Some Questions from the Profession

In December 1998 the Poetry Division of the Modern Language Association initiated a series of public conversations between a poet and a group of academic scholar-critics. I was invited as the first poet in this series. The committee consisted of Charles Altieri, professor of English at Berkeley; Susan Stewart, professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania; Sandra Berman, professor of comparative literature at Princeton; Peter Quartermain, professor of English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver; and Charles Bernstein, professor of English, the State University of New York at Buffalo. (Bernstein did not participate in the interview.)

I asked the committee members to provide me in advance with some of the questions they would be asking. In preparing for the event, I made notes in response. In fact, not all questions were asked, and the floor was opened to the audience. But I found the questions thoroughly interesting, and have here amplified my responses.

Charles Altieri: What is your current thinking on the role of gender differences in the production and appreciation of poetry? How important for you is gender difference in the framing of audience and in the staging of selves within poetry? And what if anything makes poetry written with intense gender positioning available to those not envisioned as its primary audience? How does awareness of those secondary audiences affect you as a poet?

AR: I wonder how often that question is asked of male poets. I began seriously writing in a period (the 1950s to late 1960s) in American poetry that assumed extreme gender positioning—”the poet is a man speaking to men,” as Wordsworth had put it even as he was trying to democratize English poetry. And I went through a difficult and isolated process of configuring myself as a poet who was also in a woman’s body—writing Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law and many short lyrics in that book, with no encouragement to speak of from the Zeitgeist. It seems obvious to say it now, but poetic materials, images, specific to a female life were implicitly, if not explicitly, devalued and patronized. And the evaluator, the patron, was male.

By the mid-1970s, as a direct offshoot of the women’s liberation movement, there were journals and readings and courses emerging all over the country that focused on women’s writing—present and past. It seems to me no wonder that Judy Grahn, Audre Lorde, Toi Derricotte, Diane Di Prima, and other poets emerging in this decade were first published by women-owned presses and in radical women’s poetry magazines and anthologies. There was a strong sense of having broken not just a male-patrolled barrier, but a racist and heterosexist barrier as well. I can say that with The Dream of a Common Language I felt released to write from my whole erotic self, my whole engaged self, though in The Will to Change I had been writing more and more explicitly as a woman.

When some men said they felt excluded from this poetry, I was shocked. We hadn’t realized what a huge paradigm shift we were demanding. It wasn’t only about women’s poetry, it was about the whole construction of male/female relationships, and this could be terrifying to men and to many women.

I had spent years reading black writers and feeling sometimes defensive or unnerved, but never precisely excluded. I understood that blackness and whiteness were intricately involved; that I needed black writing. I wanted to be read by any conceivable reader, but I could hardly return to the kind of poems I had written before 1968. I was profoundly involved with the debates and contradictions of the women’s movement, and through it my work was finding a kind of resonance it hadn’t had before.

Later, more and more, I heard from men who felt they needed what women were writing, whose first reaction was not defensive and resistant. Many were gay and/or political, many were themselves in revolt against the traditional construction of gender.

But finally the question is: What makes poetry with any intense positioning—gender, race, national rootedness, geography—available to those who are not located there?

I think the art of translation has something to teach us about this.

CA: In your essay on why you refused the National Medal for the Arts, you said that you wanted artists “to work out our connectedness, as artists, with other people who are beleaguered, suffering, disenfranchised, precariously employed workers.” How would you respond to those who say that poets, by their education and access to the powers of literacy as well as, at the top, to academic prestige, really cannot share materially in the conditions of the truly disenfranchised, and that claiming such affinities dishonors both poets and those with whom they try to sympathize?

AR: I’m not sure who the “those” are who say this, but I suspect they feel comfortable in the world as it is, and don’t wish to know what makes their lives so comfortable. That desire not to know has persistently impaired intellectual life.

Beyond that I would say, first, that the question artificially and disingenuously tries to conflate art with economic power and academic prestige and so denies the existence of poets and artists from disenfranchised groups. Most artists in this country are “precariously employed.”

Second, there are two kinds of forces that bridge huge spaces of difference. One is solidarity, the recognition that we need to join with others unlike ourselves to undo conditions and policies we find mutually intolerable, perhaps for different reasons. This is something more powerful and equalizing than sympathy. The other force is the involuntary emotional connection felt with other human beings, in some unforeseen moment, that can move us out from old automatic affiliations and loyalties into a new and difficult comradeship.

CA: When I hear you read, I think there are two separate registers of rhythm—one in the syntax as it unfolds and another, more abstract, dimly heard music of large patterns. Are you at all conscious of seeking such effects, and, if you are, can you tell us some of what you do to achieve them, or at least let them come through and not muffle them?

