Christina Mullin

Gerald Stern, A Wild Gratitude

 

The essay for this month’s issue of Plume appears as an interview that works also as a kind of personal essay in interview form that the interview’s subject, Gerald Stern, would probably not have written as unabashedly and wildly if he had attempted to conjure the same personal subject matter in a conventional essay, even an autobiographical one. This interview took place in 2002 at the New England College MFA In Poetry Program that Jerry Stern, Jacqueline Gens, and I founded the year before and whose faculty at the time included Li-Young, Michael Waters, Tom Lux, Alicia Ostriker, Judith Hall, Maxine Kumine, Anne Marie Macari,  Anne Waldman, Bruce Smith, and Paula McLain.

 

Stern wrote two lyrical collections of books of essays titled Stealing History and What I Can’t Bear Losing, that were notable for their vast learning and insights into poetry in general, but also focused specifically on some of his favorite subjects, such as, Spinoza, John Cage, Maimonides, Lucille Clifton, The Marx Brothers, Andy Warhol, Paris, justice; and his identity as a secular Jew with a strong objections to Israel’s political positions. In his remarkable ability to leap from one subject to another while maintaining at the same time a coherent cloud of thought, which he attributes so unashamedly to his Tourettes, Stern displays just how magnificently his embrace of his tourettes has served as an invaluable psychic complement to his muse throughout his career. This interview could also have been turned into a conventional essay, but it would have lost the unique, confessional expression of Stern’s scintillating leaping in the process.

 

 

 *This interview with Gerald Stern was conducted by Chard deNiord and Li Young Lee on July 11^th at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire during the 2003 summer residency of the New England College MFA program.

 

Gerald Stern:  I am here at New England College at 11:15, July 8, 2002 with Li-Young Lee and Chard deNiord. We are going to have a conversation that will unfold naturally. So, let’s begin. Where shall we begin?  In the beginning was the word and the word created reality. For God was a syllable, nothing more, nothing less. He is a word.  She is a word. I don’t like to call God a woman.  It bothers me. The issue of the pronoun is a major issue. So what questions have you of me on this hot day? Me wearing shorts?

 

Lee-Young Lee:  I have a question. I could be wrong about this, it might be a block in my own head but I feel it particularly in your poems. Prior to the speech, the utterance, there is a presence and the presence that your poems impart is huge and fully on earth or in the earthly realm, fully happening, at the same time really connected to some sort of understanding of cosmos, the universe, whatever, God no God, the realm of the God.

 

GS:  What I would reject or challenge is the word “prior” because it sets a temporal mode up and I would like to think the word occurs simultaneously with the act.  I never know truthfully since I have Tourette’s.  It’s no excuse. What I’m going to say when I say it, I’m shocked. It’s as if the speech takes over and drags me along.  Probably God had the same problem.  He didn’t know quite what he was going to say. “Oops, I created the universe.  I made a little mistake.  I gave human beings a sense of their own death.” God had Tourette’s and that is a very important thing to know. Calvinists denied that God had Tourette’s but the Coptic church was a strong believer in Tourette’s syndrome of the God-head. It is true and we joke about this and we laugh.  I’m silly and I’m a fool, but these are truths. God had Tourettes. It’s all true. I discovered I had Tourette’s two years ago, three years ago.  I broke down over work and my ticks took over. My ticks wouldn’t stop moving.  I went through various doctors, doctors, doctors. They gave me the medication for depression and anxiety. I suffered from deep sadness for a year and a half. Under the care and help of my dear love, Ann Marie Macari. I survived and recovered and I’m better than ever.  And I’m delighted by the fact that I have Tourette’s because now I know I have an excuse.  It’s not just bad manners.  It’s not just outrageousness, or wildness, or theatre. It’s a specific disease.  It’s a disease I share with God.

 

LYL:  I don’t mean to praise you Jerry. Those are observations I made. I hear you. But, Jerry, is there a person prior to speech for you?  It is your life, you as a person.  Particularly the way you live.

