AN INTERVIEW WITH SYDNEY LEA - CONTINUED

Jordan: What inspires you?

Lea: I'm not sure there is such a thing as inspiration. Sometimes you sit down and something will just come to you. My long narrative poem, The Feud, I wrote in an hour. And that was after a long hiatus where I hadn't written anything. In general I hear something or I see something, or something occurs to me; it's like an itch. I just write it. With fiction I figure about a hundred pages out of the first two hundred will be thrown out. I sit down sometimes to write a letter and I find myself writing something else. Maybe that's inspiration.

Jordan: Let's talk more about your process of writing poems. Do you construct a book of poems with an issue or a theme in mind?

Lea: No. I don't sit down with a game plan, not yet. I have no agenda as a writer. I don't want to prove anything -- I don't want to convince anybody of anything, I just want to sit down and relish the language, and when that happens, I'm happy. I have sometimes toyed with the notion of writing a book of poems with a theme, but I haven't done it yet. I devote a certain amount of time to writing each day and then eventually I have a body of material and I'll feel as if, I don't know, it's a visceral feeling, a certain kind of curve of energy has run its course. A danger any poet runs into is when she or he is, on one hand expected to have established a voice, and on the other hand expected to be breaking fresh ground.

Jordan: How about organizing your time? Do you have set hours when you write?

Lea: I do. I'm a kind of a morning guy. I can revise after dark, but I can't write after dark, so when I'm writing I tend to write early in the morning until about noontime. Up until very recently, I was still using my 1985 Mac 512KE computer. It's never broken down and I've written five or six books on it, so I use it as a sort of souped-up typewriter. I'm not a cyber guy at all. I'm the chauffeur in our household. I drive my daughters to school 40 minutes in the morning and then back 40 minutes again when I pick them up in the afternoon. So I adjust my writing around this schedule.

Jordan: You were one of three finalists for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Pursuit of a Wound. How would winning the Pulitzer have changed your life?

Lea: I don't think it would have changed my life behaviorally. I like Steve Dunn, who won, and I think he's a better poet than I am. He's a good fellow.

Jordan: Who are some of your favorite poets?

Lea: To me Robert Frost is the great American poet. There are contenders obviously. Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, but Frost is probably my favorite and I'll tell you why. You can take a Robert Frost poem into almost any venue and people will get something out of it. It's what I hope for in my writing. The common reader, if the creature still exists, should be able to get something out of my work, and she or he does not have to have gone to a graduate program to get a sense of what's on my mind. One of the things I really like in your work too, is that it's complex, it's difficult and so on, but there is no willful obfuscation.

Jordan: Why is Dickinson a contender?

Lea: Well, because she tells the truth but tells it slant. (laughs) But again, there is no more complex poet in our century or the one preceding it than Emily Dickinson, and when she said, "There is a certain slant of light on winter afternoons," she likens it to cathedral tunes. You can feel what she calls '"zero at the bone." She is stirring around a great big cauldron of difficult issues, but you can read the words and you can sing the words if you choose to. For all her magnificent evasiveness and elusiveness, that which is recorded on the page is available to us in some way. I'm not against difficulty in poetry; life is difficult. The things we write about are difficult, but why be willfully difficult, as to my mind, say, Pound often was.

Jordan: Early in his career Pound championed the poetic movement called Imagism. Didn't he tell us to go in fear of abstraction? What do you think he meant?

Lea: If you look at him at his best, as in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley or The Pisan Cantos, his writing is full of abstraction and, not coincidentally, rhetoric. As we all know, that rhetoric could get almost unbelievably vicious, as when he calls FDR an ambulating dungheap or whatever, not to mention his awful horseshit about the Jews. That's the sort of abstraction he should have been in fear of.

Jordan: His famous short In a Station of a Metro is hardly Imagist...

Lea: In that poem Pound wasn't really much of an Imagist at all. He must somehow have known something that Stan Plumly has said so tersely and aptly: "The image has no voice". This doesn't mean that there is no room for images in our poems. Imagine them without imagery! It's only to say again, that if you want to testify- in poems or prose, the image won't get that done on its own.

