I think it’s true that by writing poems I can see, I discover a lot more and more of what I have. But it’s difficult to talk about because I don’t mean I lose control, in a way I never lose control.  It’s the nearest way I can get to it. The writing a poem awakens what’s already in me and I know it but I don’t know it’s there.   So there are two things continually happening. I’m conscious, when I write, I’m very conscious of what I’m doing, but at the same time I’m very much vulnerable to what is being revealed. I don’t want to be just writing the poem. I want to accompany the poem that’s in me, that’s being born in me, but I don’t want to tell the poem what to be.  I just want to be available, aware, ready possessed.

                                                Flying into Winter

W.         In one of your poems you mention that Allen Ginsburg had come to tell you he was going to give up poetry because poems lie.

J.          (laughs)

W.         And you said that’s true but it’s still one of the more honest ways we have of expression. What I want to know is to be a good poet, to hit the target, do you have to adjust for your reader?

J:          Well, it’s true, but it’s also dangerous. It can become so mental. Poems really aren’t mental in a stern way. Poetry ,  as it seems to me, has more freedom to it.  That’s one thing, why I asked you, people come in and they have a list of questions… and it makes it difficult to bloom  I don’t need you to make me look good. When something starts between the two of us, and maybe gets off track, sometimes it brings out more of you and more of me. If you have it all worked out it’s hard to have the freedom that   poetry should have.

W:        Could you let me know what Pittsburg was? There is a line in A Taste of Grit and Whatever , “because Pittsburg is still tangled in him that he has a picture of God’s head torn apart by jungle roots”.

J:          Yes.

W:        How was Pittsburg for you and how did it effect you on your path to becoming a poet.

J:           Well first of all Pittsburg was to an extent, primitive.   I remember going up on the bank… Pittsburg is in a valley, and I went up   and there was a woman …free   to the waste, ..just an ordinary woman …chopping wood. It was so primitive, so different from the modern ordinary local.   Pittsburg was not a civilized place; It was better than that.  

W.        It was better than that? How?

J:           Because when you’re civilized almost everything’s hidden from you.

W:         By the codifying of manner?

J:           Well first of all it’s not so self conscious, It was a primitive kind of culture. We are all the time now weighing what we say or do or how we look, should I take off my shirt, whatever.   We’re never   real anymore, we’re modern produce, projects of how we want to address the other person. It’s hard for people to be visible when they’re that self conscious.

W:         You have spent some time in Japan.

J:          I lived there for over two years. All over.

W:        It seems to me there is an interesting tension between the civilized and tribal in Japan. How do you see their worlds?

J:           You can’t see them.   It’s what the whole culture does. Keeps you from seeing them.   They’re trying to be perfect.   So much effort to be perfect and if you’re perfect normal It’s so self conscious.

W:         It is a society that seems to be very good at the arts…

J :   ..       It’s very good at being exact but it’s so very hard I think for people there to be real. Everything is produced self consciously.   Didn’t you notice when you were there everything moved, calculated, perfect, neat, according to the rules?   ..it’s been like that for thousands of years.

W:         But I also felt that in their language and in their personalities the ambiguity left a certain amount of room.

J:           Oh, they’re perfected it. That’s what I’m trying to say. You can’t be natural if you’re being perfected, because you don’t do anything spontaneously, almost nothing in my ..opinion (in) that damn country it’s just …allow themselves to be natural.

W:        You had a Japanese wife and it sounds like a very important relationship.

J:           It was wonderful, but she was different. Her father was one of the most important people in the country, ran the country, so she had a very lovely father who allowed her to break all the rules.   She wasn’t like them.   In a way she wasn’t like a Japanese woman.   She was relaxed, and it drove her almost to craziness, to where she finally had to leave the country.

There was once an interview with a famous actor and the person interviewing was saying oh how very relaxed you are. And the actor said, “Ah but I’m not”.   The interviewer said, “Well I see you as wonderfully relaxed”. And the actor said, “I’m acting.”   That’s what the Japanese do. They imitate being relaxed.   It’s a very hard culture to live in.   Not for me because I was kind of crazy.  I broke all the rules.

W:         That is the advantage that foreigners have there. Living overseas in a number of other places did you find that was an advantage to being a foreigner? Did you find you could escape the confines of living at home.

J:           Again you don’t know if they are saying the truth or not.

W:        You were in Greece did you find you were breaking rules there?

J:           Sure. But I didn’t know how close I was going to the limit.

L:          And to you life was?  

J:           My life was being devoted to being seriously in love, not cheaply, not in a fancy way ,   but what was important to me, really important for my life, was to be really in love. Not just for 2 years then have children and to watch them grow up. I wanted something for myself. It doesn’t work for everybody in the world, but I wanted to be alive in a way that I could really experience.   Not thrills, I’m not talking about thrills. I’m not talking about having to show up in time to teach or to be here to take care of a family.

