SOURCE: An interview in The Craft of Poetry: Interviews from "The New York Quarterly", edited by William Packard, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1974, pp. 321-40.

[Here, Wakoski discusses her beginnings as writer, the technical aspects of her work, including imagery, poem structure, and working habits, and the methods she employs in teaching poetry.]

[Fortunato]: Could you tell us when you began writing?

[Wakoski]: I really did start writing when I was a little kid. I wrote my first poem when I was seven years old, about a rose bush, and then I wrote a lot of poetry when I was in high school. I got seriously involved in college, which was when I decided I would spend my life as a poet. Right about the time I was taking Thom Gunn's workshop. That workshop was a wonderful workshop because Thom was very gracious when he said I didn't need a teacher, but what he meant was that there was an unusual situation in that particular workshop. There really were five extremely talented people who would have learned from each other whether he had been there or not. He did what a gentleman and scholar would do. He quarreled with us enough to present his objective, but he also respected the fact that we all were just passionately involved in what we were doing. And would do it. In the true sense, we didn't need him. On the other hand, he really did help us because he understood that. He didn't try to mold us or do anything else. That was a formative period. I was just beginning to find my voice and write the poems that—my publishable poems date from that year.

That was Coins and Coffins?

Yes. You know, there really are events that happen in your life that are significant at the time they are happening. No one else may notice that they are significant, but they are obviously partly significant because you think they are. But you also felt they were because there was something significant about them. And the event that I will always remember from that period—and I date my poetry from that period, though I wrote poetry much longer than that—was the result of Thom's workshop being very prestigious in a strange sort of way. The Poetry Center, which was just beginning, invited him to pick five students from Berkeley or people who wrote poetry seriously, and obviously Berkeley had a reputation, and put us on a program in January of 1959 called "Berkeley Poets." For me it was a really significant event. The other poets—they were all men if that means anything—it didn't mean anything to me …

So you would say that that was your most important apprenticeship—that experience?

It really was. The first thing Thom Gunn made me realize was that there are lots of rules about poetry that have nothing to do with poetry in the abstract. Poetry is a human art, and we're really talking about our lives, and poetry which is most readable is that which is most intimate and touching. At the same time, it requires a tremendous kind of craft to walk that tightrope of talking intimately about feelings or talking feelings and not producing a certain amount of gush. Thom made me immediately aware of the fact that he didn't say this in so many words I had a proclivity to like beautiful things, that I thought poetry was about beautiful things. I still think that, by the way, but I have a different idea of what beautiful things are now. He made me realize that if I was going to get any tension at all in there I would have to stop writing those pretty things. I would have to write something more powerful. And he did this partly, I think, by being British. You know, Americans are very susceptible to a British accent. It carries a certain authority, especially when you're young.

Do you have your student poets read their own poems?

I do. I really very much subscribe to the idea that what contemporary poetry is about is partially an oral phenomenon which can only be understood and really appreciated if you hear it. I know for a fact that the experience of hearing the poetry reading is dynamic to many people who would not have had that experience reading the poems on the page. I'm not talking about the poet himself or the good reader of poetry or the scholar who obviously can find many kinds of pleasure in a poem. I really do think that if there is any such thing as a possible wider audience—and even for any of us who think of ourselves as experts having specialized in one poet—the experience of having been to a poetry reading is much more vivid to us than reading the book. Consequently, I think the people should learn to do it. I used to be very, very interested in the prospect of poetry as theatre and having some actors get involved in it. I am against it at the moment. I still believe it's an interesting prospect, but I've come to realize, from talking about this to many people, that isn't really what poetry is about these days. Poetry is about poetry, which means the poet reading his poems. This gives the poems another dimension in the same way that when you try to talk about film as an art as opposed to theatre as an art, you can make all kinds of generalizations. The point is that right now in the times we live most people find the film experience a more vivid one. It's only those of us who have certain kinds of knowledge and certain perceptions that like the theatre just as much. I think that's pretty generally true about poetry. I see no reason why if a person is really serious about poetry, it shouldn't be one dimension of his education. If he reads it, and reading it means presenting his personality as another dimension, and then that's part of the poem. There are poets who have resisted this and their argument is a perfectly good one, a good poem comes alive on the page. But perhaps that isn't really that much to think about right now. We do and we don't. We have a much different idea about poems lasting. It makes me think that if a poem lasts eighty years, it has really lasted a long time. And I do expect poems to last eighty years. Although they don't always. I know I tried to reread Shelley this summer, and found it impossible.

