[In the following interview, which was conducted in March 1975, Nemerov discusses such topics as his composition process, the relationship between poetry and meaning, politics, and the influence of other writers on his works.]

[Robert Boyers] : In the past year or so, Howard, you 've written a great many poems, by any standards more than most poets expect to write in several years. Is there any way you can explain to yourself, or anyone else, how this came to be?

[Howard Nemerov]: Well, I'd settled down thinking to myself, listen, you're 54 years old; who the hell goes on in this business, year after year, waiting for something to happen? You're supposed to grow up, you might as well cease to expect. And I said to my old lady, the minute classes stop I am facing the inner emptiness. After settling down, though, or trying to, I began saying things to myself, and appreciating again that when I think to myself, it's usually in blank verse, sometimes in rhyme. I'm very old-fashioned in this respect, you know, wrote all my free verse when I was 26, so I didn't have to do any after that. But how the new poems came so fast I can't say. All I know is every night I would go to bed and think, well, that's the end: look, you had another poem today, it could never happen again—all the while holding onto the sneaky notion that maybe it might happen again. What I love about poetry is, you don't know what you're going to do until you do it. You don't have to plan everything the way you do when you write novels—it's terrifying to wake up every morning knowing what you have to do.

The new poems that I've had a chance to look at are as various as we'd expect from your previous work. Do you find yourself writing in verse forms that are new to you? Do you think about such things at all as you 're going about the business of writing new poems?

Well, a new poem seems to start for me with a line, not an idea: if I get an idea I'm pretty sure I can't write it. I thought once, what a wonderful thing, write a poem about a deep-sea diver: get out a few books about deep-sea diving, and everything will turn out to be a metaphor for deep-sea diving, you know, heaven, hell, the rest of it—I was full of ideas, but no poem. A poem, or a part of a poem, just speaks itself in me when I'm composing. It's really kind of uncanny, though mind you I'm not claiming heaven-sent inspiration, because you would feel just as wonderful if you were writing the worst poem in the world, as long as it was coming that way. In fact, I've met people who do feel that way even though what is produced isn't much. But it feels like some kind of privileged condition. Nearest analogy: coming over on a little commuter-flight airplane from Binghamton this morning, I got this strong religious sense of being in the hand of something. You know, I used to fly in the war, and here I was, sitting up front, looking at the instruments, and I said to myself, I could fly this damned airplane, though I wouldn't know how to handle communications incessantly pouring in from the great beyond. Anyhow, we are intrepidly trudging on through clouds so thick you can't see an inch beyond the nose of the airplane, and this little guy doesn't even wear a smart cap. I had to think—one of those great fantasies—if the guy had a stroke and little Howard the hero has to guide us in, how the hell would I do it? My impulse would be suddenly to dive the hell out of the clouds so I could see what I was doing, and wind us up against the mountain, somewhere, whereas he just stays there, serenely flying, all the other passengers commuting like this full time, not terrified like me. You know, usually it's the unknown that's terrifying, but here it was the unknown that sustained, with people talking the blind aircraft in; they say, do this, steer that, descend 5000, descend 4000, and finally when they say—you're still in the clouds, can't see a damned thing—'O.K. 5-5-0, you're on your own, keep descending, you'll see the runway, in front of you,' and you do, it's just, well, miraculous, though maybe a pretty humble miracle compared with some. But imagine the industry, the ingenuity, the skill, the countless people which go into such an operation, performed all the time, guiding one tiny little airplane safely to its destination. And, above all, I was thinking, imagine the utter obedience and trust that goes with all this: you don't do what you think is right, you do what the guy tells you to, and practically all the time it works, that's remarkable. Well, it's an analogy, maybe there are better ones, and I don't want to make this all religious-sounding, but writing poetry does feel, when you're in the midst, as if something knows what you're doing, much better than you do. Of course, this is not to deny that you're supposed to have a little skill at carpentering the stuff together, so you find the rhyme at the right time, the rhyme that maybe gives you an idea you wouldn't have had if you didn't have to find a rhyme. But you can't deny that wonderful, wonderful things happen some mornings.

I agree, and the analogy does work, I think, though for me there's a problem in trying to identify what the obedience you describe would correspond to in composing verse. Clearly it's related to the more familiar idea of discipline, and would seem to involve attention to the processes of a poem 's unfolding, the character of its dynamics. Do you want to say anything further about obedience in this sense?

