SOURCE: An interview in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter, 1977, pp. 1-19.

[In this interview, originally conducted in 1974 and updated in 1976, Wakoski discusses many aspects of poetry, including the role gender plays in writing, her concern with "beauty" and aesthetics, and the state of contemporary poetry.]

[Healey]: When did you first begin to write poetry?

[Wakoski]: When I was about seven years old. I wrote many sonnets and began taking writing courses in the fifties at Berkeley. I was encouraged by Tom Parkinson and Josephine Miles, and admired Robinson Jeffers and T. S. Eliot. I think I was fortunate to be in college in the late fifties, at the time of the San Francisco poetry renaissance. Everyone around the college was as involved with contemporary poetry as people in the poetry scene in San Francisco, and that's unusual for universities. There were always the college professors who thought that poetry ended with Spenser or Milton, but there were many in the English Department like Tom Parkinson, who meant so much to me. He had the typical intellectual attitude that only history proves that something is great, which means that most people in the academic world aren't interested in things that are going on in the world now. I guess because Parkinson wrote poetry himself he was more involved, but he was very cynical. He was cruel to his students in that he loved to put them down, especially those who believed in God or had what he considered a romantic notion about the world. It meant a great deal to me to have my poetry praised by a man who was so willing to be unkind to other people.

Have you carried this over into your own criticism of other poets?

I try to do it without being a gratuitously mean person, because I still have a little of the Pollyanna in my personality, but I know how painful gratuitous criticism is. I read it all the time with my own work, but I would like the undergraduate or advanced students who study poetry with me to feel that if I praise a poem of theirs, it is really a good poem and really works. I've been told, especially by undergraduates, that it is very painful to be in a poetry workshop with me for the first few weeks, because I compare their poetry with everybody else's poetry. I never teach beginning classes because I'm afraid I would discourage people.

You have conducted many workshops. Do they contribute at all to your own writing?

I'm very fast to articulate experience but slow to absorb it. I'm not sure how typical this is of other poets; it takes me several years to absorb what I learn and use it in my poems. I seem to filter it through more parts of my body than just my mind. I've only been conducting poetry workshops for about three years, although I've always had informal sessions that were like workshops. When I first started as a writer-in-residence, I usually talked about my own poetry. Now I'm much more often in a position to talk about other people's poetry.

When you visited Montclair State College in 1973, you obviously enjoyed reading your own poetry. In this respect you are not unlike Amy Lowell who enjoyed reading her poetry in public.

I love reading my poetry, and, speaking of Amy Lowell, there have been a few poems, touchstones, that have helped me to create the kind of poetry I wanted to write. "Patterns" was one of those poems. So few people read anything by Lowell, and I'm happy that "Patterns" is one of the poems usually included in high school curricula, because I think it is one of the most terrific poems in terms of the narrative, the use of symbolic image, and the metaphor of using your own life for what life means. There's a poem by Mona Van Duyn called "Economics" which ends with a pun on "Christ! What are patterns for?" It's a poem about getting a grant from the National Endowment—a poem beautifully worked out. The poet is fascinated by the amount of money spent on a lavish dinner in Chinatown for a bunch of other poets, money spent on vacations, and justifying it because it was government money that wasn't going to the war. Whatever privileged thing it was spent on, it wasn't being spent to kill people, and she ends the poem: "Christ! What are poets for?"

It has been suggested that women writers are more subjective, internal, visceral, whereas male writers are objective, external, and perhaps less self-conscious. Do you subscribe to that overall generalization?

Not for the women poets that I know in the published history of poetry, but I think that since the women's movement, many people who would not normally write poetry do so. I don't know how accurate my observations are, but it seems to me it is easier for the women in poetry workshops to get at the material of poetry, and they're less apt to disguise it with the "accouterments of poetry." My observation has been that perhaps for beginning poets there is a certain advantage in being a woman—simply because women live more honestly with their feelings. They have to deal from an early age with the idea that if they couldn't earn a living or do something else for the world they were valueless people. So long as they are pretty, so long as they can cook, they are valuable. The girls who can't do those things don't really have a chance! But I very much dislike distinguishing between men and women poets, because there have been, relatively speaking, so few women who have "done things." We don't have a body of material to compare with. As far as I can see, poetry is a human art, and it really doesn't matter whether poets are black, white, Korean, or American—they are still appealing to the same internal forces, in some way trying to understand how you feel as against the way the world treats you.