 

GS:  It always is a big issue of whether you create yourself through your poetry if you are a poet or if you express a prior personality.  And, of course, it’s like layers, like the skin of an onion. As you uncover layer after layer you become not more yourself, but yourself, yourself, yourself.  Doctor. Doctor.  Maybe if one creates a persona one is the persona.  Every poet worth his salt has such insights?  Spencer, Keats Yeats, Pound. Hopefully, I have that, and so I write about myself.  But when I write about myself it’s not myself I’m writing about, it’s what I myself have become that I’m writing about.  It’s the universal me, for we are all universal when we think of ourselves in the process of becoming. I’m not ashamed of using the first-person pronoun. I’m sick unto death, sick unto death of the apology, the bullshit of the theorists, of the language poets not using the personal pronoun, and yet if you prick those cock suckers with a needle they say, “I hurt! I hurt!” They don’t say, “Hurt hurts.”  Pricks, liars, cock suckers, whom I love, since I have Tourette’s.

 

CD:  You said a minute ago that Tourette’s was an excuse in a way, but it’s an opportunity also, is it not? A lot of people who know you and admire your poems say that it’s not just Tourette’s that’s responsible for your wit and candor. You may possess a certain lack of inhibition that is a symptom of Tourette’ s, which in turn facilitates your talent as a poet, but not everyone with Tourette’s on the other hand is a strong poet.

 

GS:  People are talking a lot lately about Tourette’s. It is one of the new favorite diseases. There is an excessive number of brilliant people who have Tourette’s. They have amazing recovery of objects, as well as timing, reflexes, which I have. Of course, I speak about all this tongue in cheek. I don’t attribute whatever qualities I have to Tourette’s. I am who I am and I’ve always been this person and I have allowed this person to be in myself more and more and I’m actually delighted with this person to tell you the truth. I’m a showoff and I’m noisy and I offend people and so be it.  It is my personality and character.  I don’t want to describe it as character. It can only be described. Therefore, I’ll read you a poem. I’m turning the pages to a book called the American Sonnets that came out in April of 2002, and I’ll turn to the table of contents and pick something out and something that strikes me and I will read, I will read a poem that I don’t normally read if I can find one. Here is a poem called “Samaritans.”  You, Chard, and I have been talking about religious groups in America and I recently read the article you sent me about American religion and enjoyed it immensely and it is a mystery to me.  And I love these little groups that came out of New England into the Ohio Valley, then into the mid-west and into the west to express their own whimsy and freedom and dreamlike state, and ethics and hopes and ambitions in the name of Jesus or not in the name of Jesus, taking various forms, such as complex marriage, which meant sleeping with some other women other than your wife and not sleeping with women at all, or working collectively, or saving collectively, or living in dorms. A lot of it had to do with sexual and economic relationships and such, as with all religions and neo-religions—substantiation and rationalization.  This is a poem written with tongue in cheek. It is a sonnet, a twenty-two line sonnet, as many of these poems here are.  It is called “Samaritans.” And you know I talk about the Samaritans living in West Virginia and again I give this reading at high schools and nobody sees it as odd.  They are so unschooled that they don’t even know who the Samaritans are or what they are and that there were no Samaritan colonies in America, but I talk a lot about the Samaritans here with tongue in cheek and it really is about them.

 

Samaritans

 

I can’t remember what the class trip was-

I think we were going to visit the Samaritans

who lived in round houses at the border of

West Virginia.  They believed in a round eye

staring at God or maybe it was God who had

the eye and stared at them.  And Moses alone was

the light as far as they were concerned. And his was

the only law they followed.  Forget the other

prophets so called.  But how they got to West Virginia.

I forget though I know our teacher a specialist

in sociology was teaching religion

when we went on the trip.  I think I got

waylaid a little the way you did then

It was spring and warm.  The girls had on

light dresses and we had cigarettes, the chimney

holes looked like eyes., but it was God’s eye

that I will never forget, it followed the bus

back to Pittsburgh, and sometimes it seemed to smile

the way an eye smiles, though it was incorporeal,

of course, and my own eyes were closed. I was sleeping.

 

This is a sonnet that has the turn, the volte, that occurs somewhere in the second third of the poem, and there we are.  Of course, the Samaritans did follow Moses alone, that is, they did not pay attention to the Talmud—the interpretation of the Torah. Moses, Leviticus especially. So, I have read a poem.  And I reached a point that one of the few things I enjoy doing in life is writing poetry. I used to hate writing poetry.

