SOURCE: Bly, Robert, and Wayne Dodd. “Robert Bly: An Interview by Wayne Dodd.” Ohio Review 19, no. 3 (fall 1978): 32-48.

[In the following interview, Dodd and Bly discuss the “domestication” and homogenization of contemporary American poetry.]

[Dodd:] I see a curious contradiction in contemporary poetry. On the one hand, there is the most incredible amount of poetic activity going on. On the other hand, there is evidence of a real absence of sureness of direction and even purpose. This uncertainty is reflected even in such things as a call recently by a literary magazine for people to comment on what is to be the role of, say, form, or content, in poetry. It seemed to be symptomatic of a deep uncertainty. I wonder what would be a way of trying to make sense of that. Maybe you could talk about, for example, what the generation of poets under thirty-five show us, in their work, that would comment on this.

[Bly:] I think I feel the same disquiet as you do. Twenty years ago there may have been fifteen books of poetry published every year. Now, there may be sixty or seventy. They are published by the commercial presses, by the University presses like Pitt, and maybe another hundred or two-hundred by small presses. I think the directory of poets includes four or five hundred poets now. It's an extremely new situation, because poetry in this country has always been associated with what could be called knots of wild energy, scattered at different places throughout the country. In the fifties there were only a few visible: William Carlos Williams, e. e. Cummings, Richard Eberhart, Kenneth Rexroth, Robinson Jeffers, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. They were geographically separate, and none were connected to universities. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were in Europe. They represented self-creating and self-regulating knots of psychic energy. In fact they resembled wild animals. Even though Wallace Stevens was working for an insurance agency, the part of him that wrote poetry was a wild animal.

It seems to me that what has taken place is the domestication of poetry. If you're going to follow that through, you're going to have to imagine the mink or the otter being brought into cages and bred there. Oftentimes, animals reproduce more in captivity because the young are not killed off. If you bring a species to optimum conditions, you have a vast supply of them in the next generation. But the new otters don't know the same things that their parents did. The original otter knew what cold water was like, or knew how to live in the snow. That's one metaphor to explain the amazing tameness of the sixty to eighty volumes of poetry published each year, compared with the compacted energy of a book by Robinson Jeffers that appeared the same year as a book by Wallace Stevens, and those appearing the same year as one of Eliot's extremely kooky books.

Not only tameness, but sameness.

Sameness! It would follow somehow that someone is controlling the genetic breeding, and no new blood is coming in from the outside. So you have that sameness of the workshop. The workshops would be the breeding stations, I suppose.

I feel that the domestication is being done by two entities now: the universities, and The National Endowment for the Arts. When the government gives money, it results in domestication of the poet. I think that the National Endowment is an even worse catastrophe, in the long run, to the ecology of poetry than the universities. Talking yesterday to your class, I said, “Wayne understands the whole issue of the wildness that's involved with poetry, and how slowly animals in the wild learn to do things.” You have grown slowly in poetry. So you're in a spot, actually, when you teach a workshop, because as you know, the funny thing about a workshop is that we want people to write fast, to write in their early twenties. That's impossible! They even want to get a job with it. How do you feel about that?

I agree entirely, and even though I make my living doing this, I always feel uncomfortable with a workshop situation because it seems to me to be such an essentially negative, or to borrow your metaphor, domesticating, function. Understandably, anyone working in a workshop situation, let's say on a continuing basis in a writing program, who feels as though he is learning to write, is going to feel that he is being taught to do something: that he's being taught how to write a poem. The things that will happen to him and to others he will see working in the workshop, are the things that will finally become in his mind the paradigm for how to make poems. And yet, my own perception is that, unless we're awfully careful, that doesn't teach you to write poems. Often it teaches you how not to do certain things. It teaches you how not to make gross mistakes that are going to be unacceptable.

Ah, yes! Go on, give me an example.