When you read reviews of your own poetry, do the reviewers usually consider you as a woman writer, or as a poet?

They usually consider me as a woman writer, and it is something that bothers me very much. I still think it is a way of hedging, saying we can't really apply the same standards. You can look at it as an athletic or physical metaphor. Most people don't want men's and women's sports combined because the presumption is that men still are bigger and stronger than women. If we follow the physical metaphor, look at the tall girls we have had in the last twenty years. About five years ago I began to notice it—it seems as if there were just hundreds of six-feet-tall girls! It was like a science-fiction story, as if they had all been transplanted! We no longer feel that women have to be tiny, dainty things, which doesn't mean that we have gotten over all that cultural thing. You're a tall girl and may have grown up with a feeling of defeminization because of your tallness. To apply this to poetry, I think that the male and female roles have been divided for so long that even in the areas where theoretically there should be no division, there is. In the internal world of emotions (the world of poetry, for poetry may filter through the mind but goes back to the emotions), it is hard to say there is any difference. A man and a woman should feel love in the same way, should experience death in the same way, as filtered through their individual personalities.

You wrote: "My style is not light; it is heavy. / It is full of blueberry stains, and a light meal would make me thin. / I am not a thin writer / or a thin woman" ("From the Eleventh Finger"). Would you elaborate?

I am concerned with very painful subjects and very serious subjects. While I do have a sense of humor, it is much more a satirical sense of humor. It is very much connected with perceiving pain and finding there is only one alternative to that extent of pain, that is, to see how absurd it is for us who have minds to be caught up in situations which may be oppressive.

Have you at one time read a good deal of E. E. Cummings' poetry?

Not a great deal, but he was also one of the poets we read in high school. I felt liberated reading both E. E. Cummings and T. S. Eliot. That's interesting because I wrote metrical lines with end rhymes and found it extremely interesting to do so. My background in piano gave me an "ear" and my fairly large vocabulary made it very easy to find rhyme words. However, I found it difficult to make rhymes that were serious. They all seemed to turn to kind of jokes, and it's not my personality to be able to do so. I think one of the reasons I like comic novels is that I love to laugh, but I really don't know how to make other people laugh. When I wrote "From the Eleventh Finger" my wit was beginning to work whether I knew it or not, and I began to realize that there were people laughing at some of my poems. All of my life I wanted to be the life of the party, the person who could make other people laugh, and I loved it when it happened. Then I would go to the next poetry reading and be my same somber self. If what I had said had been witty or inadvertently funny, it was connected with the time and place, since there was nothing inherently comic in what I was saying. But I never learned to be a successful performing comedian. It seems to be an accident when I make the audience laugh. I realized I was straining to think of funny things to say, or to read poems which the audience would laugh at. The minute I started doing that it was disastrous. There's nothing worse than a somber person who is trying to be funny.

On more than one occasion in your poetry you are concerned with the beauty of women. You talk about beautiful women in "Movement to Establish My Identity" and in "Beauty," both detailed, sensitive statements about women.

I'm deeply concerned with beauty, and the longer I write, the more I realize that if one is to generalize about poetry, this is where Wallace Stevens is really my relative. What I am most concerned with is, in a way, aesthetics. At the point in my life when I wrote Inside the Blood Factory [1968], I was beginning to perceive beauty through myself. In all of my early poems I was trying to understand why there wasn't any beauty in my life. I couldn't accept the fact that there was no beauty because I was poor. Many of my Greed poems mention experiences such as the one about when I was a little girl going to a birthday party, seeing the silverware, and suddenly having a sense of awareness. I, like everyone else, have had a hard time coming to terms with myself, admitting things about myself. I grew up feeling pain and ugliness, didn't dwell as much on myself as on the social situations of being poor and living in an ugly world. I didn't make judgments on myself or know who I was until I was a fully formed person. I was an ugly little Polish leprechaun but didn't feel that that should be a condemnation, whereas I felt that in some way. I could condemn the world. I finally worked my way to self-examination in Inside the Blood Factory, in the [The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems] poems, and in some of the poems in Magellanic Clouds. That was the important next step. One of the reasons I am so enthusiastic about my next book is that I'm moving back to the aesthetic considerations, which I think is a healthy thing to do after you've examined yourself and seen how you fit into the mobile area in which you move.

