SOURCE: “Interview with Louis Simpson,” in The World's Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets, University of Georgia Press, 1985, pp. 140–58.

[In the following interview, originally conducted in 1980, Simpson discusses his formative influences, his approach to writing poetry, his artistic aims and thematic concern with ordinary experience, and his views on contemporary American poetry.]

The interview was originally conducted at Mr. Simpson's home in Port Jefferson, New York, in March of 1977. Searching for the Ox had been published in 1976 and Mr. Simpson was working on his third volume of criticism, A Revolution in Taste: Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell (1978). The interview was updated in Mr. Simpson's hotel room on the campus of the University of Houston in the spring of 1980, just before the publication of Caviare at the Funeral.

[Stitt:] When did you begin writing poetry?

[Simpson:] My first published poems came out in a school magazine when I was thirteen or fourteen. But in those days I mostly wanted to write prose. The first thing I published outside of school was not a poem, it was an essay on the coronation of King George V, which won first prize in a competition and was published in the Daily Gleaner. That was the big newspaper on Jamaica, and they gave me five pounds. The next year I won a second prize for a short story, which was also published in the Daily Gleaner. After that I began writing with a group that published in a newspaper-magazine called Public Opinion. That was a great deal of fun—we were all trying to win Jamaican independence. I published short stories there, and also some poems, when I was about sixteen. I was reading Faulkner and Saroyan and wanted to write like them.

What finally turned you to poetry?

Well, that was after the war. When I was seventeen. I went from Jamaica to New York and attended Columbia University. I wrote poems that were published in the Columbia Review, and also some prose. Then the war came, and I didn't write anything for three years. When I came back to Columbia, I wrote a short story that Esquire took. That was the first thing I ever published in an American magazine. Then I began working on the Review as an editor, and published some short stories there. I finally turned to poetry because I found that I could get out of my system certain things in a short space that I couldn't get in prose. And actually, the kinds of things I could do were much better suited to poems. I didn't have much knowledge of the world, the way things are done and run. Outside of my knowledge of the army, I didn't have any experience. What I did have was a great deal of emotional intensity, which was wrapped up with certain things I'd seen—and that shaped the poems, it made me write poems. That was about 1947. Some of my first poems were taken by Wake, the magazine edited by Seymour Lawrence up in Cambridge; Harper's took one, and Partisan Review took one or two.

By the end of 1949 I had enough poems for a book. I was living in Paris, where I stayed for a year, and found a very good publisher, a man who put out fine editions. He did a beautiful printing of The Arrivistes. He printed 500 copies, of which about 200 were distributed from New York by a man named Gustav Davidson. I tried to find out where the rest were, but all he said was that they'd been lost. I never did learn how you can lose 300 copies of a book. I paid for that book myself—＄500 for 500 copies, which is an incredible price. But I still didn't want to lose 300 copies. Recently they've been turning up, selling for ＄300 a copy. Anyhow, I returned to the states and took a job as an editor for Bobbs-Merrill, where I lasted five years.

I had another bad experience with my second book. I sent it in to a competition called the Borestone Mountain Award. I was delighted when, months later, they called to say I had won. But then a few days later they told me that there had been a recount of the votes and they had made a mistake, I had not won. The prize was going instead to someone called Leah Bodine Drake. The judge was Robert Lowell—I suppose he changed his mind for some reason. And what was the funniest thing, they asked me not to say anything about this because it would hurt the reputation of the Borestone Mountain Award. And would you believe it, I didn't say anything, not for four years. That was a blow. But finally John Hall Wheelock at Scribner's took the book and they published it in their Poets of Today series. They would put three manuscripts by three different writers into a single volume, and that is how Good News of Death finally appeared. It got some good reviews, but the critics insisted on treating it as one of three, as though we poets were in competition and the only point was to say which was best.

My third book, A Dream of Governors, was published in 1959. Between then and 1963, when I published At the End of the Open Road, I underwent a big change. I had been writing poetry that was quite formal; one reason for that, I think, was Randall Jarrell's review of The Arrivistes. He said very nice things—that I was a very good poet, a very promising poet, but that there wasn't a single really good poem in the book, nothing was quite finished. So I decided I'd better learn how to finish poems. I had a lot of fun in The Arrivistes kicking things around in all sorts of shapes and forms. Now I decided I should learn how to write the perfect poem. So over the next few years, I tried to write impeccable poems, poems you couldn't find fault with.