The image I have is that a person brings in a poem, and it has some good stuff in it but also has a bunch of bad, which everyone with some sophistication perceives as bad. You know, maybe it ends wrong. So the teacher immediately hits that poet on the nose with a newspaper and says, “Not here! Outside!” and so teaches him not to pee on the rug in the house. After awhile he learns not to do that. He learns how to write poems without those mistakes in them. But is that the same as learning to write poetry? What I worry about is not getting the positive aspects of poetry in there. As you put it, “The growing into a sense of what's inside.”

The poet bringing in a shallow ending to a poem can be taught not to do that. What you're saying is that we have poets who learn in the workshops not to make disastrous mistakes. But then what?

Another metaphor I use sometimes is that real poems have navels; you can always find a navel in a poem.

What is the navel? Do you mean, for example, the connection between Maude Gonne and Yeats through which the poem somehow flows?

No, I don't think so. I'm thinking of the sense of human imperfection, of the profoundly real divisions and tensions in the psyche, of the individual depth of human experience. That is still, in itself, rather wild.

I can hear a typical workshop poet say to you: “What do you mean? I wrote a poem on my grandfather last year and I made it very clear he went through certain experiences cutting wood or farming that I haven't. Now my admission is tension and it is anguish, it is a navel.” What do you say to that?

I think that the poem that we're talking about at the moment is the poem that, finally, lacks content. I think the only content of a poem is the positive or true emotional life of the individual.

Then he or she might say, “You're being insulting to me. I am twenty-three years old. I have a true emotional life. What right do you have to say that I don't have one?”

Who can answer that? But I know talking to you that I am not talking with a twenty-four year old. You have been working in poetry for fifteen to twenty years, and your poetry has grown slowly stronger and stronger. You know how long it took you to arrive at the place where you are. Don't you find a contradiction between your experience and the expectation of the workshop student, who expects that within two years, if he studies with you, he will have a manuscript acceptable enough to get an MFA, and possibly get published? How do you deal with that contradiction?

I deal with it by agreeing with you and saying I accept it. I try to tell students about it. Anyone who comes into a program thinking he's going to learn shortcuts is doomed to failure. There is no such thing as a shortcut. I think that one can learn certain skills, certain devices, and maybe indeed speed up the process of learning poetry somewhat. But there are no real shortcuts.

But they're still winning. They're winning because they're receiving the knowledge that you have received in fifteen years of writing poetry, and you are giving it to them and they are accepting it. Both of you have the tacit understanding that out of it will come a manuscript acceptable for an MFA, and possibly for a published book. So actually, even though you are warning the students about it, they are still winning and taking what they want and you are giving it to them.

I certainly think that that is the case with many writing schools in this country.

I'm in the same situation. If I come into a college, even for one day, I can find no reason for not teaching what I know. But I'm still going along with the unreality of the student, who imagines that by listening to an older poet for awhile, he or she will be able to substantially improve the manuscript, so it will be more likely to be published. This ignores everything that the Tao Te Ching talks about, in terms of the slow flow of human life, the slow growth of oak trees, and all of that. There's some kind of lie that the workshops, and visiting poets, are involved in. I'm involved in it.

Don't you think that the real problem lies somehow outside the expectations of the student? I think their expectation are a problem, but perhaps there is a real problem also in the response of—I don't know what we're going to call it—the keepers of the system and the tradition, in their accepting and reinforcing that expectation.

Who are the keepers of the system?

Well I suppose book publishers and editors.

It is a responsibility of publishers not to publish so many books of poetry. But you know what's happened. With The National Endowment supporting presses, a young man or woman can start a press. The National Endowment does not pay him a salary, but he can use some of the money given him to pay at least for the secretarial work, which the wife or husband or friend may do in connection with a book. There's a lot of genial corruption going on in that area. Books get published without risk or sacrifice—that's a book that shouldn't be published. That may sound stupid. I hear people say that the more books of poetry published the better. I don't agree. First of all, one often notices that poets who publish a book early often end up repeating themselves later on. Readers want to be amused. If you do something well—and we all know poets who have done that early on—the readers constantly urge the poet to do the same thing over again. By thirty-five he hasn't grown a bit. If he hadn't published early, but waited till his thirties, then, like Wallace Stevens or Walt Whitman, both of whom didn't publish until their late thirties and early forties, more growth would have taken place before and after that time. It seems to me that workshops are extremely destructive in the way they prepare students for publishing ten years too early.