 

CD:  I want to talk about that because you claim that your poem “The Bite” from your book Rejoicings in 1973 marks the beginning of the anaphoristic style you have pursued to this day.  You struggled before writing “The Bite” under the influence of Pound, Yeats, and Swinburne.  Then suddenly you broke through to your own sharp lyrical voice beginning in “The Bite.” You write in

that poem that you didn’t start to take yourself seriously as a poet until the white began to appear in your cheek.  You came to some realization about death, about yourself, that seemed, in turn, to trigger a list and fugue strategy in your writing that accommodates both your expansive poems, such as “The Thought of Heaven,” “Father Guzman,” “Knowledge Forwards and Backwards,” “Sycamore,” “Soap,” “The Expulsion” and “Hot Dog,” and your shorter lyric poems, such as “The Bite,” “Cow Worship,” “The Dancing,” “Behaving Like a Jew,” “Today a Leaf,” and many others.

 

GS:  I wrote “The Bite,” which is the first poem in my selected poetry, so it was the first poem that I wrote when I came to myself, the self that we are talking about, fully in 1966 or so.  Before then as you say, and I’ve talked about this a lot and I’ve written an essay about it called “Some Secrets.”  That I had been, you know, isolated, taking life easy, indulgent until a certain point. I was turning 40, and I suddenly had that crisis, but only in my case it was exacerbated by a knowledge that I was lost.  That I had no place.  That there were generations after me who knew what to do. They had to go on to certain places, schools, or networking, or giving each other prizes and such, and I was nowhere in that scene and it hurt me.  I had thrown away book after book of poems because I hadn’t saved them and I hadn’t gotten my first two bad books together, and then a third book which would have been okay  I buried my first two books privately and there I was forty years old still struggling away writing some interesting poems, some good poems maybe.  But in a different voice, as I described in that essay, I gave the analogy of a religious experience.  I gave up completely and I didn’t care.  I didn’t care about the fame.  I didn’t care about the recognition.  All of a sudden, new purpose.  This ferocity continues to this day. A famous metaphor, an allegory of the turtle and the hare appears in the poem., which goes like this:

 

The Bite

 

I didn’t take myself seriously as a poet

until the white began to appear in my cheek.

All before was amusement affection-

now like a hare, like a hare, like a hare,

 

I watch the turtle lift one terrible leg

over the last remaining style and head

for home, practically roaring with virtue.

 

Everything, suddenly everything is up there in the mind.

All the beauty of the race is gone,

all my life merely an allegory.

 

But then it went on. It was easy after that. Well, a struggle an endless struggle, I love the struggle.  When I was 24 living in Paris in perfect health, enough money, enough food, women, movies, beautiful walks.  I almost tied myself to my desk every morning for four hours so I could write my ten beautiful lines, perfect lines. There was a Bible that I had stolen from the American Center and a copy of Milton’s poems on my desk, and I had to touch these things and read them before I wrote my lines.  Milton, the prophets, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, Yeats, and I was relieved when the time was over and I could go out and eat lunch and walk through the streets of the wonderful city, go to the movies, and pick up girls at the Dupont Café. And then later on in the afternoon, read and read and reread, in French too, take naps.  Over the last 30 years I’ve loved writing poetry. Now I enjoy writing prose which I always disliked.  I’m writing prose and becoming fairly good at it and I’m enjoying that. And I think I am happier than I have ever been in my life.  I attribute a lot of that happiness to living with Ann Marie, and I’m sadder than I ever was, too. Thus, goes it. So, it goes.

 

LYL:  Would it horrify you if you knew there were people who were reading your poetry not as a literary activity but because it is some sort of model of being?

 

GS:  You embarrass me.  Be yourself for God’s sake.  Don’t be me.  Who the hell am I?  What am I?

