A note about Three Poets in Conversation

A 150 page volume, containing extended conversations between the poets Dick Davis, Rachel Hadas and Timothy Steele and, respectively, Clive Wilmer, Isaac Cates and Cynthia Haven. The poets talk about their work and their lives in unrivalled detail.

A note on Dick Davis

Dick Davis was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1945, and educated at the universities of Cambridge (where he received a BA and an MA in English Literature) and Manchester (where he received a PhD in Medieval Persian Literature). He has taught at the universities of Tehran, Durham, Newcastle, and California, Santa Barbara. Currently he is Professor of Persian and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University.
    He lived for eight years in Iran, as well as for periods in Greece and Italy. During his time in Iran he met Afkham Darbandi and they married in 1974. They have two daughters, Mariam, born in 1982, and Mehri, born in 1984.
    From about 1978 to 1984 Davis worked as a freelance writer and, during this period, published around a hundred and fifty articles and reviews in the British national press. As author, translator or editor, he has produced twenty-one books. In addition to his academic works he has published translations from Italian prose and from both prose and verse in Persian, not to mention his own books of poetry.
Davis has received a number of awards and honours. In 1979, he received an award from The Arts Council of Great Britain to write a book on Yvor Winters. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1981. In the same year he received an award from The British Institute of Persian Studies to translate Attar’s Manteq alTayr. Also in this year he received for his book of poems, Seeing the World, the Heinemann Award for ‘a work of outstanding literary merit’.
    He was given a two-year scholarship from the University of Manchester to conduct research on the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi and this study led to the PhD mentioned above. During 1987-88 he had a Fulbright Travel Scholarship at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
    His selected poems, Devices and Desires: New and Selected Poems 1967-1987 was chosen by both The Times and the Daily Telegraph as a Book of the Year in 1989. In this year he was also given a grant in aid of publication award from The Persian Heritage Foundation for Epic and Sedition: the Case of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. In 1993 he received an Ingram Merrill Prize for ‘excellence in poetry’ for A Kind of Love, the revised and expanded US edition of Devices and Desires. The Poetry Society of Great Britain awarded him a recommendation for translation for Medieval Persian Epigrams, which appeared in 1995. He was a Guggenheim Fellow for 1999-2000. The American Institute of Iranian Studies awarded him its Translation Prize for My Uncle Napoleon in 2000. These honours were followed by the Encyclopaedia Iranica Prize for Services to Persian Poetry in 2001, the year The American Institute of Iranian Studies again awarded him a translation prize, this time shared with his wife Afkham Darbandi, for The Conference of the Birds. His work, in 2002, to translate Volume III of stories from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Award. His book of verse, Belonging, was chosen as a Book of the Year in The Economist, in 2002.
    As a poet, an early passion of Davis’s – and one that has not been lost – was for Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. He uses the Fitzgerald stanza in ‘A Letter to Omar’, a homage to the poet, published in Devices and Desires. In fact, he went on to edit a new edition, published in 1989. Such an enthusiasm must have influenced his preference for the expressive qualities of traditional forms and metres that characterize his verse. In his first collection, In the Distance, he uses metre and rhyme not in a narrowly old-fashioned formal way but develops with them well-made thoughtful poems that move with a quietly spoken but effective perception. His second book of verse, Seeing the World, as mentioned above, received the Royal Society of Literature Award in 1981. The Covenant was published in 1984. Touchwood: Poems 1991-1994 appeared in 1996, along with Borrowed Ware: Medieval Persian Epigrams, a verse translation and scholarly edition with introduction and head-notes. Belonging appeared in the US and then in the UK in 2002, and Richard Wilbur wrote of it: ‘I began by jotting down the titles of the best poems, but gave that up when it seemed I might choose them all.’ Davis’s most recent collection, published in July 2006, is A Trick of Sunlight, which Booklist’s reviewer called ‘one of the most rereadable books of poems of recent years’.

