by William Walsh

The Kenyon Review, Summer 2006

Eamon Grennan was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1941. Since 1974 he has resided in the United States. He also keeps a house in western Ireland. After more than thirty years, he has recently retired from teaching at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he was the Dexter M. Ferry, Jr. Professor of English.

His books of verse include Wildly for Days (1983); What Light There Is (1987); What Light There Is and Other Poems (1988); So It Goes (1995); Relations: New and Selected Poems (1998); Selected and New Poems (2000); Still Life with Waterfall (2002); Renvyle, Winter (2003, special limited edition ). His collection Leopardi: Selected Poems (1997) won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. In addition, he has published a collection of essays about modern Irish poetry, Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century (1999). He is the recipient of numerous awards, as well as a number of Pushcart Prizes for his poetry.

This interview was conducted at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 22, 2004. It just so happened that both of us were suffering with colds, so during the interview we were able to admire one another's suffering as we tossed back cough drops; however, this did not in the least bit muffle Grennan's wonderful Irish accent nor detract from his carefully chosen words, almost as if his words were being crafted, because he is a man who knows the value of language and the consequences if it fails.

William Walsh: You moved to the United States from Ireland in 1974, so approximately half your life has been spent in the United States. How has living abroad influenced your writing?

Eamon Grennan: It's more at this stage – I'm sixty-two – I moved here when I was in my twenties. I didn't write poems with any seriousness until after I had come here. I was in college in Ireland at U.C.D. (the University College, Dublin), that was 1960 to 1964, and I wrote bits and pieces. I edited a magazine and was studying English and Italian. I wrote poems and stories, and they got published here and there in student magazines. Then I left and went to Rome for a year where I wrote some. I thought I was trying to be a short story writer. It didn't work. After that I went to Harvard for graduate school. Then I just stopped writing. I just stopped absolutely and concentrated on getting a Ph.D. and becoming a teacher. Then I got married and we had two children, and I had two stepsons.

In 1977, I took off a year from Vassar on paid leave and went back to Ireland with Joan, my wife then, and the children, who were two and three. I decided to take a year off without pay, get to Ireland, and try to plug myself back into poetry and the general literary scene. I also wanted to write a few things to get tenure. Also that summer I had started writing poems again in a way that I thought was serious. So when I got to Ireland, I pursued that. But the poetry books I brought with me were American poetry books. So I was going back to Ireland to fit myself back into the Irish situation having been out of it for a number of years, but at the same time, the influences I was feeling were American. I was reading Bishop, Creely, Snyder, Roethke, James Wright, a whole slew that were voices in my head that were of a real value to me, particularly when I spliced them with [Patrick] Kavanagh and some other Irish poets that were of interest to me and of whom I was writing about at the time. So, in some ways it was inevitable that I wrote out of an Irish psyche but one that had been transplanted and had been affected in some way, colored, by American voices which I was very impressed by, and had been even while I was a student at U.C.D. in Dublin. But it was much more immediate to me during the time I was studying at Harvard and when I started to write again.

So, as a result I really started quite late and when I did I was in the States. Which is why I have this voice, I guess. William Carlos Williams was very important, with that sense of the spoken language as part of the force of the poem and the energy of the poem. That was sometimes taken for granted and I tried to practice. That separated me a little bit from the Irish tradition, which is a speaking tradition, of course, especially under Kavanagh's influence, but it was just that I had more intimacy with the Americans and that affected the way I went about what I was trying to do.

Beyond that, I don't know. I've been here for so long that it's natural that American stuff would have infiltrated my sensibility and my work. Also, I admire, deeply, the three generations of great American work. I think post-romantic English poetry is American in certain ways: from the great first generation – Pound, Eliot, Stevens, to the next generation with Berryman, Lowell, Bishop – which I relished and was nourished by. It's that kind of natural nourishment that I feel feeds the poems in some way. I think what I bring to it from the Irish side may be a different feel for the musical, the lyrical in acoustical terms. I actually play with language on the Hopkins line, maybe in some ways. That appeals to me in a way that might not appeal in so regulated a way to most American poets.