Do you have an imaginary audience in the back of your mind during a reading, the way you really want an audience to be, the way you'd like them to respond?

Yeah, I think so. I think I have several imaginary audiences. First of all, I always write my poems with the feeling that I am speaking to someone. Or some group of people. So I obviously have people in mind. And I wrote poetry because I had a very narrow and circumscribed deprived life, and it was a fantasy world. And the Diane who's in my poems is not a real person. She's a person I would like to be, that I can imagine myself being, even though I put all my faults in my poems, it doesn't mean I'm not a fantasy or imagined person. I didn't create a fantasy that was unreal. I'm smart enough not to have done that. But the Diane in my poems really is fantasy. I don't care how happy my life ever gets, there's always a part of all of us that feels deprived in some way or another. We don't have everything and what the poem speaks to is that fantasy part of ourselves—and no matter what my life is and no matter how it's fulfilled, there are many things that I will not be, and those are the things that I will fantasize. Part of my imaginary audience are always those people who have not loved me or are not in my life because I am not the Diane I fantasize. In a way I'm always having a kind of duel with my audience. I don't ever believe they'll ever like me. And they are the very people who in real life probably wouldn't like me.

Your early poems have been called "confessional poetry." What is your definition of confessional poetry?

I'll give you my parting line first, and then—the term "confessional" has been a real misnomer. A critical school, I don't know if it was M. L. Rosenthal who coined it or not. In general, people think that it is, when he was writing about Plath and Sexton and Lowell. The one thing that Plath and Sexton and Lowell all had in common, and most twentieth-century poets have this, is they liked physical imagery. They all had been in mental institutions and all had either suicidal impulses or alcoholic behavior. They had in some way had antisocial patterns in their lives. And I use the term advisedly because the term "confessional" is related to poems and poets who are talking about experiences that were not acceptable to normal people—the fact that you've been in a mental institution, the fact that you're an alcoholic, the fact that you tried to commit suicide, the fact that you were a conscientious objector—whatever. They were things that you were supposed to be ashamed of and so to talk about your impulses was to confess them. I think that's a real misnomer because first of all even Plath's poetry, which comes closer to that term than any other, is not confessional in the sense that none of those poets are ashamed of what they did or felt that anything they felt should be condemnatory. They felt they had human experiences. In Sexton's case her poetry was only made possible by her experiences of madness because what her personal experience did was obviously shatter a kind of bourgeois insulation—I don't mean that all bourgeois people are insulated but that life is one that insulates you very easily. And to break through to a kind of feeling perception of the world is something I'm sure she would never have arrived at without her nervous breakdowns. Plath has often been said to glorify suicide in her poems. She's certainly not confessing it as a bad thing. I think in order to read her poems with real sympathy you have to have a tragic vision of the world and it has to be a kind of grand thing accomplished by itself. Sexton's poems really do point to the fact that when you go to bedlam and back and get something good out of it, it isn't a bad thing at all. Lowell's poems, which are the source of that term, are simply autobiographical poems. What he does is speak about being an aristocrat with a certain amount of humility, showing that it wasn't all that it was cracked up to be either. But none of them are confessing. Lowell doesn't feel it was an original sin. He wants you to understand that whatever condition people have, it's a human condition and he glorified it.

Could you tell us about your George Washington poems? Why did you choose him?

Because I'm basically interested in symbol and allegory. And Washington is the father of our country. And we live in this very paternalistic society, and he stands for the kind of masculine values that have strengths but for many of us have their frustrations. They do stand for the opposite of what poetry is about. For me he's really the symbol of the material world that doesn't appreciate enough how you feel and for me the revelation that that frustration comes out of not any of the things like materialism or the kind of Philistine attitude that penalizes, but really comes out of our inability to communicate, which I equate with our unwillingness to communicate. For instance, nobody ever understands anybody else. The people we think we understand or feel we communicate with are simply the ones who have tried to talk to us and we have therefore been aroused to try to talk back. Washington, as a historic figure, stands for that kind of aloofness that just doesn't give. For me it's the antithesis of what poetry is. It's also basically what I fought in myself all my life. I am extremely shy. It's really hard for me to talk to people. It took many years of writing poetry and then approaching people by talking to them about poetry to get away from this. I sat in Greece for three months this summer and literally did not have a conversation with anyone except one huge quarrel that I had with a man about poetry. And it's not because people bore me. It's because I'm really frightened of them and I am not able to give and they don't want to communicate, and they do seem boring to me. It's always been easier for me to go off and read a book. Poetry is the next thing to reading a book. By putting it down on paper and then by publishing it you're doing the same thing to people as if you had a conversation with them. But for me it's easier because I can do it by myself. I still really fear to communicate with people, unless I have that symbol.

