SOURCE: "Theodore Roethke Speaks: The Teaching Poet," in New Letters, Vol. 49, No. 1, Fall, 1982, pp. 7-25.

[The following is a transcript of a spoken address. Roethke discusses such topics as teaching, his literary influences, the role of readers, and the poetic process. In the absence of further information regarding the date of composition, the year of Roethke's death has been substituted for the essay date.]

THE TEACHING POET

I think teaching is one of the last resorts of the noble mind and is a whole, a profession, and in our times one of the ones that's least corrupted. It is a second order of creation, particularly visceral, romantic teaching of the sort that I go in for. Since I don't know anything, I have to use, make up for, energy, noise, and general pandemonium. It can get cumulative, and one can get this collective excitement going, and that's very dangerous, I found in bitter experience, well, in the first place for the teacher and secondly for the kids themselves. For instance at Bennington, I used to really teach like mad. I mean, it was the first time I'd ever been in a big-time operation. But these kids… I mean, I'd just walk around—"Ask me anything," you know, "about Hopkins." And I mugged up so much, and I worked so hard, and I puked before every class on Thursday. They'd come to me and say, "Look, don't knock yourself out; we're not worth it and besides, as soon as you get us to do something that's way beyond ourselves, you go away and then we can't do anything, or what we do is much less." Well, I'm not sure if I effect that kind of dent, make that kind of dent on kids anymore. At least I try to do it more quietly. But nonetheless, I feel it remains a second order of creation opposed to poetry. I think the very good teaching is like the dance. It's so related to a particular time and a place, and in a sense it can't be recaptured. I think, I mean, you know, Gestalt. On the other hand, I found that sometimes setting students' exercises has a chastening effect, in the sense that sometimes I just turn around and say, "If they say it's too hard, I say, 'Okay, I'll do it myself.'"

For instance a poem called "The Cycle," which goes "Dark water underground, / Beneath the rock and clay, / Beneath the roots of trees, / Rose in a common day, / Rose from a mossy mound / In mist that sun could seize. / That fine rain coiled like a cloud / Turned by revolving air, / Far from that colder source / Where elements cohere, / Dense in the central stone. / The air grew loose and loud. / Then with diminished force, / The full rain fell straight down, / Tunneled with lapsing sound / Under the rock-shut ground, / Under primeval stone." I left out one line there. But we were working on the three-beat, and I wrote the piece, which I think is a good one of its kind. (The line Roethke omits is the penultimate one: "Under a river's source.")

It is true, of course, that you do find yourself clarifying your concepts and your attitudes. I find that good students are very good and very honest critics. There are certain areas of experience, or certain kinds of poems, of course, that they're not quite up to when they are, say 18, 19, 20, can't really get inside a complex metaphysical piece, or anything that approaches, what do you call it, preternatural experience, or shall we say, mystical experience. Why be frightened of that word?

There are a great deal of emotional pressures, particularly in modern teaching at its best, and I think the whole character of teaching in college has been changed in the last twenty years, primarily by writers. Now this point has never been made. They may not all be good teachers, but some of them are, and some of them are great ones, and I include old Winters, as nutty as he is, as a great teacher of this kind. That is, whatever he does, he makes a hell of a dent in them. Well, certainly Ransom was, is still, and Kunitz, I know, is, and I suppose that carries over into the arts. Now here the art department, frankly, I don't think is much, but it sort of seems chaotic and there are no, you know, no really big figures there.

LITERARY INFLUENCES

If you want to talk ancestors, it's mistake to set Yeats up as a central guy; for one reason, I resisted Yeats for a long time. I remember even saying to Bogan, "I don't get him." See, I came to Ann Arbor at 17, wanting to do what? To learn to write a chiseled prose. I had been trained by myself largely, and in part in a good high school, on the familiar essay. I read Stevenson et cetera… you know… Tomlinson, that sort of writing. I wanted these graceful essays. At home we didn't have a tremendous library. There was a leather-bound Emerson; there were a couple of good Thoreaus; there was a book called Prose Every Child Should Know, a book called Heart Throbs, but it was prose, you know. Between the greenhouses they had toilets put in and all that, but in piles, in these piles of pipe, there was this old backhouse and I'd go in there for meditation. On the wall was this epigram; it just said, "Enter softly and softly close the door, for beneath this floor lies many a noble dinner." Well now, it's a great sentence; it has the upward flow and the downward.