WW: This can be seen in a wonderful line in the poem "Full Moon," which reminds me of a Roethke influence where it states, "... how its ashen luminescence slides inside things / so they shed the cinder skin of what goes on..." It's a very subtle lyrical tonality that you bring to the poem.

EG: I struggled a bit with that sort of conscious sound-use of language. But it's also natural. Though, of course, it could become a tic rather than a talent. Do you know what I mean? I like the music. I think that's what we're about – trying to marry speech patterns to musical language seems to me to be what I try to do. Otherwise, it's just content. I'm interested in content only so far. Like Frost says, "It's the way you say it" Frost was another American that I gravitated towards – loved the sounds particularly of Frost and the blank verse line being continued along at a great swath of a sentence and down the page. I love that. I try to do something with how language operates across a line, lyrically, and across a sentence, meaningfully. That kind of dance between the two. You find that in Yeats, too, but you wouldn't want to be influenced by Yeats. (laughing)

WW: Now when you returned to Ireland, did you start writing there?

EG: I was writing poems. A number of poems in my first book in 1983 were written at that time. They were very small, lyrical, sort of neat little poems. Not formal. I was never a rhymer or anything like that. That's another thing that separated me from someone of my generation in Ireland.

WW: Your first book was published in 1983 when you were forty or forty-one. I find it very interesting poets who do not publish their first book until they are close to forty years old or older. Many poets publish too early.

EG: Oh, yes, in their twenties. Some do it "too easily," some not. People are talented when they are young, and they put a book together and they have a vividness and voice. I didn't. Maybe I don't still. It wasn't a deliberate act of caution or calculation by any means. I worked from 1977 and I wrote poems. I was a teacher. I was a scholar, teaching Shakespeare, the Renaissance, Irish literature, Yeats and post-Yeats... but then poetry entered in and gradually the balance between writing poems and writing criticism shifted and the poetry became more central. But from 1978 to 1983 I was working on poems, tossing poems out, putting poems in, and this collection went through a few drafts and a few different names. And just as well. I was happy with the first book. It got a nice response and what people seemed to be saying was that here was a voice that seemed more or less to exist on its own terms. That was pleasing to me.

WW: When you were teaching and writing poetry, and the weight of writing poetry eclipsed your teaching...

EG: Or at least shadowed it. It was closer to the center of how I was thinking about myself. Was I a teacher who wrote poems or a poet who taught? Vassar was very generous, and very catholic in the sense that they wanted to see you doing your best work no matter what it was. What are you good at? – do it. So that was encouraging. Indeed, when I got tenure the poems I had written up to that point were very much taken into account. I was gathering stuff and had a couple manuscripts of poems and that counted. Then I did start teaching more poetry, a poetry course, poetry writing, but still my main job was teaching literature: freshman courses, Shakespeare, Irish literature, Milton, Chaucer. So I didn't suddenly become a creative writing teacher. I've just retired, but I've never become a creative writing teacher, per se, although when I've taught in graduate programs at NYU or Columbia, they've hired me to teach a craft course or a workshop. So, I wear that hat as well, you might say. I suppose we contain plenty of selves, and that intrigues me.

I'm writing a talk at the moment on Emily Dickinson and the many selves of the poet; it is a current interest of mine. I think all lyric poets in some way are creatures of consciousness in which many selves are like protons and neutrons and electrons and molecules spinning and attempting to find without finality or definition a kind of equilibrium. I find Dickinson is that par excellence. The whole issue of lyricism is about fragmentation, for me anyway. The moment. The fragment. Fracture. The things seen in passing. The notion that things halt but only in our imagination for a half a second and poetry is an attempt to slow things down a bit and hold on. It's the attempt to find the unified field, to relate quantum mechanics, which deals with the small stuff, and relativity theories, which deal with the big stuff, and maybe even string theory. I think poets are string theorists in some ways. They are trying to bring the macro and the micro constantly into a single focus. I think in some ways this addresses the split self. It goes back to Keats in some ways, doesn't it, what he said about the poet is nobody, but that really means he's an everybody, too.