Do you think your surrealism goes closer to the tremendous emotional impact of all that is in conflict?

Surrealism is a fascinating subject, and it's very easy to have a different idea about it every day. What I would say today about surrealism is that as a technique for writing it's a fascinating way of trying to combine your intellectual perceptions and your emotions about it. All those bizarre placements of things have to do with the fact that every day of our lives we have this bizarre mind living in a body that could be someone else's. Seeing too much and knowing so much more. I've never been an athlete or had any kind of physical prowess of any sort. And I often wonder if athletes, people like those Russian gymnasts, or acrobats you see in circuses, have a different kind of control over the world because I keep feeling how helpless we are. We know—I wonder, for instance, if they have more control over their emotions.

Because they seem to have so much practice.

To me emotions seem to come so much out of the body. A lot of my imagery is physiological imagery. I really do perceive my emotions as if they come out of different parts of my body. Different parts except my head. And I wonder if people who are wonderful athletes have in some way more of a sense of continuity with their emotions. My emotions are very strong and athletic, but my body just doesn't follow. I really think that part of what surrealism is about and why it's such a twentieth-century technique is that we have all developed our minds so much. They still live in these bodies which are so separate. It's a very good way of presenting that separate but together bizarreness.

What about recurring images in your work—oranges, blood, jewels, flowers, have they evolved?

Yes. I didn't start out knowing what I was doing, but after a few years of writing poetry I began to realize that there were certain things that were part of my fantasy life. Usually images are what to me seem very beautiful or very terrible things. And I realized that even before I became a poet I was going to be repeating myself. Those were the things I wanted to write about. I think at the point I became aware of that was the time I was taking Thorn Gunn's class and even more important I was for the first time reading Wallace Stevens and beginning to understand that beautiful early poetry of his, and I was reading Lorca for the first time, and those are both poets who used very, very sensuous physical imagery, and it was particularly noticeable in the case of Lorca but equally true of Stevens. He used over and over again the same images. And I realized that they used them as symbols—that their landscape became part of their trademark or their voice, and it suddenly was one of those awarenesses that you have known for a long time without realizing it. That was so obvious. There was no reason why I had to keep trying not to write about those things. The thing to do was to be superconscious of writing about them and to make them into a network. So all of those things did stand for my own sense of what is beautiful and durable.

Also, the very short words, the very strong short words. Is that part of this network of symbols?

I think that has a lot to do with the fact that I always wanted to read my poems aloud and that I come from California and that we have a—I don't know what a good adjective is for the way we speak—but it's very matter of fact, and the poetry in general cannot have a matter-of-fact tone. One of my greatest battles is how to get my matter-of-factness, which I consider part of my vision of the world, into lines and still make it sound like poetry. It's very natural for me. It's my matter-of-fact way of trying to describe things. It's something that I have deliberately allowed myself to use and tried every possible way of using it to see if I could get away with it.

Another one of the things in addition to the short words is the assonance. Is this sought or does this just happen?

That's a very hard thing to talk about because it's talking about your perception of the use of language. I don't know if anyone, including a linguistic specialist, has really figured a successful way of assessing what that is in a person. I know that my own view of it is that I studied music for many years, that I started writing Shakespearean sonnets, that in the back of my mind I'm always going de-da, de-da, de-da, and that's the test for me, by the way. If my language gets too prose-y, too short, it means that at the back of my mind I've said, "Boy, you haven't been iambic for a while." I don't mean just iambic, but that's the easiest one to use. When I feel that there haven't been any regularly recurring rhythms, even though I don't feel required in any way to make even-length lines or subscribe to theories of meter (that strange thing which poetry is all about), I still keep pulling back to that kind of thing. Poetic language is everything that's beautiful. In some way it always comes out singing. And I'm sure that that has to do with my literal sense of what music is, and the way poetry is related to that.

