Where were you educated?

I went to Yale from ’63 to ’67 and I majored in English, the way a lot of people did in those days, and I like to say I learned how to take a poem apart and put it back together under battlefield conditions, blindfolded [laughs].

You’re speaking metaphorically, right?

Yes, that was a metaphor … field-strip a poem. [Yale] is great for criticism; wonderful school for criticism, and as far as actually writing the stuff is concerned, that’s something else.

Are you implying that it wasn’t conducive to the actual creative side of things?

I think it could have been for a different, more confident undergraduate than I was. Harvard has a better track record of producing poets than Yale does. T. S. Eliot, etc.

I knew from the time I was twelve years old that I wanted to be a writer, of some sort. Poetry was my first love.

What I get from your poetry is that it wasn’t particularly an emotional or social trauma that controls your work, it’s more of a need to record events, ideas, impressions …

Well, no, I would say that there is a very large scale social trauma that informs my work. You make me sound more like Robert Creely.

Let me come back to my development for just a second, because that might clarify something about the poetry I write. I wasn’t all that interested in writing the sort of verse that young poets usually write: highly autobiographical and devoted to their feelings. I wanted to tell stories. So I thought, ‘Okay, that must mean I’m not really a poet; I’m a novelist.’ I spent my first seven or eight years after graduation trying to write a novel. It was very long and really, really bad. So bad. I don’t even have a copy of it. So I sat down and said, ‘That wasn’t very good,’ and I wrote half of another one, and that wasn’t very good either. And then I went through a very bad period of three and a half years during which I couldn’t write anything at all, and, finally, in my early thirties, I had that rarest of all things for an intellectual, namely, an idea of my own [laughs]. Which means that I put together the reading and thinking that I’d been doing and I saw something that was obvious on the face of it but not obvious in practice: you want to write poetry; you’re primarily drawn to poetry, not prose, for which you really have no talent, but you want to tell stories—write narrative poetry. But the thing is that when people hear the word “poetry,” they assume lyric poetry, and that’s been true for over a hundred and fifty years; that been true since Poe. The dead hand of Poe rules that a poem should not be narrative, it should be entirely lyric, and it should be no longer than a page and a half long. [The “dead hand”] lies on all of the Western languages. So, there is narrative poetry in America but everyone who does it has to reinvent the form for himself. Robinson Jeffers is a great favorite of mine. Edwin Arlington Robinson, another great. I think of myself in some respects as a follower of them.

I was thirty-two, it was 1978, when I actually put together my ideas for a style and an approach, and it wasn’t until I was thirty-three, so in August of ’79, that I wrote a decent poem, one that I still want to keep. As Chaucer said, “Life’s so short that craft’s so long to learn.” I spent the first seventeen years of my writing career, if you can call it that, almost exclusively working on narrative poetry.

Seventeen years since college?

That was since ’78.

So you would say that you began writing seriously in 1978?

Yeah. After the failed novels and the period in which I wrote nothing … [sighs] I was living in a slum apartment … a relationship with a girl that I’d been in for … eleven years, ended …

This was in New Jersey?

No, Berkeley. I was born in Chicago, went to high school in Palo Alto, went to college at Yale, then lived in Berkeley for a total of eighteen years. Then I moved to L.A. because I met [my wife] Phyllis.

I’ve had two books published; one in ’86, the other in ’98. The first was The Adventure, the other, Happiness. They’re both book-length narrative poems; one’s 180 pages, the other’s 160 pages. My publisher called the second one a “novel in verse” and I absolutely hate it.

Really? Because I recently did some research on a book of poems by Alice Notley described as such.

Alice Notley’s wonderful Descent of Alette, which I think is my favorite of her works, is really a book-length narrative poem. She’s somebody I’ve followed. I like a lot of her shorter poems. I’m not wild about her recent book-length poem.

Culture of One. That’s the one I was working on.

Yes. I think it’s a bit self indulgent. Descent of Alette is tighter.

Who published your first two books?

Storyline Press. Just by an odd series of circumstances, my first national publication was in ’84 in the Hudson Review. Phyllis and I went to New York and met Fred Morgan, who was their editor, wonderful guy, he published the HR; he should be better known as a poet. I mean, his work’s in print its just that no one pays any attention to it. He’s rather old-fashioned, rather traditionalist, but a lot of power. He’s similar in some respects to Donald Hall who gets a lot more attention. Anyway, he gave me a name of someone who was starting a new publishing firm in Santa Cruz, just eighty miles south of Berkeley. So my first book—actually, the second book I wrote—The Adventure, they published. And then Happiness, in ’98, was one of the last. They’ve since gone belly-up, but they were very interested in narrative poetry. For a while they put out a small magazine called The Reaper and there is a collection called The Reaper Essays which is about narrative poetry, the problems with narrative poetry and trying to get it started.