– Peter Dale, 2006

Rachel Hadas was born in 1948 and spent her childhood in New York City. She studied classics at Harvard, poetry at Johns Hopkins University, and comparative literature at Princeton. During the early Seventies, between college and graduate school, she spent four years in Greece. There she met and became friends with James Merrill. Since 1981 she has taught in the English Department at the Newark, New Jersey, campus of Rutgers University. She has also taught occasional courses in literature and writing at Princeton and Columbia and has occasionally served on the poetry faculty of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She has published twelve books of verse, essays and translations and has received several awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two Ingram Merrill Foundation grants in poetry and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Her collection, Halfway down the Hall: New and Selected Poems, published by Wesleyan in 1998, was a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
    With her home background – her father was the renowned classicist Moses Hadas – and her education in the classics, the Greek experience figures frequently in Hadas’s early verse, particularly in Slow Transparency of 1983, and it surfaces again in some later poems. Unsurprisingly, both George Seferis’s work – with its vision of sea and islands, the residues of time, classical myth and history – and James Merrill’s – with its wordplay, citation, cutting and intercutting – had early impacts on her writing.
    Her later poetry, however, has become much more independent. The language games are subordinated by an awareness of more contemporary things, the more local limits of living. In Pass It On (1989), themes of friendship, marriage, and the relations between parent and child are foregrounded. Poems deal unsentimentally with domestic themes such as child-bearing and nursing, reading children stories, watching them learning to master speech and language. Indelible (2001), while touching on themes from her earlier work, traces the contours and the erosions of time in the terrain of family, art, and literature, elegy and dream. The book also contains some prose poems, perhaps an innovation, though her prose and poems have always run closely parallel. As Rosanna Warren remarked: ‘Her traffic with the ordinary – closet-cleaning, recycling paper, sorting files – goes on under the gaze of the ancient gods.’
In 2000, she published a book of essays and reminiscences, Merrill, Cavafy, Poems, and Dream, in the Poets on Poetry Series of the University of Michigan Press. Here her Greek reminiscences, and memories of James Merrill and Alan Ansen provide background to the poems. There is also a spirited defence, as one might expect from a classicist, of the formal aspects of poetry, though Hadas has never been too regimental about this in the way that some of the New Formalists are. In using the ballade form in ‘The End of Summer’, a poem to her son, she remarks: ‘should this rigid rhyme / scheme leave you cramped …’ – A New Formalist might well think her use of the form here licentious in its use of oblique rhymes.

– Peter Dale, 2006

Timothy Steele was born in 1948 in Burlington, Vermont. He was educated at the local public, or state, schools from which he moved on to Stanford University. He received his PhD from Brandeis where that rigorous teacher and poet J. V. Cunningham became a powerful influence on his own development as a poet. He was appointed a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford before moving in 1977 to Los Angeles, where he now serves as a professor of English at the city’s California State University campus. He has won many awards and honours, amongst them: a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; the Los Angeles PEN Center’s Award for Poetry, and a Commonwealth Club of California Medal for Poetry.
    He has been mistakenly associated, even identified by some, with the ‘New Formalists’, but his interest in, advocacy and use of traditional form began much earlier than the stirrings of that amorphous grouping. His own talents in this direction were probably influenced and encouraged early on by the powerful practice of Cunningham and the ghostly ambience of Yvor Winters. Steele’s proclivity has always been to use the full expressive resources of traditional metre; his characteristic registers usually hover round the plain style found, for example, in Ben Jonson’s lyric and epigrammatic verse. Steele would subscribe to the Wintersian idea of the importance of intelligence in the making of accessible verse, reason holding the reins of emotion. Yet his work does not feel as constricted as Winters often sounds since there is also an underlying influence from Frost which can ease the rhythmic and emotional advance of a poem of Steele’s. In Uncertainties and Rest (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1979), and Sapphics against Anger (New York, 1986), there is a passion and wit delivered with an underlying authority and control in dealing with Vermont landscapes and Californian scenes. But, unlike so many contemporaries, Steele is not averse to dealing more abstractly with topics such as culture, faith and friendship. Also included in these books are some nicely judged love poems, not to mention epigrams of lapidary power, the form favoured by his old mentor J. V. Cunningham. The Color Wheel (Baltimore, Maryland), carrying much of the same conviction, appeared in 1994. A selected poems, Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986, appeared from The University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, in 1995. His most recent collection is Toward the Winter Solstice (Athens, Ohio, 2006), which prompted Booklist’s Ray Olson to describe him as ‘so technically adroit that he could write about anything and produce a poem repeatedly rewarding for music and shapeliness alone, and subject matter be damned.’
    Steele’s prose criticism has had considerable influence, particularly in America, not least on the previously mentioned, so-called New Formalists. Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter (Fayetteville, Arkansas/London, 1990), is a scholarly work which closely argues the case for the traditional approach to metrics and form. Wilbur wrote of it: ‘If it has not the slam-bang simplicity of polemic it has something better: it is patiently evidential and well-nigh incontestable.’
    Missing Measures was followed by another prose work, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification (Athens OH, 1999), designed to explain metrics in detail for those now brought up without that once traditional knowledge. Steele has also edited The Music of His History: Poems for Charles Gullans on His Sixtieth Birthday (Florence, Kentucky, 1989) and, with introduction and commentary, The Poems of J. V. Cunningham (Athens, Ohio, 1997).

