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PARTISAN REVIEW
a lot of prose writers and try to learn from them. If you look at almost all the
good poets you would find that this is true . There are poets around who are
recognizably, say , Black Mountain . I really don 't-I take all that back. I
really don't know what a Black Mountain poet is, except that I know some
people who were at Black Mountain . If you showed me a poem and said , " Is
this a Black Mountain poem?" I couldn't tell you . I'm not that interested
in movements . Poetry is something that takes place alone, in solitude, in
silence . And then there are these social relationships that people work out.
They live in New York and so they become... . They have these friends .
They are influenced as much by their friends' behavior and dress as they are
by their poetry. Poetry comes out of the whole life and goes back into the
whole life . Here I live in Fresno, and have for a long time . There was no real
group ofpoets here , and so if I don 't sound like a Black Mountain poet or a
New York poet, it 's small wonder really . And my influences have changed
as I grow older. My tastes have changed and so my poetry has changed . I
don't read the magazines with any faithfulness . I don't really know what's
being written in America. This year reading all these books is a kind of
welcome thing for me-to find out what 's being written in the country .
Int:
Maybe what you've been saying so far is the reason why you haven 't been
influenced by any particular style of writing.
Levine:
I have an idea of the kinds ofpoems that I want to write. I don 't have a
clear idea what they are, but I have an idea. Sometimes when I write a poem
I think, "That 's it! That's what! want. " So I do have a kind of conception
of what a poem ought to be . I don't know where it came from, and I think
it's very old in me-all the way back to my teens probably , and it's been
modified and changed with my experiences as a guy living in particular
places and particular times , and my reading experiences . This is true for
most of us. I think this ' 'schools " thing is a way of dealing with poetry
without reading . That is , if I pick up one of those books over there and I
begin
to
say , " Unhuh, New York," well I can dismiss a book then without
really coping with what it might be saying , without its challenge to me . I
might pick up one of those books, read it, and say, "My heavens, this guy is
doing things I never thought of doing, and it's really interesting . Maybe I
ought
to
become a different kind of poet ." That's a powerful experience .
Or I might learn something. A guy might start talking about a particular
subject: the stars, flowers, his neighbor , and I might suddenly be shocked
into my deadness to the stars, flowers and my neighbors. But if I don't want
to have a poetic experience, I can pick up the goddamn book and say,
"Unhuh , Iowa," and slip it in a pigeon-hole. " Ah , Beat , Hip, Black
Mountain .. . ." I'm just not interested in reading that way . It 's a waste of
time, and that 's one of the reasons I don 't read " reviews." It's the thing
