Between The Lines is a small British house which publishes extraordinary, book-length interviews with senior poets, including Wilbur, Justice, Gunn, Heaney, Hecht, etc. The book in which Philip Hoy interviews Hecht is probably the best of a fine lot. You can read extracts from the Hecht book and the others at www.interviews-with-poets.com. Simply click the thumbnail picture of the poet you want to read.

OK, Mastery fans, please post your questions by tomorrow evening, and I'll print them and fax them to Mr. Hecht. His answers will appear around Monday. With his having no access to a computer, we can't have the give and take we've had with previous guest Lariats, but we can all discuss his answers afterward. If this works well, the convenience store downslope from Wilbur's aerie in the Berkshires has a fax, and we'll repeat the experiment with Dick.

Here are some questions to get people started:

--Who are your favorite poets?

--Which poems of yours are your personal favorites and why?

--What do you feel about reaction to your newest book? Has it been unfairly criticized, or has reaction ranged across the board?

--How do subjects of your poems present themselves to you, and how long do you spend revising them?

--How do you know when you have reached a point of diminishing returns when editing/rewriting a piece?

--How long do you wait to return to a piece before revising (or reinstating previous drafts)?

--At what point do you decide to toss it onto the bone pile?

--How often do you go back to the bone pile and either try to scrounge for something useful in a current piece you are writing or try to resurrect something completely?

--If you can pinpoint it-when was your first major experience with language?

--How many poems did you write before you felt you had written a successful piece? What did you think made it successful?

--Which is more important to you—sound or sense?

Hecht uses slant-rhymed bisyllables with extraordinary deftness in "Haman" and other poems. I would like to ask the master whether he has any general principles or preferences for the use of slant rhyme.

A.S.

Here's one last Hecht poem before his visit this weekend. He explains in a note that it was common knowledge in the middle ages that the Mandrake sprouted from the semen of hanged men, that witches made love potions of it, that its shriek when pulled from the ground could drive one insane.

The Hanging Gardens of Tyburn

Mysteriously fed by the dying breath
Of felons, by the foul odor that melts
Down from their bodies hanging on the gallows,
The rank, limp fesh, the soft pendulous guilt,

This solitary plant takes root at night,
Its tiny charnel blossoms the pale blue
Of Pluto's ice pavilions; being dried,
Powdered and mixed with the cold morning dew

From the left hand of an executed man,
It confers untroubled sleep, and can prevent
Prenatal malformations if applied
To a woman's swelling body, except in Lent.

Take care to clip only the little blossoms,
For the plant, uprooted, utters a cry of pain
So highly pitched as both to break the eardrum
And render the would-be harvester insane.

I`d like to ask if WW2 is still ever far from
his thoughts. And how he sees his own work, and
the work of other poets, in relation to
barbarism (For want of a better word)and deceit.
Is it his job to explain the world or to make it
a better place ?

DC

Conny, Click into the url for that interview by Phil Hoy. We were all astonished that he spoke so frankly, and that's what makes it the best book in the series. The horror, the horror. Having read it, I doubt that you could better rephrase your question, though you're welcome to try, and I shall forward it to Professor Hecht. --Tim

Sorry, I unintentionally started a thread on slant rime. My question is meant for this thread on Anthony Hecht.

Is there a dictionary of slant rimes?

Bob

Tim,

I followed up on your suggestion to look at the Hoy interview, or excerpts from it, and I am rather sorry that I did so. Probably those excerpts are too selective to give a full picture of the poet as a man, but so far as they go they show Hecht to be less than admirable. It disappointing to find that an accomplished poet is, or has been, by his own confession, a cowardly and unpatriotic individual.

The old Sir Walter Scott verses come to mind: "Breathes there a man with soul so dead...etc."

Having seen a good deal of ground action in the nearly forgotten Korean War, I believe have observed American soldiers and marines under fire quite enough to know that surly, insubordinate attitudes, much less outright cowardice, are not common among them.

This discovery concerning Hecht may henceforth make it as hard for me to enjoy his poetry as it must be for you to appreciate even the better poems of, say, Leo Y.


G.



[This message has been edited by Golias (edited November 11, 2001).]

Dear Wiley, I've not been in the armed forces, let alone a combatant, so I'm no one to judge a soldier. Tony saw members of his unit machine-gun a party of women and children under a flag of truce and frankly expressed his horror at it. Like many other intellectuals he subsequently became utterly disillusioned by our government's conduct of the Vietnam war. This hardly makes him cowardly or unpatriotic. I suggest you read the entire book if you want a fuller picture of this admirable man. As for Korea, I just watched a spectacular documentary hosted by Colonel North on the retreat from that frozen reservoir, and I salute the gallantry of you and your comrades-in-arms. It is not forgotten.

I found a web page claiming to have a slant rhyme dictionary, though I haven't checked it out yet to see if it's any good: http://lyricpro.com/LyricProSlantRhymes.htm

Personally, I'm skeptical it can be very good. Some slant rhymes are rather easy to spot, like spot and spit, but then we encounter judgment calls, like sport and spate and spud and speed, etc. And if the same rhyming words are used more than twice, each succeeding use of slant rhyme may be a slant rhyme for the preceding one but may grow very distant from the first use. spot spit sport spat spud speed sped, etc., for example, in which you may agree with each succeeding slant rhyme but may not agree that spot and sped are "true" slant rhymes. This is off the top of my head. I'm sure there are better examples of what I'm saying.