I’m assuming the form of your poetry is tied to the fact that it is narrative, that you don’t branch off into some of the less rigorous structures that Pound or John Ashberry embraces. You use almost paragraph-like stanzas.

I’ll admit that. But, still, there was a big change in my style after ’98. Two things: I wanted to see what I could do with more lyrical poetry and I wanted to write shorter poems, more publishable. I’ve written thirty-four collections, counting the ones that have been published.

Oh, but only two have been published. Why do you think that is? Is that your own choice?

No, God no. I’m highly ambitious. John Milton referred to the desire for fame as “the last infirmity of a noble mind,” the implication being that if you’re really a noble, stoic intellectual then you couldn’t care less about fame. Maybe he was right but it’s bullshit.

I’ve never made much of anything from my poems, but it’s what I do all day long when I’m not grading kids’ poems.

How do you feel like going into the Academy has shaped your approach to poetry?

Damn good question …

Is George Washington the first school you’ve taught at?

No, I taught prep school in L.A. when I first moved down there in ’86, ’87. Before I came to GW I was at George Mason. It was a horrible experience.

Really? The students just weren’t engaged? Or was it the faculty?

Most GM students are living at home and they have to have a car in order to get to school, and most of them are working in order to support the car—they’re swimming with a brick in each hand from the time they’re twelve years old on. And God knows what kind of education they’ve gotten. They’d never read anything. There was not cultural connection. There was nothing I could refer to to explain to them what they were reading.

You wanted to teach them at a university level provided already with a firm grounding and they had no grounding.

Nothing. Nothing, it was heartbreaking. It was grueling to review their work. They couldn’t write, they could hardly read; they didn’t know how to read.

Is that why you left, because the experience was so demoralizing?

Yeah, basically. You mentioned the faculty. Carolyn Forche teaches out there; a number of big names teach there. But I noticed that there was a difference between the quality of the graduate faculty and that of the undergraduate. There was this Berlin Wall between them.

There generally is with regard to writing programs.

McAleavy was talking about his “big professor” at Cornell, A.R. Ammons. Did you ever have a “big professor” at Yale?

Yeah, Harold Bloom. I took two courses from him. A silly boast—in the seminar I took from him he gave me the highest grades he’d given to an undergraduate at that point: my paper on Byron and my paper on Eliot. If somebody had told us in his class back in the early sixties that Harold Bloom would become a huge famous name, the American idea of the literary critic, we would have laughed. He was so odd, he was so eccentric. Bloomians, people who sort of liked him and followed him were this little clique on campus. He was a very strange person, but brilliant.

I have to say about Bloom, he was very much a big influence on me, but in other important ways I had to put him aside. Because Bloom is completely apolitical. There’s no politics, because politics for him is just fate.

Even historical politics, when it comes to criticizing the works against their cultural moment?

He once said a great thing about Shelly, that he was a member of the permanent left. I like to think of myself as a member of the permanent left; I think that any good poet is a member of the permanent left. As far as the politics of the Romantic era, I’m sure he knows a lot about that, but he does not believe that a political viewpoint is important for contemporary poetry, for understanding contemporary poetry, for writing contemporary poetry. Politics is just fate, its just some unpleasant aspect of the environment. When something horrible was happening in the world, and God knows in the Sixties all sorts of horrible things were happening, he’d say to us “Gentlemen, we live where motley is worn.”

I can see how Bloom would feel that politics is irrelevant to contemporary poetry. There’s a book that just came out detailing the differences between New York publishing culture and MFA literary tastes. Do you feel that as MFA programs have proliferated over the past fifty years poetry has taken a highly self-referential, allusive turn as opposed to dealing with immediate worldly concerns.

