Citations

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.

And this is the kind of thing that you have to avoid. There are a great many things you can’t avoid. It’s impos­sible for the source of ener­gy to come to you in Martian or North Korean or Tamil or any lan­guage you don’t know. It’s impos­sible for the source of ener­gy to use images you don’t have, or at least don’t have some­thing of. It’s as if a Martian comes into a room with children’s blocks with A, B, C, D, E which are in English and he tries to convey a mes­sage. This is the way the source of ener­gy goes. But the blocks, on the other hand, are always resis­ting it.

And here the ana­lo­gy of the medium comes in, which Yeats star­ted out, and which Cocteau in his Orphée, both the play and the pic­ture, used a car radio for, but which is essen­tial­ly the same thing. That essen­tial­ly you are some­thing which is being trans­mit­ted into, and the more that you clear your mind away from your­self, and the more also that you do some cen­so­ring – because there will be all sorts of things coming from your mind, from the depths of your mind, from things that you want, which will foul up the poem.

You have to not real­ly want not what you don’t want to say.

That’s some­thing which is in all English depart­ment lec­tures now, but it was the first thing since Blake on the busi­ness of taking poe­try as coming from the out­side rather than from the inside. In other words, ins­tead of the poet being a beau­ti­ful machine which manu­fac­tu­red the cur­rent for itself, did eve­ry­thing for itself – almost a per­pe­tual motion machine of emo­tion until the poet’s heart broke or it was bur­ned on the beach like Shelley’s – ins­tead there was some­thing from the Outside coming in.