Inkslinger On writing, on books, and on book arts

John Ashbery: The Art of Poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

John Ashbery (photo Giovanni Giovannetti / Effigie)

Where is poetry to be found?

Interviewer:

Three Poems is largely prose, prose poetry, rather than verse.  Some readers would object rather strenuously to calling it poetry. Within this kind of form, I am wondering where, for you, the poetry specifically is to be found?  What is the indispensable element that makes poetry?

Ashbery:

That is one of those good but unanswerable questions.  For a long time a very prosaic language, a language of ordinary speech, has been in my poetry.  It seems to me that we are most ourselves when we are talking, and we talk in a very irregular and antiliterary way.  In Three Poems, I wanted to see how poetic the most prosaic language could be.  And I don't mean just the journalese, but also the inflated rhetoric that is trying very hard to sound poetic but not making it.  One of my aims has been to put together as many different kinds of language and tone as possible, and to shift them abruptly, to overlap them all.  There is a very naive, romantic tone at times, all kinds of clichés, as well as a more deliberate poetic voice.  I also was reacting to the minimalism of some of the poems in The Tennis Court Oath, such as "Europe," which is sometimes just a few scattered words.  I suppose I eventually thought of covering page after page with words, with not even any break for paragraphs in many cases -- could I do this and still feel that I was getting the satisfaction that poetry gives me?  I dont' quite understand why some people are so against prose poetry, which is certainly a respectable and pedigreed form of poetry.  In fact, too much so for my taste.  I had written almost none before Three Poems because there always seemed to be a kind of rhetorical falseness in much that had been done in the past -- Baudelaire's, for instance.  I wanted to see if prose poetry could be written without that self-conscious drama that seems so much a part of ti.  So if it is poetic, it is probably because it tries to stay close to the way we talk and think without expecting what we say to be recorded or remembered.  The pathos and liveliness of ordinary human communication is poetry to me.

John Ashbery's work comprises volumes upon volumes of poetry.  Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the Pulitizer Prise in 1975, A Wave won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1984, and Girls on the Run (1999) was inspired by the work of artist/novelist Henry Darger.  His Paris Review interview was published in 1983.

P.G. Wodehouse: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

P.G. Wodehouse

Interviewer:

If you were asked to give advice to somebody who wanted to write humorous fiction, what would you tell him?

Wodehouse:

I'd give him practical advice, and that is always get to the dialogue as soon as possible.  I always feel the thing to go for is speed.  Nothing puts the reader off more than a great slab of prose at the start.  I think the success of every novel -- if it's a novel of action -- depends on the high spots.  The thing to do is to say to yourself, Which are my big scenes? and then get every drop of juice out of them.  The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play.  I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out.  Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through?  I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself if it is all right as a story.  I mean, once you go saying to yourself, This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but I'm such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay -- you're sunk.  If they aren't in interesting situations, characters can't be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them.

P.G. Wodehouse is the author of 96 books that span a seventy-three year career.  His Paris Review interview was published in 1975.

E.B. White: The Art of the Essay (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

E.B. White

How do you get yourself to write?  E.B. White has some words of advice (personally, I second the suggestion of an occasional drink):

Delay is natural to a writer.  He is like a surfer -- he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in.  Delay is instinctive with him.  He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along.  I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink.  I am apt to let something simmer for a while in my mind before trying to put it into words.  I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor -- as though not until everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper . . . .

There are two faces to discipline.  If a man (who writes) feels like going to a zoo, he should by all means go to a zoo.  He might even be lucky, as I once was when I paid a call at the Bronx Zoo and found myself attending the birth of twin fawns.  It was a fine sight, and I lost no time writing a piece about it.  The other face of discipline is that, zoo or no zoo, diversion or no diversion, in the end a man must sit down and get the words on paper, and against great odds.  This takes stamina and resolution.  Having got them on paper, he must still have the discipline to discard them if they fail to measure up -- he must view them with a jaundiced eye and do the whole thing over as many times as is necessary to achieve excellence, or as close to excellence as he can get.  This varies from one time to maybe twenty.

