DAVID WOJAHN AND JAMES HARMS

An Interview with William Matthews

Part I

David Wojahn: Interview with Bill Matthews on October 20.

Although you grew up in the Midwest and had a childhood there that seems a bit akin to those of Stanley Plumly and to some extent Philip Levine, you don't go back to Ohio and your upbringing with the same sort of mythic urgency which they insist upon—myth for you seems to reside more in the imaginative life, in literature and jazz especially. Home for you seems to exist most crucially in art, in the delights of being an impassioned reader, listener, and fan. Do you remember the first time you heard, the first time you were moved by something you read, or by a piece of music you heard?

William Matthews: I don't know if I remember the first time. It is certainly the case that for me home is an invented place and not a given and to a certain degree, therefore, is without geography. It's true that often when I dream, though, if the dream is set outdoors the landscape resembles southwestern Ohio. I'm not sure you can reprogram dreams to do anything but that. But in any case, I think it's true that home has something to do with, it's a place that has to be constantly imagined and peopled; it has something to do with being rapt, has something to do with gauging as many of your faculties as possible. Home is a place where you're not bored, one might say.

What it feels to me I might have in common with Phil Levine's Midwestern childhood is not, I don't think, particularly Midwestern. It has to do with downward mobility, or sideways mobility. Phil's is more downward. What feels similar to me is a refusal to accept the comforts of the situation we were brought up in, and that means you have to invent something else. There's a rhyme, and an important one in some ways, between my childhood and Stan's in that Stan grew up in a part of Ohio that was heavily populated with Quakers, and I grew up in a part of Ohio that was heavily populated by Amish and Mennonites. I think that worked in very different ways on the two of us, but there's something, there are sides of Stan's temperament that seem to me recognizable and that I think have to do with finding the poise with which those people seem to need to be able to be in the world. And particularly as a counterpoint to his father, who was a figure of some Sturm und Drang, as one gathers from the poems. In fact, the people that I most admired when I was living in that part of Ohio . . . I didn't have a stormy family life, so it was less as an alternative and more of just a chance to watch other people exist in the world. But the Amish and the Mennonite farmers were the best farmers there and were mild, and I would describe them as being psychologically worldly in that their ability to know how to get along and to be individuals in a community without having a big sense of an "us versus them," of a one-and-many problem. That was interesting to me; most of the other people around didn't know how to do that.

Something that may contribute to this, some of this, is the fact that I was born in '42, my father was in the Navy, I was a war baby, I lived part of my childhood with my grandparents, and then part of my childhood in a succession of places with my parents, and then my sisters came along three and a half years after I did. So that there isn't one prevailing physical place that's a home, and that may make it easier, or more urgent, to invent a sense of home. I don't know what's Midwestern in all of that, but Phil and Stan both have, and I probably do, too (but I can see it less well in me than in them, just because we don't see ourselves very easily), a certain desperate Midwestern friendliness. It may be a link here.

James Harms: Well, in terms of that, you talked a little bit about the home being a place of invention, and you've also mentioned a little bit about your childhood. But what do you think it was that set you on the pattern of life such as this? How did your childhood contribute to your becoming a poet, or did it?

WM: Well, it'd have to. And of course the interesting, the unfindable needle in the haystack, has got something to do with the notion of—which almost everybody who takes it upon himself or herself to have theories about childhood is that . . . what everybody agrees to be the most formative years are the years on which, upon which an obligatory amnesia falls. The first two years of your life are the crucial molding years, says everyone. And nobody can remember almost anything of this period, which actually makes it very easy to make such assertions because no evidence to contradict them is available. This seems to me the strangest thing, in some ways, about being human—it's that this period that we all have a strong intuitive sense is incredibly important is absolutely unavailable to us.

But anyway, in my early years I lived in somebody else's house, and my grandparents were very affectionate, and I was treated like a little prince in some ways. But it wasn't my own house. They were older than my parents and were very fond of children, rather sentimental about children, even. But they'd had children around for a lot of years and I was near the very tail of the kite. And I think I had a lot of time on my hands there, too, where entertaining yourself was a survival skill. And then, when I was living with my parents in the early years, we lived in the country. My father was a county agent for the Soil Conservation Service, a Department of Agriculture employee. He did that for the first, I don't know, twelve or thirteen years of my life. And we always lived either at the edge of town or in the country. You would go out to play and there were cornfields, and a dog, and the weather. And you had to invent something to make that landscape more interesting and less stark than it actually is. Of course, later on, in school, the kinds of things for which you were punished as a small boy in school—the promiscuous curiosity, daydreaming, staring rudely out the window—those were all the skills which we discovered to our great pleasure were actually very useful after all. But all of our teachers were wrong. There was a lot of that for all of us, of course, in school.