 

LYL:  But the person in the poems feels so universal and so…

 

GS:  Well, that guy, that person in the poem, I’m a pagan, too, as I create him. I wonder if God imitated man. I wonder if God wanted to have a human mind.  Here is this thing, mind just a mind, not a soul but a mind.  Did that mind itself want a soul in the body. Of course, God needs man and God needs praise. Without the praise, without that fat the Hebrews, the Israelites,

burned for him, without that chicken soup that they gave him, without that Chinese fish, He couldn’t survive.  He wanted ketchup on it.  He loved ketchup.  He was like me.

 

LYL:  He had Tabasco…

 

GS:  Tabasco on eggs. He didn’t like ketchup. Does God long for a body and if He wants a body and since He has foreknowledge and since He is sovereign as we Calvinists say, He knows when He’s going to get it.  In fact, what the issue of Jesus Christ was God wanting to have a body so He created for himself a son, even if in the imagination of those who were followers of Joshua, the Jewish prophet.  He was born a Jew, lived a Jew and died a Jew. And those Jews and later those Greeks and Armenians and Africans and Spaniards, whatever, that followed him, understood the mystery.  They said there were three persons, and they said sometimes there were two persons.  You understand?  I’m suggesting no persons.  But it expresses God’s longing to be a man and what better man could there be than Jesus the Messiah as he’s called.  Jesus Christ, and it’s fascinating.  He couldn’t complete himself.  He was so jealous of man until he became one and of course I’m with the Gnostics.  The burning of the cross was phantom and certainly a man called Yeshua probably was turned upside down, nailed and drowned by the fucking Romans.  The fucking, fucking fucking Romans who destroyed history.  It gives me great pleasure when I go to Rome to take a piss on the statue on The Ark of Titus Andronicus.  He thinks he beat the Jews.  We beat him.  We piss on him. Well, I went astray a little bit into theology for which I ask forgiveness of Reinhold Neibuhr and Augustine.  Augustine that mean selfish dog who had a great gift for literature.

 

LYL:  I have the sense for instance of a figure like Jesus or Buddha or any of those sacred figures in the imagination.  They all stand for the first man and the last man.

 

GS:  Right

 

LYL:  The poet is the same thing…

 

GS:  The poet is the same thing, and the poet is God.  This is one thing, I’m terrified to say this, you teach in a program like we have here, a low residency MFA program at New England College, which is a terrific program, and what if we told our beginners that you have to be God to write poetry, or a god.  Orpheus was just a poet.  Rilke was just a poet.  Rilke went to New England College to study poetry and he studied with Joan Larkin and Ann Marie Macari.  He did alright, but we didn’t give him a degree because he strayed off to Russia.  But he’s God.  Why isn’t Rilke God?  Human beings at their best are creators.  Some of the creators are destructive, and I believe that political and military figures are imitations of the poets and philosophers and artists, and they are destroyers without being creators.  Our study of history is the study of these false creators.  Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Patton, Bush.  I hate Bush.  He’s such a liar.  Lying has become the national pastime.  We’re a nation of liars.  Rome went down after a thousand years of hegemony as a nation It produced two or three great poets.  Some fairly good painters, realistic painters.  I don’t know about their music, but only one philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, who was also a good politician whose message was I am rich, if you are poor, you are destined to be poor. So, accept your lot as I accept my lot.  What a message.  What a message.  That’s the Romans. That’s as good as they can get, unless he stole it from the Greeks or the Jews. I hear a dog barking.  I hear an army charging upon the land. James Joyce. How many people have read Finnegan’s Wake?  My God. Once I took off a week in 1948.  In my parents’ tiny ridiculous apartment.  They went off to the Catskills to a Jewish place.  To eat and rock in rocking chairs and be entertained by assholes at night.  They said come along, we’ll pay for it.  No, I said, I have work to do.  My work was to read Finnegan’s Wake and I stayed alone for eight days in that apartment.  I brought in food.  I never left.  And I stayed there for eight days reading Finnegan’s Wake.  I think it’s enormously boring.  And it’s never yet been fully explored.  I delighted in it.  I delighted in it totally, in the language.  I love James Joyce.  I love the fact that of the major writers in the various cultures of our century, the beginning of the century, the age of modernity, he was one of the few, maybe the only one, who wasn’t a vicious anti-Semite. The others, Eliot, Pound, the French writers, all were. (Several seconds of silence.) Silence is golden. Silence is not golden. Silence is mauve. Silence is not golden. silence is mauve. What color is God?  Is God blue? (Singing) Am I blue? Am I blue? Am I blue? Blue is the color of my true love’s eyes.

