Interviewer: In the past you've either been hesitant about or outright refused to comment both on the making of your poems and on possible critical interpretations. Do you believe commentary can actually diminish rather than enhance a poem?

Goldbarth: Yes, I think so. Plus, I'm not very articulate when I talk about my poems. I don't spend any time thinking about them in such terms as an aesthetic out of which I create, or an ideal toward which my body of work is heading. It's amazing, when I read interviews with other poets, to see how articulately they discuss their own writing, as if they were sharing long-held theories on the work of Pope or Keats. I'm happy enough that I've poured the best of myself into the poems themselves. What exists outside the poems is, and ought properly to be, a much less interesting garnish to them. Often it's merely a smokescreen.

Interviewer: Do you distrust comments by other poets about their work?

Goldbarth: Of course. Does anyone believe that stuff they read in interviews? I've read interviews and found them engaging enough; some of my poetry peers are very charming, entertaining and bright. But do I believe most responses to interview questions are anything more than the need to present an image to the world or buy into it oneself? No, I'm not sure I believe that. And in any case, the poetry itself — or the novel or the stories — should be sufficient. We don't still read Rilke today because he gave shrewd interviews in Poets & Writers. Or Dickinson. Or Salinger. Ovid wasn't diverting his energy into a homepage at Romanexiles.com.

Interviewer: Does this affect your reading of criticism?

Goldbarth: Yeah, I think it does. I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary — a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing.

Interviewer: Does commentary interfere with a reader's privilege to interpret the work?

Goldbarth: In general or for my own work?

Interviewer: For your own work.

Goldbarth: Most ideally I would want a kind of shared wisdom or power that exists between my poems operating at their best and the best reading that can be brought to them — a wisdom and power that rise above and are richer than anything else from outside the poem-reader relationship.

For example, when I read, I don't care about how much of a poem is autobiographically true; I care that the poem is so well written that it becomes true for the time I spend in its aura.

Interviewer: The autobiography might be interesting on its own terms.

Goldbarth: Yes, but it would be extraneous to the poem. Keats and Plath aren't good writers because they died young. Writing is good — or not good — for reasons that have nothing to do with biographical data.

Interviewer: Does this affect the way you workshop students' poems? Do you limit a student's commentary on his or her own poem?

Goldbarth: I modulate my response to meet the pleasures or the problems of a specific occasion. I let students speak, but not by way of defending or explaining what's going on in a poem until the other students have pretty well emptied themselves of their independent responses. This semester I've decided not even to have the poems read out loud beforehand. What we want to know is how meaningful and powerful and memorable a piece is on the page, not as a script lending itself to public performance. Whether one reads one's work out loud really well or really poorly should not affect someone's judgment of the poem as a literary communication.

Interviewer: This privileges poetry as a written word rather than a spoken word.

Goldbarth: More and more, and particularly in working with people who are younger and coming out of a very different universe, I give the greatest credit and integrity to the written word. I don't invest a lot of pleasure or admiration in poetry readings. I'd be happy if poetry readings ceased to exist. I've seen too many mediocre writers read well and too many wonderful writers read poorly to place much stock in poetry readings as an index of any worth outside of mere entertainment value.

Interviewer: Yet your poems retain a very musical element. Some of them are actually titled "songs."

Goldbarth: They do, and I think I give good readings. I just don't congratulate myself overly for doing that. It's not a very important extension of what I do. I read some of my poems well, and some, but not all, lend themselves to being read out loud with energy and brio. But even when poems have a very lyrical quality, the voice as it flowers in a good reader's inner ear (I mean here the solitary reader, in silence, page in hand) is still much more vital than the limited medium of the spoken voice. Even with Dylan Thomas's poems, I think my inner ear does them a greater justice than Thomas himself in performance.

Interviewer: If your work were to be placed on a scale between mimetic and imaginative, maybe it would fall at the imaginative end?

Goldbarth: If you're using the word imagination, I wouldn't want it to mean some reader imagining a voice or an intonation that the poet didn't intend to invest in the poem originally. I'm still talking about a kind of collaboration between reader and poem that, although the imagination is at work, remains within the realm of the writer's own original intentions. As just one example of dozens we could think of, Berryman's The Dream Songs flower into a voice that is comic and tender at once, ironic and poignant at once, that is sophisticated and black-faced or uneducated Yiddish at once, multilayered in intricate and bountiful ways that I don't think any one spoken human voice could adequately carry — not a trained professional actor, not Berryman himself; but I know for a fact that when I read those poems in my own cone of silence, my brain knows how to take that language and allow it to blossom.

