SOURCE: An interview, in The Progressive, Vol. 58, No. 12, December, 1994, pp. 34-40.

[In the following interview, Pollitt discusses her political views and the differences between her poetry and prose.]

"Although feminism came out of the Left and naturally belongs on the Left, sometimes you wouldn't know it.'

Like Broadway, the novel, and God, feminism has been declared dead many times," Katha Pollitt writes in the introduction to her new book, Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism, published in September by Knopf. Pollitt herself is one of feminism's liveliest writers, tackling, in her delightfully witty prose, such diverse issues as family values, breast implants, male Muppets, and the notion that women are somehow more special than men. Her book is comprised of the essays and regular columns she writes for The Nation, as well as pieces that first appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Besides being one of America's best political essayists, Pollitt is an accomplished poet. She has won numerous awards for her poetry, including a National Book Critics Circle Award for Antarctic Traveler, published in 1983.

Katha Pollitt grew up in Brooklyn, graduated from Radcliffe, and earned an M.F.A. in poetry at Columbia University. For several years she was poet-in-residence at Barnard College, where she has also taught writing. She worked as a copy editor and proofreader at Esquire and The New Yorker, and wrote free-lance book reviews, before becoming first Literary Editor and then an associate editor of The Nation.

I visited her in the cheerful, cluttered apartment she shares with her seven-year-old daughter, Sophie, and her partner, Paul Mattick, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. When I arrived, she was attempting to make coffee. Mattick intervened, averting a near disaster with the grounds and boiling water. "Women don't belong in the kitchen," they said simultaneously, laughing.

In person, Pollitt comes across the same way she does in her writing—funny and personable, extremely sharp—taking aim at stereotypes and fuzzy thinking.

As we talked, her four cats wandered in and out of her study, walking all over her desk and sitting on her lap. We were interrupted several times by phone calls and faxes from people who wanted to tell her about the rave reviews for her book.

[Conniff]: Why did you pick the title Reasonable Creatures?

[Pollitt]: It's part of a quotation from Mary Wollstonecraft, the founding mother of modern feminism. She was the first woman to write a full-dress argument for the emancipation of women, and I'm a big fan of hers.

The quotation was, "I wish for women to be neither angels nor brutes but reasonable creatures." And what she meant was that women should be neither placed on a pedestal nor considered to be of a lower nature than men, but treated as human beings. I think it's truly amazing that 200 years later this is still a controversial statement. You still have to make an argument that women should have the same rights and responsibilities as men, beginning with the right to control your own body and what goes on inside it. So I think it's pretty timely.

I also chose the title because I think it points up my difference with what I call "difference feminists"—like Carol Gilligan, for example—who see women as being so differently formed from men that they make decisions according to a whole other set of criteria. Miraculously, it turns out that what this difference is is exactly the sexist stereotype, with a positive spin put on it: Women are more loving, more sharing, more caring, more intuitive, less hierarchical, "lateral thinkers," and all this. I wanted to set myself squarely against that style of feminism.

Do you think that you are one of a few people who believes women and men are the same kind of creature?

No. Lots of people think it. But the other strand of feminism is also quite strong. And it's much more fashionable. And the reason is that it explains the world we see without resorting to the concept of sexism. What it says is that women don't have power because they don't want power. For example, Suzanne Gordon, in her book, Prisoners of Men's Dreams, thinks women go into low-paid jobs in the helping professions because they are more helpful people. This is a very silly idea. I'm saying that it doesn't have to do with the personal gender-characteristics of the people involved. It has to do with the economy, which is organized along gender lines, and with the way you're socialized.

What do you think about Emily's List—an organization that gives money specifically to women candidates?

Well, I'm glad you're asking me this question. I have a very complicated relationship to Emily's List, which is this: I belong to Emily's List. I send money to people on their list. But at the same time that I am writing out my little checks, I am wondering, why am I doing this? These politicians quite often are not particularly enlightened or feminist or liberal.

