BP: My first group of thoughts about poetry and discipline are these: it strikes me that there is a real problem with the word "discipline." There are two opposed sets of associations to "discipline." One is childish, in a way: it goes back to authority and parental discipline and time outs, and such things. It's a cliché, but that's because it's partially true. Poetry is, for millennia, and in its various circumstances, a very undisciplined activity, or sets of activities. The Dionysiac aspect of a Delphic oracle; being out of your head; Plato kicking the poets out and all that. Over and over again that trope is reinvented in different circumstances. It is reinvented socially, emotionally, and formally. The Beats were perceived as radically undisciplined, unclean, all of those things, and despite the clichés, there were grains of truth in that: they were against the gender and political disciplines of the fifties. That was really clear to everybody. There's that on the one side. Then there's poetry as a discipline. Again, before I go there, I want to finish with the other, the anti-disciplinary side, as I called it. Which is this: over and over again, there's a sense of breaking with sclerotic, prior dispensations that have come to stand for the discipline of poetry. Poetry equals the ability to handle meter effectively, to handle coherent imagery effectively— and all that. That's the history of interesting poetry in the last two hundred years, rebelling against that; Pound saying, "to break the pentameter, that was the first heave." The line itself was a very un-pentameter line. "That was the first heave": it's a very nice sound, and it's not a "that time of year thou may'st in me behold / when yellow leaves or none or few ..."

There's always that breaking against former, overly tight disciplinary boundaries. And those are really, for me, very fascinating questions. It seems to me that poetry has turned a corner, at least poetry in English. The significant poetry (I'm saying this on the record, I don't know if I believe it) is not going to be metric for the next century. There are all sorts of people who work in pentameter and make it (I'm saying this in an exaggerated way; it's occurring to me and I don't have the 'discipline' not to indulge myself in saying it) — it occurs to me that iambic pentameter is a little bit like the current Republican regime: the best that they can do is to try to disguise what they are doing. A good Bushista tries to mouth centrist sentiments while doing his nefarious, extremist reactionary things. I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek here. But it seems to me that the better iambic pentameter that has been done in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries is iambic pentameter that doesn't draw attention to itself. That seems really odd, actually. So if that's the good iambic pentameter — the iambic pentameter that doesn't draw attention to itself— and the point of it is to mime natural speech but somehow to be obeying the rules in a clandestine way, that seems fairly odd to me.

Almost all the interesting poetry, modernist poetry, is not metrically regular. Apart from the Four Quartets of Eliot, I suppose. And Hart Crane. But then, if I had to choose between The Waste Land and the Four Quartets, there's not much choice there. Whenever I teach The Waste Land, I always point to the submerged sonnets in "The Fire Sermon" —and yes, it's very clever, it's very good. But the poem is also extremely sardonic or sarcastic about that. Anyway, Williams, Stein, Loy, Marianne Moore, Pound, etc. etc. Olson, Ginsberg, Niedecker, Hughes. I won't bother to try to have an appropriate, representative list. But none of it is metrical. And it strikes me as a little bizarre to have 2500 years at least (giving the standard term, going back to Homer) of a very— well, it's not a unitary tradition, but it's a tradition that keeps re-presenting itself as something to pay attention to.

As a little digression here, when I was a young kid I was made a poet by reading [Pound's] ABC of Reading. Immediately I went off (because I hated English classes and all that) reading the classics. So I'm somebody who has read Homer, and it has been very important to me, and I do think that poetry is in some sense, for all its innovativeness, a profoundly conservative enterprise. All sorts of people have gone back to Homer, and Charles Olson goes back to Sumerian. It's that gesture of going back and either getting something from the ancients, or doing battle with the ancients. Poetry is constantly reaffirming itself as a gigantic temporal whole, but nevertheless there's a tremendous break that has occurred in the last hundred or so years. Poetry is completely different now. I suppose you could go back to the Bible. Hebrew poetry is not rhythmicand it is not rhymed. Is that correct?

MANTIS: It's not rhythmic in the same way.

BP: It's more like Whitman, right? I mean the old —the psalms (I'm somebody who has not been to Sunday school.) Isn't it more like Whitman? I mean, it's incantatory, it's repetitive and varied.

MANTIS: It is a bit, yes. You have internal rhymes, but it's not metric.

BP: Yes, the sound is very aware of itself. But you're not filling out this very regular pattern within irregularity.

