DP: I'm guessing you have returned from your reading break, so I'm sending my
next, somewhat lengthy, question. Your poetry has always contained a lot of cultural
references--to both the "high" and the "popular" kinds. In The Commentaries I sense
a difference, though. Before it seemed you were dealing with opposites and
contrasts: I'm thinking of a book like Islands. But here it seems you're
dealing with more of a continuum. That is, when you talk about Melville and
Eric Clapton and "Tintern Abbey" and "Pet Sounds" in one book you are
talking about artists and works that are meaningful to you and not aspects
of worth and less worthy art. Is that a fair comment? How do you decide
upon which cultural references make it into your poems?
KN: I think that's pretty much of a fair comment. I think when I was younger
I was somewhat "on the defensive" about my love of things like Eric Clapton
and the Beach Boys. But it was still a polarized world when I got started, of
High Art and Shakespearian Rags. A big part of the postmodern has been
bringing together the Odyssey and Fats Domino as equally valid cultural
references. Certainly, that was a big charge that we got out of the 60s. We
all love bp Nichol for bringing comic books into literature as a valid cultural
reference, and for giving them a higher purpose almost.
The twentieth century had that split in the arts of the high forms and
the popular forms. The Modernists stated a very clear preference for the high
forms (although they loved things like Chaplin movies and Marx Bros. movies).
The Postmodernists blurred the distinctions. And part of the reason why I would
be interested in blurring the distinctions would be because I find more of the
poetical in certain guitar lines of Eric Clapton, or certain songs by Brian Wilson,
than I find in a poem of, say, Richard Wilbur's.
But I'm also still playing with the textures of all of that too, because, although
the distinctions have been blurred, they haven't been entirely erased. And
we are still stuck with the essential dilemma of what is art and what is entertainment.
What creates the "continuum" you speak of is me. Melville, Clapton,
Wordsworth and the Beach Boys all peacefully coexist inside my consciousness,
within my sensibilities. I love these creators in different ways, on different levels,
but they all have nourished my soul. And, in a certain way, I think what I
am talking about in The Commentaries, among other things, is the content
of my soul, at the moment that I am composing The Commentaries. Because
I'm looking back on a previous self, the author of The Music, and evaluating
the contents of his soul. There is, of course, a lot of cultural criticism also
going on. I'm interrogating the culture as much as I'm interrogating my own
previous work.
DP: How do you decide which cultural references
make it into your poems?
KN: Well, I think what's in The Commentaries is different than what's
in the poems. That is, I don't see The Commentaries as poems. They are much
more of an open field in which to arrange material. They are, for the most part,
prose commentaries, and there's a much broader range of of reference for
what can occur to me.
In poems I'm looking for something apt and specific. Very often a borrowed
image or reference nails it better than if I try to make something up. If
it's already there in the culture, high or low, and really crystallizes
something, then I will pull it into my own work and frame it.
In the Report material I am often stocking up on cultural references,
because I'm kind of going for a cultural panorama. In lyric poems
I'm much more inclined to want something absolutely specific and targeted.
But it's kind of a reverse T.S. Eliot method. That is, I don't want the
reader getting confused and perplexed. I want the reference or image
worked into the fabric of what I've written so that it seems fairly seamless,
and the reference appears to be at home, and in context.
