Charles Simic Interview
Interview with Charles Simic on Teaching, Translating, and the Mystery of Writing Poetry
This telephone interview with Charles Simic was conducted by Timothy Gillis on October 19, 2013. Simic, 75, is a Serbian-American poet and was co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. Since 1967, he has published 20 books of his own poetry, seven books of essays, a memoir, and numerous of books of translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry. He has won numerous awards for his poetry, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2007–2008, Simic served as the U.S. Poet Laureate. He is a professor emeritus of English who still teaches part time at the University of New Hampshire.
TG: You’ve been teaching at UNH for more than 30 years. How have college students changed over that time?
CS: Students were better educated. They read more in high school. They read more in middle school. We read Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare and lots of stuff like that. Now, there’s none of that. Nothing. Unless, on their own, you know, or somehow they just love to read and got into books. It isn’t just literature they don’t know. There are lots of things they don’t know. They don’t know history. They don’t know the history of ideas, politics, on and on. When I started teaching at UNH in 1973, this was the end of the Vietnam War, and student protests were still taking place, so back then students were “veterans” [i.e. experienced]. They were on the ball. That’s the biggest change.
TG: Tell us about your writing habits. Do you write every day? Morning or night? What’s your inspiration?
CS: I still write each day, but it has changed so much over the years. I’m 75 years old, you know. I’ve had many different habits at different phases in my life. I’ve pretty much covered all the possibilities. I’ve worked late, late at night for years. I’ve worked early, early in the morning, afternoon, midday. As for inspiration, things percolate slowly and then something happens, and I begin to scribble down words or phrases or lines of poetry, so it has evolved as a mystery how these things come about. Most poems that I’ve written I have no idea how they started or why. There’s nothing clear cut. Nothing where I could say, “Yes, this is the way I work.” Writers, artists really need to have habits and routines, but poets are different in how they work. Some have to have a routine, sit at a particular desk with a particular writing notebook, some kind of ritual associated with the writing work. I have none.
TG: No rituals?
CS: Nothing. [Laughs.]
TG: Do you carry a notebook with you?
CS: I have a notebook. I just scribble things. . . . At some point, I use a computer.
TG: Your work was published in The Café Review (10th anniversary issue, Spring 1999) Two poems: “Soup Kitchen” and “And Thou Art My Lord.” What is the importance of the small press as a vehicle to reach an audience?
CS: I think it’s the future, not big press. Not just in poetry — my publisher cut down their poetry listing, not just poetry, but literature, serious literature, has a hard time finding a publisher these days. The future is with small presses.
TG: You write your poems beginning in English, but you have also translated the writing of others.
CS: When I was young I did some French, I did some Russian. It’s mainly the languages of the former Yugoslavia Those published by small presses and grants from foundations — big presses won’t touch them.
TG: Is it possible to capture the essence in translation?
CS: It depends what kind of poetry it is. There are poets who are easier to translate than others. If a poet is influenced by [W.H.] Auden or T.S. Eliot, then you know how it would sound in English because you have an English model. So that’s much easier to do. But if you have a poet who comes from a native tradition, then it’s much harder because then you have to find an equivalent. Some poets are very difficult to translate, some poets are impossible to translate, and some poets are even better in translation than in the original.
TG: Can you think of a poet who gets better with translation?
CS: Well . . . [pauses to consider] I have to think about that. That’s something you want to be very careful about saying. [Laughs.]
TG: One of your poems begins “Monk at the Five Spot.” So you also love the plunk of Monk and jazz music?
CS: I heard [Thelonious] Monk a lot of times at The Five Spot [a jazz bar in New York City]. I used to live three blocks away. On cold, windy nights, in the fall, mid-week, or raining, I knew that if I went there it would be halfway empty. I could nurse a beer at the bar for an entire set. If I had money for another beer, I would listen to another set. I love Monk. He was a very, very strange fellow, and very interesting to look at, his presence, his appearance. I saw him once at the bar, between sets, nursing a beer, and I said, “I really enjoyed the way you played . . . ,” [forgets now what the song was], and he looked at me like I could have said, “I really liked the way to played Beethoven’s Sonata.” You could see that he was seriously detached. He was completely out of this world. I was kind of mortified. It was really troubling. But then, later on, I saw him again and realized he was meant for something special.
TG: Do you listen to music while you write?
CS: Oh yes. Not all the time, but I listen to a lot of jazz, some classical music too. Country music. I love all kinds of music. Never hard rock or big band music. A huge band, a lot of brass instruments: I can’t do that. I need something quiet.
TG: Would you consider yourself a lyric poet or a narrative poet?
CS: My impulse is the lyrical. I’m a lyric poet, but I also have an interest in stories. The thing is I like to tell them quickly. I don’t mind narrative things, but I don’t like them to go very long. Many of my poems have a hint of emphatic note, there is a slight plot line, but being lyrical, that’s my deep love.
TG: You came to the United States [from the former Yugoslavia] when you were 15 years old, right into high school. That must have been a bit of a jolt.
CS: That’s when you’re a kid, no choice, so you go to school.
TG: When you came to America, who were some of the first writers you were exposed to?
CS: I read fiction: Jack London, Mark Twain, [Ernest] Hemingway, [F. Scott] Fitzgerald. It was fiction. A couple years later, I started reading poetry. The first poet who blew my mind was Hart Crane. I had read [Robert] Frost and the others. But I love Hart Crane. I didn’t understand a thing he said. They are obscure. He was hermetic, and the language was so gorgeous, so I loved that.
TG: Who are your favorite artists?
CS: A lot of people. I wanted to be a painter.
TG: Until what age? When did you shift from painting to poetry?
CS: I continued to paint into my late 20s. And I was really painting when I was 14 and 15. I was interested in, typically: Impressionism, Post-Impression, and Cubism. That was all very exciting to learn about the late 19th century painters: [Vincent] Van Gogh, [Paul] Gauguin, so many other names — paradise, so many great artists.
TG: Many of your poems have enduring images of your life as a young boy in Belgrade during the Nazi invasion. In “Two Dogs,” you write:
A little white dog ran into the street
And got entangled with the soldiers’ feet.
A kick made him fly as if he had wings.
That’s what I keep seeing!
Night coming down. A dog with wings.
CS: That’s the thing: if you go to a war, world war, big armies clashing, civil war, bombs falling out of the sky, you learn some things. If you go quietly and sit down in some corner of the world, reflect on a childhood when you go fishing with your dad, there’s not a lot to say [about] when you’re three or four or five. When the entire world is going crazy, and it’s happening all around you, that’s when the memories start early.
TG: From a newer poem, “The Foundlings,” you write “Time’s hurrying me, putting me to the test / To picture to myself what comes next.” You’re 75 years old, still teaching and writing. . . . For Charles Simic, what comes next?
CS: You know, to quote Rodney Dangerfield. He says, “Look, if I take terrific care of myself, watch my health, I’ll be dead in six, seven years.” [Laughs.] Who can tell what comes next for me? I knock on wood a lot, during the day, and I hope I still write a lot of poems.
Note: This is an edited transcript. Portions of this interview appeared previously in the Portland [Maine] Daily Sun.
