries of life were absolutely present
to me, and I had a significant relation to them. I
never had a sense of myself as insignificant.
TB: It seems as if early on, even
before you were a writer, your imagination was very
much the imagination that Ralph Waldo Emerson
celebrates in "Self Reliance" or that Walt Whitman
does in Song of Myself, filtering everything
through the self.
RP: It's kind of an American
approach, I guess. You might say what I am talking
about is the grandiosity of the provincial. I've
never felt any institution or any city was larger
than me, because I felt large in relation to
them.
TB: ...appropriate for a New Jersey
poet. It's a very William Carlos Williams attitude,
as he says, finding "the universal in the
local."
RP: I suppose so, I suppose so.
[laughs]
SF: Some part of me believes that
writing a poem is a godlike act, that you are in
full control----you are the puppet master. However,
after writing the poem, and after it gets
distributed to each person who picks it up and
reads it, it would seem as though a change takes
place in the poem, due to this reader and that
reader's response. Would you say that the creation
of a poem is individualistic and all powerful at
that moment in time, or is it a communal effort
from the start?
RP: The word 'poet' means 'maker'.
And I suppose I think of myself as the architect or
the builder who makes the house---I make the public
building or design the city. I make that city, and
then when you wander into it and walk around in it,
when you have an apartment in it, and live in it
for a while, it is yours. That is, your experience
of the building---like mine, like that of someone
else who may walk into it---is different from the
experience of the one who conceives the building,
the one who draws the plans, hires the guys who are
going to bring the concrete for the foundation, and
the ones who will set the rebar and put the forms
up, and then who hires the other people who will
come and do the framing, people who do the finish
work, and the electricians and the plumbers. Years
after you think about all of that and you
coordinate all that and you construct it as an
entity, you might die. But that entity you made is
still created anew by each person who uses it and
who has a different experience of it. Perhaps it's
not a question of how Godlike it is to make
anything as it is like designing and building a
city or a large building.
SF: With that in mind, is there ever a
sense of injury in knowing that upon the release of
each poem to society or for publication, that it
will be changed? A part of you is going into that
poem, so is there ever a sense of loss, knowing
that your poem will be changed with the response of
each individual reader?
RP: That's a very good question. I
think that when that feeling comes over me, it gets
translated into a feeling that makes me feel, "Next
time I'm going to make one that will not be
diminished as it disperses." Even though that is
theoretically impossible. To think: "The next time,
I will use so much of myself and I'll make myself
so abundantly clear, yet be so extravagantly and in
such detail faithful to my conception, that there
will not seem this melancholy gap between reality
in the world and reality in the moment when the
poem is conceived as a whole."
So that the dilemma you name is a spur to
art---that fact that the work of art goes off and
has a life of its own, perhaps not exactly the life
you envisioned for it when you were most
passionately engaged with it.
TB: An interesting concept of the
poem. In your poem "At Pleasure Bay," you write
about "a catbird singing, never the same phrase
twice," the way [Greek philosopher]
Heraclitus writes that you can never step in the
same river twice. Even the poem itself never reads
the same way twice.
RP: Yes, each reading for each
reader. As many times and as many readers look at
it, it's going to be a somewhat different work.
TB: Ah, so it's always new, right?
Hopefully.
RP: That's the good side of it, is
that it is always new. Every time I read it, it's
new. It's not the same thing, and if it were, I
would feel depleted, I think.
TB: It seems as though what you have
been talking about is that the poet is an architect
who directs the vision of the person walking
through the house of the poem, and though each
person has a different experience of the house, the
architecture---the way in which you've arranged the
rooms---survives as a sort of an autotelic
object---as something that exists on its own. At
some level, that's an issue of audience, how the
poem is available to future audiences.
RP: Yes, it is.
TB: On the other hand, you have noted
the influence of William Carlos Williams's interest
in the ordinary and in the American vernacular and
environment on your poems, and certainly your poems
are full of that, as well as elements of
contemporary culture such as jokes and TV
references and so on. Do you worry that these
things will be so quickly dated that the poem will
also age---that the house will become
uninhabitable---or do you feel that, in fact,
popular references go such a great distance to
overcoming audience resistance to the difficulty of
poetry, that it comes into balance?
RP: Culture changes so much.
Culture varies and flexes and changes so that even
if your work isn't full of cultural references,
there's a good chance that, in some way, a culture
will find it alien in a fairly short time. I am
very different from George Herbert and Fulke
Greville, and Ben Jonson. For them to conceive that
in America a republic would develop, and there
would be waves of immigration from Eastern Europe
and elsewhere, and technology would affect culture
in such a way that a creature like me should come
to exist---I wonder if even Shakespeare's
imagination could conceive anything as strange as
you and Shawn and me, and this recording
equipment!