MANTIS: Occasionally, people have found regular patterns, but that's something imposed. But isn't some of the rhythmic pattern that can be found there based upon parallelism?

BP: Syntactic parallelism. Yes.

MANTIS: It seems like a mnemonic of oral psychodynamics. We sing biblical songs now, and we're able to put them to tunes, and sing them in verses, and it works. But that's not necessarily how it was.

BP: Ultimately, I'm thinking of modifying my original statement that all poetry has been metrical for these two millennia. But it mostly has been metrical. Even the oral psychodynamics. Homer is very regular; there's lots of variation, but dactylic hexameter is a completely regular system. To me, it's as if (a little bit as if, anyway) — imagine painting as a tradition (going back to Zeuxis — the one who painted the grapes that the birds pecked at), you had some sort of iconography or representation, with all sorts of changes, etc., and eventually perspective. But then it's as if all of a sudden painting became screen-based, based on pixels instead of paint on a surface. It's not an exact analogy, but I'm trying to think of something that would be an equivalent of the profound change that has happened in poetry. And I'm saying there's been this profound change and also that it's a very conservative, continuous, contentious, self-contesting ... not a tradition, but a library, put it that way. An accumulation of all these different practices. That is something I don't understand. I don't have a good explanation, but it strikes me as an important fact, one that I want to point out and keep thinking about. So, on the one hand there's this endless push against the prior disciplines. And at the same time, poetry is a discipline. Normally, don't you think of a discipline as something that is cumulative and linear? You know, like when you learn Russian, you take Russian 1, Russian 2: it all adds up, sequentially. I don't see that poetry is that kind of discipline at all. But there are endless stories. Most poets, many poets, maybe the majority of poets, try to imagine a sort of Gradus ad Parnassum. Zukofsky says he wrote 500 sonnets when he was young. First you write sonnets, then you write "Poem beginning 'The,'" then you write "A." So there are these constant gestures. What did writing all those sonnets do for Zukofsky? — it did help him. He wrote "A"-9. And he did write "A"-7, so maybe he never did get over the need to go back and master these previous, outmoded disciplines.

I'm not making a statement; obviously, I'm thinking out loud and I guess I find myself saying that there is no set of procedures that you learn sequentially, as you do in some disciplines. And yet at the same time, poets do make gestures toward making poetry be like that. I don't know, this is something I always mention to grad students: it would be a very interesting project to look at the sonnet in the twentieth century — beginning with Williams. The capstone would be Williams, for this project, writing, "Gosh, I hate sonnets; all sonnets say the same thing." Then you'd have to look at all the sonnets that innovative poets have done. And rhyme and meter poets as well. Ted Berrigan's sonnets. Zukofsky. The reason I'm saying this is that I'm a realizing "A"-7 is a sequence of seven sonnets. Bizarre, interesting sonnets, but they in fact are "regular" in the most irregular way imaginable —but they do rhyme, and they do (I think) have a more or less regular meter. Anyway, there's a whole range of people who have done sonnets, and anti-sonnets. So the notion of that kind of discipline has always clearly been very vexed, sometimes in a generative way. That's my original opening sense of the problem, the interesting problem of poetry and discipline.

MANTIS: It seems that you're talking about discipline in the sense of a disciplinary tradition, something cumulatively determined over time. Where does discipline in terms of craft fit in there? If we look at the shift away from meter, what is still there in poetic craft that's not related to meter? Is there a way in which it's fruitful to look at discipline as a way that a poet wrangles with words?

BP: Again, I think that's really crucial and I don't have a crisp answer for that. It's a fact of my own "vocabularistic" history that the word "craft" has had this real workshop connotation (of writing based on very recognizable prior models —recognizably "poetic" poems, writing in meter, writing in sequences of recognizable imagery and statement.) There's a lot of poetry that many innovative poets have found boring and that represents the confines that one wants to break, and the word "craft" hovers over that kind of stuff. There is an old tradition (by now) where people accuse free verse (we're talking more than a hundred years) of having no craft, of having no discipline, no ability. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers write gibberish because they can't write good sentences, they're not good enough to write real sentences. Gertrude Stein, they say, was a charlatan. "She couldn't do this ordinary task," or "she didn't know the classics well enough." There's a sense that the word "craft" is an emblem on the flag of a distinguished castle of poets, or something like that. On the other hand, if anybody has written or taught poetry, it's really an obvious fact (it strikes everybody, and I think it's very hard to articulate why it strikes everybody, what the mechanism of the striking is), that some poems are more interesting than others. Certainly when one is writing a poem, this part works and this part is really bad. "I really don't like this line." And what then happens is you call upon "craft," or you could call it your accumulated knowledge, or your various sense of tools — perhaps there are "tools" in poetry the way there are tools in Photoshop? There are tools that are available to use.