Ron Winkler Interview
German Poet Ron Winkler Magnifies the
‘Minute, Exquisite, Everyday Things’
Interview and Translation by Nancy Allison
Ron Winkler is a German poet, writer, editor, critic, and translator living in Berlin. Born in 1973, he studied German literature and language and history at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. He founded the poetry magazine intendenzen, and was its editor for about ten years. Several of his poems have been translated into 20 languages. In the United States, his work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Boston Review, Blackbird, Atlanta Review, Chicago Review, and elsewhere. Winkler is the recipient of the 2005 Leonce and Lena Prize for poetry, Germany’s most prestigious award for emerging poets, and the 2006 Mondsee Poetry Award. In 2010, he served as a writer-in-residence in Córdoba, Argentina; the following year, in Venice, Italy. This past summer he was granted a residence scholarship at the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators in Visby on Gotland, Sweden. His most recent poetry collection is Frenetische Stille (Frenetic Silence), which came out in 2010. That same year, he published a book of flash fiction, Torp. In addition to his work as a poet, Winkler has edited several anthologies: a collection of young American poets; another featuring new German voices; and, most recently, poems dealing with snow. He has translated full-length poetry collections by Billy Collins, Matthew Zapruder, G.C. Waldrep, Jeffrey McDaniel, David Lerner, Sarah Manguso, and Arielle Greenberg, as well as a novel by Forrest Gander. This interview, both conducted in German by Nancy Allison and translated by her, is the first with Winkler to appear in an English-language poetry quarterly.
As a boy growing up in the former East Germany, Ron Winkler learned Russian along with German. He feels an affinity with the language and culture, so where better to meet than in a small bar named for Russia’s space pioneer, Yuri Gagarin? It was a cold spring morning in Berlin, too early for the borscht and vodka on the menu. We fueled up on caffeine instead. The espresso machine blasted off now and then as we set our sights on the planet of poetry.
NA: You’ve recently returned from the International Poetry Festival in Granada, Nicaragua. Do you find that travel brings you poems?
RW: That depends. I would never travel with the goal of making literature out of it. But travel basically feeds my awareness with interesting stimuli, whether positive or negative. It sets my whole sense apparatus into motion. Flora, fauna, social behavior, shapes or smells, architecture, my sensory reactions — all change me and act on my vocabulary as well.
Travel can lead to poems. I don’t force it. It’s enough if my thinking shifts into resonant oscillations, if my perceptual patterns change, my navigational system is given new rooms, structures, additional connections.
God knows, not everything has to be or become a poem. Anyway, I don’t write for an audience. I account instead to poetry, want to mix new combinations of sound and sense, emotions and empathy, syntax and insight. To take snapshots of the power of a sensitive intellect.
There’s also the question: What reliability or relevance does one’s own writing have in another cultural context? In Nicaragua, I wondered whether the poems I’d chosen to read would be too alien in their referentiality to the world, in their humor, their idiom, their conclusions. Would they, in some unsympathetic way, seem insulated, abstract, escapist, maybe? Who knows,
maybe the audience felt that the sound of the poems was enough, and thereby the whole thing seemed worthwhile to them. But one must also be aware that it’s impossible to write 100 percent global poetry.
NA: What sustains you, keeps you writing?
RW: My sense of self changes, interests shift, topics and their associated vocabulary get worn out. Again and again, a new state of mind takes prevalence, whether that’s irony or fury, brevity or surrealism, a desire for subtlety or for formal, weighty language. Eventually, you hybridize a variety of poetic language that you’d either like to cultivate or abandon — to venture away from that familiar Red Riding Hood path you’ve been treading, at the end of which stands your same old self.
Confusion is the foundation of poetry. It’s easier to write if you can recall the endorphins that your body released the last time a new idea worked out. Experience shows that there, where you began something that felt right, a kind of slipstream occurs. You want to go into it, to encounter aspects of yourself you’ve never met before. That can be interesting for the reader. And of course, it’s also a form of individuation.
NA: Do you work to find poems?
RW: Of course. And it’s hard to imagine someone who seems permanently able to do otherwise. The more interesting question, though, is: when and how the work begins. Is it at that very moment when the pure, unadulterated pleasure of writing turns into something else? When, elated with your progress, drunk on your just-finished draft, you start to revise, try alternative phrasing, consciously stop in the middle of your flow to put in line breaks? Because, you realize, it would be even more work to have to come back after it was all over and try and understand what you’d written in your altered state.
There are texts which are more or less already there, which in a relatively short time emerge and are genuine. But these frequently need adjusting, too. And that’s work. Yet it’s still much simpler than beginning a poem from scratch because there aren’t as many decisions to make or things to think about — for instance, meter, line length, imagery, or the clarity of the language.
The genius of creation is always accompanied by the ingenuity of composition. It’s not enough to have plenty of poetic material. Nor will it suffice simply to have a prosodic structure in mind. Something in this constellation always requires time. How idiomatic will I be, how much pathos will I put in, how will I treat redundancy? These are calculated factors that play an equal role at the beginning of the writing process. And when they click, the work is already there.
NA: You’ve translated several books by American poets into German — I’m thinking of Billy Collins, Matthew Zapruder, Jeffrey McDaniel — and edited and translated an anthology of young American poets. Translating poetry has been called “the double labyrinth.” Why enter the maze? And why choose American poets?
RW: Why go into the labyrinth? [Laughs.] Maybe I’m just really annoying. Maybe I suffer from agoraphobia. My interest in poets who stand firmly in the limelight is limited. Billy Collins is an exception. He’s apart from the herd. The still point in the center, if you like, around which “my” other poets move in their own dynamic ways.
I have a passion for authors on the threshold, from newcomer to instigator. For poetry that’s not yet over-institutionalized or smothered in interpretation. It is, I believe, natural to search after spiritual kin, but also, in general, to seek writers who are out of your own frame of reference, to see how they create the present. To me, translating these poets is less an exotic exchange than a way to record the aesthetic camps that thrive within America. Especially as it — although now struggling to keep its status — was for such a long time cultural icon, foster mother, and rock ‘n’ roll cousin to us. In hindsight, a longed-for paradise.
Translating, for me, is motivated by different things: out of a respect for unfamiliar poetics, from a delight in bringing them whole into my native tongue — not as foreign contraband smuggled into my own writing. I translate what I myself am not and cannot do, but admire. That which doesn’t happen here in our climes, yet presumably can enrich us.
But to come back to the double labyrinth: Life itself is a maze. Why should a sub-maze scare us? Anyway, I wouldn’t describe the translator as someone searching for Ariadne’s thread, but rather as someone who casts out a grappling hook.
NA: Let’s get back to your own poems. You received the Leonce and Lena Prize for poetry in 2005 for vereinzelt Passanten (Here and There Passerby). The jury applauded your ability, in that book, “to update the nature poem and make it function as a frame of reference for modern experience.” Were you happy with that statement about your work? Has it affected later poems?
RW: Totally. Initially I was surprised by the “nature poetry” label, because previously, my poems had rather dabbled in the passage of time, dealing with historical icons, epitaphs, dystopias. Yet it was definitely plausible: The source of vereinzelt Passanten was undoubtedly nature. But, aside from my personal delight and expressed emphases, this was nature in a test tube, steeped in contemporary mentality and vocabulary — the same way our perception of the natural is always understood by and rooted in our urban experience of it.
One of my methods was to work with the current changes in the language, bombarding the classical view of nature, as if it were in a particle accelerator, with the foreign atoms of contemporary language. My poetry became increasingly hyper-nature, nature ramped up: more massive and laborious, more absurd. I was itching to crank the volume full blast, in order to make way for something new. My writing is like the movement of a wave: overcharged language followed by minimalist poetics that eventually unfolds into straight sensuality.
NA: When did you know that poetry was your calling?
