INTERVIEW OF SHEROD SANTOS

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The following interview was conducted by e-mail 
in October and November 2002

I can think of few contemporary poets to whom Wallace Stevens's famous apothegm, "Poetry is a scholar's art," better applies than Sherod Santos, a fact everywhere in evidence in the conversation following, and one which makes interviewing him so challenging. Santos is one of our most intellectually fearless poets, eclectic in his tastes, and not intimidated or embarrassed by political subjects, or even literary theory, if he uncovers there possibilities for poetry. I often counted myself lucky that, in most cases, it is the interviewer's job only to know what questions need to be asked, and not necessarily to have to keep pace with the depth and complexity of their answers. Even this rule of interviewing etiquette is not sacred, however, if your interlocutor is Santos, who doesn't shy away from being the one doing the interrogating when doing so might mean an opportunity for him to learn something more about poetry from you. Indeed, it is this inquisitiveness, a restless curiosity and a fascination with the plurality of experience that defines his work. His desire to know — whether probing the mysteries of the human heart, confronting, in Whitman's phrase, the "bitter hug of mortality," or addressing himself to the tragic legacy of violence that human culture has accumulated over the centuries — makes him a philosophical poet in the best sense of the phrase. 
     When asked in another interview about his third collection (The City of Women), Santos responded, "the book proceeds more by questions than answers, more by doubts than certainties," and this seems an apt characterization of his approach, not only to this interview, but indeed to any poetry-related matter. For if it is true that his work is defined by a desire to know, there is in his work an equally strong skeptical strain, and one might not be going too far in saying that a resistance to easy answers — or even to "answers" (in any traditional sense) at all — is a guiding esthetic principle for Santos. One of Santos's foundational notions about poetry, expressed perhaps most succinctly in "Ars Poetica," an essay from his A Poetry of Two Minds, is that "more often than not, the act of writing is better served by allowing the poem to speak for itself, as free as possible from [our] own interventions, and even (or especially) when what the poem wants to say mulishly opposes what [we'd] actually like it to say." This poetic stance of deliberate openness has allowed for a broadness of scope and intellectual range in the poet's work as he has striven to reconcile the competing demands of the old Yeatsian choice — the perfection of the life and the perfection of the work.
     This interview was conducted by e-mail between October and Novermber, just prior to the January, 2003, release of Santos's latest collection of poetry, The Perishing. Of his four previous volumes of poetry, his The Pilot Star Elegies was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1999, and his book of criticism, A Poetry of Two Minds, was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award. 
                              — Andrew Mulvania
 

Andrew Mulvania: 
You've written at length of your early encounter with the spirit and work of Robinson Jeffers through the accident of your parents having settled, in 1965, just a short walk away from his legendary Tor House. Can you speak a bit more about what this meant to your developing sense of poets and poetry?

Sherod Santos: 
It was, in fact, a fairly long walk to the Jeffers house — both figuratively and literally — and it was only possible when the river that separated us ran dry in summer.  I mention this because, by the time we moved there, the house and its well-developed surrounds breathed a pretty rarified air, while our house, on the other hand, was situated on a hillside overlooking acres of artichoke field.  Crossing the river sometimes felt like crossing into a picture postcard of someplace far, far away.  But it's true that to a 16 year old's imagination Tor House presented a pretty compelling image of what a "poet" was or might be.  It was only later that I realized how eccentric, or at least how singular, that image was, and how inaccurately it served as an image of poets in general. While I was somewhat awed by that image and by all it represented — the austerity and seriousness and sacrifice of the poet's calling — the Jeffers style was never something I felt drawn to emulate.  It was just too remote from my own sensibility.

Mulvania: 
You had the opportunity both to meet one of his twin sons, Donnan, and to see the inside of the house — a signal experience.

