In Time

by C K Williams

  PART II

  Answerings

  Interview Excerpts

  For the last decades, I’ve participated in a good number of interviews. Several years ago I was approached about publishing a book of them, which seemed like a good idea, but when I began to read through them again, I realized they were a bit repetitive. This probably shouldn’t be surprising: there are only so many questions that can be asked of anyone, and given that the respondent will necessarily have only so much experience, and so many ideas up his or her sleeve, interviews generally suffer from this problem.

  Considering this, it came to me to cull the interviews and to excerpt responses that seemed to have had some meaning on their own, either in themselves or as records of my progress through a life in poetry, and to omit the rest of the hill of words from the originals as they were published in journals or, in the case of several that were never published, in manuscripts. This entailed a great deal of editing and frank rewriting, so much so that by now the excerpts often bear little similarity to the original responses. For one thing, they almost all take place in 2009 and 2010, when I polished them. I hope I haven’t offended any of my interlocutors by this, and I remain grateful to them all for their interest in what I might have had to say in the first place.

  The final revisions for the excerpts were done over a period of time in 2010 and 2011. The opinions and attitudes in them have been pretty much brought up to those dates, that is to say, to the moment I’m closing this book down. Because of the variety of subjects, and the period of time over which the interviews occurred, I’ve decided to list them alphabetically by titles that seemed to suit the sections.

  I would like to thank the following for their part in the original conversations: Greg Conley and Toriell Finch, Tishani Doshi, Alan Fox, David Gewanter, Jeffrey Greene, Edward Hirsch, Lynn Keller, Collin Kelley, Brandon Massey, Efe Murat, Sanford Pinsker, Alan Riding, Alan Shapiro, Peter Sirr, Alan Soldovsky, Christian Teresi, and Ahren Warner.

  AN AMERICAN SCENE

  I don’t really think it’s possible to talk about an “American scene” in poetry. Of course, if you get far enough away from anything, you can characterize it anyway you’d like—you might speak of European or Asian poetry, but only if you don’t really know anything about them.

  I feel that way about American poetry now: it’s just too complex to generalize about in any meaningful way. We’re in a time of terrific stylistic variety, everything from poems that root themselves firmly in different traditions of English-American poetic history, to performance or slam poetry, to the several self-consciously “avant-garde” movements; and there are different casts to the poems from different regions of the country. America’s a huge place, with a terrifically heterogeneous society; it’s perhaps surprising that there aren’t an even greater number of different poetic styles being written.

  Even the language in which our poetry is written is a complicated issue. Certainly one thing American poets would seem to share is language, but that isn’t always the case. There are a number of African American and Hispanic American poets who write in what are in some ways separate and unique languages, with their own poetic needs, and if sometimes their work isn’t appreciated sufficiently by the larger poetic community, this has nothing to do with its validity. The work isn’t written for the “mainstream” culture at all—it has its own poetic conventions and its own audience.

  Historically, I suppose there might have been a time, in the nineteenth century, when American poetry could have been characterized as a more or less cohesive phenomenon, but once Whitman’s work begins to take effect and the imagists arrive, and the modernists, then the whole thing rather wonderfully explodes.

  BISHOP

  I have to confess that for a long time I didn’t understand what the fuss was about Bishop; her work just didn’t get to me. Then one day I was in a library waiting for my son to find a book, and there was a paperback of Geography III on a table. I picked it up and almost fell over with the force of it. It’s so strange how that happens.

  The other night I was talking about Bishop with a friend who’s a great poet, and he said he doesn’t care at all for her work. I was very surprised, read aloud some what I think are undeniable passages to him—among them that wonderful epistemological section from “In the Waiting Room,” which always knocks me down—but he didn’t hear her voice at all, still found it all rather blah. And of course I could understand, since for a long time I’d felt the same way: here’s somebody using ordinary language in rather ordinary ways to talk about ordinary things, so what’s the big deal?

  When I did realize how unique and powerful her work is and attached to her—if that’s the term—I read her every day for years. It was during the time I was writing Tar in which I can see quite clearly her influence, and I still keep going back to her from time to time now. Her purity of vision, the absolute rightness of her figures and the precision of her details never ceases to amaze me and, of course, many other poets along with me. Her subtle use of language rhythms is remarkable, and I’m also often struck by the analytic rigor in her work, the way she dissects perceptions and emotions and ideas so deftly you hardly notice that she’s doing it.

  CHANGE

  In retrospect, I think the change between my second and third books, I Am the Bitter Name and With Ignorance, was driven by a combination of despair in my personal life, dissatisfaction with the identity I’d made for myself as a poet, and, naturally, by the poems I’d been writing. The assumptions I’d made in the first books about the ways to express my emotions and thoughts I realize now were, if not naïve, then certainly unreasonable. I wrote I Am the Bitter Name during the war in Vietnam, a time of great social upheaval in general, and I’d come to believe—I guess it was a part of the common mind then—that poetry could be a direct agent of social progress. But after awhile I finally had to admit to myself, perhaps not quite consciously, that poetry might be a “direct” factor in anything at all was presumptuous—more than presumptuous. I wouldn’t say I felt I’d been wrong about trying to be an active agent of the changes in society I hoped for—dreamed of—but I certainly did feel much more uncertain about the possibility of my poetry, or of any poetry, actually having that kind of effect.