RW: 1991, 1995, 1999, 2004, and 2007. A little as well in the fall of 2011. [Laughs.] Seriously: The first year mentioned started me off; it was when I wrote my first poem. I was feeling melancholy, in love, and went out to a park and wrote something about trees. That was it for me. In 1995 I published my first poem. Then, in 1999, I won a poetry competition. Fifty lines for a women’s magazine centered around one theme: bad ideas. I had a few. The prize was a new car, a Lancia worth 25 thousand DM [Deutsche Mark ]. I sold the car. In the end, I only got 17 thousand for it, but I saw it as a nudge from fate to start up as a freelance writer in Berlin.
In 2004 my first book was published, and in 2007 my second. In between, of course, I was undergoing psychophysical and dialectical changes. What you refer to as a “calling” isn’t a continuum. There are always doubts, surfeits, and aggravations.
My inner monologue has always been sort of whimsical and peculiar — full of compound words, broken, unconnected layers. My “I” is probably more discontinuous and inconsistent than most brave citizens’. But poetry for me isn’t manufactured artifice. It’s not something I do because it’s admired or sounds good or is successful. It’s natural to me. Poetry isn’t a horse I ride; it’s the legs I have.
NA: As a translator of the late poet David Lerner, you’re familiar with his lines from “Mein Kampf”: “I come not to bury poetry/ but to blow it up.” What do you want to do with poetry?
RW: That changes. But there are a few recurrent themes. For example, to capture the spell of the moment. To try and say things in a unique way. To reflect on what makes us tick. To refer to the inconsistency and discontinuity of the self. As I said before, I love to unify opposites. Contamination is a leitmotif. The blurring of fiction and reality. Once, a critic wrote about poetry by someone that it was “perfect.” But “perfection” doesn’t exist. Still, I strive for something similar. I reach after it. You want a slogan? Here you go: I come to make poetry that magnifies detail in order to reveal being. To intensify the experience of the minute, exquisite, everyday things of this world.
NA: You’ve written a book of prose called Torp, about a curious character whose experiences lead him to question himself and the world and who reports his findings in language that sometimes hides as much as it reveals. Tell me about Torp. Who is he, and how did he convince you to start writing prose?
RW: Torp is my prose likeness. He unburdens me, is a possible form of myself. He represents a world in which other perceptual models apply. The prose that he and his ambient associations depict is micro-fiction. He’s really not so strange a being in my work. He’s a magnet for weirdnesses, even though different ones.
As I’ve said, not everything is a poem, or should be. Which is why there’s Torp — a character who helps communicate very different poetic ideas. Torp is someone who has a strange perspective on the world and who isn’t afraid to make mistakes. He stands for the utopian struggle within a permanent decadence, campaigning with all his eccentricity and disguises, ultimately, for a literary existence.
NA: The poetry slam seems to be a big thing in Berlin. Should poems be spoken?
RW: There is no should. I am happily entertained, but at the same time mistrustful of the exteriority of performing. With songs I am interested mainly in the music, not the lyrics. In poetry I am interested above all in the relationship between the words, not in how someone says them.
As far as performance poetry goes, I’m no expert. I believe that the poetry slam scene here is still very popular, maybe even vibrant. But it’s absolutely separate from what one might call the poetry scene. The thing I admire about performance poets is: They succeed in selling their art as hip in a world where poets are normally seen as parallel-world nerds.
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This is an edited transcript.
Dave Haselwood Interview
conducted by: Steve Luttrell on May 15, 2012
Steve: Let’s begin with a few recollections and go from there. In an interview with someone as yourself that’s done so many things and has so many things to recollect, one doesn’t always know where to start, but let’s start with this: how did you come to name your press the Auerhahn Press ?
Dave: When I first got the idea of having a press, a little publishing thing, it was while I was with the army in Germany. I was there for two – and – a – half years in the — oh, I guess the mid ’50s. See, I’m old enough now that I don’t remember. But while I was there, I got a letter from Mike McClure, who was an old friend of mine from college, in those days. He said that he had heard from Jonathan Williams that they did very beautiful printing in Germany, and he had this poem he had written, and Bruce Conner had done a beautiful engraving of the subject of this poem. It was one of the “Hymns to St. Geryon.” So he said, “Why don’t you design something and get it printed in Germany, as a broadside ?” So I began researching it, and sure enough, they do beautiful printing in Germany, and I contacted a very sort of old, traditional, beautiful shop in Würzburg, Germany, on the Main River and was all set to go with it. And then this thing just sort of fell apart, and I don’t really know why it fell apart. I think it was partially because I was getting ready to go back to the States. And so, when I got back to the States, I moved almost immediately to San Francisco and got caught up in the literary scene there — you know, it was through Mike McClure, who was living there at that time, and some other people I knew there, that I got more and more intrigued with the idea of, “Well, why don’t I pursue and persist in pursuing this idea of having a press of my own ?” Actually, I looked at it first as maybe a book design and little publishing firm. Because what I was seeing in San Francisco was all of these manuscripts I thought were really great poetry, and nobody was publishing it or printing it! I thought, “Well, there’s a real need here for that.”
Steve: Absolutely. And your first book was John Wieners’s The Hotel Wentley Poems, right ?
Dave: Yeah.
Steve: I understand you found the manuscript for that book in your hotel room at the Hotel Wentley after John had been staying there for a little while.
Dave: Right. I had gone down to San Diego to visit my parents for a week or so, and John was just drifting around the city, so I said, “Why don’t you stay here in my room at the Hotel Wentley while I’m gone ?” And when I got back, here was this manuscript. I was absolutely in love with that group of poems. A number of people were at the time. I know Frank O’Hara went bananas over it. He was saying, “Is this guy as fantastic as I think he is ?” So I designed the book. And again, as you’ll see from our conversation, it went as per how I always operated with my press from that point on, and that was as a collaboration.
Steve: Now, you worked with a lot of well – known poets, obviously, and . . .
Dave: And artists!
Steve: And artists, exactly. Did you find it difficult working with some of the poets; some of the egos of the poets and artists that were working with you ?
Dave: Oh, some of them were unbelievable!
Steve: You’ve described Auerhahn Press somewhere as, and I quote, “the first press on the West Coast seeking to print the words of the younger poets, in cooperation with them.” And I just would wonder how much cooperation you received ?
Dave: Well, with most of ’em, that was what I was doing. Basically, although I’d never really formulated it exactly in my mind, that what I was interested in was collaboration. So most of the poets I worked with, that’s what we did, we collaborated on creating a book of poems. But as time went on, and mainly after I took on a partner, Andrew Hoyem . . . Andy was a little difficult when it came to dealing with people. And so then we began having problems, because we started having poets wanting to come in and Andy not really wanting to be very collaborative, just wanting to sort of go his way.
Steve: I think it’s safe to say that you and Andrew had artistic differences.
Dave: We had some definite differences, but I think Andrew’s a wonderful guy, and he does unbelievably beautiful books with Arion Press. I wasn’t really interested in putting out extremely fine editions that were only bought by collectors and put in their book vaults. I mean, that’s not what I was in there for. I was in love with this poetry, and I wanted to see this poetry presented in the best possible way it could be, but at a price that everyone could afford. And so Andy and I differed on that to the point where we finally ended the partnership.
Steve: Well, you’ve said somewhere, and again I quote, “Publishing is not a gentleman’s profession; it is the profession of a crook or a madman.”
Dave: Well, I was the madman.
Steve: You were the madman ? Okay. Well, having had some experience in this field, I have to chuckle at that, certainly not the experience you had, but it makes me chuckle when I think of it, because one does sometimes feel, in poetry particularly, that one is doing it in a vacuum. You wonder who’s reading and appreciating the work that you’re putting into these beautiful things. Now, when you published The Hotel Wentley Poems, you had a printer print them; you didn’t actually print them yourself.
Dave: Yeah, and that was the problem.
