AN INTERVIEW WITH SYDNEY LEA - CONTINUED

Jordan: That reminds me of what Mark Twain said about "riding loose in the saddle". What about the modern trend of thinking that this places form under the category of obsolete?

Lea: We're very obsessed in America about this notion of being natural. Even more than the English, and certainly more than any of the western European traditions. Again it's the idea of being what Wordsworth called "a real man speaking to men." That's something we've made a kind of national fetish out of and there's not necessarily any reason why that should be a shibboleth. It just is for us and I would argue, for example, that those who say that formalism is the hallmark of an inhibited academic perspective might just turn on a little Bessie Smith. Listen to some blues for a while. I mean, the blues is one of the most noble and perdurable forms in the world as far as I'm concerned. Blues singers have had as much influence on my ear, the truth be known, as Whitman or Emily Dickinson or Chaucer or Spenser.

Jordan: Fictional characters live in the writer's mind for the most part, but your characters live in your face. They are real people.

Lea: I do write about real people. It's hard for me to imagine doing otherwise. I think in a curious way my poem, "The Feud," which is a persona poem, may also be autobiographical. That poem was written about six months after my younger brother died. He had a brain aneurism, 34 years old, and he and I had a rivalrous relationship. He was barely over a year younger than I and when he died I kind of lost it. I hope you haven't had the experience, but if you've lived a certain number of years and somebody passes, all the negative things between you seem in retrospect to have been so petty, so small, and now it's too late to do anything about it. It was some time later that I came to believe that the hidden allegory of "The Feud" was my relationship to my brother.

Jordan: How do you define the writer's responsibility?

Lea: I see it, for one thing, as not writing in a way that makes you use others to serve and further your own career. You don't bear false witness. If you are saying, "This is my testimony. I was the man. I suffered. I was there," well, by god, you better have been there. Otherwise, it's a simple masquerade that promotes nothing but the radiant ego of the testifier. A poet will take other people's misery and elaborate a poem or a prose piece on the basis of that misery without in any way really participating in it.

Once I participated as a neighbor and friend in the near death of a little boy. I still feel a little bit exploitative to have written about it in the ironic way I did, but at least I know something about it, you know? I was there! It's hard for me to imagine poetry in which I write of things I don't know in that kind of up-front way. I wrote about that near death in a poem called "Reasons To Hate Poetry," in which I vent my spleen against the poet's tendency to sort of vampirize: to suck the blood out of a tragedy -personal, social, political- just to juice up his poem. It's a warning to me, too, because I'm not innocent of the tendency at all.
But when you and I talk about it now, the more important the characterological aspect, that personal up-front aspect appears to be. I rapidly and imperfectly scroll through my own meager output and I know that's a central concern.

Jordan: I think of the characters you write about and what you just said about living in the city. Street gangs and homeless people are familiar characters in big cities, but the majority of people who make up the population of our cities are insurance salespeople, accountants, computer programmers, or people who might not seem to be living dramatic lives, that is lives interesting on the page.

Lea: I'm of the opinion that deep down the biggest bore is finally interesting if you can get into his or her heart in any way, and if you're a decent listener. My friend, Richard Selzer, the doctor-writer, is one of the great and generous listeners in this world. His simple capacity to be receptive and welcoming turns the most boring person into someone interesting. I've seen that miracle occur and so I certainly want to go on record as saying that you can write about insurance salesmen (Wallace Stevens, for example!) and find out that fellow is pretty damn interesting.

I don't know what I'd do in a different context. I'm agnostic on the issue. I travel a lot and I teach overseas and I don't want to write tourist prose any more than I want to write tourist poetry. To go to Athens, say, for two weeks and then write a book about it seems to me an absurdity on the face of it. Especially if you don't speak their language. Unless the absurdity of your approach is part of your theme.

Jordan: How much does your Christian faith have to do with what you write?

Lea: I think everything. It's not an artifact. It's a big part, for one thing, of the lifelong process of recovery from substance abuse.

Jordan: How accurately do readers interpret your poems?

Lea: People tell me things about my poems that at first seem extremely alien to me, but if they are good and intelligent readers, I listen to them. I'm probably not a very good analytical reader of my own poetry because I'll find if I like a little turn of phrase, I'll try to figure out what the whole thing means, and then I'll get distracted and say well, I'm happy how that came out as articulation. What its- quote- deeper meanings- unquote- are, may in fact evade me. I know somehow intuitively when a poem is done, but what your students and mine call the "deeper meanings" may be hidden from me permanently.

Jordan: Yes, we are all critics, aren't we? Are there any societies that don't have art critics?

Lea: I think there probably aren't. I think even in oral cultures there is someone to listen with a better set of ears on them.

Jordan: Yes, like the Yoruba Knowers of Beauty. But they look for truth.

Lea: Yeah, well, you know, Keats said beauty is truth and truth is beauty.

Jordan: Right, and that's all we need to know. (laughter) Do you ever get discouraged as a writer, and how do you handle it?

Lea: Every so often I'll pick up something by one of my contemporaries or my predecessors that is so good I'll say, why bother writing anything more?- This is so good! I read my friend Annie Proulx's collection of stories, Close Range, and when I got to the end of the last story about the two gay guys I felt like the earth had moved, to quote Hemingway at his worst. I immediately wrote her a fan letter and called her on the phone. I felt small, compared.

Jordan: You wrote in Hunting The Whole Way Home that despite your education, your PhD from Yale, your life in academia, your best teachers have been country persons, or peasants, who taught you "about trout, bass and salmon and about deer and hare, woodcock and grouse, pointer and hound, tree and stream." -- Would you discuss this further?