Then between 1959 and 1963 I broke all that up and tried to write poetry that would be more free, that would sound more like my real voice. At the End of the Open Road does have a few poems in traditional forms, but it also has a considerable amount of free verse. Ever since then I've written mostly a kind of informal poetry. I work very hard to get the shape and sound of a poem just right, to get the lines breaking right, but I'm not working in regular stanzas and meters. So that was a big upheaval and a big change for me. And of course you never please people. Someone will always say, “Oh, that early stuff was the best; we wish you'd never changed.” Then there are the others who say that everything before At the End of the Open Road was a terrible mistake. Neither point of view is true, of course. Some of the early poems, I think, hold up very well, especially those about World War II. But, you do what you feel you have to do, and sometimes that means changing very strongly. I know some poets don't. They keep writing the same kind of poem forever. But I've always been changing, and this has made problems for me as far as the public goes. They can't typecast me as easily as they'd like to.

How do you compose your poems? Do you work in longhand or at the typewriter? Do you work in bursts or long stretches?

I work in bursts and I work at the typewriter. When I've done a draft of a poem, I take the sheet out of the typewriter and work on it in longhand. Then I type up a clean sheet and start the process all over again. My pages end up completely filled with corrections. There are periods, sometimes for months, when I don't really feel like writing poetry. I haven't written a poem now for about two months because I've been writing prose. Writing poetry for me demands a kind of preoccupation, a slow process of being bothered by something, thinking about it and trying to pull it together. The last poem I wrote took only one day, but that was because I had been thinking about the subject for a long time.

Do you ever have a poem, the way some people say happens, just burst into your head so that the composition takes only as long as it takes to write the words?

I've had that happen two or three times in my life, but no more. Once was in Paris in 1949 when I wrote the poem called “Carentan O Carentan.” That was a dream—I dreamed the poem, then I sat down and wrote it. It came practically complete at the first writing. The same thing happened with another war poem, “I Dreamed That in a City Dark as Paris.” One or two others have come very fast, but in general, no. Usually I get a few lines easily, maybe half the poem, and the rest comes only through very hard work. Right now I have about five different clusters of things in my head that could be poems, but I haven't seen the way yet to make them poems. When I say cluster, I mean material that's new—scenes, sequences of ideas, or images. The poems themselves will probably take me a long time to get. I work very hard on poems. That's why I can't do prose and poetry at the same time, they both take a lot of rewriting and continuous effort.

So when you are about to start a poem, it's a cluster of images in your mind rather than some abstract idea that gets you going.

It's not an abstract idea. I don't think abstract ideas are a good beginning for poems, not for me anyhow. I wouldn't know what to do next—illustrate the idea with images, I guess. No, I start with a scene or with something that I don't think has been written about; there are always an incredible number of things that haven't been written about. I'll give you an example. I have an idea for a poem now that I don't know if I can write, but it would be a very good poem. It would be a new kind of story in which there are no characters, just things seen on a highway, a succession of signs and objects. It would be a love story, actually, but the two people might not even meet. It would just be the things that they pass through in order to meet each other. The point of the poem would be that our real experience in situations today has more to do with things like driving a car than with human relations. This is the general framework of the poem, the idea that would make a poem. I've already ridden the highway with a notebook on my knee taking down signs. I have three pages of notes, but making it come alive as a poem would depend on the movement of the lines, the feeling you'd get into the lines themselves, and I don't know if that'll ever come. These are things that have to sit and wait until I am, I suppose the word is “inspired.”

Would you say that your service in World War II had an important effect on your work as a poet?

Very important. First of all, surviving the war made me realize that, in a sense, my life was mine to do with as I pleased. I could be a poet or anything I liked. Also, the war created a big difference between me and some of my contemporaries, who were only slightly younger. For example, my attitudes are very different from those of someone like Allen Ginsberg, because he was not in the war and I was. Our attitudes toward America are completely different. I have a certain innate respect and love for the United States and its government that some younger people, for whom the war was an imposition, don't have. My feeling of affection for the country has been badly damaged at times, but I have never had that hostile attitude toward it which has been common among younger people. I felt the war was something that had to be done by my generation, and we did it.

This has some bearing, I'm sure, on my attitude toward some of the rioting of the sixties and seventies. I took part in the Berkeley protests against the war in Vietnam because I thought it was a very bad thing. On the other hand, the absolute sweeping denigration of the United States which was fashionable in the sixties, when they were looking for the meanest possible motive in ordinary people's attitudes, seemed to me to be equally disgusting—just as the attitude of the people who were making the war in Vietnam. The radicals seemed just as fascistic to me as the war makers, and it was the ordinary people, the citizens, who were suffering. Now this may be romantic, but I feel that the ordinary people are pretty decent, even though their attitudes may not be mine. I don't feel that they're at all contemptible. I mean the people you meet in a shoestore or pub or shopping mall. I have always felt that there is a lot of poetry in those people.