E.B. White is perhaps most widely known for his and William Strunk's The Elements of Style and his novel Charlotte's Web (1952).  His other works include Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do (1929), Here Is New York (1949), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970)  His Paris Review interview was published in 1969.

Jack Kerouac: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

Jack Kerouac (Photo by Wilbur T. Pippin)

The effects of notoriety (from introductory remarks describing the interview by Ted Berrigan):

The Kerouacs have no telephone.  Ted Berrigan had contacted Jack Kerouac some months earlier and had persuaded him to do the interview.  When he felt the time had come for their meeting to take place Berrigan simply showed up at the Kerouacs' house.  Two friends, the poets Aram Saroyan and Duncan McNaughton, accompanied him.  Kerouac answered the door, and Berrigan quickly told him his name and the visit's purpose.  Kerouac welcomed the poets, but before he could show them in, his wife, a very determined woman, seized him from behind and told the group to leave at once.

"Jack and I began talking simultaneously, saying 'Paris Review!,' 'Interview!,' etcetera," Berrigan recalls, "while Duncan and Aram began to slink back toward the car.  All seemed lost, but I kept talking in what I hoped was a civilized, reasonable, calming, and friendly tone of voice, and soon Mrs. Kerouac agreed to let us in for twenty minutes, on the condition that there be no drinking.

"Once inside, as it became evident that we actually were in pursuit of a serious purpose, Mrs. Kerouac became more friendly, and we were able to commence the interview.  It seems that people still show up constantly at the Kerouacs' looking for the author of On the Road and stay for days, drinking all the liquor and diverting Jack from his serious occupations.  As the evening progressed the atmosphere changed considerably, and Mrs. Kerouac, Stella, proved a gracious and charming hostess."

The interview with Kerouac ripples through discussions of writers, the writing process (Kerouac believes editing and revision damage the integrity of the writing process itself), and the writing life.  Most humorous, particularly in comparison with Berrigan's introductory remarks, is Kerouac's discussion of the travails of the well-known author.  In an era of publishing where contacts and references seem the only way to publish one's first story or novel, perhaps his words will give struggling writers something to laugh about before diving back into query letters:

Work destroyers . . . work destroyers.  Time killers?  I'd say mainly the attentions which are tendered to a writer of "notoriety" (notice I don't say "fame") by secretly ambitious would-be writers who come around, or write, or call, for the sake of the services that are properly the services of a bloody literary agent.  When I was an unknown struggling young writer, as the saying goes, I did my own footwork, I hot-footed up and down Madison Avenue for years, publisher to publisher, agent to agent, and never once in my life wrote a letter to a published famous author asking for advice, or help, or, in Heaven above, had the nerve to actually mail my manuscripts to some poor author who then has to hustle to mail it back before he's accused of stealing my ideas.  My advice to young writers is to get themselves an agent on their own, maybe through their college professors (as I got my first publishers through my prof Mark Van Dorent), and do their own footwork, or "thing" as the slang goes . . . So the work destroyers are nothing but certain people.

The work preservers are the solitudes of night, "when the whole wide world is fast asleep."

Jack Kerouac's Paris Review interview was published in 1968.

Erza Pound: The Art of Poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

Ezra Pound, Poet, Rutherford, New Jersey, at the home of William Carlos Williams, June 30, 1958. ©Richard Avedon.

Good language, bad language:

Interviewer: One point of connection between literature and politics which you make in your writing interests me particularly.  In the ABC of Reading you say that good writers are those who keep the language efficient, and that this is their function.  You disassociate this function from party.  Can a man of the wrong party use language efficiently?

Pound: Yes.  That's the whole trouble!  A gun is just as good, no matter who shoots it.

Interviewer: Can an instrument which is orderly be used to create disorder?  Suppose good language is used to forward bad government?  Doesn't bad government make bad language?