The other thing to be said about the way childhood encourages you to think of an imagined life as being in some important way a real life, and not an opposition to or an escape from anything is that the very thing that I wound up spending a very high amount of my adult life doing, which is reading books and listening to music, those were forms of daydreaminess and secession from the rest of the family that were acceptable. If you sat in a corner and sucked your thumb, people started wondering if the school psychologist shouldn't be consulted. If you sat in a corner reading a book and pointedly ignoring everybody, that was the sign that you were a good child. And so there were a lot of rewards aside from the trance of reading itself. You could go on long excursions away from the house and the family by just sticking your nose in a book.

JH: Did the interest in music start just as early?

WM: It came a little later. I grew up in a house with records but not in a house where people just sat and listened to music. I'm perfectly capable of sitting for three or four hours at a time and listening to music and I'm not uttering a word during that time and not doing anything else (not reading or doing something, some other thing). And nobody in the house listened to music like that. But soon I discovered that it was like reading—it had great private rewards—and that I was being a good child—which, of course, I didn't care if I was a good child or not, I just wanted to be a successful child, whatever that meant. Good or bad is somebody else's expectation of you at that age, and anything you can do to escape from that and to live in a world where it didn't matter whether you were being good at the moment or not was valuable in and of itself.

There was popular music. Though I thought that the popular music of the late forties and early fifties was actually pretty dull and seemed to me reasonably, somewhat dull then though I didn't have much to compare it with. When I got into my early teens, I was interested already in classical music, and the music I liked the most was Baroque music, Bach in particular. Bach through Hayden was my golden age. And then there were a couple of radio stations that you could get late at night that had what was still called race music, where you could listen to black rock-and-roll and its forerunners. Then life began to get interesting. It also meant you could occasionally hear a little jazz on the radio. If I was listening to music or reading a book, I was doing something that my parents hoped for. So it's a licensed form of escape, is one of the things about it.

JH: When did the transition into wanting to make the art happen?

WM: Well, I took piano lessons when I was young. Mine was not the kind of family, I was never sent away to camp in the summer, I wasn't trucked out for a series of lessons (like soccer), not like a certain kind of suburban kid who takes every lesson and participates in every sport. I did play Little League baseball because I liked baseball a lot. My father was a baseball fan and played ball, played amateur ball into his late thirties. He was a catcher and managed a local team. And so there were some evenings when I was a kid when we sat around, sat in the bleachers in some ball field and watched these aging ball players scuffle. So it made sense that I was going to do that.

I think I probably asked for piano lessons. And that drizzled off. Later I took clarinet lessons, and I stayed with that a little longer, but I wasn't good enough. You figure that out fairly early on, it turns out. And that your fantasies of what it will lead to are corrected by the fact that it doesn't lead the way when your curiosities and your abilities to satisfy it are in sync with one another. You don't think this is going to lead to a career, you think this will lead to the next piece and it will be really interesting, so I will have to learn to play cross hands, you know I'm back to the piano . . . there's that one little Mozart sonata that everybody can play, and then the time you have to do the second one and you realize that you are going to have to do technical things that you don't possess yet. If you're really good, what it leads to is the pleasure of learning that, and that leads to the pleasure of learning the third thing, which is even more difficult. You're not sitting there picturing yourself on the cover of Time magazine. You're thinking, "You know, in another couple of months I could really do one of the late sonatas. That'll be fun." And when you're not good, it doesn't lead anywhere except to the next lesson. And every step is one at a time. It's pedestrian. And that was just more information. Probably the highest thing a musical career would have led me to was the chance to teach students as indifferently skilled as myself. And that seemed purgatorial.

JH: Was there an analogous sort of pattern of discovery in writing poems?

