Tell me what sort of things you're up to these days? What's filling your life right now?
I do so much teaching that, like so many people who work full time, writing poems
I haven't written a poem in a while. My wife keeps saying, "Steve you've got to write a poem," and it's been a while. I've been thinking of poems this last week because I'm starting to go on (semester break).
So many brilliant poems are written out of absolutely nothing; the most minor of incidences, you know—you bump into an old acquaintance who's giving out political flyers—and that becomes the poem. I mean, students might say "I haven't experienced enough to write." But it isn't true at all. I always remind them of Emily Dickenson who was a recluse.
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You can write poems out of anything, but if you're grading papers and preparing classes, you know, life intervenes. Jack Kerouac said, "you have to write on the run." You have to get the work done on the run because life always intervenes.
But these last several months I haven't been writing much poetry. [shrugging] It's kind of sad. [his tone changes to optimism] I've been diddling with other things. I'm doing two essays at the moment. I'm writing an essay for an Encyclopedia of American Poetry on standup poetry, which is not quite a school of poetry. I don't know if you know my collection The Maverick Poets, [nodding, I point out that I've brought it with me]—yeah, OK. Well, The Maverick Poets was the first anthology in the United States, I believe, to showcase the work of totally accessible, serious, fine poets. No one had looked at that world. In LA where many of these people are from—maybe because of Charles Bukowski, maybe Bukowski had a lot to do with it—there are lots of fine writers who are moving in exactly that same direction.
(Stand up poetry) is a way of talking about those poets around the country whose aesthetic is "I don't want to impress anyone. I want my work to zing. I want the good common reader, the good literate reader, to be able to read it and delight in it—and see the excitement of it and have the pleasure," like the pleasure of reading a good short story.
Modernist poetry has gone in that esoteric direction where 90% of the poems you don't know what the fuck is going on, you have no idea what's going on. You see the guy is talented and you know "oh it's Wallace Stevens it must be good." But you don't know it's good.
You've got to read it seven times.
Yeah you've got to read it seven times. You only would read it for a class. No one would read anything more than once. That's part of the mythology of modernism, and the new criticism, that you have to do these close readings. Psychologically it's not true: people read for enjoyment. And that's a great reason to read—that's the best reason to read. The only time someone would read something a second time is if the first time it interested them enough to do that.
I don't finish most of the poems I read: the fifth line and I'm out of there. I do poetry reviews for the (San Diego) Union Tribune, and I'm reviewing three books now by three guys who just died. Three very fine American formalist poets: Anthony Hecht, Thom Gunn, and Donald Justice. I was reading Thom Gunn's latest book and God there weren't three poems that I was at all interested in. One poem is wonderful
it's a classic. But
I'm not sure what he's talking about half the time.
So I'm writing an encyclopedia article now on the stand up poets. The poets who like to perform their work but are clever, are craftspeople, but want their poems to be understood. You know that's almost a reactionary point of view these days.
It seems clear in your poetry and in books like In the Palm of Your Hand and The Maverick Poets that you prefer "easy poetry," as Alex Scandalios termed it, that is "easy to read but not easy to write."
[with enthusiasm] That's exactly right. And I'm going to use that damn quote in this article. Yeah.
And I think you touched on this a bit, but do you feel the public—both the general and the literary public—is becoming more receptive of this accessible poetry?
Yes. Yes, I think there's a little bit of a shift in the last twenty or fifteen years. The general public, of course, they don't read modern poetry because they have good taste: why would any sane, healthy human being read something they didn't understand? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. So it's only fellow poets, the literati, the people who graduate from UCSD, who read that shit. But since someone like Billy Collins became our poet laureate—and that was shocking, and a lot of the literati were very unhappy.
And I think they still are.
Yes, oh definitely. Definitely. Billy Collins? He (is) a populist! You can understand him. I've seen poets and critics say that in print—almost as bold facedly as that: "Billy Collins has no right to be the poet laureate because what he's writing can be understood on the first reading. His is a childish poetics." So there are lots of those people around.
The modernists taught everyone that not only is it OK to be obscure, but it's mandatory. So someone like Billy Collins
Sharon Olds is another person who's brought poetry back
Mary Oliver is a third person. There are more American poets in 2004 writing totally accessible poetry and feeling comfortable about it than did twenty years ago
when it was almost taboo.
So you do think that Billy Collins and Sharon Olds, these people had something to do with this change?
A tremendous influence, tremendous influence in American Poetry. There is that shift. There definitely is.
Did you receive any sort of flak for The Maverick Poets? Did you feel like you were being subversive to the poetic tradition?