W:        Does your life feed your poetry or your poetry feed your life? Which comes first?

J:           My life. I don’t change myself for my poetry.

W:        You don’t go to live in a place to write a good poem?

J:          Never.

W:         You write about your greed. You don’t seem to be a greedy person. In what way would you say are you greedy?

J:           For my life.

W:         how, by???)

J:           The major thing for my life, starting when I was 14, was to live my life and, I could do anything but I swore to myself I would have my life. I’m really too greedy. I understand that I admire a lot of people with families but they had to pay for that.   It’s worth it, but it wasn’t worth it to me.   I always told myself I wanted first to understand the danger of compromise and to make more effort. The promise that I made to myself, while I’m still alive, and I wouldn’t give up even for a family, was to be present in my life going on. Do you know what I mean by that?

L:          Yes. What would you give up to be totally present in you’re life?

J:           Well ,   obviously I gave up almost everything comfortable, and other things that I had a chance at. I was always haunted by death.   I wasn’t afraid of it.   I didn’t blame God or whoever’s running the place, that’s the thing that I really refused to do, for all the alternatives, however nice, however clever and comfortable, wise; if it required me to not live my life. I would stop.

I stopped very early when I first started making some successes.   I stopped almost immediately, I kept on writing poetry but I wouldn’t give it to anybody for 6 or 8 years…I’ve been discovered several times in the 80’s. I just retired. I could have gone abroad.  

I’m not really a professional poet.   I don’t write poetry to make a living or to be famous. I write poetry selfishly.

W:         When you write who do you have in mind?

J:           Me.

W:        There is no audience involved?

J:           Vanity is involved.  I’m very weak, but the fact is, that’s one reason I’ve given up doing readings. I succumb so easily to vanity. And about half way back in my career I got good at it, giving readings, I was very good at it.   Did you ever get (to this/on the?) stage.   So you know that time when it’s going right. It got so I could make the man in the second row over there to make his head turn, control the audience without their knowing it, you can control the audience.   I got so good- I think- so good at it.   Others would be fine at it.   I was turning into a whore, I liked so much controlling the audience, to have them applaud, having them impressed. Isn’t it great ?. It’s controlling. That’s what happens with actors. Actors after their first success…Pretty soon their success wanes and they’re cursed for the rest of their lives.

W:        They can’t get back.

J:          Yeah…They want it . They search for it .. They’ll do anything to get back up on the stage. So I stopped

W:        You have stopped?

J:           It was hard for me to stop. I could give up almost anything else but that power that I had with my poetry, my poems and an audience, a good audience not just because I could trick the audience, but to stand with the audience, a good audience listening to you’re poems.

W:        Your poetry seems to just get finer and finer.

J:          Thank you.
W:        Maybe it’s the opposite of live readings; what you can bring to writing

J:           Of course I can’t trust myself, but I do think it’s been a very big element of my poetry; that I write my poetry for myself and not an imaginary audience.

W:        You seem to use poetry as conduits to the past, “tying knots in a string” and mentioned that Ken Kesey was using his writing as blazes…

J:          Do you wan to know what he was doing really?   He told me that when he was writing, because he used a lot of drugs, what he wrote down when he was high, were blazes. When you go into the woods and you don’t want to get lost you blaze. He said that what he wrote was to blaze, to enable him to find his way back to what he had found. It is not about what I wrote down.

W:         And you are using this to get back to Michiko?

J:           I don’t think so. It’s similar, but I think it’s true that by writing poems I can see, I discover a lot more and more of what I have. But it’s difficult to talk about because I don’t mean I lose control, in a way I never lose control.  It’s the nearest way I can get to it. The writing a poem awakens what’s already in me and I know it but I don’t know it’s there.   So there are two things continually happening. I’m conscious, when I write, I’m very conscious of what I’m doing, but at the same time I’m very much vulnerable to what is being revealed. I don’t want to be just writing the poem. I want to accompany the poem that’s in me, that’s being born in me, but I don’t want to tell the poem what to be.  I just want to be available, aware, ready possessed.

W:         You seem to focus on place, love, loss, but also you seem to not focus on some things. Is that because your not watching that particular area or because they don’t naturally flow into your poems?

J:          Tell me what you mean by that.

W:        You have lived through many eras…

J:          It started when I was six. I feel like I became myself when I was about six.

W:        That would have been in 1930 some?

J:          Something like that….

W:        There were many historical events that went on since that time….

J:           I recognized myself when I was about six.   Before that I liked the person I was, but it just doesn’t seem to be the person I became. And that started when I was about 6.