WM: Well, no. When I started teaching myself to write poems, I never had a creative writing class. This was by accident. Where I went to school, no high schools offered them those years, zippier high schools now do. Like most of the Ivy League schools, [Yale] disdained teaching creative writing. So there was never a course to take; I might well have drifted into one if there had been. So when I started to teach myself to write poems I found, in fact, that the process I couldn't make happen in music but some equivalent of it was available in writing. I could write a poem, and it made possible writing another poem, and it made possible writing another poem. When I started I wasn't thinking of putting a book together. I started writing poems and I loved the quality of attention it drew from me, and I loved the activity. And I just kept writing poems. And it got to a certain point, and you think, "Well now I'll do something with these." Then, for the first time, in some way, I thought there's a product here. But then, what I was really interested in at first was simply the way that curiosity rolled out in front of you like a rug before the beginning of a cartoon. It just kept working.

JH: Were you writing in high school, or is this . . . ?

WM: I wrote a few poems in high school, and I wrote a few poems in college. And for the usual reasons: either I was incredibly sad or wanted to impress a girl, or both. I didn't really start writing poems until I was out of college, and then as sort of a prophylactic against graduate school. I was a graduate student in English Lit, and I came to dislike not English Lit or graduate school per se, but it wasn't the right place for me and I could tell. And I needed to do something to prevent myself from being overwhelmed by having made what seemed a reasonable and sensible choice that immediately, instantly, when I had begun this path, I realized it was a dreadful choice, and I had no idea how I could have done something so foolish to myself, that displayed so little self-knowledge, etc. Better to start writing bright poems than to try to solve insoluble problems like that. They were at least insoluble if you post them in the terms that I suggested.

DW: Why don't we talk about your first book, and your early work? Those poems seem very rooted in some of the period styles of the sixties and seventies, the short imagistic poems of Merwin and Wright, Bly, sometimes . . . who you've written about in your essays. How did you get attracted to that sort of writing, that Deep Image writing that was in the fashion then?

WM: Yale also didn't administer courses in very recent poetry. You went further into the modern era than Oxford and Cambridge did. In those days they taught nothing after 1900, I believe. At Yale you didn't go much past 1945 or so. I didn't really have much idea of what was out there. I started buying books and reading stuff that other people around me were reading. I had never read Roethke's essay, "How to Write Like Somebody Else." It took me about two years to get to reading Roethke in any form. If I had, I might have figured out that it would be interesting to systematically imitate somebody. But what I did was I wound up imitating the Zeitgeist, in a way. I wrote in a period style. And it had one advantage for me, the prevailing short, heavily metaphorical poems. The short was the biggest advantage. Because when you're trying to teach yourself how to write, one of the things you want to do is go on. If you're working in a form that allows you to go on until you make a terrible blunder, and the possibility that you are already pretty close to the end of the poem by that point, it's happened. They were short because it was what I could manage. It takes a while to teach yourself how to get a poem, how to keep a poem going. I wrote these very short poems which you could say of that kind of poem that it begins and it starts to end almost simultaneously. I thought I could make something the structural integrity of which would hold up if it were comparatively small, and that if I did enough of that I could learn to go on longer. So, I think the short was probably a very important part of the attraction for me. I have a metaphorical imagination, or bent, had one just as a speaker, as a kid before I ever wrote things down. And so the idea that the making of metaphors as a kind of thought had occurred to me in some natural and untheoretical way at a fairly early age, and so I thought, "This doesn't feel dauntingly difficult," I thought. It was more difficult than I first thought, but it was something I could do.

JH: In terms of starting with those early models, do you feel as though you were part of something very quickly, part of a period movement that you identified with?

WM: Well, yes and no. I identified . . . I liked James Wright's poems a lot for reasons I didn't understand at the time. I liked Merwin's poems a great deal. It took me a while to realize that one of the things that was interesting to me about them is that they were poems by somebody who was rather learned and well educated who had figured out a way to write without wearing that. Two of the poets who are about my own age whom I ran into first, one by geographical accident was Robert Morgan, was living in Raleigh in those years and used to come over to Chapel Hill a lot. And I was sent Charles Simic's first book and actually reviewed it for what was nearly, probably the third or fourth issue of Lillaboler. And I felt attracted to some things in both their work a lot, but I didn't feel a part of a movement in any large sense, and I didn't have the same enemies. In fact, I was too naïve literarily to have any enemies. I wasn't reacting to anything except probably unconsciously reacting to a rather Augustan undergraduate experience in the Yale English department.