AR: I’m grateful for this question because it is about music. I am very much aware both of the musical or vocal phrase and of the larger pattern, especially in longer poems. I’ve been profoundly influenced by music—especially European classical and jazz. I’ve never analyzed musical patterns, but how could you be listening for years to those great frameworks and not absorb lessons from them? that the micro must work on its own terms within the macro, etc.? Both Bach’s passionate contrapuntal sound and the complex sounds of jazz have been my great longtime mentors as to music.

Sandra Berman: At the end of your poem on René Char in Midnight Salvage, a poem I like very much, you speak of “keeping vigil” for this poet. Can you tell me what that means in terms of your own writing, especially your most recent work?

AR: In that poem “keeping vigil” for Rene Char means writing the poem. The poem is the vigil. Sometimes one wants to hold up a lighted wick before a certain name. In the case of Char it has to do with the fusion of poetry and active resistance to facism, in his life, with no loss to the poetry. Leaves ofHypnos is also a record of an unusual masculinity caught up in war but not deluded by it.

SB: Your recent book, but also your early poems, clearly engage poetic voices beyond the Anglo-American tradition. Could you tell us which foreign poets have been most important to you over the years? What have they offered to your own poetic itinerary?

AR: I had studied French in school, with very good teachers, and there were French books in my father’s library. I memorized poems by Alfred de Musset and Victor Hugo; went on my own to Baudelaire, Valery, Apollinaire, much later Rene Char; Aime Cesaire still later. I read a lot in the original, however badly, always sounding out aloud. Also I read Racine, those great crashing alexandrines. After World War II, there was among my generation a great reaching-out to European poetries—Rilke, Brecht, Montale, Ungaretti, Ekelof, Nelly Sachs, much later Paul Celan. It was a time when poets in the United States felt a strong interest in and desire for other poetries. The Russians: Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Mandelstam, and of course Yevtushenko’s and Voznezhensky’s onstage performances. I also read Spanish and Latin American poetry—Lorca, Neruda, not always in the best translations—much later, Rosario Castellanos, more recently, Juan Gelman, Vallejo in Clayton Eshleman’s great versions.

Living in Holland in the early 1960s, I studied the language, bought an anthology of contemporary Dutch poetry, and, with a dictionary, set about translating poems by Hendrik de Vries, Gerrit Achterberg, Jan Emmens, Leo Vroman. It was my best way to get into the Dutch poetic mind. Then I met the poet and playwright Judith Herzberg and, through her, some of the poets I had been translating. One poet, Chr. J. van Geel, particularly fascinated me and I later used phrases from a poem of his in a poem of my own: “Sleepwalking Next to Death.” He was by far the most experimental of the poets I read, and was also a painter.

In New York, I would get involved with a translation project—in the 1960s they were many—such as A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg were the editors and asked me to create versions of poems by Kadya Molodowsky, Rachel Korn, and Celia Dropkin. I could use the Dutch I knew in fathoming transliterated versions of Yiddish. Molodowsky’s great poem “White Night” made a deep impression on me.

In 1968 I was invited by the Asia Society to be one of a group of American poets participating in a project to translate the seventeenth-century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib. We were supplied with recordings of the original poems in the ghazal form, historical, cultural, and lexical notes, and literal translations, by the editor, Aijaz Ahmad. For me, this project led to new poetic strategies, including a long poem, distinctly American, in modified ghazal form.

Without translations from other languages I would have been severely deprived—unaware of the poetry of Yannis Ritsos, Nazim Hikmet, Mahmoud Darwish, to name a few—not to speak of Sappho and Dante.

I can’t emphasize enough how much my poetry has been stretched, enlarged, strengthened, fortified, by the non-Anglo-American poetries I have read, tangled with, tried to hear and speak in their original syllables, over the years.

Susan Stewart: In your most recent book, Midnight Salvage, you end by speaking of the “ever changing” nature of human language. Do you see the practice of lyric as a chance to intervene in language’s changes—in other words, is changing the language a means to changing consciousness?

AR: If by “the practice of lyric” you mean the whole process of writing poetry, I feel the relation of consciousness and language is dialectical. In making poetry, or any kind of art, we’re translating into a medium—in this case language—the contents of our consciousness, wherever they may come from, let alone the huge underground beneath consciousness. And then poetry becomes something that can enter the consciousness of others—primarily and centrally through language, but language “charged with meaning to the uttermost”—through images, aural reverberations, the texture of verbal relationships within a poem, the actual image a poem makes on the page, the different voices within the poem, the playing-off of all this on the reader’s underground life. A poem, then, could be one influence on consciousness—I would hope, in the direction of enlarging the imagination and not shrinking it. I don’t believe that there is only one way to do this. Many kinds of poetry act on our consciousness in many different ways, and at different times in our lives.

