You Take Your Love Where You Get It !

Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing has been called “some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry.” Goldsmith is the author of eleven books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and the editor of I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for an opera, Trans-Warhol, that premiered in Geneva in 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, Sucking on Words, was first shown at the British Library that same year. In 2011, he was invited to read at President Obama’s “A Celebration of American Poetry” at the White House, where he also held a poetry workshop with First Lady Michelle Obama. Earlier this year, he began his tenure as the first-ever Poet Laureate of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

I recently sat down with Goldsmith to discuss his new book, Seven American Deaths and Disasters.

Since your practice emphasizes the value of the selection process over the creation process, how do you choose what to include and exclude from Seven American Deaths and Disasters?

I began with the assassination of JFK, which is arguably the beginning of media spectacle, as defined and framed by Warhol. His portrait of Jackie mourning iconizes that moment forever. Although he made Marilyn’ss, he never memorialized her death, thus it never entered into the realm of media spectacle in the same way. From JFK, I naturally proceeded to RFK, an eyewitness account of his shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It’s an incredible linguistic document—you really feel the newsman’s struggle to find words to describe what is unfolding before his eyes. John Lennon is taken from a cassette tape made by someone scanning the radio the night of and days following his assassination, which feels like an audio document from a lost time. Space Shuttle Challenger is from a TV broadcast of the event and its long, weird, silent aftermath. Columbine is straight transcript of a harrowing 911 call. The World Trade Center, the longest piece in the book, is from several sources—talk radio, news radio, color commentary—stitched together into a multichapter epic, thus mirroring the gargantuan scale of the event. And Michael Jackson is from a catty FM station, where the shock jocks have no problem cracking jokes and making racist comments at his expense.

I wish there were air checks available from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but in those cases, the media doesn’t show up until well after the assassination and the reporting is pretty slick stuff, lacking the struggle to find words to express the horrors that they were witnessing. I do have a great transcript from the shooting of Ronald Reagan, but it’s mostly Secret Service men talking to each other in numerical code, which just didn’t fit in well with the other, more transparently textual pieces.

Sadly, new material keeps on coming. I heard the language of the Newtown shootings in a very different way after having written this book.

This book feels both like an important historical document and a beautiful example of what the Great American Novel might look like today. Yet you identify it, and much of your other work, as poetry. I’m curious why that particular genre is so important to you?

I suppose that the work has become more novelistic as time’s gone on, but when I started down this path some twenty years ago, it was only the poets and the poetry world that could accept what I did. So I hung out with them. You take your love where you get it. But you’re right, I’ve never really written a poem—I don’t think I’d know how to. Yet there’s some sort of openness in the poetry world concerning writing that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere. Some of the Language poets, in particular, sort of blew apart notions of prescriptive lineation in favor of margin-to-margin madness. I’m thinking of works like Ron Silliman’s Tjanting.

As with many of your projects, I notice that time, duration, and history seem rather significant to this book, especially in terms of the tension created between our personal and cultural experiences of chronology. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how Seven American Deaths and Disasters intersects these issues.

These are all tragedies I lived through, so each one is tied to very specific memories and periods in my life. You could say that we are defined by these tragedies—and more so by the spectacle emanating from them. But it’s curious to see who is moved differently when I do readings of this work. For younger people, the Kennedys are cold, distant historical figures while Michael Jackson grabs all the heat. And vice versa for the older people, who tend to write Jackson off as a joke. As a result, the book—although based on objective public events—is read and strained through one’s unique subjectivity.

Following Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman’s claim in Notes on Conceptualisms that “failure is the goal of conceptual writing,” in what ways do you see Seven American Deaths and Disasters succeeding in failure?

I’m not sure I agree with this statement. I prefer the definition made by Peli Grietzerhere, when he claimed that conceptual writing can be evaluated by an “aesthetic of sufficiency.” In order to succeed, a book must simply fulfill its requirements—no more, no less. If I set out to, say, retype a day’s issue of The New York Times, and I actually do just that, then the book is a success. But if I begin to get “creative” with the text, and I overdo it, the book fails. Likewise, if I skimp on the task—omitting certain portions of the text—the book also fails. But if I accomplish what I set out to do, the book is a success.

Regarding your aversion to “getting creative with the text,” could you clarify what you mean in terms of your perspective on the boundary between “creative” and “uncreative” writing?

Creativity is about the most worn-out, abused concept that used to mean something remarkable, something that differentiated someone, something that made them special. It’s a term that’s been usurped by the creative class, by people like Richard Florida, and reduced to a base concept that has come to stand for the opposite of creativity: mediocre, middle-of-the-road, acceptable, unadventurous, and so forth—so that creativity is no longer creative. What was once creative is now uncreative.

Calling a practice uncreative is to reenergize it, opening creativity up to a whole slew of strategies that are in no way acceptable to creativity as it’s now known. These strategies include theft, plagiarism, mechanical processes, repetition. By employing these methods, uncreativity can actually breathe life into the moribund notion of creativity as we know it.

Of course modernisms used these strategies, and they were proven fairly resistant to co-optation by mainstream culture. So you’re starting to see a lot of these inverted terms emerge in order to describe various attempts to reenvision cultural production—like Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius and Against Expression, the title of the anthology of conceptual writing that I edited with Craig Dworkin.

I’ve noticed that you often cite Brion Gysin’s quip about writing being fifty years behind painting. If it’s safe to say writing is now in its conceptualist stage, what can we expect next in terms of postconceptualist poetic practices?

You can map this out if you look at the historical precedents of the art world. Following the period of high, pure Conceptualism and Minimalism—Judd, LeWitt, et cetera—you get counterreactions that at once reify and violate the first generation’s precepts. The LeWitt-ian grid, for instance, gets wrapped in cloth, creating a soft grid. Later, people start to hang objects off that soft grid, bringing in notions of narrative and subjectivity. After a while, it gets so covered that you lose the grid entirely, thus clearing the way for other types of discourses.

If we extend this into a post-Conceptual narrative for writing—and I’m not sure it’s such a one-to-one correspondence—we see younger writers melding rigorous strategies with kitschy and ironic texts in works such as Andy Sterling’s Supergroup, which is 426 pages of nothing but listings of sidemen and engineers from forgotten LPs. Another example would be Steven Zultanski’s Agony, in which he performs insanely complicated mathematical equations and applies them to absurd propositions like how many average-size breasts stacked on top of one another it would take to get to the height of the Burj Khalifa. For years, Kim Rosenfield has been constructing quirky, hard-to-categorize texts from appropriated material. She puts it together in ways that are not explicitly process-based, leaving a lot to whim and taste. I think these are all ways the discourse is moving forward. If you want to get a glimpse into the future of this discourse, have a look at the sites of the young online publishers of this sort of work, Gauss PDF and the Troll Thread Collective, which are full of next-generation works.

And for you, any idea what’s next or where your work is headed?

For the past eight years, I have been working on Capital, a rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project set in New York City in the twentieth century. As of today, the book is about seven hundred pages, nearly three-quarters of the way to the thousand-plus pages that constitutes Benjamin’s book. The idea is to use Benjamin’s identical methodology in order to write a poetic history of New York City in the twentieth century, just as Benjamin did with Paris in the nineteenth. Thus, I have taken each of his original convolutes, and, reading through the entire corpus of literature written about New York in the twentieth century, I have taken notes and selected what I consider to be the most relevant and interesting parts, sorting them into sheaves identical to Benjamin’s. It’s an impossible project, and if it ever is published—I have my doubts that, due to size and copyright issues, it’s publishable at all—I’ll be sixty-five before I see it in print.

(Interview was taken by Christopher Higgs for theparisreview.org)

I Was Supposed To Be A Funny Poet !

Amy Lawless

On the refrigerator of poet Amy Lawless' East Village apartment are a picture of her nephew, a photo-booth strip of friends, a small chart of this year's moon cycle, and a postcard that reads, "Don't Worry About Death." With a bold, femme-luxe style that might recall Miranda July, Lena Dunham, or Amy Sedaris, these subtly mystic, sentimental bits and pieces befit the writer. Her new book of poetry, My Dead, marks a departure from the more humorous work that can be found in her debut, 2008's Noctis Licentia. Lawless was the 2011 recipient of New York Foundation of the Arts' prestigious award for poetry, and was recently picked up by Octopus Books.

My Dead delves into the process of mourning loved ones with Lawless' calm, characteristically non-melodramatic poise. She cites videos of elephant mourning rituals seen on the Internet as a main source of inspiration. While humor might have been used to subvert heavier topics in the past, she chooses control and intimate dissection this time around. Lawless will be heading out on the "Sex and Death" tour with fellow Octopus writer James Gendron, with a reading at Goodbye Blue Monday in Brooklyn today. In preparation for her book's release, she sat down with us to discuss her creative development and how it all started with a hatred of peas.

RYANN DONNELLY: Where did you grow up?

AMY LAWLESS: I grew up in Boston—this area called Roslindale. Do you know Boston at all?

DONNELLY: I only know what would be in approximation to the music venue, The Middle East.

LAWLESS: Oh, I have a reading there Thursday! So, I went to this high school called Boston Latin, which is for nerds. You have to take some test to get in there. It's the oldest public high school in the country. And, then I went to Boston University. I didn't leave until I started grad school in New York at The New School.

DONNELLY: When did you start writing poetry?

