[In the following interview, which was conducted originally on February 2, 1993 in Thomas's classroom at Davidson College, Pinsky discusses the art of translation, the cultural ways Judaism affected him personally, the influence of Eastern philosophies in his poems, and the transformative, historical aspects of his poetics.]

[Jim Knowles:] There's an essay by Seamus Heaney called "The Impact of Translation" in which he starts out with a translation by you. He talks about the problem a poet writing in English might have when he realizes that the kind of poem he is struggling to write has been written already in some other part of the world.

[Robert Pinsky:] The poem is "Incantation," by Czeslaw Milosz, with whom I worked on various translations. Not long after Czeslaw and I had done the translation, Seamus was over to the house and I read it to him. He was struck by the same quality in it that I was. The poem is very explicit and quite, one might say, moralistic or idealistic. Could a poet in English, I thought, particularly an American poet, write such a poem? It's quite short; I'll read it to you:

     "Incantation"
 
     Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
     No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
     No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
     It establishes the universal ideas in language,
     And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
     With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
     It puts what should be above things as they are,
     Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
     It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
     Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
     It saves austere and transparent phrases
     From the filthy discord of tortured words.
     It says that everything is new under the sun,
     Opens the congealed fist of the past.
     Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
     And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
     As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
     The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
     Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
     Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.

Seamus has quite complex things to say about this poem. First, he admires it rather eloquently, and then he says something like, on the other hand, this is a poem that one can imagine being written by a prelate or somebody at the seminary on the hill, some literate and bromidic Catholic: someone of intelligence and good will who isn't really hip to poetry.

Instead, "Incantation" is, somehow, a truly wonderful poem. In a way, you can say that the most difficult thing to do in a poem is to present ideas, abstract ideas of this kind, this explicitly, and attain strong emotion. And perhaps the implication is that parts of the world that have experienced totalitarian regimes are fertile ground for this kind of direct approach, while our own good fortune in not having experienced war on our terrain for over a hundred years, nor having experienced a totalitarian regime or a police state, makes us less capable of such writing.

I don't think Seamus says that, in fact, although he takes up the idea. Milosz's own opinion of that idea is interesting—he says this is like envying a hunchback his hump. He considers it a very silly sentimentality on the part of Western writers, romanticizing or idealizing the situation of the artist in extremely oppressive political circumstances. Certainly, if there is a kind of writing we admire and would like to emulate in relation to our own woes and desires, that is up to us. A lot of American poets were disappointed, as I was, that the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration since Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, read something that lacked exactly the kind of cogency or depth or impact or precision that distinguishes the abstractions and noble sentiments of "Incantation" from the clichés of journalism or from what Seamus's imaginary seminarian might write. Ms. Angelou's poem was on the side of goodness, but lacked the passion of art; considered as a work of art it had the vagueness and figurative muddle of plausible journalism at some times and the awkwardness of mere public speaking at others. But that doesn't mean it can't be done who knows, by Ms. Angelou next time out, or by the poet laureate Mona Van Duyn, or whoever. Like everything else in art, it can't be done only until someone does it.

And the Heaney essay is quite subtle on the question, as I remember, and not easily paraphrased—he says something like, such writing depends immensely upon context. He says I read it aloud to him—he describes the house, he describes the moment, he's a Catholic writer of one generation thinking about Milosz, a Catholic writer of another generation; Seamus is from a country torn by violence and Milosz is from another country torn by violence, in short there's a whole context that made him especially receptive to the poem: and I think he's raising a question about context, rather than proposing to envy the hunchback his hump. It's a good essay, a wonderful essay, and I would not attempt to summarize it. I see you're nodding, so you'd agree with me that he doesn't exactly say we can or we can't write in this way.

[Jim Knowles:] Right. I don't think the essay says that it's impossible to write a poem like this, but Heaney does seem to say that there's a trap we fall into when we try to write a poem that sounds like a translation.