In "Movement to Establish My Identity" you write that a woman wakes up and finds herself. Somehow it seems timely. Many women can relate to what you are suggesting.

I entitled these poems "A Poet Recognizing the Echo of the Voice" because I wrote a poem at the time when I began to realize that I had written a number of poems speaking about myself as a woman. I certainly meant it on the literal level, but I'm also trying to talk metaphysically about something that's always been more of a problem to me than being a woman; that is, being an intellectual and a poet in a world where that isn't accepted. I grew up in a poor world where if you had any intelligence you would use it to make your life better, i.e., have a better profession or a better career. It's ironic that I, choosing the world of books, wind up making more money than most of the people in my family. I don't think it has anything to do with me, whatever modest success I have had. It has a lot to do with the times. Recently, we have had an overflow of money for the scholars and artists. Many of us do the kinds of things we do because of worldly considerations. I often feel like a hypocrite talking to students and telling them not to become poets unless they are willing to starve or, less dramatically, work at jobs they hate all their lives, with nothing to do. Many of them now can get jobs as creative writing teachers—getting paid salaries and being respected, and dealing with students who like writing. When I wrote "A Poet Recognizing the Echo of the Voice," I was very concerned with making the parallel (and I do this in many of my poems) between the world of the woman traditionally and the world of the artist. Both of them, the woman and the artist, have been excluded from the world of politics, finance, and banking, because they wish to cultivate their inner emotions. Those things are not useful to you when you have to make a decision in business that is basically screwing somebody's life.

Currently, the phrase "a room of one's own" has become a cliché. You make a point about "separation" in one of the poems in Blood Factory. How important to the writer is separation, isolation?

I think anyone who wants to write poetry can scribble poems anywhere. It is very inspiring to see young students scribbling their poems at a party or while they are listening to a poetry reading—at times this is insulting. It is reassuring to know that when you really need to write, you can find a place to do it. In some ways I think it is an advantage to grow up not having that privileged sense that here is my room, no one will bother me. If there is a study and a desk in the home, the man traditionally has it, even if the woman is a writer and the man is the owner of a linoleum store and all he does is write out his bills at the desk. I know an academic couple who are both getting their Ph.D.'s and the woman has already had many things published. She doesn't have a desk, but the man who has never published and will probably not write his dissertation has the desk; in fact, he has a whole room. She comes from a hierarchical, patriarchal Jewish family, where women have a definite and important role, but it is not at a desk. These are still the cultural differences between men and women. I think, however, that most writers, unless they are rich, have to earn a living, and have constant demands on their time. If you have to have a certain block of time every day in order to write, you're less likely to get it. I do think that the lives of men and women are changing so much it's difficult to make generalizations. There are a lot of customs connected with possessions, and things connected with possessions last the longest.

In your poems you have suggested that the poet, among other things, is in search of love: "The poet is the passionate man who lives quietly, knowing very well what he wants. It is love…" (The Magellanic Clouds).

Love is one of those words that I tell my students not to use in their poems because it has so many different meanings. I feel we're all working our way to some point where we are justified in using the word. In order to use it you have to define it. I was using it there as a sense of acceptance, and so many of my poems are about the sense of rejection. I often use physical and sexual love as a metaphor for some kind of acceptance, rather than as an absolute interest in sex. Basically almost all sexual discussion or images in my poems are metaphors for other things. Not to say that I am any less interested in sex than other people, but I am definitely not one who sees sex abstractly as interesting.

Operative metaphors are used deliberately?

I try to do that. I started writing poetry feeling that, first of all, there was nothing I could say about my life that would be earthshakingly interesting. Secondly, the few interesting things in my life were so painful, embarrassing, or shameful that I didn't want to talk about them. I think this is typical of most. What I learned was that poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it. I discourage people from writing poetry which is too literal or too autobiographical when they are beginning, because I think you should save that great material to work up to. For me the discovery of surrealism and of an American poet like Wallace Stevens (who is surrealistic in his own American way) was a wonderful relief. It meant I could invent a life for myself; I could invent an "autobiography" dramatic enough for everyone to be interested in and poignant enough to satisfy me. There were parallels to what I really was trying to say but didn't reveal because it was too painful. Also, I didn't feel anybody had any business knowing it.

As a poet you are claiming a certain privacy. Robert Lowell, when asked if he were a "confessional poet," answered: "I confess only what I wish to confess."