Santos: 
I did meet Donnan back then, a middle-aged, ruddy-faced man in an ascot who seemed always to have a drink in his hand. He was kind enough to invite me into the house, which he and his wife occupied at the time, and to guide me through its dusky, haunted interiors. As you know, both house and tower were built from boulders Jeffers hauled up from the shore below, and everything about it, inside and out, bore the mark of his colossal and grandly obsessive spirit.  I remember seeing, chiseled into a boulder that formed part of a wall by the breakfast table, the name of Thomas Hardy with his birth and death dates below.  When I asked Donnan about it, he explained that one morning his father took up hammer and chisel after reading about Hardy's death in the newspaper. That was pretty heady stuff, and I'm sure I drank it all down in breathless gulps. Three or four years ago I happened to meet the other twin, Garth, and he was a very different soul. A powerful, barrel-chested hulk of a man, he'd spent most of his life as a forest ranger — more what one expected of the father who'd instructed his sons to take to the mountains when civilization arrived. 

Mulvania: 
You describe your childhood as "nomadic," since your father was an Air Force pilot who moved your family to areas as diverse as Hawaii, France, Germany, Switzerland, not to mention countless bases all over the States. You once remarked that this life gave "a relative sense of home to every place and an absolute sense to none." What affect do you think this had on your poetry? Do you think there is anything about that kind of life — the sense of exile you describe — that is peculiar to the condition of living as a poet in the world?

Santos: 
Since my life is, as it were, the only life I've had to live, it's difficult for me to gauge what it might have been like otherwise. And since poems grow out of one's life, I'm sure my work reflects a certain rootlessness, a certain uninvested interest in a variety of landscapes and cities and people, and perhaps, as well, a sense of otherness that attaches itself to the outsider. A term like "exile" overstates the case — I had no longing for some place in the past — especially since I happily continued to wander long after I left my family. But there's a peculiar quality of solitariness that attends that life, that becomes ingrained and familiar and instinctual, and I think that in certain practical ways that has served me well as a writer.  Beyond that, I'd be reluctant to claim that this kind of life holds any special significance as regards a poet in the world.

Mulvania: 
At the age of 20 or so, you bought a one-way ticket to Paris, where you took a job in a hotel and worked for the next 14 months. Can you sketch in for us how that experience helped you realize that the vocation of poet was, as you've written, "something to which a man might meaningfully devote himself"?

Santos: 
My going to Paris was prompted by a number of things, some related to writing, some not.  It was an unhappy period, and I felt like leaving everything behind and starting all over again — the kind of thing, I fear, my background made all too easy to do. Looking back on it now, I realize how foolhardy a move it was. I arrived with only about $300 in my pocket and no idea what I was going to do or where I was going to go. To make things worse, I didn't have a green card and didn't have enough money to survive until I got one.  So I pretty much drifted from place to place asking about work.  Finally, the concierge at this small, dilapidated hotel near the Place d'Odeon — the Hotel Racine, on Rue Racine — offered me about fifty cents an hour plus an attic room to take up coffee and croissants to guests in the morning. The concierge could get away with paying me so little because I didn't have a green card, but it seemed about enough to scrape by on. I'd work from five in the morning until noon, then I'd make my way to the American Library, where I'd staked out a comfortable spot for reading and writing, which I'd do until nightfall. And then there was Paris waiting outside with all its various adventures. I rarely broke that routine, and I think that's the point at which I began to fall in love with the enormous difficulty of making poems.  Before that, I think the difficulty had frightened, perhaps even embarrassed me a little; after that, I began to crave the hard labor of it, and to feel a bit vague and half-hearted when I wasn't engaged in that labor.  Had I not crossed that threshold, I suspect I'd eventually have given up writing, or that writing would've eventually given up me. Was that the secret I'd gone there to find? Things are never that simple, but I do know that when I returned to the States there was no longer any doubt about what I was going to do with my life.

Mulvania: 
For some nearly twenty years now you've lived, off and on, in Columbia, Missouri, where you teach and direct the Creative Writing Program in the MU English Department.  Several recent poems refer to the landscape of central Missouri, and I'm wondering how being rooted in one place for so long has affected your work?