Yes. Yes. But I think we did a good enough job of translating "Incantation" that this translation doesn't sound like a translation, which therefore makes me think about this poem in some of the ways that I think about any poem in English that I admire. That first sentence and line—"Human reason is beautiful and invincible"—I believe I thought something like: damn it, I wish I had thought of that: and "that" could hardly mean the idea or sentiment. It must mean something more like, I wish I had found that mode and written that sentence; or, I wish I had heard that imagined music of meaning, I wish I had played that, made that sound. Which again I take to mean that it was possible: it was there to be written. The reason I couldn't have written this poem has to do with all the same reasons that I didn't write "Sailing to Byzantium" or didn't write "At the Fishhouses" but not to do with the fact that I am a Western writer or American or that I write in English. I couldn't have written this in the same sense that I couldn't have written "Sailing to Byzantium."

[Harry Thomas:] On this same subject, though, near the end of his book, Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric, Donald Davie quotes your translation of Milosz's poem "The Father" from the sequence "The World," and he calls your translation a "brilliant" translation, he's full of praise for it, but when Milosz came to put together his Collected Poems he decided to use his own flatter, more trotlike version of the poem rather than yours.

This is a complicated issue. Strictly speaking, the Collected Poems version is not entirely Czeslaw's own translation: it's largely word-for-word a trot, originally prepared by the scholar Lillian Vallee, though the note in the Collected says "translated by the author." Some arbitrariness of this kind in crediting translations is common, and more or less inevitable when many hands share the task. Lillian (who had very ably translated Milosz's Bells in Winter) generously provided her literal version of "The World," from which Bob Hass and I worked to make our translation for The Separate Notebooks.

I think sometimes a translation enters so much into the spirit of the new language that by a kind of luck it forms a new aesthetic whole; and if the author who first forged the poem deep in the furnace of the original language, and who fueled it with his heart, happens to know this new language well enough to perceive that new aesthetic whole, then it may seem to him in its formal spirit to be too much itself even though it may be extremely close, even more or less literal: he may prefer something that is not a poem in English, that is a mere rendering, even if the rendering is not particularly more accurate, even though it may be less literal. That is the interesting part: it has nothing to do with loose or free, literal or approximate, because the issue is not accuracy or maybe even not formal equivalence—but the issue of life, an alien aesthetic life. The translation that crosses over into the poetry of the new language may be so good it is bad.

Possibly something a little like this may have occurred with Czeslaw and "The World." I remember how the spirit of that project was reflected by the way we worked, in a committee: the poet Milosz, who is bilingual; Renata Gorczynski, who is not a poet but who is also bilingual, English and Polish; and then Hass and me, neither one of us bilingual, American poets dependent upon the other two and occasional helpers like Lillian Vallee as informants. I've discovered a new phrase I like: Bob and I were the metrical engineers! Also, I guess, idiom experts. This committee or writing troupe met in various combinations—two or three or four. Czeslaw used to joke about crediting the translations to The Grisly Peak collaborative, named after his street in Berkeley, or maybe crediting them to a single, pseudonymous translator, Dr. Grisleigh Peake. I remember one day Renata said Czeslaw can't make it today. His Korean translators had come to town, and he was meeting with them, she explained. Bob and I looked at one another and started to grin. Renata said, "What's so funny?" And I said, we were just envying his Korean translators, thinking how lucky they are. She said, what do you mean? He doesn't know Korean, was the answer. So he's not there looking over your shoulder, having a view and all the authority there is.

The translations from the "The World" we did in that period were much praised. People sometimes requested Czeslaw to read from them at public occasions, and reviewers singled them out when The Separate Notebooks appeared. This was all complicated by the fact that the originals are written in a form that doesn't exist in English. In Poland, for decades children learned to read by the use of rhymed primers. Not exactly an old-fashioned American primer, not exactly Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, not exactly the didactic poems of Isaac Watts. Bob Hass describes the problem very well in Ironwood's Milosz issue. And the poems of "The World," though the sequence is subtitled "A Naive Poem," are a sophisticated response to World War II: "The World" is about Europe destroying itself. But in this "naive poem," what you see on the surface at the outset is the children, sister and brother, walking peacefully to school together. In separate poems, the children draw pictures; the mother carries a candle in a dark stairwell; the family have dinner. In another the father shows them the world, saying here's the global map, that's Europe, this is Italy, beyond the forest is Germany. He shows them the world, with a certain tone that by implication and context—making Seamus's point again—becomes in its overtones sinister and heartbreaking.