What about the parallel line and the parallel structure that you use? That relates back to music, doesn't it?

That relates back to music, yes, and it also relates to the way I like to put things into neat little piles.

Do you find yourself practicing exercises to keep yourself in shape, writing sonnets and so forth?

I write short poems as exercises. It's hard for me to write short lines in short poems. Although in retrospect I've written an awful lot of them. Whenever I begin to get very long and discursive, which is when I'm writing a poem that I really wanted to write, I begin to feel myself just kind of dissolving out. I have a strong urge to just kind of pat things back in shape, and I write short poems. I haven't for a long, long, long time done any kind of experimentation with what is referred to as metrical forms. Because I started writing poetry that way. In high school poetry was a game for me. I don't mean I didn't take it seriously because I think when you're young, games are a serious part of your life—they were challenges—using language in certain rhythms, you'd get a rhyming dictionary, a thesaurus, it was really fun to do. The only thing was you couldn't say too much that way. And that's ideal for young people because you don't have much to say then except this is fun, who am I. You can boil it down to two or three statements, and you don't have to think about experiences to write about unless you want to write for Seventeen magazine. So I think game playing is a very good way of starting poetry. If you start writing poetry when you are older, I don't think that's a natural concern. Unless you have the particular sense of language which goes with that, which by the way is not a twentieth-century sense of language. But I periodically go into doing it again. I found a wonderful book of forms this summer. Its name has escaped me. It has I think every peculiar form ever invented. What is that crazy little book of forms and who is he?

But you do write in form. You have a sestina, for example, in Inside the Blood Factory, which was five years ago, wasn't it?

Sestinas are fun. If you break the rule for iamble pentameter, which I insist is an English rule and not a French rule, it's a fun-organizing form, because you keep coming back and back and back like a refrain. If you make yourself very conscious of making very long lines and very short lines then there are really interesting musical sounds to the language. I'm not sure that I could write an iambic pentameter sestina.

That was a free form sestina.

Yes. The idea of making thirty-six lines all the same length is like being in jail.

Do you keep a journal?

Oh, I'm a hopeless failure at keeping ajournai. The most I can ever do is several weeks at a time.

What excuses do you make up for not keeping a journal? What excuses do you make when you don't write?

Well, I have a lot of excuses. I'm still enough of an old Puritan to have to have an excuse for myself when I'm not writing. I truly believe in my own self-discipline and that I write when I'm ready to write and if I'm not, nothing valuable will come out. I wrote very little this summer except a few critical articles, and my excuse is that I really am going through a big change in my personal life and in my poetry. This year is a very retrospective year. I'm looking back on what I've done. I don't feel very compulsive about writing anything. As far as I'm concerned I've written enough so that I don't have to worry about not writing any more. So I don't feel obliged to write. On the other hand, I write because I like to write. I am going to write again when I'm ready. I wrote three or four poems this summer, which will be included in my new book, some that I like very much. They're moving in other directions, much more—if you can make these distinctions Apollonian than Dionysian—and I'm much more interested in prose as a component of the poem, and for the first time in my life I'm really interested in writing some amount of criticism. I'm very interested in theories of poetry, and ideas of poetry and how poetry has changed in the last years and what it means, the kind of poetry that works, and why it works and so forth, and these never interested me. I mean they interested me in terms of how you made a poem, but not interested in how you made articles out of it. I sat down and wrote articles this summer because I really wanted to.

What writing method do you find most conducive to producing your work, writing in longhand or writing at the typewriter?

I'm very unhappy these days working in longhand, which is another reason these journals are not kept up. I don't write letters in longhand. I really like my typewriter. I started—I can remember being appalled once when someone told me he composed his poems on a typewriter. To me it was appalling, and he said, "Have you ever written a short story?" and I said, "Yes," and he said, "Did you write it in longhand?" and I said "Yes," and he said, "Well, what's the difference?" But I do notice that the more I compose on the typewriter, the prosier my poems are. I never compose those kind of exquisite little things—lyric poems—on the typewriter. I don't see any way of possibly composing a lyric poem on the typewriter, because that's the kind of thing where every word means something and the way you write it down and the shape of it. I have notebooks from when I was in college that have an almost shocking little strange elegant hand—my hand was very sloppy—that the poems were composed in. It was like a different state of organization.