As a matter of fact, the poetry I'm trying to write these days—with great difficulty—is an attempt to talk about the ordinary life around us, not the rarified life of a thief or an intellectual. Maybe this cannot be done. It may be that a commercial, industrial civilization puts so many layers over things that there's no reality left. I'm not sure, but I would like to write a poetry of ordinary things. I began doing this in earnest in Searching for the Ox, and I got the impression from some of the reviews, especially the English reviews, that some readers didn't quite understand what it was all about. They couldn't see the poetry in lines that look so prosaic and ordinary. But I feel that I have two directions I must follow—one leads to this straightforward kind of poem about ordinary life as it really looks and smells, and the other leads to a poetry which is altogether more imagistic and more mysterious. I don't see why I can't do both.

You spent five years in publishing after World War II. Did you learn anything as a poet from that experience?

The only thing I learned as a poet was that sitting in that office was a complete waste of time. The books were not worthy of attention, and I discovered that you could spend entire days of your life doing nothing of any real satisfaction. I have never felt that way about teaching. The university is a much better place for a writer—at least you can read good books, and the people you meet, the students, are alive. Being a teacher also makes you work harder at ideas than you might otherwise, and this is valuable. Of course, any job that you might have is going to use up some of your valuable time, but for a writer, being a teacher is better than most other jobs. Your time is freer and that means you can write more.

You don't seem to be a regular participant in the creative-writing industry that is so prominent a part of so many universities. Why is that? Do you just prefer teaching more customary academic courses?

I think it is better to be writing your own stuff than telling other people how to write; it takes away from your own writing to be vicariously writing. It is also much more difficult to teach writing than it is to teach literature. You're more involved with the students’ personalities, and when their feelings get hurt, you have problems on your hands. Then there's the old question of whether writing can even be taught. You cannot teach a nonwriter or a mediocre writer to be a good writer. About the best you can do is show good writers where they're making mistakes, where something can be improved. But at least half of the students in creative-writing classes have no real talent. All you can do is pat them on the head and try not to hurt their feelings.

Even for the potentially good writers, the creative-writing programs present certain dangers. In my experience, these programs tend to make the students rather self-conscious in the wrong way. They learn too much about what is “going” at the moment, who's in and who's out, and this destroys their innocence. I think a real poet has to find out certain things for himself, grope his own way a lot of the time. That's what makes his poetry different and original. But these people are taught poetry as a career. They become very competitive, and this is the last thing a poet should be. A poet should stick to his writing and not worry about his competition or whether he's getting published or not. I'm a terrible romantic about poetry. I believe it is something that you do for your own pleasure, and if it pleases you then maybe someone else will get pleasure out of it. But I'm against the competitiveness and the self-consciousness; I don't like that atmosphere at all.

You have written two volumes of literary criticism—Three on the Tower and A Revolution in Taste. What made you want to invest that much time and energy in an activity peripheral to your central task of writing poetry?

Well, I don't write poetry all the time, I can't write poetry all the time, but I do have a lot of things going on in my head about poetry, and I want to be able to express them. And I like writing prose—it is hard as hell, but it also has a pleasure to it. Also, if I possibly can, I would like to affect the climate in which poetry is read today. I think that there is a need for clear speaking about poetry, that there is a lot of obfuscation taking place. There is a whole group of academic critics, men such as Harold Bloom, who seem to me to be completely mistaken or self-serving when they write about poetry. They have a theory which they insist on applying to all writers, even when it doesn't fit at all. I wouldn't mind if a man like Bloom limited himself to writing about Shelley, but he undertakes to talk about contemporary poetry, and it's quite clear to me that he knows very little about it. His values are completely cockeyed; he has a theory which he is trying to impose like a dead brick on contemporary poetry. The trouble is that people who are intimidated by the appearance of learning are likely to believe what he says. I remember meeting a woman who told me that she didn't understand him, but that he was very important. A lot of people feel that way. The reason she couldn't understand him is that he doesn't make sense. So, one reason I write criticism, is to cut through the nonsense and say something intelligible. I think we need good critics very badly—people who will talk about what is really there on the page and who will do so out of an emotional commitment to the poetry.

At one time Whitman was an important influence on your work. What was the source of that importance?

