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An Interview with Dick Allen Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected, by Dick Allen Cloth ISBN 0-9641151-9-0 $25.00/Paper ISBN 0-889330-00-0 $14.95 The scope and ambition of this book is immense, yet your poems are very controlled and mannerly, beautifully so. Rather than being taken over by the cacophony of history, your voice presides. How do you shape your voracious, enormous ruminations into such controlled, focused, shapely poems? "Thank you for such praise! I often come at a poem from two directions. When I'm fortunate, they merge. First, I'll have scores of pieces of paper on which I've written down ideas, phrases, images, notes about what's obsessing me. Second, I immerse myself in a number of particular poetic forms (and I have a backlog), writing dozens of 'bad' or light verse poems in these forms until I'm thinking and feeling in them. On a good writing day, the content and form start to speak to each other: a few lines of content seem to 'want' to be in a particular form and a stanza happens—which will determine the shape and rhyme and/or rhythms and sounds of the poem to follow. After many drafts, sometimes into the hundreds, the poem emerges. I try to create a mind-state—a conference room, if you will—ready for entrance. There the 'vehicle' has been waiting for its content and the content has been searching for its vehicle. But until the first draft is in some kind of shape—can be read as well silently as aloud—I'm never in complete control. I follow the poem." How do you avoid rhetoric in poems that directly address the political sphere? "Frankly, my early drafts are filled with outright rhetoric. 'You want to say too much. You have too many ideas for a poet,' a professor at Brown once told me. But during what may be years of work on a poem, I try to exorcise the rhetoric, leaving its ghost—or maybe a fragment—so that it is the entire poem that implies rather than states ('show, rather than tell') the thought. Too, as a non-confessional poet, I'll often let the thought come from someone else, some persona. But I do believe strongly that a poem must have, whenever possible, significant content. In a time still so influenced by Archibald MacLeish's admonition that 'a poem must not mean, but be,' my task is to have the poem 'be' and mean something—a non-preachy something, but something." Your poems assert authority over so many ideas, personages, and texts—Kopernicus, Keats, Che Guevera, John Berryman, Whitman, Monet, Ophelia, Poe, Pound, Hobbes, Marx, Engels, Nero, DNA, T.V. Guide, the Bible, et cetera—they seem like personal indices of world history—intellectual, political, and artistic. To assume your readers can keep up with you is very generous. How do you handle the problem of your readers possibly not being as well read as you are? "At Syracuse, I had a wonderful old and wise comparative languages professor, Dr. Albert Menut, who, when I didn't recognize some name or allusion, would always command me to 'Look it up, Mr. Allen, look it up and report back to the next class.' If the mood and the sounds and the feelings of one of my poems moves a reader, I guess I expect the reader to 'look it up.' But, actually, I really take great pains only to refer to people or things that any person with at least a good high school education should know. Everything's accessible, 'everything reveals the presence of something else,' unlike poems which depend for their effect on the reader's knowing the poet's personal history. Too, I consciously try to avoid references to the trivial and the passing: no Snapple bottles or many allusions and references to that which I don't think will be important in future history." What are you reading now? "My whole life, I've always read five or six hours each day, going back and forth between many kinds of books and magazines so I'll always be in a kind of flux or vortex from which poems may emerge. Right now, for instance, I'm reading Karen Armstron's A History of God; Thomas Disch's The Castle of Indolence; Birds of the Northeast; Symbolism, by Michael Gobson; Michio Kaku's Hyperspace; and re-reading Peter Davison's The Fading Smile as well as his poems. My Richard Wilbur, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Emily Dickenson, and Rilke volumes and Anthony Hecht's The Hard Hours are never far away. And Joseph Brodsky's poem, 'On Washerwoman Bridge.' And there are the dozens of magazines: Scientific American, American Arts Quarterly, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, Poetry, The New Criterion, The Atlantic Monthly, American Poetry Review, MacWorld, The New Yorker, The Gettysburg Review, Heavy Metal, scores of literary periodicals, the Sunday New York Times, local newspapers. Anatole Broyard and I share the same eye doctor and the doctor said both of us were driving our eyes crazy." This book is very fin de siècle. Poems such as "Prophecy" and "A New Age" look forward and back with an apocalyptic sensibility. How do you imagine your poems will make the transition into the next century? "Well, I hope. First, many are written from a mystic's sensibility—and mysticism belongs to all the ages. Despite their many allusions to the final half of this century, I think the allusions are almost always to what will be or should be remembered in the next: World War II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Cold War, our sense of future shock and gyrating love. Another 'new age' is always just about to happen to any generation. And many of my poems, like 'The Valley of the Shadow of Death,' 'Cities and Empires,' and 'A Perfect Mind,' I immodestly hope may be timeless. A main problem might be that I'm so 'serious.' I once had a book rejected because of this: 'Lighten up, Allen.' I plead guilty. Writing empathic poems—of praise and mystery and history and mood—that may have some chance of lasting is the only thing my life has actually been about (though my wife and children may differ about that)." 2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200 Louisville Kentucky 40205 Phone (502) 458-4028 Fax (502) 458-4065 |