GILBERT SORRENTINO
239
and they have become a kind of
lingua franca
for the next generation
of poets. But one has to wait; you have to give a poet a lot of room.
The sixties were a bad time for poets because of the war and the
social lurmoil. There was such a sense that poets had to address
themselves to these terrible wrongs, which is always deadly, deadly
for poetry. Poems simply do not end wars, the fact is.
Barone:
What about the effect of World War II on the poets of the
fifties?
Sorrentino:
The sense of making the new poem would have occurred
much earlier had there been no World War II. That grim academic
poetry that flourished from the late thirties until 1945 would have
died sooner.
It
still goes on, but it's dead. Who cares? I don 't really
care about Robert Lowell.
Lord Weary's Castle,
which I admire very
much, is a remarkable book; but I don't care about anything else
Lowell did after. It's official poetry. I think it is even worse than it
used to be because it has taken on the sheen of the "new" -either in
formal terms or in terms of "content."
Barone:
What about the people from the
Kenyon Review,
like Allen
Tate?
Sorrentino:
They really should not have had the deadly influence they
had. You can't denigrate their intelligence, it's just that their
intelligence was put to the service of the wrong thing.
To me the classic example of the failure of American literary
criticism centers on the fact that William Carlos Williams and Louis
Zukofsky worked in almost total obscurity throughout the thirties,
the forties , and most of the fifties. Louis is still almost totally
obscure. Williams is slowly beginning to emerge as a kind of freak.
The "Peck's bad boy" of poetry: good
01'
kindly Doc Williams and
his harebrained ideas. What can one say about the intelligence of
literary criticism when none of the literary critics of fame paid any
attention to two of the great American poets of the modern age:
Williams and Zukofsky? Where were they?
This happens with American literature all the time. Williams
himself was aware that it was happening to all American writers
who had begun to do something that was not the norm. Every
American writer who has anything to say spends at least half of his
creati ve life clearing the ground for himself, then he begins to speak.
I leave out, of course, the endless waste of energy spent in trying to
earn a living, trying to get published, and so on. Unless you want
to
be a full-time teacher, you are a member of the scuffle.
Look at Edward Dahlberg. He spent his whole life clearing
