Jared Carter Interviewed by Jough Dempsey

Jared Carter is a poet and essayist who has published
three books of poetry, seven chapbooks,
and his official website, JaredCarter.com,
where readers may find more about the man and his work.

This interview was conducted via e-mail in Fall 2004.

Jough Dempsey:
There are millions upon millions of poems extant, from the ancient Greeks to the latest poetry workshop graduate. Why should anyone read your poems?

Jared Carter:
Mine are better. If they weren't, and if I didn't think so, I wouldn't be writing them. I'd be doing something else, like selling used cars.

Dempsey:
What makes your poems better?

Carter:
Their pursuit of excellence. They're not cut to fit this year's fashions. They don't settle for being correct or trendy, or for re-hashing what are already assumed to be universally accepted truths

Dempsey:
So are you saying that poets like Stevens, Auden, Frost, Shakespeare, or Yeats (for example) wrote to the fashions of the time, were trendy, and re-hashed clichés? What are you doing that they didn't?

Carter:
I didn't say anything about clichés. I said "universally accepted truths" — such as those of religion, or the British empire, or Marxism, or Irish nationalism, or American expansionism, or whatever. And yeah, sure, they all did it, to varying degrees. Yeats is probably the biggest offender among

those named, although the rest of them had their less-than-honorable moments. It's an inescapable tendency. And they all rose above that tendency, too, in their best work. I'm not accusing them, or condemning them, or insisting that my work is better than theirs. I'm simply saying that in my work I struggle against it — the temptation to preach to the choir — the way every other serious poet does.

Dempsey:
How can one escape rhetorical tropes, or these "universally accepted truths"? Through abstraction? Wouldn't you be substituting one meme for another?

Carter:
You're right, and it's definitely memetic among the writers themselves, in that so many of them were trying to be considered profound. We could draw up a list of those who were more exasperating than Yeats in this respect — Tolstoy, Kipling, Pound, Heidegger, Hamsun, Céline, Sartre, Neruda. Nearly everyone agrees that when they took it upon themselves to mix art and politics, they tended to become shrill and self-defeating.
I think poetry is always impure, always suffused with a certain amount of content and controversy, but there's some sort of corollary to Gödel's theorem at work here, which says that the more argument you pump into a work of art, the sillier it becomes. That's why Flaubert and James remain refreshing, even today. The meme of grandiosity bit them, but it didn't take. They were self-inoculated.

Dempsey:
Grandiosity is an attempt to feed the ego, though; to feel important. Do you not also write as a way to be important, to be loved and be validated as a person?

Carter:
Not consciously. Although, based on what I've said already, such charges can be leveled at almost any successful writer. I take a different position. It's quite human to seek personal affirmation, to welcome approval, to be pleased by acceptance. But we're not talking about being human; we're talking about making art. They're not necessarily the same.
There's an old saying that "a writer wants to be loved not for what he is, but for what he writes." Part of his or her dilemma is that people tend to overlook what he writes, and judge him or even condemn him on the basis of his behavior. Consider how nasty the kibitzers have been about Ted Hughes, or Philip Larkin. Or how vicious they were, more than a century ago, about Byron. They focus on matters having nothing to do with the quality of the poems. I think writing "as a way to be important," to use your phrase, is something the serious writer strives to avoid.

Dempsey:
Your three books of poetry have all been published through submission to various publishing awards or contests. Are these unsolicited calls for manuscripts the most viable option available to poets who want to publish a full-length volume of poetry?

Carter:
The process of submitting your manuscript of poems to a publisher and hoping it will be accepted and published really hasn't changed very much during the last three or four hundred years. Certainly there have been poets who have self-published their books during that time, and some very illustrious ones. But in the main, at least since the eighteenth century, you submit a

manuscript to a publisher and hope for the best.
      During the last fifteen or twenty years, a number of publishers have dressed up this basic process by announcing that they're holding contests for poetry manuscripts. They hire judges, publish winners and award prizes of a thousand dollars or so. This probably encourages a greater number of submissions, but somebody still has to decide which manuscript to publish, so basically nothing has changed.

Dempsey:
Do contests help to level the playing field?

Carter:
I'm all in favor of such contests; the more opportunities to publish, the better. The main innovation has been to require an entry fee of around twenty dollars, and this seems reasonable, too, although lately a few small-press publishers have said they're trying to get away from such fees, and also from the prize-giving business.

Dempsey:
Does the increase in contests and poetry markets make it easier or more difficult to have new work accepted?