He was important to me in this opening up of the form, the line, which allows you to think of the poem, not as a structure of stanza and meter, but as a structure of cadences determined, really, by the content and the feeling of the poem. His freedom of form and his belief that the job of the American poet was to name things, to say things for the first time. I like to think, when I write a poem, that I'm saying something for the first time or creating a new situation or telling a kind of story that no one else would tell. I've been working lately on a kind of narrative of ordinary situations, and I don't know that many other people are doing that.

You are often referred to as an intensely American poet, perhaps the most consciously American of all current poets, and yet the first many years of your life were spent in Jamaica. Do you have any explanation for this seemingly paradoxical situation?

When I was growing up in Jamaica, I learned about America from my mother, who was American, and from movies we saw. I developed a somewhat romantic attitude about America—it was an exciting place to me, very different from the restrained English life we had in Jamaica in the thirties. I thought of America, as a place where people had a very exciting life and the freedom to behave as they pleased. Then too, when I came to America, I knew I was going to stay here and that I was going to be a writer. So I tried to find out about the country as hard as I could. This was my material as a writer, and I wanted to understand it. My attitude as a writer has always been to be concerned with the material, not with my own salvation. I think that many poets are concerned with working out their own personal salvation through their work, projecting an emotional outcry of their soul. This has never been part of my intention—my own personal identity seems very unimportant to me. In fact, some Englishman pointed out in a review of Searching for the Ox that the ego had disappeared almost totally from my work, and I hope that's true.

I try to see myself as a transmitter and the poem as a transmission—I stand between the material, which is out there, separate from myself, and the created work. My job is to select from the material what I think will make a poem, shape it, and pass it through. So I have tried to absorb America as hard as I could, because that is the material I've been given. I've tried hard to understand it, but I never had to try to like it—I always did like it. Even the horrible, ugly things to me were stuff that could make poetry. I have just tried to find and state the essential truth of things. I think this is why I am so fond of writers like Dreiser and Whitman. A few years ago I did quite a long review of a book on Dreiser for the London Times. What I like about such writers is not their philosophy—that is very awkward and naive. In fact, most writers are not very good philosophers. The excitement in Dreiser is that he's saying something for the first time; he's taking this absolutely rough and raw material, showing it to you, and paying careful attention to it.

And that's how I feel about America, and that's what I have been trying to do. But there are problems, undeniable problems. For one thing, I am an outsider—I grew up in Jamaica. And then, not long after I arrived in America, I left it to fight in the war—and that was a European experience. So I had to find my bearings all over again. Another problem is the material itself—can it be turned into poetry? Maybe it's just too flat, too dead. And the language which this material demands is not exciting either. I don't use colorful or fancy language because that would be an interruption of the truth I want to get across; I'm trying to get across the poem as a whole. The whole poem—one page, three pages—is a single word almost, one whole expression. It is as though the event were speaking to the reader. I want to write an almost transparent poem in which you can't find the writer and in which the language draws no attention to itself. I know this attitude toward the language of poetry is completely different from that held by a poet like Dylan Thomas, back then, or today by a poet like Charles Wright, where the words are so important, or John Ashbery, where the individual sentences call so much attention to themselves.

So—to get back to your original question—I just saw this as my material, my American material. In the beginning, I wrote about it in big generalizations—I wanted to eat the country up all at once. Now I'm doing a different kind of thing: I'm trying to get at it by writing about individual scenes and people. Of course, the irony of it is that the great American poem may well be written by a poet who doesn't think of himself as American at all, who writes American poems because he happens to live in America. He would be surprised to be called an American poet—just as Thomas Hardy would have been surprised to be called an English poet. He wrote that way because he lived there.

You've been quoted as having said: “The main fact about the American artist is his feeling of isolation.” Do you still have this feeling of isolation as a poet in America?

Oh, very much. American poets tend to find themselves separated from each other by geographical space—we don't meet in cafés; we rarely talk to each other; we see very little of each other. You may as a person have a life with other people, but as a poet you are isolated, you don't see the people you really have a lot in common with for a year or two at a time.

I also think the poets are isolated, spiritually and intellectually, from society at large. American society does not need its poets—and I'm not being cynical; I'm just stating facts. This observation is certainly not original with me. The American economy can go through a day completely oblivious of poetry without the slightest jar. And the people—there are very few readers of poetry in America. I figure that, at the most, there are ten thousand people in the United States capable of reading a book of modern poetry. I said “capable” of reading it, which doesn't mean that they will actually read it. A new book of poetry, by a good poet and with good reviews, is very lucky if it sells three thousand copies. The only way for a poet to bridge this gap is to cease being a poet and become something else—a novelist, a scriptwriter for television, something like that. As Randall Jarrell said, a poet can become famous in America if he writes a novel or does some other popular thing, but not by writing poetry.

