Because the poets around were John Berryman, and my father, and Richard Hugo, and different people who were, frankly, already full-blown alcoholics. Were you afraid of poetry because of all the ruined lives you witnessed?
And did you ever worry that your gift might not be great enough to make it all worthwhile? Well, poetry had been in my mind for a long time.
When I was nine, I started reading Homer. I would get up at four o'clock in the morning, before I had to go to school, in third or fourth grade, and, for several hours, I would read The Iliad or The Odyssey. Between the ages of eight and fourteen, I read more than I've ever read since. And then, when I was around fifteen, I was up at Clear Lake, in northern California, and I walked out into some big walnut orchard and sat down, and that poem I mentioned came to me, very spontaneously.
From that moment on, through some pretty hair-raising vicissitudes—in my sixteenth year, I went into a year-long clinical depression, my first of many—I knew that there was a possibility of tapping into this real force. Very early on it seemed to me a kind of quest. You lived your regular life, and then, at the same time, you had this hidden other life. And, if I behaved and deserved to be allowed in, it would be there. That can lead to problems, too. It's difficult sometimes to distinguish that imaginary place from the real world.
The other danger that I've noticed over the years is the tendency I've had to turn poetry into a kind of religion. This is a terrible mistake. It took me until I was forty-five years old to realize it, and I think I had to get very sick first. Art is not a religion. That other human beings are more important than poems would seem obvious to other people. But for me, who depended so terribly on this other activity, this realization came as a surprise. I think one of the reasons that poetry promotes that kind of intensity and vulnerability is that words are so transparent.
You're using the language that we use every day, and when you're a poet and these are your materials it's a particular onus. It is, absolutely. I've always envied people who compose music or paint, because they don't have to be bothered with the sort of crude mess that language normally is, in everyday life and in the way we use it. That makes me think of Wallace Stevens's portrait of the poet as "The Man on the Dump," with the wonderful lines "One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.
Stevens always had, at the center of all that magical pyrotechnical language, some very grave and serious ideas and perceptions. Interesting language is fine, we need to have that, too, but it's ultimately sterile if it doesn't have this other power in it. I can almost tell, when I read something, whether a poet has some other higher goal, or whether the person cares more about the words than about what they mean. The poems that endure and that are enduringly interesting, I think, are the ones that come out of some other, higher experience.
There are a few moments in your book that do not describe despair outlived or transcended—moments in which you make it clear that dissolution involved some very seductive and vividly beautiful moments. In "Homage" there is a vision of a girl with no shirt on lighting a cigarette and brushing her hair in the mirror. That poem for me is principally about things I will miss, including language, when I die. But, yes, I had a really good time, and there's a nostalgia for those periods of euphoria.
This is one of the most sinister things about addiction. Somebody said that alcoholics and drug addicts are spiritual people. They're searchers. All of the alcoholics I know are incredibly sensitive, intelligent people, no matter what walk of life they come from, even if they're completely illiterate. They're all on a quest. They're just looking in the wrong way. As the Chinese say, what is not sought in the right way is not found.
And if they're lucky that dawns on them, and they start to recover their true personality, which is what happens. You don't get a new one, you get your original one back. I love the humor in your work, the way, for instance, really tough turns are alluded to so nimbly in "Commercial for Absence":. Try it, just a touch of being noplace.
Death is nature's way of telling you to be quiet. Your father also took risks with wit. I'm thinking of the kind of nervy admonition in the lines:. What does this mean? In the end I just went for a walk. And kindly, pitying to some degree as sunshine swiftly changes, comes and goes and comes again. Why she may even try scribbling them down, if she can somehow overcome.
He has a new collection coming out in Fall from Knopf called Wheeling Motel ; the poems in Free Verse come from a brand new, so-far nameless work-in-progress. Why am I afraid to go grocery shopping? I suppose there is a pill for that, but why? Surrounded by so vast a cloud of witnesses why do I feel this alone in the first place?
Is heaven a place and if so, will our poor hairy speechless forebears- all millions of years of them- be there to greet us if and when we arrive? The meek shall inherit Auschwitz, too, if they're not careful. Where do such obscenities of thought originate?
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