Seven American Poets in Conversation: John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice, Charles Simic, W.D. Snodgrass, Richard Wilbur (review)

Several years ago I read an old send-up of the literary interview: it bewailed the prolixity, catty self-promotion, and lack of any observations a reader might reasonably call literary in such interviews. That would not have been enough to dissuade me from reading them—one man's shopworn generality is another man's inspirational apothegm—but the send-up's writer provided copious quotation, which included everything from nattering about favorite colors to the sort of inflated rhetoric that one cannot seriously make if (a) one is sober and (b) one is not an undergraduate literary-theorist-in-training. In fact, perhaps the only exchange quoted that had any verve to it came from the incorrigible Philip Larkin, and it was primarily a potshot at stupid interview questions: when asked how he came up with "the image of a toad for work or labor," Larkin replied, "Sheer genius."

Thus, despite my admiration for the poets interviewed by Between the Lines, I was uncertain about reading the four-hundred-and-fifty-some pages of interview material assembled here. I wasn't sure I could handle the disappointment should any of the poets make irredeemable fools of themselves. They don't; in fact, on the whole they offer enlightening comments about poetry (others' as well as their own), the literary culture of the mid-twentieth century, the intricate vagaries of publishing, their forays into other forms of art, and their childhoods, as well as offering a variety of opinions on politics, aesthetics, morality, and other matters. As a catalogue, this sounds dull; in the crisp language of the poets themselves, however, it can be captivating.

Part of the credit is due to the interviewers themselves, who demonstrate poetic intelligence and intimacy with the poets' work. Mark Ford interviews Ashbery, Ian Hamilton interviews Hall, Michael Hulse interviews Simic, Peter Dale interviews Wilbur, and Philip Hoy interviews Hecht, Justice, and Snodgrass. Typical of the modus operandi are the pointed questions Hulse asks Simic about specific poems—for instance, "De Oculta Philosophia":

. . . I'd like additionally to know, first, why the poem takes its title from a cuss-headed work of mysticism and magic by Agrippa von Nettesheim; second, whether it is right to associate it with Emily Dickinson's 'There's a certain Slant of light' and the sense in that poem, on which you have written movingly, of witnessing a sacred mystery; and third, whether we haven't in fact come full circle here, to that profound sense of silence you've spoken of since the early years of your writing life, that maternal silence of which poetry is 'an orphan'?

Hulse goes on to ask for Rorschach-like responses to recurring vocabulary in Simic's oeuvre—snow, vanishing point, naked, masks, crutches, waiter, wine, dog, fortune-teller—and elicits responses ranging from the pedestrian (Simic: "I've owned dogs and own one now") to the sublime ("It's amazing when one comes upon a long street that stretches to a vanishing point. For a city boy that's a vision of heaven"). In another example, Philip Hoy digs up an old draft of a Justice poem from archival material—"As a matter of fact, that poem, like your M.A. thesis, does survive. I've even been able to get hold of a copy. You called it 'Dream Song #309 (posthumous)', and, as the title suggests, it's written in the manner of one of Berryman's eighteen-liners"—and he continues by quoting the poem in full. (Justice even expresses surprise when Hoy evinces knowledge of Justice's pseudonyms: "But how in the world did you get wind of all this? For me it's something like reading an FBI report on one's suspicious activities.") This is not to say that there are never lamentable moments; somtimes I found Mark Ford's questions for...