PHILIP LEVINE

A Conversation with Philip Levine

Philip Levine: Well, Mary [Flinn] asked me if I would say a few words about Larry Levis, who was here for four years, and who I knew; well, from the age of eighteen till his death. I met him . . . yeah, when he was eighteen. He was an entering freshman at California State University of Fresno. He had a wonderful slang name for it, like "Shit Tech" or something. It wasn't a bad school. It wasn't a good school, either; I don't think it was probably as good as this school. But like a lot of mediocre or bad schools, you could get a good education there because you found out who was good and you took them. But that wasn't the case with Larry and me. Larry wanted to be a poet, and he seemed to have known that.

He's got an essay in which he described how he made this determination. I've never believed it: that he sat up one night and wrote a poem and he said if there's one line here and it's any good then I will be a poet, and I will be as good a poet as I can possibly be. I don't think it happened that way. But I . . . it's a wonderful story. I think it probably happened the way it happened with most of us, which is, I'm going to try and write poetry, and then he tried to write it, and he thought about other things, and he kept writing it and he kept writing it, and the more he wrote it, the more hypnotized he became, the more needy he became, to go on writing it. It isn't like a Bergman movie; you don't go to the window one morning and the light breaks and you say, I shall be a poet! I will be . . . . You just hang in there and do the best you can and pretty soon you discover that you're doing pretty well.

I remember Larry came into my office, and I didn't realize he was an entering freshman. And he asked me, "What goes on in a poetry writing class?" So I described the class to him. Then he said, he asked permission to smoke. People still smoked a lot then, but I had just quit. No, I take it back; I was still smoking. That's right, I would quit later that year. So I said, "Sure, go ahead," so he lit his cigarette. And he had a way of sort of thinking while walking, and so he stood up, and he said, "Do you mind if I pace?" And I said "No." He was an unusual guy. He was very skinny then and quite beautiful; I mean, he had a beautiful face, beautiful eyes. He wore Levi's. You know, he grew up on a ranch and he was clearly a rural guy, and he put his hands in the back of his pockets . . . he'd already asked me about Hart Crane, Rimbaud, and T. S. Eliot. But most of my students don't ask me about Hart Crane or Rim. . . you know, young people who are going to ask what goes on in a writing class. And he sort of paced back and forth and he says, "I think this is exactly the course I would like to take." I said, "Well fine, take it." He said, "Oh, there's a problem." I said, "What's the problem?" He said, "It's not open to me, I'm an entering freshman." So he waited. So he was . . . that was a quality to him that was quite seductive. By this time I loved him. So I said, "Well, I can deal with that, I can get you in, okay." So he took the course.

What were his early poems like? They were terrible, like everybody's early poems. They were quite romantic, the language was charged, the influence of Crane was obvious. But he began to . . . he was like a vacuum cleaner sucking up what was going on, and pretty soon he discovered James Wright. And Wright had an enormous influence on him at that time, and then Bly, and that . . . the kind of poetry that today you might see in FIELD Magazine, for example, he began to write. And the interesting thing was that he began to write it so successfully, so quickly. Once the models that he could appropriate were before him, he appropriated them with great skill. He once wrote a poem very much like a poem of mine—and not a very good poem by me, either. And then he showed it to me, and he said, "Does this remind you of a particular poem?" I said, "Yeah, yeah, a mediocre poem by me in my first book." And he said, "Yeah, I thought so," and I never saw that poem again. Nor did I ever see him really write a poem like my poetry again. I mean, there were certain things in my poetry that I think that he took, but it was never the line, and it was never the phrasing, the way he took the phrasing of James Wright . . . and at times, perhaps even the vision of James Wright. I didn't see what he was up to for a long time, to be frank. I mean, I really didn't. I didn't understand a lot of his poetry. I loved it, I thought it was enormously gifted. I'm talking about when he was . . . his early twenties and late teens.

At the end of that year I went off to Spain for a year and we had a correspondence. He wrote me, oh, probably six or eight times, and sent me poems. Unfortunately, I didn't save the letters; I didn't . . . I didn't save any letters I got that year, and I regret that. And then two years later I went back to Spain, spent another year, we corresponded, and I didn't save any of those letters. That was a mistake. But I didn't know Larry was going to become Larry! Although, in . . . by 1968, I knew he was going to be special. That's when he graduated and he went off to Syracuse, and he wrote me from Syracuse the second year I was in Spain. And we had a correspondence that continued to the end of his life. And I think in the early years of the correspondence, I was a great help to him, and in the later years, he was more of a help to me than I was to him. And I think he had more influence on me than I had on him, later in our correspondence.