In cultural terms, there's something strange and
monstrous about us, maybe angelic as well, but
certainly something very odd. And then, if you
could formulate that proposition to them, and tell
them, "and, they admire your work; they read
[George Herbert's poem] 'Church-monuments,'
Antony and Cleopatra, and [Fulke
Greville's] 'Elegy' for [Sir Philip]
Sidney, and they find them beautiful and like
them." It's as strange as the sea-transformation in
The Tempest. I have no reason to think that
culture is going to slow down in those changes, so
if a hundred or a hundred and fifty or two hundred
years from now anybody is paying attention to what
we do, she's going to be maybe an
Anglophone-African poet, or she's going to be in
some Asian or South American country studying late
twentieth century American Literature, and I don't
think that what we do will rise or fall on the
evolution of cultural context, references to
sitcoms and so forth. It will rise and fall on the
same thing that makes me love to say, "While that
my soul repairs to her devotion, / Here I entomb my
flesh, that it betimes / May take acquaintance of
this heap of dust; /To which the blasts of death's
incessant motion, / fed with the exhalation of our
crimes, / Drives all at last" [from
"Church-monuments"]. It's the boogie of it, the
sound. It's the physicality of it---the way the
cadences fall. And if there are people left
hundreds of years from now who care about such
things, they won't care so much about Hermes, or
Sid Caesar; they'll care about, "Does it fall out
in a way I recognize as a work of art?" And if it
falls out in a way that seems like a work of art,
people will find out the significance of "the
house," or the TV show. And if not, then they
won't.
TB: This seems to give a lot of drama
to your poems, you know, in "The Street," or
"Refinery," or "Figured Wheel," the whole issue of
mutability.
RP: I guess you are right. In each
of those poems, in "The Street," in "The Figured
Wheel," and "Refinery," there is a mixture of
ancient imagery, made-up imagery, and contemporary
imagery. In "Refinery," I make up some gods: the
snake gods and the wolf gods, and that fairytale
castle they ride toward. It's the castle that the
lord, a corporation declared real, has built: the
refinery, toward which the gods are riding by
railroad. And "The Street" is full of Ivanhoe and
the Persian carpet and its patterns, but it's also,
"The son of a bitch / Bastard is breaking up my
home," and the John Flock Mortuary Home, the
texture of Long Branch, New Jersey, where I did
often see that circus parade coming down my street.
That very eclectic parade, in which there are
baseball players and Hindu Gods---the eclecticism
of the parade---is important to me in generating
work.
SF: A lot of times, your poems are
extremely difficult, and I would attribute that, in
part, to the eclectic parade that runs through the
poems. So, who are you writing for, and if you are,
in fact, writing for a particular person or a
particular group, are you ever afraid of pulling
the envelope too far or pushing the poem too far
into a realm where it can no longer be
seen?
RP: I don't think my work is so
hard. Compared to a lot that one reads, I think I'm
pretty straightforward. I write for me---but as
though I didn't write it. I try to write something
that, if I hadn't written it and I came across it
in a magazine, I'd feel curious, amused, moved. And
the occasional opacity or real quick, abrupt
transition, I hope, would charm me. I'd say, "What
happened there?" with some feeling of interest, I
hope. In fact, I think difficulty is one of the
things that people like, up to a point; I try to
make the poems such that I would be attracted by
their moves, including their shifty or bewildering
moves. In my own tastes, I get impatient if I know
where a thing is going. It seems a rhetorical
workout if I see the first four lines or the first
eight lines and can know from them where the next
twenty are going to go. I'm impatient,and I like
the swerve and the dip and the sudden bump. Hell, I
think my stuff is a lot easier than most video
games. Video games can be really hard to figure
out.
TB: I think this is a good parallel.
The video game is a fascinating genre. You interact
with the video game very much like you interact
with a poem. To make the 'poem' work, you have to
move the joystick. And when you figure out the
pattern, that's the pleasure. Compared with
television, it is a nice, interactive technology.
You're very interested in computer technology.
You've written Mindwheel, or created
Mindwheel which is an interactive novel or
narrative. You're also the poetry editor for
Slate, which is an online magazine. Can you
conceive of what is going to happen to the poem now
that text on a screen can, for example, incorporate
sound, video, animation, all kinds of hypertext
links? What's going to happen to the linearity of
the poem and to the nature of what goes into a
poem? Do you think that the online novel that is
currently up for the Booker Prize is actually a
novel, or is a novel something between cloth-bound
covers that is printed on paper and occupies space
on a bookshelf?
