My Only Rule Is to Break Rules

I believe August Kleinzahler has one of the best ears in English-language poetry since Ezra Pound, and because he consistently writes poems that move and dazzle me, that make me laugh, and that show me things I haven’t seen before, I’ve been reading his work for two or three decades. That includes reading “chapters” of his series “A History of Western Music” as they appeared over the years in London Review of Books. He’s now collected all of his music poems into a new volume, also titled A History of Western Music (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) These poems are, I suppose, ekphrastic, in that they comment or ruminate or perform in writing on artworks in another media, but the term seems a bit fusty when I think of the aggressive and playful mutability of Kleinzahler’s relationship to his themes.

In a coast-to-coast phone call with Kleinzahler—me in Philly, him in San Francisco—in September that lasted nearly an hour and a half, I asked him about craft, art, life, and culture. I also tried hard to make him admit to optimism, for his work seems to me, in its highly idiosyncratic way, and against his protestations, full of optimism. In the transcript that follows, I’ve cut out the kinds of verbal detritus we all emit when thinking out loud, and sometimes added quotes from his poems that he or I refer to, to help orient the reader, and edited as needed for clarity. 

Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1949. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poems and a memoir, Cutty, One Rock (2004). His collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep (2003) was awarded the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (2008) won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. That same year he received a Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Francisco.

After you read the interview, click here to listen to the accompanying playlist inspired by A History of Western Music.

You ready for a bunch of chaotic questions?

I am your man, as Leonard Cohen says.

How, why, and when did these poems start?

In the late ‘90s I was asked to write a music column out of the blue by the San Diego Reader. I had no training or background remotely in that area but I was otherwise unengaged and rather useless. So, I jumped into the deep end. I had been doing that for a couple of years and . . . a weekly column is rather consuming. I was constantly trying to come up with subject matter.

Were you able to write many poems during that time?

About as much or as little as usual. I’m not prolific. A smallish book every five years or so. Anyway, at one point I went over to the UK and Ireland to give some readings. Everywhere I went, every pub and train station and restroom you went into, they were either playing the Adagietto from Mahler’s 5th or Frank Sinatra. It was Frank Sinatra week in London.

Why were they playing the Mahler?

I don’t know why. Perhaps it was being tried out as a sort of refined Muzak. It’s truly gorgeous. You hear it all through Visconti’s Death in Venice, which is also gorgeous. So, this rather delighted me, because Sinatra and Mahler are so unlike in every way imaginable. I wove a poem introducing both elements and called it “A History of Western Music,” a very grand, rather scholarly title. That was the first one. Because I was continuing walking around and thinking of music, subsequent History of Western Music chapters came to pass. Eventually I had over 25 years’ worth of chapters—poems. I decided that might make an interesting book, and there you go.

I think it was Philip Larkin who said something like he organized books of poems like a record album. Fast one, slow one, sad one, happy one, long one, short one—for contrast, for segue. Does that feel accurate to how you organized this book?

That’s a primary element. And, as with any book of poetry, you want to begin and end well.

Were there any rules that you set yourself when you were writing these?

None.

They seem very diverse in technique.

Yeah, no rules. I don’t do rules in poetry. My only rule is to break rules.

Do you break rules that, as you’re writing, you notice yourself setting up inadvertently—like, you’re halfway through a poem in revision #17 and you notice you’ve set yourself a rule, and say I gotta break that before the poem is done . . .

No. Inadvertency is my middle name.

You said a few years ago to the poet Jesse Nathan, who was interviewing you for Cordite Poetry Review, “Basically it’s impossible to write about music. It’s the very nature of the medium. It’s abstract, it’s ineffable. And if you write about it technically, it’s insufferable.” You were talking about your music columns [collected into a 2009 prose book,Music: I – LXXIV]. In your prose you’re writing about music, right? With these poems, are you writing about music, through music, in reference to music? Are you making music, or what are you doing?

