Citations

L’Allemagne a décla­ré la guerre à la Russie. – Après-midi piscine.

JS : I’m inter­es­ted in being a conveyor of mes­sages, whe­ther they’re the truth or not. There’s no rea­son to sup­pose that a mes­sage neces­sa­ri­ly because it’s conveyed from an out­side source to a poet is true. As far as not being inter­es­ted in lan­guage, it’s pro­ba­bly because I’m a pro­fes­sio­nal linguist.

As far as the busi­ness of rea­ding – edu­ca­tion – I think that unfor­tu­na­te­ly the uni­ver­si­ties hin­der it rather than help it usual­ly because they make rea­ding and edu­ca­tion a chore rather than some­thing that you enjoy doing. But cer­tain­ly I think that any poet who is going to write decent poe­try in this modern age where we don’t have the bal­lad tra­di­tion any­more, where you could get by with prac­ti­cal­ly no fur­ni­ture, and let’s squat on the floor, ma’am, and that sort of thing – I do think that just the ave­rage young poet ought to read as many books as he can and they ought to not be in paper­back. They ought to be books that nobody’s read and that aren’t fashio­nable, and things which are about ani­mal hus­ban­dry or what saline solu­tions are like with octo­puses or some­thing like that. It doesn’t real­ly mat­ter too much. But he cer­tain­ly ought to have more stock in his mind than he has.

I mean, things that you ought to be sus­pi­cious of are things that you can use for your own per­so­nal inter­ests rather than any­thing else. I wouldn’t wor­ry about if some­thing appears. It’s like an epi­pha­ny. Well then, use the epi­pha­ny, but just rea­lize that there could be about twen­ty-seven other epi­pha­nies which would be just as good, if they’d hap­pe­ned.

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.