That's right, and that's why the term "confessional poet" is such a misnomer, because none of us is going to "tell" anything we are the least bit ashamed of. Poetry is about controlling your life, control through words. We are reinventing the event on the page so that it can be controlled in a way we couldn't control it in our lives.

A minute ago you used the word "pain," and in "Love Passes Beyond the Incredible Hawk of Innocence" you wrote about the lesson of innocence: "Innocence is suffering," but suffering protects people because it "keeps them involved in the situation at hand," and the "loss of that innocence is something to fear."

I meant the paradox of the fact that some suffering is gratuitous—that is, it could be prevented if you were not too innocent to know enough to prevent it—and yet, when you are innocent enough you don't really understand how much you are suffering. It seems to me, innocence, in some strange way, promotes a great deal of unnecessary suffering. You don't "know," but at the same time, you don't know how much you are suffering. What I really wanted to get at was the paradox that innocence protects you from the bitterness, because there is nothing that makes you more bitter and angry than to think you are suffering unnecessarily. In some ways, innocence means not having a full awareness of how terrible it is.

What do you think the role of the poet is in our contemporary society? In "Greed" you wrote: "[The poets] said what they had to say, / each one, / about the world." The TV audience saw one live poet at Kennedy's inauguration, a white-haired old man trying to read his poetry in the glare of the sun.

I have always believed that the role of the artist, whether he is a poet or musician, is to focus on the conflict between the desire for beauty and the natural ugliness the world imposes on us, to create beautiful artifacts that in some way give other people a sense of beauty, other than just the physical beauty of the world. I see the role of the poet as writing poems that in some way touch, seem beautiful to people.

An artifact suggests form, composition, how a poem looks on the page something which concerned E. E. Cummings and other modern poets very much and which seems important to you.

E. E. Cummings was a great poet who influenced all of us far more than we really know. I think of the visual aspect of poetry as being especially important. We do want to read poetry aloud, and if we are to get any pleasure out of reading from the page, there has to be some clue as to the poet's voice and the deliberate kinds of things a poet does with the voice on the page. I spend a lot of time with students operating on poems, playing with what can be done with the voice on the page. Often now, the poem does not communicate anything to your eye, even for someone like you who has been reading poetry professionally for years. You hear the poet's reading and say, "Oh, that was wonderful!" and you go back to the page and sometimes it makes sense, but more often than not you feel it could have been different.

Amy Lowell apparently was able to captivate her audience when she read her own poetry.

It is interesting that we have a historical backlash against people who read their poems well; when they do, we don't take them seriously. I think that Edna St. Vincent Millay was a good poet, much better than she has been treated by history so far. I can only say that part of the reason is that she was such a popular poet, relatively speaking, in her lifetime, and she, too, read her poems well. Many assume that that couldn't be serious literature. I don't think people are going to feel that way in the future. Because Allen Ginsberg reads his poetry well, is he going to be considered no better than Rod Mc-Kuen?

Louis Simpson comments that your poems are full of experience, honestly expressed, and suggests that he is "constantly being surprised by new angles of vision."

One of the reasons that art is so important to me is that throughout my life I have seen life as filled with contradictions that don't make sense. I was very happy when I discovered Buddhism because there the paradox began to make some sense. I studied a bit about Buddhism; everyone did when I was in college. I'm not a Buddhist—I just found salvation in philosophies. I think we followed this up with existentialism.

Would you care to elaborate on the idea of paradox and contradiction?

I think one of the reasons books, music, and paintings always meant so much to me is that ambiguity in art reveals the world as a world of contradictions. So long as there is not a linear meaning involved, the paradoxes don't have to be contradicting. When someone says to you that you have to do something, then he doesn't also say you can't do it, because the two things aren't possible. In a poem, two things are possible, because in some way there is always inherent in the experience in the mind the possibility of doing it or not doing it. So long as you can conceptualize it, it can exist either way simultaneously—that's the paradox. In real life there is contradiction, and it's the kind of thing I've never been able to deal with. My life has been fraught with contradiction, and in some way I have been trying to abstract that and talk about it. Getting away from the physical to the metaphysical, though, I realize that we can't understand the metaphysical until we see the physical. For my vision of the world to be in balance, I have to keep this understanding. In life you have to make choices; there is some-thing wrong, however, with making a choice unless there is a chance to conceptualize both possibilities. That, for me, is what poetry does, what the ambiguity of a poem is. There is nothing in the poem—as there is in life—to contradict either of the possibilities. In life the action will contradict it.