Right now, I'm in the middle of finishing up a book and I have a lot of, to my mind, second-rank poems. And they're full of infelicities, or they're boring, they're excessive, their jokes aren't funny, the earnestness is tedious; whatever, my superego can charge and just batter away at me. Since this book has started to coalesce, I can somehow be in the mode (or mood) of revising these and salvaging them, making them better. [. .. ] So, how do I do that? One of the most crucial considerations is social tone. It seems to me that poetry, isn't, in a way, a recognizable skill. What I'm trying to say is that for a poem to be really good (and in some ways this is a really old trope) it has to be something that hasn't been done before; it has to break or transgress or transcend or sublate — whatever you want to say. Poetry is not a recognizable discipline, and so whatever passes for craft in a poem is something that takes place in a social space that is not a thoroughly familiar social space for other poems. It can't speak simply to literary classrooms or literary circumstances. It has to speak to more of the present than that. And the present is a tremendously chaotic but also a tremendously habitual place with different social dictionaries, different rhythms, different means for speaking. The more that a poem can use this wider post-poetic vocabulary (and I mean vocabulary in terms of the gesture, tone, word choice, sound play, the speech acts) then the stronger the poem is, and the less recognizable it is from prior models.

And I do think that if you go back in the history of poetry, there is the sense that what we now call the tradition, the lineage of poems, has always been stuff that hadn't been done before. Shakespeare is a supreme example of all this, bringing in country language and the rural and the ecological, and mixing it with high courtly language and commercial language and extreme, indecorous emotional language. It's all these very different kinds of mixtures, which is what gives the overall result its vitality. That's another part of craft, trying to pick up signals, to figure out where the liveliest signals are. How can you take something dull and stale and break it out of that dull, stale room and bring it into the live air of immediacy. And that's not a question of editing, of copyediting and removing redundancies. Sometimes that's a question of adding redundancies, or allowing repetitive ranting to occur.

I don't usually give this kind of talk — if I gave this talk five hundred times I might get crisper and better at naming the various lobes or dimensions of craft—but I think there are quite a number of them. And many of them aren't codified, aren't talked about, except in the most intuitive way, or cryptic way (by ear he said). Those are some of the endless considerations.

MANTIS: Going back to what you were saying about social tone, and the social spaces that can be created by poetry: one thing that I've been noticing about your poetry is the way that in some poems you very strongly evoke particular poetic eras, and I was thinking . . .

BP: Wait, eras? Errors? Or eros?

MANTIS: Maybe all... e-r-a-s.

BP: Poetic eras, yes.

MANTIS: I'm thinking in particular of your fake conversation between Frank O'Hara and Roland Barthes, or the imagined conversation between Frank O'Hara and Roland Barthes ...

BP: No, fake is the right word.

MANTIS: Is this one of the things that you are talking about, in terms of creating a social space, and picking up on the "live social signals?" I was wondering in those moments where you're recreating these kinds of contingent conversations if there is a way in which you're consciously trying to create a type of dialogue between poets and critics? And is that related to what you were saying in terms of social space?

BP: For the Barthes-O'Hara piece I was asked to kind of pinch-hit on a piece about O'Hara; no, it was about Barthes. Sort of like my piece on "Derrida." I'm not a theory scholar —I haven't read all of Barthes. I have read plenty, and I think he's really great, but I had no sense of mastery. So I had a very short time to write this piece and suddenly I had this idea ... the connection was that Barthes and O'Hara both died by being hit by vehicles, and they were both gay, and a little outrageous and witty and bombastic and kind of contemporary. Then, when I wanted to put this thing together I had just seen a Burger King ad (I don't watch much television, but there is a lot of poetry in there ... and I'm susceptible to it), and it just struck me as a funny, amusingly puffy fiction to use. Once I started, I took both sides seriously. There are a lot of quotes in there. I really enjoyed working on that one. Producing that little play. And I love conversations and hearing people talk back and forth. There are so many interesting dynamics to that. And I love the darting shapes of conversational intervention, and picking up each other's thoughts, and jumping over ... all that sort of stuff. [. . . .]