I’m dancing around all those things. Some of the “chapters” emphasize one of those elements or another. Never consciously. What I was telling Jesse was that to engage the music directly and descriptively in a scholarly way is fatal. Almost all music criticism is rotten apart from George Bernard Shaw on classical music and Whitney Balliett for jazz. Knowing that, one should be careful about committing to writing about music. But A History of Western Music is not really about music. It’s just, each poem has musical elements, and I develop the poem out of those and let it go where it may, or wants to, go.

Some of the poems in this book are from before you were writing the series, or weren’t originally, explicitly, History of Western Music “chapters.” Pieces of “Summer Journal,” (“Loss leaders in shop windows, / fog spilling down the slopes”), from The Hotel Oneira (2013) are here under a new name, with chapter number, and there are a couple originally from an early book, Earthquake Weather (1989)

I think there are at least a half-dozen from before I was writing my music column. Once I embarked on this journey of putting the History of Western Music poems together, I went back through the books looking for poems that had musical components that I found worthy or interesting and, in some cases, changed quite dramatically, like the Bill Evans poem, formerly “What It Takes” in Earthquake Weather.

That’s an early appearance of fog which “pour[s] in late afternoon / whelming the tower on the hill.” The original “What It Takes” is shorter than the “Chapter 18 (Bill Evans)” revision, to which you add several stanzas of description of Evans recording “My Foolish Heart”—“the faint tinkle of glass, muffled / conversations, a cough // and he launches into it.” And then you return to a scene where the song is “playing on his stereo now, here, / in the Haight, thirty years later, again / and again . . .” The scope of the poem is drastically bigger.

I also like the fact that some of the poems are quite stylistically different from what I’ve been doing for the past 20 years or so.

The older ones tend to have shorter lines, with the images maybe more forward. Why has your line has changed? What does it do differently, what does it allow you to do?

At one point I felt a bit trapped by the short Williams-esque line. There were too many people doing it. I went looking for a longer line, 12 or 14 syllables, or more, that allowed more room for voice and musical variety. I wanted it flexible and tensile, a line that never went flat or turned into prose. Torsion is a word for what I was after. My models included Whitman, Hopkins, Anglo-Saxon poetry. A hexameter or alexandrine line in English, or longer: Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” Hardy’s “Afterwards,” among others. It took me about two years to get there. But I became a very different kind of poet, stylistically. A lot of people got mad at me who were sort of in that cultish world of Creeley and Williams, you know, how dare you. And because the avant-garde which I was associated with is, um, very, what’s the word, religious about, you know, what’s kosher and what’s not kosher.

Hidebound?

Yeah. As hidebound as the Anthony Hechts of the other realm, so I found it refreshing to break out. It’s like Bob Dylan—a very flattering comparison—but when Dylan went electric, when he went from doing Woody Guthrie knockoffs to something much more plastic and inventive, he was viciously attacked left and right by people like Pete Seeger. Because there’s a real religiosity in that community as well. The Woody Guthrie Dylan is not particularly interesting. The “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” etcetera, Bob Dylan is, not to use a pun, electrifying!

Ashbery said of Frank O’Hara that he’s too hip for the squares and too square for the hipsters. I feel that you’re also strung between. Or risen above?

Everybody’s been mad at me. I mean, the formalists have been mad at me, the avant-garde have been mad at me, the confessional poets have been mad at me, the creative writing crowd has been mad at me. I’m delighted to piss people off. That’s one of the leitmotifs of my existence.

Yeah, I don’t think you mind that. Besides changing your line, has putting together this book given you any thoughts about the trajectory of your work?

I never think about it. I follow my appetite. I’ve always done that. Whatever interests or moves me. It can be just a word, an experience, it can be, gee, that’s interesting watching the fog come in over the ridge, and that reminds me of a Chinese motif. Each poem is a bit of a romance, a love affair. They don’t resemble one another, and each one is a kind of infatuation. Then once you are into it, like a relationship, it’s unpredictable where it goes. It’s supposed to be, if it’s going to be alive or successful or interesting or exciting. It’s exciting for me. Probably a sad commentary on the rest of my life.