By the way, I think your first question was about why I called it “Auerhahn Press.” That came from the German thing. The “auerhahn” is a pink grouse who lived in the forest in Germany. And so I was always interested in birds, so somehow that stuck with me.
Now we go back to The Hotel Wentley Poems. What happened was that I had no printing press or no knowledge of printing whatsoever, so I designed a book, and I got together with Bob LaVigne, who did the drawing of John Wieners in the book and was the photographer who did the print we used as a cover. And I designed the book, and gave it to this printing house. They were very good printers, but it didn’t look right. There was just something about it, so I said, “Well, I’m gonna have to do this myself.” So then it was a matter of learning how to print. The initial person who collaborated with me at the press was a man named Jay McIlroy, and he was a wonderful printer from Philadelphia. Irish, of course. I don’t know much about Philadelphia, but everybody said he sounded like he was from this really rough end of Philadelphia. And he was a great guy. He just walked into my little shop I was putting together one day and asked me what was going on. He just sort of said, “Oh, I’ll teach you how to print.” And he came in. The initial books we did were all a collaboration with Jay; with much learning on my part.
Steve: Now, there were three different incarnations, so to speak, of Auerhahn Press, and then it evolved to be called the Auerhahn Society. What made that occur ?
Dave: Oh. Well, the Auerhahn Society had to come into existence when a woman gave Robin Blaser a lump of money to see that a book of poems was brought out by . . . See, I go blank on names . . . The Heads of the Town, Up to the Aether.
Steve: Jack Spicer’s book.
Dave: Jack Spicer. Who, again, I would have never thought of asking, because he was in a poetry camp that put down all the poets and all the work that came out of Auerhahn.
Steve: In the early days when you had Auerhahn, and you were competing with White Rabbit Press and Oyez and City Lights — at least, to some degree, I suppose you were competing —
I wonder, if at the same time, there was some collaboration
going on between each other ?
Dave: Well, you know, it was a classic situation. The guy who was doing White Rabbit Press at that time, I loved the guy. He was a very lovable person, and he and I liked each other a lot. But the two different poetry camps we were in were at war with each other. I mean, it was a classic.
Steve: Why do you think that is ? Do you think that the poets were at odds with each other, and you and the publishers were just kind of dragged into that war ?
Dave: Yes. Yes, I think so.
Steve: Well, there was obviously some very strong talent. But there was probably also some strong egos that just bumped up against each other in somewhat cacophonous ways.
Dave: Well, I always thought that Jack Spicer — and I admire him and I admire his poetry — was a very difficult person to get along with. He was very alcoholic and contentious. And I always thought that actually he was doing a very interesting thing. He realized that this sort of war between the poets was creatively very rich, and a lot of good poetry would come out of it, and you know, maybe he was right. But I think he was intentionally difficult to get along with and contentious.
Steve: Interesting. Well, there was a strong degree of communication between the small presses in the Bay Area, it seems.
Dave: Yes, we were all friends! The presses were all friends.
Steve: At one point, Joe Dunn and Bob Hawley at Oyez, and Graham Mackintosh at White Rabbit — and certainly Wallace Berman of Semina were all — there was a big mix going on there. And I wonder — I’ve heard, I guess, that Bob Hawley approached you to do some broadsides for Oyez, and Robert Creeley comes to mind and Denise Levertov. And those were beautifully printed. How did that come about — that Bob had seen your work, and knew you, and came to you with that project ? And how did that seem to you when he proposed it ?
Dave: You know, I cannot remember anything about that. I think that was mainly handled by Andrew Hoyem. I do remember Bob Hawley very well. I liked him. Like I say, there was no real competition between these presses. And by the way, it wasn’t Graham — I knew Graham, but it wasn’t Graham running White Rabbit at the time I was talking about. I can’t think of his name right now. He was from Boston. He was a good friend of John Wieners.
Steve: It seems like San Francisco and the Bay Area has long been a center for fine printing and bookmaking.
Dave: Yes. Yes, it has.
Steve: Why do you think that is ?
Dave: Well, it just had been that way since the 19th century. It was a place where really good printers . . . I don’t know if they were drawn there, or they just came there out of tradition, but at the time I started Auerhahn Press, there were a bunch of fine printing houses there. There was the Grabhorn Press, which was probably the most famous fine press in America at the time. There were a number of others doing beautiful work. Brother Antoninus had his own press that turned out beautiful books. And these were mainly done in old, old, traditional ways, sometimes on hand – cranked letterpresses.
Steve: Brother Antoninus, otherwise known as William Everson, himself a fine printer, is quoted as saying, and I quote, “The Auerhahn reputation for fine craftsmanship was exactly what I was looking for.” So that must have felt reassuring, to have someone with that amount of printing expertise and design experience say that about the Auerhahn Press.
Dave: Oh, well, it was. And Bob Grabhorn was also very lovely to us. And it was nice of him, because most of those fine printers sort of looked at us like we were a couple of nuts who didn’t know anything.
Steve: A renegade outfit, huh ?
Dave: Yeah. [laughs] Bob Grabhorn just became a real friend of us, and of course, he went into a partnership with Andrew after we broke up Auerhahn.
Steve: That house at 1403 Goff Street was a very important address to the early Beats.
Dave: Well, that goes way back. Ginsberg and a bunch of people had a scene going there, and it kind of got passed on, and eventually, a friend of mine, who later became Andrew Hoyem’s chief editor at his press, took over that apartment, and it continued then on through the ’60s into the ’70s as a sort of literary haunt. Then, of course, it got sold out from under everybody when redevelopment took over that part of San Francisco.
Steve: And it passed into literary history.
Dave: Yeah. The building’s still there. I don’t even know who owns it now.
Steve: Now, Auerhahn . . . You had advertisements in most of the well – known poetry magazines at the time — like City Lights, Big Table, Poetry Magazine, and Evergreen Review. How did that work out for
you ? Did you feel that you got a lot of attention because they had seen Auerhahn Press advertised in these publications ?
Dave: No. [laughing] You know, selling books in those days was just the bane of a printer’s and publisher’s life. There was no easy way to get them out.
Steve: I wonder how much that’s changed — probably very little.
Dave: Probably very little.
Steve: In terms of getting them out, that certainly has been made easier. As a publisher of fine books, I should ask you what your opinion is of all this “online only” poetry that we’re seeing now, “the whole book versus the online” question ?
Dave: Well, I think all the poetry that’s now on the Net is an incredibly good thing. But I think . . . There’re two ways that poetry can be presented. One is verbally, the spoken word, which is almost always best in a venue with live people listening to a live person. There’s a kind of thing that happens there. And it doesn’t happen on the Internet.
Steve: Right. Well, poetry is born in the breath, I guess one could say.
Dave: Yeah. And the other way that poetry has always traditionally been presented is in book form — or as broadsides. There has always been a tradition of presenting poetry in a kind of beautiful way. Although, you know, a lot of the editions of poetry going back into the 18th and 19th centuries were not the greatest looking things. But there’s a feel to that book, you know. What I said to Olson one time when we did his book, “you know, there’s a heft to this.” It’s the feel of the book itself and the look of the book itself. But this has to do with my idea of the collaboration; that there’s all this energy coming from different directions and going towards different senses that’s there in a book. And it ain’t there on the Internet, I’m sorry.
Steve: Well, I know that you, in addition to being a publisher of finely printed, beautiful books . . . I know that your love of poetry led you to organize and promote several poetry readings in the Bay Area that have gone on to become legendary events in themselves. And so as an organizer of poetry readings, particularly the ones that you were involved with, you must have got a great sense of gratification from how those were received.
