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.…
You have to not really want not what you don’t want to say.…
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.…
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…
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.…
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.…
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.…
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.…
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.…
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…
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.…
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.…
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.…
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.…
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.…
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…
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.…
Dear Robin, Enclosed you find the first of the publications of White Rabbit Press. The second will be much handsomer. You are right that I don’t now need your criticisms of individual poems. But I still want them. It’s probably from old habit – but it’s an awfully old habit. Halfway through After Lorca I discovered that I was writing a book instead of a series of poems and individual criticism by anyone suddenly became less important. This is true of my Admonitions which I will send you when complete. (I have eight of them already and there will probably…