The handwriting had to match it.

Yes, it had to match. There was a kind of elegant slowness, and just the act of writing down a line and then another line, I can just feel it. Every once in a while I get in that mood again. It's not the usual mood.

Do you have to be in a special mood to write a poem? Or if you feel one coming on, do you know…

I do. I think that's probably fairly typical. I can sit down at any time and write something. But the good things, the better things that I write—every once in a while I just sit down and write—my favorite poem last year—I was writing a letter to someone and I wanted to include a poem and I didn't have a thing I had written, so I just sat down and wrote it out and it's my favorite poem from that time. Actually I had done a lot of things that got me in the mood to write that poem, and I became aware of it in the process of sitting down and writing the letter.

How about revision? Do you revise a great deal?

I don't revise a great deal, but I revise after I read a poem aloud, and if there are what I call dead spots in it, I bring all my rhetorical skills to bear on it.

When you say read aloud, do you read to yourself or before an audience?

Preferably before an audience. But to myself if there is none. It's very hard for me to type something up, which is one of the reasons I appreciate hiring a typist. It's very hard for me to type things up and not want to change. My kind of revision is not what Dylan Thomas would call revision. Fifteen drafts or anything like that.

Then most of it comes through your original impulse.

The one part of every poem that I subject to rigorous rewrite is the last three or four lines. I love the last three or four lines of poems, and I think they are the easiest part to rewrite. You can rewrite a poem five days after you've written it and completely change that poem's meaning by changing the last four lines. Or you can turn what was a mediocre poem into an exciting poem. It's impossible for me to put a book manuscript together without meddling a little bit.

You were talking about craft before in relation to that workshop in California. Do you think craft is a conscious thing or something that just happens when enough bad stuff gets discarded in the process?

Well, obviously I think craftsmanship is something that can be acquired in a lot of different ways. Because I've always resisted authority even though I'm a very authoritarian person, it's hard for me to learn neat methodical ways and yet I always want to see other people learn that way. So the hit-or-miss method is my method of learning. In terms of the craft of writing, I think that you learn it by reading. I just don't see any other way for learning it. I think you learn more from reading than from hearing people talk. I don't see how anybody who writes poetry conscientiously for ten years and reads can help but get better. I just don't see any way. In a way that's almost a dilemma with so many people writing today and so many, many creative writing programs because it means that any person with a certain amount of time and effort with a lot of reading and who has a certain kind of intelligence can write a respectable poem. That presents a whole other funny vehicle for poetry these days. No one really trusts reading one poem by a person. On the other hand, if you read one poem that you really like, you will remember it and you will go on and look for something else. Most people don't even see one poem that they really like in a magazine. On the other hand, they like the magazine. They say this is interesting, this is interesting and that could be and so forth. But it's a very controversial subject of what the value of publishing poems in magazines is. I know one value it has and that's purely professional, and that is you can't get a book published until you get published in a lot of magazines. They are your credentials for publishing a book. And they are the way a lot of people can get to know your name. But I don't know of a single positive value that I would say derives for people from reading poems in magazines. My feelings about this in the past few years have forced me to forget to submit poems to magazines. Lots of magazines ask you for poems and I'm always perfectly glad to submit them, but I never quite get around to typing them up, and by the time I sit and think about it, I know that those poems can be put in a book. The book will definitely have some readers. It's a very complicated subject, because if you ask me now if my conclusion is: should there be no poetry magazines, I wouldn't say that; I'd say it's even great to have poetry magazines for young writers to publish in. I can't reconcile that with the fact that I really don't think people read magazines. Obviously somewhere I'm working with a prejudice. Maybe my prejudice is that the magazines aren't good, or maybe my prejudice is even if they're good, you shouldn't submit to them.

What books do you recommend that your students read for craft principles? You said before that they have to read a lot. What do you recommend?