  At the same time, the social and political conflicts that I had perceived and the attempt I’d made in my poems to link them to my own inner turbulence—and to investigate what in myself had a connection to the deeper causes of social injustice—still seemed to me to be valid. My assumption had been that everyone had an inner life that was much like mine and that there were also only a limited number of ways to look at public reality. And I’d come to feel that I had to investigate what was between one’s own psychological, particularly psychosexual, needs and the public manifestation of those needs that drive everyone in a society. I felt the poet’s task was to try live consciously in that realm, to work to clarify it in oneself, because if you could help other people see what was in them, it might allow them to understand how the external world really worked in relation to themselves, which would presumably persuade them to change that world.

  When I began to write in a more discursive, expansive style, I still believed all that, still felt that those were the areas of my responsibility. But I think I came to see that to be too overt about it was counterproductive, that you couldn’t demand that kind of change, because the attempt could be perceived as a kind of attack on the reader: you were demanding that the reader change. The implication that if a poem is read properly the reader will change isn’t only rather absurd but wildly presumptuous.

  In the poems I wrote after that, the impulse towards social change was, and probably still is, a part of my intentions, but I, or the poems, came to work under the assumption that the best way to try to change people was not to let them know you were. My feelings about that, too, have undergone a great deal of evolution over the years, but my initial and probably abiding impulse was to try to make the evidence for change I was p
resenting more complete, more comprehensive, and to make the injunction (if that’s the word) to change less obvious, gentler, more subliminal.

  That would describe how I conceived the tasks of my work over a number of years, but since then I’ve again changed what I ask of my poems. I’ve become more directly concerned with form in poetry, and with beauty, although I certainly still feel that it’s one of the central responsibilities of poetry to engage in the conflict between the public and the private, between obliviousness and injustice.

  CHANGE, AGAIN

  Change and development are rather elusive concepts and can seem particularly seductive when you are applying them to yourself. We’re always supposed to be evolving, developing, and our great fear is that the only progress we’re actually making is through time, from one end of our time on earth to the other.

  Still, the pure accumulation of experience counts for something—all the mistakes you make that at least you might not make again. And it can seem you’ve accumulated some craft, although one of the paradoxes of being an artist is that you have to beware of becoming too deft in one’s art, too fluent, because then you can be speaking with a portion of the soul that doesn’t reach far enough into the true quandaries and mysteries with which we’re confronted.

  At a certain time in my life I found Machado’s statement that “in order to write a poem you have to invent a poet to write it” desperately useful, because I knew well, and was uneasy about knowing, that in fact I was making someone up, a poet, with my name, whom I had only the vaguest hope would someday find congruence with the person I knew I actually was. But that all calms down after awhile, thank goodness. You seem to have to check in at the identity bank a little less often. Maybe it’s just one of the benefits of middle age: that whatever you’ve made of yourself, it’s too late to change it.

  CHILDREN

  The discrepancy between what everybody on earth feels for their own children, and those close to them, and the way our social organizations actually deal with children can be depressing, even tormenting. When I had my first child, it was such an overwhelming experience, that I naturally tried to write about it. This was during the Vietnam War, when children were being killed almost before your eyes, and I came to feel that the welfare of children should be the primary determinant in any political organization. I still do. These vulnerable creatures are in the most profound sense our most precious possessions; they’re greater than us because they have the potential by knowing what we know to be more than we’ve been. It was inconceivable to me then, and still is, that such an obvious fact shouldn’t have a much larger effect than it does.

  At the same time, I don’t regard children as evidence of our lost innocence. Although I think children are pure, I don’t believe they’re particularly innocent. I’m a Freudian in this: I think children have the same motivational apparatus we do, the same psychic organization. I certainly don’t have any particular longing to be a child again, nor do I think anything is lost by becoming an adult. Unless, of course, you become a neurotic adult, which many of us do, at least for a time.

  In some essential way we split in two when we become adults, we’re the actor and audience of our lives in a way we almost never are as children, and much of the suffering of adolescence and early adulthood surely has to do with this division that becoming an adult entails. All at once we possess a self who experiences and a self who experiences the experiencing. The child isn’t afflicted with this, or only in a rudimentary way. It’s not very useful to long towards the undivided self of the childhood, though I relished beholding it in my own children and, now, in my grandchildren.