I think that people in American politics are always looking for short-cuts. For example, if we elect women, will they automatically on the whole, on average, defend the interests of women, and be less warlike, and be more honest and altruistic and all this kind of thing? I think that, yeah, if you elect a feminist she's going to do that. But just being a Democratic woman is not going to do that. How many of these women are going to stand up and say that the Clinton welfare-reform program is going to devastate the poor and that it's sexist. And that in fact all women with small children ought to receive more benefits than they do? There are a few. Lynn Woolsey, for example, was on welfare, so she's a wonderful person to have in Congress. But some of the others, they're just as big on trimming the budget and "we all have to carry our weight" as the guys are. There's an illusion that women have only women's interests at heart. Women have all the interests of their class, just like men do.

Nonetheless, given identical politics, I'd rather have a woman than a man in office, because I think there's a value in gender-equity for its own sake. There are all kinds of issues where men and women do see things differently, not because women are lateral thinkers and men are hierarchical, but because women have a different life experience, and so they have different fears and different hopes as well.

But these kinds of small and marginal and subtle differences—you can't make a political movement out of them. You have to make a political movement out of politics. It can't be made out of voting for a this-colored person or a this-gendered person as if they'd almost unconsciously carry out your goals.

What do you think about the prospects for organized left-wing politics in this country?

I guess I would have to say at the risk of startling or bothering some of your readers, I don't think there is a Left in this country. There are liberals in this country. But I don't know of any movement, really, that mounts any kind of fundamental challenge to capitalism, and to the basic way this country is organized. The way things are set up I think there is very little space to enact even liberal politics. You see this every time Clinton has some kind of vague, liberal notion that flits through his mind, like, "Let's vaccinate all the children." It immediately becomes immensely complicated and difficult and he's attacked on every front and then he drops it. Now, maybe some of that is a facet of his personality and some of it is a facet of Congress. But if there was a great, big organized movement saying, "Vaccinate the children! Vaccinate the children!" they'd figure out a way to do it. What I think is amazing is the way the left-er end of the spectrum has collapsed into Clintonism. You saw this with health care. And you see it with the crime bill. This is going to be the major achievement of the Clinton Administration—this insane punitive mess. You didn't see "the Left" out there on this issue. And I think the reason for that is the same reason you don't see Marian Wright Edelman out there on the hustings saying Clinton's welfare ideas will hurt children and poor people. It's the whole lesser-of-two-evils, this-is-our-last-best-hope, we-have-to-go-along-to-get-along mentality. Instead of trying to create some sort of independent basis for social change you piggy-back on the conservative wing of the Democratic Party.

And so I feel that when we speak about the Left we're speaking about three people.

Surely more than three. I think of you as part of the Left, and The Nation as well as The Progressive.

Well, sure. You're one person, I'm another. I'm not saying there's nobody. What I'm saying is there isn't a social basis for this politics. There isn't an organization. What is the left-wing organization? The Nation Associates?

There are little things, there's this brush fire over here and these workers over there. But there isn't anything like an organized political movement. And the minute one develops, it collapses back into the Democratic Party again.

In your book, you take a couple of shots at the American point of view that the truth lies in the middle, and you seem to take a shot at Anna Quindlen for this attitude. Is that true?

Well, it's funny. Anna Quindlen is always the first person I read on the op-ed page of The New York Times, and often the only person I read on the op-ed page. And since I myself have started writing a column, I have an enormous amount of respect for her. Twice a week, for eight years or so, she has managed to turn out a piece of writing that is pretty lively and energetic and that has something to say, and that I almost always agree with. And I think there are issues on which she is very, very good. She is really good about abortion. And she's a good reporter and writer. I'm really sorry that she's leaving.

She wrote a piece about a basic civil-liberties question, which was whether or not to identify child-molesters to their neighbors after they've been released from prison. She talked about how she had two points of view; as a columnist, she could make a case against the law, but as a mother she would want to know. It seemed like one of those truth-lies-in-the-middle treatments. What did you think about that?

About the issue or the column?

Both.