Interviewer: Part of your answer hints at another facet of your work, which is multiplicity.

Goldbarth: I hear people talk about my work's willingness to make connections, to be incorporative. Seemingly tangential paths that then do or don't get swept back into a kind of overencompassing moment — that probably is the way my mind is wired to work. And my poems of course are an extension of my mind.

The universe is nothing but incomprehensible multilayers, and all of our lives are examples of that. We're sitting here, you and I, and we're each, at the moment, what? Lover, husband, student, writer, teacher, son, parent, American (proud of it or not at the moment) — we are all a thousand things at once, with all of those selves connected to each other, laminated and pressed into a single block, all of those individuals trying to morph out of the block and retain independent identity. And everybody we interconnect with is a similar block, and the planet itself is its own little ecosphere, biosphere, stratosphere that is part of a cosmos that even Stephen Hawking can't quite encompass in his imagination. I don't know if my poems try to be true to that understanding out of any conscious project, but it is an implicit understanding that my poems generally have — that they are mimetic of a layered, interconnective cosmos.

Interviewer: Is your interest in the multiplicity of personality closely connected with your interest in 20th-century science?

Goldbarth: In the sense that science can address the multiplicity?

Interviewer: In the sense that your poems use science to argue for the multiplicity of the self.

Goldbarth: If one follows the history of science from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics — essentially from a world that is determined to a world of indeterminacy — one finds interesting parallels in art following roughly the same arc: the world of the fixed, realistic still-life becoming the world of Jackson Pollock, becoming the world of conceptual art, installation art, etc. We learn that the mind is ego, superego, id, and that its likes in music can simultaneously include opera and hard rock. Undying, monolithic structures disappear. "Compassionate conservative" or "feminist stripper" don't necessarily seem oxymoronic any longer. Suddenly we're as multiplicitous ourselves as the new physics tells us the universe is.

Interviewer: One of the ways these various modes of discipline are unified in your poems is in the voice, which I would call one of a blue-collar intellectual. You write about your father as an insurance salesman from time to time. Does he have an effect on the sometimes colloquial, sometimes fast-talking voice that often appears in your poems?

Goldbarth: That's a reasonable supposition. Of course from what I've said before, you realize I wouldn't want it to make any difference that my father “really was” an insurance salesman. I'd like the poems to be their own world, with their own integrity, interior explanations and needs.

But yes, my father was an insurance salesman. He was a sweet man, and by most contemporary standards he and my mother created a friendly and nurturing family setting. Though he himself was not a reader and never even graduated high school and perhaps never read an entire book in his adult life, it was the kind of lower-middle-class household at that moment of American time when the idea of reading and education and the empowerment of a life by the book was in the air, and it made my parents sweetly supportive of my intellectual goals, though they didn't partake of that world at all.

Here's an example of my father's understanding of the world of literature and its interface with my world. My father had to quit high school and support his parents when he was very young. His own father, the man I was named after, died when my father was just a teenager, so my father had to go to work lugging industrial cannisters in a paint factory when he was sixteen. But he always stayed in touch with the guys from the neighborhood, who would have graduated high school with him had he stayed the four years. There's a moment when my first wife, Morgan, and I go back to Chicago to visit my parents, and they're interacting with Morgan for the first time. She's a shiksa divorcée; that's a big hurdle for them, but we're all trying to make the best of things and be friendly. My father's going on and on and on about God knows what, and it's clear to everyone but him that Morgan and I aren't really fascinated by the conversation. My mother, trying to get things back on track, nudges my father in the ribs and says, "Irv, tell them about your high school reunion." Keep in mind what my parents are like — they've never been to the theater, there's hardly a book in the house — and my mother's just encouraged my father to bring the conversation up to a higher level of interest for her son the writer and his new wife, and my father says, "You know, I didn't graduate from high school, Albie," and he's a little ashamed, "but I continue to hang around with the boys. You remember Nate Nudelman. His son Howard's a lawyer in New York now and doing very well. And you remember Al Fliegel. His son Robbie, he's a doctor with a practice, and he sees people even in the suburbs." My mother pokes him again because he's still not got the message. "Tell him about the writer that was there," she says. So my father keeps on, "Yeah, yeah, great guy. I didn't know him well, but if only you were there, you could have had such a great conversation. What was his name?" And my mother says, "I think it was Saul." She pauses. "Saul Bellus." And with the realization that my father and Saul Bellow would have been sitting across from each other in high school geography, you suddenly have the story of America — and another sort of nitty-gritty, homely and familial exemplification of the world of multipartite human consciousness that we were talking about just a minute ago.