But what started all this was my feeling that willful obfuscation is a great vice. It's as if people believe (my students fall into this all the time) that if you put something down in lines and make it all but incomprehensible, you will have written a poem. But as Auden sanely points out, the role of poetic language is exactly the opposite: it is to be as lucid as possible about things that are often very very difficult of expression.

Jordan: So do you believe as Auden did, that the function of art is not to mystify, but demystify? Where does the artist's responsibility lie?

Lea: We like to bitch and moan about American materialism and Philistinism, and blame that sort of stuff for people's failing to read poetry. But I think we ought to ask ourselves if the fault isn't at the least partly our own. If I, who have spent my adult life reading and writing and teaching poetry, pick up a poem to read and immediately feel lost, what's the likelihood that the much yearned-for general reader is going to spend any time with that stuff? Much of that sort of writing is written by heralded current artists.

Jordan: Are we to then write for an broader public audience? Are we to write down to reach readers who might not otherwise grasp the meaning of our poems?

Lea: Pound said, "The man in the street is there because he doesn't deserve to be let in." Well, the hell with that, I say! I want to invite as many people into my poetry or fiction as I can. Is that a lightweight aspiration? Not to my hero, Frost, it wasn't.

Complication is not the same thing as complexity. I'd make a case that Frost is, oh, twenty times more complex that Ezra Pound, who, once you consult your Index to the Cantos, or another trot sheet (the kind he liked to use himself, I bet) turns out most of the time just to be complicated. By the same token, Hemingway is just as complex as Joyce.

Jordan: Who are you reading now?

Lea: I'm an embarrassingly slow reader, but reading is life's own blood to me. I read across the genres and I read everything from magazines to philosophy. One of the nice things I've discovered in not being a full-time academic anymore is that I can do a smorgasbord with my reading. I can be reading a book about the training of gun dogs this month and the next month I'm reading Anita Brookner and the next month I'm reading my old friend Bill Matthews' last volume, and then I'm reading Robert Frost and then I'm reading Spenser, then I'm reading Marie Jordan Giordano ...

When you're teaching and you're preparing a course in the Romantics, then you're reading Byron, Keats, Wordsworth and Shelley. And you're reading them with an agenda. If you're an editor you're reading with an agenda, too, which alas, is usually, "How can I say no?" Because you don't have space for all that material, no matter how good it is. It's good to be reading now agenda-less.

I'll go long periods of time without reading poetry at all, just reading nothing but prose. And then vice versa. And then I'll go on a jag. I've been on any number of Donald Justice jags in my life. I greatly, greatly admire his formal control, and especially admire the economy of his writing, something which clearly has never rubbed off on me. I wish it could, I honestly do. I keep saying next time I'm going to write a poem that is only nine lines long, but I think I have an All You Can Eat personality and it doesn't work out.

Jordan: You're referred to as the Frost heir apparent. How do you respond to such an epithet?

Lea: Well, I think that's a kind of critical newspeak. One thing Frost was able to do that I am constitutionally unable to do is to leave the almighty fetid, squalid "I" out of the poem. I think when people call me an heir to Frost, what they're talking about is where I live, but I'm not really very much like Frost. Frost, God bless him, would never have written anything like my poem, To The Bone, which is kind of a blues rant.

Jordan: Yes! That's the long narrative poem you wrote in 1994 after the grisly accident when a chain saw you were using sawed into your leg. You wrote about what you might have lost:

... as much as body parts
all the songs one ever learned
which would have to include in my case for the most part blues
to which by birth I have of course no right
but let the right person ordinarily of African descent
but sometimes white bend

those same old twelve bars and that same old bunch
of one and four and tonic chords ... the flatted third and seventh notes
as the good ones forever more can and my body takes it all in
to the bone ...

JORDAN: What, in your opinion, defines an American writer? Who's an "American" writer?