– Peter Dale, 2006

A note on Clive Wilmer

Clive Wilmer was born Harrogate in 1945, grew up in London, and was educated at King’s College, Cambridge. He now teaches English at Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, a Bye-Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, and an Honorary Fellow of Anglia Polytechnic University.
    He has published seven books of poetry: The Dwelling-Place (Carcanet, 1977), Devotions (Carcanet, 1982), Of Earthly Paradise (Carcanet, 1992), Selected Poems (Carcanet, 1995), The Falls (Worple Press, 2000), Stigmata (Worple, 2005) and The Mystery of Things (Carcanet, 2006).
    Wilmer is an authority on John Ruskin and his contemporaries, having edited Penguin Classics selections of Ruskin and William Morris and a Carcanet/Fyfield volume of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He is also a Director of Ruskin’s charity, the Guild of St George.
Wilmer has edited essay collections by Thom Gunn and Donald Davie and, in 1985, he conceived and helped organise the Ezra Pound centenary exhibition Pound’s Artists at the Tate Gallery. With Charles Moseley he edited the anthology Cambridge Observed for Colt Books. With George Gömöri, he has translated widely from modern Hungarian poetry, notably the work of Miklós Radnóti and György Petri, and has recently been awarded the annual Pro Cultura Hungarica medal for translation by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture. An occasional broadcaster, he fronted BBC Radio 3’s Poet of the Month programmes and his interviews from that series are published as Poets Talking by Carcanet. He was a founder-editor of the magazine Numbers and is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, PN Review and other journals.

– 2006

Isaac Cates is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Poetry Center at the C. W. Post campus of Long Island University. He was born in 1971 in Germany, and spent most of his youth on a small ranch south of Austin, Texas. He holds degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, Johns Hopkins University, and Yale University. He has published poems in Southwest Review and Cumberland Poetry Review, and essays on contemporary poetry in Literary Imagination and in several handbooks and encyclopedias. With Mike Wenthe he has also written and drawn a series of comic books and short pieces that have appeared in Other and Backwards City Review. Since the summer of 1998 he has written more than fourteen thousand postcards. He is currently writing a book on the graphic novel for Yale University Press. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

– 2006

Cynthia L. Haven was born in Detroit and educated at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor , where she studied with the late Joseph Brodsky and earned two prestigious Avery Hopwood Awards for Literature. After receiving her university degree, she moved to London and worked at Vogue, Index on Censorship , and a short-lived Third-World newsweekly on Fleet Street, the World Times.     
    Currently, she is a literary critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post Bookworld, the Los Angeles Times Book Review and the Cortland Review. Her work has also been published in Civilization , Commonweal , the Kenyon Review , and the Georgia Review. Her interview with Thom Gunn appeared in the Georgia Review, spring-summer issue, 2005 . She has been affiliated with Stanford University for many years, and is a regular contributor to its magazine.
   Recipient of over a dozen literary and journalistic awards, she has written several non-fiction books. Her most publications are Joseph Brodsky: Conversations (University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, Mississippi, 2003/Adelphi Edizioni, Milan, 2005), Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven (BTL, London, 2005), Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations (University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, Mississippi , 2006) and "Timothy Steele in Conversation with Cynthia Haven", in Three Poets in Conversation: Dick Davis, Rachel Hadas, Timothy Steele (BTL, London, 2006).

