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This
interview was conducted by Charles Harper Webb,
December, 1999.
Charles Harper Webb:
I know that you were raised to be a tennis pro. How
does that sensibility enter into your poetry? Or does
it?
David St. John: Well, my father and my
uncle were both terrific tennis players, and my
uncle was a pro. I started playing tennis when I
was about 7 and played competitively from about 9
to 15. During certain periods of my life, I would
play twice a day—once in the morning, once
in the afternoon. The way it affected me is that
it instilled in me a kind of necessary
discipline. Tennis is a tremendously solitary
activity, just you—and somebody
else—out there, so it's actually good
training for somebody who wants to be a writer,
wants to be an artist. It also has its chess-like
qualities in that it's a very psychological
game as well. And you have terrific anticipation.
You have to be able to look several shots ahead
or, as in chess, several moves ahead. I realized,
actually somewhat recently, that I do that
somewhat when I'm writing as well. I have a
sense of how things might be shaping up a few
lines down the road. I don't go into a poem
knowing “what” I'm going to write
about. For me it's important that it comes,
that the writing of the poem should be an act of
discovery. But I have a general concern, or a
general notion, or some sense of verbal music
that I want to play out. I stopped playing tennis
competitively when I was about 15. By that time,
I was playing in rock and roll bands—really
bad rock and roll bands, let me say—and I
started putting more of my time and energy into
that. My style of playing was not showy, but very
elemental and understated. It would be hard to
say that about my poems.
David St. John talks about where he gets ideas for his poems.
CHW: Somebody—I
forget who—once told me that you claimed your
favorite reading material is fashion magazines. Is
there any truth to that? I know you dress well…
DSJ: Well, certainly Molly would argue
whether I dress well or not, but I was really
half putting somebody on, but half not. I think
fashion magazines are entertaining. On the one
hand, as a writer, there's all the necessary
“serious” reading I have to do. In
recent years, I've been judging lots of
contests, so I'm reading virtually every
book that's being published, and then
there's the reading I do connected to
reviewing and the reading I do connected to
teaching, so 80-85 percent of what I do is
serious reading. But for entertainment, I read Rolling
Stone and Molly's fashion magazines.
The great secret, you know, of Conde Nast fashion
magazines and a lot of magazines is that they pay
really good writers to write for them, and so you
have somebody like Francine Prose writing the
fiction reviews. Francine is someone I've
known and admired for a long time, and it's
always fun to know what she has to say about new
novels. But I read those for entertainment the
way I read Rolling Stone. I like fashion magazines for their edginess. There's a
whole new generation of pseudo-edgy magazines out
there looking for a young, upscale market.
Another thing you find in fashion magazines is
the work of really great photographers.
There's Patrick Demarchelier, there's Avedon, Mario
Testino, Jurgin Teller; some of the
most interesting photographers are feeding
themselves by doing fashion photography.
CHW: You were raised
in Fresno, went East, then returned to the West. Do
you think you have a West Coast sensibility? And what
is a West Coast sensibility?
DSJ: I'm not sure what a West
Coast sensibility is, but I'll try to
answer the best I can. I first went to
graduate school in Iowa, then taught for a
couple of years at Oberlin College, so I kept
moving East. Then I taught for ten years at
Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. But even though I
was living in the East, I was writing a lot
about the west coast, especially in the book
called The Shore. The
long sequence in The Shore
called "Of the Remembered" has
several of its sections set either in the
West or in the Sierras. One passage is set in
Yosemite. But alternate parts of that are set
in the East Coast, on the, sort of, Atlantic
shore. The sense of the book The
Shore was that both shores were
being worked in that book. It's
interesting because even when I lived in the
East, people thought of me as having a kind
of West Coast sensibility: something actually
Anthony Hecht once said; he said that it had
to do with the way light happened in my
poems. He said to me, “Why don't
you use David Hockney for your cover next
time?” I didn't do it because it
was typical of a sense of how I was being
seen by other poets. Even in The
Shore, but most especially beginning
with No Heaven, the
landscapes were often European landscapes. I
wanted that kind of displacement. I wanted
the poems and the speakers in the poems to be
on recognizable but not completely familiar
ground, so the reader would be on somewhat
unfamiliar ground. And then in Terraces
of Rain, since that was a
collaborative project with Antoine Predock,
the architect and painter, all of those poems
were set in Italy as we had conceived it when
we were both at the American Academy. And
then in The Red Leaves of Night,
some of the poems still have European locales there. So I think
that people think of me as having a West
Coast sensibility, which, in poetry, really
has to do with a sense of permission. It
comes out of their understanding of a
writer's working with a kind of freedom that
can stand parallel to but outside
what's, in America, an East Coast
literary tradition. Donald Allen's New
American Poetry is filled with poets
of both coasts and a sort of alternative to
the “academic” poetry of the time.