On the other hand, I was very grateful for that. The English exam that you took there to qualify for an honors degree was a sit-down exam. You sat down and wrote an essay, here was the question, there was one question. They gave us five different translations into English of the same passage from the Odyssey, and the question was "Date the translation; give your reasons for the date. Name the translator, if you know or have a good guess. Finish each of the five sections of your essay by describing any recognizable features of the way the verse is operating that belong to a particular period of literary history." And I had an education well enough that you could answer that. And I never, never regretted it, always been very grateful for it. But if you're starting out to write, you have to turn your back on some of that stuff for a while because issues of decorum, and issues that could pretty well be identified by reading a copy of Understanding Poetry rather closely are not helpful to a young poet trying to teach himself how to write. That education was hardly an enemy, but it wasn't going to be useful to me until I had done some stuff of my own during a period when I ignored it and pretended with middling success that I didn't know those things.

DW: I'm just thinking, when you bring up Merwin and Wright, and thinking of how the interest in those short, subjective, surrealist poems, also starts to manifest itself in your work and the interest in the epigram. Horace was Wright's favorite poet, and I know he's one of yours.

WM: Always. And there're a couple, I can think of a couple of poets, not contemporaries, who interested me a great deal as a reader when I was that age but whom I didn't know how to make any use of in terms of writing poems. I'm thinking especially of Auden and Byron, with both of whom I came to feel some temperamental rhyme as a reader very early, but I didn't know enough. I didn't know enough literature, I didn't know enough about how to write to make any particular use of them. It was like reading Stevens at that age. I thought, "I know this guy is terrific, but I don't understand these poems yet, so I am going to turn my back on it for a while and come back to it when I have a better chance of figuring out what I can do here." It also allowed me to put some of that stuff aside on a kind of "to-do-later, when-you're-grown-up" shelf. I found it a very useful model to the extent that poems in that tradition, this is less true of Merwin—it seems to me than some of the other poets—are almost never about a social world. That seems to me a defect of those poems. That didn't mean I wouldn't use the style to help teach myself some rudimentary things about learning how to write, but it always seemed to me that the way in which they took place in an unpeopled landscape was a problem for me, whose imagination is more social in a number of ways than some of those poets were.

JH: I think the period style that you used seemed to have run its course pretty quickly, though, in terms of finding a different voice. It seems like around the third book, Rising and Falling, the poems change quite a bit. What were you conscious of at that time?

WM: I don't know how much it was conscious, but a lot of what seems to be aesthetic decisions, particularly if you take a narrative interest in your own life or career, are really made on a much more inarticulate level than that. For me a major thing that happens is that I get bored. You write a certain number of poems that have certain things in common and after a while you've begun to solve whatever the problems that you could elicit from that style, or that form, or whatever, that body of subject matter. You get to the point where you really begin to know pretty well what you are doing. As I near that point I get bored, and I get eager to get stupid again and to take on something I don't know how to do yet. I think some of it was a fairly subliminal sense of that.

Also there was subject matter that I was interested in writing about. A lot of the sort of imagist/Deep Image poems were about the assumption that subject matter was a stand-in for something else. In that sense, they're sort of Freudian, there's a latent and a manifest content, though I think Jung may be the presiding theoretician to those poems rather than Freud. But there's still that sense that the poem is the vehicle to get at something which is unspoken or unspeakable behind that. That's in fact not the way I think of poems. I think of poems as having engagements with subject matter which produces something that isn't subject matter and that really is poetry. For me, at least, I need to have it in order to write.

Andy Warhol once invited Mingus to come out to East Hampton to discuss making a film. Mingus had written the score for Cassavettes's movie Shadows, and it was a big hit among the hip. So he went out to East Hampton, and he kept saying, "Well, what are we going to do?" And Warhol said, "Well, we're going to improvise." After about a day of this, Mingus turned and went off in a huff. And he could go off in quite a huff, given his size and authority. And he says, "You can't improvise on nothing, man."

For me, in some sense, subject matters are like chord changes; they are not what poems are about but there's something about subject matter, as there is about memorizing the chord changes to a really beautiful song, that allows you to get to the thing which isn't subject matter in poetry, which is a transmutation. But it's not about something that's not said. It's finally about that thing that you make out of the chord changes or out of the subject matter. And so in that sense, those engagements with subject matter were very important and the way those Imagist poems seem to be, on some level, queasy about having subject matter and treating the subject matter as a kind of distraction, the way Language poets think of certain kinds of plot as a kind of the opiate of the masses,which you have to get rid of in order to find out what's really going on. For me it's never the point, but it's always been the vehicle.

