David Montenegro
AN INTERVIEW WITH JOSEPH BRODSKY
DM:
You've just published
Less Than One,
your first collection of
essays. Do you find prose gives you a new latitude? What problems
and pleasures do you find in writing prose that you don't find in
writing poetry?
JB:
Well, to begin with, I simply happened to write those pieces over
the years. On several occasions, I've been commissioned for one
thing or another, and I just wanted to do whatever was asked of me
in each particular instance. What pleases me really about the book is
that it's something that was never meant to be. Perhaps a collection
or two of poems was in the cards, but a book of prose - especially in
English - wasn't. It strikes me as something highly illegitimate .
As for the difficulties or differences, essentially the operations
of prose and poetry are not so different. In prose, you have a more
leisurely pace, but in principle prose is simply spilling some beans,
which poetry sort of contains in a tight pod.
DM:
You once wrote that prose is hateful to you because it doesn't
have poetry's discipline.
JB:
How shall I put it? To use an almost paradoxical term, that's one
of prose's shortcomings. That's specifically what makes prose lengthy.
What I value about poetry, if I can simply estrange myself to look
with a kind of cold, separate eye at these things, is that in verse your
mind - reader's or writer's - moves much faster, for verse is overtly
final and terribly concise, it's a condensed thing. In prose there is
nothing that prevents you from going sideways, from digressing. In
poetry, a rhyme keeps you in check.
Basically, my attitude towards prose - apart from its being the
vehicle of making a living because, in fact, prose is paid for, if not
more handsomely , at least more readily than poetry - the thing that
I can say in praise of prose is that it's perhaps more therapeutic than
poetry. For poetry's risk, its uncertainty, well, its anticipation of
failure is terribly high. And after a while one gets rather edgy or
bilious .
In prose, I think, it's harder to fail. You simply sit and write,
and as the day passes you've written several pages . Then the next
day, and so forth. That in part perhaps explains why there are so
Editor's Note: This interview took place on April 8, 1986.