WW: Wouldn't it be something if it was a poet who discovered the answer to the unified field of all matter!

EG: Yes, (laughing) wouldn't it be. In some ways I think poetry has already discovered that for consciousness but not for experimental physics as it were. All poetry seems to me to be an attempt at the statement of the unified theory of being. Think of Yeats's unity of being, and think of Milton, the Fall, and the flower in the ground. How do we bring these zones of the actual into alignment with one another without forcing them to be defined? I'm very interested in the nonreductive, not forcing the thing to make sense, but allowing it to hover with a number of senses. That's some of the work I've done. You don't do these things consciously. When I read my own work, I see that I'm trying to get many things to move around one another centrifugally and centripetally at the same time. To shoot off and come in. What did Frost say a poem was? "A momentary state against confusion." That's what interests me – the attempt to bring many things into some balance, into a kinetic equilibrium. It's what atomic theory tells us is the case. I know nothing of that, really, but the little picture we are given of the atom and the molecule and the things inside the atom, the whirl of things that make the desk, your hair. If you slowed it down you'd start to see the everything start to disintegrate, but it's held together. That seems to be what lyric poetry is all about, holding together the stuff that is flying off. That would be my metaphor for it anyway – sort of molecular activity.

WW: You grew up in an entirely different world, but now after so many years in this country, how has American culture infiltrated your consciousness? Obviously, you are bombarded with everything from our sports and television...

EG: I stay at what I would call a prophylactic distance from the culture in which I live, and which my kids have been brought up in, though I've been surrounded by it all the time, most of my life, for the last forty years.... I don't have a television. I probably had one when I was first married. I don't read the newspaper very much or used not to, until this year, or maybe since 9/11. I get news mostly from public radio. I live at a sort of distance, an angle to the place I live in. And, the same now with Ireland, I'm at a kind of odd angle there, too. I go back there every summer and more if I can. I have a house in the west of Ireland, a cottage where I live. But I don't live all year there. Here, I'm a registered alien and that seems a fair description. I have lots of feelings about what goes on here, but in some peculiar way I refuse to take responsibility, if you know what I mean. I am protected from feeling – this is of course metaphorically rather than real – but I'm protected from taking intimate responsibility.

WW: You don't have a kinship to the United States?

EG: I don't have a kinship and it feels strange to me. Somebody described me once as settled and unsettled in America. I feel that is probably accurate. So, I'd have to stay in relation to America at this kind of distance, at an angle. It isn't about irony or satire. It doesn't develop sentiment. I think I see it pretty clearly. But I don't feel engaged by it in any very powerful way. I've never been a "political" person. Even in Ireland, I'm fairly nonpolitical. But of course, that's being political in some way. I often wonder about the stuff I write. I don't write directly about politics. And, of course, Ireland for the past thirty-five years has been a pretty vexed place, too. But, I've never written directly about that. I have written indirectly about it in some ways.

I was reading Shakespeare at the time the [9/11] bombing happened, teaching the history plays – and we talked of the waste when language fails, when it is translated into gestures of such enormity in such terrible silence. You stand around with somebody who writes and you say, "Christ, what's left? Why are we doing what we are doing?" Then you recognize what we are doing is using language, and the failure of language is what creates the mess, the tragic catastrophe. Terrorism, I presume, is one mark of the failure of language. And, so too, is a major political response like the Americans in Iraq. If language fails, look at the horrors. And, poetry, in some ways, is fidelity to the language. I asked Joseph Brodsky at a reading one time what is the poet's political responsibility, and he just flung back instantly "To the language." We are responsible for language. That is our political responsibility, to do what we are doing carefully enough and try to register the world as we know it. It may seem like a cop-out, but we have to obey our own possibility. We run with our possibility. And our possibility is to use language in a clean and clear and rich way and somehow that is a reflection on how we think of the human, and the human has possibility to which the language is seeking to give registration and expression.

