Mayhew Questions 1-7

1. What is your sense of the poetic tradition? How far back does your particular historical sense range? What defines your tradition? Nationality, language, aesthetic posture? What aspect of your poetic idiolect or tradition most distinguishes you from your closest poetic collaborators?

Poetry began with Homer? Sappho burning. Horace, Virgil, Catullus.
Chaucer, Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Pope, Dryden, Shelley, Keats, Byron, etc. You know.

The Chinese Tang poets: Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Wei.

The Spanish and Latin Americans Gongora, Sor Juana, John of the Cross, Garcia Lorca, Neruda, Cernuda.

The French, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Tzara, Breton, Eluard, Peret, Max Ernst (what else, the Hundred Headless Woman, The Lion of Belfort) Ponge, Guillvec, Bonnefoy

Celan.

Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Niedecker, Creeley
Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore
Berryman, Jarrell, Lowell, Bishop
O'Hara, Koch, Ashbery, Schuyler
Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer
Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman
Eileen Myles
Barbara Guest, Ann Lauterbach
James Wright, Robert Bly
Amy Clampitt, May Swenson
Fanny Howe
Ron Silliman
Charles Bernstein
Brenda Hillman
Robert Hass

This is defined by an active, colorfull, interesting, idiosyncratic, mystical, material use of language. A spark of experiment and a sense of the thrill of words on their own, with their own intensity and wild life.

The mixture of the so called avant garde and the so called mainstream in my personal history of poetry probably distinguishes me more from my closest poetic collaborators.

2. How would you define contemporary poetic practice? (Say, the typical poem that would be published alongside one of your in a magazine where you are published.) How does this practice relate to the tradition defined above? Does poetry of the "past" (however you define the past for these purposes) occupy a different corner of your mind?

Paratactic, eccentric, sometimes funny, sense of the river of literature, of the history of literature and of history. Uncertain, ambiguous, exploratory.

Everything occupies all corners always. Crowded.

3. Whom, among poets you most admire, do you understand least? What is hindering a greater understanding of this poet?

Clark Coolidge, Ann Lauterbach. They are hard. Smart, bright, inventive. Neurotic.
I like "difficult'" poetry though. I am more and more irritated by the continuing call for "clear" poetry. Nothing is clear, least of all poetry.


4. Are we over-invested in poetic "hero worship"? Is it necessary to have a poetic "pantheon"? How does the poetic pantheon relate to the notion of an academic "canon"? Are they mirror opposites, rivals?

Yes we are. No it is not. Same thing. Opposites, rivals, too.

5. Is "total absorption in poetry" benign? How about "poetry as a way of life"?

Poetry is life.
Danger, Danger Will Robinson.

6. Do you see poetry as a part of a larger "literature," or is poetry itself the more capacious categtory?

Borges, Kerouac, DeLillo, Doris Lessing, Francine Prose, Denis Johnson, Andrea Barrett, Rick Moody, they are all poets aren't they? Sam Shepard, Albee?

7. Are humor, irony, and wit (in whatever combination) a sine qua non? Or conversely, is humor a defense mechanism that more often than not protects us from what we really want to say?

Wit and Humor are basic. Irony is less so and incredibly dangerous, contaminating and coruscating. Ha.