MANTIS: Another strain that seems to be prevalent in the poems that you read yesterday was a move towards like a bridling political partisanship.

BP: You mean Iraq? You mean, Bush not so much as a fascist but as a failed fascist?

MANTIS: Yes, and well, the politics are sort of welling up really fervently in the poems. And it made me think back to Ed Dorn's statement that poetry was his way of voting "early and often." Do you find that your poems are sometimes accidentally poems, or political propositions that happen to be in poem form? How are you framing your thoughts about politics and poetry?

BP: I'm aware of it. By my standards, I've written political poetry, although not by Sam Hamill standards, necessarily. I know that in the very late seventies and the early eighties, after being really smitten by the opening up of— we didn't call it Language writing, exactly— but just the combinatory possibilities and the collage possibilities and the stuff that became [what Ron Silliman calls] the new sentence, really playing around with linguistic perspective and formal possibilities. Then, having kids (one at a time). My oldest, Max, was born in '78. Very quickly, when he was three, that was Reagan, and we were all involved in political protests, and my wife was arrested at the Livermore Lab. We really did think this asshole was going to blow up the world and, having kids just then really seemed kind of tragic. Also, Max was a precocious kid, and there were always politics in the house, so he was asking questions, at three and four, like "what's the h-bomb, Dad?" How do you answer that? It really pushed me into politics in the present tense.

Once I let politics into my writing, it stayed in there. Now, the political situation seems harsher than ever. I'd like to be able to write more political poems (I don't write that many). The ones that are here, like the one on Dick Cheney, I think that's very effective. I'm very glad it got on the Op-Ed page. It isn't just simple; it really is reacting against "shock and awe," relating love and hate, having kids and all that, which seems to me the political center of what needs to be considered. But it's really hard, for me, to write political poetry because there's a kind of— well, it's so easy to short-circuit it, to somehow "answer" the political problem in the poem, and when that happens ... I feel a great sense of defeat, poetically. There are a range of whole poems that I think are somewhat successful politically, maybe, but they make me feel kind of disappointed — as poems. Adrienne Rich, for instance, is a strong example; I think she is very effective politically, and I give her great credit for that. Very effective, as a rhetorician —in a good way —and obviously very successful in energizing people. But I wish I could say I love her poems, and I am sorry to say I don't. There's a sense of depletion in them.

In the academy it can get tiring. There's often a rather vigilant, censorious sense of what politics is. And at worst, it's like anything that is obvious is reactionary. But the obvious is going to change, over the years (whatever is obvious now won't be obvious later, and what seems obscure now will in some cases become more and more obvious). That's the weird, impossible balance. I'd love to have something be obvious and subtle, politically. Who knows; our desires and fantasies guide us, often, in the most impossible ways. But it's a problem. The public and the obvious and the political are real —they are not the enemies of poetry. But often enough there are poems that crash against those rocks. [....] There isn't a good example. With Ginsberg, "Howl" is a pretty amazing poem, and it's very effective, and it really is something. But with some of those poems right after "Howl," which were very long, it's not very easy to sustain it. And "Wichita Vortex Sutra," which is another, really important poem, is interesting but I don't know what I think of it. But I think that where Ginsberg says, "I here declare the end of the war," it's powerful, but it's also —well, "So what?" or, "No, I don't think you did manage to end the war." That's where the poem becomes self-congratulatory. That's the end of effective political poetry.

So, it's a hard question. And those are the hardest poems to write. And there's so much wrong that is so completely obvious, that it's hard to know what to do, how to get it to act, to be active on the page.

MANTIS: I have a question about ["Indirect Address: A Ghost Story"] the poem to Derrida that you read to us yesterday. You explained to us that you used softer parentheses to distinguish between the vous and the tu in French, but you also used all sorts of punctuation in that poem, which you can't really convey to an audience ("here I used a semicolon..-."). Why do you choose those punctuations? Does it have any relation to privileging, since punctuation has the function of privileging certain parts of a sentence ... ?

BP: I feel a little like Stein, who said she liked to parse sentences; there was nothing she liked more than to diagram sentences. She did say that. I remember back in the day, learning Greek and Latin and really sort of enjoying this, finally grammar revealed itself to me; I'd never thought about it in English. I feel a little bit like that with punctuation. I sort of find it almost intriguing, as a musical and logical set of articulations. It's also a form of discipline. And sometimes I choose not to use it. Sometimes, it's interesting to eschew punctuation. But with the Derrida, that's one in the category of "poem-essay," like "The Marginalization of Poetry," which I sort of think of as ... as poems that, at birth, were prose. And then they had a sort of sex-change —a genre-change operation —and became poems. Certainly, in "The Marginalization of Poetry," that's true.