What I drew from him was inspiration. I mean, I found his poetry enormously inspiring and ambitious, the way that certain poems by William Carlos Williams, for example, rather the later poems, could kind of fire me up. I would reread them and it's Jesus, wow! A poem like "The Desert Music" is . . . oh man, there's so much you can do with such simple language, it's just extraordinary. I'm sure that none of the events that are described in "The Desert Music" really took place. I'm sure Williams made them all up, as Larry made up most of the things in his poems. That's what the hell the imagination's for.

Though enough did happen to him, you know, he traveled a lot. One of the most moving times I ever had with Larry was in Rome. He knew where I was staying and he came to see me. I was in a hotel in Rome and I don't remember how he knew where I was, that's lost to me—this is probably about twenty years ago. And I said, "Where are you staying?" And he said, "Well, come, I'll show you," and he took me to this incredible crap-hole that was right across from the railroad station, and the noise was incredible. And I said, "Larry, why don't you come to my . . . What are you paying?" And he was paying twice what I was paying, so he came to my hotel. And then he said . . . I took him to Keats's house, what's called the Keats House. It's the house that Keats lived in and died in when he went to Rome to be . . . to struggle against his tuberculosis and was mishandled by medicals. And he was very moved by that, as anybody would be, there are a lot of his . . . the books that Keats had are there, and there are letters, and there are the drawings that [Joseph] Severn—that was the guy's name—who was sort of commissioned in Britain to go with Keats and to sort of look out for him. And then he said, "Have you ever gone to the grave?" And I said, "No." And he said, "Well let's go." So he and I and my wife found out how you get there on a bus, and we went to what's called a Protestant cemetery. And what was more moving than the graves themselves, which are moving—the stone bears that famous line: "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water." And Severn's grave is there, as is Shelley's. And Severn's says, "Here lies a man who was Keats' friend" or something; I mean, that's all he sort of distinguishes himself by, but he had some sort of minor position, as like a cultural attaché for Britain in Rome.

[See "Those Graves in Rome," link below.]

But there was a man who came in with two canes and was having a terrible time walking. And his wife kept saying to him, "Herbert! Why don't you just sit down?" And Herbert kept saying, "I've got to see the damn grave, for God's sake, it's Keats' grave! Where is it?!" And he was struggling, he was an older guy, and he was feeble, and you thought he was about an inch from the grave himself. But goddamnit, he had to see those graves. And he got there, and tears started streaming down his cheeks. And Larry and I and Frannie were so moved by it, you know, and felt so lucky, that we could just walk in and view these . . . these memorials.

I'm sure there are other things you're interested in.

Gregory Donovan: In your correspondence with him, what kinds of things did you all find you took up? Was it as specific as diction, line breaks, and things like that, and meter, or was it more content, or . . . ?

PL: Well, the first thing, we were friends. We were friends before we were poets. So the first thing we took up was his love life, which was an eternal mess. His jobs, his search for publishers that he wanted, I mean, a lot of it was that kind of thing. I don't remember what I was writing him. I could go see, because he saved almost all my letters. They're in the Berg Room in the New York Public Library and I have maybe twenty-five that he sent me that are there also. He would send me poems, and I would write on the poems. We rarely wrote about the larger things that involved poetry; that is, like "vision." Mostly we talked . . . it was a kind of practical criticism: This passage stinks. These lines are no good. You can do better than this. The rhythm here is screwed up. It was things like that, or, Where the hell is this going? You've gone off track; I mean, this part is interesting, this is boring. And we were very frank with each other; we never pulled punches. That's the way I teach. I'm very frank with my students, and some of them don't like it. My feeling about it is that, at NYU for example, there are thirteen people in the room and one is getting paid to be there, so twelve of them can lie, that's fine; but the other one, he's got to . . . he's got to . . . when I say tell the truth, he has to state the truth of his beliefs, his feelings, his responses. Not that he has some large truth that he can withhold or grant them.

But yeah, it was very practical criticism. I never questioned where his poems were going, and why, for example, in the last two books they got as dark as they got. They got very dark. Something crawled in there that suggested desperation, hopelessness. Sometimes, you could almost say, even a sense of worthlessness. Because that wasn't evident when I was with him—he was a very upbeat guy—so it was . . . it was a little surprising to find that in the poetry. But I never questioned it. He was a pro, he knew what he was doing, that's what he wanted to say; it wasn't mine to say be more cheerful, for example. We were living in an ugly world, and the older we got, the more aware of it.