And these poems involve very simple, hard rhymes. In working with our translation committee, trying to get some of that formal note, thinking about the predominance in Polish of feminine rhymes, I made a thing that had a certain kind of rhyme in it, slanted or blunted feminine rhymes, and a certain sound, and to some degree it works, a compromise that does some little thing in English. But it does become another creature, another monster. So I can identify with Czeslaw in saying, well, this thing that has slouched and slanted its way into our committee is living and breathing in some kind of half-assed way; the sense is pretty literal, but there is also this smell of an alien, English-speaking animal, and I don't want to listen to it inhaling and exhaling and grunting around in its cage, I want something more like a telephone or a conduit.

[Harry Thomas:] To the original's explicit abstract language?

Yeah, The other thing made him nervous.

[Harry Thomas:] But he seems to suggest that the tone you got through the peculiar feminine rhymes and so forth prevented you from rendering the abstract language and statements of the poems explicitly enough.

Yes, but I think it was more "technical" than that. The rhymes in Polish are plain, like the cat sat on the mat. Virtually all endings in Polish are "feminine": they end on an unstressed syllable, so it's more like the kitty felt pity. They're like that, very hard and exact, and they're very simple. The rain fell on the garden and froze and the ice began to harden. They're just very, very plain, and the ones I cooked up for the version of "The World" printed in The Separate Notebooks are more like—well, Czeslaw called them "modern rhymes." Here is the opening poem of the sequence in The Separate Notebooks version:

     "The Path"
 
     Down where the green valley opens wider,
     Along the path with grass blurring its border,
     Through an oak grove just broken into flower,
     Children come walking home from school together.
 
     In a pencil case with a lid that slides open,
     Bits of bread roll around with stumps of crayon,
     And the penny hidden away by all children
     For spring and the first cuckoo in the garden.
 
     The girl's beret and her brother's school-cap
     Bob, as they walk, above the fringe of bushes.
     A jay screams, hopping in a treetop;
     Over the trees, clouds drift in long ridges.
 
     Now, past the curve, you can see the red roof:
     Father leans on his hoe in the front garden,
     Then bends down to touch a half-opened leaf;
     From his tilled patch, he can see the whole region.

"Roof/garden, leaf/region" that is our version, with the consonantal rhymes, mostly feminine. Here is the same poem in the Collected Poems:

     "The Road"
 
     There where you see a green valley
     And a road half-covered with grass,
     Through an oak wood beginning to bloom
     Children are returning home from school.
 
     In a pencil case that opens sideways
     Crayons rattle among crumbs of a roll
     And a copper penny saved by every child
     To greet the first spring cuckoo.
 
     Sister's beret and brother's cap
     Bob in the bushy underbrush,
     A screeching jay hops in the branches
     And long clouds float over the trees.
 
     A red roof is already visible at the bend.
     In front of the house father, leaning on a hoe,
     Bows down, touches the unfolded leaves,
     And from his flower bed inspects the whole region.

I think that the rhymed version is fairly close, and that it's just as abstract—the literal meaning is not much different. It is not a matter of abstractions. But the Collected doesn't attempt the rhymes; you can just be informed that they were in the original. I think that it is the rhythms and rhymes that help create an aesthetic creature—a kind of art-organism—and it is the breathing of such a creature that perhaps must make any author nervous simply by being other. I think it would make me nervous.

[Susan Wildey:] Something that came up in class is that we were wondering in what way, if any, Judaism has affected your writing.

I'm certain that it must have, in many ways. For instance, I talked last night about my interest in things that are made, made up: I am deeply interested in the subject of creation—high and low, great and small. And religions are notable makings, religion itself is. For one kind of religious person creation itself is an episode in the career of God. For me God is an important episode in the history of creation. Possibly having been raised as an Orthodox Jew, which is to say with considerable separation from the majority culture, has contributed to my interest in making. Not sharing such creations as Christmas or Easter or the—our, your—Saviour, and at the same time having other creations like the kosher laws or the prohibition against saying or writing the word for "God": that is a richly interesting conflict. It may have increased the impact upon me of the fact that we creatures—we mammals, we colony-insects, whatever we are—have invented not only language, but Christianity and Judaism and the United States of America and the violin and the blues and so forth.