I would share her perplexity. It's not an issue that I've thought through very deeply, and I would certainly want to ask: If sex offenders are tagged through life with their crime, what about other people? Should they be tagged through life, too? You can make a case that there are lots of areas where there is recidivism, not just this. But certainly, as a parent, I am more bothered by the idea that unbeknownst to me, a neighbor of mine might be preparing to kidnap and murder my daughter.

Ultimately, we need to think in a larger sense about crime, including sex crimes. The discussion is one about how long do you put them away and what do you do when they get out. It's much less about what happens while they're in there, and what I would like to see happening is that we would all ask ourselves, "How come our society produces so much violent crime and so much sexual crime?" That's a hard conversation to have. I'm not sure myself what the answers would be, although I'm sure football is in there somewhere.

Do you find yourself a feminist among civil libertarians and a civil libertarian among feminists?

Although there are certainly particular issues where you might find your wish to see women safe and cheerful conflict with your civil-libertarian outlook, basically I see these as having much more in common than opposed. The media have played a destructive role here in that when these two movements are discussed together, they are always discussed in opposition. So, for example, the major role played by the civil libertarians in reproductive-freedom issues is mentioned much less than the fact that some feminists would like to use the law to attack pornography, and all civil libertarians think that's an infringement on the First Amendment. But mostly, I see these two movements as friends.

You wrote a letter to the editor of The Nation right before you started your column—what was that all about?

Well, Carlin Romano wrote a review of Catharine MacKinnon's book Only Words which was published in our magazine, in which Carlin pretends to fantasize about raping Catharine MacKinnon and someone else does rape Catharine MacKinnon. It was to say to Catharine MacKinnon, you think there's no difference between words and deeds? I'll show you the difference. And we got a tremendous amount of flak for this. It was one of a number of pieces that we published that, although you could defend each of them in some abstract and complicated way, the bottom line was that the magazine was not attuned to the frivolousness of making this sort of joke. So I wrote a letter saying, "What's going on? I take a leave of absence and look what you do." You know, The Nation is often criticized for having male-oriented politics and publishing mostly men, and I think the criticisms have some validity.

So did that have anything to do with you starting your column?

No, no. Victor Navasky and I had discussed my doing the column for a long time. I will say, though, that there is always a space on the "Left" to be against feminism—in a way that there's not a space to be a racist. And although feminism came out of the Left and naturally belongs on the Left, sometimes you wouldn't know it. You wouldn't know it if you looked at what Andrea Dworkin likes to call the male Left. I think she draws much too harsh a portrait, but I don't think you could find a person publishing in a progressive magazine who would, say, support capital punishment. But you can certainly find pro-lifers. You can certainly find people who think that mothers should be home with their children. You can certainly find people who have bought the media caricature, which is that a feminist is a banker in a power suit.

What do you think of declarations of post-feminism, that many women say they are not feminists?

The idea that you need other people to make common cause with in order to achieve a goal feels to many people like failure. That's why you have a lot of working-class people who anathematize unions. I get letters from women like this who say, "I'm a Republican, I have an MBA, and everyone tells me I can't make it but I know I will. Because I'm determined and I'm the best, you see."

The American ideology is, "If you're the best you don't need anybody." So that makes it very hard for joining a political movement based on solidarity not to seem like weakness and a confession of your own inability to succeed by your own efforts. Now what people in America have a hard time getting through their heads is that, first of all, nobody succeeds entirely by their own efforts, but also, not that many people succeed. Capitalism is like a card game: Every time somebody wins, somebody else has to lose. We think that if everybody were equally hard-working and well prepared and determined, we would all make money. But no.

Now we have the anti-feminist feminists, as I call them—Christina Hoff Sommers, for example, who says women don't need feminism anymore. What that movement is about is saying to professional women, "You don't have to concern yourself with these problems of women who are poorer than yourself, and you don't have to concern yourself with some battered wife, or some bedraggled rape victim. You know, you're doing fine. So let those women go. Because you can compete successfully in the world of men."