WW: I'd like to take a look at the poem "Wing Road," where the window acts as a frame.

EG: It suspends time and place and in some ways that is what the lyric poem is trying to do. It is a kind of meta-poem. Saying this is the kind of things the writer does – he organizes the moment into its significant bits. Most of us live in a sort of linear and horizontal way, but what lyric poems and poetry are trying to do is probably to live in a vertical way down the shaft of one of those single horizontal moments. Most of us don't pay attention to the horizontal. We just live across the line, linearly. The poem stops and goes down. Another image may be dowsing for water – you walk around the landscape and then the willow wand dips and you say, dig here! And, you find water. The window, it is double in its metaphorical resonance. In one sense it establishes that membrane between self and the world that is complicated. Right? It is a protection from the actual, where you are entering the actual with your imagination. You are protected from it, actuality. It implies a holding out as well as an engagement.

WW: In the poem "Up Against It" the bee bumps into the window and "cannot fathom how / the air has hardened...." This is not really a criticism, but you've had criticism before as well as praise, but I enjoyed the entire poem until the last line where it states, "making the sound that tethers their electric / fury to what's impossible, feeling the sting in it." I thought the poem should have ended on the word "impossible." I felt that it was almost a pun.

EG: Yes, which is a little cheaper than the rest of the poem. Stop it there? That is a very good criticism. I worked on that a lot. I tried everything. I needed a last half line. I tried this thing and that thing. Nothing worked. I decided to go with the double-ness of it. It was called "Desire" so there is an erotic charge to it, and so I wanted to use the pun to bring it back to the human at that point. I wanted to imply that he carried the sting but he was being stung, meaning me being stung. That was my reasoning for it, but I think you are right. It suddenly takes a swerve into another notion. It's lighter because it plays. It didn't feel like play at first, though. It felt like me trying to equate the ache of desire that one can have with being stung. I was shifting. And that would be my justification for it. But, I think you are right to say that it is iffy, but then you are stuck with the formal and the substantive requirements. Elizabeth Bishop used to say to her students, "Cut off the last two lines. You'd be amazed how much better it makes the poem."

WW: You mentioned Roethke earlier, and as I have read your work, I found a Roethke influence – the lyrical and alliterations...

EG: He enjoyed sound. But he played it like a saxophonist. He was very overt about it, whereas I try to tuck it in a little. I was also struck and influenced by James Wright, his tenderness and sympathetic feel for the animal world. The natural world. I loved the kind of sheer lyrical persuasiveness in the positions he took. Roethke, I like, and Hugo, I like for his rhythms. The abruptness. The letter poems, and the forms of control and the lines in the letter poems, are amazingly controlled and convincing as a unit of rhythm, controlled meter.

WW: if you look at poets and whom they studied with or whom they were primarily influenced by and then look closely at the influences of those influences, there is a pattern. What does your poetic DNA look like?

EG: I would say, given the Irish and the American – on the Irish side, I was and many of us were, influenced by the sound of Patrick Kavanagh. Kavanagh offered, too, a great sense of the ordinary, and he mixed the spoken and the lyrical, too. There was a poet, Padraic Fallon of the same generation as Kavanagh, a fine poet, a very low-keyed speaking voice, speaking intelligent stuff, rational at the same time. Then on the American side, I was interested in Bishop, Wright, Snyder, Frost, Williams. I never got hooked on the Black Mountain crowd. I loved Berryman, and the syntactical magic of the dream songs. I was impressed by Frost and Lowell.

WW: I wouldn't think that you were very taken with the Beats?