 

CD:  What is it about blue for you, Jerry?

 

GS:  Oh, God.  Blue? My book is called Last Blue. I’ve written over and over again about blue. I’m not the only one. Everyone loves blue.

 

CD:  But you keep coming back to it.

 

GS:  Blue is the color of death among the Egyptians, as it was of God for the Jews. It’s the color of Mary.

 

CD:  In your poem “The Thought of Heaven” your imagery resonates as both lyrical and concrete ways at the same time, especially at the transcendent end of the poem where you focus specifically on the idea itself of blue.

 

GS:  That poem is a different poem, everything that is moving, tender, sad, beautiful transcendent, becomes blue.  I think it’s in Odd Mercy, that book Odd Mercy I’m looking for it as we talk. I don’t think it’s in this one. Oh, it’s in Bread Without Sugar. I don’t read that poem much, as I said, because it is so long, but Chard told me that he memorized the poem and I was very touched and read it at a conference of the Southern Baptists.

 

LYL:  It was the Northern Presbyterians.

 

GS:  Can I read a little bit of this poem?

 

LYL:  Oh yeah, you can read the whole thing

 

GS:  All right, I’m going to read the whole thing, I don’t give a shit.

 

The Thought of Heaven

 

There is one blossom on my redwood table

I smell for hours, even holding it

like a handkerchief in the palm of my hand

and bringing it to my face. I recognize it

as kind of thought, as in the black locust

the poor of the world for one or two weeks a year

have their paradise, nor is it disgraceful

nor is it weak and seedy even if the thorns

make their wrists bleed, even if the leaves

they look to strip were dry; as in the phlox

the weightless phlox, the bees drag down, the six

colors of lavender, the field of wild ninnies

growing like grass where there was a little room

beside the road; as in the bridle wreath that smells

like honey, that covers a city with cream,

there is one day for pomp; as in the dogwood

there is one day for sadness, four curled petals

with drops of blood growing white or pink

in the cold dirt, all the more to be

the contrast, under some maple of huge cherry,

for me the blossom of thought supreme, nothing

in the world like it; as in the colored weeds

on our dashboard; as in the flowers in all five pockets;

as in my blue jacket once I found 20 years

of thought-more than that-the election

of Lyndon Johnson, the death of Eleanor Roosevelt –

look how they are political-Americans

in Lebanon and Hispaniola; I sit there

like a tailor, cleaning out lint, whatever

lint is., holding a stem in the air rubbing

a golden flower through my fingers, catching

the spots of light. The sun is on my left

the poppies are in my driveway, a wild exchange

is taking place in my yard something between

my dwarf apples; yellow dust is falling

into the sweet-smelling glue-this is thought,

even if it is copulation, it is tired

and true intrigue, an old flirtation; there are

swollen stamens and green lipstick; Plato

would be the first to forgive me, but I don’t think

of forgiveness now these last few decades, I

struggle past my willow; someone has cursed me

with a weeping willow, it is Chinese and grows

in swamps best, that I remember, swamps and bogs

that in the sycamore; if anything,

I’ll turn away; if anything I’ll sit

among the broken sticks facing the fenced-in

weeds, revenge on groundhogs; I will stare

for a minute or two at a private flower, that is

enough for one day-who is it wants to sit

forever anyhow? There are two months

left-I should say three-the wind and the sun

will help me, so will water, so will bees,

for all I know and moths, and birds; ah what

dark thoughts once rested in our coats all of us, all of us,

dogs, cats and humans, not only burrs,

not only prickles, how it scatters first

and then floats back; that is what they called

a germ. it was Hegelian; I have

to find the pre-Socratic, that is for me

what thought should be, I am a sucker still

for all of it to hang together, I want

one bundle still. When the sweet scent comes from the east,

though I call it as a thought, it is, as it should be,

something that precedes thought-that is a way

of putting it-something that accompanies thought,

but it is thought as it drifts down over the Chinese

willow, as it floats above the table

and penetrates my doors and windows;

I bow down to it, I let it change me,

that is a purpose of thought-I call it all thought, whatever

changes you. Dear apple, I am ready.