I take it, then, that you don't expect your poetry of ordinary American life to gain a large audience of ordinary American readers?

Oh, the people I write about will never read it, even though they could. And this can make you angry. Let me give you an example. I recently talked to a woman who complained about some modern art that she found incomprehensible. So I said to her: “This is all very well and good, but when some of us do write or paint stuff that is comprehensible, you don't support that either.” Every now and then you will see a newspaper or magazine article about modern poetry in which it's claimed that the poets don't make enough effort to get to the common man or to write about common things. This is complete nonsense. There are many contemporary American poets who write perfectly understandable poems about things that interest everyone—about the most domestic subjects, if that's what the American public wants—about mothers and children and fathers and gardening and the day's work and the ordinary feelings people have. And the public doesn't care. They still complain that all this modern poetry is obscure. It's just nonsense; they don't care about it because there are other things that interest them more. I don't want to sound cynical, but I do feel that any serious American poet who keeps on writing past the age of forty has got to have an awful lot of motivation within himself because he's not going to get it from the public. No—you have to do it for yourself.

If there is a literary center in America, a community of writers, it is probably in New York. You live close to New York, but apparently don't find that community supportive.

There are writers in New York who support one another. Certain publishing firms and magazines that wouldn't flourish anywhere else flourish in New York. But for me as a poet, the city is a physically impossible place to live. The atmosphere is depressing, the enclosure by walls has almost a physical impact on my mind. In my view, the poet needs to have a sense of space, sense of innocence. In New York, you are constantly being bombarded by horror—in a single walk down the street you can see more horrors than you want to see for the rest of your life. And the so-called literary life in New York—people stand around and talk about what everyone is doing. Some people are working, of course, but many don't do anything, they talk about doing it. When I write about New York, I always present it in the grimmest, most forbidding terms: it appears in my poems as a sinister place.

Robert Bly has a reputation for having had a radical influence on certain poets, yourself included. Did he influence you to change your style back in the late fifties?

There's been a lot of talk about this sort of thing. One man who wrote a book on modern poetry—I've forgotten his name—said that my change of style was influenced by Robert Kelly and Robert Bly. Now I have scarcely even read Robert Kelly, much less been influenced by him. This astonishing remark was made in a book that was sold in stores and was no doubt read by students. Now Robert Bly did have an influence on me between about 1959 and 1963. But it is also quite possible that I had an influence on Robert Bly. Nobody ever thinks about this possibility, but I think the influence was mutual. When I was breaking out of traditional English forms, Robert helped me—he is an excellent critic of the individual poem. Later, I found that there are certain areas in which I did not want his criticism; he did not understand the ways of making a poem that I was becoming interested in. I also found what I consider a serious defect in him as a reader: he is unable to detach the writer from the subject. He is so eager to find the thought behind a poem that he cannot conceive that the writer is detaching himself from what he's writing about. Iago does not speak for Shakespeare any more than Othello does. They are independent creations of the poet. Bly seems to want to see every poem as a subjective outpouring, a revelation of the writer's secret and hidden wishes, which is nonsense. Quite often, a man will sit down and write a poem in which he himself is dramatized; he is looking at himself quite objectively. This Robert cannot understand. So I don't lean on his criticism of my poems anymore. In fact, I think he's a much better poet than critic. He has been very useful in bringing in foreign poetry, and this gave him a reputation as a critic. But I do think that he is one of the few poets in America that really can do something memorable. But we have gone, he and, I, in very different directions in our writing, so we don't agree on things much anymore. I believe I am being accurate when I say that Robert is very strongly influenced by the ideas of Carl Jung, and I certainly am not. The belief I have in a poetry of ordinary events would not interest Robert, and Robert's ideas about the supernatural don't interest me at all. They have no connection with any life I've ever seen or believe to be true. So we have gone in two very different directions—I am very much tied to things of this world, and Robert is looking for some sort of supernatural answer to existence.

You have spoken of a cult of sincerity in contemporary poetry. What do you mean by that?

This is an assumption which I think has dominated American poetry at least since the late 1950s. It says that if you tell the truth about your life and your feelings, if you will directly express your emotions, then by virtue of the sheer honesty of your expression, you will have written poetry. This reflects a very American preoccupation—what was it Whitman said in his “Preface?”—“I will not have anything to come between me and the reader,” he says. “I will not have any hanging of curtains.” You can find this sort of thing in writers like Henry Miller and William Carlos Williams, but where it really took over poetry was in Allen Ginsberg's Howl, back in the fifties. That book was quickly followed by Snodgrass's Heart's Needle and Lowell's Life Studies. Of course you have several subdivisions in American poetry over the last twenty years—there is the school of the “deep image,” there is the Black Mountain school, there is the confessional school—but if you look at all of them, what they have in common is a belief in sincerity of utterance.