You would agree, then, that that system is a system of avoidance of pain? It seems to me that's the exact opposite way of going about discovering how to write profound poetry.

That's very interesting, because the best part of workshops, probably, is the pain that a writer feels when someone criticizes his poem in public. But it hadn't occurred to me that this may be a substitute for the long-range pain which a person working alone feels, when he feels despair looking at his manuscript, knowing it is inadequate.

I've had that experience so many times. I'd prepare a group of two dozen poems, in my twenties, type them up excitedly, and then discover I had only two or three poems. Then I would fall into a depression for several weeks. After a few months I would put together another group of twenty, and this time find again in despair that maybe five were genuine. This solitary pain, with no one to relieve it, is a typical situation of the wild animal writer. The workshops take away some of that pain by having someone there to encourage you. Your friends in the workshop encourage you; “This is better than your last poem. I'd publish it.” And I guess that amounts to an avoidance of pain.

I found out recently that one of the stronger labors in my life has been the labor to avoid unpleasant emotions. Pain is probably one of those.

I worry too about the writer's perception of what a poem is. I worry that the person will come genuinely to believe, as he's working on and living with a poem, that doing certain things is equivalent to the poem itself and to the basic instinct or impulse to poetry. I worry about the possible insinuation of a kind of “imitation” as the essential gesture of poetry. What do you think?

Let's go back to the image of domestication. In the wild state males fight each other. One of the things that has disappeared in the last twenty years in poetry has been the conflict between the young man and the old one. And the progress of the generations does not move well in any field unless the younger scientists or poets are willing to attack the older ones. Ortega Y Gasset describes the process clearly in Meditations On Quixote. He begins four or five generations before Galileo. Astronomers then loved their teachers. But the young astronomers worked hard to find the flaw in their teacher's work. Each generation by that labor overturned the one before. This constant thought movement finally led to the astounding achievements of Galileo. Ortega makes it clear that in a healthy situation that is how males behave.

I participated in that a little when I started The Fifties. I started the magazine precisely to attack Allen Tate's and Robert Penn Warren's view of poetry. The reason for that is not because I hated Allen Tate. As you remember, in the fifties the shade from Eliot and Pound and Tate and William Carlos Williams was a heavy shade. It was necessary to clear some ground, so there'd be a place for new pine trees to grow. That clearing is not being done now. Perhaps my generation is casting shade now. The younger poets are not attacking Galway enough, or Merwin, or Wright, or Creeley, or Ginsberg. They're a little slow in attacking me too. The women don't attack Levertov or Rich. The younger poets are being nice boys and girls. Partly it is cultural; the sixties' obsession with good feeling. But the normal process of human growth from generation to generation involves, as Ortega details, the new generation attacking the older one. And attacking them strongly, wiping them out as far as possible.

Just as Eliot did when he attacked Browning.

Oh yes; Eliot's work seems a new thing to us, invented, but Eliot's old man was Browning. And Eliot, by using allusions where Browning used a standard, straightforward continuity of detail, actually was attacking and overturning Browning's dramatic monologue, and it was felt at the time. All the Browning people thought “The Waste Land” was absolutely disgusting. Time magazine called it a hoax. Eliot was pointing out that Browning was boring in the way he strings his perceptions of human beings together with no empty place for our imagination to enter. So Eliot decided to do a different portrait—for example the portrait of his wife in “The Waste Land,” and he left big gaps in the portrait. In fact, he just left out entire arms and legs. “The Waste Land” is an attack on Browning and a victory over him. Eliot also did a lot of attacking in criticism; he was a very serious critic. This struggle is related to a fact about male animals Konrad Lorenz discovered. In the wild, two males, let's say pheasant cocks, spend some weeks in the spring settling the issue of territory. Perhaps a rooster will want a quarter of a mile. The defeated male retires from the territory. When the fights are over, the rooster who remains accepts the first female who enters the territory. Essentially he has cleared ground so that there will be enough for himself, the hen, and the chicks to eat. The stag fights are similar. A stag may need five or ten square miles, but the only way to insure enough space is for the males to fight. No one understood that before. People in the 19th century thought that stags were fighting over the females, but actually they're fighting over the space. My metaphor then is that the younger poets, in failing to attack Merwin, or Rich, or Levertov, or me, or Ginsberg, or Simpson or Hall or Ed Dorn are not doing their job. They are not making a place for their chicks.