Santos: 
Here too I find it difficult to gauge.  As you say, there are certain recent poems which derive from this landscape, but then that would be true of wherever I was. I suppose it would be easier for me to say how being rooted in one place has affected my life —  a story of little interest to anyone. But how being rooted has affected my work is a much more mysterious issue, since the scope of my work ranges across time and space and the shadowy catacombs of memory. I do love this part of the country, and I love it more as time passes.  But I've never thought of myself as a regional poet in any sense of that term.

Mulvania: 
I didn't mean to imply that you were a "regional poet." I suppose I was wondering whether you felt the experience of living in the same place for some time has affected, perhaps in larger ways, the directions your poems have taken. I guess I was curious if you've felt that pressure of place exerting an influence in the way you see your own art. 

Santos: 
I can only repeat what I said before. If anything, I'm a bit surprised that more of this landscape hasn't appeared in my work, or appeared in my work in more explicit ways. But then explicitness is largely an illusion in poetry, just as three-dimensional space is largely an illusion in painting.

Mulvania: 
You earned an M.A from San Diego State, an M.F.A. from the University of California-Irvine, and a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. Who were you reading in those programs that may have helped to shape the directions your work would take? 

Santos: 
Left to my own devices, I'm a very unsystematic reader, and I share Montaigne's belief that the books we most need in life come searching for us, not the other way around. Which is to say that much of what was important to me came largely by accident — books I simply stumbled on while I was sifting through stacks in the libraries and used bookstores — and had little to do with what was current at the time. I have a good many interests when it comes to books, and I'm as likely to be drawn, say, to a novelist or a philosopher or an art historian as I am to a poet. Two of the degrees you mention were academic, so of course my reading for them was much more methodical. I read fairly widely in both English and American literature — Shakespeare was my "major figure" for the PhD — and I had a minor in German prose literature for the MA.

Mulvania: 
I gather from your work — poems as well as essays — that the French poets and literary theorists have been very significant for you. The City of Women, for example, seems to share some territory, stylistically as well as thematically, with Barthes A Lover's Discourse, a book that is also important for your essay on Orpheus. Does this interest in the French writers originate with your time in Paris? 

Santos: 
I don't think of myself as a Francophile by taste or nature, though it's quite true that many French writers and thinkers have interested me from time to time — perhaps fewer of the thinkers than the writers. As they are for many young poets, Rimbaud and Baudelaire and Apollinaire were very important to me early on, as were Flaubert and Valery and Proust in later years.  And then there are those glorious Parisian expatriates, Beckett, Cioran, Tsvetaeva, Joyce, Kundera... the list goes on and on. My interest in Barthes is as much temperamental as it is stylistic: I love the play and secularity of his intellect, and his heartfelt conviction that no idea is real until it's experienced. Unlike most French theoreticians, Barthes shunned the polemical, embracing instead the "frisson" (to use his term) of intellectual discourse, and this appealed to me for a number of reasons. I've also had occasion to attend seminars with Jacques Derrida and Jean Francois Lyotard — and, briefly, with Helene Cixous — and while I felt far less kinship with their methodologies, I was greatly impressed by the agility and range and susceptibility of their minds. One might say that I took a kind of agnostic approach to the ideas themselves, for I was less interested in their truth or falsity than I was in how these people thought their way in and out of their various positions. I remember Borges saying somewhere that he'd read Martin Buber's work for years, believing it to be poetry, and only later discovered that it was actually philosophy.  In his first reading he'd heard the words as a kind of suggestive music; in the second, as a series of arguments. It appears he found his first reading far more convincing. I suppose in some ways I listened to those lectures in much the same way Borges first listened to Buber. 

Mulvania: 
Can you say what this influence has meant for your work? 