Claude Levi-Strauss has a clue, I think, when he speaks of Bach as a composer of the code, so that everybody who's played Bach a little feels as if he just lets the language do it, you know, in the organ works, page after page, you feel you know every note and exactly where the next line will go. I like the idea of the composer of the code, of somebody who is not rebellious, who is just using the language because it says that is the way it is to be used. No doubt this is an illusion, like many others, except we've got to remember: the idea that we do things all by ourselves is equally unprovable and equally likely to be an illusion. The idea fixed in the human brain since, ah, somebody says William of Ockham, somebody says Roger Bacon, and so forth, since the 17th century maybe, that it's all done in the head and has nothing to do with out there seems to me to be very funny, tragic too, because some of its results are frightening. Is that really as clear as mud?

Clearer.

I've written satiric poems about it, of course. Sometimes I believe the business about codes, sometimes I'm not so sure. Now one of the writers who has expounded these ideas most clearly is your friend Erich Heller, who wrote, as from teacher to pupils, "be careful how you interpret the world—it is like that." That's nice, huh?

It's instructive, though in some ways hard to grasp. Your notion of the code seems to me very important if Heller's idea is to yield what it should. If the world "is like that," a fact we ignore only at great peril, then we can honor its actual presence only by having the proper words, the inevitable code-words, if you will. But doesn't this conflict with the rather more familiar contemporary notion of the poet as one who makes the language over, more or less in the image of his desire?

There is a conflict, I suppose, though when you come right down to it the real poets are doing pretty much the same thing with the language. I'm always surprised to discover, when I try to teach students to write poetry, that they rarely notice how omnipresent language is in our dealings with the world. I've often thought that poets don't have to know much about the outside world—they just have to know what things are called, the names even of strange things. It's alright to make up new ones, but that's rarer than has been supposed, I think. Karl Shapiro was being pretty silly when he proclaimed, rather arrogantly I thought, that words in a poem have nothing to do with their dictionary meanings. I felt like shaking him. You know, the words are there when you come into the world, like other institutions—they're waiting for you; you're not a lonely individual cast out on a barren shore. And if the words didn't have their dictionary definitions, nobody could use them. Of course, people didn't have to wait for dictionaries, but words must always have had a consensual, lexical human meaning, even granting that there are idioms in which no word has its dictionary meaning. And this isn't something we should be sorry about.

You've written lately on the relation between poetry and meaning. In what sense does the poem's commitment to the poet's private meaning betray the code?

Well, I'm very strongly in favor of literal meanings. I try to stress the difference between what the poem says, which should be as clear as you can make it, and what it means, which may be mysterious beyond belief, because the universe is mysterious and vast, and doesn't need to mean one thing. But the reader should get a more or less literal vision of what's being talked about. What I passionately respect in reading Dante lately—he's been such a revelation to me this time around—what I passionately respect about his writing is his painstaking endeavour to make it clear. You never question that he is talking about what he's seeing. I don't know how he saw it, but it's absolutely marvelous. He's always talking about seeing—the act itself of seeing—and sees almost everything he writes about: he never tries to show you in the grand Miltonic manner. Me and Milton don't get along so well—I respect the old bastard, but I'm never going to love him.

Are there other writers you especially value, from whom you take regular instruction or inspiration? Writers, say, at once committed to 'the code' and to the mystery of things?

I really value the writers that I think of as friends, because they are ever so full of grandeur that they don't tell you. I have four in special: Socrates, Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Freud. Freud especially, because he tells you always the process of his thought and how he's getting there—says, oh, that won't do, we'll have to go back and try this other way. And Montaigne, because he is so generous about the world and so kindly in leading you throught it. And he makes no vast claim—he says, in that last great essay "On Experience," "I have no subject but ignorance and profess nothing but myself."

The element of the mysterious, the unaccountable, which you've alluded to only intermittently in all this, seems to me of central importance when one distinguishes among the different kinds of verse you've written. Thinking about this recently, I was brought to think of something that Saul Bellow said at Skidmore a year ago in accounting for the differences among his various novels. He talked about the different kinds of inspiration involved in the composition of different books. When he wrote Henderson The Rain King, he claimed, he had no feeling of polemical urgency in him, no axe to grind; he had no specific ideas that he wished to communicate, felt entirely at one with himself and with the world he was making. Thus he preferred Henderson to all his other books, feeling that somehow there was a relation between the success of a book and the feeling of the author at the time of its composition. Now my conviction is that the poems collected in parts 3 and 4 of The Blue Swallows are, in concentration at least, the most consummately beautiful poems that you've written. Could it be that there were special circumstances, spiritual or otherwise, which might account for the special merits of those poems?