I think also he was unhappy in Salt Lake City; I think it was not a place that he found welcoming. And I don't want to step on anybody's toes, but I think the pervasiveness of the Mormon faith in the town was something that ran against his . . . his notions of who we are as people, and the power . . . you know, it is almost a theocracy there, and he didn't like that. I don't know what he was—he grew up as a Catholic, but I . . . I never knew him to go to church, for example, to take communion or anything like that. So I guess he was a fallen Catholic. He would use phrases like mea culpa, and sometimes he would talk about, jokingly, his education in the church as a boy. But like many of us who grew up in the church, as I did too, given the opportunity to say goodbye to it, we gladly said goodbye to it, and that was my sense of him.

You know, and his love life was a mess. He was a very attractive man so women were drawn to him, and he didn't seem to have the ability to separate the ones who might do him good from the ones who might do him harm. And so it was just a crapshoot, for such a bright guy, and you had to sit there and watch it. He came to me once—this is a ridiculous story—he came to me once when he was a senior in college and he said, "I'm going out with two women and I'm very intimate with them both. You know who they are." And I said, "Yeah, sure," because I'd seen him with both of them. One of them was my . . . no, they were both my students, come to think of it, they were in different classes. "And they got together with me and said you have to make a choice, one or the other. What do I do?" I said, "You feel the need to make a choice?" He said, "No." I said, "Then don't make one. I mean, you know, it's like tennis, you hit the ball back into their court."

And then I told him about a movie called The Captain's Wives, or something like that, an Alec Guinness movie. It's a wonderful movie. It's about a guy who runs a ship between Spain and Gibraltar, and what's the Moroccan city? It's a city with a reputation for being a hot spot, you know, a lot of drugs. It's a city that was both French and Spanish too; those are the languages that are spoken there. And he's got a wife in each city. And in Gibraltar, he lives like an English . . . middle-class English gentleman. And when he gets to whatever the hell it is, his whole demeanor changes, and he goes out dancing with his other wife who speaks Spanish and who's got this dark hair and dark eyes and is beautifully stacked and everything. And they go out and party all night long, and then he takes the ship back the next day. And as they cross a certain line, he flips this photograph—he's got the photograph of each one—and then, one faces him and he changes it. Captain's Paradise, that's what it's called. And I described the movie to him and I said, "Larry, you're living in a captain's paradise!" So he did what I advised, and he didn't do anything. And one of them made a choice, and it was the wrong one.

He was a very upbeat guy in spite of how dark the late poetry was.

He was not the best-read student I ever had, as a youngster. David St. John, who became a very close friend of his, was the most amazingly well-read entering freshman I ever came across. His grandfather was a Milton scholar, and his grandfather and his grandmother had separated, so the grandfather lived with David and David's father and mother, and pushed books on David. So David . . . I mean, here's an entering freshman. And David looked younger than he was, he was a very small man, physically, and here he knew Milton and Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley and George Herbert and all this stuff. The Milton scholar was also a seventeenth century expert, et cetera. He had been the chairman of the English department just before I came to Fresno State.

David was absolutely extraordinary. He was more visibly talented, in a way, than Larry. For example, he once showed me a poem by Philip Larkin that I had never seen before. And it turned out it wasn't by Philip Larkin; it was by David. He did an imitation of Larkin that was so good—and I love Larkin, I was always yelling about "You've got to read Larkin." It was so good. And Larkin is a difficult poet to capture that extraordinary, formal mastery, along with that irony and that sort of . . . and a kind of mood that you wouldn't associate with a nineteen-year-old guy. I mean it's a very soured adult's vision of the world. "Why do there have to be young people?" was basically what Larkin is saying. "Can't they all, can't we all be born into middle age, as I was?"

Larry, no matter what happened in his life, he wrote. No matter what. He'd come and see me, and he's getting divorced, da-da-dee, da-dee-da, "Will you look at these new poems?" And I'd be . . . and they had nothing to do with his daily life! Or he hated the job, and da-dee-da, and here were these poems. They were . . . that was something that just went on, and was him. So in a curious way he had a more profound sanity, or whatever it is that a poet needs to persevere, than St. John, or than anyone else that I think I've ever known.