– 2006

An extract from the conversation with Dick Davis

When you started writing, the obvious sources were Blake and Dickinson. Then that changed quite suddenly to J. V. Cunningham, Yvor Winters, and the older poets praised by them. How did that happen?

Well, my first conscious models weren’t Dickinson and Blake, they were more like Byron and Shelley. But that was when I was thirteen, fourteen years old. I was in a Dickinson and Blake phase (the Blake of Songs of Experience) when I went up to Cambridge, and I guess those were the first poems of mine you saw. Dickinson was something of my own discovery, and I was proud of that. She wasn’t taught or read much then in England, no American poetry was taught then at Cambridge, except unofficially by people like Tony, and though the Thomas Johnson complete edition of her poems had come out by that time it certainly wasn’t easily available to a schoolboy in rural Yorkshire. So I was reading the Bianchi /Loomis Todd versions, I guess, but I thought they were terrific. And of course the sensibility was clearly eccentric, and young poets love that. It wasn’t such a jump from Dickinson to Cunningham for me – there’s a spareness of diction in both, and a preference for the short line, and the tendency to look for epigrammatic conclusions that we’ve just talked about. Though I agree their sensibilities are quite different, and that’s putting it mildly. But I placed them both with Wyatt and Hardy at the time I was an undergraduate, I remember, thinking of them as a loose group who wrote a kind of poetry I’d like to be able to write: verbally spare and psychologically sharp; with a kind of hard stoicism that was embodied in rather spiky, brittle, take-no-prisoners language. Winters I discovered by chance. I picked up a book of his poems in a shop and it fell open at ‘The California Oaks’, which is an absolutely wonderful poem. I read it and was bowled over, and bought the book. I was nineteen, I think. Then I talked about Winters with Tony, and he told me about Winters’s criticism, and also about Gunn’s connection with him. Gunn and Tony were good friends, and a little later I met Gunn at a party in Tony’s rooms, and I asked him about Winters too. For a while, a couple of years at least, Winters’s Collected Poems was one of my favourite books. I read the criticism too, because I liked the poems so much, but though I liked it, especially the jokes, it was the poems I really admired. He certainly changed the way I wrote: I stopped trying to use noticeable and eccentric language, I became more conscious of metrical effects, I tried to really make and shape the poems I was writing, instead of just letting them sprawl about. I became hyperconscious of the pentameter line, and what you could do with it. Most of my poems up to that point had been in much shorter lines. But my sensibility is not like his, not at all, and his themes were never mine. It was technique I wanted from him, not a poetic ethos or a set of subjects. Once I had absorbed what Winters was saying about technique it was easy to see how good a poet Bowers was. Years later, when my first book of poems was published, I sent a copy to Bowers with a fan letter, and that’s how we became friends. His poetry has meant an incalculable amount to me. I don’t think it has literally influenced me much, except in very minor ways perhaps, probably partly because his voice is so distinctive but also because I came to it too late and I wasn’t malleable any more in that way. But certainly the seriousness and austerity of his verse, the wonderfully assured and unfussy technique, the readiness to take on great subjects and to address them appropriately, all these have been an admonition to me to write better, not to be lazy, to extend what I’m capable of.

Some people have called you a ‘Wintersian’. You have written an excellent critical study of Winters in fact. Do you accept the soubriquet?