LAWLESS: I wrote my first poem when I was eight years old. There was this children's magazine called Cricket Magazine, and my mom got me to enter this contest where you could write about your favorite, or least favorite food. I was sort of contrarian; I didn't want to write about anything I liked. But I really hated peas. So, I wrote this one-line poem: Peas cannot be eaten with ease. And, my mom said, "Keep writing it!" And, I was like... "No."

She asked, "What about a title?" "No," I said, "That's the poem." So, we sent it into the magazine, and I won Honorable Mention. They give you this little certificate, and it was framed and put in my room. It became kind of significant, actually, because there was this thing in my room throughout my childhood and teen years saying, "You are a poet." And, my parents respected that, and would no longer make me eat peas, which meant that I could impact my life by writing a poem. This was empowering on some level. My sister still had to eat peas. So, it was always in my head that I was a poet.

DONNELLY: Were there poets on your radar at that time that you wanted to be like?

LAWLESS: I never really thought about what somebody's life would be like if they were a poet. I just thought of them as "super famous people." Like [Henry Wadsworth] Longfellow. We had this anthology of children's poetry, and all these illustrated books that were very poetic. Most of the poems I heard when I was a kid were rhymed poems. Longfellow and [Edgar Allan] Poe. Robert Frost, too.

DONNELLY: What is your writing process like?

LAWLESS: I talk about this with my friends that also write poetry, and we notice that if we don't write for awhile, we get kind of grumpy. I don't have a particular process, but its usually I'll just be in my room, sometimes just sitting at my desk, and I'll have Microsoft Word open, and there's something on my mind—ideas or images or a character. But, the most fun I've had lately writing poems is while watching Planet Earth episodes. I like to multi-task. I like to watch a movie and be on my phone and writing. I do well in that chaos. Like, if my life has five windows open at once, I can soften the other four, but they're still there.

DONNELLY: Do you regiment yourself about when you're going to write?

LAWLESS: If I haven't written something in a week, I make sure I have time for it. Lately I've been writing prose as well, and that usually has to be first thing in the morning. I don't feel like I have to do it every day, though.

DONNELLY: What was the editing process like for you? Some of this was done during a trip to Colorado, correct? What was it like to work outside the New York environment?

LAWLESS: The two editors that took the lead in editing my book were Mathias Svalina and Alisa Heinzman. Mathias lives in Denver, and I happened to be going to visit two poet friends, Maggie Wells and Dan Hoy, for New Year's Eve, so it made sense for Mathias and I to meet up and go over the edits when I was out there, as opposed to doing a three-to-five-hour-long Skype conversation. It was a really empowering process because I had never had such an attentive editorial experience. Mathias is a brilliant poetry editor, and it felt like those little crazy things you think in your head about your words are validated by this person who is not crazy. It became clear that these are things we all think about. Being able to have that conversation was so exciting. And I guess one of my blind spots is putting together a poetry manuscript. When I first gave it to them, the sections were all different. I had made choices, but in working with them, it became whole.

DONNELLY: Were there thematic adjustments that came out of editing the structure?

LAWLESS: Yeah. I write so many different kinds of poems—funny or scatological or whatever. There were certain poems that just didn't fit My Dead. My Dead is a book that is mostly concerned with death, and things swimming around that topic. There were certain poems that were really funny that just didn't speak to that. That was the other thing that Mathias was good at pointing out in a very kind way. That goes over so much better when you're in the room with someone than when you see a Microsoft Word comment next to something that's like, "Meh."

DONNELLY: Can you expand on what we can expect from My Dead?

LAWLESS: It was written in four sections. Two of the sections are long poem sequences. "Elephants in Mourning" I wrote after a few of my relatives had died—three in a year and a half. I sort of hadn't dealt with it for a variety of reasons. One day I was just home watching YouTube videos of elephant mourning rituals, and it moved me so completely, because they remind you of humans keening and mourning. Suddenly, I felt so overwhelmed with my own personal loss. I just wrote the whole "Elephants in Mourning"—a 17- page poem—in a day. It took me a year to edit it, but that was the first piece.

There's this other piece called "The Skull Behind My Face," which is about last summer when I was super poor, and I had to move, and I felt like I had no control. I was like, "What am I doing? I'm a poet living in New York, and I can't afford my rent." And, I became incredibly afraid of dying. There's so much I want to do. I want to fall in love, and who knows, maybe have a baby someday. I want to go to one job every day, go to the beach, and see all these parts of the world. If I die right now, or if I die tomorrow... that's going to be a big problem." It became all I could think about. I couldn't sleep.

DONNELLY: Was it a depressing feeling, or were you motivated by it?

LAWLESS: It was both; it was like this soft-core mix. I didn't know what to do about it. Just crossing the street became this thing. I didn't really adjust my behavior, but I was sort of depressed and anxious. So I just started writing. I wrote this long poem that was originally called "Hydrangea." It was summertime, and I think I really wanted male human contact, also. And I sort of distracted myself from my fear of death. Then one day my phone rang, and it was Zachary Schomburg from Octopus Books, he was like, "Hey, Amy. Is My Dead being published?" And, I was like [assumes a drab, pathetic voice], "No." Meanwhile, I was staring at dead flowers while I'm on the phone with him. And he asked if he could publish the book, and I was like, "Yeah! Of course!" And, suddenly the fear of death was quieted by the idea of having a book come out. I mean, no one wants to die, it's just one of those things that gets louder and quieter depending on what life is like.

DONNELLY: It's sort of surprising to hear you describe this fear as "anxious," because some of the poems seem—certainly heavy, but like they are dealing with these topics in a very calm way.

LAWLESS: I felt very much on top of those feelings. I felt like everything was very technical or bright. Sometimes poets can be vague, writing through these things. But, the feeling I had was so crystalline, and I had been playing with the feelings and images in my head for a week or two. Lately, I find writing prose makes me feel more in control, which is why that piece, "The Skull Behind My Face," and most of "Elephants in Mourning," are prose poems. I think that was another formal constraint that I put on it to create that control.

DONNELLY: How do you compare My Dead to your last collection, Noctis Licentia?

LAWLESS: Noctis Licentia is very different because some of it was written in grad school, and some of it was written in the year following my graduation from The New School MFA program. During that time I was very influenced by peers, and my former mentor, Paul Violi. He has passed away, but he was very much known as a "funny" poet. I was influenced by a lot of New York School poets at the time, and I think that I just thought that I was supposed to be a funny poet.

DONNELLY: Do you still hate peas?

LAWLESS: I still really do not like peas.

(source : interviewmagazine.com)

Louise Erdrich on The Art of Fiction !

Louise Erdrich

Karen Louise Erdrich, known as Louise Erdrich, (Little Falls, Minnesota June 7, 1954) is an American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a band of the Anishinaabe (also known as Ojibwa and Chippewa). Erdrich is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance. In 2009, her novel The Plague of Doves was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In November 2012, she received the National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Round House. She is also the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis that focuses on Native American literature and the Native community in the Twin Cities. Presenting an Interview of Louise Erdrich Interviewed by Lisa Halliday in 2010 : Being Poet

Lisa Halliday : In The Beet Queen, Dot Adare’s first-grade teacher puts Dot into the “naughty box.” Was there a naughty box in your own childhood?

Louise Erdrich : Do I have to talk about this? It is a primal wound. Yes, I was put into the naughty box.

Lisa : What had you done?

Louise : Nothing. I was a model child. It was the teacher’s mistake I am sure. The box was drawn on the blackboard and the names of misbehaving children were written in it. As I adored my teacher, Miss Smith, I was destroyed to see my name appear. This was just the first of the many humiliations of my youth that I’ve tried to revenge through my writing. I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.

Lisa : Was your teacher anything like the one in your story “Sister Godzilla”?

Louise : No, but I had Franciscan Sisters for teachers later. Some were celestial, ­others were disturbed. My sixth-grade teacher, Sister Dominica, hit home runs at recess and I loved her, but there was no exact Sister Godzilla. As for Miss Smith, I still have her photograph. She had cat’s-eye glasses, a blond bouffant do, and wore a chiffon scarf tied at the tip of her chin. I’d been reading for a while before Miss Smith, but I’d never thought about how there’s a presence inside of words. The Ojibwe say that each word has a spirit. Miss Smith drew eyelashes on the o’s in look, and irises in the middle of the o’s, and suddenly look contained the act of looking. I had a flash of pure joy.

Lisa : Is it true your father paid you a nickel for every story you wrote as a child?

Louise : Yes, he did, and he’s sick of hearing about it. It’s also true that, about a year ago, he gave me a roll of antique nickels and said, I owe you.

Lisa : What were the stories about?

Louise : Lonely girls with hidden talents. At a family white-elephant sale we auctioned off one of my early stories for eight bucks—someone else got it. I’ve been trying to buy it back.

My father is my biggest literary influence. Recently I’ve been looking through his letters. He was in the National Guard when I was a child and whenever he left, he would write to me. He wrote letters to me all through college, and we still correspond. His letters, and my mother’s, are one of my life’s treasures.

Lisa : What are they about?

Louise : Mushroom hunting. Roman Stoics. American Indian Movement politics. Longfellow. Stamp collecting. Apples. He and my mother have an orchard. He used to talk about how close together meadowlarks sit on fence posts—every seventh fence post. Now, of course, they are rare. When I went off to college, he wrote about the family, but in highly inflated terms, so that whatever my sisters and brothers were doing seemed outrageously funny or tragic. If my mother bought something it would be a cumbersome, dramatic addition to the household, but of course unnecessary. If the dog got into the neighbor’s garbage it would be a saga of canine effort and exertion—and if the police caught the dog it would be a case of grand injustice.