Part II

WM: Certainly one of the factors was that the first two books came out in 1970 and 1972, and then there's a pause while I was retooling. But also during that period I got divorced and contrived to bring my children to live with me—not the summers, but for the school years. And so I became . . . I had to deal with the consequences of and responsibilities for a divorce. I had to deal with my own children, which drove me into a more urgent, considerable curiosity about childhood than I would have had merely on my own. It meant moving a couple of times. And so the textures of those things seem to me not to be possible to pick those things up, not as subject matter but as the ethos of the poems. The things that mattered to me a lot in my life, that I wanted to be able to write about so that I could be as smart about them as I could, and possibly even smart enough to stop trying to be smart about them when that was the right move to make, etc. I wanted very much to do a good job raising the kids and figure out how it was that I found myself in this situation, which had, in some ways had the same kind of awful rhyme for me with the decision to go to graduate school—which seemed like such a wise decision and then suddenly was insupportable. I had a marriage which I had entered with every optimism and affection go sour in a short period of time, and I thought, "I've done this again. What's going on here? You can't be this ignorant. You need to know something you don't know."

So at that point I was beginning to figure out that poems were a way of thinking. It seemed natural to want to write different kinds of poems under a different set of urgencies; and they very much had people in them and social consequences; and they were about different experiences with time; and they were about loyalty and betrayal. I needed to be able to address all those things—not by a series of explicitly autobiographical poems. There's not much of a paper trail, though anybody reading those books would know that the books were—there are two male children very much at the heart of the author's life—and that questions of what a home is and isn't are very important, but other than that, there aren't autobiographical poems about divorce fights. The facts are not there.

JH: Is that a product of your process, or something more intentional. In other words, your subject matter ends up being sort of . . . ?

WM: Well, I think both. I think both. I mean, out of boredom you stop writing a certain kind of poem and you think, "Well, what am I going to do next?" You write down what's in your head, and what's in your head is necessarily close to the kind of things that are worrying you, and that part is quite unintentional. Though it's very likely, in fact, to produce, to put before you this subject matter that you can't evade . . . it's like so-called free association. It works because it's not free, it's absolutely determined.

That is how I knew to write. I would write something down that interested me and think, "What the hell, where did that come from, and what could go with it?" So it was scarcely automatic writing. But there was a sense that I didn't have any idea where I was going to go, and I hadn't shown much interest in writing poems in traditional form so I was unwilling to let the solving of formal problems try and lead me to subject matter, as under some circumstances it will do rather neatly. But I didn't have the skill or the curiosity to do that. And then in another sense, I think it's very deliberate. I need to understand the conditions of my life better. And therefore I'll try writing about them, since a major tool I have for understanding is writing poems.

DW: But that's what often happens after Rising and Falling, and also, I think, in later poems like "Whiplash" and "Bystanders," it's an engagement with narrative. They're poems that start with that lengthy anecdotal piece but they seem very much a variety of a cautionary tale. It's as if you tell the stories in order to warn us or remind us about human folly, nature of fate . . .

WM: Or to remind me. I mean, I think one advantage . . . narrative interestedness is receding, but there's been a period recently when some people have spoken of narrative as if it were valuable in and of itself—a position that I don't understand. But I . . . there may be one way in which I sort of understand. It's always seemed to me that poems written by those folks are kind of spilt religion. And I think in hindsight I can . . . one reason I was interested in narrative is not because of a storytelling impulse. I like the condensing and compressing of powers of poetry a lot, and they tend to run counter, like an ebb tide, to narrative. But narratives are about consequences, in some ways. If "a" happens before "b," is it that "a" caused "b" or is it accidental that "a" and "b" are in that relation? Those kinds of things, when you think, "How is that I'm in this situation in my life?" A rhetorical procedure which allows you to think about consequence and action and choice was very interesting to me. And more than anything else in narrative, I think that's what I was attracted to.

JH: Like when Rick Jackson talks about a rhetorical narrative in your work, that's how the poems proceed?

WM: I suspect so, I think so. When I think of Rick's recent poems, which are a kind of teased narrative, in which a narrative is offered to you and something else is given to you, I'm not entirely sure I know what he means by rhetorical narrative. I happen to like those poems of his, but they operate in a very different way. I think "cautionary tale" is a phrase I like. You can't, in fact, tell yourself how to be wiser and better. And if you could, you would just drive yourself nuts. I never liked it when other people did it for me. I suppose I would really hate it if I was the one telling me what was good for me. But the "cautionary tale" can remind you that your urge to control and to understand things is subject to all kinds of misfirings, to effects which are unintentionally comic in a way that the comic or the antic has a disrupting smoothness, disrupting placidity, requiring you to lose and recover your balance. I don't think of the comic impulse in writing as being anything like relief, or a range of tone. But it actually embodies and imitates a kind of moral balance that we have all the time. It's just you're continually losing your sense of balance, certainty, and poise, and you need to recover it. And the fact that we use jokes to deal with the subject matters we find the most unsettling, and the most threats to our poise—sex, death, etc.