You mean, of course, they are not attacking them in criticism, and in reviews. But you mean in their work too? That they're not attacking them there also?

I think it's mainly the absence of public criticism that's a disaster: the disappearance of criticism. Private criticism doesn't count. We notice magazines with nothing but poems in them, not a single review or “idea” article. The cliché of the last ten years is, “I want to say something positive. If I can't say something positive I don't want to say anything at all.” There is a fear of having and using power. Imagine a stag in the north woods saying, “Well, I want to like all the other stags. I don't want any power. So I'll just take my horns off.” To me one of the disasters that's happened is that so many poets have gotten the habit of emphasizing their own work, and have been unwilling to face head-on the poetry of others, older or even their own age. Ashbery is an example, Berrigan, Wakowski, Dubie, Gluck, Ginsberg. Many poets at poetry readings read nothing but their own work.

The point is not that Eliot disliked Browning; he never met Browning. It was an attack of psychic energy only. But think of this situation by contrast: the medium generation of poets, Donald Justice, Marvin Bell, Dick Hugo, etc. are teaching in a college. The younger poets are grateful to poets like Justice and Bell for teaching them. This gratefulness to the older poet prevents them from doing the natural thing, which is to take the work seriously, turn on poets in the older generation, and attack them. Justice and Bell and Hugo don't want to be attacked, and they encourage the good feeling.

I was thinking of this only yesterday: that the university system, which seems in the beginning so sweet, where one can go in as a younger poet and find an older poet whom you admire to work with, causes everything to break down. We're living in a swamp of mediocrity, poetry of the Okeefenokee, in which a hundred and fifty mediocre books—and they're mediocre partly because the men writing them are somehow not completely males, because they haven't broken through to their own psychic ground—are published every year. When a man or woman succeeds in grasping what his or her master has done, and breaking through it, he doesn't create something artificial. He enters through his bellybutton into the interior space inside himself. And there, to everyone's surprise, are new kinds of grass and new kinds of trees, and all of that!

So that suddenly makes the term “tame” a real, living metaphor.

And it explains why, though it was so good in a way to get rid of the New Criticism—New Criticism by the way was itself a tiger, and John Crowe Ransom was Captain Carpenter. They attacked the life work of the historical critics with ferocity, and evicted it from the English Departments. Then The Kenyon Review started to get a little pesty, but no one killed it, it just died. Maybe English Departments believe in eternity. The result, I find, is a tameness and smugness in many younger male poets, the young female poets are tame also, and there is a tameness in criticism. Oftentimes I'll open a poetry magazine and there will be seventy pages of poetry and not one article. I hear poets who are proud never to have written criticism. They warble: “I'm very sensitive, you know. I'm a special person. Criticism should be done by corrupt types like university professors and journalists. I just love poetry.”

There's one stupid magazine out in California. Do you remember that one: Poetry … ? It's published in a format like APR.

Oh yes. Poetry Now.

Yes! A really stupid one! This magazine says, “I'm going to publish a review now of a book.” And the book review consists of the title of the book, the name of the author, and one or two of the poems. And APR doesn't really have much criticism. It's edited by committee, and they specialize in thirty-page articles on Ashbery that no one can finish.

That's absolutely true, and that's a complaint that has been voiced by a lot of serious poets and critics lately. Donald Hall wrote recently about the need for real criticism. And Marvin Bell also once said, commenting on some negative criticism I had written of a book, that it was really important for us to keep writing criticism, and to keep reviewing. I was glad to hear Marvin say that.