The experience of a gorgeous, fading European reality—the rich, lower-class Eastern European Judaism and its culture, which were still present and very European in my childhood—must have had an impact on me that I can't fully understand. I grew up in a nominally orthodox family. My parents were quite secular people. They were good dancers, my father was a celebrated local athlete, they didn't go to synagogue except on the high holy days. We did have two sets of dishes—that is, we did "keep kosher." And as the oldest child, the oldest son in the family, I was expected to go to synagogue every Saturday. The musaf, the orthodox service, lasts three, maybe three and a half hours. Imagine for a moment being eleven years old: you don't like school; it's Saturday morning; you spend nearly four hours every Saturday morning in the company mainly of old men, chanting prayers in a language you don't understand, in a prolonged, accreted liturgy that is not dramatic. What happens is an accumulation of prayers and rituals, a liturgy that feels medieval. It does not have the drama of Mass: you don't eat God. It just happens. It comes time for "Adon' olam," so everybody stands up and sings "Adon' olam," and then you sit down again. Time for the Shema, you open the curtains, look at the Torah, sing the Shema, close it, and sit down again. And then you sing some other prayers. Three, three-and-a-half hours. And for the old men, it's picnic, they love it. It's a social club for them. And afterwards everybody goes down to the basement and drinks schnapps and eats kichele. You aren't supposed to drive on the Sabbath, so it may be one o'clock, one-thirty, before you get home. Meanwhile, outside it is the great era of American baseball and the great formative era of rock and roll; across the street is a Catholic church, where they come and go, sometimes girls in First Communion dresses, they are doing something over there, something relatively brief and one may suspect dramatic, and relatively included by the majority culture.

And you just … well, I believe that for many people with Christian upbringings there's this thing I have read about in Joyce and others called a "crisis of faith" or "crisis of belief." That is not what happens in relation to Judaism, in my experience. You don't have a crisis of belief. Faith in any such sense was not something I could apprehend as a great concept in the religion. The religion is kind of a surrounding reality, no more "losable" in its own terms than the color of your eyes, or the force of gravity. It's like having faith in the universe, for the Jew to have "faith in" Judaism: it's just there. And there's only the vaguest idea of an afterlife. There's not a state of sin or a state of grace; everybody's kind of culpable vaguely and chosen vaguely. There's a merit system. You get mitzvahs, that is you get credited with good points, while waiting for the Messiah. Or you are credited with sins, bad points.

So you don't have a crisis of faith. You look over at the Church across the street, and you say to yourself, hmmm, Catholic girls and communion dresses and Jerry Lee Lewis and Jackie Robinson: it's the whole world out there, the splendid traif [non-kosher] cookie jar of the world. So you just turn to the world as soon as you get a chance. Or so you do if you are a child like me then. And I made a vow, I promised that little child: once you don't have to do this, you aren't going to do it again. They are making you do this, but when you are autonomous and you don't have to do this again, I promise you that you won't have to do it. And I am still keeping that promise. So Judaism was in large measure a powerful boredom for me, but it was a very powerful boredom: a serious and for me stilling force. And the force of that boredom, no mere ennui but a desperate, animal sense of being caged and trapped, left me, I think, with a feeling about the majority culture that makes me both feel more inside it than I might have been otherwise—because I chose it, I might not have, but I chose the majority culture and I like it—yet by the same process also more outside it, in my feelings, than I might be otherwise. There are special ways in which a secularized Jew feels both additionally in the new culture, compared to others, and outside it. Terms like "assimilation," or numbering generations from the first act of immigration, do not begin to deal with these intricacies.