The comic impulse is a deeply serious one in poetry, and particularly when the temptation to pontificate now that you've got the soapbox out is a problem. That the episodes in these cautionary tales are in a grim way quite funny, which seems to me the case of "Whiplash," for example, made them all the more attractive to me.

The narrative impulse, in some way, may be comic. It may indicate an attempt to make a more credible consequence-identifiable narrative out of life than life ever actually provides us with. So there's something hubristic and comic about the urge to tell stories. In fact, if it tells stories which included that comical caution against relying too much on storytelling, then I would be a lot happier. Of course, the Deep Image poem has very little room for the antic or the comic, and that was its other temperamental defect for me from the beginning.

DW: The notion of the cautionary tale too has a lot of links to Freud, who's been one of your most abiding influences. A lot of Freud's case studies read like a variety of fable.

WM: They are fables in some way. Sort of "Aesop on Acid," "The Wolf Man" could be described as. I think they are very beautiful as narratives and they have in them, because the kinds of behavior he is dealing with, have a coherence but not a coherence that's immediately available. There's a series of disjunctions, and comic misunderstandings are available, and I think of them as very beautiful narratives, without a lot of other parallels, though many of Kafka's fables, sort of paradoxical fables, come to mind. And Freud's writing on dreams and on jokes, and their relation to the unconscious were things that made absolute sense to me as I read them. I was about fourteen when I read that stuff, and there was much I didn't understand. I was too close to puberty to understand how complicated his model for the pull of the erotic was. I didn't understand, until the next time I went back to read that stuff, that almost all his models of intellectual activity were transactional. That they were . . . either money was changing hands or water was seeking a different level. I didn't understand how active they were as models, but I knew right away that the stuff about dreams and the stuff about jokes was true in some way because language was, I think, what I knew the most about, though I didn't know what I knew and I didn't know how to say what I did or didn't know. But, when I read those things, I thought, "Yes! This makes sense to me." And the other stuff, like Stevens, I would have to go back to it. It was just too grown-up for me.

JH: I think I read once where Peter Stitt described A Happy Childhood as a book attempting to unburden yourself, almost, of your passion and interest in Freud. As you began to write poems that were more investigative at that point . . . ?

WM: I never felt it a burden. I am one of few admirers of Freud who refuses to be embarrassed by him. And the sort of lazy, wholesale bashing of Freud by usually not the brightest feminists seems to me disgraceful. This is a major writer before we even ask how great a scientist and psychologist it was and a very important figure and a real pioneer. It's a fascinating life, which he allows us to see much more of than almost any other public figure who's a writer I can think of, and with the least amount of defensiveness. Freud made all kinds of dumb moves and decisions and, by and large, was very candid about almost every one of them. I mean, he is the last person people should attack because he was the person quickest to doubt himself.

I think of A Happy Childhood as a book about the need we have to have stories, fables, explanations, and names, and the damage those needs do to us. And that it was a book designed to unburden myself of feeling in some way uncomfortable that both of those things were true. And it was a book designed to make me align myself with the obvious truth that both of those things are true and you can't get rid of either of them. There's a line in that poem that Freud is a student of self-deception. Which seems to me one way to describe Freud at his grandest and most heroic, and therefore at his most comic, because we're always stupid when we're like that. So in that sense, if I could write a book in which I could put some of that stuff behind me, since Freud was a tutelary figure for me, then Freud would appear less frequently in the poems after that. But I don't think of Freud as a figure too great for us lesser folks to shuck off. I happily await the time when Freud's follies, having been pointed out by all and sundry, everybody will remember what a great man this was.

DW: Well, we could also talk about this notion of the cautionary tale as a form employed in your poems about jazz musicians, about writers, sports figures. They often focus on great artists who, because of age, or addictions, or some sort of human failing, are in decline. Time and Money has a poem called "Babe Ruth Toward the End," and in that earlier poem about Bud Powell, you give him a heroin habit that he didn't actually have.

