SOURCE: An interview in Diacritics, Vol. III, No. 4, Winter, 1973, pp. 47-53.

[In the following excerpt, Ammons discusses his ideas about poetry.]

[Grossvogel]: You seem to be suspicious of mentalisms. In your poem "Uh, Philosophy," isn't that "uh" a disclaimer?

[Ammons]: Yes. At the first level of the critical I tend to think of the discursive as assuming limits which then prevent it ever from encompassing the work that is before it. So I always think of that mode as a lesser mode than the imaginative. There is nothing new about that; most people grant it, I believe. Along the same lines as when Laotse says that nothing that can be said in words is worth saying. He means, I think that by the time we have embodied into limitation any sort of reality, it has limited itself out of the total adumbration. It is true that I use the discursive in my work a good deal, but always as a character in a play: I don't particularly care what I say; I care only that the dramatic placing of the thought is accurate in the piece as if it were a stage play. So and so enters from the left and says his thing, and it either fits in and promotes the dramatic action, or it doesn't. Whether or not it is literally true is of little interest to me because I don't think that the truth can be arrived at in that mode; but I do believe a character can represent that truth.

Let me quibble with you, nevertheless. My sense of your chronology is that in the beginning you were more dependent on specific myths or stories; this may be inaccurate.

No, I think it's accurate.

If it is accurate, would you not agree that a myth is already, as opposed to the freedom of pure poetry, the encapsulation of an idea?

No, I don't think so. I think that a narrative provides the configuration from which many ideas may derive. In some short poems, I tell a little story. The story is quite plain; it's the first level of apprehension of the poem, but it becomes mythic in what it might suggest. It can suggest any number of facets. Consequently, it is not formulable into a concept. In other words, I think the narrative is a body in motion and the concept is of a different order. I can give you a good example, a little poem called "Mountain Talk." You may know it.

I was very much sensitized to your mountains by Harold Bloom who makes a big thing of them—mountains out of mountains.

It tells a very simple story. Actually the poem investigates the feelings that might be said to surround certain objects. A person is walking along a dusty highroad. What does a dusty highroad mean? It's almost in a religious realm—you know, dust, height, abstraction, separation from the landscape, in a sense of perhaps being lost in it. And then, the moment of recognition when the person who is walking along becomes aware of a presence near him and he turns and it is not something that is wandering at all. It's a mountain that is always there. It occupies a single position and, as the poem says, it retains a single prospect. So the narrative then becomes the play of these two possibilities, of being stable and of occupying a massive view about things that is unalterable; or being tiny enough to go up and down pathways, to become lost. And the speaker finally prefers that mobility, that changeability, to occupying a single space. Now, it seems to me that the center of the poem is not a concept but a polarity; something like the two separate parts of a metaphor.

When you write that poem, you're a poet, but when you talk about that poem you're a critic.

Right.

And what dissatisfies you, presumably, in any dialogue of this kind, is that you're being forced out of your true role.

I just feel incomplete.

You are being forced to do what you may legitimately not want to do. The poem stands as the totality of your statement.

There is a lovely thing in, of all people, Carlyle, where he describes our present age beautifully—you know, bombed out—but, he says, we still have action left. Well that's exactly the mode I try to jump into; it's as if you were reading a newspaper—"I was walking along a dusty highroad…." You get to that ordinary level of things and, in a normal, almost journalistic way, you go into action, things happen, and then they end. Meanwhile they describe a curvature of some sort that's either narrative, or myth or structure or whatever, but it is, it exists and is no longer susceptible to analysis, to destruction by analysis or to further creation by analysis. It's there. It was just something that happened and it was a series of actions and somehow those actions were so interrelated that they described a synthesis, a curvature of sentences; and that is the myth, or whatever, lying at the center of the imagination. It's just there; it doesn't do anything.

When you say "myth," what you mean seems to be the synthesis effected by the poem.

Right. The essential configuration. That structure upon which all the meanings depend.

But I was thinking of an evolution in your poetry that goes from a more specific fabulation to a much freer (if I may use the word) verse.