So that's a quick sketch of my guess of what cultural ways I might have been affected by Judaism, to which I feel loyal in ways that have more to do with, say, the stories of Isaac Babel than the celebration of Passover. On the more purely religious aspects of the subject, I'd prefer to be silent right now. But to think of it theologically, exclusively theologically, would be wrong. That would neglect something else, a kind of tear-laden and enriching cultural struggle.

[Ed Breman:] In the conclusion of a review of The Want Bone in the New Republic, the poem "At Pleasure Bay" is mentioned, and the reviewer says that in that poem you cash in your debts to Eastern philosophy that had been accumulating throughout The Want Bone. I was just wondering what your familiarity with Eastern philosophy was and how it might have influenced your poems.

Oh, Eastern philosophy: I'm even less of a scholar of it than Judaism or Christianity. I lived in Berkeley, California, for nine years. I've done some superficial reading. Zimmerman's books about Hinduism and art are fascinating to me. I am attracted by the Hindu conception of time in the many parables where, say, Shiva will come, and then while he's talking there's a parade of ants and each ant is carrying a world, and each world has a thousand Shivas in it, and each of those Shivas is gesturing at a column of ants. They have many little parables or images like that, trying to enforce the immensity of the great cyclicalness—how everything comes back and comes back literally more times than you can imagine. And you give yourself games like that figure of the ants, as you try to imagine as best you can.

And I guess that at some point the idea I was talking to you about last night, about the way that culture is itself a kind of possession by the dead, coming back—at some point that idea illuminated for me the idea of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. And the way that the genetic inheritance is comparable to the cultural inheritance, each of them a constant shifting and combining of so many variables, as many variables as ants and Shivas, got connected in my mind with the migration of souls.

It is a trickle or thread that runs through this book. I suppose you could say I mock Buddha in "The Hearts." In an early draft of "The Hearts," I can remember one line that I took out was, "Easy for Buddha to say." There's that tone in the poem still, of "Easy for Buddha to say" this or that. And as I understand it, there is a considerable Buddhist tradition of mocking Buddha. It's one of the things I like about Buddhism. A Zen saying I have heard is: "Buddha is a very good stick to pick up shit with." That's one Buddha saying, and there is something awfully admirable about it; I don't know, I suppose I do think Judaism or Christianity might be better off if they had that spirit. The Torah is a good stick to pick up shit with! It would transform the religion if you could say that, if the religion were capacious enough and calm enough to embrace that.

[Oma Blaise:] In your essay, "Responsibilities of the Poet," you talk about the poet needing to transform a subject. Can you say more about that?

Bad art does what you expect. To me, it's not truly a poem if it merely says what most intelligent, well-meaning people would say. In the other direction, total surprise is babble, it's meaningless; I don't mean to say that one is on a quest simply for novelty. But your responsibility is, even if it's only to versify something you perceive as truth, to put that truth or homily into a rhyme in such a way that you are transforming it. Your job is to do something that the reader didn't already have. And this does not mean simply the lazy reader. One kind of popular fiction just spins out explicitly and doggedly the most vague, generalized fantasies the reader already has—the least individuated fantasies. The reader, on his or her own, has vague, perhaps commercially provoked fantasies of having quite a lot of money and many a sexual adventure; but the nature of these dreams or of the reader as a person makes him or her a little lazy imaginatively. So someone else puts in a lot of industry, and makes up specific names of characters, and puts them in rooms and buildings and airplanes, and flies them around, and has them have illegitimate children and meet them again twenty years later, and goes through all of the laborious spinning out of the plot.

This is an art, in the old broad sense, but it is not what I mean by the art of poetry. As I understand it, soap operas take the kind of fantasy people have in common and do the work—quite skillfully—of making such fantasy material explicit, without depriving it of a vague, dreamy generality that is part of the appeal. And the reason Anna Karenina has a loftier reputation, dealing with very similar material to the material of soap opera, is that the material is transformed by a powerful individual imagination. It is changed by not just anybody's imagination, but by that of a great, particular transformer. The result is that the material, the adultery and money and so forth, smells and feels like something that's both recognized and strange. Somewhere in that recognition and strangeness lies your job as an artist.