Not really: certainly not now and probably not ever. There’s too much in my make-up, and in my interests, that’s too different from what Winters cared about or could have cared about. Can you imagine Winters getting excited about Persian Sufi poetry? Very unlikely! Also he was contemptuous of epic as a form, and I find epic really fascinating: indeed much of my writing on Persian poetry is on epic, as we’ve mentioned. And Winters was into a kind of purity, I guess: I’m definitely into hybridity. We’re both children of our particular time in that of course. But there are many things in his work I find very admirable. I mean apart from the poems, a number of which I still like very much indeed. He was a most marvellous reader, in that he had an uncanny eye for singling out annihilatingly good poems that everyone up to then had missed or passed over. His promotion of the Elizabethan poet Gascoigne’s poems, for example, or the sonnets of the New England writers Tuckerman and Jones Very. He was like Geoffrey Grigson in that, though the two of them clearly operated by different criteria, and probably wouldn’t have had a lot that was polite to say to one another. Like a number of pretty trenchant critics (Leavis for example) I feel he was much better on what he admired than on what he dismissed, even though I often agree with the dismissals. I guess what I’m most grateful for is that he said it’s OK to think, and to think rationally, in a poem; in fact it’s good to think in a poem. After all the anti-intellectual, self-indulgent cant of much of late romanticism and then of imagism, and then in Europe of surrealism, that was such a relief. Like a sudden shower of ice-cold spring water after slogging through warm sticky goo for far too long. He traced a persistent tradition of interesting real thought embodied in poetry. Also he showed you how a poem is consciously made, which it is, of course, instead of the poet being completely dependent on a kind of vatic accident. This is not to deny the role of talent or the subconscious or inspiration or whatever we call it, but the role of the shaping conscious mind is crucial. His writings showed me that. And he was not afraid to designate charlatans as such: he did it in a curmudgeonly way that made him enemies (no one ever said he was good fun as company), but I was glad he did it. I never knew him, which was a source of some regret to me, though I doubt we’d have got on very well. I think he’d have found my mind a bit all over the place, if he’d deigned to notice it. My secondary school history teacher once said to me, ‘Davis, you’ll never come to anything, you have a grasshopper mind’. I do too, and I think Winters would have been dismissive of that, so maybe it’s as well we didn’t meet. I did get to know his widow, the novelist and poet Janet Lewis, as I know you did too, and like most people who knew her I just adored her. She was a very fine person; wonderfully courteous, wise, kind, everything one longs for in a friend. The closest person to sanctity I’ve ever known personally I think. Afkham my wife loved her too.

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An extract from the conversation with Rachel Hadas

It seems the best way to begin would be chronologically, where the narrative or your poetic career seems to begin, with your move from America to Greece in the early ’70s.

I graduated from college in ’69 and went to Greece on a very Henry-Jamesian little fellowship called the Isobel M. Briggs Travelling Fellowship, which was all of a thousand dollars. I didn’t really move to Greece; I meant to be travelling here and there, but I felt really at home in Athens. Also in many ways I didn’t know what else to do with myself.
    You could equally have said my life as a poet began when my father died, which was after my first year in college. But I think the fact that I then stuck around in Greece after a brief move back to America, then lived in Greece again for four years – this, with getting to know James Merrill there, not studying any more, and just sort of living, learning a language: it was enormously, enormously important.
In retrospect, however, it doesn’t feel like a move to Greece: it just feels like a very few years spent there, in a life that’s getting longer and longer.

Although I imagine that, at the time, there must have been some illusion of permanence.

For a little while.

I’m wondering: your father, Moses Hadas, was a well-known (even famous) classicist, and, as you said, he died when you were just starting college. To what extent was travelling to Greece and lingering there related to your father’s scholarly interests?

When I was growing up, we never travelled abroad; my father thought the best way to get work done was to stay home. So in going to Greece I was treating myself to an adventure, seeing places I’d only read about – but of course, yes, also in some way, going in search of a father who was not only a classicist but who had been in the O.S.S., had spent time in Athens (as well as in Cairo and Cyprus), and had Greek friends, some of whom I met when I was first in Athens. This was never a well-defined mission, but it was always somewhere in the cloudy or over-determined mix of a young person’s motives.

