You’re known as a poet, although your most

famous work, Letters to Wendy’s, is at least

according to your descriptions, a novel, however
poetic the prose pieces that comprise it are. In
other interviews, you have described the impulses
that directed you to write Letters to Wendy’s in
what you call the “post-poetic” mode, one whose
speaker is not quite as obliterated as that ‘self’ that
often speaks in/from the poetic moment. Your
newest book, however, will be a collection of
essays. This won’t be a new form for you, but how
would you characterize the speaker, mode, and
directional impulse(s) of your essays? I assume
there are obvious differences between your
approach to poetry and prose and your approach
to the essay, but are there any similarities or areas
that overlap?

Allen Grossman, in Summa Lyrica, describes the

moment from which poetic speech emerges in
terms of a disabling of the autonomy of the will. I like that description, and I have used it to
describe the difference between the more conventional poems I’ve written and the Letters.
When I say the speaker of the Letters is post-poetic, I am saying that his very presence
demonstrates that the autonomy of the will has been re-established, even if its re-
establishment means to hold on to a sense of the failure it has weathered. The Letters are
comical because they reminisce (either in celebration or in grief) the poetic moment; any text
that reminisces upon the poetic moment is comical (though not always intentionally, of
course). (The height of comedic reminiscence upon the poetic moment is Beckett.) As I
wrote the Letters, I was aware, of course, of their comical aspect, but I tried to maintain, at
the same time, the seriousness of the poetic moment. It took me awhile to figure out how to
achieve this, or even to figure out that this was what interested me and what I wanted to do.
I am a fairly witty person and can come up with funny things to say, and part of the
Wendy’s project depends on this talent, but ultimately I came to understand that I was trying
to do something more than be funny. The key to achieving this ambiguity, I found, was in
understanding and making apparent the devotion of the narrator. To what was he devoted?
To showing up, to being engaged with his own process, to the specificity that it is possible
to expect or to reminisce, to the autonomy of the will. And I came to understand that this
devotion is key because it—our devotion to the personae by which we manifest ourselves
and make ourselves history—is precisely what is funny and dead serious at the same time.
More often than not we laugh at a buffoonery from outside of it, as though there is an
outside of it, which we presume ourselves to be the sovereigns of. But if a buffoonery is
able to convey that there is nothing outside of buffoonery, no firm ground from which one
can laugh at it, then the buffoonery itself is changed, and the sort of knowledge it allows for
is changed. It ceases to produce practical knowledge and produces instead a sadder—dare I
say a poetic—knowledge. I called "Letters To Wendy’s" a novel because I wished it was,
I guess, at first (ah, to be a novelist!), and I suppose there are ways to define novel so as to
include it, but more recently I’ve come to think of the Letters as more poetic than I had
originally suspected. This may have to do with the point I’ve made above, but it has to do
also with some work I did recently with writing in forms. As I did that work, and as I
looked at poems students had written via formal exercises, I came to understand more
keenly the real structure of poems, which is always three-parted. In part one, the poem
opens up a scene of some sort. In part two, something happens, i.e. that scene is
developed/complicated. Part two, while it is a developing and a complicating of the scene,
provides the components from which a closure might be constructed. Part three is the
achievement of that closure. Thinking about the Letters in this light, I came to realize how
squarely they fit this description; their requisite brevity, I now realize, was attractive to me,
and I loved writing them because I loved the challenge of having to be concise in 1. making
an assertion or establishing a scene; 2. complicating that assertion or scene; 3. finding a
satisfactory closure. As for the essays I’ve collected in the new book, for the most part they
are a different matter because they have a quite different relationship to the failure of the
autonomy of the will. I want to say that they have no relationship to it at all, but it is better to
say that they have no emotional relationship to it. They are instead rhetorical, and they
progress by way of logics. If they have a poetic aspect, I suspect it’s by way of their subject
matter more than by way of their manner of engaging with that matter. But then I have
thrown a pretty wide variety of texts into the book—some are quite conventional and
earnest, some are quite satirical, and some are I-don’t-know-what. I think the thread that
runs through them, the thing that inclines me to call them essays, is above all their intention,
which is to make a point. Works of art—at least the most potent of them—do not seek to
make a point.