This is true, I think, even of poets who pretend to objectivity. Charles Olson, for example, was hung up on science and geography and typography, and he had all these theories about poetry. What Williams said about place in a man's life and poetry—Olson took this literally, and he made all these maps of Gloucester, and he really believed that there was a relationship between all that and his life and his writing. But when you look into the poetry, you discover that this worked-up objectivity is just a mask for an underlying sincerity—it's all about Charles Olson.

Now this cult of sincerity seems to be a very liberating thing, and that is why it became so popular—half of the poems still being written today are by young people who think that, if you just say who you are, what you do, who your friends are, then you've got a poem. Now it may be very liberating, but there are a couple of things missing, things like drama and narrative and even imagination. Imagination is a big thing to eliminate from poetry; you are left with only the actual circumstances of your life, and that is extremely limiting. People who write this kind of poetry really seem to believe that any making up of anything—any form of artificial making up, any creation of story—is cheating somehow, and dishonest. And of course any form of irony is completely anathema, any double view of the subject is suspect, somehow evil. Without full use of the imagination, you are left with only the facts of your own life, and this can cause a serious confusion between art and life. You end up having to justify your art by your way of life, and vice versa.

The tragic thing about the confessional poets is that they took all this the most seriously. Poets like Berryman and Sexton and Plath simply were unable to draw a separation between poetry and life—they could not find any relief, they had to be “on” all the time. They could not write a poem and then knock off and go into life. To them, poetry was life and life was poetry, so they were always on stage. They thought that they could—they thought they had to—find their salvation through poetry. If there is one thing we can be sure of about poetry, it is that poetry is nobody's salvation. It is not a substitute for religion. It is poetry. As playing the violin is playing the violin, writing poetry is only writing poetry, an activity—it is not a way of life. These people became trapped by this view of poetry, and it ended up destroying them.

In the case of writers like Berryman and Plath and Sexton, you have a degree of psychological disturbance, a negative and depressive view of life. So they wrote about their lives as tragic and terrible, and this poetry fed back into their lives, and it created a trap. Way back in about 1900, Joseph Conrad wrote about this kind of writing. He said that, once you have told the terrible truth and made a sensation, what are you going to do next? You have to turn up the volume, write an even more terrible truth. And all the time the poetry and the life are feeding on each other, until pretty soon you cross a line and pass from emotion to hysteria. Ultimately there is only one way left to prove your sincerity, and that is to kill yourself. They had the wrong theory of art; their sincerity created a confusion between life and art. They were looking for salvation, but that is not what they found. It is time to go forward, to get away from this absorption in the individual life and find a more objective and healthy theory of art.

Doesn't the title Adventures of the Letter I take us in that personal direction? What distinctions would you make between your own voice and the voice that you adopt in that book?

Well, you see, the letter I is not me. The letter I is something that appears in a poem and says, “I do this and I do that,” but it is not me—it's the letter I. Of course, a lot of the stuff that I have written in the last few years has been autobiographical, but there is an enormous difference between what I'm doing and confessional poetry. I am merely an observer in my poems. I'm not trying to solve the problems of my own life through poetry. Nor am I asking the reader to think that I'm a wonderful, interesting person. The I appears in these poems as an observer, like Marlowe in the Conrad stories—a commentator, an observer, a small actor, but not someone who is engaged in a struggle for his soul.

You see, I am really pretty different from most poets today. I am not involved in the cult of sincerity. I think of myself as an objective observer—a transmitter of things that I am seeing. I think that what we need now in poetry is imagination, pleasure. I'm sick of the puritans and the moralists, who have held sway for twenty years. It is like the Victorian age all over, except that now they're preaching sincerity, drugs, self-indulgence, an absolute cultivation of the egocentric soul. I would like to see a return to what Rimbaud said—he said, “I is another.” Well, that's what I was trying to say with the letter I—“I is another”; it's not me, it's the letter I. These are essentially narrative poems, and narrative is something I would definitely like to see more of in poetry. It is the antithesis of the kind of subjective writing I've been talking against, which I see as so limiting. Narrative poetry means imagination, creation of character, creation of scene, creation of action, creation of objective ideas about life. I would like to see that very much.

Your recent poems emphasize narrative and use a plain kind of free verse. What is it that makes these poems poetry, specifically, rather than a brief form of short story, something like that?

