Greg's aboard. You can read some poems on Mastery, and read some critical appraisals on Discerning Eye. To kick things off I asked him some questions:
Q: I’ve been re-reading both your books, and some questions come to mind. You’ve datelined "The Mockingbird Imitates Life" December 31, 2000. "The Darkling Thrush" bears the same date, but a century earlier. To what extent does your poem converse with Hardy, and how do you feel it bears up beside its great predecessor?
Well, as you imply, it's meant to converse with Hardy's poem, and a few others, pretty directly, just as Hardy's thrush is a response to Keats' nightingale and Shelley's skylark, which are in part reponses to Milton's nightingale, and so on in the rich and extensive bird-trope tradition. At the end of his century, with its desolate, barren landscape, its fervorless spirits, its broken lyres at his diminished end of Romanticism, Hardy is visited by the poetically emblematic singer, which, though "aged," "frail, gaunt, and small," nevertheless carols ecstatically, a natural voice heard somewhere overhead. At the end of a different century, on a different continent, my poem is skeptical of even that possibility. How it measures up? Goodness, I don't know. That's for others to decide.
Q: A poem I particularly admire from your first book is "Waterfall." It is very like Richard Wilbur, mimetic even. And of course Wilbur can be mimetic, his poem for Auden, "April 5, 1974," etc. Were you consciously thinking of "Piazza di Spagna" and "A Baroque Wall-Fountain" when you wrote your poem?
No, I wasn't consciously thinking of those poems at the time. But, as you know, I am a great admirer of Richard Wilbur and was reading him a good deal then, so I certainly wouldn't deny his influence, both conscious and un-.
Q: To what degree are you influenced by Stevens, and what is your assessment of his achievement?
I'm not sure I can gauge Stevens' influence, but I've always been enormously excited by his attempts to negotiate the paradoxes of the pathetic fallacy, his turnings upon the turnings of metaphor, his meditations on the nature of art (or the art of nature), his ironic, self-satirizing sense of Romantic belatedness, his grandly witty verbal artifice.... To paraphrase Dennis Hopper in "Apocalypse Now," He is a great poet; I should have been a pair of ragged claws....
Q: I am deeply impressed by the proficiency of our younger poets, particularly, Williamson, Stallings, Thiel, and Tufariello. Lord knows there may be others I haven’t encountered. What do you think of my generation, and how do you assess the current health of poetry in this new Millenium?
Tim, demographers dispute the line between the Baby Boomers and Generation X. In any event, there are many poets indeed born in the forties and fifties (the generation you mean?) to whom I turn with immense respect and delight, too many to try to start naming. From a very, very general perspective (and I emphasize "general" because there are so many idiosyncratic and contradicting examples), one may detect a (perhaps Lowellian) flattening of the line and literalizing of the poem in this period. There are understandable reasons for such a drift, and the style can have a powerful rhetorical effect, but there are losses with it too. What the influence of those writers or any individual writer will be I don't think we'll know for at least one more generation.
As for your second question, the death of poetry has been declared lots of times, generally with conflicting autopsies. We seem to be perpetually at the end, when "universal darkness buries all." It's easy to look back at grand periods and imagine all those huge artistic brains striding around like giants, but I once picked up three issues of Poetry from 1915 or 1917 or so, famous publisher H.D. and Eliot and others in that period, but there wasn't one person in there I'd ever heard of. And, heck, Pope was mad at someone; nevertheless, here we are, thousands of gorgeous poems later. Besides, "they also live/ who swerve and vanish in the river." In spite of pockets of frustrating anti-literariness and the usual disagreements about good taste, I think poetry is in good shape.
Q: Aside from your immortal line in "Double Exposures," "the official messkit of the BSA," what has the Boy Scouts meant to you?
The Boy Scouts, eh? Well, I learned many indispensible life skills. I can tie a bowline around my waist in under a second, tie a clove hitch around my thumb with one hand, and lash up a twenty-five foot observation tower with logs and hemp. Really, though, while I make light, I look back with a lot of fondness, six or seven years of Scouts, after all. Many of my best friends were in Scouts, and we did all kinds of things I wouldn't have otherwise done, hundreds of miles of hiking, scores of weeks and weekends camping out, countless visits to historical sites, canoeing, rafting, riflery, archery, map and compass reading, snowy fire building, ill-advised shortcut taking, suspicious water drinking, mouse wrangling, chigger dementia suffering, black bear away from running, non-OSHA-approved bridge building, and so on. We had a very devoted scoutmaster. And aside from "reverent," maybe some of the Scout law even stuck, all evidence to the contrary.
Q: In an early Truffaut film, ‘le grand auteur’ returns from Stockholm and his acceptance of the Nobel, and he’s asked at a planeside press conference "What do you want to do next?" He replies "I want to become immortal and then to die." What are your plans?
I haven't written anything in quite a while. Driving down here the other day from Baltimore, the idea for a new poem came to me from the voice in the radio. After that, if eventually that's that, I hope I'll learn by going where I have to go.
These were tough, Tim, but fun. I hope they're satisfactory. And more so I hope you and Alan feel better quickly.
Best,
Greg
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