Some people compare writing poems to having kids. Which never seemed right to me. Wrong relationship. But writing a poem as a love affair . . . 

It’s more like making kids than having kids.

You’re going to get a bunch of people to try writing poetry because of what you just said.

I hope so. Well, no, I don’t hope so, but I hope it serves to get them away from their fucking screens for 10 minutes.

What about your process of exclusion? Were there music-related poems that could have got in here and didn’t?

No, there were a couple where the musical element was less significant, but mostly I threw everything involving music into the hopper, as long as I still liked the poem. And I tend to like my poems, not with the same ardor with the earlier ones. But I see what I was trying to do, and I don’t disapprove of them. I don’t say: How could you have been such a dope?

What about the chapter numbers? “Chapter 1 (Mahler/Sinatra),” the first one you wrote, is more than a third of the way through the book. Obviously, they aren’t arranged chronologically here. But did you number them in the order you wrote them?

For “Chapter 29 (In Memoriam Thom Gunn),” I use his birth date. With “Chapter 13 (Monk),” that’s because he’s got a song called “Friday the 13th,” and he’s spooky. But usually it was pretty random.

So, a few little Easter eggs for people in the know. Related to the Thom Gunn elegy [“I took a trip on a plane / And I thought about you / I lunched alone in the rain / And I thought about you”], I was trying to think why simple direct speech tends to feel more emotional, or moving, or what have you, whereas the more complicated accumulations of diction in some of your other poems seem more of the mind, of thought. Why does simple speech seem to deliver a more direct appeal to the emotions?

That’s a great question. Of course, with that poem I’m reproducing, pretty much, Johnny Mercer’s cadence and versification. I once reviewed a book by a dear friend of mine, Lee Harwood. I said that one of the unique things in his poetry was that he could, in the midst of a poem which was otherwise involved in poetic ways, say I love you or you are beautiful. And it fit. It was startling and emotionally forceful. But that’s very hard to do. You have to set the reader up in order to do it, and I don’t know anyone that comes to mind who did it the way he did it. That’s one of the impressive things about his poetry. And he was like that personally. If you do it skillfully you can be very direct and personal, but if you do it wrong it’s just sentimental and slobby.

It’s something to do with staging that moment, I guess, where that moment feels like a necessary reaction to what else you’ve done in the poem.

Yeah. Staging is the right word. Managing.

I’m curious about moments of the personal in your poems. I have no interest in—well, I mean I might have gossipy interest in where the real Augie Kleinzahler is in the poems—but I don’t think it’s a very interesting poetic question. But there are all kinds of moments where you seem to approach, and veer from, the personal. Maybe this a question about the speaker, or about tone, but what I read as personal moments, that felt closer, sometimes were done through moments of deflection. Like you say you instead of I in the Whitney Houston poem, a poem about a man shopping in a supermarket who, among other things, is overwhelmed by hearing “I Will Always Love You.” One might be forgiven for suspecting the poet of writing a break-up poem. Or there are other figures who seem to stand in for the poet, like the character Migrenne in the prose poem “Chapter 4 (The Monkey of Light),” whose ambition is “to sit down at the instrument and illuminate the entire map of the world . . . put a prism over this world, in order to color it with his playing.” Or in “Chapter 33 (“Coming on the Hudson”: Weehawken”), Thelonious Monk is a shut-in and is looking across at New York City late in life.

Let’s talk about that one. I have spent many hundreds of hours at the Lincoln Harbor Sheridan in Weehawken, New Jersey, on the western shore of the Hudson, looking across at midtown Chelsea.

Why?