[Sighs deeply] The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, the poets who are almost inevitably and almost uniformly entrenched in the Academies, who regard themselves as an avant-garde also like to believe that they are leftists, that they are in fact revolutionary. A lot of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school criticism of itself that I’ve read—and they don’t like to make a distinction between their creative work and their criticism; it’s all one thing, as you know—makes what I consider a totally specious equation between liberation of language (liberation of the signifier from the signified) and political liberation. I think this is silly; I think this is very crude thinking; I think its vulgar Marxism and vulgar Structuralism combined. It is a way in which L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets can have their cake and eat it too; they can be thoroughly careerist, thoroughly entrenched, thoroughly tenured, scratching each others’ backs and scratching the backs of the critics and creating students to carry on their names after them, etc, etc, and still believe that they are late-Sixties-style revolutionaries.

You don’t believe that that’s possible.

No; look, I’m a Marxist. I have a lot of different philosophies I dabble in, I like to dabble; I would not claim even the status of an amateur when it comes to that, but I like to have some sort of philosophical grounding. And if there’s one approach that I would identify with, would claim, would sign on the dotted line for, I think of myself as a Marxist. On the one hand I reject the unexamined and hasty equation between modernist and post-modernist stylistic developments and liberating thought and social liberation; on the other hand, there is no way in which any poetic style can, now, be easily accessible … because—and everything I’m going to say now is circular—people don’t read. And insofar as they do read, their reading upholds hegemony. The most powerful and pervasive hegemonic idea in our society is the myth of the private life, the myth that there is a small realm of feeling, of one’s personal fate, one’s personal changes, one’s immediate family and immediate reactions, immediate love, that’s all “here;” then there’s this big horrible thing which consists of politics, society, nature, the cosmos, and you don’t write about that. Maybe occasionally you pull metaphors from it but you don’t think of yourself as belonging to that. You think of yourself as being in this private world, and that’s what you write about. Now, what I’m describing I think is very true of people who are not self-identified avant-gardists. By the way, the notion of an “academicized avant-garde” like we have with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets is a contradiction in terms. An avant-garde is outsiders; an avant-garde is beatniks, is bohemians, is hipsters. An avant-garde with tenure? Forget it. Also, the thing is, an avant-garde by definition is not traditionalist.

And academia is by definition traditionalist.

Exactly. You read L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet writings and they are utterly traditionalist: ‘You have to like Gertrude Stein, you have to like Olson, you have to like Williams, you have to like a set of names, a sequence of names in a particular order, you have to have pretty much well-defined attitudes toward them, your own work has to relate to them in a certain way.’ What is that if not traditionalism? Just because it’s traditionalism based on people who in their lifetime were rebellious doesn’t make it any less traditionalist.

That’s where every school of thought begins. Of course it gets usurped by the academy.

Of course. What Eliot says is the canon is a game of musical chairs; there’s a certain number of chairs and the people sitting on them are members of the English canon and occasionally one gets up to go to the john and while he’s away someone else gets up and gabs his seat, so the canon does change but basically it’s a bunch of guys—mostly guys—sitting there.

An avant-garde is a rebellion, and an institutionalized rebellion is very questionable.

So do you feel like the contemporary poets who’ve emerged since the late Eighties and Nineties, who’ve been associated with the academy since their graduation from it, are trying to be a member of the avant-garde and uphold the spirit of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets?

It’s as if the avant-garde has mutated. It’s been peculiarly sapped of content.

Since academic-creative writing has been so marginalized from the popular/visible it may seem to have become the revolutionary groundwork.

Look, as a Marxist, I have to say this: people have to work, they have to make money, and what else can a poet do in this society but teach? But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep a hard critical eye on what your doing with regard to the ideological limitations imposed by the system you’re working in.

I want to talk about the poetic mainstream. Think of a poet like Jack Gilbert, who writes wonderful poetry. Think of the poets who do have names, who people read, like Billy Collins, like Hicok, like Sharon Olds. What I said a moment ago is literally true of them; it’s just the private world.

I’m old enough to remember the Vietnam War, and people like Denise Levertov, Robert Bly, and W.S. Merwin tried to write anti-war poems. Interestingly, Merwin’s are the most successful I think. There’s just a few of them and they’re very interesting. He’s a cagey, interesting poet, but Denise Levertov’s and Robert Bly’s, for the most part, are garbage. Why? Because they’re trying to deal with large scale realities—the motivations, the feelings the choices of people in the mass—with a language that is entirely personal, that denies the mass, that ignores the mass. They’re trying to speak suddenly no longer just for themselves or some aspect of themselves, but for the whole. And they don’t have the language to do it in.

What time, then, held the most fertile language for that purpose?