In many of my favorite poems of yours, a speaker is placed in or directed toward a

particularly ‘pedestrian’ setting, say a Go-Go Bar, a fast food restaurant, a working class
lounge. Plenty of writers and poets frequent and then celebrate (albeit in a patronizing way)
such places. And there are, of course, the other kind, say like James Wright or Richard
Hugo, to whom a literary relationship to such places signifies a kind of pride in one’s
identity stemming from humble origins. But unlike these writers/ poets, your work addresses
but never seems to indicate any particular relationship TO such places. That is, not only
does the speaker in your work refrain from romanticizing or taking pity on such places and
their inhabitants, ‘he’ also makes no direct claims to come from them. It’s as if the speaking
‘self’ is not directed from any one particular group toward such a setting. Is this in keeping
with your explanation of the speaker in the poetic moment as “falling through” the security
of ‘self,’ the security of someone with a personality, a particular status, a set of tastes and
opinions? And if so, why situate such a speaker in these locations rather than, say, a school
room? To what extent can the speaking ‘self’ in the poetic moment be extracted from a
particular, historically-located ‘self’?
That was what the Letters To Wendy’s book meant to explore—that last question. And the
answers it found varied. Some of the Letters, that is, are more comical, more resonant with
the absurdity of the historical particulars, than others. The main thing that distinguishes the
speaker of the Letters from the speaker of my poems is desire; the speaker of the Letters is
desirous, and is situated wherein his desires are (to some extent, at least) satisfiable. The
speaker of the poems—or I would prefer to say the voice of the poems—is not desirous; it
speaks from after desire, telling the story of desire’s failure. Thus, the different relation to
the scene that you’ve spoken of. I agree that my poems do not evidence a pride in the scene
they speak of, or at any rate not the usual sort. I think that all poems are celebratory, but
again, not in the usual sense—not in the sense that they mean to distinguish one scene from
another. They are celebratory in that the autonomy of the will has been disabled… but this
disabling has not achieved silence. They are celebratory in that they speak at all. If the
scene of a poem is, at bottom, particular, then that poem has failed to do what good poems
are able to do, which is to produce a sense of the site of scenes—the site of all scenes. Thus,
when I am describing a go-go bar, I am doing so because that particular scene, for me,
evokes the site of scenes—it evokes the scene that does not change, which is to say, the
conditions in which our selves must dwell. Diving Into The Wreck is a great poem not
because it evidences the identity or the lifestyle of a proud or humble diver; it is great
because its metaphor works to describe the site of scenes. If I am drawn in my poems to
working class scenes, this is probably because that’s where I’ve happened to live. Also, one
might argue that, because the conditions in which we dwell are essentially cruel, it is more
likely that poets will turn to scenes of particular cruelties to evoke those conditions.
I once heard you explain, at one of your readings, that Letters to Wendy’s is a novel,
mainly because, as you explained, the letters form a kind of progression. I always
understood you to mean that the speaker in the novel undergoes this progression. If you still
feel this to be the case, could you elaborate on the kind of progression you have or had in
mind?
I do not think that the Letters work in the way that good novels work. If the book works, it
works over and over, not by way of narrative developments.
In 1996, you wrote an editorial in The American Poetry Review in which you responded to
A.R. Ammons’s claim that ‘poetry is action.’ Your response seemed to argue that poetry is,
in fact, the very opposite of action, that it presents itself as a moment of in-action, of
hesitation before and questioning of any and all actions. I always understood this to mean
that poetry is not activism, that it cannot afford to be limited to any particular kind of
activism, political or otherwise. Now, almost nine years later, and given the urgency of the
national, political climate, do you still feel that poetry cannot afford to venture towards the
realm of action or toward exposition?

Yeah, I have still seen no evidence to make me believe that a poetry of action can be any
good. I don’t see that this is a problem, though. Let’s say someone is attacking you, and you
have a knife, a baseball bat, and a small sack of opium. You should use the knife and/or the
baseball bat, and you should not lament the fact that you cannot use the small sack of opium
at that moment. It has its own usefulness, its own time. I have turned to writing essays more
often in these past ten years, I suspect, because of the worsening of the political situation. It
may seem obscene to indulge in the arts while certain things are going on in the world, but I
think that if we disallow ourselves the dignities of art… we are letting the terrorists—i.e. the
current administration—win.

Interview finalized in October 2004.

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