I think it's a good idea for each poet to take a vow to review, let's say, two books every six months. It's a part of his discipline. And he doesn't wait to be assigned a review. He writes it and then finds a place for it later.

When my own generation began to write, around 1954-58 or so, poetry and the persona were considered linked, and both were considered a child of the imabic rhythm. Allen Ginsberg, following Whitman, attacked those linkages by talking about his own life in Howl. And Jim Wright altered the relation of the iambic line to English poetry by bringing in whole areas of things that Keats had never thought about in relation to grief among the coal miners. And when he brought the slag heaps in, he found, following Trakl, that some new kind of consciousness in the twentieth century passes to the reader through the precise image, conscious and unconscious. Ginsberg uses mainly the mental or general image. I studied the precise image a great deal too. But we must see that the image is not a final solution. Many young poets are still writing calmly, almost smugly, in the image, without looking around. Obsession with image can become a psychic habit as much as obsession with persona, and we need new ways of bringing forward consciousness. Some hints have appeared, but few younger poets have cleared ground for themselves in that area. They have simply accepted the whole discovery of the image as it comes through, through Neruda, through Trakl, and the Americans.

And you could also say that this shows that the American male is solving his father problem less and less. It's quite possible that a hundred years ago there was much more resentment of the son against the father. The father after all controlled the keys to the economy, particularly if he were a master and you were the apprentice. Now the son can avoid living the whole father problem by going into a completely different field, say, computers. Maybe he doesn't realize that he still has to confront the father in some way. I think this failure in the artistic world is a reflection of a desire of the young males to live in a state of comfort, as opposed to the terrific state of tension and anger with your father which was more the situation a few generations ago.

Speaking of criticism, it seems to me that one sees a resurgence, or upsurge, or something like that, in the last few years, of what I would call the “new neo-classicism.”

All right, give me an example.

I'm thinking of the criticism written by Harold Bloom, and poetry by people such as Ammons and Ashbery.

And in what sense is that neo-classical?

Well, I think the way in which it emphasizes strictly formal and intellectual concerns and almost wholly denies the emotional.

Ashbery would say that his poetry is actually rather surrealistic. So how can you reconcile those two adjectives?

Ashbery is surrealistic at times, that's true. But I find very little emotion. I find that his surrealism much of the time is not getting at other, more disturbing realities, but keeping away from them.

I follow what you're saying, because if you examine something like Beowulf, it's perfectly clear that neither the poet nor the reader can go on eighty lines without going into a powerful gut feeling like deep thankfulness, or anger. One can go through pages of Ashbery and never find any emotions beyond those that the cerebellum is capable of. Neo-classical critics are writing again, suggesting that perhaps Yvor Winters was right, after all. Robert Pinsky is one.

And I'm thinking of Pinsky too.

Are you? The old dualistic line doesn't change, it seems, no matter what else changes. The Yvor Winters types just remain. They are like the old VW Beetle, and remain the same from generation to generation. But the academies have also produced a new sort of academic critic, and Bloom surely belongs to them.

An odd thing about Bloom's criticism is that it consists of “forwarding” a poet.

That's interesting. It hasn't always been that way. Samuel Johnson was a critic who was willing to tackle even Shakespear. He'll say this scene with Cordelia is absolutely absurd, or he'll declare about a certain passage, “I'm sorry to say that human beings do not speak this way.” In most cases he's right. A critic's task is to find where genuine feeling is not touching the words, or not nourishing the words, and so point out the fake areas so that others become aware of the problem. Mencken did that, constantly, with every speech a president gave. Edmund Wilson did it with novels. You can't appreciate the great unless you see where it fails. But Harold Bloom decides to “creatively” uplift his subjects, so instead of criticizing what is there in the shadowy area, being uncomfortable, he elevates Ashbery and Ammons, a very unusual thing for a critic to do. What he is elevating upward is some kind of a …, well, I suppose to go back to your image, it's poets that know precisely how not to pee on the rug. They never do that; they're very well mannered. They ostensibly have a shirttail relation to Wallace Stevens. But they do not have the grandeur of Stevens. Ashbery has become an utterly academic poet. Academic poetry in the fifties was recognizable by emotional aenemia and English meter. Now it is recognizable by fake French surrealism and emotional aenemia. In Ashbery there is no anger, there is no world. There are no trees, there are no animals, there are no women; there is no oppression, there are no dictators: there's actually no intense compassion! There are no characters as in Chaucer. You have an academic aenemia disguised as the French avant garde and almost none of the critics, young or old, have the guts to see through it. Ashbery has a kind of genius. But I also feel that his poetry is empty and academic.