Thoreau, too, Emerson, Thoreau… but I was on to Emerson already, but I liked that aphoristic junk. And then some of the major essayists, I mean, of course, Thoreau. But the thing is when I got to Ann Arbor, I got a B plus in freshman rhetoric. As a freshman I read all of Stevenson, and wrote a paper without looking at any critical book, spent my whole vacation doing it and got A plus, marked my singular exactitude… would have A's. I'm a kid; I'm just 17; I didn't want to go to Michigan. I did because I'd be near Mom. But I thought, "Well, if I can't get A in a freshman rhetoric course, I can't be a writer; the hell with it, so I'll go through law school like Mama wants." So from then on I just took what I wanted. But I did have a guy, who went nuts, solemnly gave me a course in Wordsworth and also in American literature. But the Wordsworth—since I never like to repeat their damn fool ideas, and I used to learn great passages by heart, and I used to know hundreds of lines of Words-worth, and I tried… I mean, he is there, yet I feel that actually Wordsworth didn't make much of a dent in…. It was supposed to be an opening up of unconsciousness, but I feel it's a very timid one. "I have felt a presence that disturbs me with a joy of elevated thought" and so on is always just the sense, or he's rowing and he has vague feelings. Oh, whatever… in my case, it seems to me, there should also be a focus on the minutiae of life, the little things of life.

Blake is a real guy for the beat. I've had I don't [know] how many editions of Blake. I can't explain those damn poems, exactly what they mean. But it's that beat, eh. And I was much more grounded in Blake, say, than I ever was with Yeats and also with some of the people that affected Yeats. You know, Yeats himself… I'm not trying to say that I wasn't influenced by Yeats; everyone was. But the particular poem where I give him this tribute, I'd been reading Sir John Davies deeply and also Raleigh. (The poem referred to here is "The Dance.") Particularly, I wanted the 16th century guys. I wanted to get back to the plain, hard style. I said all this, by the way, in a piece, "How to Write Like Somebody Else," in which I pay tribute to certain early ancestors, people who have affected me technically. Mademoiselle Eleanor Wylie, who I think is in many ways a bad poet. And I wrote a pastiche of her. Then I did one of Léonie Adams; she was an influence. But oddly enough the contemporaries that affected me most when I started were Kunitz, whom I thought of as a superbrain—you know, summa cum laude—and Bogan, whom I caught just at the end of college. But what I mean, I went roaring around for four years with the richies, with the richies, with the dolls, and school for me was a kind of joke. I figured, well, you have to demonstrate you can do it, so I made Phi Beta Kappa by a cunt hair, to everybody's surprise. But it was only after getting out of college, I mean getting into the graduate school, that I began writing poems, and they were very bad at first. But then all of a sudden there was a real jump, say within six months, I mean. I published in the New Republic, The Commonweal, Sewanee Review. When I did that, and when Hillyer told me, "Why any editor who wouldn't print these is a fool," geez, well, at last I'm something. (Roethke introduced himself to Robert Hillyer at Harvard.)

I liked my prose all right, but I don't know—there's a combination of a deep unhappiness, a bust up of this real love affair. I mean, it went on four years and had, shall we say, all the ramifications… we might as well have been married, I mean, what the hell. But we each had more money than we… just pooled our money. Christ, some guys would go to Europe, and some of the chicks would go to the Evanston Cradle of Heaven, have an illegitimate kid, come back. Ann Arbor was unlike anything on land or sea, I mean. It's never been put down. We thought Scott Fitzgerald was a little shitass. I mean, that he was a little puke, and he was overwhelmed by money. Well, for Chrissake, some of the silly shits jumped around with him. Go across the street and this one guy in the Phi Delt house, he had seven million in his own name, which, of course, by Harvard standards isn't much, but he just had money in the closet like laundry.

In terms of immediate influence, I read a lot of Lawrence's prose, almost all of it, and I wrote a paper on him once. But, I mean, The White Peacock and Sons and Lovers dented me the most. When he got into those nutty phases—The Plumed Serpent, I thought, was far too strange—I didn't try to understand it. I think Lawrence's poetry is more important than the prose. And I think Eliot's all wrong about, you know, his sneering at him. Well, Lawrence talks about the immediate moment. That's what the poem, in a sense, should capture. I think Lawrence is, of course, often self-indulgent, but in the great runs we can feel into primordial kinds of life. I mean, that sense of identity.