I grew up on the New Jersey Palisades overlooking the Hudson and the Manhattan skyline. After we sold the house, whenever I visited that area, I tried to reproduce that view, which the Sheridan provided. I don’t imagine myself in Monk’s mind—a scary notion—but the view we shared is a view that sings to me like no other on earth. Monk, in the last years of his life, lived on a hill a couple hundred yards, if that, behind the hotel, in a large house belonging to the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, a patron of the arts, of jazz, and especially of Monk, whom she adored. And his mind was going, or largely gone. I think he’d succumbed to his manic-depressive­—what do they call it now?—his bipolarity. A broad word, but I think it covers what was happening with him. He was not really doing music anymore, but he was content, living there comfortably. He was taken care of, and there was a piano which he almost never played, but he had visitors and his routine. He liked to watch certain TV shows, and he’d dress up every morning. He's one of the two or three musicians I adore the most. We essentially had the same view, and I gave Monk my view, which we shared, and I was happy to do it, because it’s a magnificent view of the river and the New York skyline and the traffic on the river and above the river.

In another poem about Monk, you have him getting up from the piano and dancing, something the real Monk did. Was there something important for you about these odd moments—when he stops playing piano and dances, or when he’s not playing music at all? I notice that a lot of these poems have to do with when the music stops playing, or with the scene around the music, or with the scene that gives rise to the music. Are you more interested in the lives or the music?

Both. And they’re interchangeable on occasion. Meanwhile, Jean Migrenne is my French translator, and he was very amused by the poem Migrenne appears in. I am enamored of maps. I have been since I was a boy. I’m surrounded by maps, their colors, by older maps which leave more room for the imagination, as opposed to a 2024 Atlas. Then the notion of synesthesia, which some composers actually had: Messaien, for example, very much heard colors. Scriabin did that as well; he tried to create sound environments. The possibility of observing or creating the world through instrumental color tantalized me, and I tried to make that happen.

A lot of these poems seem to me to be . . . aspirational. Making something happen that can’t happen. Creating fantasies. For example, “Chapter 57 (Route 4),” in which John Coltrane visits the poet through his life, at his family home in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

When I was seven, I think I’m seven in the poem, he would have been recording in Hackensack, 20 minutes down the hill at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio for Prestige Records. He made a ton of albums, sides, in those days. I was up the hill learning to tie my shoes, and he was down there making beautiful music. He commuted from the 168th Street bus station in Manhattan, which I was very familiar with because I used to go to school from there later; I commuted from New Jersey to the Bronx to the Horace Mann School. And he would get on the bus usually hungover . . .

You would see him?

No, I wouldn’t have known who he was.

You’re creating an alternate reality in the poem.

I’m conflating reality, sure. But I know Route 4, I’ve traveled it hundreds of time. I know Hackensack; my mother worked in Hackensack. I’ve read a lot about that studio and Van Gelder, and I’ve listened to thousands of hours of recordings made in that studio with Coltrane and others. How can one resist, knowing that I’m just down the road, and introducing him to my folks and the dog . . .

In another poem, “Chapter 60 (Little C.R. and Judy),” you imagine the British poet and editor Christopher Reid as a boy on a plane hearing Judy Garland in first class (“behind the black curtain . . . a very drunk / American woman warbling in a stricken vibrato, a familiar tune”).

Christopher told me that story. I like these weird juxtapositions. I know and love Christopher the man, and I immediately thought, this could be fun. His father was in the oil business and spent a lot of time in the Gulf and flew his family down to be with him on occasion. It’s fun, if you’re very fond of someone as an adult, imagining them as a child. I had a good time writing that, and when I sent it to him, I think it really blew his mind.