Well I knew it was subversive. I mean I knew what I was doing. I knew that I was doing something very subversive. But, no I didn't get any flak and lots of people picked it up and used it as a text. It's wonderful for students because they can have fun with it, read good poets. But no I don't think there was any critical comment on it at all.
They just ignored it.
Yeah. Some kind of little, small press thing. "Maverick Poets." You know. Although it contained wonderful poets, Ray Carver is in there, Bukowski did the illustrations
and he wrote a preface for it. So on the West Coast it made some waves, and I think the people who are involved in this kind of poetry—like Charles Webb—saw, "oh yeah, that's what needs to be done: we've got to start showing this kind of poetry and its power, and its virtues." And of course the power is obvious: real people read them. Real people who love to read, read poetry that they can understand and delight in.
And that goes to another question I have. Why do you think it's important for people to read and write poetry in today's world of instant gratification, and when so many other things vie for our attention?
[pause] I don't know that it is. You know that famous quote from William Carlos Williams, "poetry is news that stays news?" I think that's bullshit. I mean it's true we're still reading things two, three thousand years old. But I don't know about "important." I don't know, you know the importance of art [thinking]
art is important. All art. It's consciousness raising of the highest level. It changes people's lives when they start investing a part of their time in art: poetry, music, whatever. They change. And it humanizes people. But I'm not convinced—and especially given Modernism, poetry became this unimportant [trailing off]
I can see why people would rather watch a stupid T.V. show than read a poem they can't understand. Of course, it makes perfect sense.
 Steve Kowit's thumbtacked photo of the young Bob Dylan. |
I don't know that I have a good answer to what the importance of art is.
We're talking and I'm looking at (a photo of) the young Bob Dylan. [he points it out on the bulletin board next to Bush Sr., and we both look] I'm looking at Bob Dylan—there's an artist, a real artist, and he was enormously important. Whitman. [pointing] Dylan Thomas. Ginsberg, up there
Joyce. You know in the long run those people do affect a lot of people. I mean, you hardly hear a male vocalist who hasn't been influenced by (Dylan). Yeah, it has a humanizing influence. It doesn't help humanity—humanity is lost; art will not save humanity.
Please write that down. [We both laugh]
And I'll sign it too. I'll sign that one. [continued laughter]
Nothing will save humanity from its malignance. Homo Satanicus is a species that all the other species are waiting to see expire. There's gonna be one big party on this planet when the last Homo Sapien has died. A big party. From the cockroaches to the chimpanzees, you know. They've been waiting a long time. And art helps humanize us but, you know, it doesn't do the job: we're still a genocidal species, we kill each other at every turn, en masse—not just one on one—but by the hundreds of thousands.
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The written word has been very harmful for all other species, and I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to the cockroaches, and every other species, if our ability to read and write is what brought us to this demonic point. [hearty mutual laughter]
On page 39 of In the Palm of Your Hand, you write, "Abandoning all sense for the sake of a rhyme is a sure sign of a versifier who imagines that poetry is a lot of foolish nothings that sound pretty. If that's your ambition you would be better off becoming a political speech writer, where a talent for high-flown rhetoric, clichιs, and pomposity might earn you a decent living." Do you feel that poetry and politics are antithetical?
You know it's funny because I've often thought that the poets disparage the politicians—intellectuals tend to disparage politicians—and yet the poets are writing more bullshit than the politicians are speaking. The politicians are at least speaking coherent lies. The poets, the modernists, are writing incoherent lies. So I'm not at all sure that the poets have the right to think they're in a higher trade. I would like to see the whole modernist thing collapse. I'd like, at poetry readings, I would like the people in the back rows to have tomatoes in their hands. [grinning] And if there's a poem they don't understand, start throwing them. Boy would that be therapeutic, for poetry and poetry readings and art. Saying, "we don't understand you. What the hell are you doing up there? Talk English for God's sake!"
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[building laughter] God I come off like a philistine.
[more laughter] Don't worry, it'll be a good article. We'll polish it up
Oh I don't care. I have nothing against philistines.
Well when we think about the poets who gathered in verse to protest the invasion of Iraq
[interrupting] That's good, oh yes, and Vietnam also. That was very honorable. And remains very honorable. In fact, that speaks well of poets doesn't it? Because you didn't see that among dentists or neurologists or shoe-salesmen. It's the poets who gather together and protest these wars. No other group does, so you gotta give the poets credit for that.