The difference is that they are written in lines—the rhythmic part of the poem enfranchises it from prose completely. You could argue other things—for example, that there is a greater concentration in the poems than you get in prose, or that there are more images—but these arguments are fallacious because they can't be held logically to the ultimate. You could have a short story which is just as concentrated or intense as a poem, and you could have an example of prose which has more images. No, it's the old difference between verse and prose—it is the line. And I work very strongly in lines. It may not be evident on the page, but I think that when these poems are heard aloud, it is clear that they have a strong rhythm. I'm very insistent on this point, that the line of verse is the absolutely essential thing.

How do you feel about the concept of the prose poem then?

I'm one of the few public enemies of the prose poem. I think it is a mistake because it abandons the strong points of both prose and verse. The strong point of prose fiction for me is that it develops a narrative that goes somewhere. And it is a vehicle for information—even the most beautiful prose is a vehicle for information of some kind. Now the prose poem does not carry information, it does not usually develop a narrative, and it lacks the line of verse, obviously—it breaks down into sentences. The unit of attention in poetry is the line, and to do without it is to leave out the musical elements entirely. I think some of Baudelaire's prose pieces are magnificent—but they are called prose poems only out of whim. There are no rules governing the prose poem—it can be anything you like. Verse is like a dance that is occurring in front of you—the poet's words move in measure. Verse imposes certain laws upon the writer from outside. In a way it makes writing more difficult, but in another way it gives verse an objective reality that prose does not have. The prose writer has nothing to sustain him but appetite and reason—apart from the laws of grammar and syntax, usage and punctuation, there are no rules that the prose writer has to follow. Everything else can be determined by his will at the moment of composition.

You have said that you try to adhere to an organic notion of form in your poetry. Could you say a little more about that?

Yes, I believe that it is the cooperation between the writer and his material that should determine the form of the poem. You don't start with the idea that you are going to fill up two-hundred lines of blank verse, and then put anything in just to fill up the lines. You can write only as long as you have something to say, and then you stop. If what you are going to talk about is brief, simple, a momentary thing perceived, then the poem will be short. If your idea is complicated, then the poem will be longer and may break into separate blocks and developments. Emerson has a beautiful description of it, about the growth of a poem being like the growth of a plant, with different branches and blossoms and so on. The opposite of this idea would be something like the sonnet, which always has fourteen lines, no matter how large or how small the subject you're dealing with.

Ultimately, I suppose a poem is an emotion which uses certain facts and images in order to generate itself. But the emotion is what forms the poem, and when the emotion is dead, then the poem must stop. It is the emotion formed by the material that makes the form of the poem. When I am writing, I immense myself in the subject and try to remove from my vision of it anything distracting at all, including language, anything that distracts from the experience. My object is to get the original vision across to the reader, and when I have done that, I'm through. I think this makes me very different from a writer like James Merrill, for whom the language is always a distraction; it is always calling attention to itself, pulling the poet away from the original experience. That is the polar opposite of what I'm talking about.

You've also suggested that, by using free verse rather than some more rigid, restrictive form, a poet will be more likely to express the truth of his experience or vision. Could you say something more about that?

Well, in free verse you are much more likely to follow the cadences of your thinking voice. I'd rather use that term that the word speech, because we don't speak aloud in our heads. Now the voice in which you think is the voice in which you are most likely to tell the truth. We don't think in iambic pentameter or trochaic tetrameter. So by writing free verse, you are more likely to bring over into poetry the cadence of your real feelings as expressed in words.

Is your book Searching for the Ox based on ideas grounded in Zen Buddhism?

Yes. The title poem in fact had its origin in a Zen cartoon series, the Ox-herding Series. This herd boy is searching for the lost ox; he finds a footprint, then he finds the ox; he starts leading it home, then he rides on it; in the next panel you see a little cottage and the moon and a branch, and then the cottage and the moon and the branch vanish; everything is gone except a big circle in the sky, which is ultimate reality. It is a parable of the search for mastery of the self. The ox is the self, which is found, then mastered, then eliminated, so that the Zen objective can be reached. The Buddhist goal is to merge with the universe in Nirvana and to cease searching. That's what I had in the back of my mind while writing that poem, though it appears only obliquely. Mostly, the poem is a free-floating series of associations which somehow hold together.

