Melinda Camber Porter
AN INTERVIEW WITH OCTAVia PAZ
MCP:
You are one of the poets who manages to maintain a high
level of cerebral awareness. You do not seem to be wary of writing
criticism while writing poetry. Someone like Wordsworth says,
you know, we murder to dissect with our mundane intellect. And
particularly nowadays many poets and artists tend to take a very
mistrustful stance towards a certain form of cerebral awareness.
Why aren't you frightened or wary of being a critic?
OP:
Well, I am more frightened of the obscure part of our mind we
know as the personal part of the unconscious.
I
am afraid also of
pure reason.
I
think that the great problem of our time and of our
civilization has been the dissociation of reason and the uncon–
scious self. As a matter of fact Wordsworth has some ideas, and
very cerebral ideas, but he didn't want to discuss them. Coleridge
wanted to discuss his ideas . But Coleridge was dull; his poetry
was. Perhaps in his case (we don't know) the mind destroyed the
poet, but
I
don't really believe what
I
just said . No,
I
believe great
poetry in some ways can be united with good thinking. After all,
the great moralist Dante was also a great thinker and a great poet.
And in a more modest way in our century Eliot has done it, and
some others, such as Verlaine. But
I
think reason has its limita–
tions. As poets we must read that limit.
MCP:
How?
OP:
In
my case I think it was a girlfriend interested in my poetry,
who helped me see the limits of reason . As a matter of fact, it was
very strange because I spent a large part of my life trying to prove
the limits of pure reason. But the girlfriend helped me to realize
that I used too much reason in my poetry .
MCP:
In
your book
Conjunctions and Disjunctions
(which I saw, more
or less, as a synchronic and diachronic study of eroticism) , you
seemed to be saying that in recent times we have codified sexual–
ity and the unconscious drives in an over-dogmatic way. As if our
intellect has destroyed a workable concept of love.
OP:
Yes, that's right. I suppose that in Western civilization , there
was great repression of sexuality and eroticism, especially since
the nineteenth century. Perhaps it has accelerated . Clearly, with
the triumph of rationalism and the Catholic ethic , we experienced
