1. Name some poets everybody in your milieu likes, except for you.
2. The opposite. Poets you like, but none of your friends do. Poets you are always having to defend.
COMMENTARY ON 1 AND 2. These two questions are supposed to get at opinions and tastes for which the person receives no applause. Things like that occupy a special category, for sure, but it’s not like the contents of that category reveal the person’s Authentic Taste.
Authentic Taste is whatever you like or dislike irrespective of all applause, including your own. A fundamentally unknowable category. And here it is further obscured by the fact that a certain kind of citizen gets off on holding perverse opinions. This is how they “know they’re in the right.”
More on this hereafter.
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3. Never mind other people for a second. Off by yourself, name some poets whom you really should like—’cuz they’re just exactly your kind of thing—but you just don’t.
4. The opposite. Poets with whom you have virtually nothing in common, but whom you truly love.
COMMENTARY ON 3 AND 4. Baby poets never have answers for these questions. They are all invested in defining their tastes in a way that coheres, makes a statement, is portable, can be summarized. Consequently, whenever they see something is written in a style that they supposedly approve, they treat the thing like family. That poem or poet always has a place to stay. At the same time, baby poets exclude all kinds of stuff on principle, and so even when they like it, they don’t like it. They explain away their liking in the same way I used to explain away my liking the Monkees. I don’t really like them; I just like listening to them and singing along.
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4 (b). Poets you’re embarrassed to like, exactly because your liking them reveals what a shallow, tasteless, sentimental, unintelligent person you really are.
4 (c). Poets who proved to you that {your stupidasshole ideas about what makes for good writing} were wrong.
COMMENTARY. Again, I’m just trying to get past the baby poet in all of us. I have asked people question 4 (b) and had ’em come back with a rigmarole of great names. “Shelley, Keats…” It’s quite frustrating. You wanna say: “Look, answer the question in such a way that you’re not implicitly bragging.” But with a lot of these customers that’s like saying, “OK, grow a new head. Good. Now lemme ask you all these questions over again.”
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5. You know how T.S. Eliot allegedly put the Metaphysicals back on the map? Suppose you were an arbiter of taste like that. Whom would you like to put back on the map.
COMMENTARY. This is actually a really loving and affectionate question—provided you’re not dickishly asking it of someone who, you know damn well, doesn’t know anything about old poetry. But when the person does know things, you often get a response that is a joy to listen to.
Some of the most valuable ten-minute conversations of my life have taken the form of somebody telling me about an old poet whose reputation deserves reviving. Edmund Waller. James Thomson.
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6. Poets you regard as your personal property. I.e. it literally annoys you, or at least makes you uneasy, when others like this poet, because you cannot believe they like him/her for the right reasons.
(I call this the Emily Dickinson question. Anyhow, for me, Dickinson is exactly this poet. When I first saw Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson on a shelf in 1997 or whatever it was, I thought: “Totally get that. Totally.”)
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7. If a photo were suddenly gonna be all over the internet, a photo of some famous person or celebrity reading your book, who would you want it to be. Name a few people.
(Corina Copp knows what I’m talking about with this!)
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8. Poems you’ve wept over more than once.
9. Poems you have thundered against.
COMMENTARY ON 8 AND 9. Question 8, of course, will have rather more authority than 9 with persons like myself, who go by the Kama Sutra theory of pleasure. The less voluntary the response, the sexier. (Goose bumps, too, have a lot of authority on this model.)
Meanwhile, the thunder question might be the most intimate one on this list, insofar as it’s basically a given that if you were thundering against some poem you were denouncing a lot more than the poem without realizing it. Or maybe you’re too savvy for that. Maybe you always draw excellent distinctions between the poem and the poem’s influence and the kind of person who would be excited by it, and so on and so forth. Perhaps in discussing the poem itself you always maintain a steady tone of amused superiority.
In which case: Get lost. Can’t you see we’re trying to get something done around here?
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10. If, twenty-five years from now, we were to find you on a bench in the New York City subway, drooling on yourself and rocking back and forth and reciting something from memory, what would it be?
COMMENTARY. I think Edward Lear must have regarded the above question as the Supreme Index of Poetic Goodness. Likewise, the author of Peacock Pie. I asked Nadya, the other morning, what her answer would be. She thought about it a while and said, smiling, “Adze-head.” Here’s the piece she meant, a much-repeated item in this household:
Across the sea will come Adze-head,
crazed in the head,
his cloak with hole for the head,
his stick bent in the head.
He will chant impiety
from a table in front of his house;
all his people will answer:
“Be it thus. Be it thus.”*
(*Copy-text: The School Bag, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, eds. London: Faber and Faber, 1997, page 4. The poem is listed as “Anonymous, Irish, sixth century.” Translation by James Carney.)