I sometimes use that technique of dream, for instance "gliding shape / Beckoning through halls, / Fell dreamily down…" and so on. It's a combination of dream and even, you know, sexual—"my own tongue kissed / My lips awake" ("The Lost Son"). I mean, it's obviously onanistic, sweet myself.

THE ROLE OF THE READER

What happens in each reader, it is frequently said, is never the same, but nonetheless, it seems to me the reading of a good poem is in itself a re-creation of the poem, just like in looking at a picture, and that the experience itself is vicarious, and that's one of the reasons we have art, isn't it; that is that man can experience other men's experiences, to realize that this is there, this can happen.

I'm always writing, as it were, for as wide an audience as possible. That may sound fatuous, but perhaps I began wrong in deliberately courting the so-called popular audience in very plain, little poems about rather simple experiences. As I say, I began with verse, hoping that poetry would happen, and then went into things much more complex, but in a sense, I'm coming back to verse now, or I'm using the techniques and the longer line that I used originally. I think the capacity for poetry is much greater and much wider than most people realize, and I think that if the poetry can be made accessible to the so-called general reader, if it can be heard—and I've written almost everything I've done to be heard—once that occurs, there's usually understanding. I mean, I think a barrier has been erected against poetry. It isn't that poetry isn't being produced. I feel this is the greatest age, particularly for the shorter forms, in the language. We have no great drama but a body of lyrics of immense variety and a body of longer poems, but perhaps not so much full length drama; I mean, longer, meaning a hundred or two hundred lines. But everything sort of militates against… I mean, the radio, the television, the visual education. [To] bring up a whole generation trained, as it were, on TV is to abandon, as it were, part of the body, the ear. I mean, poetry is—or the use of language is—one of the differences between us and the apes, and if we're not careful of keeping that difference wide, we are going to have a retrogression, and certainly it is occurring in slovenly speech. Poetry is speech at its most memorable, at its best. And certainly it's human to desire the best, and that best is so accessible.

The best in the great complex poetry makes, in a sense, a profound and terrible demand; it says, "Change your life." That phrase is Rilke's, but other people have said it. And I think that's why the general public backs away from poets like Bogan or Kunitz and will read instead Millay or Brooke. They don't want their lives changed; they don't want to enter some other consciousness. They are, in a sense, consciously or unconsciously afraid of something. The best modern poetry is characterized by a terrible honesty of imagination. It is one of the things that we inherit from Blake. If one thinks of this in practical terms, we're supposed to be culture-mad America. Here is an area where we can really say we are the best in the world; that is lyrical poetry. It's available for 95 cents to usually four or five or six dollars. For 50 dollars a home can have a library of really choice, great poets that the young should have access to. Whereas people are willing to spend 1500, 2500 or 3500 for a lousy action painting, the idea of buying a book seems to be abhorrent to them. Again, thinking in utilitarian terms, it's one of the ways in which we can defeat our great provinciality. We can't all get to the great opera; we can't all hear the great symphonies, but we can buy a book, or we can buy a good recording of poetry, and there are some.

The poet presumably is in the foreground of consciousness. He is aware of things, in a sense, before they happen, or before they generally happen. Now that isn't just falderal; it's simply so. I mean, a public poet like Auden, when he says, "We must love one another or die." He said it in a very few words… the central thing in our civilization. We are surrounded by all kinds of shoddy speech, by the clichés of advertising, by the kind of stylized prose of Time, Life, with the bromides of editorials. I mean, if someone can begin to hear good poetry, I don't mean serious or profound, but even "Mother Goose" or the poems in anthologies like Come Hither. They're part of the heritage of our race. If we cut ourselves off from them, we drift inevitably into a kind of obscene gobbledygook, of officialese, of jargon, and many of our courses in the university tend the same way, even some of the subjects themselves seem simply a waltzing with a special terminology. Whereas poetry is using the holy words, the words around which there's a great accretion of human association: "hill," "plow," "field," "mother." Furthermore, it's one of the ways we can, as it were, keep in touch with the subhuman, the other forms of life. I think the best modern poetry and some of the best modern painting still has a profound moral drive, not in the sense of a message, but it is written for the glory of man and the glory of God. It's the best we can do in our time, and we should be aware of it; even an indifferent or mediocre poem is more a human achievement than most prose.