RP: I don't think anybody can
conceive what the genres of the future are going to
be. I think that genres of art and technology are
so exquisite, and changing so rapidly, and the
human imagination itself is also so powerful and so
capable of different things, that we cannot
imagine---literally, cannot produce a mental
similitude or image---of what people might be
doing, the way books will look, twenty years from
now. It's too hard to picture. The words of a poem
come from the human body one at a time, and
therefore, in a certain order. In that sense,
linearity is immutable, if, by 'poem' you mean as I
do something that comes from this column of air
[points to chest], vibrates here
[points to throat], and is shaped here
[points to mouth]. And then other little
physical vibrations receive it here [points to
ear]. That's not capable of changing all that
much, if inherently the appeal of the medium is
that the medium is one human body. Well, there
might be poems incorporated into computer
entertainments and transformed by them, but the
poem part of it is precisely that it uses an
ancient technology---a technology that is part of
our evolution as a critter, which is the strange
fact that this mammal communicates by means of
grunts---amazingly articulated, and organized, and
perceived grunts that come from the orifice of
nutrition. Now, if you hadn't ever heard of that
arrangement before, you'd think it was bizarre. And
the exquisite shades of meaning that can be
conveyed with these grunts! The description of the
nerves in a dog's head---into the main branch goes
the optic nerve, which is tucked behind this
muscle---"Ode to a Nightingale," we can convey all
this with language. All these things are
communicated in a system of mouth noises. It's
remarkable! That technology is ancient, and part of
its appeal is how ancient and fundamental it is and
how far back it goes. So, while welcoming and
enjoying all the permutations of technology,
also---for me---the poem is something I can do
after the electricity fails. The poem is... it's
just... [touches face and chest] in
here.
TB: I had an experience once, when I
was living in China. I had just written a sonnet at
a time when I was trying to learn how to write
sonnets. I was trying to do one a day, just to get
the form down, and the power went out, as it often
does in China. Now, this was an old computer which
was a portable Compaq, but at that time, it was the
size of a suitcase---they didn't have such things
as laptops! It wasn't saved, of course, because the
computers didn't automatically save back then. So,
after the power went out, it was pitch black, but
the words were just resonantly radiating out of the
screen enough that I could barely read them for a
few seconds. So I looked down the end of the lines,
and got the last words, and I repeated those 14
words---I just kept saying them and saying them and
saying them, while banging my shins, stumbling
around in the dark, until I found a piece of paper
and a pen, and then I jotted them down. Half an
hour later, the power came up, and---having the
end-rhymes---I was able to reconstruct the sonnet.
And I reconstructed it nearly perfectly, which says
a lot about the nature of meter.
RP: You were using three different
technologies: you were using the computer
technology, which is very fast and quite dazzling,
but in this case was vulnerable to Chinese
electricity; you were using the technology of the
pencil, which, in that circumstance, happened to be
more reliable for you; and you were using the
ancient technology of "like grunts," of sounds that
you make with your body that have a certain
resemblance and a certain difference.
TB: That's right. The way with
[Argentine writer] Jorge Luis Borges, after
he went blind in the middle of his life, he had to
give up on writing short stories and begin writing
sonnets, because he could keep a whole sonnet in
his head, and then speak it out after he worked it
out mentally.
RP: That poem of mine "ABC" where
each word begins with a successive letter of the
alphabet in order---I never had to make an effort
to memorize the poem. You memorize it as you're
writing it because the memorization almost
is the composition of the poem. It is very
easy to say the poem aloud by heart because the
sequence of letters in the alphabet is so deeply
ingrained in our memory, in that perfectly
arbitrary sequence.
SF: Poetry started out as an oral art,
that ancient form of grunts, but because of who we
are today, because of new technologies, it has
turned into more of a written form. Do you think
it's lost something along the way in terms of how
it is now expressed or how it is now
written?
RP: I think there is a tremendous
loss if people don't recognize the vocality at the
center of the art. If there weren't some problem in
that I wouldn't have had to write a book called
The Sounds of Poetry. The Sounds of
Poetry is a kind of instruction book and
reminder that the primary ingredients of the art
are vowels and consonants and sentences and
lines.
Can I ask a question?
TB/SF: Yeah!
RP: Can you show me some examples
of difficulty in my work?
SF: In "What Why When How Who" you
lose me at the end.
RP: Yeah, good example---that's
about as difficult as it gets.
SF: One thing I noticed in your
reading last night is that you will bring a lot of
things in a poem, and I will be with you, and it'll
change, and I'll be with you, and I'll be okay with
the change. But I think the changes that
accumulate, at some point, give me a little bit of
an overload.
RP: It's just shifted ground so
many times. I think the end of "What Why When How
Who" is a great example, and I think when it is
difficult it often is a matter of really fast
piling up of many ingredients.
TB: I heard a lot of these poems,
especially the ones that went into The Want
Bone, eight or ten times at your readings in
Berkeley before I ever saw them on the page. It's
an interesting way to go into the poetry. The first
couple of times I was mainly just listening--- you
have a very mesmerizing reading voice---I was
listening to the sounds; I was capturing images
here and there, and it would come together, but I
would have a hard time articulating how it was
coming together. With successive hearings and
eventually reading on the page I eventually cracked
the code, but for me, part of the pleasure was the
walking of the tightrope in terms of my
understanding. I was walking the tightrope with a
pole, and I stumbled and threatened to fall into
the net, but recovered, and I think that a lot of
the pleasure is that save, and the fact that the
poem weaves in a way that you don't expect.