I’m curious, too, about your friendship with James Merrill. Had you known him, or known his work, before you met him in Athens? How did you meet? Merrill was fairly established as a poet by the early ’70s.

John Hollander, who was a family friend (and who had accepted my poem ‘Daddy’ for Harper’s while I was an undergraduate at Harvard) said, ‘If you’re going to be in Athens, you absolutely must look up Jimmy Merrill,’ which I did, and I fell in love with Merrill instantly – fell in love with everything about him. It was as if I’d always known him. We took to each other at once. But everyone always took to Merrill.

That’s certainly his reputation. Was it through Merrill that you met Alan Ansen? Ansen is not as well known, but I take it he was also a sort of early mentor to you.

Alan Ansen was a great friend and teacher from the time I met him in the fall of 1969 onwards. I’ve written about him (in ‘Fructifying a Cycle’, which is in Merrill, Cavafy, Poems, and Dreams) and learned from him steadily, and our lives have been intertwined in numerous ways. In fact, I’m his literary executor, and I hope to visit him in Athens in a few weeks.

What were the circumstances of your meeting? In a way you seem a very unlikely pair: his ‘raucous yawp’, as you have it in that essay, which he seems to owe to Ginsberg, sounds very far from your poetic voice. (I’m thinking of his line about the ‘ululant leap in skivvies through snickering respectable streets’, which you quote in that essay). It’s a little hard to imagine being the person to make introductions between the two of you.

I seem to remember Alan Ansen’s name was, like Merrill’s, given to me by John Hollander. Anyway it was inevitable that I met Alan once I started circulating in the little pond of American writers in Athens. Bernie Winebaum, an occasional poet and aesthete, for example, lived across the hall from Alan.
    Alan was alarming, energizing, welcoming, mysterious, hospitable, utterly unique. Maybe he represented something I needed – which was mutual. I also understood and enjoyed the incongruity of our friendship from the start.

Was poetry the text, or the subtext – or really only a pretext – for these friendships with Merrill and Ansen? That is, were you mainly friends who happened to be poets, or were you seeing and influencing each other’s poems? Were they keen to help you ‘become’ a poet?

Merrill’s and Ansen’s being poets certainly played a role in our friendships, but they never nudged me to be or become a poet, and they never showed me their drafts. I would have been too shy to ask. They were adults who were writers whom I encountered as friends (or who became friends), not as teachers. I hope this isn’t either too obscure or too obvious!

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An extract from the conversation with Timothy Steele

Let me begin with a confession. In preparing for this interview, I read your poetry through in pretty much one go, beginning to end. While I’ve always been an admirer, ever since we met at a reading in 1986, it was the first chance I’ve had in years to read and think about your poetry quite separately from your scholarship. Many of the poems are really stellar, and I went to bed quite enchanted with the opus. The problem: your scholarship is remarkable as well. Do you get tired of answering questions about your scholarship when you are, after all, first and foremost a poet?

You’re right, the poetry comes first and foremost. But I don’t resent questions about the scholarship; I’m grateful for the attention it’s received.

In a 1995 interview, you noted that you initially avoided the scholarly works, because, you said, they ‘impinged so closely on writing verse.’ Do you feel you have sacrificed your own poetry for your scholarship – not to mention your classroom teaching? How do you strike a balance? And how has that balance shifted over the years?

Would that I could strike a balance. Unfortunately, in the choppy seas of conflicting claims, the best I can manage is to hang onto the tiller and hope not to get pitched from the deck. The worst period for the poetry was the mid to late 1990s, when I was putting together an edition of J.V. Cunningham’s poems and trying to write All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, in addition to dealing with a heavy teaching schedule.

Do you ever regret the time you spent on Missing Measures and All the Fun?