Lisa : How did your parents meet?

Louise : My mother is Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and she lived on her home reservation. My father taught there. He had just been discharged from the Air Force. He went to school on the GI Bill and got his teaching credentials. He is adventurous—he worked his way through Alaska at age seventeen and paid for his living expenses by winning at the poker table. He saved the money he made as a cook’s flunky and helped out his parents. After he got his credentials, I guess he thought it would be interesting to work on a reservation. He assumed there would actually be mountains in the Turtle Mountains, so he brought his skis. In fact, on the way there, he looked north and saw cloud formations on the horizon and thought they were mountains. But when he arrived he found that the Turtle Mountains are low hills—no skiing. He met my grandfather before he met my mother.

Lisa : Your mother’s father.

Louise : Patrick Gourneau. Aunishinaubay was his Ojibwe name. He had an eighth-grade education, but he was a fascinating storyteller, wrote in exquisite script, and was the tribal chairman during the treacherous fifties termination era (when the U.S. Congress decided to abrogate all Indian treaties and declare Indian Nations nonexistent). My grandfather was a persuasive man who made friends with people at every level of influence. In order to fight against our tribe’s termination, he went to newspapers and politicians and urged them to advocate for our tribe in Washington. He also supported his family through the Depression as a truck farmer. My father, himself a great talker, got to know Pat Gourneau as another interesting person who loved to converse. Then he saw Pat’s daughter Rita and apparently she knocked his socks off. My mother has always been the reserved beauty to his smitten schoolteacher. I was born when she was nineteen and I’ve always loved having a young mother—she is often mistaken for my sister.

Lisa : Did she speak Ojibwemowin when you were growing up?

Louise : My grandfather spoke the Red Lake dialect of the language as his family had originated there, but he also spoke and wrote an exquisite English. My mother learned words here and there, but you have to be immersed in a language as a child to pick it up.

Lisa : Why?

Louise : We are wired to have a period of language opportunity. It is harder to learn languages after the age of eight or ten. In addition, Ojibwe is one of the most difficult languages to learn because its verbs take on an unusual ­array of forms. There’s no masculine or feminine designation to the nouns, but instead they’re qualified as animate or inanimate. The verb form changes ­according to its status as animate or inanimate as well as in regard to ­human relationships. The verbs go on and on. Often when I’m trying to speak Ojibwe my brain freezes. But my daughter is learning to speak it, and that has given me new resolve. Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer’s language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures—its cruelty is its vitality. Ojibwe is taught in colleges, increasingly in immersion programs, but when my grandfather went to government boarding school he wasn’t allowed to speak Ojibwe. Nor were Indian students in Catholic boarding schools, where my mother went, as so many of our family were Catholic.

Lisa : Were you raised to be devout?

Louise : Every Catholic is raised to be devout and love the Gospels, but I was spoiled by the Old Testament. I was very young when I started reading, and the Old Testament sucked me in. I was at the age of magical thinking and believed sticks could change to serpents, a voice might speak from a burning bush, angels wrestled with people. After I went to school and started catechism I realized that religion was about rules. I remember staring at a neighbor’s bridal-wreath bush. It bloomed every year but was voiceless. No angels, no parting of the Red River. It all seemed so dull once I realized that nothing spectacular was going to happen.

I’ve come to love the traditional Ojibwe ceremonies, and some rituals, but I hate religious rules. They are usually about controlling women. On Sundays when other people go to wood-and-stone churches, I like to take my daughters into the woods. Or at least work in the garden and be outside. Any god we have is out there. I’d hate to be certain that there was nothing. When it comes to God, I cherish doubt.

Lisa : What was it like to leave Wahpeton for Dartmouth?

Louise : My father, rightly, picked out a paragraph in The Plague of Doves as a somewhat autobiographical piece of the book. Evelina leaves for college and at their part­ing her parents give her a love-filled stare that is devastating and sustaining. It

is an emotion they’ve never before been able to express without great awkwardness and pain. Now that she’s leaving, that love beams out in an intense form.

As the eldest child, I often felt that I belonged more to my parents’ generation than to my own. In the beginning of the book, Evelina is always scheming to watch television. My parents didn’t let us watch much television. Dad had us cover our eyes when the commercials came on. He didn’t want us to nurse any unnecessary desires and succumb to capitalism. Shakespeare’s history plays and The Three Stooges were major influences.

Lisa : What was Dartmouth like?

Louise : For one thing, the ratio of men to women was nine to one. And I was quite shy, so meeting people was painful. I’d be at a party and because I was so quiet, someone would say, You’re stoned, aren’t you, Karen? (My name was Karen then.) But I was only rarely stoned, just shy.

Recently I read a book by Charles Eastman, one of the first Native American physicians in Dakota, about going to Dartmouth. He described exactly how I felt: like I was being torn away. And yet, I wanted to go, I wanted to get away. Sinclair Lewis knew about the crazed feeling that you get when people think you’re a pleasant person. You get all this praise for your good behavior but inside you’re seething. I was fairly dutiful, and I felt that way. I’ve always loved that line from Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation”: “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.” In Wahpeton I was a graveyard-shift waitress who wanted to destroy my customers.

At Dartmouth, I was awkward and suspicious. I was in the first year of the Native American program. I felt comfortable with Chippewas and ­people from the Turtle Mountains, and I felt comfortable with Dakotas ­because Wahpeton is part of the Dakota reservation and I knew many Dakota people. It took me a while to get to know people from other tribes. People assume there is just one sort of Native experience. No. Do the Irish immediately feel comfortable with the Chinese? I was intimidated by the mighty Mohawks; it took me a long time to get to know my serene and beautiful Navajo roommate. Certainly I didn’t understand the non-Indians, the people who came from East Coast backgrounds. Until then, I had met three African American people in my entire life. I had never met an East Indian person, a Jew, a Baptist, a Muslim. I hadn’t left Wahpeton so I only knew a peculiar Wahpeton mixture of people, all smashed and molded into a similar shape by small-town life. I don’t have a thick skin, and I especially didn’t then. I obsessed over everything people said, ran it over forever in my mind. I still do that, but it’s better now.

Lisa : Why did you decide to change your name to Louise?

Louise : There were so many Karens when I was born. It was the 1954 name of the year. I think there was a Mouseketeer named Karen. I was happier when I was called Louise. My grandfather was named Louis. I thought it had a good, lucky sort of writerliness to it. There were lots of Louises who were artists and writers: Louise Bogan, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Glück. The only Karen ­writer I knew and liked was Karen Blixen and she changed her name, so I did too.

Lisa : Were you a good literature student?

Louise : worked hard to catch up with people. I didn’t know any of the writers other Dartmouth freshmen had read. I knew the Old Testament, of course, and read indiscriminately from the local library—Leon Uris and James Michener and Ayn Rand and Herman Wouk—but nobody at Dartmouth was reading Marjorie Morningstar. They were reading Joyce. Who was that? I did have some Shakespeare, because in Wahpeton we’d bought a wonderful record player with green stamps, and my father brought home recordings of the plays—the tragedies, of course. And I liked James Welch, the Blackfeet writer. But otherwise, it was the Dune trilogy and Isaac Asimov and The Prophet.

Before coming to Dartmouth, I won a scholarship to an American Legion summer camp and was trapped with the John Birch Society. So I had a strange, brief flirtation with the right. I voted for Richard Nixon. But then Nixon was a hero to a lot of Native people. Despite everything else, he was one of the first presidents to understand anything about American Indians. He effectively ended the policy of termination and set our Nations on the course of self-determination. That had a galvanizing effect in Indian country. So I voted for Nixon and my boyfriend wanted to kill me and I didn’t know why. Why was this so important? Nixon was even running against a South Dakota boy, George McGovern. But McGovern had no understanding of treaty rights, and I also thought I was voting in accordance with my father, because he kept saying George this, George that, what a demagogue. Then about a year ago, I said, Dad, I thought we were both against George in that election. And he said, I was talking about George Wallace.

Lisa : How does your father feel about your books?

Louise : He gave me those nickels, remember? It didn’t occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That’s how one has to write anyway—in secret. At a certain point, you have to not please your parents, although for me that’s painful because I’m close to my parents and of course I want them to be happy.

Lisa : When did you start writing Love Medicine?

Louise : I went back to North Dakota after college and became a visiting poet in a program called Poets in the Schools. It was a marvelous gig. I went all around the state in my Chevy Nova, teaching, until I contracted hepatitis at the old Rudolf Hotel in Valley City. What did I expect for eight dollars a night? I was in my smoking, brooding phase, and I was mostly writing poetry. In time, the poems became more storylike—prose, really—then the stories began to connect. Before the hepatitis I also drank, much more than I do now, so I spent a lot of time in bars and had a number of crazy conversations that went into Love Medicine. I also used to go to tent revivals up in the Turtle Mountains—that experience eventually became part of The Plague of Doves.

Lisa : A tent revival?

Louise : Where the revivalists pitch a tent and you sit under it and listen to preachers who try to convert you—bring you to Jesus right in the tent. It’s like a traveling church. I went to hear that biblical language. Maybe I thought at last I’d witness a miracle. I used to listen to Jimmy Swaggart and Jack Van Impe, who are televangelists. I don’t listen to TV preachers anymore because they lost their music and became political, but I used to love it. The formality of Mass was gone—it was just you and some crazy, powerful version of God. As a child, I couldn’t get up in the middle of Holy Mass and shout, Come down on me! Come Spirit, Spirit! The closest version was a charismatic Catholic group I joined called the God Squad—I was still a teenager then—mainly I’d heard you could go on retreats and make out.