Interviewer: It's also a hint at the equality in your work. Not only an equality of class but an equality of text, in that you feel free to reference Hamlet next to a comic book from the '40s or '50s. Is it part of your project to seek out subjects that have not been traditionally included in the poetic tradition?

Goldbarth: It rarely feels as if I'm "seeking out" a subject. To me it doesn't appear as if from some preexisting aesthetic I'm reaching out with the conscious intention of bringing together disparate elements of human culture. But it certainly is true that when I'm done with a poem, I might sometimes look back and find pleasure if elements that we're taught to normally think of as very separate now take their places in a shared community.

It's probably true of a lot of us by now: writers of my generation who came out of blue-collar or lower-than-blue-collar socioeconomic realms, who became the first generation of a family to go to college, who've availed themselves of the world of scholarship and the world of sharing a doobie at a party late at night, the world of street smarts and the world of what Stanley Fish might be up to on a given day. Certainly I'm not the only writer in whom those seemingly disparate strands twine together. It's fair to say that a lot of my work is powered by creating small bridges between ordinarily separate realms.

Interviewer: This reminds me of the book Saving Lives, which begins with a kind of homage to "the book" The first line of the poem is, in fact, "This book saved my life." Do you think it's too romantic, in a time when readership is on the decline, to believe that books can save lives?

Goldbarth: I believe still in the power of books to save some individual life out there. Whether or not they're capable of saving or even impacting the culture in a major way is a different question altogether, and for me a question that would probably have some pretty sad answers. I still work with students all the time and have discussions with friends and colleagues that are predicated on the idea that books can save, books can shape, books can be essential to the infrastructure of a life. But I'm not sure that my friends, students and colleagues represent the future of the culture as a whole.

Interviewer: You've described your attitude toward reading as "read everything" — instruction booklets of toys, all of Dante. You assert that there is no canon and that works exist with each other through time. There's a certain hyperbole to this, but I'm particularly interested in how you privilege works across time rather than breaking works into time periods.

Goldbarth: I want to make clear that I believe very much in distinguishing greatness from dross. I don't think Dante and Maya Angelou, for instance, are poets on the same level of accomplishment. The feeling of humility that greatness inspires is the same, though, whether it emanates from a 21st-century poem or out of a reading of Beowulf. Greatness makes its own canon, across time.

Interviewer: Is this an assertion that's based on a reader claiming authority over the text without regard to prior scholarship on the text?

Goldbarth: Poems across the centuries have thematic and stylistic qualities that don't necessarily pay attention to division by century or nation or culture, race or gender — that precede and are more durable than whatever is the scholarly flavor of the moment.

For example, in my poetry class I talk about George Herbert's "Easter Wings" as a structure — the symmetry of the two stanzas looking like wings on the page, the beautiful counterbalance in which one falls from grace and yet that very fall enables one's flight upward — and then a moment later I read a very sexy Sharon Olds poem called "Topography," in which the two lovers are compared to the two sides of a map being folded together. Then I go to the board and look at the two poems and list how different they are. A dead male British poet writing a very devotional poem in a very strict form; and a living female American poet writing a very funny, rambunctious poem in free verse. But both of these poems work only because the poets believe an individual life can be subsumed into a much greater world — for Herbert it's Christianity and for Olds it's the sex act. And both poems succeed because the infrastructure is one of absolute symmetry. These two poems, for all of their differences, are twins who have been separated at birth. If you don't understand the poems' similarity, you don't understand either poem as well.

I really do believe there is a community of expression in which poems argue with one another, express love for one another, disdain for one another, over barriers of time, place, gender, nationality, literary theory, etc., and that finally this community of coeval discourse is a much better place to be than are those ghettos of smaller concerns.

Interviewer: You mention the deep structure of poems. What do you mean by that?