Lea: Mind you, I had great teachers like Geoffrey Hartman at Yale. I taught with another great one, Jim Cox, at Dartmouth. To say that the country persons I referred to in the passage you quote, were even better probably says as much about my character and my callings as it does about them, though a guy like Creston MacArthur, whom I eulogize in the last poem of my first book, was forevermore one hell of a great teacher. I call him and others like him the 'best' in a sort of backward way: they must have been that for me because they are the ones I learned the most from, more even than from brilliant folks like Hartman and Cox. But the process of outdoorsy education has a lot of stars in it: my dad, an uncle or two, neighbor kids ... As a poet my profoundest influences (like yours, I bet, Marie) are not academic. Sam Cooke has more to do with my literary psyche, or my psyche, period, than Samuel Johnson, for instance.

Jordan: What emotion do you feel when you read your own work?

Lea: That's an interesting thing for you to ask because when my family came home from Switzerland a couple weeks ahead of me, all the books went home with them. I was left with my own books so I started reading my New And Selected Poems, which was published in 1996. I don't know if it was the poems themselves that moved me so much as the occasions that sponsored them. I remembered sitting around in the canoe with my friend, Joey Olsen, for example, and telling local anecdotes, and feeling the canoe vibrate with our laughter and seeing the moon and all that stuff; I mean, I don't know if the poems themselves particularly moved me. There are certain poems that I'm real happy with because they did what I wanted them to. I could list maybe four or five that I've written of that kind, and then the other ones I go back and read and I am by turns manic and depressive about them. I certainly do that every time I do page proofs of a book. I'll get all the way through and I'll think I'll just tell them not to publish this time. And other times I'll read the proofs and I'll say, well, I'm proud of that. That came out okay.

I don't think I've ever been wow'ed by any book I've written. I've thought, well, it'll do. But sometimes I'm really depressed and I think, all right, we're going to move to New York and I'm going to write those poems about insurance salesmen.

Jordan: Do the New England characters you write about ever read what you've written about them?

Lea: Some of them do. There is a woman named Annie Fitch, who is my inner ally. I visualize her face when I want strength. She's a very bright woman and reads all the time, but she couldn't afford to go to high school so she left school at eighth grade and went to work. She lives up in Grand Lake Stream, Maine, and she reads every word I write. What I have liked about her reactions, though she's not a literary critic, she has always attested to the accuracy of my observations. That means an awful lot to me. It's that business again, if you're going to say something happened, it better have happened. She is a kind of a muse figure to some extent. I think, how would Annie have seen it? That's the way I want to see it. She is bright and honest and clear headed, more so than I. My immediate neighbor here in Vermont reads anything of mine as long as he's mentioned in it. Other than that, he reads Louis L'Amour.

Jordan: And now? Will you be writing about your literacy clients in the future?

Lea: It would be immensely tempting to write about the literacy clients that I have, largely female, and how deserving of our encouragement they are. But I don't want to see their lives as mere subject matter. That would be another of those Reasons To Hate Poetry.

Jordan:On September 11, 2001 you and I were on the telephone talking about poetry when the twin towers were struck. At the time we had no idea of the immensity of the tragedies that were taking place that morning.

Lea: Auden's famous dictum that poetry makes nothing happen seems all too chillingly true. Although I don't buy it actually. We all have to come to terms with this terrible tragedy.

I can tell you some things that I hope and some things that I fear. It's not just for the art world, but if artists, called by Shelley, rightly or wrongly, "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," I hope that rather than stirring up all the baser instincts of ambition, hatred, envy, covetousness, which are bound to come, I hope they bring better results. I would hope that the nobler instincts would prevail.

Jordan: How do you define noble?

Lea: I think I define it unoriginally more or less in the context of Judaeo-Christian ethics. The first great commandment is to love the Lord thy God with all thy soul, with all thy heart and with all thy mind and the second is like unto it: love thy neighbor as thyself. God separates the sin from the sinner. I don't do that very successfully. I think those are the noble commandments. None of us will ever attain anything like perfecting the merits in them, but it is a goal. I suggest reading and re-reading the things that make us feel most human. I think everybody's sensibility is changed by major world events in ways that are inscrutable, but writers write and that's what they'll always do. And readers read.

Jordan: You were founder and editor of The New England Review for thirteen years from 1977 to 1989. What were some favorite moments?

Lea: Dealing with Robert Penn Warren was a big one. He was a wonderful advisor. We were lucky early on because I guess like many a young editor, I had this idea of making this terrific journal which would be full of famous names and so on, and I did that for a couple of issues, but he told us to open the magazine up primarily for unsolicited material. He said, "you don't want an anthology of stars. You can find that anywhere. What you have to do is find out the people who are going to supplant them. That will be the excitement of your being an editor." Of course, he had been the editor for The Southern Review so he knew what he was talking about. So we very rarely solicited anything except for the first couple of issues. And that turned out to be the most gratifying thing and still pleases me and makes me glow a little bit, to run into people who have gained a reputation now and they tell me "You were really encouraging, even when you rejected me. You took the time-" and so on. Of course, it's an exhausting way of running things.

Jordan: What's the best piece of advice you ever got?

Lea: It's probably from the scores of 12-Step colleagues I've heard: "Live each day 24 hours at a time." Be here now kind of advice. If I get overly remorseful about past mistakes or overly manic about projecting my future, too much goes by me. The older I get the more I realize the moment is the one thing we do have.