EG: No. It wasn't my thing. I go back to them now and read Ginsberg with interest. But forms of excess, that's not my thing, and a form of bardic self-regard – that is not me. I'm more cowardly than that, you know. I'm more cautious. I'm not one for taking too many risks. It's a pity. I'd like to think I take risks a bit now and then on the page, but the most recent one might be this new book that is coming out soon. It is all ten-line poems without titles – just standing on the page.

WW: What would be the risk you are taking with the new poems?

EG: Not spelling things out. Even in the poems in Still Life with Waterfall, some of the longer poems are jumpy and unexplained in terms of transition and collision of image. I think there were risks taken there. The kind of things that throw off the narrative impulse and rely on a kind of force field of electrical connections. That's a big way to put it. I'm still interested in sentences so I counter that impulse to jump. I'm still interested in making sense. But I want to load things more. I think the risk is in being less accessible. And, that's all right. That's fine to take that risk. I don't like to lose contact with people I'm talking to, but I don't want to do what I've done before. You want each book to have an imprint that says "he's probably doing it somehow differently this time," whatever it is. The new book is different. It's more compact, more distilled, more uniform in some way. These are ten-line poems, long lines very often.

WW: Is there a connectedness to them?

EG: The weather. The fauna, the flora, the weather. And, the emotional pressure that you bring to bear on these things. They are kind of like meditations in miniature that begin with a notation and then try to load it as much as you can. The book is called The Quick of It.

WW: I find it interesting that you do not have titles for the poems because in Still Life with Waterfall about a dozen of the poems were originally published with different titles, then you changed the titles for the book.

EG: In some of them I know why and in others it was a whim. Some I thought that's not a good title. A lot of those poems had titles that no longer belonged in the collection. I wanted the titles to mirror the collection in some ways and stand on its own, but also to feed it as a collection. A lot of them are called in their original form, an Approximation. I made a series of approximations, which meant I can't say what's going on here so I'll approximate it. So, that was the general title. I had approximation #1 and approximation #2. And then I said, no, that is not going to work in the book so each individual one of these has to have a title of its own. Then they get freed from the original unit that they belonged to. I let them float free. The bee poem, "Up Against It," was called "Desire," which is a bit obvious. So why not "Up Against It", which carried the physical. I like to hover with titles between meanings. Even the title of a book, like Wildly for Days, does two things at the same time – it goes up and comes down at the same time, a manic depressive sort of thing, and then What Light There Is, is a gesture of "there's not much, but what light there is." Wow! As If It Matters – does it matter? The stroke between celebration. I was looking for that with titles. And then I didn't want titles to be too sign-posting. And, "Desire" was a bit on the sign-posting side. But when the poem occupies itself as a magazine poem, that would be OK. The last poem in Still Life with Waterfall was called "Lesson" and now I call it "Detail." I moved from drawing your attention to the fact that this is a metaphor [to one] that is a detail. There was a kind of move toward the neutral. I think that is a habit of mine, to move back toward the neutral which may have a "political" implication. All these poems in the new collection had titles when published in magazines, but I don't give their titles in the notes or acknowledgments. It will only confuse people. If they have no title leave them with no title. But they all had titles when they were first published.

WW: Since you come to the world of poetry with an international mind set, how do you regard the current state of poetry in the world?

EG: Oddly enough, I'd say healthy. I'd say there is an enormous amount of poetic activity, but the problem in America is that it doesn't form part of the mainstream culture in any significant sense. In Ireland, the interaction between poetry and mainstream culture is much closer and much more continuous than it is over here. The problem with poetry here, as the problem with a number of things, is that it can get commodified – prizes and stuff, you know. It can get marginalized in the universities or writing workshops and so on. This is just a moment in cultural history, a moment in which there are a great many people interested in trying. I don't mind workshops and even therapy groups – God help us – who work with poetry. Isn't it better than beating your husband? In some ways I don't know how to answer the question because I am not sure I could offer an alternative to the way things are. I've seen valuable things happen, on an individual basis, in workshops. That's why I teach them.

