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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
You are trying to pass this on to the adjuncts, the grad students. But you've also mentioned that the poets should do this themselves. How can they do that in a culture where the poetry that does exist comes out through pop music, hip-hop. How do the poets assert themselves?
Well, first of all, they better stop talking just to each other in those small groups of the like-minded. I used to like John Ashbery, for example, but he got addicted to critical adulation. Too many people want academic idolization. They want the prizes. I want the poets and all artists to address the general audience again: Stop addressing the like-minded true believers, cut out the partisan politics, stop thinking that the only people you can speak to are those who agree with you already. Writers and artists need to start addressing those who don't agree with them.
That's certainly what I do. I've won a very wide audience in that way. I listen to or monitor a huge range of opinion, including on talk radio, which I love. I want to understand how most people think! That's why I can communicate with large numbers of people. What's the secret? The secret is I cannot stand the coterie mentality, whether it's in downtown Manhattan or in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or in L.A. I cannot stand the cool in-group -- "We are the special people, we are the best people, everyone else is just rubes and hayseeds." Get over that! People who claim they're leftists and who have contempt for ordinary people and how they vote. I voted for Kerry and Clinton, but I don't look down on people who voted for Bush. I try to understand it.
The most recent poem in your book is the last one, Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock." Is there anyone more current who you look at and say, "There's a poet"?
No.
But hasn't there been a true revival of the spoken word since then? In rap and hip-hop...
Rap is not transferring well to the page -- though if I ever write a book on song lyrics, rap would certainly be in it. To get into this book, the lyrics had to transfer well. I invented this course at my school for musicians to develop their lyrics. I often would be disappointed when I would transfer lyrics from my favorite songs onto the page. My criterion for this book was that there has to be a kind of shapeliness to what a poem looks like on the page; there has to be a kind of visual that the reader gets. None of the arts are separate for me: They all feed each other. Visual arts, literary arts and music -- they're all mixed together for me. I think we've kind of lost that sense that there's a pleasure at looking at something on the page. For a poem to survive the cut in my book, it had to be pleasing every time I returned to it. Every time I went back to it, I had to see a visual vitality, I had to be drawn into it visually -- not just in terms of the content.
The controversial thing in the book is that many of the contemporary choices are completely unknown. I did not anticipate that when I started doing the book. The most famous poets of our time were listed in the original proposal for the book given the publisher, but when I actually gathered the material, I did not find the strong poems I was looking for.
Is there anyone you're surprised did not make the cut?
A whole series. Poets I heard reading in college who I thought would naturally be here -- A.R. Ammons, W.D. Snodgrass, John Berryman, John Ashbery, James Merrill -- just name after name. I couldn't get Ginsberg in, unfortunately; what I would have had to do was excerpt "Howl," and I just didn't think it was going to work. Auden -- I found virtually nothing that would work, and it astonished me. I didn't find an Auden poem that I felt I could endorse for the general reader and say, This poem will repay your constant rereading. Example after example -- Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, Denise Levertov. I was looking for sports poems, animal poems, war poems, antiwar poems. I was bitterly disappointed.
At the end of the introduction, you write: "I am uncertain about whether the West's chaotic personalism can prevail against the totalizing creeds that menace it. Hence it is critical that we reinforce the spiritual values of Western art, however we define them." It has a markedly a different note than "Sexual Personae," which is largely celebratory and optimistic about Western culture.
But no, actually. "Sexual Personae" is about decadence! -- the beautiful decadence of Western civilization. There I say I am a decadent, and I celebrate it, but I don't know how long the West is going to last. If our popular culture is equivalent to Hellenistic culture during the Roman republic and empire, I have no idea if we are going to last 50 years or 500 years. But there is no doubt that there is an end to every civilization, whether it's from some climatological disaster or invasion or something else. I mean, last December's tsunami showed everyone that my vision in "Sexual Personae" of nature was right -- that we just huddle here on the thin, brittle skin of the globe. Civilizations rise and fall. I'm saying it's time for us to reassess our conceptions of the West. In all its failings, the West has produced a great art tradition.
So I'm saying to the left: Stop bad-mouthing your own civilization; get over it, you little twerps. I'm saying to the religious far right: If we are defending Western civilization, as you claimed in the incursion into Iraq, then you'd better realize it's much more than Judeo-Christianity and the Bible. You'd better get real and accept that we have a Greco-Roman tradition of literature and art that started in 700 BC. And yes, some of it deals, quite frankly, with sex and the body; you must deal with it and allow students to deal with it, because that is part of the brilliant strength of our arts. I'm demanding that conservatives support the arts and that liberals stop being so snobby about art and quit celebrating art that is simply cheap sacrilege of other people's beliefs.
Artists have got to get back to studying art history and doing emotionally engaged art. Get over that tired postmodern cynical irony and hip posing, which is such an affliction in the downtown urban elite. We need an artistic and cultural revival. Back to basics!