Well, applying a comparison even more exalted than Saul, notice in Shakespeare each of the great tragedies has its own absolutely unmistakable atmosphere and tonality. You know it's Shakespeare with every line, but you also know which play it is; in fact, there's one exception that proves the rule, a place where Hamlet talks just like Macbeth, very melo-dramatic and ranting, so that I think, my god, he must have had this left over from Macbeth, tucked away. But there's never a question about the authenticity of the passage. As to the parts of The Blue Swallows you speak of, they were written over a period of maybe four years. Each poem has its own peculiar history. I remember that the "Bee-Keeper" poem came, I'm ashamed to say, from a newspaper article about a beekeeper who said, not in the words of my poem, a good many of the things that get said there. "The Mud Turtle" was written while I was writing the Journal Of The Fictive Life one summer, and poems like "Celestial Globe" in part three were practically all written one summer in '66 when I was trying something special and rather different for me—you note they're all little trimeter lines instead of blank verse, or rhymed iambics.

We mentioned the name of Auden in talking together earlier, and I would like to ask you about him—not only because he's died recently, but also because what most of us think about Auden is likely to say a great deal about the way we think about contemporary poetry in general. Lots of poets have become increasingly dissatisfied with Auden's verse, especially his late verse, and I suppose this feeling about Auden was most vividly expressed by Randall Jarrell many years ago, when he described much of the verse as "an invalid's diet, like milquetoast." Arguing that the dominant emotion in most of these poems was pity, he said that they tended to express an encompassing passivity. Do you feel this way about Auden? I know that at one time at least he meant a great deal to you.

Well, I guess I always admired Auden's poetry very much. Still, when asked to review his last book, or 1/2 book, collected and published by his friends, I got kind of stymied, and thought of a one-sentence review: "Dear reader, whatever you thought of Mr. Auden before this, you will continue thinking, and you won't change your mind on this account." I thought of his as a rather triumphal career in a way: here he had gone from a kind of boyish pseudofascism, through leftist pseudo-fascism, writing all kinds of nonsense, some of it terribly obscure, but learning at last to speak in a decent middle-range voice. He became a grown-up who could tell you lots of things, who had done more than any other poet to absorb the technological scientific sophistication of the time and make it go in his verses. At the same time, of course, as a declared devout Christian, he is also among the saved, and must be a happy man. If there is a great good place I hope he is in it, and I hope the cooking is good. All the same, this sort of thing makes me nervous, and I think—if that is all there is to being happy, I'm doomed, and maybe poetry as I know it is doomed too. And Auden doesn't improve the prospect much when he says, giving himself every freedom, that the poet qua poet is always a polytheist. Isn't that wonderful? When you're saved you can have it any way you like … Did you see the little remembrance by his friend Hannah Arendt in The New Yorker a few weeks back? The shocking revelation of loneliness and despair and not caring? I can conclude only that we human beings are a mass of contradictions, and anybody that tries to make sense of us must be a human being himself. In all, I wouldn't go quite as far as Randall Jarrell, but it is true that the later poems are mild-mannered, avuncular, full of crummy wisdom: if the word was still usable you could say that they were the poems of a godfather. He addressed one volume of them to his godson, you know, benign, witty, charming advice on how to get on through the world and how to put up with its contradictions and miseries. But I keep thinking, is that all? Maybe a great voice from on high wants to say, "yes, bub, that's all," to which I can reply only, "I have no rational argument, sir, to put up against that; if it's that way, so O.K." So Auden in his poetry and career raises some very poignant problems for anybody who is serious about writing. Whatever you feel about Auden, though, or about other writers, one thing at least can be said in favor of poetry: it doesn't kill you for not believing in it. Fair enough?

You bet. Still, it bothers me that work by writers a lot less famous than Auden, though very accomplished, is regularly overlooked, badly neglected, usually on behalf of another kind of verse which in our time has come to be known as naked poetry. I wonder whether we might talk a little bit about the obvious neglect of poetry decidedly more exacting, more reflective, than most of the poetry that my students tend to read. I'm thinking of poets like Ben Belitt and John Peck, whose work we both admire.