I mentioned on Facebook that I was reading a review copy of your book, and Christopher commented, “I’m in one of the poems, hitching a ride on August's genius.” So now I’m thinking about “Chapter 88 (Zipoli and the Paraguay Reductions),” in which you’re imagining what the Baroque composer Domenico Zipoli saw when he went with the Jesuits, who were converting the indigenous people of Paraguay. The poem yokes disparate sounds (“the organ blast of a diaspason reverberating throughout the jungle, / then slowly subsiding, until swallowed by insect whirr and birdsong”). Then, in the middle of the poem, you fast-forward several centuries to Susan Alexander-Max recording Zipoli at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the steps of which are “littered with tourists and locals.” The poem goes from place to place, century to century, sacred to profane and back, making connections. Traveling in a poem that way, conflating realities, imagining scenarios that happened to other people, putting them together with your own thoughts or imaginings—that seems idealistic. Are you idealistic?

No. I don’t know. I don’t follow that notion. But before we pursue that, back to your question about personal moments, in “Chapter 11 (Spoleto),” I think I use the personal pronoun in there. In any event, I participated in the Spoleto Festival in Umbria, 20 years ago or something. And much of that is from my experience, but then I change it around, I had the abstract expressionist . . .

Willem de Kooning comes barging in drunk in the middle of the poem.

He would have been at Spoleto at some point, I must have known that. I do time travel a lot. I sort of poke in and out of these situations like Woody Allen. I hate Woody Allen, but in that movie where he finds himself with famous people, you know the one I’m talking about . . .

Oh yeah, yeah, starts with Z . . .

Zelig! Yeah. I sort of wander around, Zeliglike, among historical figures.

Would you care to analyze why?

I don’t think there’s a why, it’s just an appetite, a taste.

The Spoleto poem reminds me a little of Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room”—"Such order from confusion sprung, / Such gaudy tulips raised from dung”—because it’s such a drunken, feral scene, in your poem, but then a mezzo voice sings Monteverdi “with such tenderness, and unearthly sweetness.”

Good quote. You were asking me if I am idealistic. No, I don’t have an ideal of any kind, an ideal poem, or an ideal painting, or person. I have enthusiasms, poems and pieces of music, and places and people I love, but they’re not ideal to me, they just greatly appeal to me.

I guess I ask because your poems make the world seem less small and closed in. Which feels like a generous act, like it might come from an idea of possibility, which is a kind of idealism to me. Even down to single lines, like putting Boccherini and Mississippi Fred together in “Chapter 3 (“The Magic Flute).” Your habit of incongruity seems delightful, and full of an idea of possibility, breadth, generosity, connection rather than narrowness. Rather than everything staying in its own lane.

The Magic Flute was an actual record store a few blocks down the hill from my place. It closed around the time of the ’89 earthquake. The fellow who ran it, named Flynn, was very unpredictable. He would play Boccherini, then Mississippi Fred, then gag tunes, he once made me a whole compact disc of gag tunes. But also, the phrase “Boccherini and Mississippi Fred” is sonically very attractive to me.

The sound of the names.

Yeah. Lots of consonants and so forth.

I have that feeling often, reading you. Like, “Oh, he just wanted to put the word furze into that line . . .”

Exactly.

“Chapter 42 (Caspian Lake, Vermont)” almost killed me. That’s an elegy to the poet and editor Bill Corbett, I believe.

When you love somebody and they get sick unexpectedly and die, it’s like something being torn out of you, like tearing your liver out. Again, that’s very emotional, but that’s the challenge, letting sentiment in without letting it overpower the poem. And that’s a very delicate balance. I think I rewrote that a bit, cutting back on the sentiment, but as I say in the poem, Bill was someone unafraid of sentiment, so I wanted to give straightforward feeling more free rein than I might ordinarily have done.

The poem doesn’t even begin to suggest that it’s going to be an elegy for quite a while. That doesn’t really come into it until the very last two lines. Talk about an enormous finale. For the first half you’re talking about people in bars and clubs and songs, then the weather changes [“You can begin to make out a hint of bite in the air now”] and you start to characterize the “you” of the poem through poetry that he liked. The poem digresses and digresses and digresses to arrive finally at the killer ending.