WM: Well, actually there's some debate about this. The story in the jazz community, sort of the insider's story in the jazz community—and this came up when the Bud Powell Verve set was, that came out about a year ago, produced, and the guy who put that together called Al Young, and he wanted to use a part of Al Young's poem in the liner—it's elaborately produced, if you've seen it—and Al said, "Oh, I have a friend who's got a poem about Bud Powell, and you should use it." And the guy calls me up, and he says, "Your poem is the best poem I've looked at for this anthology but I'm not going to use it because . . ." And then—I heard this story from other people—he says, ". . . because Powell snorted heroin, but never shot up." And I've always thought that there's, the insistence on this, there's something . . . about this. For a short poem, I threw in the heroin addiction because it's always seemed to me possible that he was more involved with heroin than people had said. And also, in a short poem, I thought it would help not to just have him be depressed, but to have him be in a more melodramatic form of trapped by himself. I mean, if you're Powell, who when he was on, was one of our four or five greatest jazz pianists, it was great, and you were rapt, and your full attention was there. And then when you quit playing you were just a depressed guy who couldn't manage his own life. I think there's a way in which all of those poems about artists are cautionary tales about the difference between you're a writer when you have a pen in your hand, and the rest of the time you are just a biped. It's hard for us to remember that, for some reason, which must be why I tell myself this story so frequently in those poems.

JH: You do this a lot. I mean, you write about these sports figures and musical figures in ways that italicize the region where the tragedy in their lives and the consolation they receive from art is at its most present. Are you conscious of in some ways ennobling those figures as people who have achieved a kind of mastery that in some ways secures them but then traps them?

WM: Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. I do think it's a trap. I think most of the—not all, by any means—but most of the great artists for whom we have the reliable, empathetic, good-hearted, and well-researched biographies, you know, you're sort of in the company of a monster while you're reading these books about these people. There are people for whom this is not true. When the big, huge Verdi biography came out about a year and a half ago, I read through the Verdi biography and I thought, "Well, this guy was no . . . I might rather go bowling with St. Paul than with Verdi, he wasn't a lot of fun, but this was no monster." There are people who are not like this. I don't think that being an artist and taking your own pleasure at making things seriously necessarily makes you a monster, but it has made huge numbers of people into monsters. And only a few of those people have had a talent large enough to be a consolation for what bastards they became. They say absolute power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But what most people say when they think that is power corrupts others, absolute power corrupts others absolutely. But the truth is, all these rules are for us, too. If large numbers of people are driven to kind of low-grade monsterhood, and you want to do this for the rest of your life, you better damn well be on guard. I think that's what they're about.

It's parallel to something I think about a lot at my age, which will be 53 next month, that most of the people older than I am in my department are bitter and unhappy. And I look at the remaining years that I may wind up teaching and think, "There's got to be a way not to do this. What is it?" And I think in this way, as the poems that start with Rising and Falling, which begin to include my sons and my domestic life, and so forth, much more than the earlier poems, there is a sense in which you're working out of very direct and practical concerns. I probably have written more of those poems about musicians and composers and athletes in the last few years, partly because this is a problem that becomes very apparent at the stage in life that I'm at now. And I think, there's got to be a way not to get caught in this. I, of course, don't know whether there is. But it is a hell of a lot better to imagine that there is one and look for it than to just let it sweep over you like some kind of dreadful mental plague.

And I think a lot of poets . . . there are counter examples. I see Galway here in the city and he's gracious, he's generous, and his last book was, I think, his very best, better than The Book of Nightmares, I think. Gerry Stern, Phil Levine, Carolyn Kizer—I know a lot of poets who are pretty content, but I know a lot of poets in that age bracket who are grumpy and who could list off every prize they have not won and can't get through a conversation without chopping off two poets of about the same age and status. And you think, you know, there's a lot to watch out for. That's where the cautionary tales come from. I don't imagine that I'm immune to any of this stuff, and it scares me.

JH: I'm conscious of it already when walking down the halls of my department.

WM: I've never been in a department where walking through the halls doesn't feel like you are swimming in the pond in the summer where there's like warm spots and really cold spots—you don't know where they are until you go through them. Going down the halls of one's department is like that. "Oh, here's where Dr. Hathaway insulted Archie A. twenty-two years ago."