I was very interested in the six-word line. The history of this is in [a poem from] Ten to One, and it's called "Chronic Meanings," and it's an elegy for a man who died of AIDS, Lee Hickman, the great editor of Temblor. And I wrote five-word lines that just stop on the page ... of my own poems, it's one of my favorites; I think it works very well. And five words are just long enough to really start saying something, but most sentences are longer than five words. So after that I had this idea of writing six-word lines and making six-word couplets. Some minimal amount of complexity that can make a line —a discursive line. So, with "Marginalization of Poetry," I was really thinking of it as prose but then there's this aggressive, arbitrary counting to six. I even made a macro (because I was constantly changing things, and it was a pain: if you change a word in line three, you have to retype the whole poem). Instead, I made this macro where I could write it in prose and then make it in six-word lines, with this macro (six, six, couplet). What could be less inspired than that? It's Fordist production.

MANTIS: Staying with the Derrida poem and the "Marginalization of Poetry," I'm thinking of a moment where you quote yourself in "The Marginalization of Poetry" and kind of accuse yourself of glibness. In a way you say, "Sure, Derrida is useful..." But do you find certain theory useful, and what theory have you found that you take from?

BP: This answer won't make me seem like a very organized person. I do find theory really useful, but I have a permanent anxiety, a permanent (perhaps unwanted) negative capability about theory. I always feel like I don't fully get it. I never keep the terminology straight; it always feel as though I'm learning it (and I think, "yes, I know that"); then I read it and I don't know it. Perhaps it's willed ignorance about theory. And having said all that, I'm perpetually very interested in theory. I like theory that is the most open to history. I'm always interested in De Man, his paradoxes of literary modernity and the possibility of modernity, but I always find when he ends up proving that there's no such thing as modernity — with those proofs, I always shut the book and end up thinking, that's why I'm not a theorist. I'm more interested in people like Jameson, for instance, although I'm not in love with his treatment of my poem, "China." First of all, he doesn't read the last line. When they asked me for permission to reprint it I said, "Yes, if you print the last line." He also leaves out one of the best lines in the middle; so there are two lines missing in his version of it, which is unfortunately the copy most people have read. But he has some riff somewhere in The Geopolitical Imagination about garage-door openers, and how that is a new symptom of the postmodern, force at a distance, and I find that very interesting and generative. This is such a naïve answer. But I find lots of it really interesting. Zizek. Although I get tired of his paradoxes: "paradoxically, we have to all become Stalinists." He's always being a sort of bad boy in this sense. But I find the globalizing power of theory very energizing.

It's the theory that is more sure of itself and has the answers that I'm less interested in. I don't like theory where you know what is going to be proven at the beginning of the article; you already know that the good guy is going to win, and the bad guy is going to lose. Not that I'm for the bad guy.

MANTIS: Your work also posits these insistent hypothetical conversations and affinities between American poetry and Continental theory. Derrida, Barthes and O'Hara ...

BP: Or it's saying, it's whining about, basically, "Gee, they don't really read poetry, these theorists." Like in the Derrida piece, it says, "we (these poets and philosophers) really should get together and have a lot in common" —but they actually don't. Theorists don't read poetry.

MANTIS: In this sense, as a poet, do you see your active role in the academy as a poetic or critical liability? Do you worry about discussing literature from an objective angle and then engaging in it? There's the sort of old-fashioned claim that critics shouldn't engage in art and poets shouldn't engage in criticism.

BP: And then there's one of Pound's more interesting ideas —it's pretty convincing — that if you really want to know about poetry, you should read what the ones who have written it say. (i.e., Pound is saying: "You should read me.") There's something to that. Never mind me, though. I find Barry Watten's book, The Constructivist Moment terrific. And ... Charles [Bernstein]'s book. Lyn Hejinian's. There's a lot of good stuff being done. Barry really has theory down. He can do all that programming, so to speak. And maybe his book is going to be listened to and cited by theorists. But there's still a bit of a tendency to read poets' theories or poets' criticism or poets' prose as its own special, ornamental category. Which is not the way I want to see it work.