Santos: 
How that affected my work is anyone's guess, though I do recall feeling that American poetry seemed somewhat constrained by the generational edict of "no ideas but in things." I feared this constraint had limited our capacity to think in both abstract and discursive ways, and, as you know, one of the age-old tasks of poetry has been to find ways to express abstract ideas in concrete terms. The Elizabethans, for example, found one way of doing this, the Metaphysicals another, and then we have the towering examples of Rilke and Stevens in the twentieth century. I also feared that, in the long run, such limitations could only isolate our poetry from the radical shift in philosophical thought that has taken hold in virtually every area of post-war intellectual life. I say this because it seems to me that, as Freud observed, poetry has always been one step ahead of philosophy, not by articulating the particulars of its thoughts but by tracing the historical arc of the mind toward thought. Heidegger understood this at a very fundamental level, believing pure thinking lies closest to the ground of poetry. My concern was that a "no ideas but in things" aesthetic might lead us to a distrust of thought itself, hence to a distrust of the very lifeblood of poetry, of poiesis in the Greek sense of a water that flows backwards toward its source.  I think American poets have been a bit cowed by theory, when a healthier response might've been even greater boldness and audacity and innovation.

Mulvania: 
One of your foundational notions about poetry is the idea, as you've written, that "more often than not, the act of writing is better served by allowing the poem to speak for itself, as free as possible from my own interventions, and even (or especially) when what the poem wants to say mulishly opposes what I'd actually like it to say." I think I understand this on a conceptual or theoretical level, but I'm curious about what this means in practical terms. 

Santos: 
This is in fact less a theoretical position than a habit derived from my own practice as a writer. One can either muscle a poem in a direction settled on before the first line is written, or allow the poem — through its own generative inclinations, the swell of its music, the associative connections suggested by its images, the syntactical affect of its sentences — to lead somewhere you hadn't foreseen before you sat down to write the poem. In that sense, one allows a poem to evolve more like a dream, carried away by impulses which are not so governed by the conscious mind, perhaps even by impulses the conscious mind has attempted to suppress. This makes writing poems, for me at least, a good deal more perilous, for one must give up the assurances of a fixed destination and allow uncertainty to fill the sails.  But this is part of the thrill that draws me back to the empty page.

Mulvania: 
You once asked Charles Wright, in an interview you did with him in 1981, if he felt "that a change of style from book to book, however slight, is a necessary thing for a poet," and I was curious whether this was a question you've put to yourself, in terms of style and subject, over the course of your career so far. More than is the case with many contemporary poets I can think of, you seem to be a poet whose individual books of poems each represent a radical departure from the one that came before it, primarily thematically, but also stylistically in some cases. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.

Santos: 
I don't want to make a virtue out of habit, so I'll simply say that I think of my books as bracketed obsessions — bracketed by time or circumstance — and that writing each book was an attempt to interrogate, elaborate, and examine each obsession. A book ends for me when I come to feel that I've exhausted that process, and this feeling marks the stage at which the cutting and rewriting and editing begins.  I believe it was Stevens who said that a change of style is a change of subject, and I suppose my own experience has led me to feel that the opposite is true as well.  As I moved from one book to another, I found the new subject often brought with it a new set of poetic requirements, a new way of thinking and saying what I thought.  Whatever methods I'd adopted in the previous book no longer seemed to work, and perhaps that's not as mysterious as it sounds. The City of Women, for example, was a long meditation on erotic and romantic love, and it makes sense that its particular set of stylistic requirements would prove inadequate to the next book, which was a collection elegies.

Mulvania: 
I'd like to turn to a few, more specific questions about your various books. Perhaps we should start at the beginning: Many poets go on to disavow or repudiate in some way the work in their first book. What are your feelings, twenty years and four books later, toward the poems of Accidental Weather?

Santos: 
Oh, I don't feel any need to disavow or repudiate my early work, however remote or unseasoned it might seem to me now.  The journey is the thing, after all, and the only way to chart a journey is by the distance you travel in time.

Mulvania: 
Christopher Buckley has written of The Southern Reaches that "the book concerns itself with the notion and the facts of empire and the effect they have on us individually and collectively," and another reviewer, Daniel McGuiness, has written that "the book's structure led the reader from childhood love through married love to a more public poem linked to history, war, and the dangers to love in the world's mechanical and inevitable self-destructions." Are these accurate characterizations of your project in that book? 