Goldbarth: Here's an example: I am teaching a graduate course on Whitman's "The Sleepers," a nine- or ten-page poem that most readers at first probably enjoy for its energy, barbaric yawp and manic, Whitmanic inclusiveness. That's all really there, of course, but I also go through it line by line talking about its structure, how there are moments at the start of the poem that set us up for moments at the end of the poem, whether we initially realize it or not. Beginning gestures in "The Sleepers" can be seen as seeds that are meant, after a long lapse, to flower for us near the end, and all the more richly if we understand the effort that Whitman puts into that seeding. And I discuss the kinds of balances between widely separated lists in the poem, lists that have their individual pleasures but that also work in conjunction with each other over many pages of separation. Often, the larger the separation, the more powerful the charge that moves along the arc of connection. I love that kind of thing.

Interviewer: In Pieces of Payne, your novel, you ask what the difference would be between the ideal library, with infinite holdings, and the world. This hints at the transformative power of the text. Is there a spiritual element to your belief in the text, in the book?

Goldbarth: Sure, depending on how you define spiritual. We all know people who claim to be atheists but who nonetheless walk through a world that is filled with wonder, who possess an ethical decency and a sense of a cosmos larger than any human life or any one set of human concerns — a cosmos that interacts with us across the fixed borders of our skins. If that can be defined as spiritual, then a text is not only a proper part of such spirituality but a proper way of access into its immanence.

Interviewer: You mentioned to me when we spoke earlier that a research institution has made inquiries into your papers. It seems to me the prospect of this would bring a sort of pleasure to someone who takes a deep pleasure in libraries, in books and in cataloguing.

Goldbarth: It's been an interesting experience in any number of ways. Just following that moment of literary-journal history from an antediluvian culture of stapled typewriter-offset-produced little magazines to the world of larger university-sponsored journals. Following the work of poets who were publishing like gangbusters at one time but whose presence has dwindled. Rediscovering the first few negligible poems by someone who has since become a major player on the scene. Even just looking at changing graphic styles and fonts. All of that has been interesting. And then, of course, reencountering my own earliest work. Also coming out of these cartons are books I was reading once upon a time, some purely for pleasure, some to research specific poems. My high school paperback edition of Gulliver's Travels just rose, like a strange, dreamy cream, to the top of a carton the other day.

Interviewer: You mention the books you used to research poems. One of the things you do is to lay down disparate texts next to each other. This has an interesting effect on the diction of the poems — the language of science next to the language of science fiction, for instance.

Goldbarth: As I said before, it's true that in some portion of my work differing modes of our discourse are set side by side. The language of the academy, let's say, alongside wise-guy street slang. But I don't think this is because of a consciously undertaken "project" at work, a predetermined, intellectualized goal. This range is simply part of my life and part of the lives of most people I know. Most of us can go bowling one evening and on the next sit through a lecture deconstructing T. S. Eliot. It's the way my friends exist — they watch Sex and the City and then later they might sit down with a text on feminist critical theory. I suppose not all poets, fiction writers, novelists create work that asks to be true to a representative range of available styles of diction, but many writers these days do, and I simply seem to be one of them.

Interviewer: You write in at least three genres — more if you count hybrid genres: essay-poems, verse-novels. Do you see any value as a reader or writer in genre distinctions?

Goldbarth: There was actually a large conversation with Graywolf Press about how to best categorize Pieces of Payne. The small version of an answer to your question is that the distinction hasn't been very important to me. The first of my pieces that were published as essays, I thought of as poems that simply occurred in paragraph form. They "came to me" as poems; they seemed to draw upon the same needs, presented themselves in the same voices. They were poems that thought their best presentation to the world would be in paragraphs. Why not? Some poems ask to be rhymed and metered, while some ask to be free verse, and yet both remain "poems" despite the division.

Journals, however, almost immediately refused to publish these paragraphed pieces as poems and encouraged me to call them essays. Some editors were willing to go with the hybrid term essay-poem. When I finally collected them into A Sympathy of Souls, I tried to publish it as a book of poems; in fact I thought it might be more interesting as a book of poems than as a book of essays. The very gesture of calling them poems, I thought, would add about three extra calories of oomph to the collective weight of the book. Coffee House Press, though, was really adamant about wanting to publish the book as a collection of essays. I remember the phone conversation, with the editor of Coffee House Press saying, "Albert, Albert, what do you want to shoot yourself in the foot for?" He won — although I finally took a kind of strange, perverse pride in the fact that the book sold no better than a book of poems would have.

With Pieces of Payne, I honestly had no genre in mind during all of the writing, and I submitted the manuscript to Graywolf Press without a genre specified. For about a month, I was pushing for "belle lettres," which seemed more honest than "book-length essay." "Novel" is what it ended up being. But those are the concerns of distribution systems and marketing departments. The writing exists apart from that.