What about the use of the unconscious in American poetry today? For a time, after the work you and others did in the fifties and sixties, breaking down a parochialism of the imagination, it seemed that a good many poets were beginning to respond to this in their work. But now I see poems in which the signs ought to be pointing in that direction, but there is no road into the power of the unconscious where the wild is, to go back and borrow your metaphor. Is this an example of what you were just saying about Ashbery, finding dodges to make it seem that one is doing one thing when in fact one isn't?

That's very interesting. D. H. Lawrence wrote of this progression, using the image of the umbrella. Kafka or Conrad, let's say, rips holes in the umbrella; then one sees through to the night sky and the stars, which in this case represents the unconscious. That's rather scary. Poe did that. What happens next? A Longfellow type appears; he makes another umbrella and this time paints stars on the inside of it. And grateful readers say, “Look at that sky! Look at the wonderful stars up there!” Andy Warho! does that in relation to what Max Ernst was doing. It may be that this sort of thing goes in waves. After all, some non-literary Conrad in the psyche tore off the umbrella and showed Americans the Viet Nam war. So the whole nation insists on comfortable stuff again. “Don't scare me.” Writers who want to deal with the true unconscious will be alone for a while.

Do you think there is a kind of correspondence between the fact of, on the one hand, the presence of this domestication of the poet learning forms and formulae, and on the other hand this academicism? Because academicism doesn't want the wildness anyway?

I went to the Iowa workshop a year. In general what was being taught was technique. That was because there had been with the New Critics a swing away from Whitman and William Carlos Williams back to using English models again. If you look at New Poets of England and America, published in 1958, you see most models are English. But during the sixties most workshops, graduate at least, stopped teaching iambic technique. Why don't the workshops then emphasize the deep content, the angers, the confrontations, that you find in Neruda or Yeats; the political content that you find in Brecht, and so on? Why aren't those being emphasized? Well, as you so wonderfully say with the image of the rolled newspaper, some form of behavioral training takes place instead. Students are taught to write, as David Ignatow says sarcastically, “the perfect poem.”

We have never before faced what it's like in the culture when hundreds of people want to write poetry and want to be instructed in it. In the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, there weren't that many people who wanted to be painters; but if they did they went to a studio and entered into a deep father-son relationship with a painter, privately, one-to-one in his workshop. Now we are trying to instruct hundreds of beginning poets in the universities. We don't know how to instruct in that area. We know how to instruct a hundred engineers, or a thousand computer technicians, but that knowledge doesn't help. If you read a history of Ch'an Buddhism, you'll notice that Buddhism faced the same problem. It began with just a few people, and later huge numbers of people wanted Buddhist instruction. Ch'an Buddhism does not involve doctrine; it involves the same kind of thing we're talking about, breaking through the ego and getting down to the unconscious, breaking through conventional attitudes and getting down to the real ones, breaking through your society face and getting down to your genuine face.

They learned how to do that. Their method doesn't resemble a workshop. They didn't teach politeness or the smooth surface. They didn't teach “the poetry of fans” as Neruda would say. The teacher wouldn't assign an exercise to be done at the desk for the following week, but his plan would involve something entirely outside the building. Perhaps a man might come in and say, “I want to learn something about Buddhism. I want to get my degree in Buddhism in a year and a half. What books shall I read? You want me to do meditation exercises now?” The monk would say, “No, I don't think so. You go out in the woods there, and build yourself a little house and live there six months, and then come back and see me.”