RP: Let me look at the poem. [Reads from
"What Why When How Who"]:
More images, as when desiring we desire
Fresh musics of desire, at concentric removes.
Doing a brake job, he sings into the wheel
and I do remember seeing this guy working on a
car singing this Eagles song, while he was working.
I can't remember the name of the song.
Somewhere alone she knows a boy is
waiting
Ta da ta da ta da, So she drives on through
The night anticipating, because he makes
Her feel the way she used to feel, and
so
While he rebuilds the calibers he makes
Me feel the music of her heart as she
Drives toward the boy whose waiting she
imagines
Restoring her lost desire…
It is a strikingly complex thing to have in a
rock song: that she is anticipating seeing him
because he makes her feel the way she used to feel.
This guy, while doing a brake job, is singing about
her wanting to feel----and therefore feeling
something for this guy because of how he makes her
feel:
…and so
While he rebuilds the calibers he makes
Me feel the music of her heart as she
Drives toward the boy whose waiting she
imagines
Restoring her lost desire, concentric rings
Each seeing more than the one that it encloses
Yet somehow larger than what we make around
it…
See, there is always another ripple or ring
outside.
…somehow larger than what we make around
it,
With even the death camps radiating their
jargon
And nicknames, surrounded by their lore and
studies
It's just the art-making instinct I'm thinking
of, the instinct that makes us sing while we work,
or make up songs. Or poems. That desire---which we
could say is all about [the sex act], it's
all about bodies---turns out to be tremendously
much about the imagination, about making what
really are works of art---the creation or
re-creation of that other person and
yourself---that you make when you fall in love.
She's imagining the work of art this boy is making
in her head and that re-makes her, and then the
brake guy frames all of that, thinking about it,
making himself feel a little different.
As the tumblers fall. The current swells and
shifts,
It lives by changing---Andreas Capellanus
Eight hundred years ago, The Art of
Love:
And he does say this eight hundred years
ago---he wrote a book called the The Art of
Love.
Rule IV: It is well known that love is
always
Increasing or decreasing.…
I can remember a black guy I was in college
with, sophomore or junior year, he told me, women,
it's always either going up or down, tighter or
looser. You don't want it standing still.
…The country changes
Outside of town, and the little town itself
Is so demolished it seems that all along
It was a tissue of changes...
And I think that---like love---culture is made
out of change; it's not a state, it's a flux.
...though the boardwalk
Still with its giddy herringbone ribbon marks
Our element at its border with a greater
one,
That in its darkness regularly roars
And falls and rises: as if we made a rocket
Molded in the image of a human body
Hugging its shoulders, head at the streaming
prow
With eyes held shut, and launched it at the
sun.
I'm just trying to think what would be the
ultimate furthest reach of this restless, desirous
making making making making and never knowing what,
why, nor how, nor when, nor who.
The poem is obsessed with making, and a kind of
a fear, a kind of restless making. I confess, I
agree with you, it does generate a kind of dizzy
proliferation. The parade goes by very quickly, and
it is a very crowded parade. But it is all about
making and desire and the way makings incorporate
and include and frame one another.
SF: That is quite an inspiring poem.
You have dizzied me.
TB: It seems in a poem like that you
have written into the poem the method of
interpretation necessary to crack the poem's
code---as a pattern of concentric rings.
RP: I hope so, I hope that the
impatience or restlessness or the sort of
centrifugal quality of the poem will help you to
understand that that's the kind of thing it is.
TB: I think of the pivoting drawbridge
in "At Pleasure Bay," which mirrors the way the
poem pivots between stories. The issue of the pivot
is interesting to me, because I've been thinking
about your poems from last night, the rhetorical
form you're using in your new work, in which each
poem begins with a reference to the end of the
previous one. I've been interested in this myself
recently because of a lot of Japanese haikai
, which is not quite the same thing as
renga, though both are forms of linked
poems. In one of your poems, "Impossible to Tell,"
you speak of [Japanese poet] Basho and his
students writing a "collaborative
linking-poem..."
RP: Yes, "Impossible to Tell"
works very much in the way I imagine renga
working.
TB: In renga, like in
haikai, you have short linked poems, each of
which picks up on the previous poem...
RP: Yes, and there is a master who
will organize. It's like a social event, and the
master will organize rules and the sequence
something like an excellent host. Perhaps if you,
Shawn and I were doing it, you'd do four or five
haiku, and one of your haiku would
have to include autumn, and it would have an image
in it of leaves in autumn and of leaves going
floating up in the wind very briefly before they
fall. Then, when it's my turn, I do my four
haiku, and I'm going to have a winter
haiku in there somewhere, and I'm going to
have images going up and then down---maybe
snowflakes or a skier on the slopes. And when it's
his turn he's going to do four haiku, and
one of them is going to be a season, and his is
going to have spring in it. And there is going to
have to be something in it where the waterfalls get
full of water in the spring, and when you look at
the waterfall for a long time, the motion of
falling becomes a motion of going up. Now, you've
completed that cycle, and you know that now it's
going to be summer; there won't be falling or
coming up, but that motion is going to be a line.