Santos: 
The notion of empire as I use it in that book is largely metaphorical, as it is, say, in Magritte's Empire of Light, though it's true that as the book progresses the metaphor takes on increasingly complex referential meanings.  What I call in the book's first poem the "Weak, white empire of childhood" — that is, the imaginary childhood enactments of power — becomes along the way a widening consciousness of the real formations, and terrors, and fascinations of power. As a child growing up in a military environment, often on bases in foreign lands, one soon comes to realize the larger implications of the vast arsenal that composes your everyday environment. Not surprisingly, as that realization increases, so too does its looming shadow-life, fear. 

Mulvania: 
Is there something about the nature of late-twentieth, early twenty-first-century-life in the United States that you felt — feel? — may be inimical to our subjectivity, to our capacity to love — call it empire, capitalism, mechanization — and to which The Southern Reaches, indeed, poetry itself, was — is? — a response? Can you comment on this?

Santos: 
Given the enormous privileges that we enjoy in America — and that the rest of the world does not — I think it would be self-indulgent of us to suggest that life here is inimical to our subjectivity or our capacity to love. Imagine how that might sound to someone in Rwanda or Bosnia or the Gaza Strip. I remember Milan Kundera remarking that during the Soviet invasion in 1968 the terror was so unrelenting that something like ordinary romantic heartbreak would've seemed like a luxurious feeling. Perhaps fears about obstacles to our subjectivity fall into a similar category when placed alongside the less rarified forms of suffering so prevalent in the world today. 

Mulvania: 
The words "confessional" and "autobiography" (related, but by no means substitutable, terms) occur in a number of reviews of The City of Women and, more recently, The Pilot Star Elegies. Can you speak a bit about what these terms mean to you in relation to the strategies and aims of the poems in those collections, and, more generally, whether you find these terms useful ways of approaching and understanding your work? 

Santos: 
I'm always confused by these terms when they're applied to poetry in anything other than descriptive ways, as they are, I suspect, in the reviews you mention. But as categorical terms, as terms that one might usefully apply to distinguish one kind of poetry from another, they seem to me based on highly suspect postulations, suspect from a historical, psychological, and generic perspective. But perhaps you can help me see them more clearly.

Mulvania: 
I suppose when I think of confessional poetry I think of something along the lines of Irving Howe's remarks, in an article on Sylvia Plath, that a "confessional poem would seem to be one in which the writer speaks to the reader, telling him, without the mediating presence of imagined event or persona, something about his life," and I would add to this the claim that what is told is often somehow shameful or traumatic. In any case, if there is a persona, it is one that can be — and is — identified with the poet's private self. As far as autobiography in poetry, I think of a poetry that makes use of events drawn from the life of the actual historical personage of the poet in such a way as to construct a narrative of the poet's life for artistic purposes, as well as for the purpose of self-knowledge. 

Santos: 
Perhaps the key phrase in Howe's remarks is "would seem." One must concede that the notion of a confessional poem is always delimited by that qualification. Disregarding for a moment the ethical issues involved, I feel fairly certain that I could write a first-person poem (worthy or not) that would seem to be about some incestuous relationship I'd suffered as a child, that would seem to be written in a voice a reader might identify with my "private self," and that would seem to be drawn from events in my life as a "historical personage." The fact is, I never suffered such an experience, but how would you, as a reader, ever be able to know for sure, one way or the other?  Clearly we can't use our reading experience, our sense of how sincere or persuasive a poem seems, as any sort of reliable proof — any more than we can use our impression (to repeat something I said elsewhere) that a "moving picture" is actually moving — and not, in fact, an illusion created by the rapid projection of still photographs. But even setting aside that reservation, I still don't see how the terms Howe uses are useful in distinguishing one group of mid-century American poets from poets of earlier ages and cultures. Is it not equally accurate to say, for example, that Shakespeare's sonnets "seem to be [poems] in which the writer speaks to the reader, telling him, without the mediating presence of imagined event or persona, something about his life"?  Can't that same description be applied to the elegies of Propertius, the fragments of Sappho, the odes of Horace? Hasn't this always been a feature of the lyric poem? I believe Archilochus in the 7th century b.c. was the first poet we know of to make the autobiographical particulars of his own life the subject matter of a poem. Not coincidentally, that's the same period in which the lyric as we know it today comes into being as a form.