“What shall I do?”

“Oh, that's your business. I don't know; you do what you want to. Don't have any servants or anything like that. Get your own water and bake your own bread.”

So the man is out there for six months all by himself, and he is in charge of his own body. Finally he comes back and says, “O.K., I've done it. I've built my house and I'm ready now. Will you give me instruction?”

“Oh no, I don't think so. Actually we need a meditation hut out there very bad. I think you had better build that.”

“What do I build it out of?”

“Oh, stones. There's a lot of stones on that hill there. You can use those stones and build a house up there.”

“How long will it take me?”

“Oh, six or eight months. When you're done come see me.”

He comes back and says, “Well, O.K. I'm done now. I want my instruction in meditation.”

“Well, you haven't been moving around very much. Probably a good thing you see a little land. Why don't you take a trip around China? Make about a six month trip. I'm busy. You come back, see me in six months.”

And if he's willing to go through all that—actually during all that he is doing something and getting away from his mental attitude—he has received instruction. The instruction throws him back on his own body. By making him do things he understands that art is not a matter of getting something from a teacher. Art is a matter of going into your own resources and building. You may even have shown the student that it's necessary to build a house out of stone.

We're doing the opposite. We allow people to come to a workshop and receive immediately what you, for example, have worked ten to fifteen years to learn yourself. A nineteen-year-old student comes to your office, and because our teaching is structured so, we offer him that material right away. We can't say that plan is wrong or right. We can only say the Buddhists learned not to teach that way.

I must say that if I were going to teach a workshop on a longrange basis I would try to introduce some method of that sort. I would refuse to meet with the students regularly; but they would have to live away from the campus, in the woods or desert. They wouldn't be able to get any instruction until they had earned it, by breaking dependencies, doing things for themselves. One might say to a student, “After you have your hut, translate twenty-five poems from a Rumanian poet.”

“But I don't know Rumanian.”

“Well then, that's your first job. You learn Rumanian, translate the twenty-five poems, and then come back to see me, and I'll tell you what I think about ‘the deep image.’”

One learns a lot by translating a great poet. By that method, we get closer to the actual way that art was taught in the Renaissance. You might go to Rubens, for example, and say: “I would like to be your student. Would you teach me your philosophy of painting?” And he might say, “Well, there's a shoe missing down in the left hand corner. Please paint it so it looks exactly like the other shoe. Don't talk, paint.”

What do you suppose accounts for the almost total absence of this sort of attitude from the writers in our society?

This contrast between “doing,” which is the ancient way of learning, and “studying,” which we want to do, I think is connected to the difference between the working class, who are always doing, and the white collar classes.

In the Midwest, most of our grandparents or great grandparents came here as immigrants, if from Scandinavia, they belonged to the working classes. Virtually all Norwegians were working class in the nineteenth century. So most of the immigrants were working class. But, the next generation doesn't want to be that way; they want to go to college. They want to rise.

The phenomenon of the university-based poet I think is linked to this longing. Many grandsons and granddaughters of immigrants are proud to be MFA's because it proves that they're not working class.

You know, Gary Snyder said something not unrelated to that in an interview we recently published. The interviewer could hardly believe what he was hearing when Snyder said that if a person wanted to learn how to be a poet he ought to go find a person who could “do” something well, and learn how to do it with him. Find, for example, a good carpenter. Or find a good mechanic, and then just stick with him for awhile! Live with him, hang around him. Watch him and help him work. Learn to do it, maybe for two or three years. The interviewer finally said to him, “Are we still talking about poetry?” And Snyder said, “Fuckin' A we're still talking about poetry. You learn how to write poetry by learning how to do anything really well and proper.”

Beautiful!

So that's surely related to the kind of thing you're talking about.

Surely it's related to Thoreau's care in building his house in which he learned how to put together a chapter.