Carter:
Having a poem accepted for publication in a magazine has never seemed easy to me. I'm still sending out poems that I wrote ten and fifteen years ago. If one of them gets accepted somewhere, it's because I persevered, and kept sending it out until it finally landed on the desk of someone who thought it had merit.

Dempsey:
Has the addition of new outlets for poetry on the Internet affected your submission process?

Carter:
On the web there seems to have been an explosion in the number of opportunities to submit new poems — and also to reprint previously published ones. The speed and scope of the web — the alacrity of editorial response, the worldwide audience reached — is qualitatively different from traditional print venues.

Dempsey:
How seriously do you take web-based publications, though? With a print journal there's the cost and difficulty of putting out a tangible product which creates a barrier-to-entry for amateur publishers, whereas publishing on the web is cheap and easy.

Carter:
When was the last time you hitched up your horse and drove the buggy into downtown Philly? Or out to Harrisburg for the day?

Dempsey:
How many times have you trusted your life to an automobile that a ten year old boy built himself, though?
      On the web you really don't know who's holding the reins (to use your metaphor), or who's behind the wheel (to use mine). Compared to a print journal, it's cheap and easy to put up a web site. Do you take web journals seriously (or as seriously) as traditional print journals?

Carter:
Literature on the web has much to offer. But in many instances existing sites have not yet availed themselves of the best intellectual traditions that the print world has worked for so long to develop — journalistic integrity, identification of sources, scholarly attribution, principles of fair use, respect for copyright, and many other professional conventions and statutory agreements that help to make contemporary discourse possible and accountable. To the degree that web journals put these traditions into practice, they too will become as important and respected as the earlier print magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, at one end of the spectrum, and George Hitchcock's Kayak, at the other.
      Emerson, Lowell, Howells, and their successors didn't publish The Atlantic anonymously. They had the courage of their convictions. They listed their real names on the masthead. Putting up homemade web sites that lack contact information for whoever runs the sites, using fake names, attacking or ridiculing others without taking responsibility for your actions — all that sort of thing is chat-room silliness, a form of cowardice and a symptom of what one friend of mine calls "the dark side" of the web. It has no place in serious discourse or in art.

Dempsey:
I suppose the real question is why do you publish in poetry journals at all?

Carter:
First, it's a process of validation, of casting your bread upon the waters. It's a risk-taking you can't achieve by sitting alone in your room. And second, to accept the challenge of getting work published invariably refines and strengthens that work, in unexpected ways. The dross is skimmed off, the ore remains in the crucible. This seems to me the only conceivable goal — to try to write as well as you can.
      When it comes to publishing poems, I see no inherent difference between print journals and web journals. Each is susceptible to abuse and corruption; each can foster excellence and operate with impartiality. It is not hard to tell which are honest and legitimate and which are deceptive and inauthentic. True, we're currently in a period of transition from one mode to the other, but this

will pass. In time, even the respected print journals will recede farther into the mists and then disappear altogether. And the bogus web sites will dry up and blow away, too. In their day, for every Kenyon Review or The Nation, there were a thousand small magazines that came and went. This weeding process is at work on the web, too.

Dempsey:
There are so many web sites to read on the Internet that readers have been growing increasingly selective and impatient. If one site doesn't provide the information needed, people are quick to return to a search engine and look for another site.
      Recently you've sidled up to the table with your own web site, JaredCarter.com, which you approached more like an art project rather than an online résumé or brochure. Has working on your own web site helped to make you a better poet?

Carter:
It made me more aware of the technical requirements of the people like yourself who work behind the scenes to keep the web functioning and looking good. A lot of would-be authors have no idea what goes on in a conventional publishing house, or what steps must be taken to turn a manuscript into a book. A year ago, I had no idea what went on in the source-code world, that part of the web that the average person seldom sees.
      Now, after helping to build that site, I'm slightly better informed. If I'm thinking of submitting a poem to a particular online magazine, I can halfway anticipate how it will look through different browsers, what the maximum line width should be, how fast it will download, whether the site is running a Mac or PC, whether the editors want links provided in the bio, and so on.

Dempsey:
Does familiarity with the technology increase your chances of having work accepted?

Carter:
I think this kind of knowledge always helps you to write with more confidence. To borrow a couple of your terms, it has enabled me to be more selective, and at the same time has taught me to be more patient, when assessing different sites, and imagining how my work might fit in.

Dempsey:
Obviously validation is always helpful, but does publication still increase your confidence, or matter as much now as it did when you were first starting to publish?