Mulvania: 
You've stated elsewhere that The City of Women was "written at a period when those forces [of romantic and erotic love] in my life had declared themselves as an overriding imaginative preoccupation," and you say, earlier in this interview, that you think of your individual books as "bracketed obsessions — bracketed by time or circumstance." Does this imply that at least you understand your work in terms of autobiography, whether you find it a useful way for critics to approach your work? 

Santos: 
It's just this sort of blurring of terms that bothers me about this argument. By what strange logic does one arrive at the conclusion that "imaginative preoccupations" or "bracketed obsessions" are  synonymous with autobiography?  And if one applies that logic, then one must ask what work of art is not, therefore, autobiographical? Are Cezanne's mountains at l'Estaque "autobiographical"?  They certainly were an imaginative preoccupation and a lifelong obsession.  Is Matisse's autobiography to be read in his palm trees? Or Milton's in "Paradise Lost"? Or Mozart's in his "Requiem"?  Of course, one can always say "yes" to those questions, but once that's done then the term becomes meaningless, to me anyway, for it no longer serves to elucidate anything in particular. 

Mulvania: 
I guess when I asked the question, I was thinking more of the other parts of the statements I quoted — the parts where you say "those forces in my life had declared themselves," or obsessions "bracketed by time and circumstance." Don't these statements imply a connection between your concerns in the various books, and the concerns of your life at the time of writing them, your immediate circumstances? 

Santos: 
Yes, of course, but that's a given in any kind of art. For a particular or "bracketed" period in Cezanne's life, the mountains at l'Estaque "declared themselves" as an obsession. And that obsession in his life was (perhaps inevitably) an obsession in his work.  How could it be otherwise?  But my question remains the same: Does this mean, therefore, that the paintings he made of those mountains are "autobiographical"? 

Mulvania: 
You remarked, earlier in this interview, "explicitness is largely an illusion in poetry, just as three-dimensional space is largely an illusion in painting." Can you elaborate this claim? And given these feelings on "explicitness," how truthful can we assume you to be when speaking as an "I" in a poem that is not designated as a dramatic monologue or persona poem? 

Santos: 
I think it's a grave mistake to confuse explicitness with truthfulness when it comes to poetry. And I think it's an even graver mistake to confuse truthfulness with autobiographical fact. Poetry is, after all, a branch of imaginative literature.  It's not journalism, it's not autobiography, and it's certainly not, in the religious sense, confession.  In poetry, the truth we encounter is not the truth of fact, but the truth of experience. I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that a poet's life necessarily suffuses a poet's work. But how it does that is a far more subtle, complex, and sublimated affair than a purely biographical reading allows. After all, one of poetry's greatest charms resides in the mystery of what, without saying it, it somehow manages to say. And this occurs precisely because a poem's meanings are transmitted not through its literal sense, but through its meta-linguistic effects — the associative pattern of its images, the phonic spell and resonance of its lines, the suggestive gulf that arises out of its resistance to interpretation. Which is another way of saying that, when it comes to the facts of a poet's life, "reticence" in a poem is often far more communicative than "explicitness." 

Mulvania: 
Is this what you were getting at when you responded, to an interviewer who had asked you about social responsibility in poetry and the claims another poet had made about the need for poems to voice injustice, "The truth of a poem, and the truth of a poet, must be sought in some deeper place — beyond the veil of self representation"? I was curious at the time I was reading that where that place might be.

Santos: 
The very same place from which we dream, that intersection of the imagined and the real. Keats's letters are filled with wisdom on this subject, and I believe it's a similar distinction he insists on by opposing his notion of the "poetical Character" to Wordsworth's notion of the "egotistical sublime." As Keats famously remarked of that Character, "it is not itself — it has no self — it is everything and nothing."