I was talking the other day with a high-school coach who said he won't pat girls on the back, or be in a room alone with them, because he's afraid of being accused of sexual harassment. It's the same thing Nat Hentoff writes about at universities, that sexual-harassment suits have had a chilling effect, and male teachers are now going to treat female students like they have the plague. What do you think about all that?

Well, I don't think the price that women should pay for access to their teachers should be that every now and then one of them is going to be assaulted. I think that's a very short-sighted response to this problem—keep them at arm's length.

I think Nat Hentoff likes to portray these issues as, "Here are these wacko Women out there with their absurd sensitivities and as a result of that, a relationship that was very good and valuable is being destroyed." But I don't think that's the picture. I think you could say as a result of there being a couple of truly vile men out there who have been protected by administrations for a long time, and about whom no action has been taken, we end up with this situation. Why frame it as these women are spoiling it for everybody? Why not say these men are spoiling it for everybody? The anger is always directed at the women.

What do you think about that part of Catharine MacKinnon's work—the idea of the hostile work environment?

I agree with Nadine Strossen of the ACLU, that you don't want it to be that someone puts up a Playboy pin-up, or somebody reads Playboy in their own lunchtime, and because there is a woman in the office all of a sudden that is illegal. But there is a lot of hostility to women in the workplace. That's definitely true. And I don't think it should have to be true that in order to go to work and earn a salary women should have to put up with being constantly insulted and demeaned. And I think that there's some middle ground here that, if we were all people of good will, would not be all that hard to arrive at.

How does one go about trying to achieve that?

Men and women need to talk to each other. One thing about speech codes is the way that, because lawyers are so important in these discussions, it immediately turns to damages, to throwing people out of school and firing people. What I would rather see is a free and open discussion about sexism, about racism, about prejudice, about class privilege. That's the discussion you don't get to have once you start with all this speech-code stuff. And that's the discussion I think people don't want to have. If one student calls another a nigger or some other horrible epithet, what if you said, "Why do you say that?" What if you had a discussion about racism?

Take Charles Murray, for example. Now this is very interesting, because Charles Murray [in his book The Bell Curve] is saying something that large numbers of white people believe. They don't say it, but many, many white people at some level of their being think that the seemingly intractable situation of the black underclass indicates that black people are genetically inferior. It's very hard to get people to admit that they have this idea. But how do you get them not to have this idea if they always say, "I don't think that. No, look, black, white, purple, polkadot, it's all fine with me." Then you don't get to have a discussion where you examine what it means to think these things. Maybe there are other reasons that explain what seems to you to be evidence of this biological inferiority theory. You can have a discussion about this idea even though it's reprehensible. But that's a discussion that you don't get to have if you just call someone a racist and kick the person out of school.

So do you think Charles Murray is doing a service?

No, absolutely not. Because that discussion is not going to happen because of this book. What he's doing is he's making it acceptable to say this, but not as part of a discussion with black people. His main interest is to de-fund the welfare state. He just wants to say "Oh, don't spend all this money on remedial education, they're too stupid."

So you don't think it's good that someone is saying it out loud, because that's what it sounded like you were saying.

No. I don't think it's good. I mean I guess you could say yes, and it was good that Hitler voiced all that anti-Semitism, too, because now we can have a conversation about it. But no, Charles Murray is not like a student. Charles Murray is not some eighteen-year-old who was brought up to be a racist, and now he's in college and thinks maybe he shouldn't say it, you know, because it's rude. Charles Murray is a major political actor with certain policy goals that he wants very much to achieve. That's a very different sort of thing. I'm not saying that he doesn't have a right to say what he wants, but I think it's very important to combat his ideas most vigorously.

What do you think of the debate about pornography?

I have a lot of sympathy for a very deep critique of heterosexuality. But what I don't have a lot of sympathy for is spending enormous amounts of political energy on the futile attempt to get rid of certain kinds of images.

People like to argue about pornography because it's about sex. And it relates to certain academic feminist interests having to do with representation. But as politics, it is a true waste of time.

And it's worse than a waste of time, because not only does it use up energy that could be better devoted to something else, it places feminism in the camp of those who think that women are less sexual than men, that women's sexuality is less diverse and perverse than men's.