I started writing Love Medicine after I realized that narrative was ­invading the poetry. In the beginning, I was trying to write a spare kind of poetry, like James Wright or Robert Creeley, I suppose, but it was terrible. Then I started writing poems with inner rhymes but as they became more complex they turned into narrative. I started telling stories in the poems. But the ­poems I could write jumping up from my desk or lying on the bed. Anywhere. At last, I had this epiphany. I wanted to write prose, and I ­understood that my real problem with writing was not that I couldn’t do it mentally. I couldn’t do it physically. I could not sit still. Literally, could not sit still. So I had to solve that. I used some long scarves to tie myself into my chair. I tied myself in with a pack of cigarettes on one side and coffee on the other, and when I instinctively bolted upright after a few minutes, I’d say, Oh, shit. I’m tied down. I’ve got to keep writing.

Lisa : Where were you when you wrote Love Medicine?

Louise : I had come back to Fargo again and was living downtown. I worked in a little office space with a great arched window on the top floor. It was seventy bucks a month. It was heaven to have my own quiet, beautiful office with a great window and green linoleum floors and a little desk and a view that carried to the outskirts of Fargo. The apartment I lived in over Frederick’s Flowers belonged to my brother and had no windows, only a central air shaft that was gloomy and gray. That apartment also got into the book. It was a peculiar apartment—you couldn’t stay in it all day or you’d go nuts. It cost fifty dollars a month, so all I had to pay every month was one hundred and twenty bucks in rent. I had a bicycle. I ate at the Dutch Maid café. I was living well.

Lisa : What did you do for money?

Louise : My best job was working for a man named Joe Richardson who had a small-press outfit called Plains Distribution. He managed to get funding for a ­fancy traveling RV stuffed with small-press books. We distributed work by writers like Ted Kooser, Linda Hasselstrom, Mark Vinz, Tom McGrath. In the middle of all of this I found myself at the trial of Leonard Peltier. It was all taking place right near the sinister apartment I lived in. I was surprised to see neighbors from Wahpeton and a lot of other ­people I’d grown up with. They were passionate about the American Indian Movement. They got me into the courtroom every day. After listening to all that was said, I was astounded when Peltier was convicted. There was simply no evidence that convicted him. He was convicted out of fear. We know how that goes.

At last, I ran out of money. I applied to the Yaddo and MacDowell ­writers’ residencies. I got some time there, and I was able to finish “Scales.” Then I thought I’d better write a real novel. So I left everything else and wrote a book called Tracks. I started it at Johns Hopkins, where I received a teaching stipend. I got a lot of encouragement there from John Barth, a genius, a superb teacher, and Edmund White, whom I adored—a man of tender intelligence, and a daring writer. I also got to study with Richard Howard. What luck. He would set one of my poems aside and say, “This one we’ll ­allow to leech away into the sands of discourse.” So some of my poems leeched away into the sands of discourse. Then Richard looked at other ­poems and responded from his sublime knowledge, but he always spoke with a natural sort of kindness. I also met C. Michael Curtis at Johns Hopkins, but he wouldn’t have remembered me. Later, he was the first person who accepted a story of mine—“Saint Marie”—into a glossy magazine. That was a huge moment for me. I still have his acceptance letter. I stared at it for hours and days. After the story was published I got two letters. One from an outraged priest who said I’d written nauseating phantasms of convent life. The other was from Philip Roth. He sent me a letter out of the blue just to say that he liked the story. I stared at his letter for a long time as well. I think I was too shy to answer it, but I wrote the rest of the book.

Lisa : What happened with Tracks?

Louise : It continued to be rejected. It was rejected all over the place. And thank God for that—it was the kind of first novel where the writer tries to take a high tone while loads of mysterious things happen, and there was way too much Faulkner in there. People would find themselves suddenly in cornfields with desperate, aching anguish over the weight of history. I kept it though, the way people keep a car on blocks out in the yard—for spare parts.

Lisa : The Tracks I’ve read is a short book.

Louise : That’s because all of the spare parts got used in other vehicles. And of course I rewrote Tracks entirely by 1989, but before that I had withdrawn it from consideration by publishers and started again on Love Medicine.

Lisa : One of the characters in Love Medicine says, “You know Lulu Lamartine if you know life is made up of three kinds of people—those who live it, those afraid to, those in between. My mother is the first.” Which category is yours?

Louise : I suppose I’ve always wanted to be the first, but really I’m the last. By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive. I’ve only had children with two fathers. Lulu’s had children by what, eight? People sometimes ask me, Did you really have these experiences? I laugh, Are you crazy? I’d be dead. I’d be dead fifty times. I don’t write directly from my own experience so much as an emotional understanding of it.

I suppose one develops a number of personas and hides them away, then they pop up during writing. The exertion of control comes later. I take great pleasure in writing when I get a real voice going and I’m able to follow the voice and the character. It’s like being in a trance state. Once that had happened a few times, I knew I needed to write for the rest of my life. I began to crave the trance state. I would be able to return to the story anytime, and it would play out in front of me, almost effortlessly. Not many of my stories work out that way. Most of my work is simple persistence. I’ve had some stories for twenty years. I keep adding to them word by word.

But if the trance happens, even though it’s been wonderful, I’m suspicious. It’s like an ecstatic love affair or fling that makes you think, It can’t be this good, it can’t be! And it never is. I always need to go back and ­reconfigure parts of the voice. So the control is working with the piece after it’s written, finding the end. The title’s always there, the beginning’s always there, sometimes I have to wait for the middle, and then I always write way past the end and wind up cutting off two pages.

Lisa : Why do you do that?

Louise : When I can’t end a story, I usually find that I’ve actually written past the ending. The trick of course is to go back and decide where the last line hits.

Lisa : How do you keep all your characters straight?

Louise : I used to try to keep them straight in my head, but I didn’t really care if they got messed up. It didn’t mean a lot to me if I got them wrong. I’d like to say it was out of some sense of aesthetics, or adherence to some tradition, but really I just didn’t care. I wanted to get on with the story. If it weren’t for Trent Duffy, the best copy editor in New York, everything would be inconsistent and I still wouldn’t be worried about it. And, you know, there still are inconsistencies.

Lisa : But they’re not deliberate?

Louise : You mean are they there so that English and Native American literature scholars have something to work on? No.

Lisa : Why did you decide to add family trees to your books?

Louise : I resisted for a long time, but then at readings people began to come up and show me their painfully drawn out family trees, so finally I was overcome by guilt. Delightfully, my dear Trent had kept track of the relationships. Now people come up to me and say how grateful they are that they don’t have to write out the family trees themselves. It never seemed particularly important to me. In the Turtle Mountains, everybody is related because there are only so many families. Nobody sits down and picks apart their ancestry. Unless you want to date somebody.

Lisa : How do your books come into being? Where do they start?

Louise : I have little pieces of writing that sit around collecting dust, or whatever they’re collecting. They are drawn to other bits of narrative like iron filings. I hate looking for something to write about. I try to have several things going before I end a book. Sometimes I don’t have something immediately and I suffer for it.

Lisa : Why?

Louise : I feel certain that I’m never going to write again. I’m positive that it’s over. The world seems boring. I can’t enjoy anything. My family knows I’m moping. I’m not nice to live around, and I’m not a stellar cook. Nothing seems right. The worst times are ending a book tour and not having a book to return to. It’s sheer emptiness.

But I guess that’s an essential part of this entire process: You feel your mortality and there’s nowhere to go. I walk more, which is good. Then I start rummaging around, thinking, It’s all over, so what’s there to lose? I go to our bookstore, and others, used bookstores, I talk to the booksellers and look around. I go back to things I didn’t finish, but then, if I didn’t finish it in the first place, it probably isn’t really worth going back to. I go to a historical society and leaf through things. I’ll take a drive in the car. Eventually something turns up. That’s where I am now. I haven’t really engaged with the next book in the same way that I engaged with Shadow Tag. I suppose I could go back to my eternal science-fiction novel, though it is a failure.

Lisa : Then why do you go back to it?

Louise : It’s irresistible, especially when I’m in free fall. Maybe in a decade I’ll have finished it.

Lisa : Is it set in North Dakota?

Louise : Yes. The North Dakota of the future!

Lisa : Do you ever feel like you’re writing one long novel?

Louise : All of the books will be connected somehow—by history and blood and by something I have no control over, which is the writing itself. The writing is going to connect where it wants to, and I will have to try and follow along.

Lisa : Is it true that you have control over the cover designs of your books? Writers aren’t always afforded that privilege.

Louise : That’s because the most clichéd Native images used to be suggested for the cover design, so I fought to have some say. On a foreign copy of Tracks there was a pair of massive breasts with an amulet hanging between them. Often, a Southwestern landscape appears. Or an Indian princess or two. A publisher once sent me a design for Master Butchers Singing Club that was all huge loops of phallic sausages. They were of every shape and all different textures, colors, sizes. I showed it to my daughter and we looked at it in stunned ­silence, then we said, Yes! This is a great cover! I have twenty copies left of that edition, and I’m going to keep them. Sometimes I’ll show one to a man and ask what he thinks of it. He’ll put it in his lap and look at it for a while and the strangest look will cross his face. He’ll look sideways at the women in the room, and he’ll point and say, I think I see myself in that one.

Lisa : Do you revise already-published work?