JH: You talked about how your, in some ways these poems about artists and sports figures have occurred recently because they needed to, because of things you're trying to work out in your life. Have you, in some ways, have your ambitions for what you think of as poetry's mission changed in the last few years? In the new book, you make some comments about what poetry can do. For instance, "The world's a poem we'll never learn to write," in "The Rookery at Hawthornden," and then the comment about "verse is easy and poetry is hard. / The brash choir, like a polyphonic heart, / beats loudly in the trees and does not ask / what poetry can do, infamous for making / nothing happen. The rooks and I rejoice / not to be mute." That seems to be saying something about like why we make art and what the mission of art is.

WM: Some of it is birdlike. But the song is, "Here I am," and, "Pleased to be conscious again."

JH: Sometimes that seems like enough.

WM: Yeah, and I don't think that's a small thing. I do think that writing poetry imitates, in some ways, the process of keeping alert, keeping your poise, keeping your curiosity, keeping all the balls up in the air—it's a model for an attentive life—and that it acts it out. If you were to say, "What kind of symbolic actions, Mr. Burke, can a poem perform?" the first thing I would say is I would use images from juggling and images from choreography, and say that balance and posture, in the largest sense of the words, poise in the largest sense of the word, are some of the things that the writing of poetry teaches us. It also teaches us a certain ordinary bravery, which is not to call a spade a garden implement and not to leave out the stuff that you don't know the answer to, and things like that. It is good for the human spirit to speak the truth in public in an unquavering voice, and writing imitates some of that. You especially forget that after a long department meeting or any number of places where public speech happens where the rule seems to be not to speak, to speak as little of the truth as possible, and never to say what the real issues are. And so I think poetry does a lot of things in that way.

It works, I've always liked the phrase "symbolic action," though I don't think I mean by it exactly, or anything close to exactly, what Kenneth Burke had in mind. But it does seem to imitate one's curiosity and one's moral alertness, one's generosity. It reasserts the power of laughter in the face of terrible things that life can do to people. I think it does a lot of things. Auden was wrong. It's not true that poetry makes nothing happen. It tends to work its wonders in a very small arena. It makes you more interesting to yourself, and you and me, at its best. It doesn't persuade anybody to reinstate the funds for the National Endowment for the Arts, but the power that it does have is very real. It has the power to perform a kind of cleansing, or rinsing of the sort for which for a long part of human history, we had only images of theological intervention to describe. Obviously, people knew that something important had happened to them, so you attach it to the highest available power. If it is good for you, it must come from a great place. But it turns out, as Perimide had suggested to those folks, it can be instigated by yourself. And it has a necessary social component because language is social and historical. So that while these activities take place in solitude, there's a sense in which you are in company the whole time. The language represents the other people who aren't there physically. And I think that's actually a lot, that poetry can do a lot.

JH: And it's something I was thinking of asking you later, because I heard this line of Milosz's where he talks about poetry's role for educated people today being something like Gnosticism was for early Christians. In some ways, what you just said . . .

WM: Yes, and we are sort of like the Essenes in that sense.

DW: And yet, another line in Time and Money, it sort of suggests that poetry is trying to improve on "this babble that issues like a dial tone from our bodies, / this empty talk that surrounds us and numbs us."

WM: Our sense of that may be fairly recent in human history, the amount of babble, starting from the paper on the doorstep, which I'm addicted to reading to start the day, it's not as if I spurn that stuff. I turn on the television, which I don't think is the devil's instrument. Much of it's dull, but that is another problem. The access that people . . . it's one reason why I have eschewed the fax machine and I'm still on the outernet, because I feel the world can get to me all too readily as it is. And we need to be able to distinguish between meaningful noise and what is like sort of a merely electronic noise, like a dial tone figure. People, nomadic tribes sixteen centuries ago had nothing of this problem. They were in danger of hearing divine voices because there was not enough stimulation going on. So I think in some ways this is a recent phenomenon, but it's a very real one. It's a danger that language can be debased just by, by the sheer torrent of it that we are technologically capable of bombarding ourselves with.

JH: It seems to be more and more the project of a lot poets to sort of, in some ways, privilege the subjective, to sort of resurrect the "debased vernacular."

WM: Yeah.

JH: More and more. Even, I think, some of the experiments that we don't approve of, perhaps, or are quite less interested in are still somewhat bound to . . .

WM: Oh yeah, those are desperate moves. And I don't think the desperation that the poets who make them feel is illusory in any sense. It's not what I would do in the same situation, but I understand why they're doing things that they want to see as extreme. Because extreme measures of some kind or other are required.