Well, [John] Berryman had it. Berryman was an absolute wreck. I mean, he was one of the most wrecked . . . There's a line in T. S. Eliot, "My nerves are bad tonight." That was Berryman. His nerves were bad. Night, morning, you name it. And he was always shaking, and he was constantly taking drugs. He had a thing that was shaped like a can of that Copenhagen stuff that people chew, but it wasn't that. It was just this sort of little thing and it screwed. And he would unscrew it, and it was divided into all these little compartments with tiny little dots of drugs in each compartment, and he'd lick his finger, and then go doop-doop-doop-doop-doop-doop. He'd make this cocktail, suck it off his finger, and then wait about . . . and “Ahh," and he says, "Okay, we'll go on now." He'd do it right in class; it was incredible. People would say, What the hell is he doing? And he's smoking at the same time. He was a . . . he was wrecked. And yet he wrote, constantly, and lied that he wasn't writing, even when he was. He was always writing. So he did have a kind of sanity, at least in regard to that. He didn't handle his personal affairs very well either, Mr. Berryman.

David Wojahn: Phil, I know that in that Berryman essay you wrote you talk a lot about going to Iowa . . . I guess it was probably the late 40's or early 50's?

PL: It was 1953.

DW: So you were probably in that . . . maybe the first generation of people who studied creative writing in a kind of formal way. And I guess maybe I'm asking, for the sake of people here, how things were then, and how they're different now in that discipline or whatever you'd call it.

PL: Well, one of the differences I think was, I taught at . . . in Iowa in 1992, and the class that I was in was, in the 50's, was very different in terms of just the age of the students. Many of the students were vets from World War II so they were much older. And some of the people, a woman like Jane Cooper, for example, had been teaching professionally for many years. She was probably about thirty. Snodgrass was a vet; he was probably thirty. Justice, I don't know, Justice about three or . . . was about three or four years older than I. I was about . . . I was twenty-six, and I was one of the youngest guys. And there's another difference. I think there were twelve of us, and ten of us were men. Now when I teach at NYU, it's rare that I have a class with as many men as women. Then, it was very rare that there were as many women as men. There were . . . you just didn't see that.

I went back in the 50's and, you could say, studied with Paul Engle, and that was hopeless. He was useless. He had no real interest in our poetry, and we had no interest in what he said about it, because his own poetry was so wretched. But we were interested in how much money he could hand out, and we were interested in what the other students had to say, because there were some very good students there. I think that workshop that I took, with Berryman especially, was most interesting in the aspect of how good the fellow students were. I got a lot from Berryman, but I also got a lot from Justice and a lot from a poet named Bill Dickey, who's dead now, who lived in San Francisco later on, who was very sharp. Snodgrass is not the person . . . is not the sort of person who would give anybody anything, so I didn't get anything from Snodgrass. But Justice at that time was rather a nice guy. There was a big heavy-set guy named Don Petersen who thought he was Ivor Winters. But it was good to get that sort of neo-classic, plain-style vision from Petersen, who really did know Winters. So the students were a very opinionated group. Lowell let . . . let the class sort of run itself, because he . . . what we took for boredom on his part was really a psychic drama that was going badly, and he just didn't have the energy to focus on our poetry. I'm sure that, later in life, when he got the kind of drugs that could control the bipolar thing he had, he became a much better teacher; I've heard that. But he was terrible.

But I think the biggest difference . . . it's hard for me to say because I'm so much older than Berryman was. Berryman only turned forty, he was still a very young guy, he turned forty during this semester. [Robert] Lowell was younger than Berryman; he was probably about thirty-seven. It surprises me to think of how young they really were. Berryman had not really published yet his best stuff. I mean, you couldn't even tell how good he was going to be at that moment. Until Partisan Review published Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and then we saw, Oh my god he's not just the poet who published that first book, the Un-something or other [The Dispossessed], which is a bad sort of . . . well, a very competent amalgamation of the influences of Yeats and W. H. Auden.

Berryman's class differed from the kind of class that I've . . . I've seen or visited, in that he . . . he was very commanding. He absolutely took charge. Everything proceeded exactly the way he wanted it to proceed. A lot of times there were lectures . . . there was a lot of sort of seminar-like questioning. "Levine," he would say, "How would you go about finding criticism on the poet Charles Churchill?" I mean, he'd ask a question like that! "Levine, you're a scholar." Yeah, I remember that's how it went. He once asked me to go up to the board and write a footnote. "You're going to be teaching on the graduate level, or else you're going to continue being a truck driver. Now, we want to make a teacher out of you, so let's see how you can write a footnote. You have read these lines from Yeats in an anthology by so-and-so. Let's see how you would put that in a footnote." I said, "Why don't I just go to Yeats and . . ." "No, but you didn't!" And then he would laugh, because he didn't take it all that seriously, but . . . and he had a very definite . . . I'll say something else for him. He read our poems very closely, so that everything we were trying to do, he seemed aware of, and he seemed aware of where we ran out of gas or where we failed. And his candor was incredible.