I think you're right.

In that case, if we subtract from the earlier verse the freer verse of your later period, there is a residual armature that I wanted to call "myth"—a more formal way of showing; not a simple statement, but a relatively learned structure drawing on oriental or Indian philosophies, or folktales. And it seems to me that all this raises a more fundamental question about the legitimacy of criticism. Your primary responsibility is that of the poet; but what about the rest of us, the teachers or those whose function is to provide a bridge to your poetry, for those who may not know it, or who may not know how to get to it? Is it a legitimate function? I understand to what extent your suspicion of the critical function determines that it is an illegitimate exercise. But what about the possibility of teaching poetry in the classroom? My first caution in a poetry class is that we are going to do the one thing we should not be doing with a poem. We are going to analyze it, that is to say we are going to destroy it. But then I go ahead and do it anyway. My rationale is that it is a necessary sort of destruction. I am hopeful that the student will be able to effect his own syntheses later on.

My feeling is that the critical function, at least at the lower level about which we were speaking earlier, engages the intelligence primarily as a conceptual function and I take that to be a very small part of a possible human response—that is, the physiological, the emotional, the visceral, whatever, so that I distrust the conceptual in that it separates out and over-emphasizes one particular function of the human organism. I think that what is gained at the cost of that separation is clarity, and to the extent that criticism can offer clear opinions, opinions obviously superior to some other set of opinions, it does a great service to the poet and everybody else. But here again, as Edmund Burke says, the clear idea is another name for a little idea. Now this is not to say that there cannot be large critical ideas. It's just to say that the critical idea itself illuminates only a part of the work of art at a time. It may be that, seriatim, the critic would get around the whole periphery. But there would never be any one moment when the poem was apprehended in its entirety.

I can't help feeling that you are describing a bad critic.

Well, I don't know. All I'm saying is that criticism does not enable you to embrace the whole work of art at an instant—a moment of sudden coalescence—a tripping of the feeling when the whole being is suddenly imbued with a heightened energy and a feeling of understanding, though its an understanding of seeing into, or through. The mind can exist in all kinds of ways. It can be too rigid, it can be loose to the point of lunacy, it can be disoriented, disconcerted, and so on. This suggests that there may be some desirable state that the mind could be in, that might vary from culture to culture, but that might be substantially the same in any given culture. I think this would apply also to the whole body. The entire body is functioning, perhaps at a slightly stepped-up rate, and all the energy is available, and it is directed, as in coitus for example; but also in a focusing of the attention when the mind is fully awake, fully focused and penetrating (if I may get back to coitus) and realizes the experience that is to be shared. That might be what we would calla desirable state of being. It seems to me that in teaching, beginning with images, or rhythms, perhaps going through several motions, situations or strategies within the poem, one might gradually be lifting the student into the kind of comprehensive attention that would enable him to move into a desirable state of being, where there is a complicated, free (though directed) functioning of his energy. I think that the poem is an image of this complex activity. And not only the poem: I think this is true of any work of art.

Any art form that enables its beholder or participant to rehearse an essential moment of the human condition?

