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PARTISAN REVIEW
I'm not sure about England. But perhaps more so than in Amer–
ica, where sexuality is somehow cleansed in a rather strange way.
OP:
The Americans are obsessed with the idea of nature.
MCP:
Nature?
OP:
They want to be natural. The Americans are obsessed with the
idea of love being natural.
MCP:
Why do you think that is?
OP:
In the American tradition, eroticism is a sin. They're puritani–
cal. Now in a rebellion against sin, the favorite thing is to turn to
nature. It's very funny, all these manifestations of love. Sexual
minorities confuse passions and political rights, political rights
and natural rights. I think eroticism is not natural.
It
is the con–
trary of natural. This is one of the myths of the American civiliza–
tion. Nature. To be natural. To be naive.
MCP:
Corning from what, Thoreau?
OP:
Yes, coming from Thoreau. But Thoreau is corning from Rous-
seau, no?
MCP:
Yes.
OP:
Of course, all civilizations are nostalgic for nature.
MCP:
For some imaginary past when we were at one with the world?
OP:
Yes, and that is very visible in Whitman and Thoreau. I love
Thoreau, as a matter of fact, and Whitman. Whitman is a great
poet, but even he has his faults. He has had a very bad influence
on Latin American poets. Many of them have tried to imitate his
grandiosity.
MCP:
The influence of French literature has been very strong in
your work.
OP:
Yes. But in Mexico when I was very young I studied English
poetry. I loved the Romantic poets: Shelley, Keats. Then I sud–
denly discovered modern poets, and I read Eliot, in the forties.
And then many others. I knew Whitman . From Eliot I went back
to John Donne and seventeenth-century poets . Essentially,
French ideas on poetry were rather important , especially those of
the surrealists. But my poetry was closer to the Americans. The
idea, for instance, to make a long poem was not French; it was an
American idea.
MCP:
On the other hand, in
Eagle Sun,
I found similarities with
Baudelaire's prose poems.
OP:
Yes .
Eagle Sun
comes directly from French surrealism. I know I
am very much interested in intellectual things , but when I write
