534
PARTISAN REVIEW
fairly frequently a blissful one, in my case, or the sense of guilt. But I
know what I'm going to do more or less from the moment I set out.
That is , I more or less have the sense of form at the moment I'm
starting with some sort of content, and the form gives you a great
deal of headache.
DM:
Like Auden, you have a fascination with form . Do you think
structure itself sometimes leads you into new content?
JB:
Presumably ,
bec~use
by and large it's very seldom that one
knows at the outset where one is heading . Simply by virtue of being
a citizen of a different era, you're
bound
to invest the ancient form,
old form, compromised - if you will- form with a qualitatively new
meaning. That creates contrast, it creates a tension, and the result is
always new. It's bound to be new. And it's terribly interesting. Apart
from anything else, sometimes you write about certain things pre–
cisely for the form's sake, in many ways. That's not to say that you're
trying to write a
villanelle
and la-di-da to check whether your facility
is still there. No , it's simply because, otherwise, to write about cer–
tain things wouldn't be as appetizing a prospect. After all, you can
say only so many things , you can express only so many attitudes
towards the reality of this world. In fact, all the attitudes in the final
analysis are computable. And forms are not. Or at least the in–
terplay of an attitude and the form in which it is expressed in writing
increases the options .
DM:
Some poets now don't use rhyme and meter , they claim, be–
cause they feel such form is no longer relevant to experience or ex–
perience doesn't have the continuity or structure that such form im-
plies.
"
JB:
They're entitled to their views, but I think it's pure garbage. Art
basically is an operation within a certain contract, and you have to
abide by all the clauses of the contract. You write poetry, to begin
with, in order to influence minds, to influence hearts, to
move
hearts ,
to move people. In order to do so, you have to produce something
which has an appearance of inevitability and which is memorable, so
that it will stick in the mind of the reader. You have to wrap it in
such a fashion that the reader won't be able to avoid it, so that what
you have said will have a chance of entering his subconscious and of
being remembered. Meter and rhyme are basically mnemonic de–
vices . Not to mention the fact to which Ezra Pound alerted us , I
think way back in 1911 or 1915, by saying there's too much free
verse around. And that was in the teens of the century.