Poetry, more than
anything else, addresses those things that most resolutely defy
being spoken of.
There's always a strong counter-current
in American poetry. Sometimes, calling
someone a West Coast writer is meant to be
pejorative: it's meant to say
they're not serious, they don't
work hard enough, but I think it's also
sometimes said with a kind of envy.
What's entertaining, of course, is that
half the people you meet in L.A. are from
Manhattan, and they've all come out to
escape that. More than anything else, I think
the West-Coast sensibility has to do with a
sense of permission that writers feel to work
outside of the normal channels or forms, of
literary pressure that I think is felt,
actually, much more profoundly felt living in
the East. Certainly I felt it far more
profoundly there.
CHW:
You've lived in L.A. for 13 years now. How do you
think the L.A. poetry "scene" has changed
since you arrived? Or do you give any thought to that
sort of thing?
DSJ: Oh, absolutely.
I'm one of the people who's always
believed that L.A. had a strong poetry scene.
When I arrived 13 years ago, a lot of
interesting, hard-working, dedicated poets were
already here. I think San Francisco tends to get
more East-Coast attention, especially as so many
of the Bay Area poets have aligned themselves
with language poetry, and before that with the
St. Mark's School; and because a number of
those people came out from New York to live in
San Francisco and in Bolinas obviously, but for
me, Los Angeles has always been fiercely
independent: the poets here developed a kind of
strong, quirky, idiosyncratic voice that I think
is really unique. And I think that not enough has
been written about it critically. It's just
one of those fascinating events that
nobody's quite picked up on. I think the
change, in fact, is that more and more people
from the outside are aware of the writers here,
in addition to the fact that people know
Carol Muske and I are here. What's important
to me is that people know that there are all
these other fabulous poets here: you're
here, Suzanne Lummis, Stephen Yenser is here,
Ralph Angel, Ceclia Wolloch, Molly Bendall,
Stephanie Brown in Orange County, Michael Ryan.
It's something that people are slowly
becoming aware of, and yet, there are people who
hold on to their clich�s desperately, because if
they have to think anew about it, it becomes very
dangerous.
CHW: Do
you think there is an L.A. aesthetic in poetry?
DSJ: I think there's
a sense of humor; I think there's a kind of
irony that's wicked and, to me, tremendously
entertaining. I think there's a sense of
self-consciousness that's properly
post-modern. And I think that there's also
an incredible sense of impassionment and that,
oddly enough, the irony doesn't lead to
poems that are incredibly jaded. In fact, it
seems to me that all of the irony is very
forgiving and that the poems seem really generous
towards the failings and foibles of the world
around them.
CHW: Do
you see yourself as having an L.A. aesthetic?
DSJ: Only in as much as I take pleasure in the poems of the poets
doing that. Obviously, it's hard to
generalize because everyone is doing something so individual. But I take a real sense of solace in
the community itself. I think that,
stylistically, I'm just lost in my own sense
of conflict of today from poem to poem and book
to book. But I have to say that the idea of humor
in poetry has begun to interest me a lot. I
don't know if I can do it. I don't know
if I'll ever try to do it. But I want to try
to write about it because I think it's
something that allows—I think it's true
in drama, too— it's a sense of that
Beckett-like dark humor I like seeing in poems.