No. We have long needed to re-examine the standard views or explanations of modern poetry, which have remained for several generations now largely shaped by and weighted in favour of the theory of Ezra Pound and the practice of T. S. Eliot. Because the triumph of the experimentalists coincided with the establishment of the study of English literature as a university discipline, the normal process of sorting out over time – of letting the dust settle before attempting to determine what was and wasn’t significant – didn’t occur to the extent it had in earlier periods. Writers like Eliot and Joyce were more or less immediately canonized, and notions that were originally polemical – for instance, that modern verse had to be fragmentary and difficult in response to a chaotic and trying age – came to be adopted as descriptive truths. And many subsequent critics and poets have embraced and propounded the illogical principle that modern or contemporary poems that aren’t experimental aren’t modern or contemporary.
    This is not to say that one outlook is wrong, and another is right. But the experimental movement left in its wake some narrow and proscriptive attitudes, and we’d all benefit if we could think more broadly and flexibly about Modernism and modern poetic practice.

What do you think is the most serious or disturbing effect of Modernism on verse technique?

The experimentalists identified metre with dated idiom. They felt that to get rid of stale diction and subject matter they had to get rid of traditional metre. I agree with Eliot and Pound that the bath water had to be thrown out; but the baby didn’t need to go with it.

Technical matters aside, can you summarize your general feelings about Modernism?

We should prize its vitality, but be concerned about its tendency towards self-obsession and discontinuity. We perhaps have made too much of our singularity. Too often we’ve insisted that the present is radically different from the past, that the human is separate from the natural, that thought and feeling are opposed, and that subject and object are unconnected. We’ve dwelt so much on novelty and change that we’ve neglected and isolated ourselves from valuable resources and ideas from earlier periods; and we’ve very nearly deluded ourselves into believing that simple linearity is the only dimension of time and being. We exist of necessity on the surface of life, but under every instant lies a depth of experience vaster than we can imagine. And even when we feel that, as the Earl of Rochester puts it, ‘The present moment’s all my lot,’ we also live backward by memory and forward by anticipation.
    A characteristic irony of the twentieth century is that its most famous scientific revelation – Einstein’s principle that temporal, spatial, and kinematic phenomena are related – was converted, in many circles, into a doctrine of subjectivism.

Can you elaborate a little on what you term the ‘doctrine of subjectivism’?

Einstein observed, among other things, that the mass of an object is affected by its velocity. But many ignored that this and other ‘relativistic’ phenomena can be calculated by mathematics. They misinterpreted Einstein to mean that measurement is dependent on the preferences of the individual observer.
    Incidentally, Einstein repeatedly inveighed against this misconstruction. And on various occasions he expressed dissatisfaction with the term ‘Theory of Relativity’, which Max Planck had originally applied to the Lorentz-Einstein equations for the motion of electrons. For Einstein, relativity – meaning ‘relatedness’ – was simply a principle to be considered in formulating a more general view of the physical universe. And he felt that Felix Klein’s ‘Theory of Invariants’ more accurately described his ideas.
    In any event, we’d do a better job of caring for each other, our fellow creatures, and our planet if we acknowledged and explored connections as much as we have divisions. It is interesting that Eliot – for all his earlier emphasis on fragmentation, dissociation, and dislocation – came around to something like this view in his later work. The interpenetration of past, present, and future is the great theme of Four Quartets.

As you indicate, you are hardly as unsympathetic to Pound and Eliot as your critics sometimes say you are.

In one respect, the leaders of the experimental movement were like characters in Greek tragedy, in that their innovations produced results exactly the opposite of those they intended. Free verse, for instance, was originated to make poetry more challenging. Would it be possible, without metre, to create poetry with the rhythmical coherence, force, and subtlety of traditional verse? This was, in the early years of the twentieth century, a fresh and bracing enterprise. Yet, in short order, free verse became an excuse for an anything-goes aesthetic. Moreover, many poets started using free verse as a means of avoiding the sustaining exigencies of poetic craft.

In Missing Measures, you point out that when Pound, Eliot and William Carlos Williams recognized that this was happening, they were horrified.

Yes, and by the century’s end, free verse had eclipsed not only metrical poetry, but itself. To be genuinely free, free verse needs something to be free from, and the metrical tradition had been pretty much lost.

Which is why you wrote All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing as well as Missing Measures …

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