Some time before I came to write that book, I spent two years in London, studying Zen Buddhism, among other things. I read many books on the subject, and I would go to the Buddhist Institute, where I learned meditation. The process of Buddhist meditation is an attempt to eliminate distractions and to attain objectivity by escaping a narrow vision of the self. You try to feel the life which is around you, throughout the universe, by concentrating on the process of your own breathing. In the poems, this shows up as a concentration on the object, not distracted by any intrusion of my own personality—it is a clear view of the thing. This is true even in the poems that begin with I—it's an attempt to be objective about myself as well as everything else. I am trying to get past the limitations of the personal ego and link up with an impersonal reality somewhere outside myself.

For example, in the book there is a poem called “The Middle-Aged Man.” It is an attempt to look at the man exactly as he is, in all of the triviality of his life. I keep staring at him, until finally, at the end of the poem, his eyeglasses become burned into my consciousness. Buddhism teaches that your physical existence and your mental existence are one thing; in the West, we tend automatically to split them apart, as in the Christian idea of the body and the soul. I prefer the medieval idea—they had a term for the body which recognized it as the form for the soul, which I take to mean that the body is the outward garment of the soul. Whitman says that too, that there is no split between the body and the soul. And this is what the Buddhists say also. This way of thinking leads to a poetry that is very physical in its orientation, a poetry that concentrates on ordinary life. The Buddhist says: “Your ordinary life, that is the way.” To believe that—really to believe it—is to have it made. Then you really could live life fully and be an intellectual at the same time. Otherwise, one tends to live an unsatisfactory daily life, and compensate for it by creating in dreams the life one would prefer to live.

To write poetry of ordinary life, especially of ordinary American life, seems to be the goal of your recent poetry.

I came to the United States when I was seventeen, almost forty years ago. I'd had a very rough time in Jamaica—my brother and I had just been swindled out of our inheritance from my father. I had a wonderful time at Columbia before the war—I was sort of born again. My intellectual allegiance since that time has been very strongly American—I have been constantly thinking about this country, even when I have been away from it for prolonged periods. I feel absolutely no affinity for Jamaica at all, because the culture is still so English—they are still under the shadow of the English, and I'm not. The English culture, which I've also seen recently in Australia, is lagging very far behind us in poetry. American poetry is really much, much more alive than English.

My latest book, Caviare at the Funeral, tries again to capture some of this. The poems in the first section attempt to recreate an atmosphere—they cover things I have seen and lived through since about 1940. The second section turns to contemporary American life, which I present mostly in domestic terms. In the third section, I have written about my Russian family background. This is a contrast to the first two sections, but it also shows our American ethnic diversity. The fourth section is more wide-ranging—there's something in there about what modern technological life is doing to man and his world. I use a lot of Australian material also.

The book as a whole I think has less of a unity of content than it has a unity of tone. I have tried very hard to eliminate insincerities of language and form in order to write narrative poems that bring out a quality of feeling in myself, in others, or in the scenes themselves. It is this feeling or tone that determines the detail and the unity of a given poem. There is a kind of poetry in America today in which we see the words playing with themselves. The language is looking at itself—it's a game within the poem itself. In the kind of poem I am writing, the language points outward from the poem to the things and people and scenes that are being described. I am trying to bring out the feelings inherent in that material.

There is a poem in the book which does not at first glance seem to belong—the one on Magritte.

That poem is quite a departure for me, but it is based on a feeling I have of kinship with Magritte. The more I look at his paintings the more I think we are trying to do something very similar. He takes images of very common objects and juxtaposes them in odd ways. What you end up with is something both very common and surrealistic, and it shows how weird the ordinary can actually be.

Would that impulse or desire have anything to do with the poem “The Beaded Pear”?

Yes. The poem is meant to be absolutely descriptive of the kind of domestic life we actually live in this country today. When the poem first came out—in the Long Island newspaper Newsday—it upset a lot of people. I got hate mail from people who thought I was being devastatingly sarcastic. But I don't see it that way. There is an element of ridicule in the poem, but it is directed at the culture which fosters these kinds of values, not at the people themselves. No—mostly it is a purely descriptive poem, an attempt at absolutely dead-on, accurate truth. There is even a touch of pathos at the end.

What really pleases me about that poem is the way it incorporates things like TV Guide—the real stuff of our everyday lives. There are too many poems today in which sophisticated, contemporary Americans—who watch TV and drive cars on freeways—pretend that they are Indians. Well, we are the tribe that chews gum and wears polyester and blow-dries our hair, and these things belong in our poems. You can do this in narrative or dramatic poems, work it naturally into the situation without giving sermons. The comparison may sound somewhat farfetched, but isn't this what Chaucer did for his own time? By incorporating the actual details of people's lives, he managed to portray the texture, the feel of life in his time. I mean, it is our life, it is what we use and do everyday. Shouldn't there be some connection between that and the poems we write?