Dave: What it was, was that it was an enormous amount of fun, especially in this atmosphere of these contending factions in the poetry scene. It made it really interesting and fun! I’ll never forget — I think it was the first one we had — we looked out and Kenneth Rexroth was in the audience. He had been gone for quite a while, so he had not been involved at all with our press. He was very hostile about it.
Little things like that would go on. But one of the things, too, is that there was a lot of showmanship
there. I remember when we did the Mad Mammoth Monster Poetry Reading, we had a parade through the bohemian area of San Francisco. There were these beautiful masks that were created by Bruce Conner and Bob LaVigne, and again, it was a big kind of collaborative thing. It created a kind of warmth and feeling that I haven’t seen since.
Steve: Those are rare times when the stars align in a way that . . .
Dave: It was! It was a miraculous time.
Steve: And fortunately it’s been recorded by people, particularly like yourself, that have put it in print. Now, I know that you’ve said to me — and others, I’m sure — that you don’t consider yourself a writer. But at the University of Wichita in 1954, you were the first editor of the Sunflower Literary Review.
Dave: Yes. [laughing ]
Steve: And I wonder if you got a little bit of a taste for publishing, even unconsciously, then.
Dave: Well, I probably did. The whole thing was so, sort of disastrous that . . . There was a very lively bohemia at that university, of all places, in Kansas, and some very good teachers in the English department and stuff like that. It was a very small group of people. It was like talking to yourself in a closet.
Steve: Well, I have to admit I did go online and read from a manuscript entitled The Moon Eye and Other Poems, the poems that you were making at that point in time, and I enjoyed them very much. So I think that . . .
Dave: That was real juvenilia, let me tell you.
Steve: But you know, there’s an honesty sometimes in juvenilia that is refreshing — an innocence, I think, would be just as much of a word. But also you’ve done translations, too, haven’t you ? I know you translated some Baudelaire.
Dave: Yeah, I’ve done some. But it’s spotty. See, all of that I’ve always done as a total amateur. Some of it I’m proud of, and some of it I’d just as soon is forgotten. But I think in more recent years, I did just a group of translations of Baudelaire. I’ve always thought Baudelaire is the greatest poet of our time. And I did translations of just six of the shorter poems, the sonnets and that kind of poem. And I’m very proud of those pieces. I think they’re the best translations of those I’ve ever come across. And I’m not a person who likes to, particularly, [laughs ] overestimate my ability, but . . .
Steve: Well, but you used the word amateur just a moment ago. An amateur, by definition, is one that loves something passionately. It’s the love of that activity that brought you to promote poetry readings and to publish poets. So really, I think that the love of poetry that you have is what’s spurred you on.
Dave: Yes, and it still does. As Mike [McClure] probably told you, I’m a Zen teacher, and I have my own group, and then I give some talks at Zen centers occasionally. And so I have to come up with a lot of talks. And I notice that in at least half of my talks, I quote from somebody’s poem or I read a whole poem. And it ranges from everything from Baudelaire to modern poets. I even did, in my sitting group one time, a whole series on American Zen poets that I talked about. I’d read a lot of Whalen and . . .
Steve: Somewhere I read that you consider Philip Whalen your first Zen teacher.
Dave: Right.
Steve: You actually said, and I quote, “Poetry brought me to Zen.”
Dave: Yes, exactly.
Steve: So I think that’s a great way to be introduced from one to the other.
Dave: Yes.
Steve: Particularly in this instance.
Dave: Yeah.
Steve: After the press, in the mid to late ’60s, you embraced a very distinct spiritual path. Did that come about right away ? I know that Philip Whalen was very prominent in the Zen community in the Bay Area. I was wondering if your interest in Zen developed slowly over time, or it was very instantaneous, coming from Phil Whalen ?
Dave: Well, actually, it was . . . It’s really hard to say what got me more and more involved with Zen. But definitely Philip and some of the other poets around at that time, what some people think of as the “Buddhist poets,” were affecting me deeply, and so I became more and more interested in actually practicing Zen. And which I did, because I was fortunate enough to be in San Francisco when Suzuki – Roshi was beginning to teach. So I studied with him from, I think, about 1963 to ’64.
Steve: Oh, wow! What a wonderful experience!
Dave: Yeah. Because he was a really interesting teacher.
Steve: And, at that time, Alan Watts was pretty active in the Bay Area ?
Dave: And I met him just once only. He was an interesting guy. He was one of those people who was sort of a polymath. I think it was Ginsberg and myself and a couple of other people went over to visit him on his houseboat in Sausalito, and we sat there a big chunk of the day, getting tipsy. What I noticed about him was that you could bring up anything. Out of the blue, you could say “tulips,” you could say “poetry,” you could say “meditation.” Anything! And he could take that and run with it. [laughs ] He had an enormous font of knowledge and interest in everything. I think that’s what impressed me about him. I didn’t care for his books.
Steve: In retrospect, did you feel that you had to do a lot of hand holding with some of these poets and artists ? By that I mean, did they come to you and depend upon you for some sort of emotional gratification coming from you as the publisher of their work ?
Dave: [hesitantly ] Yeah, I . . . Yes. [ pauses ] I guess, occasionally. But you know, because of the way that I operated, it would tend to be more of a mutual . . . maybe weeping on each other’s shoulder, or laughing together, or something like that, rather than . . . I think, with some publishers, they become more like father figures to the people they publish. But I always saw it as just friends. I didn’t really see it as that. But we would have . . . I remember, with people like Philip Lamantia, we would sit up all night talking and reading poetry and stuff like that. And this would be while I was working on his book. We’d get into this sort of intense communication around doing the book. And I think that happened with a number of the poets.
Steve: In addition to the very well known poets that you worked with and published, some of the aforementioned, there were also poets that possibly were less well known. Because you did take on some commission printing, so to speak.
Dave: Yes, to try to make a little money.
Steve: Did that actually end up helping the press in terms of finances ?
Dave: Uh, no. I don’t think it really did. Like I say, the exception — although it turned out to be a mess — was our doing The Heads of the Town, Up to the Aether for which we were paid some money that Robin Blaser had gotten from some woman. But you know, I had almost nothing to do with that book; Andrew almost entirely dealt with that, and he got into a tremendous squabble over that book. And I don’t blame him for that. This guy was hard to get along with. So Andrew did take it and dealt with him. Spicer, you know, was capable of enormously moving things, too, because when the book was finally printed and we were distributing it — and like I say, we always had trouble with distribution — at some point, he sent one of his minions over and said, “We want to distribute the rest of the books.” So I kept a number and gave him the rest for them to distribute. And I got a call from somebody that said that Jack was so pleased that he wanted to do a reading — you know, a private reading for us. And so we went over to his place, and he asked, “What book of mine are you most interested in?” I said, “Oh, I love After Lorca.” And he proceeded to read it to us.
Steve: Yeah, I’ve heard that story. That must have been wonderful for you.
Dave: It was. It just showed that he was . . . That was one of the reasons I thought that his contentiousness was deliberate, in order to stir up a lot of creative energy.
Steve: Well, it would seem that is an unfortunate byproduct sometimes of great literary endeavors. The waters can sometimes get muddied around that. One of the things you just mentioned I’m quite aware of presently, with The Café Review, and that is that distribution, especially for really small presses . . . I don’t know how many copies you did of any one book — I’m sure it varied — but unless you’re doing thousands, distributors don’t really want to talk to you. If you’re doing hundreds of something and it’s very well put together, distribution, to this day, is sort of difficult.
Dave: Well, I would imagine it’s even worse, because of all the disappearing bookstores.
Steve: That’s true.