To rehearse, to alert, to freshen, to awaken the energies, not to lunacy and meaningless motion, but to concentration and focus. That is the desirable state to which art should bring you, and to the extent that the poem becomes an image of this, and a generator of it, it is a desirable thing. No computer, no bank of computers, can keep track of the physiological events that must occur for that state of being to be reached. So dozens of sciences have as their objective an analysis of one part of this complicated process. I think that the poem, or the work of art, has underneath it this entire physiology. I believe it is so complicated that you cannot say anything clear about it except about a small part of it. Through the concatenation of such clarifications one can heighten one's own attention so that by exposure to the thing itself, one comes into a sense of coordination with the work of art. Ultimately there is no value to this except the experience of having been there and felt the heightened focus and the heightened release of energy. Once again I think that the whole thing is very close to the experience of coitus. I think that's one reason why the University cannot get closer to the imaginative moment because it's a little bit embarrassing to be that close to coitus; it's safer to talk about it than to be in it. Take a boy and a girl, they see each other. It's like the first line of a poem. It either sets up an immediate attraction so you want to know more, or it doesn't. If the attraction is there, what happens? The two people manage somehow to get close to each other and what happens next?—not silence but an outbreak of dialogue whereby they try to sense where the other person is, with the anticipation, I believe, that whatever comes of this experience will be deepened, will be colored and made more beautiful by whatever they do know, which apparently cannot be shared in any other way, except through dialogue, through conversation and through doing things together. A poem is just that way; it begins by talking; that's all it does—talk. Because as the two people come closer and closer together, and—say everything is going fine—and the thing is consummated, speech begins to fail and finally there's not much more than a grunt. The reaction to a poem that is especially effective is just that—a grunt. I think the parallel is just too close to be dismissed. Now when the poem starts to take on radial completion, that is to say that, whatever the structure might be, it is now complete, you are left in a state of silence. You now know where all the motions are—you know all the words, you know all the images, you are in it, and you are almost without words, but you're still able, through that focus, to meditate, to contemplate, to move deeper into the poem and sometimes far beyond the poem. But the most meaningful thing happens at the non-verbal level. The motions are all reconciled when motion ends.

Does that mean that we are supposed to leave out of all conversation talk about poetry?

No, not at all. Certain levels are discussable. That is what bothers me so much about some of the French critics, as I understand them. They have arrived at the point where there is no text. It's impossible that there should have been an author; it's inconceivable that there could be an audience. Now it just won't work, because human life and human organisms go right on. Maybe not precisely in the same way, but generally in the same way. And if you locate meaning there, then it's idle, it's sophistry to take things apart until nothing means anything at all.

Since you have introduced French critics …

… about whom I know little …

… let me ask you about something that one of them has said. I am thinking of Mauron, who practiced what he termed "psychocriticism." In reading poetry (and we should think of critics like Mauron as people who enjoy reading poetry), he discovers what he calls obsessive images, something the poet may not have been aware of.

Why not? I'm aware of obsessive images in my poems. I can see how the poet might not know at first because the images have not had a sufficient chance to recur, but surely after he has written for a few years I would think that it would start to be very plain to him.

It is possible that the individual does not necessarily hear himself as accurately as an outsider hears him. His inner landscape may be more accurate as he perceives it …

But he may not be able to translate it as well?

No. I mean he might not be able to see it in exactly the same way, or from exactly the same perspective, as an outsider.

He would see it in a different way.

Right. He sees it by virtue of being in it. The critic, being outside, allows no more than another view of the forest. But isn't that important? Or is it irrelevant?

It's important. It's finally not very interesting to me, but I can see how it might be to someone else.

Tell me why it isn't very interesting to you.

Well because here again, I think that a person and a poem are very close images of one another. I've never been psychoanalyzed but I understand that you can go along for eight or ten years and at a certain point you quit, but you never come to that very deep point where you can reach absolute formulation and say "this is I, and this is the reason I am I." What do the French critics ultimately hope to arrive at through psychoanalysis, structuralism, or whatever? What is the energy behind the effort?

I have a feeling that their answer would be similar to yours when I asked you about poetry. Their interests are just postures of the mind. I don't think they claim that they are arriving at an ultimate truth or even an ultimate object. They are merely interested, as is the poet, in exploring the object of their respective attentions.

That makes the critics' attention a little more provisional than that of the poet who, though he's involved in mortality and time—as everyone else—has in his imaginative work a stabilizing center. The work of art is complete, however unexhausted. Works of art are complete moments that stop. I don't think that the critic would be satisfied to say, "Here is another aspect of the systems which we already have going: now let's see how we can sort it out and move forward."