Maybe that was the only way I was going to be able to get there.

Do you know this Calvino quote, that digression is “for putting off the ending . . . Perpetual evasion or flight. Flight from what? From death of course”? I don’t know if that’s a little too clever, but I thought of that when reading that poem.

Yeah, um, I don’t know about death, but digression—that’s one of my principal tools. I do it instinctively at this point. It’s just how my mind works, or how I compose. I am aware that I do it habitually and shamelessly.

We mentioned “Summer Journal,” some of the pieces of which show up in this book as “Chapter 12 (Ingram Marshall, Fog Tropes).” 

Yes, a serial poem, with different squibs about summer in San Francisco. I took the ones that had musical components and put those together under this overarching title by a composer from here, Ingram Marshall. I wanted to give a shout-out to Fog Tropes because it’s a beautiful piece and works as a kind of overarching soundscape.

It blew my mind when I listened to it after reading the poem.

Good, I’m glad you did. It weaves different soundscapes of a foggy summer day/night, a mosaic of the music fog horns make. And it sort of fit “Summer Journal.”

You write about fog a lot. Your “Fog Tropes” chapter is a very image-forward poem, but I had the sense reading it that the images were trying to bend into a kind of music. I’m thinking about the way your eye interacts with your ear. I guess that’s something that poets are supposed to do, but do you have a sense of whether what comes first for you is sound? What you hear or what you see?

It’s a combination. The poem has to be based in music, organized sound. But I am a highly imagistic poet, and I think that was my beginning as a poet. There was a little paperback called The Imagists which included people like H.D. and Richard Aldington—there was that movement, and then one of my early infatuations was with Japanese poetry, haiku, tanka, this is going back to high school. The Rexroth translations. So much of my poetic enterprise is rooted in imagism, but I wasn’t satisfied with just the image. I had to make things move. I found over time ways to do that. Certainly, reading Bunting, studying with Bunting [at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island in British Columbia from 1971-1973] helped me tremendously in that regard. And Pound, who was in many ways Bunting’s mentor. And, of course, Williams.

Speaking of Pound, in the last poem in the book, “Chapter 99 (Finis),” European culture is collapsing, finis, everything’s falling off the cliff, “with a great roar, it all comes crashing down.” You connect that, among other things, to giants of Modernism, including quoting Pound, who made his own indictment of culture in imperial England just after World War I, in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”: “an old bitch gone in the teeth”.

“There died a myriad, / And of the best, among them, / For an old bitch gone in the teeth . . .” He’s thinking of friends slaughtered for nothing. Pound’s notion of culture was much more antique than mine. But culture is being—has been—destroyed, willfully. Not even in a half-generation. A quarter-generation. It’s irretrievable. And it’s tremendously upsetting to me, and to many people. Because it’s not really being replaced with something else. But that poem was fun to write.

You’re talking specifically about music in that poem, but I sense you’re not talking only about music.

I’m talking about all the arts, and not just the arts. Historic ideas which continued since classical times. I mean everything’s always going to hell, but you know, my wife Marcy tracks—it’s her job to track, and has been for 30 years—the arts and the audience for the arts, in her case, but not exclusively, the performing arts. Even before Covid, theater, dance, symphony attendance, gallery attendance, it was in freefall for a variety of reasons, and then Covid hit and that just accelerated the freefall. There seems to be general antagonism in certain quarters to traditional art forms, and, you know, it’s horrible, that all the symphony orchestras in this country are going out of business, publishing is going out of business, dance attendance, you can’t get people to go to modern dance and ballet, and it happened, I think, so suddenly. It wasn’t a gradual decline, it just fell off a cliff. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. There are many who argue: well, why would you bother? That those sorts of art forms are obsolete and Eurocentric and so forth. But I personally feel there’s much to recommended in the work of Chaucer, Vermeer, and Bach. In my humble opinion.