Dave: I mean, there weren’t a lot of bookstores that were interested in what Auerhahn did, but they were good ones. Usually every city, big city, would have one that was really good, like in Chicago and New York and San Francisco. There wasn’t in L.A. We never, I don’t think, found a good outlet for our books in L.A. — well, there was one they had down on Seal Beach. That was a problem. At least there were a lot of bookstores then. Nowadays, my god, it’s hard to find a bookstore.
Steve: Which I think is making a big impact on the publishers and book designers and printers. Because I think that the book as a means of transmitting content is — I don’t want to use the word “replace,” — but certainly threatened by online. If you want your work seen by a worldwide audience, then that’s the way to go. But, then again, there is the book in terms of how Mallarmé, for example, saw it, as a beautiful little world unto itself.
Dave: That’s right!
Steve: And that concept of presenting poetry especially is rare, and I think that we’ll see more of those books that are getting back to the collaboration of beautiful design, beautiful art and poetry in a very limited run of issues.
Dave: Yes. And I think that’s probably the way it has to go. But the books themselves tend to be pretty ephemeral, but they’re almost eternal compared to what’s on the Internet. I mean, all anybody has to do is stop a site and there it goes forever. If that’s the only form that that poem ever exists in, is on the Internet, it may be gone pretty quick.
Steve: Yeah. Well, there is that ephemerality effect these days, with so much being published and printed online. I remember speaking about that at least ten or twelve years ago with Charles
Henri Ford, the poet and publisher of View magazine. I remember Charles Henri Ford saying to me then — in the early 1990s — that never was it so easy to get books produced, but that the audience was not any larger than it ever was, as far as buying them.
Dave: You know, I think that’s always been true. We look back at the 19th century and think, “Oh, my god, these poets were getting through to a lot of people.” Were they ?
Steve: Well, yeah. Maybe in retrospect we think they were, but not so much.
Dave: I don’t think that they were. For one thing, the sophisticated audience that read poetry was probably very small; very, very small.
Steve: Yeah. And I think probably it still is. It’s just that we don’t really know how to gauge that. It certainly can’t be done by looking at the numbers of book sales of poetry.
Dave: Right. Right.
Steve: And the inevitable last question. If you had to do it all over again, would you, and how, if at all, would you do it differently, and what would you change about your involvement with poetry and publishing and what Auerhahn Press eventually did ?
Dave: Well, I think I would’ve liked to have done a lot more books. And I think that the . . . I’m a financial know – nothing, and in those days, I sort of gladly lived in poverty, and I didn’t think anything about it. So I wasn’t out there trying like Jonathan Williams who was very good at getting money from donors to publish books. I never gave that much of a try at all. I think if I’d paid a little more attention to trying to get people to finance the press so that we could have done more, I would’ve done more of what I really wanted to accomplish. However, saying that, I think I ended publishing at the right time; after about ten years of publishing. Because at that point, other publishing houses were getting interested in these people and it was no longer hard for them to get published. So this was a good time to end it. What else I could have done, I don’t know. I was a product of, and the press was a product of, a lot of conditions that existed in a certain place at a certain time, and I just threw myself into it, and did what came up, and then got out. I don’t know that anything could have been different. [laughs ]
Steve: Yeah, or should have been, even.
Dave: That was probably it!
Steve: I know that the Wichita Vortex, as it’s been called, all that great creative energy coming from Kansas — you and Bruce Conner, Michael McClure, Charles Plymell, Roxie Powell, all of those people came west and just added to that huge block of creative energy; added to what was already there in the Bay Area, going back to probably the days of Robinson Jeffers, even. It made a tremendous impact. It truly was a perfect storm as far as creative energies around poetry and the visual arts went. It was a very explosive event at a particular place in time and certainly you and the Auerhahn Press were a big part of that.
Dave: Yes, and a big product of that, too. Like I said, again, I look at all of these things as collaborations, or that you are a part of the conditions, and the conditions are affecting you, so it’s a big stew. I was just lucky enough to be there in a certain place at a certain time when a very, like you say, explosive, rich environment occurred.
Steve: Absolutely, Dave. Thank you for your time. It’s been a great conversation, and I hope to talk with you more in the future.
Dave: Okay, Steve. It’s been great talking with you, and I really look forward to when that issue comes out.
Steve: Absolutely, and you’ll get the first copy.
Dave: And by the way, I was just, this morning, looking at that issue that has the Branaman cover on it. That’s a wonderful issue of The Café Review. I really enjoyed it. Anyway, I’m looking forward to when this issue comes out. Good – bye.
transcribed by Ruth Elkins
Agha Shahid Ali Interview
Agha Shahid Ali: The Lost Interview
Conducted by Stacey Chase
This interview with the late Kashmiri – American poet Agha Shahid Ali, granted to Stacey Chase, took place over the weekend of March 3 – 4, 1990 at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. At the time, Shahid was 41 and an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Hamilton College in central New York.
SC: I remember reading somewhere that you said you consider yourself a ‘triple exile.’ What do you mean by that?
ASA: Well, some of it is just kind of a self myth-making, very frankly. Basically, it’s that I went from Kashmir to Delhi, then from Delhi I went to Pennsylvania, and from Pennsylvania to Arizona. And now that I’ve left Arizona, I call myself a ‘multiple exile.’ How’s that? You don’t want to say ‘quadruple exile.’
SC: Can you be an exile when you go from one part of the country to another?
ASA: When I say ‘exile,’ I mean an entirely new kind of geography, an entirely new kind of sensibility became available to my poetry. . . . [Long pause.] I used ‘exile’ also because, in some ways, when you write in English, in India, you are in some ways an exile in your own land. In some ways. And I know I’m romanticizing.
SC: I have also heard you call yourself an ‘expatriate’ — not in print, but in talking to me and at other times. How’s that different than an exile?
ASA: An expatriate is someone who voluntarily chooses to live in another country for professional or personal reasons. Exile is an involuntary state — you’ve been pushed into it, forced into it. The reason I use the term ‘exile’ is because it’s a term with a lot of resonance. It also, I think, in some ways describes some of the emotional states that I don’t think ‘expatriate’ would suggest.
SC: So, technically, you’re an expatriate but emotionally you’re an exile?
ASA: Emotionally, I like to think I’m close to the condition of exile.
SC: In the sense of expatriate meaning renouncing allegiance to your homeland, do you feel that?
ASA: I don’t feel I’ve renounced anything. I feel, as a matter of fact, my being away has sharpened my sense of being an Indian. Sharpened it in some ways, naturally, because I also feel very much at home in America. And, in some ways, I say I feel at home everywhere.
SC: You say, in some ways, you feel at home everywhere. Do you ever feel the opposite of that — at home nowhere?
ASA: When I’m alone, sometimes, I feel at home nowhere. But the moment I’m with people, I feel almost immediately at home because I love being with people. And the moment I’m with people, it helps me to bring my dramatic side out — my shameless side out, my absolutely impossible side out. And it gives me a chance to perform, whatever kind of performance. I love being with people. I love to entertain. I love to be entertained. I love to be on display! On fucking display! How’s that for shamelessness? [Laughing.]
SC: One of the poets you admire, Galway Kinnell, constantly examines his place in the natural world. Do you, by contrast, feel your place is wherever people are?
ASA: The natural world, I can assure you, bores me to death. Oh, no. [Laughing again.] I’d much rather go be in a city, any day. I’d like to be seeing some bars and bookshops and restaurants and people — and imagining sex going on in every apartment in New York City. In Manhattan, at least. But I certainly do not want to be close to nature. . . . [Turning serious.] Partly because, I think, to some extent, I, as a Kashmiri, have taken nature for granted because Kashmir is so stunningly beautiful. I love Kashmir! Kashmir is so beautiful, so beautiful, that, for me, this business of ‘return to nature’ has never been an issue. Nature was always around me. It’s so much a part of me that I don’t have to make a case for it.
