78
PARTISAN REVIEW
Wallace Stevens if you could have read it when he was 32 . It wasn't even
printed until he was in his forties .
Int :
You published yourftrst book,
On The Edge,
when you were 35, and it's
a very solid book of poems. You show a lot of talent and craft in it . Your
second book,
Not This Pig,
is more relaxed . Overall it's stronger and more
varied than
On The Edge .
And then you came out with
They Feed They
Lion,
which is a very demanding book to read. It 's very aggressive and it 's
very good . Now you have another book coming out , called 1933 , which
contains poems about your childhood . Is this book more mellow , now that
you 've gotten that fterceness out in
They Feed They Lion?
Levine:
I don't think this book is so aggressive. It's very different.
Int:
That doesn't necessarily mean it's weaker, does it?
Levine:
No, it doesn 't mean it's weaker. It doesn't mean it's stronger either.
[Laughter] It just means that it's different. It 's a lot less aggressive in that
way . There are alot of poems in it which wouldn 't have looked at all out of
place in
They Feed They Lion .
In fact, there is a long poem which I
considered using in
They Feed They Lion .
It seems very much to be written
in the tone and the rhythm of that book , and it's the longest poem in the
book. So I don 't think there is a clear demarcation .
Int:
Ifwe can assume that you're improving all the time , it ought to be a very
strong, powerful book .
Levine :
I don't think I am . I don'tthink I'm getting any better. I may be , but
I'm not sure . I don 't think about that too much . I think that too is a trap .
Int :
Maybe it's a question you can 't answer.
Levine :
I don't think it's a question ofwhether you can answer it or not . If you
look back on the careers of poets you'll ftnd that it's a very answerable
question. But it's a trap . It's a question that we tend to force on ourselves ,
when by and large, it 's irrelevant to what we 're doing. What I'm trying to
do is write the poetry of the feelings and experiences I now have . If I don 't
turn out to be a particularly good poet of middle age , well that 's the way it
goes . Wordsworth wasn't . He seems middle aged in his early poems.
Curiously enough, he has that wise tone very early in his poetry . You'd
think, God, when he got to middle age he'd be.... And then we look at
Yeats and we see a great poet ofmiddle age . You just do the best you can in
any particular period, and I think it's a mistake to look back and say, " Oh
shit, I've got to do those poems over again , ' , or ' 'I was better then than I am
now." As I said, I think it 's a trap that we tend to get ourselves into. I ftnd
it's not all that hard to avoid .
Int :
Is it one poem at a time , then?
Levine :
No , no . It's not one poem at a time . I get ideas that encompass more
than one poem at a time , that almost reach out to the idea of a whole thing I