In one of your poems you write: "Choice is a watch never presented to me at graduation" ("Greed").

Again, I am concerned with poetry and its parallel with life. The difference between a good poet and a bad one is that a good poet has a marvelous sense of choice—the good poet makes the choices which are interesting and exciting. The artist is one who learns to choose well so that economy can exist. The fewer things you choose to make a whole, the better you are as an artist. I chose to be a poet and not continue to be a clinky piano player. I chose to be a poet and not remain in the academic world where surely I would have had a nervous break-down. When I said choice is "a watch never presented to me at graduation." I meant that, in a realistic sense, I didn't have many choices about many things. One has to presume a degree of realism and live with it. After playing the piano for sixteen years and realizing that nobody wanted to listen to me, it was obvious that I couldn't spend my life that way. Many people wouldn't have seen that as an obvious choice. The prevailing idea is that ordinary people always get a watch for graduation, whereas, in reality, ordinary people get cars for graduation. What the ordinary person does not understand is that there are actually a few people who don't even get watches, and I was one of them. If I had really known as much about comfort and the bourgeois life as I know now, I might not have chosen to do many of the things I did. I might have chosen to live the calm, peaceful, comfortable life that I now know I would like to have.

One of the best things I have heard about you is that you were a landlady.

I sold my building at a tremendous loss! And one part of "Greed" is about being a "landlord of the emotions." Punishing because everyone hates you.

These are all parts of your identity, and in "At Welsh's Tomb" You are concerned with identity: "The journey one you must make to find your name. " Do you think this search is important to a poet?

I think it's important to every human being, and one of the miseries of being young (whether you're rich or poor) is that you haven't created an identity for yourself, and you know that is something you have to do. Perhaps for a few young people (this is much less true in the present than in the past), the sense of coming from a large and important family is so overwhelming that they don't go through it. All the rest of us (99 percent of the human race) in some way realize that if we admire our parents we aren't them; if we hate them, we pray we're not like them. The most important thing is to get people to take us on our own terms.

Perhaps this is reflected in our contemporary scene. In the fifties you felt you knew what you wanted to do when you finished college. Now, that is not always the case. Do you think this identity problem is peculiar to our time?

I think every human experiences this, but we express it generationally in a different way. When I was young the real identity crises came when I was thirteen or fourteen. When I was a freshman I might not have known who I was, and I certainly didn't know what I was going to do. By the time I was a junior I was making choices which made it obvious what I was going to do. I was going to become a poet. Recently, young people really believed the whole doomsday thing and were surprised when they got to be eighteen and discovered they had to do something—go to college. They were surprised to graduate from college and to discover they were still alive and there was something for them to do. It was different when I was a young poet. Today, young poets have a whole set of steppingstones to success: an M.F.A. degree, first-book prizes. None of that existed in the past. Oh yes, there was an M.F.A. program at Iowa, but that wasn't what you did to become a poet.

Because of these circumstances, do you think there will be a dilution, a weakening in the quality of the performance? I remember Richard Chase being concerned about the future of poetry when it was becoming so academically oriented—the phenomenon of the young poet being "apprenticed" to the older established poet.

I don't think we've ever not had that chain of succession, but I think we have it institutionalized in a way that's bad. There is an Iowa school of poetry. It's creating jobs for people to teach creative writing to other people! It's an industry. Imagine thinking of becoming a writer as part of an industry. Teaching people to do it for absolutely no purpose at all, which is kind of wonderful; I'm happy at least it doesn't have any purpose. But I don't feel like being a social prophet about the future. We do live in a healthy time for poetry.

What about the competition among authors concerning being published?

I have a new kind of anguish, and that is that at least one publisher will publish anything I write. I'm waiting for the day, maybe next year, when he suddenly realizes that not only will he not publish everything I write, but will consider me a has-been and not want to publish me at all. I think John Martin of Black Sparrow Press is a very loyal person, and it may take him ten or twenty years to do that. I have loyalty from the people at Doubleday who are interested in my work and want more. But I worry about this continuing. I experience competition on other levels. I'll probably never win a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award. I'm not friends with the right people, and at times this bugs me. Being a fairly conscientious person, I worry about another aspect of this. I'm not sure but it would be worse in relationship to Amy Lowell. What if you got to the point where the publisher is willing to publish you and everyone else considers it "garbage"? If I disregard the negative criticism, what do I have to go on? In some way I find totally gratuitous reviews which everyone looks at and says, "How can you take that seriously, Diane?" much more painful than positive reviews that contain a few reservations.