This is not really what it is; this is an
equivalent of what renga is.
In "Impossible to Tell," I'm thinking of the
renga-like motion when people who really like
telling jokes let themselves loose to have a very
long session of telling jokes. So you have an
optometrist joke, and the optometrist is Polish,
and then you have a Polish joke about a dentist,
and Shawn has one about a dentist, and it goes on,
linked and expanding and wandering and
returning.
TB: Very interesting. In the
haikai I brought today, Basho and his school
of poets start out with a haiku [a three
line Japanese syllabic poem with a sequence 5,7,5
syllables]; it's called a hokku because
it's a haiku that sets off the sequence. The
following tanka [a five line Japanese
syllabic poem with a sequence 5,7,5,7,7
syllables] picks up on the final two lines, and
the next poet writes another tanka, picking
up on the last lines of the previous one. So it's a
sort of interesting linked sequence, linking
different poets together, creating a long
meditation in a series---again, usually on a
seasonal sort of theme. I wanted to talk about
that, how your new work uses this sort of linkage
from poem to poem, but even more about the
gameplaying, the rhetoric, the interest we have in
reading books like The Temple by George
Herbert or The Branch Will not Break by
James Wright, books that are symbolically or
structurally sequences, instead of anthologies of
fragments. What is the pleasure for you of writing
a sequence like that? What is the pleasure of
game?
RP: I think the idea of hooking
the ending of the poem to the beginning of the next
poem is another way of coming at the same question
that comes up in Shawn's saying the meaning is
pretty difficult there at the end of "What Why When
How Who." Motion and conductivity. How do you get
the quality of the gesture, which is to
change---you know, the body is the same placed here
as it is if it were there. And also consistency:
the dancer wants motion [makes a rising dance
gesture with his arm], but he also wants this
[indicates the top of the gesture] to have
some relation to this [indicates the bottom of
the gesture], where it starts out. The hooking
of poem to poem, I hope, will make them work as
glosses for each other. It's that simple. It gives
me the opportunity in one poem to do what I tried
to for the ending of "What Why When How Who" when I
was talking to you about it. I started using other
metaphors that aren't in the poem, and I elaborated
on the idea of even the concentration camps
generating works of art and works of the
imagination and jargons and images, because we're a
culture-making animal. Even in the most disgusting
and appalling and horrible of circumstances, you'll
start to create culture around that circumstance.
Well, as I envision the book, "What Why When How
Who" would be followed by a poem that might pick up
that art-deco rocket; it's a rocket with a sort of
helmeted head, like a caryatid on a thirties
building, a carved art deco-building, and I would
hope,of course, for that poem to add something, and
to provide a sort of gloss on what I was thinking
about those concentric rings of making---the
imaginative construction and
reconstruction---surrounding something as basic as
horniness. The Eagles song is basically about
people getting together to make love, and how some
songwriter wrote it; the Eagles sing it; this
mechanic working on the brake job on the car sings
it to himself; I hear him singing it, and I
actually think of that imagined woman and all the
imagining she's doing.
TB: It makes a lot of sense. In a way
that's the heart or structure of the imagination of
that poem. You would expand outward from poem to
poem, instead of from move to move within the
poem.
RP: Yes. And maybe civilize the
poem a little bit. Make it seem less raw and
challenging and less mean to the reader and a
little more relevant. You know, "let me start
again." "Let me pick up where I left off."
TB: This links to me, in a maybe
idiosyncratic way, to your translation of Dante.
You have now written the Inferno from the
inside.
RP: You can say that. I've
certainly translated it. Which is like, certainly,
putting your hands on the master's hands and having
him show you what he did.
TB: Yeah, the ouija board. You're the
club that he uses to swing at the ball.
RP: When you're teaching a little
kid to swing, you put his hands on it. I'm the
little kid and Dante's swinging the bat.
TB: Having the master holding your
hand as you're swinging the bat, especially for
something as extraordinary as this, how has it
changed you as a writer and your ambitions? Do you
now want to sit down and write another epic poem?
What have you learned as a poet from being Dante
for awhile---being Dante for a year?
RP: His confidence and boldness of
imagination strike all the more the deeper you get
into that work. It's pretty unorthodox, his
cosmology, his theology, the boldness with which he
combines personal scores he wants to settle,
classical mythology, Christian notions, God knows
what all, and makes a little synthetic world, his
own world, a constructed universe. The eclecticism
appeals to me, along with the boldness of it. He
manages to make his eccentricities become something
other than eccentricity. They become realities. We
spoke of a piece of architecture. The
Inferno is a pleasure palace, a horror
palace, that one wants to walk around in forever;
it's as interesting as any place I've ever been.