THE POETIC PROCESS

I think the general genesis is one begins with a mood of some sort. And frequently I find that when I get grumpier and grumpier, and more and more irritable, that I… well, Beatrice, for instance, can say, "You had better write something pretty quick." The mood may not always be related to the piece, or it may be. But then the actual writing, the genesis of it, I think, for me, usually takes the shape of a line, or one or two or three lines, and these lines may accrete, I mean, sort of gather similar lines and images, you know. Then the actual composition of the poem for me… well, it isn't a fairly short… it is very rarely a thing that's just dashed off. But the only poem I ever wrote that I felt—well, there's been more than one—but as it were, a kind of seizure, is that one I wrote after Thomas' death ("Elegy," included in Words for the Wind). That was for me almost a straight dictated poem, except that it had an extra stanza in it that I knocked out, and also that first poem "The Dance." But even there, I think, I usually have in the back of my mind the genesis of lines that, you know, that are skating around in your forebrain or in your fore-part of your consciousness or conscious mind. But it's the bringing together the whole thing into a coherent whole that's hard for me. I mean, that's the ultimate and the final work. Usually I can, in fact almost invariably I can tell when the thing is at least, shall we say, done, or in its final form; there may still be some fiddling or polishing with lines. But sometimes in an effort to describe an abstract thing, for instance these poems, "The spirit moves, / Yet stays: / Stirs as the blossom stirs" and so on… ("A Light Breather"). Well, that poem first was much longer, and then about twice, or more than twice its present length in the book. Then I cut it way down 'til it was almost nothing; then I sort of brought it back to its final shape.

Oddly enough, in "The Adamant" I had a kind of piece of luck. I fell into its form, which is three three-beat lines, and then a two-beat line each time. Originally they were all three-beat lines, and by cutting adjectives in the first and second stanza and changing the wording in the last stanza I came up with this curious cutoff effect which in a way sort of suggests the action of a rock crusher, and it gave it… well, it moved it from a poem that was just a poem into something where the rhythm was really integral with the feeling.

But writing for me is not an easy thing to do. I mean, it's always difficult. And I always am terrified, sort of, with the feeling that, well, the feeling after something that you know is really good, say, that well… "Is this the last time?" Well, I noticed that Auden said the same thing in his The Making of Poetry. As someone that gifted technically, whom I always think of as being able to write a poem at any time, on any subject, and within a very short time—that poem will always at the very least be readable—he would be the last person to worry or have that sense. To the public, anybody who has ever written a poem, a good poem, is regarded as a poet. But to the poet himself, it's that last, those last things that [matter].

I rarely can sit down and work from a very cold start. A poem that was written quite swiftly was "In a Dark Time." That's a villanelle, of course, slightly modified, and a damn tough form. And I remember writing that. I was reading a student notebook—well, by the way, there, in that sense, when I make them keep journals and whatnot, you sometimes… you know, they become your eyes and your ears and you do learn something from them. I believe very definitely the Kierkegaardian notion that education begins when the teacher starts learning from the student. That may sound like a paradox, but I'm sure you have had that same feeling, when it becomes, you know, a real reciprocity.

"In a Dark Time" was written while I was up really high (I mean high in the semantic or psychothalmic, constitutional-type sense). It took me about three days. It was in summer and I was sitting out there in the grass on a chaise lounge. Well, some of the lines were in notebooks before; the line, for me, sometimes will hang around for years. But I finally wrote it, as I say, in about three days, and I had the sense that this is one of the great poems of our time. I mean, I just knew it, and I shot it to Marianne Moore, who's tough if anyone is tough. Gee, she wrote back this card, saying, "an apocalypse and in mere language," et cetera, et cetera, see, and then Cal Lowell, 'cuz I thought, "Cal, ha, ha, think you know something about religious experience; get a load of this." Course this is Theodore's weakness still. I can't purge myself of playing, acting like I'm George Radermann or a quarterback, you know; I have to be cocky. But hell, that's 'cuz I had to grow up that way. After the old man died, there was me and Mama against the field. Everyone was trying to do us in, and I lived, well, I spent a lot of money. I lived in complete economic fear for years, hence that business "Money money money / Water water water" ("The Lost Son"). I mean, it's a cry from the very soul's depths. I mean, I have to live and I have to keep the creative, too. (Kenneth) Burke has some very good remarks there. Furthermore, we lived in the same house and his office was next to my class, and he used to sit there, when I was trampin' around teaching, [and say,] "Gee, you're going good today. I put a whole lot of things down." I said, "You son-of-a-bitch." But he wrote a thing called "The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke," and he marches right through the first six poems, six of the long poems. There were some things in there; he says in our time that it's natural that the poet should make that equation, equation meaning water, all of fertility, all of life. Sounds nutty, but likewise, he draws a parallel, or contrast, with Eliot—Eliot using all the abstractions, whereas I use almost none. Now I'm moving more toward abstract language, but then again, that's another problem. This area which I'm puffing and blowing about… I say that because in most of those last short poems I feel I was the instrument, you see, as bleak as hell. Oh yea, that's rather good, "as bleak as hell." In a sense it is hell, and a dark night can be repeated, and there's no A-train to paradise. We don't grow up, older and and older, more and more benign, more and more full of wisdom and so on. I'm still death haunted, I'm afraid, in spite of saying death is an absurdity, it's an irrelevance.

