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DP: Formal love sequences have a certain operatic intensity and idealism
that might seem out of place in today's cynical world. Your book has this
kind of intensity and risk taking self exposure, viz.: "I entered the old
world naked,/broken and battered, my life in pieces/and my heart in
tatters" ("I followed a lonely road"). How hard is it to reveal yourself
when the force of society pushes us to conceal?
Yes, the language of love is both operatic and idealistic. Everything
is intense and everything matters. A book that was very important
to me early on was Barthes' A Lover's Discourse. Maybe the most
important idea I took away from that book is that lovers really mean
what they say when they say it. Whether they still mean it, or would say
it, five years later is another matter altogether. What's said in the
moment is absolutely true, in the moment. And there is great beauty
and emotion in that. And we live for those moments far more than
we live for an eventual retirement in Florida.
KN: I remember, with great shame, an argument I had with my
friend Jim Mele thirty years ago. At that time I greatly admired Eliot,
and he greatly admired William Carlos Williams. We were university
students, and aspiring poets, and I really thought that Eliot was where
it was at. And I was being highly critical of Williams, a poet I now
greatly admire. And maybe we'll now get Pound in here, with his
"only emotion endures." Although I still admire some of Eliot's poetry,
I find that there is very little love in it. And there is a vast feeling of
love for the world and all of its inhabitants in Williams' poetry.
There's an inhuman element in Modernist
art. I don't think what
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