Louise : At every opportunity. Usually, I add chapters that I have written too late to include in the original. Or I try to improve the Ojibwe language used in the book. As I learn more or I consult my teachers, I learn how much I don’t know. Ojibwe is something I’ll be a lifelong failure at—it is my windmill. I’ve changed Love Medicine quite a lot, and I wanted to revise The Blue Jay’s Dance. For one thing I wanted to take out the recipes. Don’t try the lemon-meringue pie, it doesn’t work. I’ve received letters. I can’t wait to change Four Souls. There are some big mistakes in that.

Lisa : Like what?

Louise : I’m not saying; it is absurd and filthy—and this is a family publication. But I also feel the ending is too self-consciously poetic, maybe sentimental. I wouldn’t end it that way now. I am engaged these days in rewriting The Antelope Wife substantially—I always had a feeling it began well and got hijacked.

Lisa : Many of the books are hijacked by a child in trouble.

Louise : When I had to go on my first book tour—those are the lowest points in my life, the times just before a book tour, when I have to leave my children—I was sitting on a plane next to a psychiatrist. I said to her, “I’ve just written this book and it has another abandoned child in it. Another loveless person abandons another child in the beginning. What is it about abandonment?” This psychiatrist, who had a deep, scratchy voice, said, “My dear, we are all abandoned.”

Abandonment is in all the books: the terror of having a bad mother or being a bad mother, or just a neglectful mother; letting your child run around in a T-shirt longer than her shorts.

Lisa : Every summer you drive several hours north to visit the Turtle Mountains, sometimes also Lake of the Woods. Why?

Louise : Actually, I do this all year. These places are home for me. And I like to travel. Driving takes hold of the left brain and then the right brain is freed—that’s what some writer friends and I have theorized. But I can’t always stop when I get an idea. It depends on the road—North Dakota, no traffic. When I’m driving on a very empty stretch of road I do write with one hand. It’s hardly legible, but still, you don’t want to have to stop every time.

Of course, if you have a child along, then you do have to stop. By having children, I’ve both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. I hate to ­pigeonhole myself as a writer, but being a female and a mother and a Native American are important aspects of my work, and even more than being mixed blood or Native, it’s difficult to be a mother and a writer.

Lisa : Because of the demands on your time?

Louise : No, and it’s not because of hormones or pregnancies. It’s because you’re ­always fighting sentiment. You’re fighting sentimentality all of the time ­because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way. You are alerted to any danger to your child, and by extension you become afraid of anybody getting hurt. This becomes the most powerful thing to you; it’s instinctual. Either you end up writing about terrible things happening to children—as if you could ward them off simply by writing about them—or you tie things up in easily opened packages, or you pull your punches as a writer. All deadfalls to watch for.

Having children also makes it difficult to get out of the house. With a child you certainly can’t be a Bruce Chatwin or a Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona. If you value your relationships with your children, you can’t write about them. You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one’s inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I’d have written with less fervor; I wouldn’t understand life in the same way. I’d write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I’d probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I’d have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I’ve made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor.

Lisa : Were you concerned that the quality of your writing would suffer?

Louise : It’s a touchstone for me to have everything written down by hand.

Lisa : Do you transfer your writing to the computer yourself?

Louise : I don’t let anybody touch my writing.

Lisa : And do you revise at that point?

Louise : I revise as I type, and I write a lot by hand on the printouts so they feel ­repossessed. I have always kept notebooks—I have an obsessive devotion to them—and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas. Any scrap goes in, and after a number of years I’ll get a handful of earth. I am working right now out of a notebook I used when I wrote The Blue Jay’s Dance.

Lisa : You wrote in that book about moments in which suicide was appealing.

Louise : Postpartum depression, but I beat that thought down. Certainly after Michael’s death it became clear that I wouldn’t kill myself to save my life. At that point I realized that the main thing a parent has to do is stay alive. It doesn’t matter how rotten you are, or if you fail. A failed parent is better than a dead parent. A failed parent at least gives you someone to rail against. A former army psychiatrist said something that struck me. He said that there are people who will kill themselves no matter what, and there are people who won’t do it no matter what. There are people who can go through an endless level of psychological pain, and still they will not kill themselves. I want to be that last person.

Lisa : You wrote The Crown of Columbus with your husband, Michael. How was that different from the experience of writing your other books?

Louise : I’ve not spoken much about what it was like to work with Michael, partly because I feel that there’s something unfair about it. He can’t tell his side of the story. I have everything that we once had together. It touches me that he left me as his literary executor. I think he trusted that I would be good to his words, and I have tried to do that. So it’s difficult to set the record straight because it would be my view, the way I see it. Still, he controlled our narrative when he was living. I am weary of all of the old leftover assumptions, and what else, really, do people have to go on?

I would have loved for Michael to have had his own life as a writer and not covet my life as a writer. But he couldn’t help himself. So in agreeing to write The Crown of Columbus I really made a deal, at least in my thoughts, that if we wrote this one book together, then we could openly work ­separately—as we always did in truth, of course. I wanted to make him happy, you know. He was the kind of person whom people want to make happy. People did this all the time, they tried to make him happy, but there was a deep impossibility within him and he couldn’t really be happy. Or he couldn’t be happy alone. So I’d had the idea for The Crown of Columbus; I’d done the research and I said, This is the project. We can do it together because you can write your part and I can write mine and both of our names will be on the cover.

I haven’t ever read the published book. I’ve never watched the movie of The Broken Cord either. There are just certain things that I’ve never been able to get close to again. I haven’t been able to revisit most of the year 1997. I hoped that The Crown of Columbus would be what Michael needed in ­order to say, Now it is enough, we truly collaborated. Instead, it became the beginning of what he wanted for every book. When he told me he ­wanted both of our names on every book now, something in me—the writer, I guess—couldn’t bear it any longer and that was the beginning of the long ending. We’re talking only of our writing relationship, as distinct from the tangle of our family.

Lisa : Why do you think he wanted and needed so badly to see himself as a writer?

Louise : Perhaps because I loved writing so much and he loved me. Perhaps because he was a very good writer. Or perhaps—I don’t say this in a negative or judgmental way, because this is the case with writers whether they admit it or not—Michael also adored everything that went with the identity. He adored meeting other writers, adored being part of a literary world. He would ­answer everyone who wrote to him, beautiful letters, every single person. I don’t take much pleasure in being “the writer.” That’s what my bookstore is for. So that people can visit a version of the writer, and incidentally, visit a real bookstore. I can’t talk to people, so—

Lisa : You can’t talk to people?

Louise : Still socially awkward. Once I was in a bookstore in New York and a very short man reached up and patted me on the top of my head and said, “I think you’re a good little writer.” So I patted him on the head and said, “Thank you. You’re a good little reader.” Then I thought, I can’t take this anymore. It’s just what I tried to get away from in Wahpeton, being a good little anything.

Lisa : How did the relationship with Michael break down?

Louise : There were signs from the beginning, but I ignored them or even exhaustedly encouraged them. He took over as the agent for Love Medicine. After it won an award and The Beet Queen was published, we went to New York for an interview with The New York Times. I was walking out the door to meet the interviewer, and I noticed that he was dressed up, too. So I asked him where he was going. He said, “I’m going to be in the interview.” And I said, “No, they asked me.” And he said, “What do you mean—I can’t come?” So it was both of us from then on. As long as he was content with being in on the interview and saying what he needed to say, I wasn’t that unhappy. Actually, I was tired. Love Medicine and Jacklight were published in 1984, and I had a baby. The Beet Queen was published in 1985, and I bore my second daughter in that year. What kind of woman can do that? A tired woman who lets her husband do the talking because she has the two best things—the babies and the writing. Yet at some point the talking infected the writing. I looked into the mirror and I saw Michael. I began to write again in secret and put together a novel that I didn’t show him.

(source : theparisreview.org)

A. R. Ammons on The Art of Poetry !

A. R. Ammons

Archie Randolph Ammons (February 18, 1926 – February 25, 2001) was an American poet who won the annual National Book Award for Poetry in 1973 and 1993. He wrote about humanity's relationship to nature in alternately comic and solemn tones. Presenting a talk between A. R. Ammons and David Lehman : Being Poet

DAVID LEHMAN : All right. [Pause.] What do you write with or on?

A. R. AMMONS : My poems begin on the typewriter. If I’m home—and I rarely write anything elsewhere—I write on an Underwood standard upright, manual, not electric, which I bought used in Berkeley in 1951 or 1952. It had been broken and was rewelded. It’s worked without almost any attention for forty-four years. When I was away a few times, for a year or a summer, I wrote on similar typewriters. It’s hard now to find regular typewriter paper (as opposed to Xerox paper) and ribbons.

I sometimes scribble words or phrases or poems with a pen and pencil if I’m traveling or at work. But I like the typewriter because it allows me to set up the shapes and control the space. Though I don’t care for much formality (in fact, I hate ceremony), I need to lend a formal cast, at least, to the motions I so much love.

LEHMAN : When you begin a poem, do you have a specific source of inspiration, or do you start with words and push them around the page until they begin to take shape?

AMMONS : John Ashbery says that he would never begin to write a poem under the force of inspiration or with an idea already given. He prefers to wait until he has absolutely nothing to say, and then begins to find words and to sort them out and to associate with them. He likes to have the poem occur on the occasion of its occurrence rather than to be the result of some inspiration or imposition from the outside. Now I think that’s a brilliant point of view. That’s not the way I work. I’ve always been highly energized and have written poems in spurts. From the god-given first line right through the poem. And I don’t write two or three lines and then come back the next day and write two or three more; I write the whole poem at one sitting and then come back to it from time to time over the months or years and rework it.