The difference [between Yeats and me] is that I can dance, and Yeats can't. I mean, as somebody put it, 'cause—and I can say this without batting an eye—I know, in the final term, something and perhaps a good deal more than I realize about mystic experience. Yeats didn't. Sometimes people say that when I get rolling in the rhythm, in reading certain kinds, I start a thing that seems to approximate the dance. Of course there was a low point in the history of the modern dance when I was at Bennington where I was actually approached to be in under Martha Graham's… Well, of course, those pieces for Sir John Davies began out of a… probably the literary impulse came out of reading John Davies' "Orchestra," which is a long poem in praise of dancing and celebrating, and based on the whole Elizabethan notion of the cosmic dance. The whole thing is, you know, an improvisation. It was written in 15 days. But it has a wonderful rhythm. Kunitz introduced it to me originally. Arthur Smith quotes in one of his books about there are times that come in every living creature when the impulse to dance and to sing, or to sing and to dance—Oh gosh, I'm getting incoherent. This comes to all living things, I think, and I think it goes back, way back into the Dionysian experience.

There was the one time I played the Rimbaud business of really driving myself, seeing… you could really derange the senses, and it can be done, and let me tell you, I did it. I mean, I got in such good condition. I wasn't drinking at all. I was 27. This was in East Lansing, Michigan. I was running on those cinder pads four, five miles a day. Jesus, and teaching too. But you know I got in this real strange state. I got in the woods and started a circular kind of dance, and I've never put this down very… I refer to it in "I tried to fling my shadow at the moon" ("The Dance"). I kept going around and just shedding clothes. Sounds Freudian as hell, but in the end I had just sort of a circle—as if, I think, I understood intuitively what the frenzy is. That is, you go way beyond yourself, and this is not sheer exhaustion, but this strange sort of a… not illumination… but a sense of being again a part of the whole universe. I mean anything but quiet. I mean, in a sense everything is symbolical. In one of the Old Woman poems ("Her Becoming") I just sort of put it in there, because I know if you put this down in prose, for God's sake, "Oh, this is merely clinical," I mean, "Obviously, he is crazy" and so forth. But it was one of the deepest and most profound experiences I ever had. And accompanying it was a real sexual excitement also… and this tremendous feeling of actual power. But finally, when coming back, I was just so exhausted that I could hardly walk, in as good condition as I was.

