Home > Work > Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in their Own Words
1 " Writing is not always a priority. . . .I only write those things that are necessary for me to write. I love to write, and when I’m not writing, I often feel as if I’m betraying my art, my gift, my calling, but that sensation is probably hubris or neurosis as much as anything else. The problem, and one of the joys of writing poetry, is that none of us can really count on entering the canon. The chances are that none of our work will survive long after we’re gone. That’s just the way it is. To feel otherwise is foolish. we write in competition with the dead for the attention of the unborn. We are writing poems that are trying to take the attention of people away from Sappho, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Baudelaire. Good luck to you! There’s a built-in failure to writing poetry that I find comforting.If you know you’re doomed to failure, then you can work freely. People who think their work is going to last, or that it matters, well . . . I always try to disabuse my students of their desire to write for fame. I ask them, “Who here has read Shakespeare?” Everyone raises his or her hand. We agree that his work is immortal, then I remind them: “he’s still dead. He’s as dead as he’d have been if you hadn’t read him; and you’ll be dead too someday, no matter how well you write.” To sacrifice your life for your art is an appalling notion. On the other hand, I have been called to be a poet, ad it’s an unimaginably rich gift. Like every artist, I know that in order to be a moral, effective human being, I have to give myself wholly to my art. The trick is finding a balance. If you can’t recognize that your art is no more, and no less, important than what you make for dinner, then you should find something else to do. "
― , Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in their Own Words
2 " Robert Frost didn’t like to explain his poems—and for good reason: to explain a poem is to suck the air from its lungs. This does not mean, however, that poets shouldn’t talk about their poetry, or that one shouldn’t ask questions about it. Rather, it suggests that any discussion of poetry should celebrate its ultimate ineffability and in so doing lead one to further inquiry. I think of that wonderful scene from Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, where Mosche the Beadle of the local synagogue, in dialogue with the young, precocious author, explains: “Every question possesses a power that does not lie in the answer. "
3 " This summer, a lot of what I was teaching was against Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, very broadly speaking, this anxiety of sounding too much like another poet, especially a firmly established poet, for fear of not sounding original. I kept telling my students, “Why wouldn’t you want to be influence by these poets! Why wouldn’t you want to sound like Keats or Robert Hayden?” Pound and Eliot were influenced by Browning, and they influenced one another. James Wright—when he came on the scene, many of us were consciously imitating him, trying to do do what he so gloriously did.... I tell them not to worry about influence or imitation as long as you’re emulating the best work, the work you love. How much imitation is too much? You’ll know it when you see it. . . .And that’s just a huge problem in general, especially in America. We’re individuals. we’re the one, not the many. We want to stand out from the crowd. Everyone is trying to differentiate themselves. The fact is we are one big organism. We belong together. We are a tribe. Not one of us can do something that doesn’t affect the other, past or present. "
4 " You have a poem called “Bad Theology.” What would you call a bad theology?I guess any theology that presumes to have God in its pocket. Can I explain this without sinning further? We’ll find out. The community in which I was raised did what they would call theology, but it was always a kind of cranky, brutal reduction of lush and beautiful complexities into the lowest common denominator, the dullest version. But when I went away to school and started reading more, I became increasingly dissatisfied with any theology that replaces the enormous, immeasurable real with very measurable and very calculated replacements. I’m not saying this very eloquently, but I guess bad theology articulates as definitive and conclusive that which is unknowable and without end. "
5 " [I]f we could imagine a world without slavery and abolish that institution, then we can face the troubles we have now. . . . Who was it that imagined a world where the Nazis could be defeated?There were those who looked upon that war machine and said: this can and must be destroyed.That resistance . . . began with an act of the imagination. Resistance begins with the imagination. "
6 " I don’t know who invented 8.5 x 11 paper as the standard on which we impose our work. If our paper were longer or wider, as it is in other countries, would many of us who write the same sort of poem, shape-wise, and fill up the same amount of space, perhaps write longer, more vertical poems? If we turned that longer sheet on its side, would our poems have longer lines and a shorter vertical movement? "