It's hard to talk about the situation in poetry; like all those large general things, as soon as you assert something about it you can instantly think of 3, 4, 8, a million exceptions. Still, what you suggest seems true enough. I like poets like Ben Belitt, very much as you do, and I like John Peck, who's much younger, and has only one volume to his credit so far—a very distinguished volume, I might add. But they are both extremely refined, elaborate, fastidious, and curious artists, whose effects you have to get familiar with for rather a long time. I don't think they yield themselves instantly at all, and of course, for I guess maybe two decades or so, people have been very much in favor of the immediate in poetry, what can be picked up like Kleenex—you use it and throw it away, the poem of strong opinion frequently. Naked poetry, the title of some silly anthology of several years ago, did suggest at least that if you want to go around naked you'd better be in a warm climate, and that it's best to be beautiful. When I looked at the book I had to say I'd rather write closed couplets. Again, old-fashioned.

There was a time when you wrote novels, but you seem to have given that up. Were there things that you felt you could express better in the poetry than in the medium of prose fiction?

Well, maybe I just gave in to natural laziness. Writing a novel is terrible hard labor, whereas in my new book [The Western Approaches] I have 4 or 5 poems about what a novelist thinks when he's writing a novel; you know, that's much easier, because you can do it in 14 lines. Maybe the decisive turning point came when I taught at Bennington over the way some years ago, and dear Stanley Edgar Hyman, now the late Stanley, was holding one of his typical benevolent despot department meetings. We were going to hire somebody, and Stanley said, we have to hire a novelist, and a voice from the back of the room, not mine, said, but Howard's a novelist, and Stanley said, Howard's a poet. So we hired Bernard Malamud instead. You know, it's trivial little things like that that mark where you have to go. I said to myself, now you know something your best friends wouldn't tell you; in fact, they've told you.

We're covering all of your various literary enterprises here, as you can see. You've written a great deal of criticism, published several volumes of it, in fact. Does writing criticism play any special function for you? Does it bear, say, a specific relation to the ups and downs of your verse writing? Do you make elaborate calculations to decide which medium you'll write in?

Hmm, I can remember when I began to think of all this in economic terms. When I was starting out, benign greyhaired publishers would explain to me how very proud they were that I was a poet, because that would be good training for when I went on to write the novels they wanted me to write. And, before I got out of commercial publishing and settled down with University presses, and other such unprofitable endeavours, the only way I could get my poems published in the main was by hooking a novel onto them. And you know, once I came through with a novel I could say, I will not sign a contract for this unless you promise to publish me a book of poetry. So that worked, twice I guess, or three times. Then a poet named Elder Olson at the University of Chicago said they were going to start publishing poetry and could they start with me? I said, oh dear, yes you could, and we've been friends ever since. It's a very gentlemanly relation, nobody makes any money or expects to, but they put out a handsome looking book, they keep it in print, it sells its respectable seven copies a year, and we seem to be reasonably happy that way. And so the same thing happened with Rutgers University Press and my essays: they published two books of those and sort of a novelist's creature called Journal of the Fictive Life. For me publishing seems to be largely a matter of going on record—I did this, see, here it is—and it doesn't much matter whether it's criticism or verse or fiction. It never occurred to me to write criticism as a conscious decision. When I was growing up criticism was a very serious industry, big time for such a little thing as literature. At 18 I thought the Kenyon Review was, well, eternity, and that John Crowe Ransom, who edited it, must have been there years and years and years. Only 20 years later, when John asked me if I wanted to succeed him as editor, I went back and looked at the files and found Kenyon Review had started only the year before I went to college, and had that imposing appearance of permanence and the imposing tone of authority, shared by the Partisan Review and the Sewanee Review, and one or two others in those days. Then one wrote because one felt that there was a literary community, life seemed to be a little smaller and more compact. I know I am talking like an elder, but I feel like an elder. About 1955 when Allen Ginsberg emerged from somebody's head, the whole thing exploded and it all got redefined, and among many of the effects of that period was that I generally stopped reading those magazines and even writing for them. Anyhow, you write criticism you make as many enemies as you need quite early in life, and I didn't think I needed to write any more: I had already done for myself. But I never gave up criticism, and have always alternated between poetry and prose, lately deciding to do only what can be accomplished in brief spans of time. Unlike our friend Ben Belitt I write very fast and concentratedly, and suffer with years of silence inbetween. People like Ben or Bernard Malamud seem to go to the desk every day; they know what they're working at and they steadily do a little something to bring it toward completion, whereas I have to do it all in a single day—if not a whole novel, then an entire episode or chapter at any rate.