For instance, a lot of people have the notion that totalitarianism contains the seeds of its own destruction, and that art is somehow linked to truth, and therefore is the opposite of totalitarianism. According to such a belief, Fascist poetry at some level would become a contradiction in terms, as in Montale's essay on the subject. And one such person with notions of that—what is the word, let's say of that humanistic kind—Czeslaw Milosz wrote in the poem we were talking about earlier: "Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia / And poetry, her ally in the service of the good … The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo." That changes it; the unicorn and the echo, for example, transform the idea with a peculiar blend of irony and astonishment. And it's your job, if you are an artist, to find that moment of transformation. In contrast, sometimes people really like clichés, they really like being told what they already think.

[Wyman Rembert:] Can you tell us a little bit about Mindwheel? Something we have says it's an electronic novel or complex interactive computer game. Does it have anything to do with poetry?

It is a text adventure game, and I did put a lot of poetry into it, mostly borrowed. There are many poems in the game, and it was a great pleasure to see the playtesters at the company I wrote it for say, about some two- or three-hundred-year-old piece of writing, "that's neat." For example, there's a wonderful Walter Ralegh poem that you could call a riddle; it's in the form of a prophecy. It says, "Before the sixth day of the next new year … Four kings shall be assembled in this isle" and there shall be "the sound of trump" and "Dead bones shall then be tumbled up and down." What's being described, but never named, are the playing cards and dice. The charm of the poem is that it sounds like a mystical, rather frightening prophecy, and it's the cards and dice. At the end the poem says,

            this tumult shall not cease
     Until an Herald shall proclaim a peace,
     An Herald strange, the like was never born
     Whose very beard is flesh, and mouth is horn.

Until a Herald calls: "… the like was never born / Whose very beard is flesh, and mouth is horn." Well, Mindwheel is a narrative game where text appears on the screen; and in response to each bit of narrative, which ends with a prompt, you decide whether to go north or to look around a room, say. You type in an imperative or complete the sentence "I want to…." and the machine responds by giving you more text on the screen. Early on in Mindwheel, a winged person is trapped behind bars, and you—the reader-protagonist—can free this person by solving a riddle. The riddle is, "an herald … the like was never born / Whose very beard is flesh, and mouth is horn." Has anybody guessed it yet? There is a hint in the expression of insult popular when I was in grade-school: "You weren't born, you were hatched." The answer is, a rooster. They play cards all night until the rooster calls: a morning herald which isn't born, but comes out of an egg; it has a beard of flesh and a mouth of horn.

This exemplifies a basic form of transformation, because the little riddle takes the extremely ordinary perception—that the cock crows in the morning and the night is over—and gives it a mystical aura: its "very beard is flesh, and mouth is horn." Ralegh's poem is a commentary on mysticism, and indeed on poetry, perhaps more than it is on the cards and dice. It is a delighted, somewhat sardonic commentary on rhetoric.

[Ursula Reel:] In your essay on T. S. Eliot you write: "True poetry is never really misunderstood or discarded, because its basis is in pleasure. Explanations and theories are misunderstood; pleasures are either had, or not." Can you elaborate a little bit on that and talk about the effect you want when you write a poem?

It's very much involved with the sounds of the words. I hope that such an answer does not seem disappointing to you, or simple-minded. I have a conviction that if you write whatever it is well enough—Wallace Stevens is a good author to demonstrate this with—the reader will put up with quite a lot of incomprehension. Look at the rooster. I think, I hope, that you all recognize that there is something appealing about the sound of those lines. "Whose very beard is flesh, and mouth is horn" is a good line, one whose appeal may come not only before you think it's a chicken, but before you even think it's a riddle. You can sense that it's something, you get a little frisson of something interesting from it, though you don't "understand" it in the sense that you don't have "an answer" to it. You understand what kind of thing it is. Possibly before you "understand" that it's a riddle, you "understand" that it has a mystical quality, or that it sounds impressive. You come to understand how it's meant to make you think.