Well, there's just so many good books. I would like to suggest something very different from specific poets for people to read to learn craft. I think the way you learn craft is the same way you learn criticism. And that is by reading everything that you can find. I don't think you learn any kind of discrimination if you only read masterpieces. When you read a masterpiece, you may not like it. It may seem awful, and it's not until you read about a hundred more pieces that are nothing like masterpieces that you suddenly realize how good that was and when you start reading things that are badly written, and you suddenly recognize how badly written they are, you have already learned some craft. You can see students doing this, but you can't see them doing it if you say, "Now, read Sylvia Plath, and notice how she uses imagery here and so forth." There's nothing wrong with doing that in retrospect after they've read a lot, but if that's the way they learn, they will know that that's how Sylvia Plath knows how to use imagery and they know that Auden's lines are all scanned, and they know that and that, but they don't have any idea of why that is good poetry. They don't have any of the sensation that that's really exciting. When you go through a magazine and there's nothing that you can even stand to read and then suddenly there's this beautiful poem there. That's the experience they don't have because they only read masterpieces. They don't seem as masterful when they don't have a whole life of schlock around them, when we don't have a whole life of reading to compare them with. I think at any given time it helps to have models to write from. I learned to write from models. I think most people do. Anybody who learns on his own uses models. I started imitating Shakespeare's sonnets when I was in high school. It's still the best way to learn many many things. So I don't see anything wrong in putting whatever five or six books together at any given time, and I'm sure they change over the years, and reading them because it will give pleasure, and pointing out what you really like about poets, and they'll get some ideas. I've seen students that I would be willing to swear will not become poets, even if they have a certain amount of talent, write some nice pieces because they found a poem by someone that really excited them and they imitated it. And it was an exciting experience for them. But my real feeling is that if you read five books and that's all you're going to read, you're almost doing them a disservice. There should be some way that they could go out and have a lot available. This is done in the universities because the libraries are getting better and better and better. But you still have to go to the rare books room for most of the poetry books, and most students are shy about doing that. So they don't really get to sample anything. Another article that I wrote this summer—and it's a letter, a response to a man who teaches English at Kent State—and the whole subject of the letter is how it is possible to teach poetry today without being exclusive, because I think that's what the most exciting thing should be for the student—here's just this huge gamut of interesting stuff being written. Any time you make a reading list, it doesn't become a reading list, it becomes a list of what you leave out. And that's the biggest problem. And if you're in some place like Kent State, Ohio, maybe you stick around because you had a good teacher for a few years, but if you're in an ordinary college town, you don't have anything to browse in, to really see what's going on. So if they have one professor there who teaches Robert Lowell, they don't even know half the time that someone like Ginsberg exists. And Ginsberg is a different case because he's been in Life magazine. But they don't know the possibilities of poetry, they know that there's one, but they don't know that that one doesn't have to be in a quarrel with any other one. And they often don't find out that there are really ten or twelve things going on instead of two in a quarrel with each other. Because usually if somebody is teaching Robert Lowell and then he teaches anybody else, he'll teach someone and say, "Now this poet doesn't write anything like that." And they'll spend the time going over how much less good he is.

And you can't do that in writing. It destroys the whole idea of creativity.

The whole idea of making literature competitive the great story of your life if you are an artist and you love nature, is savoring the beautiful things that you've read and you've heard, the masterpieces, but the masterpieces aren't beautiful because they're famous. They're beautiful because they're things that really hit you and you really like them, and there's no way that some young person is going to have your masterpiece experience. I may have loved Beethoven when I first heard him. But I didn't feel he was a master the way I now feel. And the real problem is that you have—I sometimes think that instead of lectures given by experts, the best teachers would be people who didn't know anything. I think the problem of teaching poetry today, I think it has to do with the way poetry is going to be taught in schools, and I can't—I'm usually very good at thinking of ideal systems, I can't think of any ideal system of teaching poetry. I just cannot think of it. Everything seems to be lacking. No matter what you do you seem to be putting something else down, or leaving something out. Maybe that's the way the poetry world is. They're always at each other's throats. You don't seem to be able to praise one poet without putting down another one.

How do you feel about the need for isolation in the life of a writer and how does it affect personal relationships?

