I think so. Robert Duncan speaks of the “tone leading” of vowels. One vowel sound leads you to another vowel sound leads you to another vowel sound—I mean, at some point, the core of the business of poetry is to be taken someplace you didn’t know you were going by the sound out in front of you that you didn’t know you could hear until you heard it. This is probably true of prose, too, it’s just more intensely true of poetry. Sound harmonies and disharmonies lead you to say things and invent things you couldn’t otherwise say. And the other part, of course, is that those harmonies, if they’re particularly arresting to the ear, make the old connection between poetry as an oral art and memory as a storage system. That’s the oldest thing about poetry.

The work I’ve done in translation, or writing essays, for example, is just labor. You get in and you do it, though the getting in can be prolonged agony. With poems, if I have a deadline—like I told my editor, Dan Halpern, that I’m going to get a book ready, so I know he needs a finished manuscript by a certain time—then I can get down to work in a forced march and say, Okay, I’m going to spend x number of hours a day and wrestle with these things and muscle through all my hesitations and get the poems into shape. There’s a part of me that wants to let problems go for a while, let a piece of writing simmer and percolate, in the hope that my unconscious will take care of it. That the solution will come. And I think that’s useful up to a point, but I also think you come back to the basic thing about writing. You’ve got to exercise your will and get work done. You’ve got to show the muse you’re willing to show up, whether anything is happening or not. But in another way I’ve been such a bad model, as far as work ethic, because of my ox-like tendencies. A lot of that labor went into prose and translation. Sometimes I would be in the middle of writing an essay on Ernesto Cardenal or on what’s going on in Chinese poetry, but I’d be thinking, Why don’t I just shut up and try to write a poem?

But anyway, so, how many years was it, five? I was writing poems. And I was in New York and giving a reading. This was sometime in the late seventies. Dan said, I would like to publish your next book with Ecco Press, which he had just started. I said, Dan, I don’t have a book. And he said, I just heard you read an hour’s worth of poems I haven’t heard before. There must be a book there. I said, I’ve got lots of poems, but I’ve no idea for a book. And I was really stuck because I was dead sure that it had to be organized more or less chronologically in the order that I’d written the poems. And he said, Let’s take a look at them, and we went to his place. He had an apartment down on West Thirtieth. A penthouse in the middle of the Garment District. We started to lay out the poems on the floor. And he started moving them around, and I said, See, here’s the problem, you can’t do this, and you can’t do that, and those have to come near the end, and this has to be near the beginning. And he said, Just let me work on this, will you? He laid out all the poems on the floor and started moving them around. He put what I thought were some of the strongest, which I was sure had to come at the end, at the beginning. And he said, I think this is starting to work. And I went into the bathroom and threw up. And came back and looked and said, Actually this does kind of work.

One of the things that was interesting to me working with Czesław for twenty-five years was that he never thought it wasn’t the most important thing in the world. He had despair about the world. He had despair about whether his art could ever achieve what he hoped it would achieve. He had a feeling that serious art can lose its way among junk. But he always felt that, as he says in one poem, “Great was that chase with the hounds for the unattainable meaning of the world.” He always thought that the poets and the philosophers and the artists and the theologians and so forth were engaged in the grand human adventure.

In the late fifties, early sixties, I was aware that there was this culture of people who were trying to think about a whole range of social justice issues more or less out of the mainstream. Lawrence Ferlinghetti starting the Journal for the Protection of All Beings, the essays of James Baldwin, Whole Earth Catalog, experimental institutions like Black Mountain. A writer who was very important to me for thinking about politics in those years was Paul Goodman. I met him when he came to Stanford. We were talking about researching the power structure and how we were going to confront the military-industrial complex, and he kind of said, Whoa whoa whoa, slow down. Here’s the thing, figure out what you love doing and try to find a way to do it, and if you find that the structures of institutions around you keep you from doing it in the way that’s valuable to you, there’s where you work on changing the structures. If to be an actor you have to survive doing degrading commercials, figure out how to change that system. Maybe it’s government support of the arts, maybe it’s something else. If you’re a scientist and you can’t do the kind of science you want to because of the money, that’s where you try to make change.

[...]

I remember listening to Terry Gross interviewing Philip Roth, and she asked what it takes to be an artist. He said there were two things, to his mind. A deep appetite for play, and a moral stake in the world. I thought, That sounds right to me.