Of course, the critic cannot live within a closure in the same way as the poet does within the completeness—I believe you use the image of the orb—of his poem. The critic lives in a speculative realm which, by definition, cannot be closed. But even though you know when the poem is finished, you also know that the poetic investigation continues, and there is a first similarity between the critic, any critic, and the poet. But the modern French critic in particular confronts a poetry that is, generally, less storying than is a good deal of English and American poetry. He is therefore less likely to formulate final truths or ideas about it. Rimbaud moves from storying poems to a free kind of discourse that tells only very dimly a discernible story. This kind of poem really defies intellective interpretation or analysis at the level of ideas. As for your detecting a diffidence when these critics talk about the text, or the text's author, you are perfectly right: you distrust the critic in what he might leave unsaid about the poem: many modern French critics distrust the very act of saying. But they are not really the critics I would like to talk about. I would like to know more specifically, about the critics who have written about your own work. As a critic, I would like to know how an author feels about the criticism he elicits. In his book Alone with America, Richard Howard quotes a line of yours, "Teach me, father: behold one whose fears are the harnessed mares of his going! " That seems to confirm two of Harold Bloom's theories about you: one about your anxiety, and one about your anxiety of influence. And this runs counter to a sense that I have of you. I do not detect the quotient of anxiety which a line like that, taken in isolation, would seem to indicate.

Well, Harold Bloom says somewhere that those who reject their poetic fathers write very forgettable poetry. I think that what he is suggesting is that there is a continuity of some kind, a continuity that moves on through the centuries and remains largely the same, but that is consequently very hungry for, and suspicious of, any novelty, or shift, or change, that it can incorporate into itself, to make itself a more adequate river of the mind. I think he means that if you do not acknowledge the river, the river can easily pass your contribution by. It seems altogether probable that anyone raised in a culture takes in, if unconsciously, much of the gesture and significance of that culture; even if he thinks he is writing counter-culture, he's writing out of the culture in order to be against it. But the culture, if you consider it as this stream, has no need greater than to step outside of itself, and see itself. In personal terms, that's what I'm talking about in that poem called "Laser" where an image or representation is seen, and the mind is then locked with it obsessively, and what the mind needs most is some other, disorganized energy that it can use to break free. And I believe cultural influence acts a little in the same way. Culture is always hungry, at the same time that it questions novelty or change.

Isn't culture many things?—first of all a language, certain rhythms, certain life rhythms? One cannot be for or against these; one can only be that culture, so defined. But can't a culture be also a self-consciousness—a thing of conscious learnings and rehearsals? I feel more comfortable with, say, an analysis that tells me about the rhythms or cadences of a Southerner as opposed to those of a Northerner. In a poem of yours, I believe it is called "Mansion," you write that when the time comes for you to cede yourself you choose the wind, and the wind says that it is glad because it needs all the body it can get to show its motions with. That seems to be a good image for the way in which a non-self-conscious culture might inform the individual. When one speaks of culture, must one not speak of these more fundamental definers of the culture? Harold Bloom and Hyatt Waggoner see you writing in the lineage of Emerson. Such an influence would be more than your native culture speaking through you—it would be the cultural acquisition of a culture, what I was calling a self-consciousness. When Bloom analyzes your "anxiety of influence, " I feel that he is placing you within such a more formal concept of culture in order to make you part of an historical, evolutionary process. And I wonder whether he is on safe ground, speaking of a specific cultural influence, like Emerson, or the "visionary" sense that is supposed to be yours, just as it is supposed to have been (or maybe because it is supposed to have been) that of a number of your cultural ancestors? The reason I ask this is that I feel this influence much less in your writing. But perhaps this is due to my ignorance.