I had never taken poetry writing before. There was no poetry writing offered at Wayne University where I went as an undergraduate. So this is my first experience, Lowell was my first poetry-writing teacher. I had shown my poetry to a couple of guys on the Wayne campus, faculty people, who wrote poetry, but it was just a one-on-one kind of thing. And they lied to me! I mean, they said the poems were very good; the poems were not very good. They may have been better than the poems that they were shown by other students, but they weren't good. But I don't think they felt the personal authority that Berryman . . . Berryman felt unlimited personal authority. I mean, he thought he was . . . he knew everything; and in a way, he deserved it, I mean, he was a brilliant man and a terrific scholar, a Shakespearean scholar, and he was incredibly well-read. He had a wonderful memory. It would break down now and then, but rarely when he was sober. He was always sober in class, by the way; whatever else you read about him, he took class very seriously. He always came sober and gave it . . . gave it hell. I mean, he really worked hard in class; there would be discussion.

I think another nice thing about it is Iowa City is a small town, certainly very small then. And so it was very easy for us as a group to meet two or three of the others whose work we liked, to get together and talk about our poems individually, and that's more . . . I got more from my fellow students outside of class than in class, with Berryman. Not with Lowell, because Lowell didn't say much of anything. Lowell sort of had a . . . an extended yawn that began the first time we met him and continued probably until his nervous breakdown, which did not take place during that semester.

I think the seriousness was a difference too. Because we tended to be older, we were more serious about what we wanted to do. A number of the students were married, some had children, I mean, so . . . so they were embarking on this venture with . . . with a lot at stake in a way. It was an unusually talented group; I mean, if you've got a class with Snodgrass and Justice, and this guy Dickey, and a poet named Melvin Walker La Follette, and a poet named Henri Coulette, and a poet named Paul Petrie. I think almost everybody in the class went on to publish at least a book. One guy died very young, but he too published a book. One of the most gifted was this guy Melvin Walker La Follette who gave up poetry and became . . . he became an Episcopal minister, and he works on the Tex/Mex border. He was the wackiest guy in the class, and a lot of fun.

GD: When you began to feel like you wanted to take in those influences but then also carve out some separate territory for yourself, who were some of the poets you began to look to, and how did that process start?

PL: I think . . . I think it started with Williams. Williams was not a poet that any of my teachers had ever promoted; I mean, Berryman never talked about him. Lowell never talked about him; Lowell would write about him later on. And so Williams was a discovery of my own, and it came about in an odd way. I didn't know Williams's poetry at all. I was in love with a very different kind of poetry. I was . . . how old was I? . . . I was twenty-three, maybe, twenty-three or -four, and the poet I was in love with was Dylan Thomas, who was then touring in the United States and had come to Detroit and hypnotized us. I sort of saw him and had a little tiny contact with him, but he was . . . there were so many people around him, especially young women, that I wasn't up to fighting my way through. So I had a teacher who was a very close friend of a close friend of Dylan Thomas's. His name was Oscar Williams . . .

DW: The anthologist?

PL: Yeah, the anthologist, who was also a very minor poet. The only place you'd find his poetry today is in his own anthologies, where he and his wife, Gene Derwood, would occupy many, many pages. Now, William Carlos Williams, being cursed with exactly the same name, had one poem in his famous little anthology of modern poetry. Williams, W.C.W., has one poem; Oscar has like twenty. So, my teacher says . . . I tell my teacher, I'm going to New York, I want to hear Dylan . . . I've got to hear Dylan Thomas again, I mean, that was just . . . He said, "My friend Oscar Williams is very close to him," because Williams was almost like an agent of his here in America, publishing him and everything. So he gave me a letter to give, as an introductory letter that I would give to Oscar Williams. And then I would meet Dylan Thomas. Well, I get to the 92nd Street Y, which is still this sort of place where readings were held, and the place was mobbed. Dylan Thomas just seized the American imagination in a way I don't think anybody has; maybe Seamus Heaney would fill it like that. And I went up to John Malcolm Brinnin, who was the guy who was . . . who was a poet who ran the 92nd Street Y. And I said, "Is the poet Williams here?" And he said, "Oscar, or The Great Williams?" And that really resounded—The Great Williams.