What happened to me eventually, well, one thing… you have this curious sense that you're actually being transformed literally into an animal. You start getting fantasies, I mean, of power, lion-like power. But the next night was much tougher, in a sense—I really thought my features were changing. Of course this was madness, you see, but the relationship between the ecstasy and madness is so… well, one of the things that the head-shrinkers know, or the good ones, that if these descents are too rapid, that can be chaotic, and I mean you knock. In other words, something could happen to you that you could get lost back there, because what you're doing is going right back into the history of the god-damn race. I mean, you're down to the animal, dog, and so forth, down to snake. It sounds nuts, but, well… fight your way out of that. What happened to me there, I simply blacked out, eventually. I knew I was teaching in real manic frenzy. Well, I woke up in the morning, somewhat like this, with very little sleep and decided I wanted to get to his office. (Probably a reference to Lloyd C. Emmons, Dean of Liberal Arts at Michigan State University.) I took a little walk on the edge of the city. There I got so cold I lay down and took off a shoe, and there I had… this is again real loony, and goes beyond… there was a curious crabhole, and I lay there and started whistling to this thing, as if you were really trying to call it out of the earth. Well, I knew what I was doing, that this was not a snakehole and so on and so on, but… and I put this down in one of those pieces, in one of those running ones ("The Song"). Then I got scared; it started getting cold; it was November and I started to run with only one shoe on. Jesus Christ, here you are, and I was barefoot… well, symbolically yet. I got into a gas station. There was a guy I again, I just associated with my father. I was out on my feet, see, just punchy from…. You know, I hadn't slept for five nights and I said, "Can… get me, drive me," and he said, "Sure." He drove me to the campus and I came in, you know, just like someone who had been beaten for five rounds. I sat down in that god-damn office and I thought, "Jesus Christ, you're going to have to ad-lib now." But the trouble in these high states of consciousness is that everything gets heightened, so that sound particularly… somebody walking overhead, it just sounds like a concatenation. Well, I finally said, "Just bring me a coach and I'll try to explain on what happened to me physically." I was just going to say, "I'm not nuts. I'm just out on my feet because I've been working." I finally thought I'd died. There was a profound and beautiful experience, as if you… and you can hear the thing going, but you just die right then.

The real point is that this business of the dance accompanies exaltation of the highest, the human thing, and it also goes into the Dionysian frenzy, which in modern life hardly anyone even speaks of anymore. But the real profundity of that experience, I mean, in the sense of the mood itself, seemed to be, you know, the whole Islamic world. All the cultures were with you. This is exactly what they felt when they were rolling in the circular, you know, frenzy thing. And your perceptions, as I say, both in sight and particularly in sound and smell, and frequently also another is that you get the transfer of senses. Sometimes that comes even with memory. You know, Hopkins says in one of his… when he said that "I tasted brass in my mouth," well, that's the very essence, it seems to me, of metaphysical thinking. That is when the body itself… when Vaughan says, "When felt through all my fleshy dress, ripe shoots of everlastingness," well, that's the feeling. You feel one way that you are eternal, or immortal, and it doesn't seem to be a cheap thing either. And furthermore, death becomes, as it were, an absurdity, of no consequence. And also, the notion, conceptions, of time are completely subjective, and I've often thought sometimes that when the suicidal leaps from the window, when he hits that pavement and is just a blob, who knows, maybe he explodes into a million universes and he is happy. Who knows? That's behind, you know, the nuttier aspects of certain Hindu religions, when they'd start dancing and singing and finally in this ecstasy run right into the god-damn sea when they know all those sharks are there. Nothing could stop 'em. I mean, we can say that this is collective madness. It is, but it's part of the human psyche; it's there.

Well, maybe part of our problems, people nowadays, is that we have lost contact with both the ecstasy and the frenzy. "But the unconscious is a very funny thing," said he pontifically. I know, I know I'm supposed to have… as Kunitz says, "He sinks into the very bed of the self, and disorder itself has, takes on, its images or given images." Well, I think almost anyone could do that once they were willing to, shall we say, to pay the price. I mean, I think maybe this business about being able to tap the unconscious is a polite kind of way of saying you speak completely nutty, I mean, or potty, as it were.

Let me get back to this point—the unconscious, you can take a dive in and you come up with all kinds of garbage around your neck, or you can bring up something beautiful. I mean, in a sense it's like nature. I suppose it is nature, an interior nature. I mean, part of it's dead, irrational… dead. And when it's unlike nature, well, it can't be bullied. Maybe you can bully nature under some conditions. Does it sound like too cryptic a remark?

Eischler in New York has written on death, and Hoffer is one of the very great ones, and these things which sound sort of eerie and scary, to them are absolutely comprehensible. Well, what I mean is, we have modern man living as if he had no unconscious, as if he had none, and being ashamed of the impulse. That is, building up guilts about say, even masturbation and whatnot. Well, for God's sake, the most advanced thinking, as far as I can determine, is that any sexual expression, if done with love or even understanding is legitimate. I mean, therefore, of course, I suppose I'm no expert on the homosexual kick, but I mean, what the hell. Well, I don't mean to get mumbling about that, but the point is that once you neglect the unconscious and act as if isn't going to backfire personally it can backfire collectively, and that's certainly what happened with the Nazis, with the Germans, with a whole great, gifted people, in many ways more gifted, say, than the English.