Peter Quartermain: Do you really want “a common language”?

AR: The phrase “the dream of a common language” is the title of a book I wrote in the early 1970s, and it comes from a poem in that book, “Origins and History of Consciousness,” in which I say, “No one lives in this room / without confronting the whiteness of the wall / behind the poems, planks of books / photographs of dead heroines. /Without contemplating last and late / the true nature of poetry. The drive / to connect. The dream of a common language.”

Now that phrase, like the title of that book, has sometimes been read, or heard, as, variously, a call for a literal world language, like Esperanto!, or for a “women’s language,” or something like what French feminist theorists called “écriture feminine.” But what I had in mind was poetry itself as connective urge and power. Do I want that? Yes. Do I want it in a literal sense, that each word or line I write has the same meaning for everyone as it does for me? No. Do I think poems are made of words used according to dictionary definitions? Obviously not. But poetry is an art of translation, a connective strand between unlike individuals, times, and cultures.

PQ: In the last twenty-five years, quite a few women (e.g., Beverly Dahlen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Kathleen Fraser, Judy Grahn, Susan Howe, Maureen Owen, Joan Retallack) have explored gender identity through so-called “experimental” writing. How do you see your own work in relation to theirs?

AR: In the early 1980s, Kathleen Fraser and Rachel Blau DuPlessis kindly had their journal (HOW)ever sent to me, and I read it with interest. My own concerns at that time were different. I was involved in a part of the United States women’s movement that was grappling with differences among women—race and class being at the fore—more than with art and gender identity. Grahn’s A Woman Is Talking to Death affected me profoundly, and I later wrote a foreword to her collected poems, The Work of a Common Woman.

It wasn’t that I was indifferent to “innovative” writing—I was searching for new strategies from the early 1960s on, as in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law; I think it’s obvious in poems like “Shooting Script,” “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children,” “Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib,” and “Leaflets.” But most of the work in (HOW)ever seemed a bit aside from the questions that were haunting me then.

One of the things that has fascinated me is, How do you make poetry out of political experiences—not about, but out of, the questions and passions that drive a collective movement? a political life? That’s the kind of thing I was trying to do in “Yom Kippur 1984,” or, later, in parts of “Inscriptions,” and more recently in “A Long Conversation.” I want to add that the work of many of the women poets you mention has provoked me, in the best sense, to look at my own work critically.

PQ: Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, Olson—male writers who, perhaps, in the 1960s tried to take American poetry on courses quite different from your own: you looked in another direction. What do you think of them now?

AR: In the early 1960s Denise Levertov introduced me to the work of Creeley, Duncan, and Olson. Also, of course, Williams, though I’d read him a bit before. But my own life, also, was pushing me into kinds of poetry I hadn’t written before. Over the years, I was to draw in my own way on their (very different) poetics, but more on the poetry itself. The title and epigraph of The Will to Change are from Olson’s “The Kingfishers.” Duncan’s “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” showed me that you can bring together in one poem the contemporary with the visionary. It probably affected my writing of the poem “Leaflets” just that that poem was there. Ginsberg I wasn’t drawn to, though “Howl” and “Kaddish” at their moment did seem strikingly and outrageously new. But I’ve gone back more and more to Creeley, Duncan, and Olson in recent years. More recently to George Oppen, Robin Blaser.

Influence is a multifarious thing. You might be resisting a certain poetry intellectually and emotionally while absorbing it at some more intuitive level, taking what you can use. I’m fairly omnivorous. Poetries of many kinds and periods have taught me things I needed—so have films, histories, political philosophies, song lyrics, visual art, pamphlets, etc.

A poet’s problems—the materials she has to grapple with—are infinitely expanding and require a multiplicity of approaches. A lot of poets in the United States today box themselves in too easily—what my old friend Hugh Seidman once called “a poetry of false problems.” I think what he meant was that conventional problems are given conventional solutions, already arrived at. Even an “experimental” solution can be conventional if it merely repeats an old experiment, doesn’t recognize it has to struggle with a different problem—or with an old problem in a different way. A male poet who is frozen into conventional male entitlements can only be conventional however “experimental” his use of language. A white poet who is frozen into metaphors of race, likewise. People think it’s just about “politics,” but it’s equally a question of art.

In poetry you need everything you can get your hands on, so you look back and forward and sideways. You are, in a word, avid.

1998