INTERVIEW
OF JONATHAN HOLDEN
The
following interview
was conducted by e-mail in January, 2000.
Chris
Ellis:
There
are some
critics of poetry who maintain that public interest in poetry is
declining.
What is your opinion on this? Do you feel this decrease is
related
to people's waning interest in reading in general, or do you think
that,
possibly, people are not taught to read and appreciate modern poetry
appropriately
in the first place, thus making interpreting poems too difficult to be
enjoyed as "entertainment"?
Jonathan
Holden:
Serious
poetry,
like serious reading, has always been a marginal art.
Proclamations
about "decline" are clichés and somewhat tiresome. The
primary
place for poetry has been the place where all serious reading happens
÷
the university: with the democratization of higher education has come,
inevitably, the democratization of poetry within what Robert Persig
calls
in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance "the church of
reason."
Of
course, there
are many different styles of poetry. The "style" which I pursue
was
founded by Pound and Eliot around 1914, "The Modernist" movement
÷ a movement
that was originally elitist but which, in 1956 with the publication of
Ginsbergâs "Howl" and in 1959 with the publication of Robert
Lowellâs Life
Studies, threw off the yoke of Eliotian "impersonality" and, with
the
confessional poets like Plath and Sexton and Snodgrass, became more
human.
American poetry became personalized, and that is the dominant vein in
American
university poetry. (Iâve likened it to secular prayer, in
various
places: prayer within "the church of reason." Like all serious
art,
it requires indoctrination.)
Ellis:
You
made a
comment in The Fate of American Poetry that there is a lot of
poetry
being written today, and stated that there is more poetry being
published
and written today than at any other time in the history of American
poetry.
Is this a good thing, or a bad thing overall?
Holden:
Poetry
goes
on. Most of it is, like most things, mediocre, but a small
percentage
of it is miraculous. As Randall Jarrell famously said: "A poet is
a man who stands outside in thunderstorms hoping to be struck by
lightning,
and if he is lucky he may be struck three or four times in a lifetime."
Ellis:
Poetry
slams
are becoming very popular. Most poets do not really hold these
slams
in very high regard. I can certainly see how they represent what
can happen to poetry when it is written strictly for reading
aloud.
What is your opinion on poetry slams? How do you think they will
affect poetry in the future? What do you tell your students about
them?
Holden:
Slams
are fun,
but have little to do with poetry as I know it. One of my former
students here, Taylor Mali, has gone high in the slam world.
Remember
that name.
Ellis:
In The
Fate
of American Poetry you make a strong case for poetry's movement
toward
the page. In a sense you maintain that poetry is meant to be
appreciated
on the page first, and that oral readings are second place in
importance.
Why do you feel this is so?
Holden:
Itâs
a bias
of mine to like books. The idea that one can open a book and hear
a voice is amazing to me. It doesnât require
equipment. That
so much heartrending "music" can be encompassed in a mere book will
always
amaze me, and this is why poetry, like prayer, will never die.
Ellis:
Robert
Pinsky
seems to maintain an almost completely opposite point of view. On
his Favorite Poem Project website, he is quoted several times in
poetry's
defense as an "oral art," and maintains that it must always retain its
oral quality. What is your opinion on this?
Holden:
Obviously,
I agree with Pinsky, though thereâs a famous tradeoff between the
"oral"
qualities of a text and the imagistic potential. The two
qualities
are almost mutually exclusive. Most of the best imagistic poems
donât
read aloud well. In the ideal poetry reading, the audience would
have studied in advance each poem being read. Since this is rare,
many poets, when they read aloud, will compensate in one way or
another,
trading off literary values for performance values.
Ellis:
You
have drawn
similarities between poetry and mathematics. Can you explain the
association
or similarity between poetry and math in a way the mathematically
challenged
can grasp?
Holden:
The
"poetry
and mathematics" analogy was simply to demonstrate, for those with some
mathematical sophistication, that both languages "measure" things.