Interviewer: Speaking of essay-poems, it occurs to me that the poem "How the World Works: An Essay" is a poem that is central to your work. A lot of your future work radiates out from that poem. Did you feel that when you wrote it?

Goldbarth: Yeah, yeah. Probably in three different ways. In the ideas that could be extracted out of the poem, in the way the poem's own strategies embody those ideas and in various kinds of language — differing modes of discourse, as we put it earlier — that were coming into an easy cohabitation.

Interviewer: Moby Dick is one of Pieces of Payne's primary reference points. How deeply did that book, in its form as an anatomy of a whale, affect some of your work, particularly Pieces of Payne, which can be read as an anatomy of a consciousness?

Goldbarth: If one wanted to do a study of my own minnow of a work set alongside Moby Dick, one could find similarities. It's possible to think of Moby Dick, in its literary structure, as a version of the multipartite brain we've been talking about. There's the relative sanity of Ishmael, and there's Ahab's crazed, indomitable obsession. There is the vast universe — unknowable, unfathomable — and there's the everyday, legislated world of whale harpooning. There is Anglo Cape Cod and, over the horizon, the mystery of the South Sea islands. There is plain prose and there are those poetic moments, those magic subconscious undergrowths rising out of nowhere. If one sees the book as a single brain encompassing all of that, then I think you do get a very, very grand version of what, in smaller ways, informs the writing of a lot of people in my generation.

Interviewer: In the book, you also use Columbus's two log books, one real and one forged. You reference Dickens's writing in code. And the book itself is broken in two — the narrative and the footnotes — which are of equal length and importance, it seems to me. There's always the text that is true and the text that is artful, presented to the world as whole.

Goldbarth: In a way, that's what Pieces of Payne is about: a world that seems fragmented to us, and our attempt to nonetheless find a kind of structure or center. There's history's whole movement from boundaried, Newtonian physics to the world of unboundaried contemporary cosmology, and there's the movement from a world predicated on the Great Chain of Being to a world that, if it is predicated on anything at all, is predicated on change and the sense of an ever-morphing universe and self. I trust it makes sense that the book tries to emulate that in its structure and that Moby Dick exists in the deep background of the book as a text that itself draws upon, and is in danger of breaking down into, a number of variant sensibilities. It's another reason Dickens's fractured life, his secret mistress, become a part of the book.

Interviewer: The female lead sees her job as "Seeking out Unification." Is that what your work does? Or the work that you admire?

Goldbarth: Yes and no. One could say that no surrealist author seeks the accomplishment of unification; nor do the Beat writers — and I can read in these realms with pleasure. So I wouldn't say I go out of my way to embrace only writing that seeks unification. But I suppose that all of the writing one loves over a lifetime forms a unified core or sensibility in the reader. I can imagine somebody whose own favorites are surreal authors, Beat authors, let's call them writers willing to welcome chaos into their embrace, authors who might not be interested in unifying their sense of the universe at all, but the consistent incorporation of those fragmented, crazed, whatever-you-want-to-call-them writers into one's life still forms something stable, a core sense of passion for that individual reader.

Interviewer: Literature presents us with a form of sanity?

Goldbarth: It's a gift we can accept in the interests of sanity. Reader X can read the sad, lost, suicidal poems of Poet Z and use them in a way that for this reader makes them part of an ongoing quest for clarification in life — whether or not they worked this way in the long run for the poet. Surely the right reader can empathize with the pain, the confusion, can admit their credibility but then incorporate them into a sanely ongoing day.

Interviewer: I want to ask you one more thing about Pieces of Payne. There's a short section of the book that deals with September 11th as a seminal moment. Has art adequately responded to September 11th?

Goldbarth: I've seen a few essays and a few poems — good poems and intelligent essays. Admirable, emotive things. But in terms of sorting through that disaster in any comprehensive way and making any sense of it or suggesting what it means in terms of modes of viable existence from now on, I haven't seen a lot of that yet. But that's a big project to chew on. I wouldn't fault the art of the moment for not yet having that capability.

Interviewer: Death and grief are a large part of your own work that don't get the same attention that the wit and agility of your poems receive. Your books Adventures in Ancient Egypt and Popular Culture are grief-stricken books, particularly with regard to the grief over the loss of parents. Do you think it's the job of poetry to immortalize its subject?