Pound: Yes, but bad language is bound to make in addition bad government, whereas good language is not bound to make bad government.  That again is clear Confucius: if the orders aren't clear they can't be carried out.  Lloyd George's laws were such a mess, the lawyers never knew what they meant.  And Talleyrand proclaimed that they changed the meaning of words between one conference and another.  The means of communication breaks down, and that of course is what we are suffering now.  We are enduring the drive to work on the subconscious without appealing to the reason.  They repeat a trade name with the music a few times, and then repeat the music without it so that the music will give you the name.  I think of the assault.  We suffer from the use of language to conceal thought and to withhold all vital and direct answers There is the definite use of propaganda, forensic language, merely to conceal and mislead.

Interview: Where do ignorance and innocence end and the chicanery begin?

Pound: There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance.  I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five percent.

Interviewer: What kind of action can you hope to take?

Pound: The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time.  You never get clarity as long as you have these package words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways.  That seems to me to be the first right, if there is going to be any intellect left.

His Paris Review interview was published in 1962.

Marianne Moore: The Art of Poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

Marianne Moore (Marianne Moore tossing out the first ball, opening day at Yankee Stadium. Photo: Bob Olen, 1968. Marianne Moore Collection, Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia.)

Weighing the "profession" of writing:

Interviewer:

I was intrigued when you wrote that "American has in Wallace Stevens at least one artist whom professionalism will not demolish."  What sort of literary professionalism did you have in mind?  And do you find this a feature of America still?

Marianne Moore:

Yes.  I think that writers sometimes lose verve and pugnacity, and he never would say "frame of reference" or "I wouldn't know."  A question I am often asked is: What work can I find that will enable me to spend my whole time writing?  Charles Ives, the composer, says, "You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.  The fabric weaves itself whole.  My work in music helped my business and my work in business helped my music."  I am like Charles Ives.  I guess Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller would not agree with me.

Interviewer:

But how does professionalism make a writer lose his verve and pugnacity?

Moore:

Money may have something to do with it, and being regarded as a pundit.  Wallace Stevens was really very much annoyed at being cataloged, categorized, and compelled to be scientific about what he was doing --- to give satisfaction, to answer the teachers.  He wouldn't do that.  I think the same of William Carlos Williams.  I think he wouldn't make so much of the great American language if he were plausible and tractable.  That's the beauty of it -- he is willing to be reckless.  If you can't be that, what's the point of the whole thing?

Poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) published numerous collections of poetry and essays, including Predilections: Literary Essays, 1955, O To Be a Dragon, 1959, and the edited anthology Homage to Henry James, 1971.  The interview with The Paris Review was published in 1961.

William Styron: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

William Styron

William Styron on the most difficult problem a novelist has to cope with:

Well, the book [novel Lie Down in Darkness] started with the man, Loftis, standing at the station with the hearse, waiting for the body of his daughter to arrive from up North.  I wanted to give him density, but all the tragedy in his life had happened in the past.  So the problem was to get into the past, and this man's tragedy, without breaking the story.  It stumped me for a whole year.  Then it finally occurred to me to use separate moments in time, four or five long dramatic scenes revolving around the daughter, Peton, at different stages in her life.  The business of progression of time seems to me one of the most difficult problems a novelist has to cope with.

American novelist and essayist William Styron (1925-2006) published a number of novels and collections, including The The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), Sophie's Choice (1979), and Havanas in Camelot (2008).  His interview with The Paris Review was published in 1954.

Ted Hughes: The Art of Poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)

Ted Hughes

The function of poetry.  The function of art.

In the seventies I got to know one or two healers.  The one I knew best believed that since everybody has access to the energies of the autoimmune system, some individuals develop a surplus.  His own history was one of needing more than most -- forty years of ankylosing spondylitis.  In the end, when he was sixty, a medium told him that no one could heal him, but that he could heal himself if he would start to heal others.  So he started healing and within six months was virtually cured.  Watching and listening to him, the idea occurred to me that art was perhaps this -- the psychological component of the autoimmune system.  It works on the artist as a healing.  But it works on others, too, as a medicine.  Hence our great, insatiable thirst for it.  However it comes out -- whether a design in a carpet, a painting on a wall, the shaping of a doorway -- we recognize that medicinal element because of the instant healing effect, and we call it art.  It consoles and heals something in us.  That's why that aspect of things is so important, an why what we want to preserve in civilizations and societies is their art -- because it's a living medicine that we can still use.  It still works.  We feel it working.  Prose, narratives, et cetera, can carry this healing.  Poetry does it more intensely.  Music, maybe, most intensely of all.