There's been more a sort of vaudevillian
humor of someone like Jim Tate, but both Jim Tate
and Charles Simic are very dark at the edges,
obviously, and that really interests me. Tate, Simic, and Mark Levine, who is really
interesting; it's the darkness of the humor in
those poems.
CHW:
Your poems are full of gorgeous images and objects. I
always think of "The Man with the Yellow
Gloves" as an archetypal David St. John
character. Did you ever want to be a painter or any
kind of visual artist?
DSJ: Yeah, I did. My
father's sister was a really
wonderful painter. It just happened that, as I was
growing up, my focus was really language; and
although I really loved paintings, I didn't
have any really serious exposure until I was
already writing and playing music. At given times
in my life, I spent a lot of time around visual
artists and have been able to indulge my love of
the visual arts. Some people know this, some
don't: when I was going into the PhD program
at the University of Iowa, one of the areas I was
going into was art criticism. Then I suddenly got
offered the job at Oberlin, so I took the job
instead of going into the art program.
David St. John on what we should ask ourselves as poets.
One of the
things I wanted to do was write about the art
criticism of poets. All the way across history,
poets have written about paintings, and it's
been a really wonderful body of literature.
But paintings have always been an important part
of my life. Looking at paintings is an
experience, just as profoundly engaging a kind of
experience as meeting a new person. And the kind
of opulence, in terms of the poems, the beauty of
the images, is all there to provide a kind of
context and sense of both visual and aural
pleasure as the poem gets under the skin of the
reader. It's one of the ways to seduce the
reader into what might be sort of a starker
revelation in the poem.
CHW:
You've mentioned that you used to play in bands. Is
music still important to you? What music are you
listening to these days? And does it influence your
poetry?
DSJ: Yeah, it's still
really important to me. And, you know, we both
came of age at a time when singer/songwriters,
people like Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Tim
Buckley were important voices, when rock
musicians were important lyric voices. Getting to
know Jackson Browne is kind of interesting
because he won't call himself a poet. He
says he's a songwriter, and he's very
careful to make that distinction. I think most of
the rest of us would say that he's also a
terrific poet. But I
think the music I listen to now is tremendously
eclectic. I've always loved both classical
music and jazz, but I've also always kept up
with everything from The Clash to Mary Lou
Lord—and I love Mary Lou Lord—but
lately, in the past few years, and partly because
of Molly's influence, I've been
listening a lot more to world music. She just
discovered this amazing Indian musician named Jai Uttal, and he's just off-the-charts... amazing,
plays sort of everything; and his most recent
release, which I've been trying to buy for
people and can't find anywhere, is called
Shiva Station. Music has always been essential to
my sense of what matters in poetry. I think the
single most important aspect of poetry is the
music of the language. Poems persuade by the
music of the language, the music of what poems
say, not the content of what they say because
poems aren't essays, they're not
arguments. Poems persuade insidiously. From
within. And so different rhythms of
consciousness, different rhythms in music help me
think about different rhythms of that insidious
persuasion in poems as well.
CHW:
Your poems seem to evoke a world that's far
removed from late 20th century Los Angeles. I've
heard it referred to as fin de si�cle, as
decadence, and so forth…
DSJ: That's very
conscious. I really have tried to meld together a
sense of something that sometimes seems out of
this time with something, some detail that's
contemporary so that there's this kind of
double vision. That's something that I like
a lot. I like echoing especially 19th century
symbolist poetry and, to some extent,
expressionist painting. I love 20th century
French surrealism, which has gone way out of
fashion, but not quite as out of fashion as
French symbolist poetry. I like all that rich,
luxuriant, out-of-fashion stuff, and I like
trying to make it up-to-date and make it…
well, try to bring (what I see as the risk of
bringing) those writers and artists into a 20th
century context and bring it into a confrontation
with 20th century landscape and experience. I
love a bit by the British poet Geoffrey Hill
called "Mercian Hymns." What goes on in Mercian
Hymns is exactly that conflation of two different
times. Like my poem, "Troubadour:" On
one hand it's an ancient troubadour and, on
the other hand, they're sitting at a Santa
Monica restaurant, waiting for the valets to
bring their cars. Putting together those
anachronistic things seems to me one of the most
interesting kinds of things to do.