You've written often about the public world in your verse, though your most memorable work seems to me meditative and personal, frequently even mystical, rather than ocasional. Would you say something about the poet and politics. It's a subject you've addressed once or twice in your essays, for example, "Poetry And The National Conscience."

I remember vividly the assassination of President Kennedy. It was, you know, a very terrible moment, and like a great many other poets I went right home and spent all day writing a poem of which I think it was The New Leader published only a part. When things had calmed down I recognized sadly that it was a terribly bad poem, and so I never reprinted it. When we poets believe that we are thinkers, moralists, or preachers, that we're going to give you the word—now this is wisdom, kid—we reveal more terribly than others how stupid we are. And so I mostly have stayed, I think, out of the preaching business. It's very hard to be sure because someone may think you're preaching when you didn't know you intended to at all. I like to think I've succeeded in writing poems that try to say what the world is, instead of what it ought to be, though I'm sure as I age I make my moralizing sententiae as nobly and with as grand a gesture as anybody else. But I don't think I've lately committed the sin on the scale I achieved in the Kennedy poem—that was awful slop. You can, of course, be moved by a political event and set out to write about your response, only to find that your poem isn't about the subject you were moved by at all. That's hard to tell without getting down to cases, and I just don't have any examples at hand to help me there. I do think I wrote a very good political poem, about the murder of William Remington, who nobody perhaps remembers now. In that great Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers scandal he was one of the not-innocent victims who went to prison, where he was beaten up by two thugs. He died there and I don't remember that I was terribly moved when I heard it, but I wrote a damned good poem, and managed not to moralize. At least there's no overt sermonizing about how the American people should behave better, or stuff like that.

You once wrote, I think it was years ago in Journal of the Fictive Life, that you hate intelligence and have nothing else. I've been curious about that.

That's one of those petulant things you say once in a while if you're writing a more or less confessional book. It doesn't mean that that is your settled habit of mind; after all, I wrote that book just at the beginning of those terrible middle years. Since then I've cheered up considerably. I now teach with a ruthless geniality, handing my misinformation out with the greatest good cheer.

That's good to hear, and something I'll try to remember when I reach my own terrible middle years. Speaking of terrors, though, I thought we might talk a little about the subject of anxiety (you've got to admire this transition).

I think I know where you're headed.

There's been much debate lately about what Harold Bloom calls The Anxiety of Influence. In your recent review of Bloom's book for Sewanee you sound some skeptical notes on the theory. Without addressing the book itself, perhaps you'd care to say something further about the relation between influence and style.

Well, Mr. Bloom may be correct, and there may well be an anxiety of influence for most people. If so, I guess I was just too stupid to be anxious, though I was influenced by everybody. I remember T.S. Eliot's first poetry recording, reading "Gerontion" on one side and "The Hollow Men" on the other—I got so I could imitate it even down to the scratch of the needle at the start of the record. My first girl-friend at college told me to cut out the parson-like tone of voice, that it didn't have to sound that way. I went on from there to make up my own talent school of virtuosity exercises—Tate, Auden, Stevens, Pound. 20 years later somebody gave the exercises back to me and I swear there is a Stevens imitation there that could go in his Collected Poems and even he wouldn't know he hadn't done it. It always seemed to me a lot of cant to talk about finding your own voice—I never went looking for it. My way of saying this in the review of Bloom's book was that, when you're 20 you write "the grass is green" and they say "ah, Wallace Stevens." 20 years later you write "the grass is green" and they say "ah, sounds just like you." It's a very mysterious business. Seems to me that to learn to write poetry includes learning maybe to sound like Yeats at his most arrogant, putting on an attitude you couldn't afford in your personal life because people would kick your teeth in. What's always marvelous is at the end how the poem can sound like all the others and still be itself. Style is the making visible of the soul, about which Proust had a good thing to say, when he wrote that the universe is the same for all of us and different for each. I like that.