In Worcester, Mass., community poetry readings have been going for eight or nine years now. They have a wonderfully serious duo there: Mike True and Franny Quinn. They began the reading in the downtown library, which isn't a university setting. The community comes. Young poets now are glad to come and read at the library. Meanwhile Franny has been setting up readings in four or five places on the outskirts of Worcester, city halls or senior citizens' places or bars.

A poet says, “You know, I've been around a lot; I'd like to read at the library.” And Franny says, “We'd like that, but we'd like you to read at three of these places also.” Well, you drive out to an old town hall at six o'clock on Friday evening, and there's four old men sitting there, and they've never heard a serious poem spoken in their life. So it's not a thrilling reading. There's no standing ovation. However, if you want to read at the library you do that too. So the poet says, “O.K.” And the old men like to have young men come out and tell them about their marriages.

Then Mike or Franny might say, “That was fine. Now I'd like you to set up the program for the next group of poets we have coming through.”

“What does that involve?”

“Well, it would mean going to, say, Lowell, and starting from scratch there to set up the reading places and dates.”

“I can't …, ah, I'm not gonna …, I can't organ- …, ah, I'm not organizing … that's not …”

“Why not?”

“Well, I'm a poet.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, I'm just not an organizer. Some people do that well, really, but I just write poetry.”

Then Franny might say, “I have one bit of news. I'm a poet and I've been organizing for eight and a half years, and you've just received the benefit of the organization. The job here would be to talk to the city council. Convince them the idea would work, ask for a spot, etc., and do some work on the posters.”

There's a great resistence to this, because being a poet with an MFA is a status symbol. Or even being “a poet” implies that in this country. So the resistance to crafting and learning by doing may go back to a fear of being working class.

.....

What is the effect on poets of all the “sameness” you spoke of earlier?

Perhaps poetry is developing a protective camouflage of brown and gray feathers. A poetry shelf has fewer and fewer peacocks with long tails, like Robinson Jeffers. Probably this heavy breeding is nice. And it's possible that hawks don't see some gray birds, and don't attack them, you know.

But if a person just beginning to read poetry walks into a bookstore and starts paging through all the boring gray and brown books of poetry, what does that do for the readership of poetry? When too much boring poetry is published, poets themselves begin to lose morale. I'm wondering how that could change.

I assume that the number of workshops will continue to increase. Then as the job offers go down, the new poets' will becomes more and more tame, and more and more like the last generation. Suppose a number of poets would like a new position at Wisconsin, but Wisconsin wants to hire Galway Kinnell. That means that unconsciously, even consciously, the young poets will try to be more like Galway Kinnell. William Carlos Williams did not want to be like Galway Kinnell. Cummings or Marianne Moore did not have bureaucracy mentality. Each wanted to be wild separately! I don't see any possibility but it's getting worse.

It may also be that poets will be afraid to risk doing the really different thing, that might seem to be profoundly true to them none-the-less, for fear of being accused of peeing on the floor.

Oh, indeed! That's right! I'm sure that the reviewers of Pound's early work, which had a lot of freaky originality, accused him constantly of being poorly house-trained. What would originality look like today? Perhaps it would involve intimate revelations not confessional, such as Akhmatova writes.

I don't believe originality will increase if the poetry becomes more primitive. Jerry Rothenberg to the contrary, most primitive poetry is probably boring. After you've said, “Here comes the otter, here comes the otter, here comes the otter. A woka-woka-woka! The bird flew down from the sky. Dawn is coming, Wok-i-way, I'm alive.” You say that about ninety-eight times … We live in an industrial society. I love the oral quality of primitive poetry, but how can a university be oral?

The problem is, how does poetry maintain itself as a vivid, highly colored, living thing? It's possible that originality comes when the man or woman disobeys the collective. The cause of tameness is fear. The collective says: “If you do your training well and become a nice boy or girl, we will love you.” We want that. So a terrible fear comes. It is a fear that we will lose the love of the collective. I have felt it intensely. What the collective offers is not even love, that is what is so horrible, but a kind of absence of loneliness. Its companionship is ambiguous, like mother love.