Oh well, when I finally got into these poems, the first one, which was "The Lost Son," came after a period of very intensive teaching, and also teaching particularly lyrics and long poems like "Anthony and Cleopatra." Then I began to realize what could be done by playing against the line, as it were, and also I saw certain forms of the diminishing kind in the Elizabethan songs. I wasn't conscious of that at the time. I wanted to write the kind of poem which would follow the action of the mind itself. And furthermore, a kind of poem which could represent the struggle—that is, between the two parts of one's personality, the self and the other self, daemon, call it what you will. So I began writing a style that had a considerable speed but still used monosyllables. But the shape of the stanzas was essentially as if I was composing for music. In other words, the poem would have a theme started and then that theme replied to, or answered to. There might be question, then answer, et cetera. The general design of these poems was cyclic. That is, frequently they began in the mire, in the depths, in a depressed state, if you will, and then they moved out. And often the eventual end came to a kind of resolution, or sometimes as euphoria, in other words, a poem of joy. The important thing to remember is that the euphoria, or euphorias, are not all the same, but they are conditioned by the very sights that are in the eye, and the mind's eye at the time. And I think it's rather odd that conditions of joy have much more variety than conditions of depression or despair, the blank grayness and sameness of the lower depths, as it were, although again, there are certainly degrees and depths of terror.

Well, as I say, (I) follow the movement of the mind itself, mind that is cyclic or, if you will, manic, to use an overworked or misunderstood term. But to take that movement and then to turn it into art, one takes only the general design of that movement, and there are times of interlude, times of rest, times of waiting. Then, of course, these poems that followed were kind of soul's history, beginning with a small child. As Burke has pointed out, adolescence is peculiarly an interlude time, a time of being blurred or fuzzy or uncertain about what is happening, what's going on. I said someplace that "so much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying" ("I'm Here"). Of course, we are always dying into ourselves, and then renewing ourselves. That's perhaps as good a definition as any of what I do, or what I try to do. But this is simply one kind of poem. That is, I believe that a poet should show as many parts of his nature as he can in all decency reveal, and that includes the epigram, the aphorism, the joke, the song, the song-like poem, up to the very highly formalized lyric. It's there, perhaps, I come closest to old W.B. Yeats, but I think I do a different thing technically. I end-stop the lines much more than he ever did. In other words, I'm using a style that was more current—and the language was perhaps a little less sophisticated—in the 16th century, we'll say, in an effort to write a plain, bare, an even terrible statement. Whether one does it, of course, it always depends on the reader.

I think the deepest and most evocative images that come out of poetry are those, the things you saw and smelled and felt with the senses the earliest. But curiously enough I have rather a bad memory in the literal sense.

I sometimes try to render the object faithfully, to see it as intensely as I can, and turn that back into language, language that doesn't compete necessarily with the painter. In final terms, the purely imagistic poetry is decidedly limited if it remains nothing more than image, however good. But it is my belief that a thing perceived finally—and when one looks so long at the object or has looked at it habitually, or looked at it out of love as Rilke would look at an animal in the zoo for hours on end, until you become that object and it becomes you—is an extension of consciousness.

I can't profess to know. Well, maybe the kind of knowing that occurs in poetry is related at least to satori, as it were. I believe that one can suddenly become aware of another consciousness, a consciousness other than immediate; and sometimes that may happen to be a very trivial thing. And Proust has recorded this better than anyone when he stumbles going up to church, and he's suddenly aware that there's another world other than his, a consciousness that is higher. From what I gather from Japanese, our version of what is usually thought of as Zen is pretty superficial, to say the least. Suzuki himself is rather careless, and most of the Beats take Suzuki as their bible. It does represent a really rugged discipline, of course, so ritualized, so formalized. But let me see. It is possible that I might come close to it, if I can find… well, yea, in "The Right Thing Happens to the Happy Man." This is "His being single, that being all," or "he sits still, the solid figure when / "The self-destructive shake the common wall; / Takes to himself what mystery he can." This's possibly close to Zen notion… that's that sitting still which goes beyond mere quietism. I mean, quietism as such is noble enough, but it's a relatively low plane. Also, at the end of "The Abyss," this, I don't know, this isn't Zen essentially, but is Buddhistic. I mean, there's deliberate allusion to the Buddha here: "I am most immoderately married: / "Lord God has taken my heaviness away; / I have merged, like the bird, with the bright air, / And my thought flies to the place by the bo-tree. / Being, not doing, is my first joy."