SC: So, what is Shahid’s environment?
ASA: Shahid’s environment is: Screw and let’s screw.
SC: Oh, God. No, that’s your religion!
ASA: [Snickering.] That’s my religion. Ok.
SC: I’m asking: What’s your milieu?
ASA: I would love to live in Manhattan, in San Francisco, in Copenhagen, in Amsterdam, in Paris, in Rome, in New Delhi, in Bombay.
SC: But you’re living in Syracuse, New York?
ASA: I’m living in Syracuse, New York right now. . . . I mean, I wish Hamilton College were 20 minutes from Manhattan. I would be in bliss.
SC: You named your first full – length collection, The Half – Inch Himalayas, after the mountain range. Still, you feel that since you were always surrounded by nature you perhaps took it for granted?
ASA: When I think of Kashmir, I don’t think of nature. It is just a part of my growing up. For me, nature is not the issue.
SC: Then, what do you think of when you think of Kashmir?
ASA: I think of my friends. And I think of certain areas I used to go walking. I think of the mountains. I imagine sitting in certain places and watching the sun set. . . . I’m close to the landscapes that have been an integral part of my emotional being and, of course, some of that comes into my poetry. But you will notice that, in my poems, there is no poem that deals with nature as nature.
SC: I can’t recall one.
ASA: There isn’t. I’m certainly not Wordsworthian. I have no desire to write a poem about daffodils, if I may be very, very reductive about Wordsworth because obviously he’s a very fine poet. A great poet.
I do love “Tintern Abbey” and “Intimations” and parts of the “Prelude,” too, I love. But I can’t stand the “Daffodils” [poem] no matter what anyone says — as much as I can see those little yellow things shaking their heads.
SC: I agree. They don’t really transcend, for me, anything. Daffodils are a nice extended image, but . . .
ASA: But who gives a fuck?
SC: What languages do your parents speak?
ASA: My parents speak English. They speak Urdu. They speak Kashmiri. They speak three languages, and very comfortably.
SC: Which language did you grow up hearing in the house?
ASA: All three.
SC: And do you speak all three as well?
ASA: Well, my Kashmiri isn’t good, but let’s say Urdu and English certainly.
SC: Have you always written poetry in English?
ASA: Yes, always.
SC: Why is that?
ASA: It just came naturally. As a matter of fact, I wish I could write in Urdu. I went to a Catholic [elementary] school. Then I went to the boys’ [secondary] version of it — which was called Burn Hall School — and they were Irish and Dutch fathers and brothers who taught us. . . . So, all my education as a kid was in English. Whenever I picked up a pen to write something, I always wrote in English.
SC: Was that just because you were in a private school?
ASA: I would say that’s the general experience of most upper – class Indians. Has been. I don’t know what’s happening now, but it has been. A relic of the British times.
SC: Did any of the Catholic tenets in those Catholic schools take hold in you?
ASA: If they did, it must have been unconscious because, you know, these are not proselytizing schools.
SC: Did you not do prayers and stuff?
ASA: No. Sometimes just to impress the nun, I would go into the chapel and dip my hand into the holy water. But it was more the pageantry that excited me, you know what I mean? . . . But I must say, I loved those teachers. I must say, I loved those fathers and nuns.
SC: Why?
ASA: Well, they were wonderful teachers. . . .. And, I suppose, maybe it is nostalgia because, after all childhood is finished. And they’re a part of my childhood. At that age, I remember, they seemed to me these larger – than – life figures in their robes and all that; they just seemed these incredible presences.
SC: [Joking.] Did they beat you with rulers?
ASA: Ah, they beat the shit out of us!
SC: When were you first conscious of poetry as a force in your life?
ASA: I wrote my first poems at the age of 9. And they were in English, of course. I showed them to my mother, and she was quite encouraging. At the age of 12, I remember, I wrote a poem on Christ, you know? It’s a poem I’m still not really embarrassed by because, of course, I’m embarrassed by most of the stuff that followed it for years and years and years. . . . It was called “The Man,” and I showed it to my father and my father went and bought me this beautiful leather – bound notebook. And he told me: Why didn’t I write all my poems in it? So I got a lot of encouragement. There was no deprecation of any kind at all [such as]: What is poetry going to get you, et cetera? Poetry was quoted in our house all the time — in Persian, in Urdu, in English, in Kashmiri.
SC: I’ve heard you describe yourself as a ‘cultural Muslim’ and, at other times, I’ve heard you use the term ‘secular Muslim.’ In what way are you a Muslim?
ASA: I grew up in a Muslim environment. We were a Muslim family, and we were known as a Muslim family in Kashmir. The Agha family has been a significant Muslim presence in Kashmir for several generations. My ancestors were royal physicians. They were in the government of the Mahârâjas as ministers and other things.
SC: Did you, yourself, take to the Muslim concepts?
ASA: Religion was never a big issue in our house. . . . But if somebody asked me what I was, I would just say, ‘I’m a Muslim’ because that was in my name and it was just natural to say it. It implied no more than that.
SC: In what sense of the word are you a Muslim then?
ASA: Politically I consider myself a Muslim, and I think that sense dawned on me more after I came to America and I realized how unfairly Islam is caricatured in the media here. . . . It seems almost racist to me.
SC: In a couple of the newer poems you use Christian, Biblical epigraphs from Isaiah. In what sense have you adapted, or used, Christian images in your work?
ASA: I use the Bible as literature. There are individual lines in the Bible, individual sentences that I find extremely moving. And extremely beautiful. I think one of my favorites is just the line: And Jesus wept. Things like that. I don’t know why, [but] I find them incredibly moving. And of course I don’t believe in that whole business of resurrection and all that — the entire theology. . . . But I love that phrase: And Jesus wept. Oh! I think it is the utter simplicity of the truth, of the bare statement of a fact unadorned in that manner that is very moving. Sometimes lines like that even occur in pop songs that I like very much. I mean — this will seem like a terrible come down, but — in Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” there’s this line, I get so lonely I could die. Just like that. I get so lonely I could die. Or, there’s a song by the Talking Heads called “Psycho Killer,” and here’s that line: I’m sadder than you’ll ever know. You see?
SC: Is Jesus a historical figure to you? Do you believe he’s someone who really walked the face of the earth?
ASA: I don’t believe or disbelieve, I just don’t have enough information. I assume there was a figure such as Jesus, historically. To me, it’s irrelevant whether he did or didn’t exist. . . . What matters is what the people believe.
SC: Muslims believe Mohammed was a prophet, but not the prophet, right? Whereas, Christians believe Jesus was the son of God.
ASA: Mohammed is just considered the last of the prophets. . . . And then they [Muslims] are waiting, like the Jews and the Christians, for Doomsday. [Dripping with sarcasm.] The three of them, let them just wait.
SC: Do you consider yourself an agnostic or atheist?
ASA: Atheist.
SC: So, sex is your religion!
ASA: [Laughing.] You could say that. [Then, seriously.] Sex is very central to my way of looking at the world, it’s not my religion.
SC: How much of a minority are Indo – English poets in the US?
ASA: They don’t even begin to be a presence.
SC: Just a handful?
ASA: [Completely deadpan.] We must be about eight, total. Or six. Maybe even five.
SC: How is your voice unique among the Indo – English poets writing today?