Ah! The Romantics. Shelly. Remember, it’s very interesting: Shelly was born in 1792, he was barely thirty when he died. He comes to poetic maturity when (a) the Revolution has transmuted into Napoleon’s dictatorship and (b) Napoleonic France has become this big imperial and repressive power and (c) it’s been defeated. So he is beginning to write, in the mid-1810’s with Keats, amidst the ruin of the hopes of the French Revolution. At one point Shelly refers to himself as “the last fly of a scattered swarm.” And whats interesting is that many poets since then, no matter their style, have been able to think of themselves that way, very accurately, the way I think of myself as the last fly of a scattered storm. Kenneth Rexroth: his great poem “For Eli Jacobson” was written in the 1950’s to an old activist-leftist friend of his. And he refers to them both, in effect, as the last flies of a scattered storm. Modern poets with any political concern write in the midst of the ruin of their political hopes. At the end of Prometheus Unbound, Shelly states a kind of slogan: “To hope, til hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”

It sounds like you’re saying at that period, when everything was so unstable and seemingly hopeless there was a great influx in impression and passion. So if we … do you think we’re still in the post-modern period of poetry?

You know, I hate the word “post-modern.” I hate the whole concept. Look—and I hope I don’t sound too much like a traditionalist or a pedantic, but—what, as far as Keats and Shelly are concerned, are they writing?–they’re writing modern poetry for the 1810s. By the 1830s and 1840s, the word “Romanticism” exists, and the word has been more or less agreed upon to describe the art, the painting, the music, the poetry, the novels, even, of the age. Mendelssohn, writing his Walpurgisnacht in the 1840s; a conductor said, “Ah, Mendelssohn, it is a masterpiece of Romanticism,” and Mendelssohn was pleased. So: Romanticism is a good word to describe what everyone from Hugo to Shelly was doing. But “Modernism,” notice a difference, there’s something wrong with the term. What does it mean? You have to do a hell of a lot of research on stuff outside of art to understand it. And “post-Modernism” is ridiculous! All it means is that we’re not doing exactly what our parents and grandparents did, we’re doing something else. But what? … The truth is, if you make a distinction between style and content, if you make a distinction between the prevailing ideology of art and its style, we are all still Romantics. Romanticism never ended.

The really big change came at the end of the eighteenth century, beginning of the nineteenth century: the sudden valuation of the individual, the positive value given to individual vision rather than to official public values and morals. The changes that have taken place over the past hundred years have been primarily changes in style. The degree to which those changes in style imply a profound shift in viewpoint is another issue. Do not assume that a change in style per se means a change in viewpoint. The thing about American poetry is that it’s an American product, and the thing about Americans is that (a) they don’t like to think in historical terms, (b) they like to think in technical terms, they like tinkering, they like machinery, (c) they like to think in terms of a quick fix, (d) they like to think that a technical change is a profound change (“the new hottest, latest thing;” “the new hottest, latest style …”). In other words, we over-valuate style and stylistic change; we put far too much weight and emphasis on it at the expense of thinking about what we are really doing as artists. And what one is really doing as an artist has to do with one’s relationship to a content and one’s implicit view of the self in relation to a content.

So where does that leave contemporary poetry? Does the Academy as the biggest, best funded, and near-only vehicle for poetry leave contemporary poets with a stability and comfort that the Romantics lacked and thus benefited from?

Picture this: pseudo avant-garde over “here,” and then “this” huge mainstream … I read a lot when I was young. So lets go back to when I was fourteen, 1960. In 1960 there were two anthologies that came out: Donald Hall’s anthology New Poets of England and America and Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry. These two anthologies were at war with one another, they represented diametrically opposed views of what poetry was. Donald Allen published Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Kerouac, Lou Welsh, the beat poets, Charles Olson, surrealists, they even had a couple of Jack Spicer poems in there whose now the daddy of the post-modernists. That’s where I came in. I was really turned on by Ginsberg and the beat poets. I like to say I was born at an awkward time, I was too young to be a beatnik and I was too old to be a hippy.

There was the Black Mountain School, people following Olson. Robert Duncan, who I’ve been re-reading recently and quite like was associated with them and he starts his own thing, the Berkeley Renaissance. There’s the Beats, there’s the Deep Image School around Bly. All of these schools had their little magazines, they had their manifestos, they could clearly distinguish themselves—at least stylistically, from what other poets were doing. They had their favorite past masters, their “traditions,” although they would not have used the word. Now, in contemporary poetry, fifty years later, there’s been this homogenization. There are these two big, vague groups: the so-called Avant-Garde (a thing that calls itself an avant-garde) and then the Mainstream. As far as the Mainstream is concerned, it’s just poetry.