Poetry is always single, singular men and women in silent places putting words down on paper, or speaking words into the air. And that is happening here, a great deal of it – here you are writing this book of interviews and you've got your book of poems coming out, and we are here with one of the great poetry collections of the world beside us [Emory University library]. I would say that I love reading poetry by American or English poets as well as Irish poets. I think maybe we don't know one another well enough back and forth and there is a kind of parochial aspect to American poetry, but it is true that Americans are not widely known in England or Ireland either. They are now becoming so. It's only recently that they've started to become more known. There were twenty-five or thirty years where there was a real glass between the two cultures, and poetry developed independently in both places. Then Americans took the lead and the English started to hear more. The Irish always had a look at the Americans. There's been an American presence in Irish poetry for a long time, right back to Yeats, for whom Whitman on the one hand and Pound on the other, were very important.

WW: There was a book published in the 1960s by Al Alvarez called The New Poetry, which brought to light Thomas Gunn, Ted Hughes, and Philip Larkin, to the American audience, and that pretty well set the stage for fifteen or twenty years of influence, then it dropped off.

EG: I'd say it has dropped off. I'd say the interest is in the other direction, though. English women poets are influenced by people like Jorie Graham, Sharon Olds, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath. That's another thing to remind us of when we talk about poetry, the extraordinary flowering of women's poetry in the last fifty years in both cultures, in all three countries. And, not to be parochial, [also] Australia and Canada. Think about how little Canadian poetry we know. We know Anne Carson, Margaret Atwood. Who else? There are some pretty good poets in Canada. Maybe the American interest in this generation of British poets is actually growing now. There's a new anthology of them published by Graywolf.

WW: Why do we not see this crossing over?

EG: I don't know. Maybe it's because there's only so much poetry one can attend to or digest. Also, there are leagues as you might say. Few poets occupy any really universal position. Czeslaw Milosz was one who was, I suspect, the great poet of the last fifty years. He had an extraordinary copious imagination, sensibility, intelligence. And there are very few like him. One can think of no one as capacious as he in that variety of achievement in terms of intellect, in imagination, in asserting the power and value of poetry, in claiming an honorable place for it in the world.

WW: You spoke of the different leagues, sort of like a hierarchical pyramid, and writers filter out – some come in and others go out – and very few stay at the top level and remain there. Those that do become our major poets. Each year there is a new Nobel Laureate, a new Pulitzer Prize winner, and a new National Book Award winner, and in ten years you have thirty writers and after they sift themselves out, there's only a few left.

EG: That's right. It's terrifying. Why do we do this anyway? For me, it is a question of making sense, making music of a certain kind, putting something together that you are pleased with, and understanding in some ways the registrations and the possible extension of the self. It's very solipsist in some ways. Not entirely. We are trying to word the world. That's our task. The more the world is achieved by language the better. It doesn't make it a better world necessarily, but it is better that the world should be "worded." I think the great poets, the major poets, have burned a small zone on the map of the world; they have worded it, so there's Eliotland, Poundland, Yeatsland, Bishopland, and gradually the world itself becomes as we know it subjected to language. Each strong poet brings a greater degree of the world into her or his domain of language. That's a good thing. We then understand the world through the lens of that strong poet. The rest of us are trying to be foot soldiers in this particular action. We are the infantry. Why did I wake up these military metaphors!? (laughing) That pyramid, the top tier, the top two tiers, uses up most of the available oxygen in terms of any public acceptance or knowledge or recognition.

WW: I wanted to ask about your early childhood, your background.