What is what is it for you, is it dreaming, does that set you

Free? I call a bursting “dreaming,” I call

a rage in sundering by its sweet-smelling name,

as if I were a child domesticating

everything within a mile for purposes

of my own rage. There is a thought. It is

if not in this blossom then in another,

in the lilies of our highways, in the great

brown thistles beside them, in the black-eyed Susan,

the flower I always bend down for, most of all-

in the two or three weeks at least-in the chicory,

blue was a dust of the universe, a blue

more like lavender-I would call it purple

if I were extreme-I would say the edges

are white from gripping the sky or they are drained

from so much thought. I call it the thought of heaven,

not too disgraceful for the chicory,

solemn and blue as it is, such as my thinking.

LYL:  You’ve got to read that poem more often, Gerry.

 

GS:  Now some beautiful woman with good color has entered this room and has to be part of the company. We have a tape playing. How’s it going anyway? Once I was interviewed years ago by a chap who came to me from Franklin and Marshall College and he said he had to go, had to go fast because he was an Orthodox Jew and it was Friday and Saturday was Shabbat. So, he

started to play the tape and he said, “You know I was interviewing a couple weeks ago and the tape wasn’t working.” The interviewer’s name was Sandy, he was a friend of mine and I said, “Sandy, put the fucking tape on.” It wasn’t working! He had to run back to Lancaster and it was Sabbath and so we had to talk double time. He was a great guy. Sandy Pinsker. I spoke to him the other day. I was sitting in my kitchen which is my office and I was thinking about Sandy Pinsker and I said, Sandy’s sick. I said to myself I haven’t heard from him, Sandy’s dying, so I called his home and his daughter Beth answered and she said my dad is down in Florida at his mother’s, my grandmother’s house. I said, “How is your dad?” He had what was called a quadruple bypass the day before. So, I called him down there and I said, “Sandy, I thought you were dead,” and he said “No, I just had a bypass. I can’t talk. I’ll call you back.” I love that. Do we all have that quality of knowing something? What is that called?

 

CD:  Prescience?

 

GS:  Is that called prescience? It’s also called telepathy. A very primitive way to communicate. I’ve had some telepathic experiences. Once I came into this school I was teaching at and there was a guy named Brock who was teaching a class and his was the next room over and I walked into the class, and it was noisy and nervous. Where’s Brock? his students asked. “Brock has just had an accident, he fell off his motorcycle and broke his arm,” I told them. I swear to God I said that. An hour later word came that he had broken his ankle and his arm. That was weird. When Brock found this out he was terrified of me, and then he visited my house. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to my house in Easton, Pennsylvania, the old farm house, and we walked down the street to the Delaware River which I loved and in the summer. The river was low, there were rocks and you could walk from the rocks to what came to be an island in effect in the summer and we started to walk down to the river and I said I was going to make rain come. Brock looked a little terrified. I took these rocks and I started to make Indian sounds with them and I threw the rocks up into the sky and I swear to God it started to rain and the sun was shining. I haven’t done anything like that since. Brock is terrified of me. He married three women and hasn’t invited me to the any of the weddings.

 

CD:  When you were sick with a bad back in Iowa you commented once to me that you were a slave to your style, as if it had possessed and that you couldn’t change if you wanted to.

 

GS:  You know at one point when I was writing Rejoicings I had a choice between two styles. I was writing one kind of poem that belonged more to, the what’s his name?, Creeley. It was that kind of poem I felt sympathy to then. But then I turned to the other poets more influenced by Yeats, and after that I went a long way, just as an artist or comedian goes a certain way and doesn’t change because he’s defined himself or herself by what he or she is. How can you break that? And go another way? I mean your style changes, it modulates as you get older, you change as a person, physically, mentally, you deteriorate. It’s really sad that you decay and grow simultaneously. If it were decay alone it wouldn’t be so bad.  Does Yeats not talk about that? What are those lines?  Well, when I had my bad back in Iowa, I was working on a long poem called “Bella.” I wrote upstairs in this old house I lived in on Governor St.. Both of you were in that house. Li-Young, you visited me there. I remember we went to a party one night, and I don’t know where you were living at that time, maybe Chicago.