It sounds good, and it sounds good as a syntax, as well as an arrangement of consonant and vowels, and it sounds good as an unformulated recognition of other kinds of fact: the fact that "flesh" and "horn" are good words here, and the fact that horn means the substance of fingernails as well as the bony process of, say, a ram's horn, and that the ram's horn makes a pleasing connection with "herald," because it's the same word—to blow into a horn, a goat's or a ram's horn. That's how we have the word "horn," which we now apply to a sax or a trumpet, instruments made not of horn but brass. And a jazz musician will call his piano or drum set his "horn"! And so forth, through innumerable chimes and associations. A horny thing is a callous, a hardening of flesh. There is a sexual component to the flesh and horn and born and morning and certainly to the buried image of the rooster.

All of that is operating, operating and alive in you long before you think "rooster"—or else if it isn't operating, then no amount of cleverness or profundity will make it good, will make it poetry. So that "I don't get it" is a more damaging thing than "I don't understand it," because I think often you get it long before you understand it. We are familiar with this phenomenon in music. A record comes out, and part of the pleasure of it may be that the first five or six times you hear it you don't know what the words are; then you gradually find out what the words are. But you know whether you like it or not before you understand it. The words seem to be going very well with the tune, with what the chord changes and the harmony and the instrumentation and the singer's voice sound like, and you half-perceive whether you like these words, already. It is the same with a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé.

And I don't think these things are forgotten. I think that once something really gets under somebody's skin—is recognized as really good, in the way of art—it tends to remain, always a source of what I have to call the art-emotion: whatever that feeling is that art gives to us. And this happens in the culture in general, too. Eliot is rather out of style now, particularly with academics. But he's too good, the pleasure is too solid, for his work to truly fade. Kids are still reading "Prufrock" in high school, memorizing parts of it without meaning to. It's there forever, for everybody.

[Will Anderson:] When you were talking about transformation earlier, I believe you used the word mystic or mystical, and it reminded me of, in "The Refinery," the idea of refined from "oil of stone," and it seemed like the imagery is sort of chemical there, but there is a sense of a wondrous transformative power. Is that the same idea?

Yes, it is the same idea. As I said last night, I always seek a way to experience these ideas as part of what's very ordinary. And "oil of stone" is a literal translation of "petroleum." You know, if something is petrified, it is turned into stone. And Peter is the rock you found your church on. So petroleum simply means stone-oil, oil of stone. The idea in that poem, that the transformations of petroleum—into gasoline, benzine, naphtalene, and motor oil and heating oil and all the other things it makes—WD40 and margarine and whatever else—is comparable to the transformations of language. I mean the way language itself changes, the way it changes other things, the way it illuminates our life, and in some ways is very toxic, quite poisonous and dangerous.

[Will Anderson:] It's a pretty volatile mix.

Yes, that is the sort of thinking the poem invites. It was a metaphor or comparison I liked so well that, maybe uncharacteristically, I based the whole poem upon it. The proposition is that language is like petroleum: it is dead life; it was once alive in a different way; in some other sense it remains stubbornly alive; it comes to us from the past, and we do gorgeous things with it—we wear these clothes, these fine woven stuffs and subtle colors, we have light, we have music—and there is also something terrifying about it. You are tapping an energy that can feel supremely ordinary, yet that can also associate itself with mysterious awe. Explosion, gusher, leak—energy, as in a word like fuck or Jesus or vendetta.

[Will Anderson:] I believe you said last night that you like the mix of the high and the low. Towards the end of that same poem, "The Refinery," it seems like there's that idea, the apposition of "Loveeries and memorized Chaucer."…

Yes—and "lines from movies / And songs hoarded in mortmain." Varying texture in language is a pleasure partly as a reflection of the variety in oneself. My terminology of "high" and "low" oversimplifies this variety, or whatever I was trying for with "smeared keep" or "a gash of neon: Bar," or pairing "pinewoods" and "divinity"—to me, contrast, maybe even more than the richness of some single word, is a gorgeous, living part of language, like contrast in music or cuisine. The degrees and kinds of crunchy and smooth, high and low, the degrees of pungency or volume or hotness. In the refinery, they have that whole chemistry, as I understand it, that tunes a kind of hierarchy of degrees of refining. They call it "cracking" petroleum, breaking it into its components. And that is sort of like language too, maybe especially English, and maybe especially in America.

