Lu

Yeah, except when he deci­ded that he was a solid recei­ver, then he star­ted wri­ting those damn pro­phe­tic books which I have gone through two, three times, and I can’t make any poe­try out of them what­soe­ver. I mean, I can make poe­try eve­ry once in a while, see it hap­pe­ning. But when Blake real­ly was sure that the angels were spea­king to him, they stop­ped spea­king.

The point is that words are not some­thing which in them­selves are any­thing but Lowghosts, ins­tead of the Logos. Words are things which just hap­pen to be in your head ins­tead of someone else’s head, just like memo­ries are, various other pieces of fur­ni­ture in this room that this Martian has to put the clues in.

Q : Getting back to this idea of the crea­tive insights being iso­la­ted from the medium. Are you saying that all poe­try has to be writ­ten this way, or that some poe­try is writ­ten this way, or what ?

JS : Well, I cer­tain­ly don’t know. If you mean it as a recipe for baking a cake, obvious­ly no. If you mean belie­ving in all of this, obvious­ly no. But it’s my firm convic­tion that all poe­try, good poe­try, is writ­ten this way, in spite of the poet.

You see, the Word, the Logos is – and this is impos­sible to read out loud, just like the whole per­so­ni­fi­ca­tion thing is – the word is half the time with capi­tal W, upper­case, and half the time with the lower­case w, you see. And so Lowghost then becomes Word. In other words, the words which are being used are sim­ply a reflec­tion of the Word, with the capi­tal. And the pun doesn’t get as fun­ny when you have him pin­ned to the cross, and the busi­ness of the shadow—which was writ­ten, inci­den­tal­ly, on Good Friday, for some obvious rea­son.

JS : You mean can we take cre­dit for our poems ? Well, is a radio set a crea­tor of the radio pro­gram ?

Q : No. Well, that’s what I mean.

JS : Yeah. But at the same time you don’t get the radio pro­gram if the radio set has sta­tic in it.

Q : Oh no, no. But the poet is an agent then, or…

JS : Well yeah, like a mother is, yeah. But you know, it’s pret­ty hard for a father to have a baby. I mean, good agents are kind of hard to find these days. I don’t real­ly see that it’s any­thing less to be proud of to be a good agent.

Well, what I’m trying to say is if you have an idea that you want to deve­lop, don’t write a poem about it because it’s almost bound to be a bad poem. You can have an idea that you want to deve­lop, and the poem deve­lops an idea which is a lit­tle bit dif­ferent. Say, like Pope’s “Essay on Man” which was sup­po­sed to please Bolingbroke enor­mous­ly and didn’t, and didn’t please Pope. I’m using just about the so-cal­led most dis­ci­pli­ned poet there.

I don’t think that anyone who’s a prac­ti­cing poet, even a prac­ti­cing bad poet, who’s done it for a long enough time, would disa­gree with the fact that there is some­thing from the Outside. I mean, you get this in Longinus for christ’s sake, all of these pret­ty square people going all the way back. Saint Thomas Aquinas says it, and you can’t have anyone who’s far­ther away from poe­try than him. But I do think that an awful lot of poets feel at the back of their minds that they would real­ly rather express them­selves. “This poem is me. I am this poem,” you know, and so forth.

Now, Creeley talks about poems fol­lo­wing the dic­ta­tion of lan­guage. It seems to me that’s non­sense. Language is part of the fur­ni­ture in the room. Language isn’t any­thing of itself. It’s some­thing which is in the mind of the host that the para­site (the poem) is inva­ding.

But on the other hand, given a source of ener­gy which you can direct, you can direct your­self out of the pic­ture. Then given the coope­ra­tion bet­ween the host poet and the visitor—the thing from Outside—the more things you have in the room the bet­ter if you can handle them in such a way that you don’t impose your will on what is coming through.

But at the same time, you are stuck with lan­guage, and you arc stuck with words, and you are stuck with the things that you know. It’s a very nice thing, and a very dif­fi­cult thing. The more you know, the more lan­guages you know, the more buil­ding blocks the Martians have to play with. It’s har­der, too, because an une­du­ca­ted per­son often can write a bet­ter poem than an edu­ca­ted per­son, sim­ply because there are only so many buil­ding blocks, so many ways of arran­ging them, and after that, you’re through. I mean, the thing behind you is through. And it can make for sim­pli­ci­ty, as in good bal­lads, American and English. In the long run, it can make for real­ly just good poe­try. And some­times for great poe­try, an infi­ni­te­ly small voca­bu­la­ry is what you want. Perhaps that would be the ideal, except for the fact that it’s pret­ty hard to write a poem that way.