Better Than Starbucks!

AMJ: More like a sullen teenager. I have never had a formula or a schedule and have always been a little jealous of people who do. I worked hard in public service and the biotech industry, and I tried to be a good husband and parent, so for most of my life I didn’t have either much time for writing or much flexibility with the small amount of time that I did have.

 

It helped my writing that I did not have other time-consuming activities—I don’t play golf, I don’t do online gaming, I don’t watch much TV, and I haven’t asked anyone out on a date since early in the Ford Administration. I squeezed poems out of long commutes, pointless mandatory meetings, delays in airline terminals, and little scraps of time on weekends.

 

One would think early retirement would let me follow a schedule, but the unpredictable pain and fatigue caused by my diseases has kept my work habits chaotic. More often than not, I feel best in the morning, which is when I tend to work on projects that require sustained analytical thought—prose and translation. The rest of the day I can often think about my own poems, even if I am lying on a sofa with my eyes shut.

 

AN: Given the state of your health, one might expect to see a turning inward, or even traces of embitterment in your recent work. Your new poems may reveal a little more of your contemplative side, but there’s no sign of bitterness. Your acceptance of things as they are does not feel like resignation. I suppose I’d call that another “adult” aspect of your work  in poetry, which complements your active concern for the poetry community. With your critical writing, with the information center you’ve made of your Twitter account, and even with your wallet, you have been a tireless promoter of the poets and poetry that you value, even including material support for institutions like the West Chester Poetry Conference, the Powow River Poets, the now defunct but never to be forgotten journal, The Formalist, and the Frost Farm Conference. What do you consider the most promising recent development in American poetry?

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AMJ: Our literary and academic establishments have increasingly pushed poetry into language that most people who love poetry don’t value—or even understand. It has been important to me to try to nurture the fragile institutions that have a perspective similar to mine.

 

I was skeptical about online literary journals when they first appeared but have come around to realizing that they are our best hope for the future. The old model of a paper journal run by an academic institution or someone with a trust fund is failing because the barriers to entry and ongoing costs are so much lower. If you look at what people consider to be the most prestigious journals of recent decades, today most of them are publishing unreadable poetry most of the time.

 

Upstarts are bringing competition and a respect for readers into this stale environment. Rattle—a journal that cracked the code for balancing paper and online publication—became our second largest poetry-only journal in record time. Waxwing allowed Maggie Smith’s magnificent “Good Bones” to become a viral sensation.

 

The reach of the Internet also allows online journals to create niche audiences in ways that were almost impossible in the twentieth century—whether it be light verse, beat poetry, long poems, or poetry addressed to people with a strong interest in anything from comic books to food to gender to the environment. In short, I see a slowly advancing democratization of the literary world that I welcome.

 

AN: I’d call that a cautiously optimistic perspective on the state of our art, considering that you once portrayed yourself as a horseshoe crab: “our kind assesses change in clear, cold light / before once more deciding to hold tight.”

 

On the other hand, you’re not afraid to speak your mind regarding trends in contemporary poetry that you consider harmful, or to puncture reputations you find overblown. While your book-length parody of Billy Collins’ poetry seemed to me at least partly a tribute, there can be no mistaking your antipathy toward the experimental work of Christian Bök, who encoded his poetry into the genome of the bacterium E. coli. That particular folly deserved your contempt, but at least it’s unlikely to serve as a model for other poets. What do you consider the least salutary development in American poetry over the past ten years or so?

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AMJ: I often wish that Ezra Pound had made the slogan of modernism “Make it fresh” or “Make it interesting” instead of “Make it new.” The push for novelty over worthier qualities has taken us to a dead end; the tricksters of so-called “conceptual poetry” define poetry out of existence and turn it into mindless mind games—often mind games with a racist or sexist edge.

 

As you noted, I detest the antics of Christian Bök and the University of Calgary’s subsidies for those antics. It is also outrageous that the University of Pennsylvania has brought in Kenneth Goldsmith, a proponent of “uncreative writing” and plagiarism.

 

Moreover, many institutions of this stature refuse to teach prosody or train students to read poetry critically. They encourage automatic adoration for whatever they consider the hippest work, even when it is riddled with the clichés of our era.

 

Poetry is losing its status as a widely loved genre and academia is a big part of the problem.

 

AN: It’s sad —and ironic—to think of academia working against the “democratization of poetry” that you sense taking place elsewhere, largely due to the reach of the internet. That would include your own Twitter account, where somehow you manage to steer clear of politics.

 

You’ve written a number of political poems, however. I think of “Moscow Zoo,” your sonnet that speaks of a mass grave about whose origin the bureaucrats claim ignorance; “Kennings,” your stunning poem about the immigrant experience, and your masterful narrative poem, “The Secret Life of Women.” These are all entirely successful political poems; by that I mean they work both as political statements and as poems. What makes a good political poem, as opposed to a poem that preaches to the choir, or a poem that serves to showcase the moral superiority of its author?

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AMJ: A rhetorical trick of today’s literary establishment is to use a sweeping definition of “politics” to define all poetry as “political” and then use a far more narrow and left-wing definition of “political” to regulate what is allowable as criticism. In the process, attention to form, metaphor and the music of language drops out of curricula.

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It’s hard to write a good political poem—the temptation to turn the poem into an op ed piece is irresistible for many poets. The trick is not to start off trying to write a poem to make a political point. I’ve made that mistake a few times, and the results made me cringe. Instead, when you’re writing a poem about an event or image that moves you, you can let the poem start to tell a story that will resonate politically, perhaps in ways that surprise you. Generally, the less didactic a poem is, the more effective its political message will be.

 

On my Twitter account (@amjuster) I do try to stay away from the partisan politics of the moment and focus on the craft of poetry across time and languages, which is why we are closing in on 5,000 followers.