Craft Non-Lecture

CRAFT NON-LECTURE / Philip Levine THIS CRAFT NON-LECTURE has a curious history, which requires a little background if it is to make sense. I wrote a lecture on the state of our poetry to be delivered in Iowa City earlier this year; the audience would have been a large collection of poetry brats'and elder statespersons, people who took themselves with great seriousness and were very assured about their position in poetry. It was meant to startle and insult; it was very abrasive. I was leaving town the next day and thus felt confident I could escape before harm was done to me. Due to a breakdown in the sound system in the huge room where I was to deliver the thing, I never had a chance to give it, so I saved it for another opportunity, which came a few weeks later when I went to a writing conference in Alaska. My craft lecture was scheduled on the third day of a ten-day conference, so I would have had to live with these people for a week after insulting them. Within a few hours I could see they were a very different audience. The students, or whatever you call writers who enroll in a summer writing thing, were unknowns; many were rank beginners. I quickly realized my lecture would never do, when a woman who'd asked me if Td ever taken a class in poetry writing gave me a blank stare when I answered that I had and with John Berryman. "John Berywho?" she said. The day before I was to give my talk, I was wandering around the campus when a sudden downpour caught me. I shall not bore you with the history of my neurotic dread of wet feet. At any rate, I ran into a building where, to my disgust, I discovered a fiction panel was taking place. The lobby was cold and forbidding; the lecture hall cozy and warm, and my feet would surely dry and I could nap. I did not nap. For some reason I became very attentive to this panel, for the members seemed to be responding very acutely to questions from the audience which involved that subject upon which nothing, I believed, useful could be said, the craft of writing. I realized that while I agreed with much that was said I had my own answers to the questions, but I was too polite to correct the panelists before their students. What you will hear now are my responses to the questions and to the answers given by Bobbie Ann Mason, Ntozake Shange, and Nancy Willard— so when you hear those names they should not startle you. Or puzzle you. I should begin by making it clear I have an antipathy to the notion of a craft lecture, that is, to the notion that I have some methodology The Missouri Review · 47 that I can pass on to you, perhaps even to the notion that there is a craft. For certain I don't believe I can pass on to you what I've learned in forty years of fooling around with words. People ask me, Do you write in the evening or the morning, as though my answer will be useful for them, as though the things that worked for a man of fifty-eight who hopes to forget most of what he's written will work for someone twenty-two who yearns to write most of what he or she has already read. I have learned and unlearned a great deal in these years, and because I've unlearned so much—finding that what I once believed was useless—I'm somewhat loath to set down any rules of the game. If you're around long enough you tend to discover how foolish you have been, and if you discover enough times how foolish you have been, it dawns on you that you are undoubtedly foolish now. It's possible I have another reason for not wanting to address the question of craft, and this will require a small anecdote. Some years ago I was involved in a doubles match in which one of my opponents...