I think that it's very interesting that the women's movement in thirty years has not been able to get paid parental leave, something that many other countries have, something that's very modest, but actually would help people a lot. It has not been able to get a national system of day care—something else that exists in many countries. But it has been able to inject into the public discourse the views of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon on pornography.

I think it's been able to do this because it's hitching a ride on a feeling that is already very deep, which is Puritanism: Sex is bad, looking at it is bad, thinking about it is bad, and masturbation isn't very good either, and it's just all bad. So people are ready for this argument.

You don't find anybody defending pornography as pornography, except for Alan Dershowitz and women—Sallie Tisdale wrote an article, and now a whole book about it. She's really interested in pornography. Pornography is a multi-multi-million-dollar industry. But when is the last time someone made a case for pornography and said, you know, I like it? It's a pleasure. It's harmless. I don't beat and rape women. But I enjoy watching dirty movies. This is a case that is very, very rarely made, because people are ashamed of it. At the same time, they want to do it. And I think the shame and the wanting to do it are related.

That's how Puritanism works. It's a two-part system.

What do you think of Camille Paglia, who also sees violence and sex as inseparable?

I think she is very much like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. The media have constructed feminism as a cat fight between Katie Roiphe and Camille Paglia on the one hand and Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin on the other. But you'll notice that all these people agree that sex is a kind of violence, that it's exploitative. Except Paglia thinks that's good, or that's nature. Whereas, I think at some point Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon would want to say it's culture, but it just happens to be that way as far back as you can go.

Paglia is sort of the Charles Murray of sex. You know, "There's nothing you can do about it."

But take your garden-variety act of sex; they all agree that what is going on here is essentially sadomasochism, really. And that's its central feature. None of them have much use for the idea that sex is amusing, that it can be light, that it can involve affection or friendship, that people can laugh while they have sex, that it can really be rather sweet. This is the point of view that Katie Roiphe—all of twenty-six years old—would dismiss from her vast experience as utopian.

Well, I don't think it is. I think the kind of sex I have described is the kind of sex that lots and lots of people have. And it is one of the things that people like about having sex.

I come away from reading about this debate thinking, it's all so grim. Is sex really all that grim? You know, especially when you consider, if you believe these sexual surveys, women are having more pleasure in bed than they've had since they started trying to figure out women's sexual experience in some kind of a pseudoscientific way. And yet when you read all this you just think, it's all so grim and hateful, why would anybody bother?

They just have no sense of the subtlety of it all—that sex can be used to express a lot of different feelings. So you see, I'm still a romantic. I still believe in love.

Do you think that having a lighter or friendlier view of sex is part of having a left-wing political perspective?

No. I guess I think it's more individual than that. I've been very struck, as I go through life, to see how people's personal lives, while not immune to change for political reasons, come from a deeper place. If you look at the fathers that are involved with their children, I don't think you can say it's the Democrats, and not the Republicans. It's much more complicated. I think people's behavior has much less to do with their professed beliefs than is usually acknowledged.

But there's a great desire to preserve what we call traditional gender relations. And in their different ways, both the Camille Paglia-ites and the anti-pornography feminists do that. In each of these scenarios, men and women act in stereotypical fashion, don't they?

In the media, you see the women fighting about whether, as Mim Udovich quips, all sex is rape or all rape is sex, and then the man, the moderator, gets to come in and say, "But I love my wife." He gets to be the reasonable creature. It's a way of portraying feminism as a battle between competing mad notions.

Speaking of media portrayals of women, I especially liked your piece about the all-male Muppets.

Yes, it's amazing to think that it took twenty-five years for Sesame Street to have the idea that they should develop a female Muppet.

Who was the little girl who was in such despair when she found out Big Bird was a boy?

That was the daughter of a dear friend of mine—the same one who thought that her mother, who is a doctor, had to be a nurse.

One thing that is underarticulated about women in this country is that women are sexist, too. So you look at the credits on Sesame Street—there are women writers, the psychologist who advises them is a woman, the producer is a woman, too. A lot of sexism is unconscious; one thing that men and women have in common is that they hate women.