That's one thing about these performance poets, open mic, poetry slams that you see all over. The real virtue of that is, a lot of it is not white guys—it really is multicultural—and it's political. And you don't find that in academic poetry. You go into any spoken word event and you'll hear people talking politics in their poems, and I think that's very admirable. It's true a lot of their poetry is dreadful, but a lot of the academic poetry is dreadful on other grounds. I'll take (the first) kind of dreadfulness because at least people are trying to talk about the real stuff.
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Well the poets' protest was an achievement as an outcry of principle, a symbol of principle if you will. Yet it failed to achieve any measurable success beyond the symbolic. I'm wondering if you think poetry can have any actual effect on the way our society, our country, or our president, acts?
[long pause] Well I don't know about our President. [we both laugh] I think only on that subtle level, that people who are better educated are more likely to be cynical about the state in which they reside. And more able to look at it critically. And that's all the arts and sciences, and anyone who's educated. On the other hand, I confess sociologically, in our culture the poets—as I said a minute ago—tend to be the most critical, or the writers in general. They tend to be the ones who immediately can be counted on to say the President is a fool and an asshole.
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That's wonderful that the writers always are in that position. That's why a lot of writers all over the world are in prison. They tend to be the "conscience of the race," as Shelley said—in that very important sense. The writers have enormous power in the culture. So yeah they do have something to do with helping to, if not make the world (better), to ameliorate the criminality of the state.
Some of your poetry deals with aspects of religion. Your quote, "If Jesus Christ died for my sins he was overreacting," expresses a feeling and frustration many people have today and yet, increasingly, are unable to express. I'm wondering if you see the increasing, fundamental I'm-right-you're-wrong, religious movement in our country as detrimental to the kind of honest free expression that lies at the heart of poetry?
I don't know if it's because they say "I'm right and you're wrong," I think it's because they're wrong. [mutual laughter] They're wrong and very dangerously wrong. I don't mind Noam Chomsky saying, "I'm right about this," you know, because he's done the research. He might be wrong but it's respect-worthy. Oh yes, the religious right in the United States has taken over this country, or is in the process of taking over this country. Definitely they're an enormous danger.
I don't like the old or new testament anyhow. I don't like either of those books. The new testament basically says, this Jesus Christ fellow basically says, anyone who disagrees with me is going to be tortured for eternity. That's what any neurotic adolescent might say: "Anyone who disagrees with me (should be) tortured, eternally, every moment." That's a paradigmatic, sadistic theology. I don't think you will ever find any statement that can be more sadistic than "if you don't believe in our religion you are tortured for all eternity." That's monstrous! Monstrously evil!
[thoughtful pause] And do you think the atmosphere in this country right now will stifle the voice of poetry? Or do you think maybe it will fan it, because people will be so frustrated?
Oh, that's interesting, yeah. I don't know. You look at Eastern Europe and their poetry for many years was subversive in that they could not say anything directly or they'd be arrested. And that's probably true with any kind of totalitarian system. Now, our poets are indirect enough, I'd hate to see them go another stage of indirection. So I have no idea. I would love to see more political poetry. Political poetry, like all poetry, is very difficult to write. It's easy to soap-box, it's easy to write in political clichιs, it's very hard to write good political poetry. I was just late last night reading
Martin Espada, he's a lawyer, and he's a poet. He's a good political poet
but he knows what he's doing so he never sentimentalizes, he never gets soap-boxy, he's never ranting in any foolish way.
I love great political poetry. I translated a book of (Pablo) Neruda
one of his most political books. I have a (Bertolt) Brecht poem on my window here, a wonderful Brecht poem. Four lines and it's a masterpiece. But it's hard because it's easy to miss the mark.
Of course during the Vietnam war
poets were starting to write political poems. A voice emerged that was larger, was more public. So I think it would be very good if more and more poets started writing political poetry. And it might be happening because of the war, because poets are up-tight about it. And how do you put it in words?
That goes to what I was going to ask you next. Do you think that perhaps political poems might be more effective because so much passion can come from politics?
I think so. And also it's more public, the language tends to be more public, and it's not about the ego—it's not about your grandmother or yourself. At their best they're poems of compassion. They're poems about the suffering of this world, of other people. So they can be wonderfully large, spiritually.
And for that very same reason they are tough to write.
