I’ve been reading – rereading mostly – interviews with poets from the early days of the Paris Review¹. Creeley, Kerouac, Olson, Williams, Marianne Moore. I’m just starting the one with Auden at the moment. I download the PDF file onto my Palm TX & carry it around with me wherever I go.

When I first read these interviews, in the libraries at SF State and UC Berkeley in the 1960s & in the journal itself pretty much up to the time when Tom Clark got fired as poetry editor & one no longer needed to read the Paris Review to find out what was going on any more – mostly because reading it no longer could tell you – I was still a pup insofar as poetry goes, trying to make sense of the tradition as it then existed, when the likes of Creeley & Ginsberg where the “new, young” poets according to more journals than just the Paris Review. I always knew that that couldn’t be true – they were both born the same year as my mother, a year before my dad. Nobody my parents’ age could possibly be “young.”

Reading the early interviews, in particular – Pound’s was published in 1962, Williams’ in ’64 – one is reminded of just how recent the form of the interview itself is, and how rapidly it’s evolved. Creeley’s 1968 interview, patched together from a session with Lewis Mac Adams & correspondence Linda Wagner-Martin, anticipates the evolution of the written interview conducted over email. In 1972, Auden refused to let his interview even tape record the session, insisting that he would remember anything worth writing down. The interviews by Donald Hall, Clark’s predecessor as poetry editor, are remarkable for watching a diligent but gentle soul coax anything out of writers in their seventies & eighties who clearly did not understand (nor trust) the form. I don’t know if we fully understand just how much what we think of the interview today is itself, if not exactly an invention of Donald Hall, certainly a form that found its first recognizable master in him. Pound, Williams, Moore are all difficult, diffident subjects, Moore perhaps most of all because she’s so sweet about it, taking him out to lunch but deciding not to wear her Nixon button – the piece was conducted on the Monday prior to the 1960 presidential election – because it would not match her outfit. Pound flat out lies about his involvements during World War 2.

We are now as far from the election of JFK as that event was from the start of the First World War. In 1914, Ezra Pound was still working for William Butler Yeats in London, H.D. had not yet met Bryher, Williams was still imitating Keats, James Joyce was just publishing Dubliners, Faulkner was a teenager, Zukofsky just 10, Moore was teaching at the Carlisle Indian School in South Central Pennsylvania, making faux Europeans out of children taken from their tribes, Russia was still ruled by the czar.

I think it’s hard for anyone in my generation to fathom just exactly how far we have come, as a species, as a nation, as a poetry community over the last 90 years. You can sense it in the interviews of the modernists especially: their idea of American literature is a scene about the size of the one we have in Philadelphia, maybe smaller, where everyone knew everyone pretty much, or at least of everyone – I surprised to discover that Moore didn’t actually meet Stevens until ’43. Asked if he reads younger poets, Pound concedes that “Cal Lowell” isn’t bad, but says nothing of the writers who actually took The Cantos as a project seriously, such as Olson. Hall tries to draw Moore out on her elusive literary politics by framing a question this way:

Louise Bogan said that The Dial made clear “the obvious division between American avant-garde and American conventional writing.” Do you think this kind of division continues or has continued? Was this in any way a deliberate policy?

As I read this, Hall is hoping Moore will challenge that division – the same impulse that later led him to recommend Tom Clark as his successor at the journal – but Moore, knowing New Yorker poetry editor Bogan’s commitments in this “obvious division,” dodges the question:

I think that individuality was the great thing. We were not conforming to anything. We certainly didn’t have a policy, except I remember hearing the word “intensity” very often. A thing must have “intensity.” That seemed to be the criterion.

That’s a response that echoes very differently, post-Althusser.

The Review is starting with its first decades and intends gradually to work its way to the present. Whether the present stands up to these interviews from the past may well depend on whether you think J.D. McClatchy, Geoffrey Hill, Richard Howard or Robert Bly to be the equals of Pound or Williams. In fact, it’s all information, part of the landscape & at least partly how American poetry got to where it is now. One thing that surely has changed, tho, is that poets today understand better what they’re getting into when they say yes to an interview. Kerouac’s alcoholic stupor, Auden’s ample self-regard or Olson caught between the bottle and the cancer that eventually would kill him, all are pretty much laid bare for all to see. The interviews are free (tho not all authors or estates have yet agreed to make them available online) & certainly worth a look.

 

¹ The site has been up & down the past few days.