Who is in the Mainstream?

[Billy] Collins … Everybody to the right of Ashbery. Really, can you even say that [Ashbery] isn’t a Mainstream poet? He’s gotten himself into the Library of America.

So being in the Mainstream is chalked up to visibility.

It’s a question of visibility, exactly. But there is this assumption of writing about the private life. The people who are popular, whose work you can be sure you’ll see in the New Yorker, in the Atlantic, the big middle-brow magazines tend to be sentimental, jokey, and highly subjectivistic. Does this mean they’re bad? Is Charles Simic bad? No, not necessarily bad at all. What they do, they do quite adequately. What they do is not very ambitious. I’m ambitious. But my ambitions have primarily to do with the content I want to consider.

Your content revolves around a lot of paranoia like the CCTVs in London, certain American values like over consumption and social media—which in fact provides an interesting contention to the idea of the “private life” we see in so many Mainstream poems. I wonder why the most visible poetry is talking a step back from those big topics when they seem to be the most pressing presently. Could it be that the news covers them quite expansively already?

News covers it as news, not as art.

What keeps your books from being published in that case?

[Deep sighs] Obviously, anything I say about my career or lack of one has to be taken with a big grain of salt: I’m sure that any editor who sends me a rejection slip and puts me in a depression that ruins my afternoon—or even week—unless I fight it would say something totally different than what I’m going to say. And I’m pretty sure that they would answer in terms of style.

That it’s not field-driven, or all-over-the-place [physically, visually]. That seems to be the aesthetic we’re in. You’re too neat.

Focused, I would say.

I really don’t like Jorie Graham. She deals with her very small-scale immediate responses to things, as if they were important. And, the fact that her words scatter all over the page, that traditional syntax goes out the window, that there are these half-lists, half-enumerations, half-insights, half-epiphanies that don’t immediately connect—this is supposed to make her poetry radical and new.

There is one basic kind of poetry being written now, because for the most part, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, despite Jaques Derrida, despite their post-structuralist denigration of the idea of the self, the authorial self, their idea that narrative per se, even syntax per se, is oppressive, or male or white or whatever, didn’t write about anything. What do they write about? You read long poems by people like Bernstein and it’s petty, personal bullshit. It’s stuff from their daily lives. Sure, it’s hard to get to, it’s hard to figure out what they’re talking about, it’s filled with all sorts of off-the-wall associations … Susan Howe, who was regarded as such a cold intellectual—there’s one book of her’s, Souls of the Labadie Tract, that I saw a point to, but the rest of it … A personal association, a free association, is important, is valid poetic subject matter just because it is stylistically explosive and not immediately accessible. It’s a shell game, it’s a con. People write about that private world. I try to write about the world. There is an “I” that comes in, often that “I” is not me, but even when it is me, it is a lightening rod for large-scale social forces, for political forces. What really interests me is the interface, the membrane, the front, between the historical/social/political and the subjective/psychological/biographical. That’s where things happen. Reality is one thing. The truth, as Hegel said, is the whole. And reality contains politicians, ecological catastrophe, the finitude of the universe, habitable planets, the day-to-day self, the most intimate fantasies and intimate unsuspected dimensions of the personal self—all one thing. One should be able to write about the whole, not about this little comfortable ghetto. Now when I say a “comfortable ghetto”–Sharon Olds had a miserable childhood. Many Mainstream poety write about personal suffering. They can say, “It’s not a comfortable ghetto.” But intellectually is it comfortable. No one can prove you wrong. And a lot of the appeal of many of these people is not sophisticated, not mature, not fully civilized—and I mean that in a very strict sense: it doesn’t make use of knowledge of what has happened in literature. People read somebody like Sharon Olds and they say, “Oh, I’ve been there. Oh, I can relate to that. I had an experience just like that.” Or Collins can write a humorous description of suburban life and people will go, “Oh, I recognize that, I’ve been there.”

John Berger says in one of his novels, and he always thinks in painting, “Real painters paint for heroes.” And when there are no heroes, we experiment, we do studies—that what Abstraction amounts to, just testing things on the palate—but we’re waiting for the heroes to emerge.