Mulvania: 
Perhaps a final question on these issues collectively. In an essay you write: "The uses of attention require special notice in an age like ours, when the senses (the way we pay attention) are being bombarded at a rate unprecedented in the history of the world; and when the world as we've known it through the senses is being rapidly and continually revised — In the face of such vanishings, it's no wonder we feel that something has come between us and the world, no wonder we've seen the arts in our age grow more and more inward and insular. For inevitably the eye turns in on itself, and the self thereby becomes our one accessible subject." What implications does this remark have for poetry as autobiography? 

Santos: 
I'm going to pretend I know what you mean by "poetry as autobiography" and respond with the voice of Echo: "everything and nothing."

Mulvania: 
Your latest book, The Perishing, forthcoming in January 2003 from W.W. Norton, seems to represent a more direct engagement with history. Is this a fair characterization, and can you speak to why the pressures of history may be exerting themselves more forcefully on your poetry?

Santos: 
A number of poems do deal with historical subjects, and several deal with atrocities of one sort or another.  I'm not sure why I was drawn to write those poems, though perhaps it had something to do with the calendar, with that retrospective look across the century just ending, the bloodiest and most destructive century in the history of humankind. I wish I could say that, standing in the rubble that is left behind, we have reason to be hopeful, but all signs seem to suggest otherwise. 

Mulvania: 
You mentioned Freud earlier in this interview, and the notion of the unconscious — as muse, or as the seat of subject-matter — plays a prominent role in your writing about poetry. I'm curious about how your reading in Freud informs your poem, "The Talking Cure," which borrows techniques drawn from the language of psychoanalysis to explore the implications of a very fraught sexual experience that occurred when the poem's narrator was thirteen, and which includes an indictment of psychotherapy for its self-appointed role as the religion of our age. 

Santos: 
That title of course comes from Freud and is meant to point up this very odd therapeutic notion we've inherited from him, the notion that talking, in and of itself, can actually heal a wounded mind.  I'm certainly no expert in these matters, but my guess is that the advances in our knowledge of brain chemistry in the last decade have been far more effective in treating mental illness than the talking cure has done in over half a century. That said, I also want to say that I greatly admire Freud, that he seems to me one of the two or three most influential thinkers in the twentieth century, and that it's almost impossible to imagine modern literature, indeed modern art, without him. He created an entirely new symbolic order, and that order has settled into our consciousness in profound and lasting ways.  I also think his case studies are among the most fascinating "literature" I've ever encountered.  But my poem is, as you point out, a dramatic monologue, and it's spoken, as it were, on the analyst's couch, so the speaker's opinions about psychoanalysis are the speaker's own. As such, they are also highly invested in the personal history you describe.

Mulvania: 
The interrogation of the value or purpose of a life of writing is something that occurs often in your work. I'm thinking in particular of a passage in the "day-book" chapter of A Poetry of Two Minds. There you write: "When I think about giving up writing, it's never for very noble reasons (whatever those might be) but from boredom, futility, hopelessness: 'What Jules de Noailles said is true: "You will see one day that it is hard to speak about anything with anyone."' (Jean Cocteau)." Has there ever been a point in your writing life when you seriously considered giving it up? 

Santos: 
Yes, there have been occasions when I felt that way, and in fact there have been fairly lengthy periods, a year or more, when I did stop writing altogether.  But to be honest, I can't say how much of that was due to my own frustrations with writing and how much was due to the bouts of depression I've struggled with from time to time.  As I say, there was nothing the least bit noble about those silences, and I was certainly happy to see them end.  I hadn't actually thought about the frequency with which I've visited the subject of the value or purpose of a life of writing, but it's certainly true that it does loom large in the new collection coming out.  I suppose it's inevitable that anyone who has given to writing the better part of his or her life must ask those questions, though there are certain writers — Yeats and Stevens are two who come immediately to mind — for whom those questions have a special poignancy and pathos.  You may recall a passage from "As You Leave the Room," one of that series of short poems Stevens composed toward the end of his life: "I wonder, have I lived a skeleton's life, / As a disbeliever in reality, // A countryman of all the bones in the world?"  Those poems are both heartbreaking and heartening in the depth of feeling they bring to this subject.