Perhaps this ultimately happened to the imagists who consistently reviewed and praised one another's poetry. Fletcher reviewed Lowell, Lowell reviewed Aldington etc. Not a healthy situation for poetry.

I see myself drawn into that for what I consider good reasons. I would really like to write an article about Eshleman's poetry because I don't think anyone realizes how good it is. But one of the reasons I would like to do it is that I'm a friend of Clayton's and I've been reading his poetry in a very careful way. Even if I write an article in terms of genuinely pointing out things that the reader can find in the poetry (which is what criticism should do), people will think it is just another of Diane Wakoski's articles about her best friend.

When you read your poetry at Montclair you talked about your letters. Are you going to use them deliberately in your poetry?

I've used prose in many long poems and decided it was time to do it in an even more ambitious way. I decided it would be interesting to work consciously on a long poem which was part prose and part poetry, the way Paterson is. At the time, I realized I was getting a great deal of satisfaction out of correspondence and, in my letters, was talking about a lot of the issues I was going to cover in my poetry. I started making carbon copies of my letters, thinking that if I could edit them in an interesting way, this would be the prose part. I love to receive letters and to write them, but I'm a very erratic correspondent.

Periodically, I realize how little excitement most people experience with poetry. I sometimes go through periods of this, too. I began to try to think of analogies I could apply to the reader's concern with poetry. Wouldn't it be interesting to try to invest some of the excitement you experience when reading a letter into the poetry of a poem? It's a fine analogy. That was the only period in my life when my typewriter seemed like a sexual object to me; I could hardly wait to get to it. I've never felt that way about writing. Oh, I've always had a good time once I made myself sit down at my typewriter. I wanted to try to create artificially a sense of excitement in myself and have it come over into my poetry. I wanted to edit my letters so that would be a primary thing.

Might you use them the way that Emerson used his journals?

Yes. I can't write journals, but I can write letters, especially if I get a correspondence going with someone for a month or more.

Dreams seem important to you. You refer to your "dream closet" and suggest, "I dream to offset my empty brain" ("The House of the Heart").

I love to sleep and I feel that my dreams are more interesting than my life. I've always been interested in the analogy that I would like to exist between the dream and the poem. I would like the reader to have the same sense after reading a poem, that you have when you wake up from a dream so vivid you can't get rid of it. I have noted that you can have that same sense from a dream that doesn't have one single interesting image in it or isn't one of those dreams that you can tell because it is funny, bizarre, or interesting. What interests me more is the dream that is not necessarily interesting but which nevertheless haunts you. What I'm looking for is the analogy between the experience and what you would like to create as an experience. And one of the things which I have discovered is that if you are going to use dream material at all, it has to be only those dreams that are metaphysical, symbolical, full of bizarre events and exciting images. Because if you try to tell someone that you dreamed someone's arm was around you, that it was the most wonderful feeling you ever had, that isn't very interesting, and you will not be able to convey the same sense that you had. It's a kinesthetic response and it's exciting. I think a good poem can touch many senses in a reader, or I would like to believe that it could, and the question really becomes how to create this process. The only thing you can recoup from dreams are the bizarre, the surrealist elements.

And this is what leads you to use surrealist techniques in your poetry?

At one time I thought this was just about the only thing you could do with dreams. I'm not sure I believe that now.

In surrealism there is no orderly sequence, is there?

One of the things I have noticed is that when you have a dream, part of what's fascinating about it is that things seem to be happening simultaneously, and one of the aspects of surrealism is try to get that sense of simultaneous experience by disordering and fragmenting images and events, so that you yourself have to say either it is hopeless and try to experience it, or you have to reorder it. I have noticed that when you tell your dream to someone, you can't retell everything, but you try to re-create it in a linear sequence. To do this in a poem may be interesting. I think that, except for the ear, there is very little hope for just random images. I've totally rejected the surrealist manifesto as Breton wrote it, because I not only don't want to place the burden of arranging the images on the reader, but I actually resent that! I feel my only value as a poet is to present a series of images in terms of my perception of my experience arranged in my order. The poet is a person desperately trying to create order in his own world and communicate it to others so that, at least in two minds, the world is perceived in the same way. To that extent the poet wants to manipulate and control the reader.