It's like an amazing city where every street
corner, every store, every house looks like you
want to go in it and experience it and open it.
It's like some unimaginably marvelous Florence or
Venice or Paris.
TB: The poem as the city that you've
been talking about.
RP: That would be one way to think
of the Commedia, the three parts of the
Commedia as endlessly vital and interesting
cities that we move through.
TB: Formally, in the way it comes off
the page, Dante's terza rima seems an extension of
what you are doing in your poetry. You often write
in tercets.
RP: Yes, I always have. Three is a
nice forward tumbling kind of number. It's always
saying, "and then...this!" Four is like a chair or
a table or an animal. Four stands there. Three
always seems to tumble forward, and I've always
liked the deadpan quality, that metronomic quality
of three, three, three, but you're leaping past it.
Dante's imagination has that quality; it's always
shifting and changing.
SF: What is it that attracts us to
Robert Pinsky, or Tony Barnstone, to Dante's
Inferno, to any work of poetry? Aristotle
says in "The Art of Poetry" that it's two things,
the instinct for imitation and the instincts we
need to enjoy the works of imitation. Do you think
these two things are instinct, and in fact, do you
think these two things are what lead us to enjoy
what is sitting in front of us?
RP: The human animal is an
art-making animal. Almost its main attribute is the
restlessness with which it makes. Someone was
telling me the other day about a passage he had
read somewhere about primates and canines. Canines
are contemplative. That is, if all is well with the
canine, it's in a place it likes to be, and it's
well-fed, a canine will become very satisfied. A
primate becomes restless very quickly; it starts to
jump around, do this or that, change things. If you
build a lot of primates tract housing, the
dwellings all look exactly alike, but in a few
years the primate will have changed the
landscaping, added breezeways, different kinds of
garage doors, idiosyncratic paint jobs. And if our
parents' generation have collars that do this, then
our generation has collars that do that, or has no
collars at all, or goes back to our great
grandparents' generation with a little change, and
does that with the hair and this with the hair.
We don't have the quality of repose that the
canines do, or the felines, and I think that making
something new, a diversion, is probably part of an
evolutionary imperative having to do with how we
hairless apes survive. The classical tag is that
the animal is puny; its hide doesn't give it very
good protection from cold or from enemies. Its
claws and teeth are almost useless as weapons. It
can't run very fast compared to most other species,
is kind of a below average swimmer, cannot fly at
all, is a below average climber, but it does all of
these things a little bit. Shifty---it's a clever
little monkey. And that idea of "what can I do
next" does seem to be a part of how we survive.
TB: Mahadevi, the Indian poet, in a
poem called "Monkey on Monkeyman's Stick"---and
this is something that she picks up from the
Upanishads somewhere, or the Dhammapada---talks
about the spirit as a monkey, always restless,
never at ease, jumping from thing to thing; the
soul is constantly moving from object to object,
desire to desire, and if we could only keep
still---then nirvana, release, awakening.
RP: This is a commonplace I
believe in Buddhist as well as Hindu lore---the
mind as a monkey.
TB: ...Which takes me to another
question I wanted to ask you. In a lot of your
poetry I see echoes of the Bhagavad Gita and the
Upanishads, Bhakti poetry, some Sufism here and
there, a little bit of Omar Khayyam. You seem very
interested in a plethora of pan-religious
experience.
RP: Asian spiritual thought is
very appealing to me, and particularly all those
little Hindu mind-games and exercises that
encourage you to think in increasingly vast
perspectives. And to think of time as circular
rather than linear. I think in some deep part of me
I do think of time as circular---certainly I'm more
skeptical about linearity. And those games, they're
a little bit like a passage in "What Why When How
Who" because you have Brahma or somebody sitting in
a palace, and coming towards him; let's say there
are ants, and each ant is paying tribute because
each ant is carrying on his back a hundred
universes, and they're bringing universes to
Brahma. And the line of ants goes further than you
can see; it's just tremendous. If you look
carefully at each ant, at the hundred universes
that it has on its back, in each of those universes
is a Brahma sitting on his throne and a long line
of ants, bringing a hundred universes on each ant's
back. These meditations are like calisthenics,
exercises to strengthen your mind beyond
narrowness, provinciality, of taking your own
Brahma very seriously. You talk about the vastness
of the universe; you must fill it in and try to
teach yourself with perhaps even childish little
parables like that one, to gradually enhance and
deepen your sense of what you're going to need to
fill the vastness.
TB: The atman [individual
spirit] is the same as the brahman
[the spirit of the universe] in Hinduism;
but also the soul is the oversoul in
Transcendentalism. It seems like the West has
somewhat of a similar tradition, not just because
of the influence of the East on Emerson, Whitman
and Thoreau. There's something like it in the use
of Christian typology as a way of appropriating
Judaism---Samson as a type of Christ, and so
on.