Lea: I think it has to do with a kind of cultural heritage and I think that American writers are more inclined than western European writers, for example, to say "I was the man, I suffered, I was there." That's very important with American writers, and you could extend this to somebody even as elegant as Jimmy Merrill. There's a way of writing that's testimonial. Whether you're pro or anti Whitman, he is the poet who writes the "I know whereof I speak" kind of poetry that happens to be American.

Jordan: Yes, no matter what ethnicity or whether we live and write in Los Angeles, Chicago or a small New England town.

Lea: It started with Wordsworth in England, this notion of, as he said in the gender-biased language of his time, "to use real language really used by men." We have an inclination to hope we can blend the speaking voice with the poetic voice. Certainly Frost was very concerned for "The Sound of Sense."

Jordan: Sounds and sense. Like Alexander Pope's line, "The sound must seem an echo to the sense," right? It seems to me, your work does just that. For example, your poem, "Prayer for The Little City," which ends:

... O little city, we think, it's cold
city, how still, how still we see thee. Still, the stars
go by above, even here, and still may love
embrace the year.

There's that conclusion of hope found in so many of your poems. How does place affect your voice?

Lea: I live in a town in New England where I know everybody. I mean I know absolutely everybody. The town in Maine in which A Place in Mind is based and a lot of my poems are based, is a town of 180 souls. I know family histories, I know local gossip, and that kind of thing. I suspect it may very well be a failing in me, but if I lived in Los Angeles or New York City, I'd write poetry, to be sure, but I don't know what kind of poetry it would be. I think it would be less beholden to the concept of character just because it would be difficult for me to sift out people I wanted to write about with intimate knowledge. Sure, I could write a poem about gang members or drug addicts or street people or whatever, as many people do, but I'd have to write about them as a complete stranger and I certainly wouldn't want to write about them, as some do, as seen through the window of the bus on the way to a faculty meeting. That concerns me; it's a little exploitative, and there's no charge for it.

There are those people out there who may dismiss me as well as Robert Frost, for not writing much about the city and for sticking to writing about the small community, but I think that's a life choice. I also like living an outdoor life as much as I possibly can.

Jordan: You've said that without poetry your life would be a jumble. Would you explain?

Lea: I'm basically a foggy thinker, and when I sit down and start messing around with language I feel like I can make a sort of sense. Writing poetry I feel I have some control. I can make connections, which is often a hard thing to do in civilian life.

Once I've written something down, even if it's lousy, I've sort of thought and felt that process through. I'm more focused by having done so. When I write narrative poetry it's because that's what is crucial for me to write at the time that I'm writing. The shape the poem takes, or the mode that it adopts, is something I discover in the act of writing. That, more than anything else, I think finally is why I stick with poetry. There's no money in it. There's no reputation in it relatively speaking, but I think more than any of the other things I do or the other genres I practice, poetry is a way of discovering what's on my mind. It's a way of discovering a subject of interest to me, maybe not to other people (laughs). There's nothing in my life that compares to that, that kind of discovery. It's exciting to me.

Jordan: Let's talk about what you call "poecide."

Lea: I refer to Derrida-zation of poetry rendered as a deeply encoded, mystifying and ultimately nihilistic process where you don't really mean what you're saying. If we can no longer believe in the notion that poetry is an act of utterance, but is actually an art of masquerade or charade and reflects nothing other than one's class, race and gender, I think we're going to kill it.

Jordan: What do you foresee for the future of poetry in the next few years?

Lea: People who reflect on such an issue have always been wrong. I think people will have their poetry one way or the other. I don't think it's an art that's going to die. It's dangerous for me to speculate on this because it puts me in danger of trying to plot out what I ought to do as a writer in order to prevail. I've always operated, perhaps naively, on the assumption that time is the big anthologist.

I did an interview with Robert Penn Warren for an early issue of New England Review and I asked him what you just asked me: what did he think was the future of poetry? He said it's something we shouldn't worry about. He said not to draw a kind of football diagram for the muse because she's not going to be happy with it. She's going to turn you into a conniver and a speculator, rather than what you should be, which is somebody who writes down the best words in the best order.

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