Carter:
It's always important. But the emphasis changes. When you're young and just starting out, publishing can give you credibility as a person. When you're older, you're more interested in validating a style, a body of work that you've already put together. Both approaches are probably a little off the mark. It is always the particular poem that matters, not the person. It is the poem that the good editor accepts or declines, not the reputation.

Dempsey:
Do you feel pressure to keep reinventing yourself, to come up with something new, or do you feel that you've been writing the same poem throughout your life and are only refining the process?

Carter:
There's no pressure. I keep searching for new and different kinds of material, the way a wave moves through water, encountering everything from plankton to whales. The wave has probably been there from the beginning.

Dempsey:
How does that search proceed? Do you try to think of something you've never written about before? A new subject? A form that you haven't yet explored?

Carter:
Faulkner said sometimes he could write an entire novel based on a single word that had caught his attention. I'm no different. Words, sounds, textures, odors, the antics of the cat playing with a piece of string. A poem can arise out of anything at all, rather like subatomic particles that can suddenly materialize out of the vacuum flux.

Dempsey:
Are there any subjects that you've been unable to transform into a poem?

Carter:
I've never had much luck with poems involving childhood memories; something that Proust did so well. Certain events in my childhood, while not inherently remarkable, still seem quite vivid to me. They come back at odd moments. I have especially poignant recollections of my grandmother's house during World War Two and shortly thereafter. These are memories that remain mysterious and evocative, even now. But putting them into a poem wouldn't necessarily make them that way for anyone else.

Dempsey:
Are there any subjects that are taboo to you?

Carter:
I don't think so. But here we need to be careful and resist the notion that a poem comes into being after the poet selects a particular subject. Certainly, there are times when one writes thesis poems. Yeats called them "poems of statement." Tom McGrath makes that useful distinction between tactical poetry and strategic poetry. But most good lyric poems don't come about because someone has selected a subject, or a thesis, or a theme. They just sort of happen. After years of practice and application, of course. Anything can trigger a poem, but ideas don't seem to play much of a part in that process.

Dempsey:
Do you, like W. C. Williams, think writing poetry has made you a better person?

Carter:
No, I don't. I'm the same person I've always been. I don't believe in personal progress, or historical progress, either. Most things naturally grow, prosper, flower, decay, and pass from view. But they seldom get better in a single cycle or incarnation. I don't think making art, appreciating it, or studying it is redemptive or improves one in any way. Of course some poets assume their version of events is politically superior, or socially uplifting, or whatever. I don't believe a word of it.
      I do think poetry can at times comment on ethical or social issues, and sometimes literature can illuminate certain problems, in ways different from — say — political discourse, philosophy, or religion. Ways that might strike us with greater immediacy. But art can't provide answers; that's not its business. The only way I can conceive of becoming "better" would be to show increased kindness and consideration for other people and other living creatures. It's certainly something to strive for. But we can improve in that way only as individuals, and in our hearts, if such betterment matters to us at all.
      The critic F. R. Leavis claimed that "the business of literature is to raise moral questions, not to answer them." That's a hell of a claim, and it can be disputed. But he didn't say that reading literature makes us better. Rather, that a familiarity with great literature, from Homer and Sophocles to Tolstoy and Henry James, might provide some insight, or guidance, as we face the sort of ethical quandaries we inevitably encounter during our lifetimes. Oedipus' dilemma — not understanding who he really was — will sooner or later be your own problem. So will Lear's — failing to grasp the power of love. It helps to be familiar with such precedents, so you don't get completely knocked off your feet when it's your turn to act like a jerk.

Dempsey:
So if not to better yourself or mankind, what purpose does poetry serve for you, as both a reader and creator? Entertainment? Yet another diversion to keep you from thinking about death?

