AG: Is it incidental that when you were talking about this, you first used the word sound? 

BW: No, it’s not incidental because I compose very intensely in terms of sound and I speak my work aloud to myself and I very strongly believe that poetry exists first of all in the mouth and my sense of sound and rhythm is crucial. It’s why I am so attracted to poetry. 

AG: You write, as a vast majority of American poets, in free verse. So it is interesting, this idea of the sound being first in the poem is not really shared by most American poets. What you are saying is very close to the Russian sensibility and understanding of what poetry is all about.  You don’t feel that there is a contradiction between writing in free verse and working mainly on sound? 

BW: I don’t consider myself really writing in free verse.  I write much closer to a loose meter.  If you scan my poems you will see lines and passages that are utterly iambic and so to me my practice very much takes a lot from T.S. Eliot. I’m very interested also in Robert Lowell, in that boundary between so-called formal and informal verse. So I don’t consider myself writing free verse in the sense that the iambic norm has been tossed out. I’m always working within that norm. It’s how I perceive rhythm. 

AG: Where do you draw the line between poetry and prose?  What is the difference? 

BW: Poetry honors the line.  Prose doesn’t. 

AG: Anything related to the approach to a topic, to the delivery of a theme? 

BW: Prose is organized around the sentence.  Poetry is organized around the line. 

AG: So again you are talking mainly about the construction. 

BW: Sure. 

AG: Anything related to the sensibility in the approach to the topic? 

BW: I don’t think so.  Not to me. 

AG: I’ll rephrase my question.  How much do you feel that in poetry or in the poem something should be said?  What do you feel about leaving things unsaid or just implied?  Also following this question, does the poet have to exactly know everything what he’s talking about?  Or one leaves some dark corners, never really knowing what’s in there? 

BW: I think very much what’s left out is just as important as what you put in and that it is natural to leave things out. All so-called creative writing is about leaving things out. As far as poetry is concerned, I’m not very interested in poetry that’s strictly of a declarative nature.  I’m much more interested in poetry that’s dramatic in its intent. There are spaces between actions and those spaces are mysterious, whereas in declarative poetry if one is simply declaring oneself about a topic, there tends to be less mystery. Mystery doesn’t mean incoherence, however, or fuzziness. There can be plenty of mystery in a simple, direct, imagistic poem. Poetry as it proposes sentences that don’t proceed in a strictly logical fashion is inclined to implication by nature. 

AG: How can you qualify yourself?  Are you a lyrical poet?  Are you a political poet? 

BW: I would think of myself more as a dramatic/narrative poet.  Because I’m writing about people, I’m writing about people going through situations in life and responding to situations in life, many of which are of a dramatic nature. 

AG: Not a philosophical poetry? 

BW: No. 

AG: I personally consider much of your work as a philosophical poetry with an interesting twist or rather a method you use which is kind of on the surface and could be understood by anyone.  But what you’re really saying is underneath. 

BW: Well, that’s true.  There is a philosophical, intellectual layer, texture or impetus to the poems that’s woven into the drama.  

AG: What is your feeling about the possibility of writing poetry not in a native language?
This is obviously a question which I have a great personal interest in and I would like you to be very candid about that. 

BW: I don’t feel it’s insurmountable because people have done it in the past so I don’t see why one would feel it’s insurmountable.  I also think that that’s a bogus idea that you necessarily have to be born into the language.  What does it matter?  People are different, people assimilate languages differently, so I don’t see how one can make a judgment that way, a categorical judgment.

AG: Could you give some examples?

BW: Samuel Beckett.

AG: Then this is, of course, an imminent question: your relation to Joseph Brodsky, what  do you feel about Brodsky as an American writer?

BW: He isn’t an American writer.

AG:  Could you expand a bit on that matter?

BW: He is a writer from Russia writing in English which he learned from books, heavily influenced by poets, by the classic great English poets, and also by W.H. Auden. Brodsky was composing literature in that tongue.  And that tongue is an utterly distinct tongue that is not American.  But that is not necessarily to denigrate his achievement because it can’t be judged on the basis of American poetry, because it isn’t American poetry.  Does that make sense?

AG: It makes perfect sense.  But you feel that it was important what he was doing in terms of his achievement in language in his strange alien sensibility?  Is it interesting for you to read his work?

BW: To some degree but I would never classify him as a great English poet, not at all.

AG:  How about your feeling about his poetry in translation?  When you take his really great Russian poems – what do you feel; does it come through as in the case of Mandelstam, for you?

BW: It does. I think it comes through in some of his poems. Again, it’s through translation and of course it’s the work of the translator too. Cape Cod Lullaby, translated by Richard Wilbur, or Anthony Hecht.  I just think that’s an astonishing poem, a great poem.

AG: What about his essays, Less Than One and On Grief and Reason?

BW: They’re wonderful.  To me, they’re some of the greatest writings about literature in the twentieth century.  His piece on Auden’s poem is a masterful discussion of what’s going on in a poem.

AG: As I remember you were saying: not on Robert Frost.

BW: Not on Robert Frost.  He was trying to put Robert Frost on a Procrustean bed; the bed is Dante, and Robert Frost really doesn’t fit on that bed.

AG: How about his style, style of his writing?  Do you like his style?  Is it just the topics of his profound thought, or style in writing?

BW: I think it’s the style too, very much so.  There is an amazing, again, sensibility at work in terms of its range and balance of feeling, philosophical acuteness. But also, its sort of slangy later half of the twentieth century attitude.

AG: It sounds to me you feel that he is a very successful and really great critical personal essay writer, which is basically prose, and somewhat artificial or not as great English language poet.  That’s what it sounds like to me.

BW: That’s true.