LEHMAN : Did you write, say, “The City Limits” in one sitting?

AMMONS : Absolutely.

LEHMAN : The eighteen lines of that poem do seem to be a single outcry. Were there changes after you wrote it?

AMMONS : Hardly a one. I sent the poem to Harold Bloom, something I almost never had done, and he admired it and sent a note to me not to change a word.

LEHMAN : Bloom has been a longtime champion of your work. How long have you known him?

AMMONS : He was here for the year in 1968, and his children were the same age as my son John, and they became playmates. Harold and I became friends. I didn’t regularly send him my poems, and he never suggested how they be written. But I wrote “The City Limits” and I wanted to share it with him. It was not literary business. It was friendship business. That was in 1971.

LEHMAN : Does inspiration originate in nature, in external reality, or in the self?

AMMONS : I think it comes from anxiety. That is to say, either the mind or the body is already rather highly charged and in need of some kind of expression, some way to crystallize and relieve the pressure. And it seems to me that if you’re in that condition and an idea, an insight, an association occurs to you, then that energy is released through the expression of that insight or idea, and after the poem is written, you feel a certain resolution and calmness. Well, I won’t say a “momentary stay against confusion” (Robert Frost’s phrase) but that’s what I mean. I think it comes from that. You know, Bloom says somewhere that poetry is anxiety.

LEHMAN : Bloom talks about the anxiety of influence, but you talk about the influence of anxiety.

AMMONS : Absolutely. The invention of a poem frequently is how to find a way to resolve the complications that you’ve gotten yourself into. I have a little poem about this that says that the poem begins as life does, takes on complications as novels do, and at some point stops. Something has to be invented before you can work your way out of it, and that’s what happens at the very center of a poem.

LEHMAN : What poem are you referring to?

AMMONS : It’s called “The Swan Ritual.” It’s in the Collected Poems.

LEHMAN : I have this picture of you taking long walks along places mentioned in your poems, such as Cascadilla Falls here in Ithaca or Corsons Inlet on the New Jersey shore, and writing as you were walking, writing out something longhand.

AMMONS : Or memorizing it in your head.

LEHMAN : Did you do that?

AMMONS : Yes, oh yes. Not something as long as “Corsons Inlet,” but shorter poems. I’ve done that here in Ithaca and down there many times.

LEHMAN : “Corsons Inlet” is a hundred and twenty-eight lines long. Did you write it at the end of the long walk described in the poem?

AMMONS : Yes, and at one sitting.

LEHMAN : A poet of inspiration, a poet who depends on inspiration, isn’t likely to write on schedule, and I don’t suppose you do.

AMMONS : No, I never sit down or stand up to try to write. It’s like trying to go to the bathroom when you feel no urge. Unless I have something already moving through the mind, I don’t go to the typewriter at all. The world has so many poems in it, it has never seemed to me very smart to force one more upon the world. If there isn’t one there to write, you just leave it alone.

LEHMAN : Why do you write?

AMMONS : I write for love, respect, money, fame, honor, redemption. I write to be included in a world I feel rejected by. But I don’t want to be included by surrendering myself to expectations. I want to buy my admission to others by engaging their interests and feelings, doing the least possible damage to my feelings and interests but changing theirs a bit. I think I was not aware early on of those things. I wrote early on because it was there to do and because if anything good happened in the poem I felt good. Poems are experiences as well as whatever else they are, and for me now, nothing, not respect, honor, money, seems as supportive as just having produced a body of work, which I hope is, all considered, good.

LEHMAN : It took you a long time to get respect, honor, money, and fame for your work. You had the support of Josephine Miles when you were a graduate student at Berkeley, and you had poems accepted by Poetry magazine in the 1950s. But you had very few readers, and you weren’t winning a lot of prizes and grants.

AMMONS : That’s right. I spent twenty years writing on my own without any recognition. You know, I started writing in 1945. In 1955 I published a book of my own with a vanity publisher, my first book, Ommateum. It wasn’t until 1964 that I had a book accepted by Ohio State University Press, Expressions of Sea Level.

LEHMAN : And the quality of that work, when looked at now?

AMMONS : Well, it’s the best I have. It still sustains my reputation.

LEHMAN : So you found it possible to be a poet, and to thrive as a poet, without the material trappings of celebration and success.

AMMONS : I couldn’t avoid being a poet. I was really having a pretty rough time of things, and I had a lot of energy, and poems were practically the only recourse I had to alleviate that energy and that anxiety. I take no credit for all the poems I’ve written. They were a way of releasing anxiety.

LEHMAN : When you say you were having a rough time, do you mean financially?

AMMONS : I had really no clear-cut direction to my life for those years. I was working in business, not necessarily getting anywhere. It was just a lack of definition and direction. Financially, I didn’t have a great deal of money, but I wasn’t impoverished at that time.

LEHMAN : You grew up impoverished in North Carolina.

AMMONS : We grew up rather poor, yes. But we didn’t think of ourselves as poor. You’ve heard this said many times, I’m sure, about people in the depression. We had a farm. It had been created as a sustenance farm, that is, you grew as many things as you might possibly need. My two sisters and I—I had two brothers but they died young—were never hungry. We always had clothes to wear. There was no money, however, in the South. I mean, during the Depression, there were actually no coins. People bartered. We had no money, so we were poor in that sense, but my family, in Southern terms, was fairly distinguished. My uncle was sheriff of the county for eight consecutive terms, longer than anyone had been. It was a highly prestigious job in those days, and he was a splendid working man who was always erect and never carried a gun. He had a reputation for going into the most dangerous places unarmed and telling murderers or suspected murderers to come with him, and they would do it. He was also a considerable landowner in the county and owned what later became a whole beach down at the ocean, which was about forty miles from us. So he was a wealthy man and a highly prestigious man. I honored him greatly as a child. He sometimes helped us in the winters when we were broke.

So I was caught in the contradiction of feeling that I came from a good line and yet being inhibited as far as resources went. Since I was the only surviving Ammons of an enormous family, I was frequently told I was going to inherit forests and farms and things like that. But I didn’t. By the time my uncle passed away I had left that region and never went back.

LEHMAN : Sometimes it seems that the economic circumstances of one’s childhood do play a determining role in one’s psychological makeup later on. You can never really transcend those early insecurities.

AMMONS : I agree. Though there were other insecurities in my youth—the death of the two brothers, for example.

LEHMAN : Were they younger brothers?

AMMONS : Yes. I was four when the brother eighteen months old died. I still carry images of that whole thing. And then the last member of our family was born dead. So I was the only son left.

LEHMAN : Did you like working on the farm?

AMMONS : I hated it. You had to work in all kinds of weather. In the winter, you were in the swamp cutting trees for the fuel you needed in the summer for curing the tobacco. I mean it was just a constant round of hard work without reward because we remained in debt year after year after year.

LEHMAN : Did you read books at home?

AMMONS : That came later. The only book I can remember having in the house apart from textbooks was the first eleven pages of Robinson Crusoe. I read that so many times I practically had it by memory. I don’t know where the eleven pages came from, but there they were. Otherwise we read the Bible in Sunday school and we sang hymns. That was my exposure to words. And, by the way, I think that hymns have had an enormous influence on what I’ve written because they’re the words I first heard and memorized.

LEHMAN : When did you start writing?

AMMONS : When I went to high school (which in those times included the eighth grade) I wrote an essay, and the teacher praised it highly and told all our classes, even the senior classes, about it. So I began to get some encouragement pretty early on about writing.

LEHMAN : What was the essay about?

AMMONS : We were asked to read articles in Reader’s Digest and then to write our own version of the substance. I wrote about a cow they were trying to breed that would be only about thirty inches high but would give vast amounts of milk. I must have done this in an excellent style because as you can see the subject matter is not all that thrilling.

LEHMAN : You mentioned Sunday school hymns as an important influence. I can see that in your very first poems, your “I am Ezra” poems. Certainly the religious impulse—the resolve to render the sacred in terms of the secular, to wed the lowly and the divine—is in much of your work. In a poem as recent as “The Damned” a mountaineer surrounded by silent peaks looks down from the summit and supposes that “these damned came of being / near the sanctified, wherever one finds / one one finds the other.” Were you brought up to be serious about religion?

AMMONS : My mother was Methodist, but there was no Methodist church in our rural community, so I never went to a Methodist service. My father was Baptist. The New Hope Baptist Church was two miles away next to the elementary school. Nearer to us, less than a mile away, was the Spring Branch Fire-Baptized Pentecostal Church. I went to Sunday school there and the family sometimes attended preaching on Sundays, prayer meetings on Wednesday nights, or occasional weekly revivals. Once a two-week course in reading music was offered there—the do-re-me-so method—and I attended that when I was about eleven or twelve. As for the Baptist church, I went there for the Christmas Eve celebrations. For some reason, a paper bag containing an orange and apple, raisins and a few English walnuts or pecans was always under the tree for me. The funerals in my family took place at the Baptist church. My little brothers, my grandmother, my aunts, and uncles, and my father and mother were buried there. The Baptist Church represented a higher social and intellectual class than did the Pentecostal. I identify coldly with the family religion. I take my religious spirit, whatever that is, from the Fire-Baptized Pentecostal.

LEHMAN : Reading your poems I sometimes feel that they employ scientific means to reach a kind of religious end. I suppose I’ve always taken it for granted that you stopped going to church and that at some point—perhaps in your days as a sonar man in the navy during World War II—poetry became the means by which you expressed your religious convictions.