Do you think that aside from problems like the male Muppets, your daughter has escaped seeing herself as a lesser person because she's a girl?

Girls at her age are quite female-chauvinist, actually, I don't know how new that is. Just the way boys are—boys are very into being boys, and girls are very into being girls. But I have found that the kids in Sophie's class have an expectation of fairness between the genders that wasn't there before. So she'll say, "Do you love me?" And I'll say, "Of course I love you, all mothers love their daughters." And she'll say "and their sons." I didn't mean all mothers love their female children. But she will immediately pick that up and want it to be universal. And she's not the only kid like that. These kids also—they'll say that something's sexist. I've heard Sophie say, "Men, they all have to think they're so important." And it may surprise your readers, but I don't talk like that!

Where does she get it?

I have no idea. This is one of the things you discover when you have a child. They will come out with things and you have no idea where they came from. Often they have quite specific sources—something a friend said, something they heard on television, a story they read. But you don't know what that origin is. And suddenly it's like this little person is a radio station through which the culture is beaming itself.

What were your influences when you were growing up? Do you come from a family of writers?

No. My father was a lawyer, my mother sold real estate. My mother had wanted to be a writer, and I think because of that she was particularly encouraging. She was always finding poems and sending me poems when I was in summer camp, encouraging me to read, and sharing books with me and reading what I wrote with great interest. Both my parents were very encouraging. I was very lucky that way.

Did you start writing when you were very young?

Well, I started being interested in poetry when I was in about sixth grade. I always loved to write. And I used to come home from school and go up to my room and sit on my bed and write my poems. And I was writing angry letters to the newspaper.

Even when you were a kid?

Well, I recently came across a letter I had written when I was twelve years old to The New York Times. It was about some complicated legal case involving someone who was accused of being a spy, but I have absolutely no memory of writing this letter or what this case was. It was actually like something I would write today. I thought, oh my God, have I been doing this for that long?

So if it was someone accused of being a communist spy—was that partly your parents' concern with that case?

Oh, I'm sure it was. I was a child of the McCarthy era. These issues were very much in the air at our house.

What did your parents do during that time?

Well, I don't think they did anything very interesting, but I still feel uncomfortable talking about their politics. I will say that my father worked for the electrical workers' union—the more militant of the two electrical workers' unions—for a while. He had a number of dissident union cases, and cases related to the Smith Act, which in effect made it illegal to be a member of the Communist Party. And it was a very different world then. Victor Navasky's book Naming Names is a very good account of that era from the side of people who did give testimony and turn their friends in and all that. You come to understand how in a way that is not the case today, people felt that their lives, their identities, and their ability to exist depended on filling very narrow social roles.

Did you look at The Nation when you were a kid?

Yeah. My entire life has had The Nation in it. I can see those old issues with a few headlines in fat black type, sitting on my parents' dining-room table.

Do you feel like you are part of the same world that your parents were part of then?

No. I have a very different life from them. They had, for example, a very jolly group of friends, and politics were part of their social life in a way that is not true for me. And their politics brought them much more in contact with people from different social classes, whereas I tend to stay in my study. You know, it's funny because everyone has nothing but bad to say about the 1950s. But I think actually people had a lot more fun then. There were more parties. My friends and I are always wondering, why are there so few parties? I think people work harder now. And I think people lead more isolated lives than they did then.

Is your life the way you imagined it would be when you were a little girl?

That's an interesting question. In some ways, yes. I thought my life would be more exotic and exciting. I thought that more would be required. I imagined a life full of starker choices.

What do you mean by stark choices?

Well, if you grew up in the McCarthy era, one of the things that you would be constantly thinking about is, what would I do? Would I turn my friends in? Would I give in? You grow up and you learn no one is interested. Nobody's asking. And that's where the true irrelevance of politics becomes clear. I guess I shouldn't say that, because there are certainly a lot of people who have got in a lot of trouble with the Government for their politics. But I think that the one good idea that Herbert Marcuse had was the idea of repressive tolerance. American society has a very great capacity for absorbing protest and dissent. The Clinton Administration is a good example of that. The academy is another.

