MS: Well, a good reader of poetry may be very much like an actor working on his part, because he reads the poem aloud to himself again and again, and sometimes he learns it by heart. And it becomes familiar. It, finally, becomes part of him. A poem releases itself, secretes itself, slowly—almost, sometimes, poisonously—into the mind of the reader. It does it with cadence, it does it with combinations that might strike the reader as beautiful. Of course, God knows what the beautiful is. I don’t know. Because the beautiful fifty years from now will be what is seen as the ugly now or what’s insupportable now or barely tolerated now. But, you know, I think if you try too hard to be immediately comprehensible to your audience, if you give too much to the moment, you’re also giving too much to the status quo. The poet’s obligation isn’t to his audience, primarily, but to the language that he hopes he’s perpetuating. And when you think of how long it takes us to understand each other, for example—and how much leeway we give other areas of knowledge in our lives—why can’t we be a little more patient with poetry? The language of a poem is meant to be meditated on. You clear a psychic space for poetry. It’s a space in which words loom large.

MS: Well, when I say the unknown—death is the great unknown. I mean, most lyric poems lead to some acknowledgment of death. In fact, most poems are dark and dreary affairs that have to do with death and dying, or loss of one sort or another—loss of love, loss of friends, loss of life. Most lyric poems are sad, because if you think deeply at all about your experience, you think about your experience in time—your life—and if you’re thinking about your life, you can’t avoid the fact that it will end in death. In fact, everything about a poem—the meter of the poem, or the measure of the poem—is a reminder of time. Even a line that’s repeated: we’re back again. I think that the popularity of villanelles or poems that use refrains, is caused by the fact that they seem to enact a stay against time, they seem to give us a momentary reprieve from what usually is the subject of the poem, or the matter of the poem. So, although the poem may be about dying or death, we have repeated lines that seem to say we haven’t really gone anywhere, we’re back again. But in the end, that just helps us to hold on to the loss that is in the poem. It helps us to remember it.

MS: Well, I think a poet’s focus is not quite what a prose writer’s is; it’s not entirely on the world outside. It’s fixed on that area where the inside meets the outside, where the poet’s sensibility meets the weather, meets the street, meets other people, meets what he reads. So a poet describes that point of contact: the self, the edge of the self, and the edge of the world. That shadow land between self and reality. Sometimes the focus is tipped slightly in favor of the self, sometimes, more objectively, in favor of the world. And so sometimes, when the balance is tipped toward the self, strange things are said, odd things get into the poem. Because the farther you are from the world that everybody recognizes as the world, the stranger things look. I mean, some novels do this, but most don’t. There are some narrators who insert themselves, as Philip Roth does brilliantly and amazingly. I’m always dazzled by his books. The world is electrically alive in American Pastoral, for example, but he’s there, too: Roth is Zuckerman, and he’s there, he’s telling the story. In a sense, that book is more magical than any poem I’ve read recently.

WS: What did you mean when you said that a poet’s first responsibility was to the language?

MS: Well, in writing poetry, one wants a certain flexibility in the use of language, a flexibility that can keep alive successes in the language from the past, that is, other poems, and that will also ensure that whatever poetry comes next will capitalize on the successes instead of on the failures. The fact is that we take many of our cues on how to proceed, and our ideas about what is a good line, or a beautiful line, from what we’ve experienced from the poetry of the past. In other words, it would be nice to know that poets in the future will have read the best poets of today and yesterday, that they won’t simply base their poems on news reports or instruction manuals. You know, so that there’s some continuity in the language of poetry. Because it’s complicated, but we’re defined by the best that’s written in our language, and so we want to perpetuate the best that’s written in our language. If poetry becomes just a revision of the newspaper page or the talking heads on TV, that’s not a language that will last; it’s not a language that translates into the future.

MS: There is only one reason to be envious of the people who write very successful songs with three or four chords, and that is that they earn the kind of money that gives them a kind of freedom that Elliott Carter may not have. So it would be nice for Elliott Carter to go to the restaurants that Elton John can afford. But if the price was that he had to write music exactly like Elton John’s, then he would do without it. And that’s it. If I had to write the kind of sentences that Jacqueline Susann wrote, you know, write the kind of novels that she wrote, I wouldn’t be able to hold my head high anywhere! I’d slink into restaurants—very expensive restaurants—and I’d slink into expensive hotels. And I’d be ashamed to say what it was that I did.