Yes. Yes. Tough to write also because it's hard to
how do you write about a general abstraction when the heart of all writing—prose or poetry—is that specific detail, is finding that one little moment that metaphorically stands for the rest. So it's hard on those grounds
and it's easy to get bombastic and sanctimonious. There's a lot of bad political poetry—a lot of bad love poetry too. It's easy to be bad at anything. [smiling]
Again the Modernists, the new critics, really disdained any kind of public poetry—political poetry. There wasn't really a whole lot of it, although there was fine poetry coming out of the wars—guys who were in the Second World War, someone like Anthony Hecht. Hecht was a formalist and a master. And very erudite. Always references to the Greek Gods or German literature. But he was in the Second World War and he was Jewish, and he wrote several poems about the holocaust where you could feel that passion. You could feel that this was important. And we've had lots of war poets
it's not triumphalist poetry, it tends to be a poetry of guilt. And that's real too, that's real too, people writing that kind of personal political poetry—owning up to their own participation in all that.
Poets do bear witness, and novelists—when I say poets it's kind of awkward, because the truth is short story writers and novelists do the same damn thing. And they're all part of that (bearing witness).
Yeah, verse is one thing, but poetry is in all good writing.
[nodding] That's right. Poetry is just language used well and imaginatively.
Do you feel this accessible style of poetry is more valuable than Eliot's "dislocating language into its meaning," or abscure [Kowit's term] style?
I think, I mean, a poem like Prufrock is a great poem. And there are other poems, Preludes, by Eliot—they're just great poems. So I don't want to disparage him. But that direction of esoteric writing definitely was the wrong direction to go. But Eliot was talented and there's no reason all those techniques can't be used: fragmentation—which is certainly a central mode of twentieth century art—nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with any of those inventions if they can be used in a way that expresses not just the music but that in fact does what art does at its best, or literary art does at its best, gives people some information on some level. I don't just mean that linear information, but a larger sense of the world. Eliot was a damn good writer.
Is The Dumbbell Nebula your most recent collection of poetry?
You know someone came out about six months ago with a collection of mine—a little thing—called Steve Kowit's Greatest Hits. There's a series of these, about a hundred or more, and all around the country they're going around and getting people to do their greatest hits. It has a little essay by me and twelve poems. That's the format of all these greatest hits books.
My latest piece of writing is an essay in Skeptic Magazine about
an incident in the 19th century, in what is now South Africa, when a hundred thousand people of the Xhosa tribe starved themselves to death because of a religious prophecy. So I write a lot of prose these days too, you know, a lot of essays. That's part of a book
on collective self deception.
[sarcastically] Talk about the United States on November 2nd.
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I would say even 9/11. For a month or two after that, no one dared in the media analyze why it happened. We were told by Condoleezza Rice, George Bush, and all those other war criminals not to. The media was basically explicitly told "it's because they're bad guys and we're good guys," and that was the line that was presented. And no one did any analysis at all. And millions of people bought into this infantile kind of non-analysis. That's the kind of collective self-deception you see in war hysteria—war hysteria is a form of self-deception. And after 9/11 we went into about seven or eight months of it. And out of it came the Afghanistan slaughter, and the Iraq slaughter really comes out of it also—pretty directly.
Even though there's no reason that it should.
Right. But the fact that everyone knows we had no reason to go in, that all our rationalizations have proven to be lies, doesn't seem to matter to 50% of the population. That kind of mass self-deception.
The media really hasn't improved all that much since the months after 9/11, since that period of self-deception.
No they haven't. No, the media is very implicated—profoundly implicated—in what's going on in the country. That's where people get their information, from the media. And the media told them "support the U.S.," and "we're right," and "we're the righteous." Of course every country does that, every tribe does that. That's how tribes function. But the media is the messenger here and is the one who makes opinion. Bush doesn't make opinion. The LA Times, and the Union Tribune, and The New York Times make the opinion—and CNN and Fox News.
You touched on this when you talked about poetry bearing witness, but here's kind of a tough question for you, perhaps. [we both laugh] If you could sum up what makes poetry important, unique, valuable, and so forth—in just a few words—what would you say?
[long pause, thinking] It's a kind of music. You're making music ultimately, and music is part of the joy of the human species. It has to do with joy and pleasure. You know when you read a great poem and you say, "Oh! Ah!" [he mimics a satisfied sigh] It's that experience. Or you hear
you know I was listening to Lucinda Williams last night. God I love her. Or Dylan, you know, a great musician.
So it gives us that joy, there's an aesthetic joy
and it's wonderful. It's a high kind of pleasure
. It's a high kind of pleasure therefore it's a kind of high. It's a good way to get stoned. It's a really good way to get stoned.
You know I'll read Whitman and he'll wake me up—spiritually. Your viewpoint will go from a narrow tunnel vision
and your world expands for a few minutes. And you're larger. And you're in a larger world. And there's joy in that sense of increase, or space. It's very therapeutic.
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