[Ann Brooke Lewis:] It seems that in "Window" you use the word "Window" as an artifact or, as you talked about last night, as a matrix of its own, with its own history, its own part in the culture. How do you feel about the language that you grew up with personally? Do you feel that, as your Irish mother says, your house has a "windhole"? How much history or culture actually is in your language?

Ideally, I would like to have it all in there. I would like to speak and write a language that does not deny either my lower-middle-class childhood or all the books I've read. I am what is called an educated person as these things go. That does not negate the way I spoke when I was a child, or the way the people around me spoke in what I suppose was a small town slum—so my mother would call it when she lamented our living there, and was certainly a working-class, racially mixed kind of a neighborhood. Just as the history of the language is in the language, the history of any person's language is in that person's speech and writing, and should be honored. One doesn't want to be limited to a pose or mode as either a pure street kid or as a pure professor, because one is not pure, and the pose or mode is a confinement. As an ideal, I would like to have it all together.

And sometimes you discover the plainness in the learnedness. It is delightful to discover that the origin of a word like "window" may be something as homely or simple as "windhole." Is that a "learned etymology"? In a way, but what could be more down-home, what could be plainer? It's [pointing] the windhole, the hole where wind comes in. Is that a piece of arcane learning, or a bit of fundamental, funky information about these brutal Anglo Saxons in their hut with its windhole?

Something comparable is found in the lovely language of the trades, for which I have considerable affection. A carpenter won't even call it a "window." Those separate panes are the "lights" to any builder or carpenter, and the whole is also a light. And these things, the vertical members in here, are "mullions." That piece of wood, the flat piece against the bottom below the sill, is the skirt, and the movable unit with the separate lights in it is the sash. This one has an upper sash and a lower sash. And there's a parting bead between the two sashes. And a head jamb and the side jambs. And they'll use these words very unself-consciously, in the interest of clarity and precision. Hand me some more of the parting beam and the four-penny nails. Because you need to be precise. Go to the lumber store and bring me back some 3 5/8″ head jamb. Or I forget what this other thing is called, face molding or something. There's some other kind of jamb that goes this way. The word j-a-m-b: is that a high word or a low word?

One more pleasing example. I went to the hardware store and bought some fertilizer. The guy says, you could buy one of these little whirling things to spread it with, but really you could just strew it broadcast. And I realized what someone from a farming background might have always known, that "broadcast" was not invented by television or radio. The word was there: it's what you do with, say, seeds. If you have a sack slung around your shoulder, and you do this [swings his arm forward], you're broadcasting. The word existed before Marconi and before TV, and for me it had been an unrecognized, dead metaphor, it's just a homey word—not archaic, for farmers, I would guess, nor for the guy in my hardware store.

[Susan Wildey:] Did you write The Want Bone from the picture by Michael Mazur that is reproduced on the book's jacket or did you actually see a shark's jaw?

The image is tied to a weave of friendships that pleases me. I saw one that my friend, the poet Tom Sleigh, had given Frank Bidart. It was on Frank's mantle, and I saw it shortly before I was going on vacation to the beach—a vacation where I saw something of Mike and Gail Mazur, in fact. And I wrote the poem at the beach, remembering the bone on Frank's mantle. When Tom saw the poem, he generously gave me a jawbone too!

Later, when I needed a jacket for the book, I couldn't find an image: the ones The Ecco Press liked, I didn't like, and the ones I liked, Ecco didn't. And Mike, working from the poem and from Tom's present to me, made the picture—a monotype, a form of which he is one of the contemporary masters. I happened to be in the studio when he pulled this monotype from his pressit's a wonderful, sensuous thing to see a monotype pulled: it is a one-of-a-kind print, the plate gooey with color pressed against paper by powerful rollers, a big surface, and a motor drives the roller across the sandwich of wet plate and paper, shhhhh. There's a certain amount of chance in the medium. If you're an expert, you can make textures that look like water or hair or smoke or these bubbles here. But you don't know exactly what it's going to look like. Maybe that is a model for what it is like to make any work of art?