In your George Washington poems you reveal the avarice and acquisitiveness of our society, and in "The Father of My Country" there seems to be a very personal tone.

On an abstract level what I was trying to do in those poems was to say that in some way, no matter how much we reject the culture that we live in, we are extensions of it. No matter how much we hate it, we should also look for an equal amount of love in order to balance the situation, because we are out to love ourselves. In those poems I am trying to search out the love-hate relationship we have with ourselves as expressed in the culture we can't totally accept. It both oppresses us and makes us what we are, and we can't deal with the positive or the negative parts until we see them both in perspective. Having always been a kind of misfit, I realize that in an odd way I've been a more patriotic, a more American person, than my less misfitted colleagues. In some strange way I really am more of the American spirit because I so rejected the negative aspects of it.

Do you think that being a misfit is an American phenomenon? We have so many poets who couldn't survive or comply with some of the demands of our culture: Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, T. S. Eliot.

I think that is a serious question and I don't think I have enough of a historical perspective to answer that. We love the image of Robert Frost who is supposedly our pioneer father. But when you really look at his life, what a misfit he was. I'm not prepared to make generalizations. Perhaps intellectuals, artists, since they are classical people, are always misfits.

Do you think there is a "renaissance" in literature written by women, as some have suggested?

Renaissance presumes some kind of rebirth. It seems to me women writers haven't been active as a group. I don't think there is a renaissance, because I can't think of any period in history when women were predominant in anything. Right now we are living in a sort of golden age where anyone who has a chance to do something is doing it. It is one of the first times in history when women have as much, or almost as much, of a chance as men. Certainly in the literary world I think we do. However, I so rebel against looking at literature from a female-male perspective, that I haven't set up my mind to deal with it.

What about your latest book of poems?

Virtuoso Literature for Two and Four Hands is a shorter collection than others because many of the poems are new. In the past I've always dredged up things. There are a few earlier poems which fit in, and I'm republishing the very first adult poem I ever had published. The theme of the book is an aesthetic theme; that is, what does beauty mean in our lives and how do we re-create it. It's a very personal book for me because it looks at my life in a very retrospective way. Lots of flowers and garden imagery (California is so luxuriant with flowers!). There's even a poem about that. Another aspect about my childhood is playing the piano, which for me was pounding out the ugliness around me, making the sounds which were beautiful, to drown out everything else.

Have you changed your techniques, devices, or structure drastically in your latest poems?

The only thing I would say about them stylistically is that many of them are the prosiest I've ever written. One of the best is "The Story of Richard Maxfield," and part of the aesthetic search is to understand the difference between the stories that poets tell and the stories fiction writers tell. Basically the poet is someone who loves a story but gets so sidetracked by the details and what it means, that he forgets to finish telling it. In this poem I don't really tell the story of Richard, which is summarized in the first line. Richard Maxfield committed suicide in southern California, and the poem is about not understanding why someone would take his life—which is another theme of my Greed poem about Sylvia Plath. When the search for beauty becomes an important factor in our lives, especially as artists, then we realize that the process of searching is part of the product of beauty. The process of writing a poem is part of what makes the poem interesting, which is very contemporary notion. This means you must have an educated reader, someone who can look for that process and is not just looking for what the poem says. The poet and his readers are special people, and my latest book embraces that proposition.

Do you think about an audience when you write?

I do, and to be truthful, I can't remember what my sense of the audience was ten or fifteen years ago. I know I had a sense of audience, but I don't know whether it has changed remarkably or not.

What last comment would you like to make about your life as a poet?

There's something really beautiful in being alive, and I don't know what, because I didn't grow up in happy circumstances; I didn't grow up in a beautiful world. I had to keep looking for it. The reason I get into all the problems I do is that I'm an optimist, even though all of my experiences should have made a pessimist of me. When I write about love and being a woman, in part, I am trying to make the point that I have never had an experience so bad (often I chronicle the badness so you know I'm not talking about nothing) that it makes me feel life is not worth living. In some ways it's when things are terrible that you perceive the beautiful things, you perceive them with a passion, and they mean so much. This is what produces art and makes life worth living.