Well, as I told you, I grew up extremely timid and shy and it was very very hard for me to even be interested in making friends with strangers. And consequently I always had a lot of enforced isolation in my life. And I grew up hating being alone, being terrified of being alone. And yet I spent a lot of time alone and it took me many years to learn to be alone and not freak out, to begin to appreciate that I really liked being alone and I didn't have enough privacy for being alone, and I got equally disturbed. And I approached it from the opposite side. I feel like you have to have a certain amount of privacy to sit down and work. But I don't feel that people interrupt that. I don't have that closed-door sanctuary attitude. I really am very seldom annoyed if someone disturbs me when working. And that's a result of compensation from when I was a kid and I would have been delighted if someone had disturbed me. My attitude is that it's natural for me to be alone, and if my life just flows its own way I'll find myself alone anyway, that I'm grateful when there are people there that I can talk to. I'm very much less flexible about it if somebody I don't like interrupts.

Have you ever done any experimenting with concrete poetry?

Not in the most literal sense. I've done a little series of what I call spells and chants. I did these a few years ago, many of which are just repetitions of words. I think of them as sound poetry. There is very little informational or emotional content. I think of that aspect of poetry as precisely that, an aspect of poetry. I'm not very satisfied with poems that only appeal to your eye on the page or can be listened to by your ear. It seems to me that an exciting poem can be seen on the page, and can sound good, and can also have all those other things.

Do you feel that you have a public image because of your readings?

I think that it's inevitable that anybody who gives as many readings as I do and I tend to give fairly consistent readings—I read many of the same poems—I present myself in one of two or three ways.

Is it a public image or images?

Well, that's a good question. I think the people think that I'm just as willing to talk to them in private as I am in my poems. Which may be true. I may be willing, but my old shyness and inhibitions arise and I don't find it very easy. And there's a real intimacy when I read my poems because many of them are very intimate gestures. And there's no way I could have a first conversation with a stranger that's anything like what I say in a poem. Now I think that's a hardship because I think they are disappointed. I keep telling people that if you love me, you should love me in my poems, and I could be a mass murderer or something. In fact, I have always felt that there is too much personality and silliness in the poetry world, so that if you like someone, you try to like their poems. I'm a victim of this too. You dislike someone, you find something wrong with their poems. I'm a very perverse person, and recently I've developed a dogma that you should be able to insult a person, somebody that you don't want to have anything to do with, you don't like him, you think he's stupid, and still like his poetry. And if you do, then he's written good poetry. Because you can transcend that. Now there are some people who just aren't honest enough to do that. I always admire people who can write wonderful poems and be rotten. It seems to me that they have achieved something. Poetry is a heroic form. People are idealizing themselves in a poem. I don't care what you say about confessional poetry and all of us presenting our weak sides, or our crazy sides, or whatever, we are presenting them to be loved, and we are presenting them in our most lovable form.

Do you write best early in the morning?

Yes, and I find it almost impossible to work at night. I don't find the dark conducive at all. I like real light, the sun, coming in.

Do you have a certain number of hours a day that you set aside for writing poetry?

Like my journals I'm always trying to do that, but I'm afraid it never did work out.

Do your dreams provide images for you?

They haven't for many years. I haven't written many poems in the last three years using dream imagery, but I don't really know why that is.

What do you do about fragments and unfinished lines?

I've always thought that's what journals ought to do. I have one in that journal.

Do you usually use them right away?

No, sometimes I use them five or six years later. I tend not to look through stuff like that. Because it's not exciting to me to keep a journal. I don't know and yet everyonce in a while I go through my papers. Sometimes when I'm going to edit a book and I want to put some poems together, I'll find fragments and write a poem from them. It always seems such a waste to have a fragment when you could sit for an hour longer and have a whole poem.

We talked about early workshop experiences, but was there any writer that you felt or you feel now did influence you when you began writing poetry?

Well, when I was younger I really didn't think anyone influenced me. It was all absolutely out of my head. But in retrospect, you see things slightly different. I really think Jerome Rothenberg had a profound influence on it. He was one of the people I met when I first came to New York and published my first little book of poems, which he liked because they used those surrealist kind of dream images and had a haunting sense of being terrified. It was a way of presenting the world that interested him. He translated a lot of German and Spanish poetry and he himself had this kind of Hassidic tradition. Even though I'm not Jewish, I've often felt like I've had a lot of the same emotional experiences in my life that the Jews associate with their history.

Do you have a sense of where you want your poetry to be, say, in five years?

No. I don't really know. I guess the best thing I could say is that I want to create the possibility of being as discursive as possible. And discursiveness is not really an atractive quality in poetry. It's like looking for ways to do something that I think basically unattractive.