ASA: I have these three major cultures [Hindu, Western, Muslim] available to me. They’re part of my mental makeup, my emotional makeup. And I do not have to strive for exotica to use them; they’re just there, they’re part of me. . . . And I think that is the lucky part. I mean, I think, even American poets can go out and write about something out there, but you’ll be aware that they are writing about it. I can write a poem using a Greek myth, I can use a Muslim myth, I can use a Hindu myth, and each one will seem absolutely innate to me.
SC: Can you identify your own voice?
ASA: I would say it is a kind of deeply rooted, and yet cosmopolitan, voice with a deep desire for internationalism. Maybe that’s it. Maybe that sentence would also require, maybe, tons of qualifications. But.
SC: How do the international cultures meld, or fit into, the American experience?
ASA: I don’t know. . . . A poem like [my] “Snow on the Desert,” I suppose, is a poem that describes the whole notion of exile, nostalgia, the expatriate elements, and the mixing of three cultures, as well as their being apart. Its subject matter is absolutely different from my early experiences and, yet, treated in a language that I would say the music of which is not quite American. It’s a tangle — that’s the term. It’s a tangle of various forces.
SC: In terms of your oeuvre, do you see a tangle?
ASA: I see a tangle, and then sometimes one dominates and not the other, depending on my mood and my particular temperament at that particular moment. . . . You see, when I write, I don’t think of these matters. It’s more a question of looking back, and then trying to rationalize and trying to theorize. But when I write, I want to write the best possible poem. And if I’m in my witty mood, then I will come up with something funny. And if I’m in my nostalgic mood, with something else. And if I’m in my historic mood, something else. [Sips drink.] If I’m in my flippant mood, I’ll want to write a poem about Georgia O’Keeffe and those paintings of hers which are full of those petals and they look very vaginal. I want to write a poem about Georgia O’Keeffe’s vaginal petals! [Both giggling.]
SC: I remember that when we were at MLA, you ticked off five, significant contemporary American poets — [Adrienne] Rich, Ginsberg, Merrill, Ashbery, Merwin — for a critic sitting at our table. How’d you come up with that list?
ASA: I find these poets, in one way or the other, reflect certain things I have wanted to do with my work. They’re not necessarily my favorite poets, though they are that, too. I mean, there are other poets who are just as much top – of – the – line for me — who are just as much favorites — like Galway Kinnell, a poet I admire exceedingly. There’s a poet called Michael Palmer; I just love his work. But I don’t think I could ever really write like Kinnell or like Palmer. But I do think I could . . . [Unfinished thought]. This’ll sound very strange because James Merrill is a genius. And John Ashbery’s a genius. And [W. S.] Merwin is a genius. These people are genii. I think they represented various currents I like in American poetry, and there’s a part of me that would love to be able to write as un – self consciously as Allen Ginsberg, a poem of social protest. Where he’s not even being pretty. Or he’s not being poetic, where he’s just saying things. A line like: America . . . Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb. I wish I could write a line like that. I don’t know whether I could.
SC: Do you consider your audience to be in the West or in the East?
ASA: My audience is in both places. Sometimes certain details in some poems someone in India might recognize more easily and relate to immediately, but I don’t think the absence of knowledge on the part of someone in America or England would necessarily exclude that person from the experience of the poem.
SC: Do your own books — as you have said of [Salman] Rushdie’s —have a “thorough Indian – ness” to them?
ASA: I think the poems in The Half –Inch Himalayas, many of them do. I think the sensibility of my poems is very much the sensibility of someone who grew up with a lot of Urdu poetry being recited around him. I mean, I grew up with it, I think, in my bones. And I think, if you read my poems carefully enough, you see the sensibility and the music, if you will, of the lines is not akin to the music of American English or British English. I think one should be able to detect the music of Urdu, the Urdu language, behind my English — or at least I hope.
SC: Does it get harder for you to hold onto that [Urdu] music the longer you’re in the States?
ASA: No, I don’t think so because I translate Urdu. I listen to Urdu poetry sung and recited, and I know so much of it by heart that it’s always with me. So I don’t ever feel I lose it. And I go home every summer. I go to India every summer to visit my parents, to visit my friends, to keep in touch in a sense. So, I really feel I belong to . . . [Stops. Corrects himself.] Well, I don’t know whether I belong to, but I feel both worlds belong to me. Both America and India. I feel they both belong to me, and if I belong to both of them too, that’s fine too. . . . I’ve found that people in America have been unusually good to me and very nice to me. Some of that I attribute to my charm. [Chuckling.] Or should I attribute most of it to my charm?
SC: What do you regard as the major themes that you keep coming back to?
ASA: It is a sensibility more than a theme. And the sensibility seems informed by a sense of loss. Things vanishing. Loss. And this can take place in an engagement with language, in an engagement with landscape, in an engagement with history, in an engagement with myth and legend. In all of them, there seems to be — not even ‘seems to be,’ there is! — this overriding sense of the evanescent, the vanishing. And I suppose that’s what inspires me most to write.
SC: Do your poems start out at least always being about yourself?
ASA: No, no. Not at all. . . . I’m not interested, as such, in confessional poetry — for myself. There’s a lot I admire, a lot of confessional poetry I admire very much, but I’m not interested in my life for the sake of my poetry — meaning my life as autobiography — I’m interested in my autobiography to the extent it helps me to illuminate my concerns, my themes. And the way they merge. But I don’t think some people read [my work] and say, ‘This is a poem in which we are getting Shahid’s personal neuroses or something.’ You know what I’m saying? That may sound like a criticism, [but] I admire John Berryman and Sylvia Plath and many of them very, very much. Sometimes the autobiographical streak can get a little trying and a little irritating, but that’s a different issue.
SC: What about your new poems?
ASA: In the new collection I am working on, [A Nostalgist’s Map of America, published in 1991.] most of the poems are set in United States, particularly in the American Southwest, the desert. I think one very good thing that happened to me by moving to Arizona was that I suddenly found a landscape that could somehow bear my concerns and my themes of exile, loss, nostalgia. . . . Some of my political concerns, too.
SC: Is A Nostalgist’s Map ultimately about homesickness then?
ASA: It’s a homesickness for what has gone, what has vanished. The homesickness in many of my poems is for what has vanished. There can sometimes be a homesickness for others’ nostalgia for something.
Sometimes in my poems, I’ve really been nostalgic for what I imagine is my father’s nostalgia for his youth. For his youth and his nostalgia for his ancestors.
SC: How do you see history and nostalgia feeding off each other’s plate?
ASA: An interesting history is a way of recovering and enriching one’s memory, one’s collective human memory — if there is such a thing. Or, at least, one’s racial memory. . . . [History is] a way of nourishing one’s memory, strengthening it, making it be something more than just a very private, simple affair. I mean, why is it that people look back to their past, to artifacts, to recover what has been lost? Maybe there’s a real human need there.
SC: Do you know why “your” particular themes have a hold on you? Obsess you?
ASA: I don’t know. I think those are very difficult questions to answer. I think somebody would have to do a psychoanalysis of the poems. . . . If I want to imbue myself with political significance, I could say: We feel terrible about the devastation of the earth, about the wars, about the trampling on peoples’ rights, [about] the sheer hypocrisies that exist —
SC: And, for you, poetry is a way of recovering from all that?
ASA: Yes, I suppose. Writing poetry is an individual act of affirmation of some sort. I mean, I think of W. S. Merwin’s obsession with the earth of late. So much of it concerned with the rainforest and the environment. Why is it? Well, I suppose you feel something is being destroyed and you don’t want it to be destroyed. Sometimes the reasons are very simple; their expression is complex, but the reasons are very simple. We just want a better world. No?
*This is an edited transcript.