EG: I grew up in Dublin, the suburbs. The suburbs in the Irish sense mean it's just outside of the city. It's called Harold's Cross. South Dublin. Middle-class. My father was an educator. He was a civil servant educator with the Department of Education for the vocational branch. My mother was not very educated. She knew a lot and gave us a lot, but she wasn't what you'd call "intellectual." She stayed at home. She was a housewife, as it was in those days. She had four kids. I have two brothers and a sister. I lived in Dublin in a household pretty well void of books, oddly enough, since my father was an educator. But he was in the sciences. There were not that many books in the house. A few Dickens. No poetry as I recall. I went through the Christian Brothers School up to thirteen and then I went to a monastery school run by Cistercian monks, where I discovered that I liked English. Poetry, prose, writing essays – that was the start of finding what I liked – literature. I was there for five years. It was an important five years, that I have never found a voice for, although I suspect living close to a monastery with monks as teachers, an all-boys' boarding school with its mixture of loneliness and gregariousness, solitude and crowds, was important for the person I became. It was my first movement away from home, and I've been moving away from home ever since. Back and forth.

WW: What prompted your going to the monastery school?

EG: My father had taught there at one time, before I was born. It was a family connection, because his brother had gone to that school, too. Some of the monks taught, but there was always that exposure to the monastic that was of interest to me. Kids when they graduated would enter the monastery and try to become priests. It left a mark on me. I suspect at the very base of my psyche, Roserea is there in some way with its loneliness and solitude and gregarious companionship. I was a sports person. I was the captain. I wasn't that popular, but I was respected I suppose. I was a good athlete. Rugby and soccer and track and field. Then I went to the university and studied Italian and English and got involved with literary stuff. I edited the magazine. Then I started to write short stories. So childhood came to an end. I went to boarding school from thirteen to eighteen, then from eighteen to twenty-two I lived in Dublin and went to college. It was a fairly unexceptional childhood I would imagine. But, when I look back on it, I see the shift back and forth as formative to the person I became. The sense of not belonging in any context was probably exacerbated by a home life that wasn't entirely happy, one fraught with the anxieties that a kid has if he thinks his father drinks too much or if he thinks his parents aren't happy together. All those kinds of senses of being a divided self were a part of my growing up. Presumably, an unresolved knot in the psyche of some kind. I write hardly anything about childhood so it is a kind of blocked space in my psyche, I suspect. But you can't force it open. It'll open up of its own accord if it wants to.

WW: Is there anything that I haven't asked you that you would like to discuss?

EG: I guess the sense in which my poems try to establish a kind of range of commitment to the domestic on the one hand, to the erotic on the other, to the natural world, the simple, observed world, and at the same time stay fairly clear. I might note that there aren't too many people in my poems. Some, yes, but not too many – except I guess for my children, who make frequent appearances. I don't write much about the city. Those absences trouble me to some degree. Then you say, "What the hell – you do what you can." My poems have a kind of curious solipsistic, no that's wrong, because I think they are sympathetic enough, but I don't think they are very fully engaged with the human world, though the psyche of the "speaker" (as they say) is obviously affected and sometimes deeply affected by his relationships.

Somebody said the other day that it was surprising to watch, in some ways, how uninvolved the self is in the actions in the poems, and how involved the language is. I substitute a kind of kinetic charge and a transitive power to the language while remaining deeply intransitive myself. I suspect that is probably true. But in the end, you do what you can. You try to register in the poem as much of the life you've lived as you can. And while that can be a moment of just looking at ants, an enormous amount may funnel through that particular moment of perceptive awareness or attention. Yeah, attention. That would be the word I want. I would like to be able to continue paying attention, and to continue finding a language to register, to record that.

It's an interesting phrase, isn't it, "to pay attention." Because what do you get in return? You get a return of knowledge in the broadest sense. Somebody said that God only wants our attention. Another way of putting it is that attention is a form of prayer.

About the Author
William Walsh recently published The Conscience of My Other Being (Cherokee Publishers, 2005). He has work forthcoming in Five Points, Hunger Mountain, and Turnrow. He edited Under the Rock Umbrella: Modern American Poets from 1951-1977, to be published in 2006. Visit his web site....

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