  CIVILIZING

  When I was doing the translation of Sophocles’s Women of Trachis, I became convinced that it’s really about civilization, about the moment at which humans become civilized—what Norbert Elias called “the civilizing process.” Sophocles’s play is the enactment of just that process. Herakles is the pivotal figure; he’s from the world of precivilization, but he’s the agent of civilization. He’s the civilizer, yet he never really quite civilizes himself. I’ve always been fascinated with that phenomenon as it occurs in the individual. Freud calls it the relation between the id and the ego or the id and the superego. One of the abiding themes of my adult consciousness has been the struggle between instinct and reason, if you would call it reason and if you’d call it instinct—I’m not sure either term in fact is adequate.

  The other thing that intrigued me about doing the translations was that when I was a kid my father used to tell me bedtime stories, and my favorites were the labors of Hercules, and so the play had an intimate meaning for me as well.

  COMING TO TERMS

  I don’t myself find any hint in my work that I’m readier to accept the horrors of the world than I ever was, and I certainly don’t see how anyone these days could be less “idealistic,” if that means clear-eyed, about justice and injustice, given that we’ve had a crash course over the last years in every variety of it. Still, maybe there is, if not resignation, then something like exhaustion about it all; perhaps I’ve resorted more to irony than I used to, and perhaps I’ve sometimes expressed a kind of resigned futility about so many aspects of the great struggles we’re involved in against power and its abuses, but my indignation and despair certainly haven’t flagged.

  Sometimes, to tell the truth, all the terrible crises that seem about to overwhelm civilization feel just too much for me, and it can seem not only futile but self-destructive to maintain that level of passion. I find often lately I just can’t bear to hear any more of the details about global warming, environmental disaster, the apparent trajectory America’s been on towards an executive branch bent on totalitarianism, even if it still wears the guise of legislative democracy, which it hardly has been lately. We never consider what might have come to pass if Iraq hadn’t been such a disaster: what if the Bush administration had been able to claim, and demonstrate, that it had “won” the war? How much more power would Cheney and Bush have demanded and, certainly with the lapdog Congress they had for most of their reign, achieved?

  Of course America isn’t the only bad example. It becomes clearer and clearer to me over the years that the basic issue about justice and injustice is power, pure and simple. It’s about those who desire, and attain, and possess power against the rest of us, demanding we die for them, make them wealthy, put them beyond our influence. I’m in much more of a state of something like despair about all of this than I was when I started writing—a state of hopelessness about human beings being able to achieve any but the most fleeting states of justice or, rather, non-injustice. Perhaps my recent poems demonstrate that. Perhaps in those earlier poems of rage and despair there were elements of hope that now have transmogrified to at best states of . . . if not resignation, then something approaching blindness, forgetfulness, at best disattention.

  The old question of what poetry has to do with any of this remains ever alive. I may have actually believed, in my earliest political passions, that poetry could change things, that anything could change things. God, that seems so naïve now, so innocent, so . . . Well, I have to say admirable, jejune but finally admirable.

  At the same time, wherever I picked it up, however little it might mean, I still believe that if my poetry is going to have any value, to me if to no one else, it has to strive for and hopefully embody truth—truths. It’s odd to realize, as one has to at some point, that poetry can seem to have no particular interest in truth, but when I look closely at the poems I admire, now or from any period, they all, to one degree or another, are fervently involved in finding out the truth. Perhaps that’s what makes a certain portion of the poetry that’s being written by young poets now difficult for me to respond to: because their poems are given over so completely to the irony I was speaking about before, there’s nothing else left. What remains is a world colored deeply by a surrealistic irrationality, a rejection of connection and of consequences. It can seem to be a kind of playground game so
ng, sometimes very beautiful, as children singing is always sort of beautiful, but without the resonance that the philosophical, moral belief in possible truth rings in great poems.

  CONFESSIONAL POETRY

  I have mixed feelings about the term, and at least in some ways about the poets who enact it, although there aren’t really all that many poets for whom the word is just. When the term began to be used, it seems to me there were really only three confessional poets of any note: Sexton, Plath, and Lowell. Berryman is sometimes included in the group, but I don’t think he really fits—I’d say he wasn’t so much a confessional poet as a poet of narcissism. The great “Dream Songs,” the first seventy-seven, seem hardly at all confessional—the personal matter in them is so outweighed by the artifice of the poetry—but when he kept on with the poems, writing those few hundred more, he allowed his great artifice to flag, the poems became self-indulgent, and the confessional element in the poems, I suppose, more prominent.

  Lowell’s confessionalism, if we can call it that, can trouble me in a different way. He’s been very important for me over the years; I’ve gone through periods when his work has been a model for me, at least in its technique, but his injudicious use of his own and his unscrupulous use of other people’s lives has bothered me. When he was incorporating Elizabeth Hardwick’s letters to him in poems, in some cases really making poems more or less directly from them, Bishop objected, and I agree with her. There are aesthetic and moral issues in all of this. Besides the question of a poet making significant poems (and Lowell certainly achieved that), there’s also the fact that because of your poetry, other people can value your life itself, beyond the poems, because they’ve been so effected by your work.