AMMONS : One day, when I was nineteen, I was sitting on the bow of the ship anchored in a bay in the South Pacific. As I looked at the land, heard the roosters crowing, saw the thatched huts, etcetera, I thought down to the water level and then to the immediately changed and strange world below the waterline. But it was the line inscribed across the variable landmass, determining where people would or would not live, where palm trees would or could not grow, that hypnotized me. The whole world changed as a result of an interior illumination—the water level was not what it was because of a single command by a higher power but because of an average result of a host of actions—runoff, wind currents, melting glaciers. I began to apprehend things in the dynamics of themselves—motions and bodies—the full account of how we came to be a mystery with still plenty of room for religion, though, in my case, a religion of what we don’t yet know rather than what we are certain of. I was de-denominated.

LEHMAN : When did you join the navy?

AMMONS : I think it was 1944. I came out in 1946. I was in for nineteen months, about twelve of them in the South Pacific on a destroyer escort. It was on board this ship that I found an anthology of poetry in paperback. And I began to imitate those poems then, and I wrote from then on.

LEHMAN : Did you write about home and America and North Carolina or about what was happening in the South Pacific?

AMMONS : Mostly about what was happening in the South Pacific, including some humorous poems about the other members of the crew.

LEHMAN : What has happened to these poems?

AMMONS : Oh, they’re around.

LEHMAN : Did you continue writing poems in civilian life?

AMMONS : I had never stopped writing but after having gotten a degree, the B.S. in general science at Wake Forest, I borrowed the money to go back for a summer of education courses and then taught the first year as the principal of a three-teacher school in Cape Hatteras. That was 1949–1950. That same fall, 1949, I got married. My wife, Phyllis, had been to Berkeley and liked it. So after a year of teaching, we went to Berkeley for two years. And there I did a good many English courses, completing the undergraduate degree. I had minored in English at Wake Forest so I completed that degree and did almost all the work toward a master’s. And then we left and came back to south Jersey. I lived there for twelve years before coming here to Ithaca.

LEHMAN : I know that you worked in your father-in-law’s biological glass factory as a vice president in charge of sales. Were you interested in the work or was it dull?

AMMONS : It wasn’t dull. I have a poem somewhere explaining how running a business is like writing a poem. In business, for example, you bring in the raw materials and then subject them to a certain kind of human change. You introduce the raw materials into a system of order, like the making of a poem, and once the matter is shaped it’s ready to be shipped. I mean, the incoming and outgoing energies have achieved a kind of balance. Believe it or not, I felt completely confident in the work I was doing. And did it, I think, well.

LEHMAN : That raises an interesting question. Most American poets work in universities and many if not most were trained in creative-writing programs. It’s the rare exception who makes his or her living outside the academy, as you did. I’m not entirely convinced that this academic dependence is a healthy state of affairs.

AMMONS : Me neither. In my own case, working in industry wasn’t exhausting—I mean poetically exhausting. I could write all the time. It’s been true for me that, in the thirty years I’ve been teaching, my writing is done before the semester starts. The time I do any writing is Christmas vacation. That’s when I wrote “Hibernaculum” and Tape and the “Essay on Poetics.” Most of the things have been done between semesters or during the summers.

LEHMAN : When were you invited to teach at Cornell?

AMMONS : I received an invitation from David Ray to give a reading here. He’d seen poems of mine in The Hudson Review. Also, I had that same year relieved Denise Levertov for six months as poetry editor of The Nation. And I had, without knowing the man, accepted a poem by David Ray and published it. I suppose as a kind of return gesture, he invited me to come give a reading for fifty dollars at Cornell, and then he saw my poems in The Hudson Review and raised the fee to a hundred and fifty dollars. So I came in July of 1963 and gave the reading and afterwards James McConkey and Baxter Hathaway and others asked me if I would be interested in teaching. And though I was not a teacher and had not taught, I said yes, because my wife and I were ready to make a move, and so we came to Cornell.

LEHMAN : And you’ve been here ever since.

AMMONS : They were very good to me. At first I was the only non-Ph.D. in the English department, and they welcomed me and kept me. They gave me tenure. I thought it was quite remarkable.

LEHMAN : Your standing-room-only poetry reading in Ithaca last December was memorable. I never thought I’d see you in a tuxedo. Did the event change your feelings about poetry readings, or confirm them? Why do you suppose people go to readings anyway?

AMMONS : It’s a great mystery. When you consider how boring and painful nearly all poetry readings are, it’s a wonder anyone shows up. And, wisely, few people do. I think it’s not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come but theater—to see what the beast, possibly already heard of, looks like in person; to make a poetry-business connection that could prove useful; to see who else comes to poetry readings; to endure pain and purgation; to pass one’s books or pamphlets on to the reader; to see the reader mess up, suffer, lose control, and to enjoy the remarkable refreshment of finding him no less human, vulnerable, or fallible, than oneself.

LEHMAN : It may be time for another official Paris Review interview question. What advice do you give to young writers?

AMMONS : First of all, I omit praising them too much if I think that will be the catalyst that causes them to move into a seizure with a poetic way of life. Because I know how difficult that can be, and I tend to agree with Rilke that if it’s possible for you to live some other life, by all means do so. If it seems to me that the person can’t live otherwise than as a writer of poetry, then I encourage them to go ahead and do it. However, the advice splits, depending on how I feel about the person. If I think he’s really a genuine poet, I’d like to encourage him to get out into the so-called real world. If he seems like a poet who’s going to get by through a kind of pressure of having to turn in so many poems per week in order to get a good grade or having to publish a book of poems in order to get promoted, then I encourage him to go to an M.F.A program somewhere and become a so-called professional poet. You get to know people who know how to publish books, you begin to advance your career. I don’t think that has very much to do with real poetry. It sometimes happens that these professional M.F.A. people are also poets, but it rarely happens.

LEHMAN : You once said that trying to make a living from poetry is like putting chains on butterfly wings.

AMMONS : Right. I’d stand by that.

LEHMAN : How do you feel about government support of the arts?

AMMONS : I detest it. I detest it on many grounds, but three first. And the first is that the government gouges money from people who may need it for other purposes. Second, the money forced from needy average citizens is then filtered through the sieve of a bureaucracy, which absorbs much of the money into itself and distributes the rest incompetently—since how could you expect the level of knowledge and judgment among such a cluster to be much in advance of the times? At the same time the government attaches strings to the money, not theirs in the first place, to those who gave it in the first place. And third, I detest the averaging down of expectation and dedication that occurs when thousands of poets are given money in what is really waste and welfare, not art at all. Artists should be left alone to paint or not to paint, write or not to write. As it is, the world is full of trash. The genuine is lost, and the whole field wallops with political and social distortions.

LEHMAN : Do you feel the same way about private support of the arts?

AMMONS : Not at all. Everybody who loves the arts should have the liberty to sustain the particular arts he loves, whenever, wherever. If the love and money go to the popular arts, that’s the way it should be. If there is an outcry for symphonic performances of the great Bs, then that is what should be addressed. High arts that hang on almost vestigial in a culture should be addressed in their own scope, and I think they would not perish but that genius and energy would burst out whenever it’s not already stifled by some blank, some holding grant, some template that just keeps blocking itself out.

LEHMAN : Working with you on The Best American Poetry 1994, I noticed that you’re not exactly overjoyed at the sight of poems that have a political agenda.

AMMONS : It’s not because I don’t take political and large cultural matters very seriously. There are wrongs to be addressed. There are balances to be restored. The pragmatic merely supports my theoretical position. That is, what good does it do to write a poem about a matter of urgent interest that almost no one reads? In a thousand years, if it is a magnificent, not half-baked poem, enough people will have read the poem to make a difference, but by then, where are the people, what is the issue? A letter to the editor of a newspaper or magazine could be read by twenty-five thousand or twenty-five million people. It would seem patently a waste of time not to try the letter.

A more general position has to do with autonomy. One does not want a poem to serve anything; the liberating god of poetry does not endorse servitude. What we want to see a poem do is to become itself, to reach as nearly perfect a state of self-direction and self-responsibility as can be believably represented. We want that for people too.

LEHMAN : Your short poems are lyric outbursts, and you’ve said that they come forth all at once. I know that you write your long poems in increments or passages. These seem in some ways deliberately imperfect—casual, expansive, all-inclusive, loose—in contrast to the shorter lyrics, which are all intensity and compression. Do your long poems entail a different process of writing?

AMMONS : Very different. In the long poem, if there is a single governing image at the center, then anything can fit around it, meanwhile allowing for a lot of fragmentation and discontinuity on the periphery. Short poems, for me, are coherences, single instances on the periphery of a nonspecified center. I revise short poems sometimes for years, whereas, since there is no getting lost in the long poem, I engage whatever comes up in the moment and link it with its moment.

LEHMAN : What’s your favorite among your long poems, if you have a favorite?

AMMONS : The poem that I like best, parts of it, is The Snow Poems. It seems to me in that poem I had a more ready availability to the names of things and to images of them than in any of the other long poems.

LEHMAN : Tape for the Turn of the Year has everything to do with the physical circumstances of its composition. You typed it on an adding-machine tape, and this determined that you would have a poem of some length consisting of short lines and wide margins. I remember your telling me that the finished parts of the tape fell in coils in a wastepaper basket—kind of a forerunner of Garbage. Was this a way of reminding yourself not to take yourself too seriously?