Goldbarth: It's not my place to define "the job of poetry," but a lot of my poems do try to serve as memorials, as segments of frozen time that save people or cultural moments that have otherwise passed away or are in danger of passing away. I've always been surprised at the things readers tell me they've taken from my work and the characteristics reviewers tend to emphasize. There is, as you suggest, a large portion of my work with an elegiac strain that people often don't mention. They talk of the energy or the willingness to make connections but overlook a tendency to mourn and to conserve against disappearance. For instance, Popular Culture, in addition to having poems that address a mother's surgery for cancer and the death of a father, also has poems that recall lost popular-culture artifacts: comic strips, comic-book characters, old cartoon or newsreel creations that are also dead now, that are part of decaying acetate or yellowing, crumbling. newspaper archives. Though no one poem speaks to this directly, there is probably the emotional assumption on my part that a personal elegy for a parent and an elegy for these kinds of popular-culture deaths are both part of a large pool of not-altogether-dissimilar sadnesses. They're each emblematic of the other. In my last book, Combinations of the Universe, there's a final long poem that asks to look at old-time comic strips that were based on a narrative continuity that lasted sometimes over many weeks or even many months; readers flocked to and cared about this chapter-like presentation of story the way they once did the serial publication of Dickens's novels. All of that's gone — newspaper comic strips are read by only a small number of readers, and newspaper editors won't even consider adding narrative-continuity strips anymore.

Interviewer: If narrative continuity no longer exists, does that affect the way we read older texts: do we then try to find fractured narratives in books from a hundred years ago?

Goldbarth: Sure. We can break up stained-glass windows into kaleidoscope bits if we choose to. But the guiding question should still always be: What was the author's intention? The poem, the novel: it isn't a high-toned neutral gameboard on which the reader or critic is meant to prove his own cleverness. Don Quixote isn't just a bunch of Scrabble letters. The person to be talking about this with is Sven Birkerts, whose book The Gutenberg Elegies is a beautiful, soulful, keen elegy for certain kinds of reading, including narrative reading.

As you know, I don't use a computer myself; I've never touched one. I have no desire to go into a long-winded political shtick about the damaging ways in which computer culture is altering the face of the world, but I do think that computers are in the process of changing the very way the mind makes connections, the way we see and interact with our universe. Clearly, it's becoming a world that's no longer based upon an understanding of or a need for sequence. My undergraduate students, who are products of MTV, computer games, non-narrative television, really do not see the world in terms of sequential building blocks. It's not just that they read differently; the way they interface with their own lives is completely different from my own. Their neurons spark differently. The change will be finally not attitudinal but evolutionary.

Interviewer: Speaking of your students, do you feel that it's essential for a poet to be a scholar?

Goldbarth: Do you mean scholarship that studies poetry from a position outside of its text, or do you mean a scholarship that is worn inside the work?

Interviewer: I mean the kind of scholarship that is worn inside the work, even if it just demonstrates a knowledge of a poetic tradition. As an intellectual poet yourself, what are the drawbacks of not having earned that scholarship?

Goldbarth: Am I "an intellectual poet?" I can tell you that when I sit down and read Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence, I feel like an idiot. Or when I read someone like Joseph Campbell, I realize how little I know and how little I've been able to piece together myself over the large divides between little contemporary boxes of study. I do wish more of my students knew and cared about the literature of the past and knew more and cared more about intellectual capability outside the world of literature. I suspect the poets I value are usually people who love poetry enough to want to know all of it, including going back to the original oceans from which our small trickles have descended. (Of course, while I need to believe that those people will be the most exciting and worthwhile creative artists themselves, I still have to concede that one's own talent can be such that one writes good poems out of a smaller and more focused understanding. There are no rules to poetry, and I can imagine someone writing about his or her own particular life without those lively, sensitive connections to the past — and still doing a wonderful job of it. It's not as if most people go to Dickinson for the history of our culture in terms of scholarly apparatus. They go to her to see how persuasive she can be about her own strange and courageous visionary life.)

I'm teaching a graduate course this semester, and everybody's going to do a seminar paper on a poet of their choosing; my directions for the paper include setting the poet and poet's work side by side with some other completely different "-ism" — psychology or theology or art history. Or even the history of amusement park rides, or the history of pornography. I want students to be able to take that poet's work and set it beside something — the creation of perspective in visual art or Madonna's wardrobe — as a way of reading the poet's work as expansively as possible. I don't know if that's "intellectual," but I certainly hope it's smart. I'll take that for a start.