About the "anxiety of influence," you know that Emerson is supposed to have felt that very little. I have experienced very little anxiety of that kind that I could identify—a need to come, and a fear of coming, to terms with a literary father. It is nearly impossible for me to identify closely with Emerson because he comes from Concord, and I from a rural and defeated South. You know, there are just too many wave lengths that we don't share; it's impossible for me to imagine myself belonging to any culture because of that rural South, which, in growing up, I tended to discredit religiously and intellectually, though I could not emotionally—you know, I am there, that's who I am. But that culture contained no elements, either religious or intellectual—formulable elements—that I could maintain to this moment. And it may be because I have no culture that I have not experienced what Harold Bloom talks about when he speaks of culture in the formal sense. My feeling about the anxiety of influence is that it is so generalized a theory that it could be applied to corporations or to body politics, and that it is really an introductory topic into the larger subject of hierarchy. Hierarchy would include the pantheon of which we, in the universities, are the guardians: we very carefully sort our authors; you know, Donne goes up and Shelley goes down; and then after a while we say oh, no, Shelley has been down too long, Shelley must come back up; he has been up and down so many times, that now he doesn't have to go down anymore. And we have widened our scope so that we can tolerate both Donne and Shelley at a fairly high level in our pantheon. I am convinced that this kind of sorting goes on all the time and it may be valuable: what we are trying to do is give structure and definition to our minds. I don't see anything wrong with that. But a theory that enables us to do this, such as the theory of influence, is so general that it has to be explored in any number of other ways. But I have no feeling that it should be discounted. I believe it provides very strong insights into some figures, and one of its specific applications can be literary. As to my own anxiety, my Angst, that is a different matter. I tend to think of it in a much less apocalyptic way than Bloom does. I have been fascinated by social orders of animals, baboons in particular: there is this creature called the solitary; he's a very strong baboon, but he's not quite strong enough, he thinks, or he lacks the courage, to test the dominant male in the structure—he is afraid he would be defeated. So he can't stand to live in that structure, out of pure hatred, jealousy and envy of the dominant male. So he goes off into the woods as a solitary baboon, self-exiled from the group. His deepest longing is to be back with the group. He's less safe because he's alone, where before the group might have protected him; it is a very fearful situation to be in. And I identify myself as one who has not found the group in which I feel safe, or welcomed, or by which I feel realized and expressed. Consequently, I feel that my terrors, which in my life have been at times quite severe, though not so much lately perhaps because my work has been more accepted, have as their root a secular, social structure, deriving from something situated somewhere down all of our spines, and racial experience—a sense that we do better within the compromises of the group than in the terrifying precision of being alone.

And yet your poetry is so much a close attention to the natural world that, although you have spoken somewhere about all poetry being about impermanence, I feel that in this attention to nature there is a constancy of permanence and renewal.

What would the solitary baboon amuse himself with? The people aren't there. Not the people: I mean the other baboons aren't there; nature is there, the day and the night, the things around him.

But he has been forced out there.

Forced out or self-willed.

But there is no Western tradition for baboons and there is a tradition for humans, and in particular for poets. It tells us that it is not all bad to be forced out into nature, whether by your own choice as Democritus, or by the ill will of the group, as Rousseau believed. Perhaps the gregarious virtue is, I don't know, a part of the puritan ethic?

Oh, I think it has a lot to do with it: you remember when Frost says it is not sex but grex—that we will make nearly any compromise in our sexual life in order to continue being with grex, with the group, with the society, with the body politic? We make these puritanical sacrifices all the time.

So what you are describing then is an uneasiness born of a cultural need and a cultural rejection.

I think so. Perhaps you can extend that directly into the anxiety of influence. At any rate it would be an analogy for such a theory. I myself have not experienced it in those terms. I have experienced it more in social and hierarchical terms. When Joyce exiles himself, he says that he will survive by cunning. That too reminds me of the solitary individual, who has a fury in him to go back to his own order and possess it somehow. But he cannot do that in an open way, so that he has to resort to exile, cunning, sulking, deviousness. Rather a bad set of characteristics.

Is there no virtue at all then in solitude?

Yes: one writes one's poems. And then one day, perhaps, one is astonished to find that people belonging to the order of which one does not feel a part identify with them.

Perhaps we are too much with the world and our society enforces too much this gregariousness. When a critic like Bloom says that your poems enable him to live, maybe it is there that we should look for the meaning of his words: perhaps the poem enables us in a very necessary way to rehearse our own sense of solitude. This would be a less negative way of envisioning solitude.

Yes. However negative the sources of the energy, may be, it is energy and, hopefully, imaginative energy, and can be multiplied reader by reader. It is always astonishing to me that while the relationship of author to reader is one to one, this sort of energy can be endlessly multiplied without necessarily compromising it.

It must be wonderful to be at the source of such renewal.

It is. I received a letter from a man who said that he was listless, ready to call it quits. A very lovely letter: he said he had read my book from beginning to end and he now felt that he had the energy to live and to die. That may have been a gross overstatement on his part, but I said to myself afterwards that I would never have to ask myself again why I write poems. If a man who wakes up with no energy in the morning finds himself in possession of energy, then I need no further justification.

That's also a little frightening.

Yes, it's terrifying.

But then, that is the function of art, isn't it?—if art has any function ….

That's what I would like it to do—to give people the energy to move through their lives…. I mean to contribute a small part—obviously it's a small part—of the energy needed to move through life. The source of this energy is, I believe, quite obviously a bad state of life, confusion and terror, with momentary releases and flashes, concentrations of energy and, in those moments, you get that energy onto the page and then the recipient of that energy doesn't have to share in its source, in the negative aspect of its source. He has the energy which he can put to his own use.

Art most likely serves a number of purposes. It is clearing in our social and industrial wilderness. In that desert, it is one of the last remaining genuine plants. And then, there is also what you see as the awakening and mustering of energy in coming to terms with the work of art. Those are the sources of what I would like to call a natural function. But what about the other culture, the self-conscious or acquired culture? If you acknowledged literary fathers, who would they be?

I think that Bloom is right. In American literature, it's Whitman and Emerson. But Emerson led me to the same sources that he discovered himself—to Indian and Chinese philosophy which, when I was younger, I read a good deal, finally coming to Laotse, whom I mentioned earlier. That's my philosophical source in its most complete version. So that when I look back at Emerson, Emerson looks derivative to me of certain of those oriental traditions in the same way as I am derivative of them. In an immediate sense, my forebears are Whitman and Emerson, but in a larger sense my source is the same as theirs.

I have the feeling that as one moves into your later poems, this influence is progressively less important as the influence of nature is progressively more important.

Yes, I think that is correct. I identify civilization (the city) with definition, as against the kind of center-and-periphery, closed-openness that I identify with nature. That's why I'm not in the city; that's why I am not an urban person. The city represents to me the artificial, the limited, the defined, the stalled, though obviously the city changes. I often think the city represents the confrontation of the artificial in man with the natural process and I tend to think that the natural process produced everything—including the city.

The problem is that, even though secreted by the human mind, the city has secreted in turn such a thick overlay that it now seems to determine all further secretions of the mind. Still, the human race appears to endure, somehow. Since I am in such a rashly optimistic mood, let me suggest another theory of history, one which might be opposed to the apocalyptic view. It's the laundry list theory, the view that everything is lustered by time. The belief that if you took a laundry list written in the days of Henry IV, something that was simply functional in the fourteenth or fifteenth century—a completely dismissible object—would now be informed with a density of time and the careful scrutiny that we would give it, since we are always looking back for our own traces in what has endured as long or longer than we have. If that is a possible interpretation of history, then everything is in the process of becoming better, if you will only give it time.

I think I understand the idea: but I have another view of history that means more to me. I have written a little poem about it which I have never published, whose last line is "history is a blank." Whatever you see when you look out of the window at any particular moment is history—is the truest history surviving into the immediate moment. The whole history of the planet earth is in your body at this moment, and so on. So that I don't have to structure it into time periods. Perhaps this is another reason why I do not have problems with the anxiety of influence, because I believe that what is here now, at this moment, is the truest version of history that we will ever know. Consequently, I have as much right to enter into it with all the innocence of immediacy as anyone else possibly ever could.

I understand that history can never exist for anyone except through the percipient's view of it. But history yields its own precipitations regardless of whether or not there is a percipient: when the perceiving consciousness becomes aware of those precipitations, is it not affected by them, is it not in some way altered? Is not an alteration due to the thing that was a working of the historical process?

You may remember my rather long "Extremes and Moderations." At one point I'm addressing the city directly and the poem says that the cities' work and the cities' artifice confront the artifice in capital letters—that is, God's creation. And then it says

beyond
the scheduled consummation, nothing's to be recalled: there is
memory enough in the rock, unscriptured history in
the wind, sufficient identity in the curve
of the valley….

And what I mean is that if you see the shape of the valley, it's there, immediate in this moment. But in that shape is the entire history of its coming there.

You have cosmic sense of history—the thundering course of the planets and the molecules to which they gave birth …

Some of that. But I also think of the human parallel. Take language: language is the same kind of history as survival. In the case of language, any discontinuity between its beginning and its present would interfere with our use of it now.

We may not be so very far apart. It is just that you appear to focus on a presentness which you inform with the density of history. Your sense of the archeology of language is after all the sense of an object that was. Perhaps that's what a poetic sense of language is—an awe of its resonance in time as well as in space. What does a poet do? Does he pay more attention to the resonances of a language or to the people that give it rise? I ask you that question because I do not find many people in your poetry. In a review of your selected poems by Reed Whitte-more—a review that did not particularly turn me on—I found, nevertheless, something that corresponds to a feeling that I too have about your writings. Whittemore says that although you are very good with objects, and sometimes even with people, he finds that you are "weaker on people. " Would your baboon theory shed any light on this?

I think it would, yes …

Nature is really nature in your poems. One of the significant differences between you and the romantic poets is that you do not anthropomorphize nature.

I use the pathetic fallacy quite a bit, but always quite deliberately, with full knowledge of what I'm doing. There is probably some psychological explanation that is better than the baboon theory, or the hierarchy thing. I have to insist though that I am a human being and that the feelings I experience, I am somewhat surprised to find, are shared by other human beings: so that though you say I write about nature, I might insist that I write about nothing at all except human nature. I may not be able to form characters or vessels of human nature in poems. But that doesn't eliminate human nature.

Yours is a humane poetry. It is simply that its humanity is contained mainly in your reaction to the world of nature.

It's much cooler to find the objective correlative in that which does not answer back—nature—rather than in the furies and anxieties, jealousies, envies and whatever else a human correlative would contain. I take this to be the rightful province of the novelist; although great poets are able to do it, too. I don't know anything about nature. I am not a dislocated part of anything you call nature. I am a human being who has entered into certain kinds of expressive relationships with the external world. And while I may not have been able to manage those expressions as expressions by other human beings, they are the elements of human nature.

In your first "Carolina Said Song," you take a character that may be indeed, as you say, a member of your family and you have her talk about an incident that occurred; but you seem to be interested in relating the incident mainly because the richness of the language contrives a mood, rather than in the interpersonal developments that one might have stressed.

In the other "Said Song," I think it was the same stimulus that awakened my attention to that particular experience in which a man calms a swarm of bees that could represent chaos, disorder or whatever, and reduces them to a perfectly manageable order so he could put them on a limb over his shoulder and take them home. Just that motion from the chaotic to the ordered is a complete motion to me.

And yet I would be willing to bet anything that the source of this abstract notion was a real man you met, an actual event that occurred in your life.

Oh yes, it's an actual fact. That's as nearly as I could reproduce the man's speech. It's not my poem. These are things that I remembered—tried to remember—as they were being said. If only we had someone to record the poems that are being said every day, it would be marvelous.

I would like to get back for a moment to your way of masking the human in your poetry. In your poem "Nelly Myers," the heroine turns out not to be a girl, the mother turns out not to be a mother—these immediate sources of a possible tenderness are once again hidden, at least at the surface. But in a poem like "Coon Song," there is an outburst of real anger. What triggers that sort of thing?

I think that wherever there is energy, it is as likely to be violent energy as anything else. Energy is violent. Under the proper controls and uses, it is beautiful; and only when it is mismanaged, is it destructive. So if you're saying, under my quiet exterior, is there a tiny little volcano, the answer is yes. Sure.