The Paris Review interview with Ted Hughes, author of poetry collections such as Crow: From the Life and the Songs of the Crow and Birthday (winner of the 1999 British Book of the Year Award), was published in 1995.

Chinua Achebe: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)

Chinua Achebe

Advice to those with literary promise from Chinua Achebe:

I don't get the deluge of manuscripts that I would be getting in Nigeria.  But some do manage to find me.  This is something I understand, because a budding writer wants to be encouraged.  But I believe myself that a good writer doesn't really need to be told anything except to keep at it.  Just think of the work you've set yourself to do, and do it as well as you can.  Once you have really done all you can, then you can show it to people.  But I find this is increasingly not the case with the younger people.  They do a first draft and want somebody to finish it off for them with good advice.  So I just maneuver myself out of this.  I say, Keep at it.  I grew up recognizing that there was nobody to give me any advice and that you do your best and if it's not good enough, someday you will come to terms with that.  I don't want to be the one to tell somebody, You will not make it, even though I know that the majority of those who come to me with their manuscripts are not really good enough.  But you don't ever want to say that to a young person, You can't, or, You are no good.  Some people might be able to do it, but I don't think I am a policeman for literature.  So I tell them, Sweat it out, do your best.  Don't publish it yourself -- this is a tendency that is becoming more and more common in Nigeria.  You go and find someone -- a friend -- to print your book.

Nigerian novelist, poet, and critic Chinua Achebe is a professor at Brown University.  His first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) is part of the cannon of modern African literature.  Other works include Anthills of the Savannahs (1987), Another Africa (1998), and Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975).  His interview with The Paris Review was published in 1994.

Raymond Carver: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)

Raymond Carver

Where stories come from:

Interviewer

Where do your stories come from, then?  I'm especially asking about the stories that have something to do with drinking.

Raymond Carver

The fiction I'm most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.  None of my stories really happened, of course.  But there's always something, some element, something said to me or that I witnessed, that may be the starting place.  Here's an example: "That's the last Christmas you'll ever ruin for us!"  I was drunk when I heard that, but I remembered it.  And later, much later, when I was sober, using only that one line and other things I imagined, imagined so accurately that they could have happened, I made a story -- "A Serious Talk."  But the fiction I'm most interested in, whether it's Tolstoy's fiction, Chekhov, Barry Hannah, Richard Ford, Hemingway, Isaac Babel, Ann Beattie, or Anne Tyler, strikes me as autobiographical to some extent.  At the very least it's referential.  Stories long or short don't just come out of thin air.  I'm reminded of a conversation involving John Cheever.  We were sitting around a table in Iowa City with some people and he happened to remark that after a family fracas at his home one night, he got up the next morning and went into the bathroom to find something his daughter had written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror: "D-e-r-e daddy, don't leave us."  Someone at the table spoke up and said, I recognize that from one of your stories.  Cheever said, Probably so.  Everything I write is autobiographical.  Now of course that's not literally true.  But everything we write is, in some way, autobiographical.  I'm not in the least bothered by "autobiographical" fiction.  To the contrary.  On the Road.  Céline.  Roth.  Lawrence Durrell in The Alexandria Quartet.  So much of Hemingway in the Nick Adams stories.  Updike, too, you bet.  Jim McConkey.  Clark Blaise is a contemporary writer whose fiction is out-and-out autobiography.  Of course, you have to know what you're doing when you turn your life's stories in fiction.  You have to be immensely daring, very skilled and imaginative and willing to tell everything on yourself.  You're told time and again when you're young to write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?  But unless you're a special kind of writer, and a very talented one, it's dangerous to try and write volume after volume on The Story of My Life.  A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction.  A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

For more discussions in the Paris Review about where stories or characters come from, see here and here and here.

Raymond Carver's interview with the Paris Review was published in 1983.  Some of his numerous book-length works include: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1983), and Tell It Straight (2003).