Interviewer: You've talked a lot about the current state of consciousness and of poetry and poetry students. Do you have a sense of whether poetry is enlarging itself or becoming an isolated endeavor in which only poets care about poetry?

Goldbarth: I'm always cautious about making pronouncements regarding the state of the art, or where I think poetry is heading. Keep in mind, too, that I'm someone who knows almost nothing about the possibilities of poetry in an Internet age; I don't know much about slam or spoken-word poetry. I couldn't claim to have a large overview of the "cutting-edge" world of poetry, but if your question implies that many of us think the audience for poetry is limited to poets, then sure, that's my understanding as well. And if your question implies that some of us think the audience out there, for better or worse, is highly fragmented these days — L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, neoformalists, people who only read poetry by feminists or cowpokes or French theorists — I think that's accurate as well. Some people find this revitalizing; some people find it a real shame that there aren't central, shared sources of aesthetic pleasure. All of what I've just said is true, but I'm not the person capable of putting it together toward a vision of what might be happening two generations down the line.

Interviewer: There's a sense in your work of, if not reincarnation, then a regeneration that borders again on the spiritual. Could you speak about how you think science interacts with, if not the religious world, then the mystical world that also seems to be an element of your work?

Goldbarth: I provided an introduction for an anthology of essays Kurt Brown compiled on science and poetry, where I go back in time and try to understand what was happening in the world of 19th-century literature and science... a time in our history when literary writers and scientists seemed to be speaking a similar language and engaged in parallel pursuits. I was trying to pinpoint the moment when those two tracks diverged, when the language of science became too obscure for even the educated poet and when the language of literature became too inconsequential for the scientist. But before that schism there's a generation when scientist and poet are not completely differentiated and when there probably is a modicum of spiritual quest that's built into the projects of both. We know Newton was researching alchemy and astrology as seriously as he was the laws of thermodynamics; it's just the laws of thermodynamics for which we value him. His own research took him just as far into what we would term mystical or spiritual realms.

Interviewer: A lot of what you're saying hints at a connection between spirituality and the quest for unity that is present in your work. Along with being elegiac for your parents or a moment in popular culture, your work seems also to be elegiac for some idyllic moment when unity existed.

Goldbarth: Or for an admission that the unity still exists, that it's still a part of us, but our age has buried it under a very fragmented dailiness. Let's look at it this way: It's Sunday morning. Some people are coming home from an early church service, some people are coming home from a long Saturday night of drinking and whoring. Haven't they all been, at their most essential, trying to ignite something extraordinary inside of themselves, trying to battle the humdrum, to burn up the allotment of undefined gung-ho need that's woven into the pattern of our psyches at birth? Isn't there something that yokes the sybarite out drinking or drugging himself into another mode of consciousness and the chanting monk who is divining himself into his other form of consciousness? Really I've said it already: Haven't George Herbert and Sharon Olds written the same poem in different skins? Isn't it possible, too, that we see this in ongoing scientific and poetic quests: no matter how different their momentary procedures, no matter how different their schemes or their surfaces, they speak to the same essential needs and goals? If that's true, then indeed a link between the sciences and the humanities might have been more obvious, more holistic in Wordsworth's time than in some of the decades following, but it's still possible today to rediscover the link: the quantum mechanical quest and the artistic quest as siblings. If that's true, then it makes sense when we refer to Moby Dick as a single human brain that is both conscious and unconscious, rational and irrational, personal and cosmic simultaneously. And it makes sense that there are some writers out there who try to tie together these different languages of discourse. And look — doesn’t this pretty much tie our interview together?

[This interview was conducted in Wichita, Kansas, in September 2003.]

The Missouri Review
University of Missouri

Editor: Speer Morgan
Managing Editor: Hoa Ngo
Associate Editor: Evelyn Somers
Poetry Editor: Bern Mulvey

---

Poetry Daily / Amazon.com

Selected books available by Albert Goldbarth:
Budget Travel through Space and Time — Paperback
Pieces of Payne — Paperback
Combinations of the Universe — Paperback
Saving Lives — Paperback
Troubled Lovers in History: A Sequence of Poems — Paperback
Beyond: Poems — Paperback
Selected books available by Steve Gehrke:
The Pyramids of Malpighi — Paperback

Search Poetry Daily / Amazon.com for other books: