Not originally designed as an interview, this discussion took place over the course of two days in 1993. On May 31 we spoke in Ammons’s office in Goldwin Smith Hall at Cornell University, and the next day we spoke in his home. Many of the questions and issues that arise here had been at stake in our conversations since the fall of 1984, when I entered the M.F.A. program at Cornell.
May 31, 1993
In what sense is your poetry a matter of communication, of addressing a listener?
Well, I think one of the more perceptive statements ever made about my poems was made by Helen Vendler when she said that “never has there been a poetry so sublimely above the possible appetite of its potential readers.” I think she means by that that the poems are addressed to nobody. So I was thinking, isn’t that an interesting form of address when you don’t address anyone. And I would think that this is an important part of what poetry makes possible. There it seems that all conventional means of addressing someone have been put aside and yet the pressure to communicate a presence is never greater or more successfully done.
I have coffee sometimes in the morning for years with people. And then it may be five or ten years afterwards they will show me something they’ve written and I will suddenly feel that I know them better in that minute than I have known them through all the conversations that had taken place before. And this is not to dispute the value of conversation, but to say that there’s something about the poem, the rest of the poem, that communicates a person’s gait—I wonder if I’m deluded about this—and that allows you to get somehow deeper into the nature of that person, the essential nature of that person, than you can through conversation, which tends to be more discursive.
As you say in “A Note on Prosody,” as a poet you are—at least initially—both the speaker of the poem and the listener. And that accounts for your experience, as a reader, of getting something more full from listening to someone speaking within the poem than from conversation. Of course, I would argue that that’s a fiction. It’s a useful fiction. It’s a really useful fiction for poetry because there’re so many situations in which you have things to say to people but you can’t actually say those things to those people. Right?
Yes. But when you use the word address, I think you’re admitting about yourself that you’re interested in personal relationship. And most people are. But I wrote in such a vacuum for most of my life. Address didn’t seem to be important. As Helen Vendler says it, I didn’t seem to be wanting to say anything to anybody.
But do you really think that’s the case, that you don’t want to say anything to anybody? I can understand that the poems may appear as if they don’t care whether anybody listens to them. Well, that’s one thing. But I don’t think that’s the same as: “Archie Ammons doesn’t want to say anything to anybody.”
Well, let me put it another way. With me, when I’m writing a poem it seems like there’s a phrase that’s sort of in my mind that I begin with. But it just seems to me that I’m there to follow it, and it just turns around and it comes out at the end, often totally surprising to me where it comes out, you know? But it seems like my attention has been focused on something like dynamics or something, or how this poem is going to work, how this poem is going to find its way, how it’s going to find its way rather than whether or not it’s speaking to anybody in particular.
But it seems to me that actually an enormous amount of speaking goes on in this very indirect way.
I’m wondering about your experience teaching creative writing. Could we talk about that?
I had the M. F. A. workshop at Cornell this spring, and there are some very good writers there. But the drive to be unintelligible, to be very difficult, is so strong that we were almost compelled to begin by trying to find out the disposition of the poem and how the parts did or did not work together and whether or not it meant to be coherent or incoherent, whether it meant to make statements or just jabber, and whether or not it’s centered around any cluster of images or a relationship between one image and another. You know, it really was difficult to read these poems.
But that sounds like a worthwhile process.
Well, yes. But when students, having taken some workshops, begin to see that that’s the way poems are approached, then they begin to write puzzles that will cause more discussion and more wrenching of the spirit to see what’s there. Frequently by the time you clear it up all the energy is gone.
Right.
And there’s nothing there. There’s no residual feeling. It’s been used up. The simplest poem in the world is also a puzzle. Jonathan Culler, trying to refute M. H. Abrams, uses that couplet by Frost: “we go round, go round and round,” and “we don’t know anything, but the secret sits in the center.” Culler just takes those two lines, which are perfectly clear, as for their direct content, but then he begins to find complication after complication, so that ultimately the poem, like every other, turns into a puzzle. Often creative writing students set out to create puzzles.
Would that apply to you?
No, no, no.
Not at all?
No.
And yet that would seem to me to resonate with how you understand what Helen Vendler said about your first book, in that it was “above” the listener?
Well, I suppose I’m just too old-fashioned to talk here, but I always thought that the poet should be deeply enough involved in the complexity and many-sidedness and depth of things, that he would be naturally struggling for some sort of clarification, and that then he would put his whole effort into creating a model that would show how some clarification runs through this multiple structure of things. That a person could know something rather clearly, and deliberately complicate it, is absolutely foreign to me. And yet I think twentieth-century poetry has aimed at distortion rather than clarification. What I’m aiming toward is clarification but at the same time inexhaustibility. The deconstructionists talk about the multiplicity of a work, its soliciting. But that sounds as if they’re making negative what I always consider as positive. What’s positive about a poem is that it can be clear in the way it structurally or procedurally sets itself up, and yet absolutely inexhaustible in its suggestiveness. You can approach it from so many different sides. Is that not true? And so I always thought that you can be clear about a poem, clear enough to see how it disposes itself, and yet it can invite you to consider more and other aspects of things, so that you learn from it. But the very idea of deliberately taking something that was clear and making it obscure seems to me perverse. And I’m a very perverse person myself, so I’m not blaming perversity. It’s just, that to me sounds perverse.
It seems to me you’re talking as if you care about saying something to people. When we began this conversation, I understood you to say that you yourself really didn’t have a reader in mind. But you do have a thing that you want to say, that you want to share. And you want people to get that.
I do, but at the same time to feel that they haven’t got it all, that it’s inexhaustible, that this is just a sort of a structural clarification of very complicated matters. But I think that my students think of clarity as being simplification. And I also think they’re terrified of feeling of any kind, because they think it will be mistaken for sentimentality.
If you heard somebody walking down the hall and you couldn’t see them, and you recognized that you knew that person from the way he walked, you would know all kinds of things about the statements that person would make when you did see him, and you would have memories. Well, if you knew the work of a poet, it would be the same way. You hear this clunking thing going on. You say, “Oh, I know who that is.” And that’s not a mystical thing. Those things are just as real as the words are.
June 1 1993
I want us to step outside our personal uses of the poem, and into the poem itself somehow.
Well, I want that too—I mean I want the poem to be listened to in and of itself, as much as possible. But I also think that we have to work on acknowledging the kinds of investments we’re bringing to our reading. I don’t think we can just disregard that we have things at stake in reading.
Yes, well, there is a difference between us here. It’s not a big difference. I think mainly we agree. It’s just the way everybody has a different disposition toward things. But we were talking yesterday about not knowing what use you’re going to make of yourself, or what the world’s going to be, and you expose yourself to the arising or emerging of the poem on its own terms if possible. And, for example, when I think of Adrienne Rich, I think of a very fine poet, but of a person who has certain programs to promote, certain areas of interest that she wants to promote. And that feels propagandistic to me. It feels to me as if she imposes those burdens on the poems she’s writing before the poem has a chance to make its own emergence. The most precious thing to me about a new poem is that it be unconditional, that it not be prelimited, or predirected, by some interests of my own, but that I try to disabuse myself of all interests, with the hope that there will be some originality of perspective, or content, that will arise without my being able to anticipate it. I mean, that would be what creativity is—creating something you didn’t know before. So I want to disable my own interests in the poem, except that, of course, I’m there. I am the one who’s writing the thing, but the fiction is that I am trying to have it emerge as itself first, and then I will make whatever use I please out of it—but that I mustn’t put any limitation or imposition on it, as a program, as propaganda, as an issue first.
But you realize that that’s a position that you’re allowed to inhabit because of who you are.
No, I don’t realize that. How do you mean that?
For instance, when I write something, when I write a poem, in whatever I write, nobody imagines that it is disinterested, because I have an identity that is marked as interested because I am a woman.
Well, I’m a man.
You’re a man, but that’s an identity that exists as if it is unmarked in this culture. You’re a white, straight, man. You’re educated. You teach in an Ivy League university.
I’m not as untroubled as you think.
I know you’re not untroubled. J know you well enough to know that you’re quite troubled.
But I know that, or I’m arguing that, the idea of a position that is not invested is really a privilege. It’s a very useful privilege. It’s a privilege everybody should get to have. But the thing is, if you have moved around in the world and nobody has ever taken anything you did as disinterested, because of who they perceive you to be, then you just can’t take that position. I can’t take that position. And Adrienne Rich can’t take that position, and a whole lot of poets can’t take that position.
Well, I have interests, as you have interests. The way that I address them, though, is not poetically. It seems to me that if I wrote a letter to the editor of the Ithaca Journal, it would be read by twenty thousand people. I could write it overnight. But if I write a poem, it will be read by three people in Wisconsin, or somewhere. That is not an effective way, in my case, to present my personal interests.
But it’s not a matter of straightforwardly presenting a matter of personal interest, but to admit that you have an interest. To admit that you have an investment, even if that investment is to appear as if your investments aren’t in the fore.
Well supposing, instead of thinking of the poems you write as being an identity you have, or wish to expand, supposing you just thought about poetry and wrote and became a major poet. I mean a great, major voice. I know that such things are an embarrassment in our time, but supposing you did, then you could promote your issues much more effectively. You could get on the air and say “It’s true I’m a great poet, but let’s forget about that. What I’m really interested in is helpless people, or poor people around the country, or whatever.”
You’re reducing the idea of an interest very much here.
Yes, I do think of it as a limited thing.
And I don’t think of it as a limited thing.
That’s a very important point.
I don’t think of the fact that people have investments in things as a disability. Now I know that this is the way we’re trained to think. If somebody is invested in something that they’re talking about, we give them less authority. This is something that we’re trained to think. And the idea of a disinterested poem works very nicely in line with that.
Well, I told you I was old-fashioned.
Well, this is how my students think, too, and it is the way I was taught to think. But in my experience, what that means is that people who don’t have the privilege in whatever situation they’re in to be perceived as uninvested can’t take that stance. So there’s no point to it for me.
Well, you know the traditional response to this is, “If you’re interested in these things, why don’t you go into politics, or political science, or psychology?”
Right, but it’s politics at the level of how things work and how we think about things, and that seems very appropriate in the poem. I mean there is a politics to what you were saying yesterday about clarity. You say, “I always thought that the poet should be deeply enough involved in the complexity and many-sidedness and depth of things that he would be naturally struggling for some sort of clarification—”
Yes.
“—and that then he would put his whole effort into creating a model that would show how some clarification runs through this multiple structure of things.”
That sounds pretty good.
Now, it sounds to me like that’s a politics.
What kind of politics does that sound like?
That’s a way to approach the world, a way to approach things, a way to think about things. “I think the poet has a responsibility to advocate a certain kind of clarity.” That seems to me like an investment, a completely legitimate kind of investment.
But it’s not spelled out in the terms of an issue or program.
No. But see, I don’t think that investment comes just from your intentions. As I was saying before, a lot goes on in the world and in relation to our poems that has to do with who we’re perceived to be, and the fact that I am a woman and a poet means that this poet-ness is always marked by that. It doesn’t matter whether I announce it or not. If I am read that way, I am read to be invested that way. And you’re read to be invested in the things that your identity is bound up with, Southerness, and so forth, and it doesn’t matter whether you put that there, or not.
It’s imposed.
It’s imposed, but as we were saying yesterday, it’s pretty hard to get outside all of that stuff. I mean it’s important to try, to try to imagine things differently, and that goes back to people starting to write out of an urge to be understood in a context in which no understanding is possible—like children, for instance, writing poems to adults who would never just listen to them say what they have to say. And I think that’s the thing with the poem, we can create a space in which as a speaker we have authority.
Okay, you have perceived in your world that a change is taking place in the way women poets are viewed as poets and as women, and you wish to enter into that stream of energy, and cause some things to happen. You would like to see women poets in a state of equality with male poets. That would be a given. But you would also like to see more women poets more strongly and vigorously entering into the world of poetry. Is that correct? Is that one of the things that you feel that you’d like to see happen? Is it that you think women poets are not taken on an equal basis now, and that hurts? What hurts?
The issue for me is not women in particular, although as a woman poet I am taken up into that “stream of energy” as you call it. What I’m really interested in is having everybody who is writing and talking admit that they’re invested in something.
Why is that so important?
Because it seems to me that everybody is interested in something. Everybody is promoting something.
I would have taken that for granted, I think.
But some positions are treated as if they’re not positions.
Yes. Well, there are positions, on the one hand, and the way they’re described, on the other. And we all have positions, but you could describe the position as propaganda. I think that you would like me to say that I’m invested in something, and I’m sure I am, but to tell you the God’s truth, I don’t know what it is. And however I’m perceived by other people, I don’t agree with them—except for those who think my poetry is worthless, because I think it’s worthless, too.
I mean, you’re saying that I’m some kind of white male straight whatever creature that has no doubts. I know you don’t mean to say that.
No, I don’t think that anybody has “no doubts.”
I’m as afflicted with all kinds of doubts and all kinds of sharings of mortality with others and the need for love and the lack of it and all these things, just like everybody else. And I never think of myself as being superior to anybody. Quite the contrary. Even with you, I feel that what you’re trying to tell me and will tell me, is something that I very much lack and very much need to know, and wish to find out. But I don’t know what my investment is. I’ll bet you could see it better than I could.
Yes, I think that that’s probably almost always true.
Under the little shell that we go by day to day, for everybody, there is such turmoil and confusion. We really need to spend a little more time, I think, not sympathizing, not empathizing either, just tolerating. That’s a terrible word. Realizing that people have to come up with defining shapes of themselves day to day in order to deal with the world. But underneath that fiction, useful as it is, is a multipurposed, laboring, frightened, happy, sad cluster of circumstances, and this is true for all of us and we all need all the help we can get.
I completely agree. I mean we all need all the help we can get, but I guess what I’m trying to get at is nothing about you or me in particular, but about the fact that when something’s said, it matters who seems to be saying it.
Give me an example.
Say for instance, if there was a line in a poem—let’s see—”I always thought that the poet should be deeply enough involved in the complexity.” Say that were the opening of a poem. Now, if you perceive—now maybe not you—but I am saying that in my experience of people reading, who they perceive that speaker to be will determine how they take that first assertion. And some people have the authority in given circumstances—I mean authority doesn’t stay with you wherever you go and for all time—
I’m sure you have to earn it or it wouldn’t be granted to you at all.
Yes, you have to earn it, but there are also identities—
Offices, offices. You step into the office and your voice resonates with the size of that office, like Bill Clinton or George Bush.
Right. The office of a poet is very important for everybody—everybody can use that office somehow because it does have something.
But it’s by being out of that office that you can size it up, relate yourself to it, sometimes just as much as by identifying with it.
But if you inhabit certain identities in certain places, it’s easier, or harder. Right?
Okay.
That’s all I’m saying. There are contexts in which my voice would have more authority than yours—
Absolutely.
—and there are contexts in which your voice would have more authority than mine.
And there’s the whole equivocal issue of who is in a happier position, the one who finds it easy to say these things, or the one who finds it hard to say them. The one who has less authority and for whom it’s more difficult to speak will very likely engage a denser, more realistic set of terms than will the one who finds it easy to say something.
Well, you don’t find it easy to say things?
I don’t think so. I always feel uncertain about what I’m saying, so it’s never easy. I’m always feeling, whatever I’m saying, that I don’t really believe it, and that maybe in the next sentence I’ll get it right, but I never do. And I think it’s because I’m always trying to speak the unspeakable, but that’s the only thing that’s interesting. Why speak the speakable? That’s easy. That’s what I mean. It’s easy to speak the speakable. But how do you bring your attention to the unspeakable and then say that? That’s difficult. And you don’t know what’s going to emerge. I guess that’s the position I’m from, rather than these given entities of things that you just deal with and move around in different sets. Like Coleridge—you go to a territory where it has not yet been spoken. And you don’t know how to speak that either. And then you begin to try to say what it is and where you are.