In this poem, the seals are very energetically clapping their flippers as everything Western and high culture comes cascading: “CHUM CHUM, CHUM CHUM, they bark, / beside themselves, raucous with bloody-eyed glee . . .” Do you like those seals at all?

No! I detest them!

They get the last word in your book.

I mean, I’m writing a book of poems about music, much of it classical, and who reads poetry anymore, or who reads those kinds of poems, or who can read, who can appreciate what I’m trying to do, what you’re trying to do, all those years of working at your craft, following earlier models, it’s almost an obsolete art form. You used the word generous before. I think all artists of every stripe are the most generous creatures on earth. I mean, there’s Doctors Without Borders, and that sort of thing, but when you’re pouring your heart and soul into something that maybe 35, or 135, or 335 people will appreciate, that’s either extreme generosity or folly. But it’s wonderful, one of the things I love about the arts. Most of the makars, the Scottish word for poets, weren’t getting material gain or fame in their lifetimes, they were doing it for the joy of it.

Still, some people say there’s a real renaissance in poetry. I ran into a couple of my lovable students in the park at the beginning of the summer—right after their art school had been suddenly shut down due to culpable mismanagement or outright fraud on the part of admin and the board—and they were telling me they had just taken over a local poetry series that had been run by local poets of my generation. They were all excited to get younger poets to read for the series so they could get a younger crowd, not noticing or not caring that I was middle-aged. It was quite funny really. They had big plans. I can’t speak to whether they were going to get good younger poets in, or whether they wanted to tear down all the idols, or whether they or I would ever agree as to what constituted good poetry. But does that DIY, street-level enthusiasm count for anything? One of them had recently taken my class on poetic meter and poetic form and loved it, and would say things like “I really have to read some Milton” when we were scanning bits of Paradise Lost.

You’ve got to be kidding. “Renaissance in poetry” in 2024?

Why not say: Well, maybe this is just another one of those cycles where nobody cares, but some people will survive. Is it different now?

I think it’s different because of the technology, the screens, the speed, the collapse of the attention span. That can’t be slowed down. You can’t bury all that. It’s not like how the Irish monks saved classical culture during the Middle Ages. It’s not going to be like that, I don’t think. But I still see poets in their 40s, like your student, Liza Hudock, who’s young, isn’t she?

I think she’s in her early 30s at most.

Thirties! Yeah, there’s still wonderfully gifted and original poets like that. And a Jamaican-born poet FSG published a few years ago . . .

Ishion Hutchinson?

Yes. So, it’s hard to despair completely when young people like that come along. And they’re very courageous. Because the environment was never particularly friendly for poetry. It was a lot more friendly 50 years ago, there was a lot more going on, a lot more interest, but it’s an ancient impulse, so I suppose it will continue on in some form or other. I hope so. It is extraordinarily hopeful when you run across greatly talented young writers, and artists, of all stripes.

One of the reasons I appreciate the poems in this book is that they—especially the long-lined ones—make me slow down. I, too, have no attention span, but reading your stuff, I don’t want to say it’s tonic, because I don’t think it’s medicine, but these poems are written against speeding past things, against distraction. If people can slow down and take a look at your work, it might make their brains feel good.

I hope so. I mean, good writing, good music, makes my brain feel good. It’s pleasure. It’s entertainment. A more complex and deeper form of entertainment.

So even if the seals are barking with bloody-eyed glee at the likes of you cascading into the sea, what are you working on now?

Nothing in particular. I’m going through a quiet phase. I don’t know if that’s age-related or I’m about to have a seismic shift, but I’m interested in the poetic diary and the weather diary. There are 19th- and 18th-century weather diaries that intrigue me, that show what one can do with that sort of format based on the weather.

What should I have asked you that I haven’t asked you?

How’s the weather?

How is the weather?

Foggy.

You’d have written completely different poems if you never moved to San Francisco.

I like to write about what’s in front of me. You’ve looked out the window here. There’s a lot to talk about.