Your poetry is not political. I'm interested in those two parts of your life. Did you start out as a poet, and then how did you get sucked into the political writing?

Well, I always was a two-track writer. I always wrote poetry and prose. And the prose I started out writing was book reviews. I wrote many, many, many book reviews, storing up an enormous amount of bad karma for myself when I came out with a book. I did think, oh God, the knives will be sharpening all over America. So I reviewed books and I made a good portion of my living by doing this for all different kinds of magazines at all different levels of seriousness. But at a certain point I became tired of reviewing books. George Orwell said the really hard part of being a book reviewer is thinking of something to say about this very ordinary, not-that-interesting, run-of-the-mill book. At a certain point I was more interested in what I had to say than in the book I was reviewing. I started more and more using book reviews—as a kind of jumping-off place for my own reflections. And then at a certain point the book dropped out. And I started writing on my own.

How are your poetry and your politics related?

I have to say that I see poetry and political writing as rather different endeavors. What I want in a poem—one that I read or one that I write—is not an argument, it's not a statement, it has to do with language. I'm looking for a kind of energized, fresh, alive perception. The politics of the writer seem to me—well, we can talk about it, but it's not what I care about most. I would say my favorite modern poet is Philip Larkin. You can't get much more conservative than that. But if you look beyond, okay, he loves Margaret Thatcher, what you get from him—besides amazing, memorable, alive language and the revitalization of traditional forms—is a picture of what it is like to live in England now that is quite moving and true. He puts a different political slant on it than I would. But to me it's much more interesting to read that than to read a poem with whose politics I would agree, but that doesn't have a lot of depth of language and imagination to it. There isn't that much political poetry that I find I even want to read once, and almost none that I would want to read again. A lot of it is aural poetry, too. I like the written form. I like the several layers of meaning on each other. I think that's much harder to do with aural poetry.

So the poetry you read and write is not best read aloud?

Oh, well, best for what? I love to hear poetry read out loud. And I always write with the ear in mind. But not just the ear. I don't write a poem in order to speak it out loud. I think poetry-readings have had the effect of encouraging poets to make their poems simpler—more like a little anecdote, more like a story that you would tell around the dinner table. Well, that's okay. I don't want to be too judgmental about this. But I think it has its limits. And I have the experience constantly of going to poetry readings, and I'll have the impression that this is really interesting. I like it. It's funny, it's good. Then when I find the book, the poem is just dead on the page. It's just not an interesting piece of writing. There is nothing going on. It is all put there by the performance, by the voice, by the story that the poem is telling. But nothing would have been lost had that poem been told as a little 300-word op-ed piece, or a paragraph in a letter. And for me, what I like about poetry is the verbal concentration and levels of meaning. A poem with only one level of meaning is not a very interesting poem.

Did your parents read a lot?

Oh, yes. They did. There were a lot of books at our house. But here's the thing, you know, my parents read poetry. They didn't read poetry like scholars. But they read Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare's sonnets and Keats and e. e. cummings. It was just there. They enjoyed it. Poetry has never been really popular, compared to, say, the novel. But I think the idea that you would just never approach it, that you would write it off completely because it was too difficult or refined, I think that is a new thing among the class of people who would read other serious books.

You wrote a column about being interviewed about Richard Nixon, in which you noted that you're almost always asked to comment on women's issues. Do you plan to continue to write about women or not?

Yes, I kind of left that open. These issues are very much on my mind. I believe that if I keep writing my column, eventually I will have written about every single facet of feminism since time began. No—I did enjoy writing about Nixon, the last real President. But, you know, at The Nation I have the only regular potential space for a feminist column. I am the only columnist who is at all interested in these subjects or even favors them strongly—well, that's a little too strong, but let's not forget Christopher Hitchens's pro-life column, which must always be mentioned. So I feel, well, this is my brief in life. If I don't do this, then that's that much less representation of feminism.