RP: Dante's doing something
similar in the way that he suggests a kind of
Ur-reality, a kind of reality underlying realities
that he perceives. This almost Gnostic quality
appears in the nature of the shades he's
encountering, his sense in which they both are and
aren't real. The souls, they're suffering; they
seem to be suffering physically. One of my favorite
passages to think about in this respect is when the
centaur Chiron points out to his companions when
Dante and Virgil come down the slope that Dante's
feet, unlike Virgil's, are actually displacing
stones as they climb---which is strange because in
a sense this realm is not made of matter, a
shadow-realm as Virgil is a shade. So, while the
Inferno is a disgusting and manifold
presentation of physical suffering, in some ways
also the physical suffering is just a
representation that is gesturing toward something
else.
TB: You deal a lot with religious
matters, in poems like "The Changes" and "At
Pleasure Bay." You seem very attracted to the Hindu
notion of the wheel of birth and rebirth...
RP: Yes, well my book is called
The Figured Wheel.
[laughter]
TB: Do you think of yourself as a
religous poet? Or as a poet who is attracted to
issues of religion? And have you made any decisions
about the universe at this point?
RP: I'd like to think of myself as
a poet of the sacred. And almost every poem I've
written involves the sacred or blasphemy, and I
think blasphemy can be a sort of avenue to the
sacred, or testing of the sacred. I think of myself
as in line with those poets who are not poets of
piety. And it's almost an operating principle in my
work that piety is not a satisfactory way to the
sacred. I suppose I could divide all the poets I
admire into the good children who practice piety
and the bad children who are always undermining
piety: George Herbert is clearly a good child; he
takes the turn of piety. I think Gary Snyder is a
good child. Emily Dickinson is not a good child;
she's a bad child, like Donne. In such writers, any
terms of piety have to be ironic or subverted or
twisted, made odd and brazen.
TB: Dickinson puts religious terms in
ironic quotes.
RP: Yes. Wallace Stevens clearly
is another bad child. And it's not only traditional
piety, but whatever the available terms of piety
are, you have to get very far away from anything
that can be accused of belonging in the religious
art shop.
TB: Both Stevens and Dickinson, one of
the ways in which they're bad children is that they
try to steal God's work---they make a religion out
of art---along the lines of Matthew Arnold, and
others, in the late Victorian and modernist
periods... William Carlos Williams.
RP: Yeats.
TB: ...and Yeats.
RP: Eliot's a good child. I think
Ginsberg is a great poet, but in his best poems
he's a bad child, and when he tries to be a good
child, he's less of a good poet.
TB: Probably right about that. He was
a better poet early on when he pretended he wasn't
revising, and he actually did revise, than later on
when he got too caught up in that "first thought,
best thought" Zen thing.
RP: He became pious about his own
spontaneity.
TB: Exactly. I'd like to ask you
another question which is again one of those
ringers; it is a very difficult question, but I
imagine you'll answer it well. The life of a poet,
usually comes with lack of respect, lack of honors,
lack of money, usually lack of a job, and so on.
The poet is usually disrespected. Probably you get
this on airplanes going from reading to reading,
when someone asks you what you do and you say,"I'm
a poet," and they respond, "Well, how do you make a
living?" There's that sense of some level of
interest but also a disdain for one's lack of a
marketable skill. And yet---we were talking about
poetry and the sacred---a lot of poets have found
something sacred in poetry itself, if only because
of the way it qualitatively changes the way you
look at the world. Why have you made the decision
to go this road, and do something so incredibly
difficult and resistant to what might be---in
materialistic and in other terms---a good
life?
RP: I think there is a kind of
grandiosity involved, or an aspiration to
aristocracy. I'm trying to take your question quite
literally and psychologically in biographical terms
and not answer it theoretically. I grew up in the
context of a small town where my family was well
known. We didn't have any money. When I was quite
small,we were very poor; my father was unemployed
for awhile; he became prosperous when I was in my
late teens. He never got rich, but you know, we had
a house. When I was quite small, the family wasn't
very well placed in material ways. But we were well
placed in the subtle sociogram of the sort of
Italian and Jewish families in the city of Long
Branch who had known one another for a long time.
My grandfather's bar, my other grandfather's
window-washing business, the fact that my father
when he was in high school became an apprentice
optician in the office of the optometrist,
Alexander Vineberg, who later became mayor of the
town---I had at least some confused sense of us as
something like gentry. Then you get old enough to
realize this is a microcosm; it's not gentry at
all. You're nobodies, in the larger world,
not---socially---anywhere important to, say, the
New York Times.
