INTERVIEW OF JONATHAN HOLDEN

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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 Ginsberg’s "Howl" and in 1959 with the publication of Robert Lowell’s 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.  (I’ve 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:
It’s a bias of mine to like books.  The idea that one can open a book and hear a voice is amazing to me.  It doesn’t 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 there’s 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 don’t 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 can’t say that either of them influenced my style.  I’m influenced by particular poems by many different poets — by the poems which I know by heart, going back to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, etc.  I’m 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.  I’ve 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 don’t have an agenda regarding content, although I guess you’d 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, I’ll discover a particularly memorable way of phrasing something.  Then I’ll go back later and more coolly play with language for the experience.  I don’t use exercises to "get myself going."  The route of every poem is sui generis — absolutely unique.
    Lately, I’ve been working on a longish poem about the paintings of Edward Hopper, which I decided to compare to grand opera, and I’m 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 Hopper’s famous painting, Nighthawks.
    But this is just one example.  As I said, every poem’s genesis is sui generis.