 

LYL:  Yes. I was in Chicago.

 

GS:  And I couldn’t walk upstairs, the steps were steep. I would get nauseous. I wanted to finish that poem, “Bella”.  That was my goal. I finally did. Your beloved bride Liz, Chard, would come over and make me breakfast. I had to learn to walk. I literally couldn’t walk from here to that dresser. I couldn’t walk. It’s good to be sick. It’s very good to be sick so you can appreciate life.

 

LYL:  You keep talking about strength in sickness, or weakness, Tourette’s, and your bad back and the enormous strength that emanates from that.

 

GS:  If you didn’t see the other alternative, where would you be?

 

LYL:  So, you’re associating that pain and the wounds or the illness with the other condition?

 

GS:  With the other condition of no pain, no wound. Maybe that’s what it’s all about and of course many theologians have talked about this. Only happiness is possible, they say, when you see unhappiness. It’s the possible opposites. How can a plant enjoy itself and its beauty?

 

CD:  Well it’s your obsession, the “this and the that” as you like to say, the left hand and the right hand, this side and the other. The constant dialectic that infuses the electrify in your poems.

 

GS:  Isn’t it sad that the Christians or the Jews or Babylonians had to invent something called the devil as the opposite of God? What would God have been before? It’s a pity for God he didn’t have another. Is He going to worship Himself? Did He create mankind so he could be worshipped? Is mankind the opposite of God? Not the devil? Are we collectively the devil?

 

LYL:  The image of God according to genesis?

 

GS:  God created us in his image

 

LYL:  But that would be the same relationship you were talking about, Gerry, with the poem “The Maker.” Right? The same relationship between the poet and the poem, so the poet who makes the poem is making himself or herself. And then in turn we remake God. So, like you said, you tried to live toward the persona that your poems generate.

 

GS:  But there is an alternative life that is projected. More and more I pity God and his loneliness. There are people who have things they love to do. There’s been so little meditation. I guess the saints and the mystics, the Spanish mystics and Italian mystics. Maybe it’s time to start thinking.  I love our little silences as we’ve been talking. How long have we been talking?

 

CD:  An hour.

 

GS:  An hour? How close are we to the end of that second tape?

 

CD:  Well, we can take a break.

 

GS: No, let’s finish the tape and then we’ll be done. One more question and then we go to lunch. What’s the most joyous of the three meals?

 

LYL:  Oh, breakfast is the best.

 

GS:  For you, Li-Young, it’s your eggs with Tabasco sauce. I don’t’ know, for me..? Now that Ann Marie is in her house and I’m in mine we work all morning. She writes her poems or sometimes pays bills, and I do the same thing. We work until noon and then one of us calls to the other to say, “You want to eat lunch now?” “Okay.” And then we go out and drive a few miles and eat lunch in some little place. We don’t do that every day. I just love lunch. Supper. You’re tired, my body is nervous. Probably my blood pressure or something like that. You know last night, about 11 o’clock, Ann Marie and I were starving in the dorm. Now what I’ve done? Don’t tell the chef. I’m starting to accumulate a nest of food. So, tonight when Ann Marie says, “I’m starving. Let’s have something to eat, we eat some of the food I’ve taken from the kitchen. There’s always time for lunch. Lunch is a wonderful thing because my stomach always feels pretty empty and because I eat only a nice small breakfast of cereal. What did you eat for breakfast?

 

LYL:  I just got up

 

GS:  Do you want an egg?

 

LYL:  No, I’ll eat at lunch. I’ll have some iceberg lettuce.

 

GS:  Iceberg lettuce. I’m furious at those who have had iceberg lettuce. Everybody accepts iceberg lettuce. It’s crap. You know what the worst thing in the world is? Tuna casserole, Fuck tuna casserole. I can’t stand tuna casserole. What food do you hate? You like eggs and fish, the juices of them. What’s the question?