In the history of American and European art one
great source of artists, the social class that the
artists come from, is lower middle class, with some
pretentions, but they're rather fragile
pretensions. And if you become a scholar or a
lawyer, or a doctor or a businessperson, out of
that class, in some sense you're always a little
behind. You started off in an overcrowded
apartment. To enter the realm of art is to be out
of the social system in some ways. In the history
of art, not that there are no genuine aristocrats
like Philip Sidney---or genuine plowmen poets, or
working class poets---that ambiguous provincial
middle class is one of the sources of artists. So
if I look at it objectively, it was kind of a
morose social-guarding older child's way to be a
prince, to be the artist. Because even if you
become a very successful wealthy businessman, you
don't become a prince. The artist however does
become, in some figurative way, a prince.
SF: I think I've heard it said, or
read in past interviews, in fact I think I heard it
said last night, that you have raised a family, you
have taught, and you have written ... and those are
your three things. I read in the past that when
asked on a plane, you will in fact say that you are
a teacher.
RP: Yes, I usually say, "I am a
teacher," because most of my life I've earned my
bread that way. I've tried to do a decent job of
it, while in my heart writing is my vocation.
SF: Do you think there will be a time
when you answer, "I am a poet," or can there ever
be a time when you answer, "I am a poet"?
RP: I've been advised that the
best answer is to say,"I sell office furniture." It
makes for a pleasant plane ride all around.
[laughter]
TB: Walter Benjamin, in his famous
essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction," speaks of the work of art as
possessing an "aura," one might say an aura of
authenticity, stamp of creative approval, perhaps,
that is sapped through the act of reproduction, but
one thing that's always struck me about this is
that a poem in fact is inherently a reproduction.
Perhaps it never had an aura to get lost. Quite to
the contrary, it exists only in print, or only in
the voice that speaks it, or in memory, and there's
no original to hang up in the Louvre like the Mona
Lisa. By some logical extension you might say that
the poem has no authenticity or no aura, but that
clearly is not true. It seems to me that a lot of
what you're saying in the The Sounds of
Poetry, or in what articles I've read out of
it, excerpted here and there, is that perhaps the
poem is achieved in the moment of its incarnation
with the reader. If so, is that really what you're
trying to get at through the Favorite Poem
Project---through asking ordinary people to recite
and record their favorite poems?
RP: Yes, precisely, I think the
thing that is equivalent to the original individual
work of art is the reader saying the poem aloud in
her voice, or his voice. When the poem is uttered,
that is the poem. In this sense, the words of the
poem in print do not exactly comprise the poem. In
my mind, in my opinion, the poem as said by the
poet---a singer plugging a song, courting
approval---that is not as much, not precisely, the
central poem. The central poem is when the person
who loves it, not as parent but as lover, says it
aloud. It's not necessarily a performance; it's a
vocal embodiment. And that vocal embodiment is more
primary, more central.
The Favorite Poem Project attends to that
phenomenon of vocal embodiment. It is a phenomenon
I think people recognize. There's an
anthropological way a gathering of people pay
attention to the one who can play an instrument or
game well, to the one who can sing or leap
excellently. The group pays a certain attention to
a great dancer. There's another, different form of
attention we pay to one who is one of us, not
specially gifted, but who is inhabited by the
spirit of the poem. And who stands up and
says---not as an expert, not as a polished
performer---but as an ordinary person, declaring, I
have this treasure, and I give it to the community.
That is the special kind of attention that these
Favorite Poem readings achieve. The art of poetry
relies not so much on the performance, exactly, but
rather on the experience, the mysterious experience
of feeling "I had this work of art in my body."
SF: As Poet Laureate, you seem to have
reached the pinnacle of your poetry career, though,
hearing you speak and in reading your work I wonder
if it possibly can be that this is true, that you
have pushed the art and the progression as far as
it will go. With the Poet Laureateship, and with
the Favorite Poem Project, as well as the books
that you currently have out, where do you see going
now?
RP: You know Shawn, the word
career is a much a lesser term than the
phrase life's work. Career is a smaller
thing. Career is where you are employed, where you
published your books, what prizes you've won. You'd
rather have it go well than ill, but that's not the
essential thing that you seek in a life as an
artist. The art is not a mere career; it is your
life's work. Your career may interfere with your
life's work, or it may facilitate your life's work.
Somebody gives you a lot of money or a literary
prize, and that's part of your career, but it's
also going to help you---or less likely, going to
hinder you---in getting your life's work
accomplished. But the proper purpose of a career is
not to please your parents, not to get your name in
the paper or to enhance your own ego. It's to
enhance---or facilitate---your accomplishment, your
life's work. So, I have plans like everyone else,
which for me means: to be an artist.
Tony Barnstone teaches at Whittier College,
near Los Angeles. His newest book of poems is
Impure. His other works include Out of
the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry,
Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Selected Poems
of Wang Wei, and The Art of Writing:
Teachings of the Chinese Masters. He also, with
Willis Barnstone, co-edited Literatures of
Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Shawn
Fitzpatrick is a student at Whittier College.
Return to
Top
of Page
• Archive
Index
|
