210
PARTISAN REVIEW
never know it's a bad play until you really hear the groans.
DM:
What about the line itself; when the actor begins to speak the line, does
it
lift
itself off the page and change into something else?
DW:
No. the poetry that survives in the theater survives by itself. It isn't
made;
it can't be
created.
If it's there, it's there; if it's not, no amount oflight–
ing effects and terrific acting can make it happen. I sometimes give my stu–
dents exercises in which they read their own lines. If you take a lyric poem
and treat it dramatically, the embarrassment you can feel in reading a line
that is not on the page but is coming out of the human mouth is acute. So I do
a lot of that with the writers in the class. You learn a good deal either way.
You learn that a line that may pass by the ear and be forgiven and slide by
grates
in the theater. Of course, the other threat is pomposity because you
can elevate theatrical speech into making it sound extremely good, but that's
the voice getting up on a platform, you know, and performing.
DM:
In your poem, "Nearing Forty," you implied you were trying to strip
your style: "the household truth, the style past metaphor." In your recent
book,
Midsummer,
you seem to be more spare, almost impatient with artifice,
almost impatient with poetry itself, and yet these poems are extremely con–
centrated.
DW:
But there can be
clear
concentration. I mean a drop of dew is clear
concentration, because it can reflect an entire universe. In the little window in
a dewdrop you can have that. The clarity that one wants and never
will
get
but one lives all one's life for is, I think, to become an element, if it were
possible. To become water, you know, to have no coloring, no obvious
source, no artificial source, no frame. And, in a way, as one who is dealing
with time, you think of the component of water, the element of time in the
stillness of water. In a sense, that's the kind of simplicity that one strives for.
I mean you wish to live to be ninety so you can try to be as clear as that in
the effort. Larkin has a poem that says: "If I were made to construct a reli–
gion, it would be of water." Pasternak says it about water, about simple
nouns. Or Rilke says it - just to put that word down as if it were the first
time, as
if
it had an element of simplicity. And I think there are periods in the
epochs of English poetry in which again one comes back, as Wordsworth did,
at a certain point, to something that is - not illiterate and not dumb - but
clear,
a simplicity that may contain a lot of knowledge in it, like Blake's has.
The simplicity of Blake is a profound simplicity that has all the cosmology and
myth that is in his head. But when he gets to putting down his monosyllables,
that's the clarity one is talking about, something that is an elemental, unmea–
sured, unscannable kind of clearness. And one is talking, I think, about mem–
ory, really. How direct is the word to human memory? The word put on the
paper should be not
read
but remembered when it is read. The moment of
reading is a moment of remembering, not a moment oflearning.
DM:
Distillation, in a way, and expansion at the same time?