So I . . . did I meet Dylan Thomas? No, I didn't meet him again. I heard him, I heard him twice. And it was disappointing, because it was almost the same as, I mean . . . these great jokes that were coming across, they were all rehearsed, right? They were part of the patter. And he looked even seedier than he had in Detroit. He didn't look the way a poet's supposed to look, whatever the hell that means. We had seen photographs of him—high cheekbones, drawn face, black turtleneck sweater, a lot of wavy blond hair—you know, he was the kind of guy who walked around in his own wind so the hair would blow. And who comes out on the stage but a tiny W. C. Fields? A guy with a very red nose, rotund, piss-stained trousers, a soup-stained tie, I mean just looking dreadful. And you'd go, Oh my god, and then the voice would open up, and the guy had the most extraordinary voice, it was hypnotic. And you said, Yeah, that's the poet. Anyway, it was, it was to . . . when I got back, I started reading Williams. And there were a number of poems I just fell in love with, and I thought, This is something I haven't seen. And I just kept him in my mind, poems like "[The] Widow's Lament in Springtime," "On [by] the Road to the Contagious Hospital" [Spring and All"], poems like that, that I thought, they don't use meter—I was writing metrical poems—they don't use meter, they don't use rhyme, but they have as much music as anything else going.

And another poet that I then discovered who was enormously helpful to me was Theodore Roethke, what are called his “greenhouse poems." Again, I saw free verse being handled in a way that made it as rich as anything that was metrical, and anything that was rhymed, and gave it as much texture and weight as anything I'd ever read. And then somebody—and I don't remember who it was—said to me, "If you want to see the source of Roethke, you should read D. H. Lawrence," and so I began reading Lawrence very seriously. And there were two things there: there was not only the subtlety and the delicacy of the free verse, there was also his narrative poems. And the narrative poems just seized me. They were so extraordinary. It was great. And I'm not a guy who has much feeling for animals, I mean, I like them on a plate. I mean, I just . . . I didn't grow up on a farm, and I mean there were horses when I grew up, but they were mainly . . . they pulled milk trucks, and they . . . and then later on, I did work at a race track for four years, so . . . I worked for a woman who owned racehorses, so I got to see beautiful animals, but I found racehorses scary. They really were. They made me very nervous, very jumpy, they were very . . . they were so fractious themselves. But it was the way he handled the narrative, and the way he put himself in the context of the narrative so that you had this secure point of view, but it wasn't the main issue. The main issue, what was . . . was the animal. So I think those were things that I sort of . . . discoveries that I made that were extraordinarily important to me.

And another poet whose narratives I really loved was Robert Penn Warren. I didn't much care what Robert Penn Warren was saying, and sometimes I thought the poems were so confused that he wasn't saying anything. He had a little book with a title like Eleven Poems on the Same Theme, and they were narrative poems that went all over the place. I mean, they had these wonderful jumps in them, and I just loved the structures of them. I didn't know what he was doing, the way I didn't . . . I didn't really know what Dylan Thomas was doing either. I remember one day I sat down and I said to myself—my favorite poem by Dylan Thomas was "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London"—and I sat down and I said: I wonder what this means? "Never until the mankind making / Bird beast and flower," and blah blah blah, and it just goes on, thundering away, "And I must enter again the round / Zion of the water bead / And the synagogue of the ear of corn / Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound / Or sow my salt seed / In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn // The majesty and burning of the child's death." I skipped half the sentence, but it's all one sentence. And I looked at that thing and I said: I wonder where the verb is? Let me approach this as a statement, with grammar.

And I started to parse the poem, and son of a bitch, I understood it. I had just been reading it and becoming intoxicated by its texture and its imagery, "the round / Zion of the water bead / And the synagogue of the ear of corn" and I thought, oh Jesus. Or images from the poem "After the Funeral," to his aunt, Ann Jones. "Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;" Whoa. I mean, I would just see these images and say: Holy cow, what a gift for metaphor this son of a bitch has. And then I . . . as I got older, I got demanding, I wanted to see what . . . I wanted to figure them out, and so I went to the criticism. It was useless. They would talk about the vision in these large forms and never really go after the poems themselves. So you realize that . . . you began to realize that the best critics were all dead. They were named Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt and Samuel Johnson, and the rest of criticism, you could have.

Well folks, that's all. Thank you.

GD, DW, Mary Flinn, and others: Thank you.  

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