Ellis:
Avisiting
poet
on the Valparaiso University campus recently made the comment that you
single-handedly stopped the overuse/abuse of poems written in second
person
with one essay you wrote in which you basically said everyone ought to
"knock off the second-person thing." What do you think of that?
Holden:
My
chapter,
"The Abuse of the Second-Person Pronoun," was in response to a
particular
fashion popular in the seventies; but what I said then still holds.
Ellis:
What
inspired
you to want to make poetry a principal part of your life and
career?
When did you begin to write poetry? What evolutionary process did
your writing career go through from the beginning to the present
position?
Holden:
From
studying
poetry as literature. But every serious student of poetry as
literature
has wanted to make poetry; to get a job such as mine is
difficult.
You have to win prizes and be in the right place at the right
time.
I happened to win an important prize when I was a graduate student at
the
University of Colorado ÷ The Devins Award. At that
historical moment,
every college and university in the country was looking for poets as
the
creative writing boom happened. The Devins Award guaranteed me a
job teaching creative writing at the college level, a vocation which I
had always envisioned. I was lucky; for as my celebrated father
(a
physicist) explained: "Many are called, few are chosen." Creative
Writing (like a career in, say, show-biz) is fearsomely competitive.
Ellis:
Who
inspired
you then, and who inspires you today? What poets do you consider
to be particularly influential in American poetry ÷ in the past
and present?
Richard Hugo states that poets learn by first mimicking poets they
admire.
For an aspiring student of poetry, what poets do you strongly recommend
as models?
Holden:
Although
I
wrote a book about the poetry of Dick Hugo and a book about the poetry
of Bill Stafford, I canât say that either of them influenced my
style.
Iâm influenced by particular poems by many different poets
÷ by the poems
which I know by heart, going back to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton,
etc.
Iâm influenced by The Tradition. My advice: if you have
picked up
part of a poem which you have studied, and if you like the poem a lot,
memorize the rest. This is what composers and conductors do
routinely.
Ellis:
What
texts
do you suggest to someone who wants to learn about the history of
poetry?
Holden:
The
best text
for me is the famous one, The Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop
Frye.
Ellis:
How
have the
students changed over the years? Are they more or less
knowledgeable
about creative writing in general? Has the quality of their
writing,
their perspective, or their subject matter changed greatly?
Holden:
Students
come
and students go. Occasionally, one will be a genius. The
percentage
of talent remains the same over the years.
Ellis:
When
you write
a poem, how do you prioritize its content or form? How does the
poem
take shape for you? Do you decide you are going to write a
sonnet,
couplets, or free verse first, or do you just sit down to write and see
what takes shape? How do you pick your subject matter? What
exercises (if you still have to do those at this point in your career)
do you use to "get yourself going?"
Holden:
Every
poem
finds its way via a unique route. Iâve written fixed form
poems and,
predominantly, "free verse" poems, though Eliot was right when he
declared
that "no verse is free for the man who does a good job," by which he
meant
that in every accomplished "free verse" poem one hears the echoes of
traditional
prosodies, especially iambic pentameter.
I
donât have
an agenda regarding content, although I guess youâd say that I
am, like
Wordsworth, a poet of memory: my way of working is to imagine some
scene
which really happened, to relive it in my imagination until I may
actually
forget where I am. Usually, at that moment of composition,
Iâll discover
a particularly memorable way of phrasing something. Then
Iâll go
back later and more coolly play with language for the experience.
I donât use exercises to "get myself going." The route of
every poem
is sui generis ÷ absolutely unique.
Lately,
Iâve
been working on a longish poem about the paintings of Edward Hopper,
which
I decided to compare to grand opera, and Iâm bringing into the
poem a part
of an opera libretto by Paul Valery, called Cantate du Narcisse,
telling the story of Narcissus and Echo. I had translated the
libretto
from the French as an undergraduate at Oberlin, and suddenly, over 30
years
later, writing about Hopper (who loved opera and who was quite
narcissistic)
I can make use of my translation. I use Hopperâs famous
painting, Nighthawks.
But this
is just
one example. As I said, every poemâs genesis is sui
generis.