CHW: For
many years now, there's been talk about the shrinking
audience for poetry. Do you think it's true
that the audience has shrunk? And do you think
it's true that the main audience for poetry consists of other
poets?
DSJ: Neither of those
statements is true. There's a wonderful
essay by Donald Hall where he debunks those
myths. He talks about how those statements are
cyclical—how every 15 years some new person
arises to say, “poetry is dead, poetry is
irrelevant, poetry has no audience, and the only
people who read poetry are the poets.” And
if you look—and Hall does this: he pulls out
the publishing statistics and shows that more
books of poetry are being published than ever in
the history of poetry, and more copies of those
books are being sold. And if people believe that
MFA students are actually reading poetry,
that's a nice idea, but it's not true.
For one thing, they only have the money to buy a
few books, and they're not the ones buying
those books. My sense is that it tends to be an
audience of people between 30 and 50 who are
buying poetry books. Certainly that's what
I've seen in the last 10 or 15 years. The
audience of poetry is wildly various, and
there's a solid audience for every kind of
poetry from formal poetry to language poetry. It also cuts across all kinds of demographics.
It's really boring to see these new cultural
critics come out every 10 or 15 years and lie
about this. I was really grateful to Donald Hall for
taking on this kind of misinformation.
CHW: Why
should people read your poems? What do your poems
offer the reader?
DSJ: I don't think
anybody should do anything they wouldn't
want to do, but if they had some interest in
reading poems,… I mean, there are a lot of
poets whom I'd suggest they read before
I'd suggest they read me. I think
there's a kind of psychological urgency to
the poems. I think there's a confrontation
of overtly sexual concerns in the poems that they might not find in other poems. I'd
just suggest reading a few poems, and if the
experience is pleasurable, then read more. But I
would never try to justify to anyone what I
wrote. I've never tried to persuade anyone
that what I've written matters. If it matters to
people, fabulous. But if it doesn't matter
to them, then I'd rather they go do
something that does matter to them, whether
it's going to a museum or playing pool in a
bar. Whatever matters to them is fine with me.
CHW: Do
you have anything in particular that you want your
poems to do?
DSJ: Yeah, I want the
poems to give the reader an experience, an
artistic experience—and because it's a
poem, the experience is an engagement of
language—that is unlike any experience
they've had. I want the way in which their
brain has to move, the way their consciousness
has to work to move through the poem, to be
somewhat disconcerting and new because
that's how I think we learn as people. I
want the poems to open up a sense of possibility
to people.
CHW:
People are always interested in where poets get their
ideas for poems. Do you have any helpful hints?
DSJ: Well, I buy all my
ideas from other poets. I have a lot of young
poets on retainer, and I just call them up and
say, “It's time for a new book, give me
a couple good ideas.” No, I think that to
some extent all of those things take you by
surprise, that after you've written a
certain number of years, you know that you could
pick any “topic” and write a pretty
decent poem. You have enough facility to do that,
but, at least for me, that holds no interest. I
want the poems to be “about” things
that take me by surprise, things I don't
even know I'm concerned about until the act
of writing reveals to me that it's something
I'm thinking about. A lot of it has to do
with how people treat each other and interact.
I've always been obsessed in the poems with
how men and women engage with each other
socially, sexually, psychologically. That's
really the terrain I find most compelling.
CHW:
Where do you see your work heading in the next few
years?
DSJ: I want to keep trying
to do things I've never done. I want to
write a book-length poem. I want to write a sequence of
pseudo-sonnets. Not real sonnets; they'll
all be sonnets that are maimed in some way.