AMMONS : Yes. That’s great. That’s a good connection.

LEHMAN : What started you going? How do you decide when to write a long poem like Tape or Garbage?

AMMONS : In 1963, when I did Tape, I had been thinking of having the primary motion of the poem down the page rather than across. The adding-machine tape, less than two inches wide, seemed just right for a kind of breaking and spilling. Variations of emphasis and meaning that make the long horizontal line beautifully jagged and jerky became on the tape the left and right margins. Soon after I started the tape, I noticed resemblances between it and a novel. The point, like and unlike a novel, was to get to the other end; an arbitrary end would also be an “organic” end. The tape itself became the hero, beginning somewhere, taking on aspects and complications, coming to a kind of impasse, then finding some way to conclude. The material itself seemed secondary; it fulfilled its function whether it was good or bad material just by occupying space. In many ways the arbitrary was indistinguishable from the functional.

So with the other long poems, I wrote them when I had a new form to consider, some idea that would play through. Garbage came from the sight in passing of a great mound of garbage off the highway in Florida. When I found a single image that could sustain multiplicity, I usually could begin to write.

LEHMAN : Were you surprised by the success enjoyed by Garbage? The title is a pretty audacious gesture.

AMMONS : I’d paid little attention to Garbage after writing it. But there was a real spurt of interest in the first five sections after they appeared in American Poetry Review, so I engaged a student to type up the rest of it presentably, and I sent it off to Norton, where my editor surprisingly took it. My hope was to see the resemblances between the high and low of the secular and the sacred. The garbage heap of used-up language is thrown at the feet of poets, and it is their job to make or revamp a language that will fly again. We are brought low through sin and death, and hope that religion can make us new. I used garbage as the material submitted to such possible transformations, and I wanted to play out the interrelationships of the high and the low. Mostly, I wanted something to do at the end of a semester.

LEHMAN : How about Sphere: The Form of a Motion? You once told me that the subtitle of that poem occurred to you at a Cornell faculty meeting when somebody talked about putting something in “the form of a motion,” and you liberated this phrase from its parliamentary context.

AMMONS : That’s right. My application of the phrase had nothing to do with such meetings, but that was an interesting place for it to arise from. Sphere had the image of the whole earth, then for the first time seen on television, at its center. I guess it was about 1972. There was the orb. And it seemed to me the perfect image to put at the center of a reconciliation of One-Many forces. While I had had sort of philosophical formulations for the One-Many problem before, the earth seemed to be the actual body around which these forces could best be represented. So when I began Sphere, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to kind of complete that process, that marriage of the One-Many problem with the material earth.

LEHMAN : The One-Many problem in philosophy has to do with the nature of reality, whether reality inheres in various things of which there is an infinite supply or whether there is one organizing, unifying principle that unites all the disparate phenomena. Is that a fair summation?

AMMONS : Yes. Another way that I think of it is the difference between focus and comprehensiveness. For example, if you wish to focus on a single point, or statement, to the extent you’ve purified the location or content of that statement, to that extent you would eliminate the comprehensiveness of things. You would have to leave out a great many things in order to focus on one thing. On the other hand, if you tried to include everything comprehensively, you would lose the focus. You see what I mean? So you have a polarity, a tension between bringing things into a sort of simplified clarity and going back to the wilderness of comprehensiveness, including everything.

LEHMAN : Do you feel this as a tug of war inside yourself?

AMMONS : An ambivalence, I suppose. Or ambiguity. But somewhere along the line, I don’t know just when, it seems to me I was able to manage the multifariousness of things and the unity of things so much more easily than I ever had before. I saw a continuous movement between the highest aspects of unity and the multiplicity of things, and it seemed to function so beautifully that I felt I could turn to any subject matter and know how to deal with it. I would know that there would be isolated facts and perceptions, that it would be possible to arrange them into propositions, and that these propositions could be included under a higher category of things—so that at some point there might be an almost contentless unity at the top of that sort of hierarchy. I feel that you don’t have to know everything to be a master of knowing, but you learn these procedures and then you can turn them toward any subject matter and they come out about the same. I don’t know when I saw for myself the mechanism of how it worked for me. Perhaps it was when I stopped using the word salient so much and began to use the word suasion.

LEHMAN : In a few weeks I’m going to be on a panel, a symposium on the question of what is American about American poetry. It seems like a good question although not an easy one. How should I answer?

AMMONS : Well, I think that question addresses itself to the past and not to the present or the future.

LEHMAN : Do you think poetry has any future?

AMMONS : It has as much future as past—very little.

LEHMAN : Could you elaborate on that?

AMMONS : Poetry is everlasting. It is not going away. But it has never occupied a sizable portion of the world’s business and probably never will.

LEHMAN : It seems that few of your contemporaries strike you as indispensable, with the exception of Ashbery.

AMMONS : Wouldn’t that be true of almost any period? Of the great many who write at any time, history has kept track of few.

LEHMAN : Who are the few that you hold dearest?

AMMONS : Do I have to answer that? As a peripheral figure myself, I hesitate to comment on the devices of my contemporaries.

LEHMAN : I meant from earlier generations.

AMMONS : I would say Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton. I’m not that crazy about Dryden and Pope and the eighteenth century, but I like the romantics and I like Whitman and Dickinson. That’s all. That’s enough. Isn’t it?

LEHMAN : You’ve said many times that Ashbery is our greatest poet.

AMMONS : Ashbery has changed things for poetry in interesting ways above any other of my contemporaries. I admire almost everyone else equally.

LEHMAN : You are often identified as a distinctively American poet.

AMMONS : Do you find that to be true?

LEHMAN : Certainly your idiom is American, your conception of the poem, and I would say your relation to poetic tradition seems to me American.

AMMONS : I have tried to get rid of the Western tradition as much as possible. You notice I don’t mention anything in my poetry having to do with Europe or where we come from. I never allude to persons or places or events in history. I really do want to begin with a bare space with streams and rocks and trees. I have a little, a tiny poem that says something about the only way you can do anything at all about all of Western culture is to fail to refer to it. And that’s what I do. This makes my poetry seem, and maybe it actually is, too extremely noncultural. And perhaps so. I grew up as a farmer and I had at one time a great love for the land because my life and my family and the people around me depended on weather and seasons and farming and seeds and things like that. So my love for this country was and is unlimited. But that’s different from a governmental assessment of things, which I believe is basically urban. And it seems to me a poet such as Ashbery who locates himself in the city, which is the dominant culture now, is more representative of the American poet than perhaps I am.

LEHMAN : You said you wanted to eliminate Western culture from your poetry. Why?

AMMONS : Well, I sort of disagree with it.

LEHMAN : With the Cartesian mind, or with what? The philosophical tradition of the West? The Roman sense of justice?

AMMONS : If I get back to the pre-Socratics, I feel that I’m in the kind of world that I would enjoy being in, but nothing since then. Especially in the last two thousand years, dominated by Christianity and the Catholic church and other religious organizations. I feel more nearly myself aligned with Oriental culture.

LEHMAN : I’ve always been curious about why you’ve traveled so little. I think you spent a year in Italy.

AMMONS : Three months. We had the traveling fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which was for a year, but we came back after three months. I lost twenty pounds and I couldn’t wait to get home.

LEHMAN : You didn’t care for the experience of being an expatriate?

AMMONS : I hated it. I’m not interested in all that cultural crap. It was just a waste of time for me.

LEHMAN : Maybe this is part of what you were talking about before when you spoke of your rejection of Western culture, by which I take it you mean more specifically a rejection of Europe or of European cultural domination.

AMMONS : Yes.

LEHMAN : But it occurred to me that one reason you have traveled very little is . . .

AMMONS : There’s no place to go.

LEHMAN : There’s no place to go?

AMMONS : Yeah, that’s a good reason not to travel. Well, I’m interested in the Orient, but I’m really not interested in going there. I’m not interested in Europe. I have no interest whatsoever in going there. Every now and then I go to Owego and sometimes I go to Syracuse, sometimes to Geneva, Binghamton—all over the place.

LEHMAN : Geneva, New York, rather than Geneva, Switzerland.

AMMONS : Geneva, New York, right.

LEHMAN : It occurred to me that another reason might be that you’d already done a considerable journey in going from your origins on the coastal plain of North Carolina to the hills and lakes of central New York state. A critic could spin a parable about the northward progression of your life—from a state that was part of the Confederacy to a university town in…

AMMONS : In the Emersonian tradition. In fact there is an essay about how I came to the north and took over the Emersonian tradition.

LEHMAN : I thought you had decided to become influenced by Emerson only after Bloom told you that you’d been.

AMMONS : That’s basically correct, except that I did have a course on Emerson and Thoreau at Wake Forest. The professor was basically a preacher, however, who treated the hour as an occasion for sermonizing. But yes—it’s a marriage of the South to the North.

LEHMAN : What is?

AMMONS : The movement of my life.

LEHMAN : You’ve spent more time in the North.

AMMONS : Much more. I lived my first twenty-four years in the South. I’ve been in Ithaca more than thirty years.

LEHMAN : Are you conscious of being a southerner here?

AMMONS : I don’t hear my own voice, but of course everyone else does and I’m sure they’re all conscious of the fact that I’m southern, but I am mostly not conscious of it. In the first years, I was tremendously nostalgic, constantly longing for the South—for one’s life, for one’s origin, for one’s kindred. Now I feel more at home here than I would in the South. But I don’t feel at home—I’ll never feel at home—anywhere.

(Source : theparisreview.org)