Carter:
Purpose? Who said anything about purpose? Does the Mona Lisa have a purpose, or a utilitarian function? Does Hamlet? The Goldberg Variations? Chartres cathedral? Rather than purpose, and rather than entertainment — and there's a value in entertainment, I'm not knocking it — I would say that these different works of art, and poetry too, can provide pleasure. But it's not sensual pleasure we're talking about. It's existential. Works of art help to remind us who we are, and where we are. We're humans, living together on the planet earth, in harmony with animals and plants, and bound for the stars. As individuals, each of us will die, certainly, but poetry has much to say about that, too. And what it says is not discouraging; least of all does it counsel us not to think about our own demise. Rather, to accept it as part of our natural condition.
      But I'm being too harsh. Let me put it a different way. I think you're asking what poetry can contribute to our awareness, and to our daily lives. Rather than purpose, it's more like, does it have a value? Or, does it "make nothing happen," as one poet has said? I would reply that it has value, and can contribute a great deal. Poetry involves vision, and the play of the imagination; it springs from those sources. There is not enough of either one in most of what we do or say or experience. We can become more familiar with the unbounded imagination from the examples poetry gives us, without assuming that this is what we "get" or extract from it, or that this is its "purpose." Poetry has no more purpose than a peony or a rose. But neither of these is insignificant, and both have an existential presence similar to our own, if we take the time to stop and really see them.
      It's a cliché, but I am fond of the story about the old football coach, who told his players, at the beginning of the year, "It doesn't matter what kind of record we have when the season is over. It doesn't matter how many games we've won or lost. What matters is what each of you becomes for having played the game." I look at the making of poems in that way.

Dempsey:
Yet you don't think that writing poetry makes you a better person, the way that coach thought football made his players better men?

Carter:
Touché. But I'll defend my metaphor, without going too deeply into the zen of football. The coach, and the players, already believe that they are men. That's not the issue. Football, like many other athletic contests, is, at heart, far more of an identity quest. It's not about what you are, or what you might become, but who you are now, at this moment, whatever the odds against you, or the difficulties you encounter. Ultimately, by participating, you test yourself. Sure, there are the months and years of practice, before you ever take the field. Just as there are decades of reading and study before you write that first promising poem. You polish and practice the basic skills.
      But football itself — actually being in a game — is an existential experience, one that can lead to self-knowledge. By that point the players are not concerned with getting better morally or physically, or behaving in some swaggering, macho way. They're concerned with being able to look back, when it's all over, and say "On this occasion, I did my best. I fought for my team. I came through the fire."
      Once the ball is kicked off, you have the opportunity of "playing up to your potential," and, by doing so, finding out who you are — what you're made of, whether you can really hack it. "Sweet are the uses of adversity." You're also discovering what it means to be part of a team, which is no small thing — to be responsible for a specialized assignment, and yet to be ready to act in the face of unpredictable developments. Many have observed, not always with approval, that football is in this sense a kind of warfare. Or at least a metaphor for combat, maybe even a preparation for it. And in this they are not entirely wrong.
      Achilles doesn't assume that he is getting better by participating in the Trojan War, and neither do we. Obviously he already believes he is the best. And so do all the rest of them — one is the best archer, another is the best swordsman or rock-thrower. On the plains of Troy, each of them tests such propositions, and pays dearly for being proved wrong. They have been brought there by their shared notions of honor and tradition — what it means to be an Achaean. In combat they encounter their individual destinies. A football player does the same thing, in a less-than-lethal way. And so, I'm suggesting, does a maker of poems.
      But writing does not resemble a violent, adversarial game. As others have pointed out, it's more like golf. It's politely competitive, but it's not confrontational. You can't disadvantage your partner by disturbing his swing or changing the lay of his ball. Instead, you're always playing against yourself. Individual performance is everything. With each swing, each putt, you're constantly called upon to play your best. I think that's what it's like to try to compose a new poem. And it's an exhilarating experience. It's what the years of practice and preparation have led up to: this moment.
      The last poem you wrote doesn't matter, nor the last literary prize, nor the last raspberry from some sourpuss of a detractor who thinks your stuff is crap. None of that matters. Rather, it's like being the halfback who, standing just in front of the end zone, looks up and sees the opening kickoff coming down to him, end over end. If he had time to think about it, he would say to himself, "This is it." But of course he doesn't. It is all happening now. In the next couple of seconds, eleven people bent on pounding him into the ground will be on top of him. The other end zone is ninety yards away, which at that moment looks like ninety light years. And here comes the ball. It's a moment of truth. There's nowhere to hide. The existential examination has begun.
      In moments like that, and similar peak encounters, all the essentialist claims and assumptions fade away. When you've arrived at that moment — whether you're fielding a kickoff, writing a poem, or squaring off against Hector — you're about to discover who you really are, and what you're made of.
      We do not speak of developing courage, or getting better at it. We assume it is there all along, inside each of us. The task is to find it, and to act according to its dictates. That's why young men play football. And that's why I write poems.

Dempsey:
What do you hope readers will value in your poetry?

Carter:
That certain poems they notice in my books, or encounter on my web site, seem to beckon to them, and encourage them to start off on journeys of their own.