They'll be sonnets that are limping in some
significant way—a sequence like that. To keep
doing things that seem to me provocative. I
don't know exactly what that will be, but
I've got a lot of ideas that I think will be
fun to try. And sometimes I try these things and
they're just bloody awful, so I say, well,
that's too bad, and then go on. But if I
knew what I was going to be writing, I probably
wouldn't bother, so it's still that
sense of discovering what I'm going to be
doing. I have some really vague ideas about the
shape of books that I want to do. I like to think
of books as books and not just as collections of
poems. It's more interesting to me that way.
CHW:
You're married to a very fine poet, Molly Bendall.
What's it like for a poet to be married to a poet? Do
you help each other with your work, or do you keep
hands off?
DSJ: The way we've
worked it out is that we work on the poems very
independently until we think they're finished,
and then, at that point, we'll show each
other what we've been working on. Usually,
then, we're able to at least be the first
reader for each other, and if there's
something particularly embarrassing or stupid, we
can catch it before it goes into the world. But I
think we're actually very hands off with
each other's work and get involved only when
one of us asks the other, when we have a
particular concern. When I write essays or
reviews, I always ask Molly to read them because
she's good at having me cut back on my sort
of natural extravagance in talking about things.
So that's always helpful.
CHW: Has
your daughter Vivienne affected your poetry in any
way that you could specify?
DSJ:
That's an interesting question. I think that
she's influenced the work in this way: her birth
sent me back to a lot of old English poetry,
anonymous poetry and ballads. It really sent me
back to this sense of language as song. W. S.
Merwin gave her this really beautiful book of
poems for children. When she was young, Molly
would read poems to her from that book, and it
reminded me of the kind of elemental urgency and
the simple beauty of those poems. Obviously, a
lot of those poems are also dark and filled with ravagement. But I mean things like old sea
shanties and ballads and the child ballads and
things like that. It was really fun for me. In a
practical way, what her birth changed is that I
now work very late at night instead of during the
day because the day is filled with other
concerns, and the night is when it's quiet.
CHW: We
should probably mention that David has a daughter who
is five.
DSJ: Now six.
CHW:
We're talking about a little daughter here.
DSJ: If I had a teenage
daughter, I'd never have any time to write
at all. I'd be bailing her out of jail at
all hours.
CHW:
What is the question you would most like to be asked
in an interview—something I haven't asked, which
you think is important to talk about?
DSJ: I think people need
to ask themselves, “Why in this culture does
poetry—or literary fiction, but not to the
same extent—have the marginal place it does
in the perpetuation of what we value in our
culture?” The answer might be really simple:
that as a highly material culture, what we value
are those things that perpetuate our adoration of
the material: TV, movies, things that are part of
a co-modified culture. Poetry, literature,
ballet, and opera, like religion, all have to do
with questions and issues of the soul and the
spirit. People sometimes ask, “Why is there
such a huge audience for poetry now?” I
think the answer to that is that all of those
questions of the spirit and the soul which used
to be addressed by religion, are now going
wanting. And instinctively and intuitively
they're turning to poetry, which is
reverential and devotional and celebratory of the
world and filled with faith in human beings and
the world in which they live. It seems to be no
accident that two of the biggest sellers on
Amazon.com are Rumi, for example, and Rilke, two
poets who most nakedly address matters of the
soul and the spirit. People are hungry; people
are lonely, and poetry, more than anything else, addresses those
things that most resolutely defy being spoken of. All of the things that
resist being said in our lives, poetry helps to
lure out into language. That's one of its
great values and virtues, but I think that the
place of the arts in this country is once again
beginning to suffer. The legacy of Jack and
Jackie Kennedy and the NEA and the importance of
the arts that we've enjoyed for the last 40
years is beginning to be held suspect. I think
that's always bad for culture, and American
culture is tremendously arrogant. As a young
culture, it's a punk culture in that it
doesn't want to learn from older
cultures—and that's perfectly
understandable—but we also have this
incredible fear of… let's say, in the
realm of literature, anyone who uses language too
easily and too fluently. We're still a
culture that believes in extreme reticence, and
the less said, the better. And that has a really
deep impact on all facets of our lives.
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