W:        You very clearly noticed that change?

J:          When I look back on it, very much.

W:        Do you consider yourself a classicist in your writing?

J:          I don’t go for categories.

W:        I’m trying to understand why the periods of time don’t exist in your poems. They are almost like little capsules that exist in any time.

J:          My mind, my spirit, have always been constantly exploring. except that sounds pretentious.   It seems to me I grew through a lot in my life, up until now, and I’m curious about being this age I’ve arrived at. It’s more unknown than anything I have known before. Everything is so full of blur and change and all things go that way and grow.   I don’t know what to do. What being a hundred years is.   I’m interested you see. I don’t know if I’ll live or die.   This is different than anything else. I don’t know if it’s adequate.   (yet?)

W:        And at some point you’ll know whether it is or not? It seems a difficult question.

J:           As I dissolve, as all my faculties wane maybe then I will discover a different version of myself as has always happened in the past.   But I have a hunch I’ve gone too far now. I’m probably not equal to it   . Even when I was a child, each period I’ve come to, I felt I knew  well. Now there’s nothing familiar to measure death by.  Old age; I’m interested to see if I can find out.

W:        This is what you are working on in the poem, “Refusing Heaven”?

J:          Oh no.

W:         You write that you can’t give up your life for what someone has found in religion.

J:          Well, I don’t mind religion if it doesn’t lessen me.   My experience with the way religion is usually taught…is the reduction of things. Religion has a certain ambition and it is largely to reduce your consciousness to one or a very few wonderful accomplishments. A waste of your life. I don’t see why we should do that. I think if in religious terms; I would like to believe by knowing ourselves may God   expand or break or fail or whatever it does. But I don’t want to learn how   to imitate the official idea of what I should be.

W:         That recalls the ending of  the poem, “Bring in the Gods”.

Then you are at peace, she says. I am not at peace,

 I tell her. I want to fail. I am hungry for what I am becoming.

What will you do? she asks. I will continue north,

carrying the past in my arms, flying into winter .  

What do you want to fail?

J:          I want to not yet understand all of this.

W:        You want to not yet understand all of this?

J:          Yes. When you understand all of it you don’t grow anymore. You come to a blank part. I want all of it.

W:         You want all of it and you want to fail?

J:           That’s how you get to know the other part because what’s dangerous is that you learn how to do the thing. Maybe your finally a way to make peace with God. I don’t want to make peace with God. I want to go on from there. If it’s awful, it’s terrible, it’s torture, I want to know. And I don’t want to be content. The minute I feel content I stop becoming what I can become.

W:         And of the last line “Flying into winter”, what does that mean? Getting older?

J:          Yes. It means going to more.

W:        Going to more austere?

J:          Doesn’t have to be. It has to be exceeding.   When you do something and you learn to do it well, you’re  in danger, because when you do it well you stop growing. That’s one of the things I’ve resisted about god.   I don’t want to be happy in that way. I don’t want to be content. I don’t want to believe. I want to be able just to grow.

W:        And yet you are a very happy person?

J:          I am , I’m very happy, but not entirely happy. Michiko died. The other most important love affair of my life ceased. Not just Michiko but the woman I still know.

W:        Linda Gregg?

J:           Yes.

W:        She said to you, “A white horse is not a white horse”.

J:           Yes. If he’s lucky he gets smart. That means it’s not the name it’s the thing that the name is. You say “A white horse”, that’s an image in your brain of something that’s not in your brain. The image is what’s in your brain.   It is not what you’re conscious of having. Does that make sense?

W:        Yes, though if we remove these concepts that  we use to deal with everything, order our lives by, and communicate with then not only do we not have a white horse we don’t have a horse. The horse becomes something in the field that we no longer have either.

J:          Exactly. Of course it forces you to have a whole other experience of existence. You don’t turn it into something that’s stamped. There isn’t such a thing as a horse.

W:         Or a poet.

J:           Or anyone who’s smart. If you think it’s one thing you’re impoverishing yourself.

W:        The piano has music in it only when it’s played.

J:           Yes.

W:         Does it want to be played?

J:          No.

W:         Does the piano exist to be played?

J:           The machine doesn’t care. The thing you hit to make noise, it doesn’t care. It doesn’t care if you play well or badly. It’s us that gives it value.   Piano’s are just machines. Do it the right way it comes alive. The object doesn’t care.

W:        Does the hand care when it caresses a beautiful woman?

J:          That’s an interesting question. No. And a piano doesn’t reject us, ever.

W:        Even if it’s only projection, which it might all be, sometimes my piano responds to me and other times is more difficult.

J:           That’s you inventing something. Yes. It’s nice.

W:        When my hand is doing something it likes I can’t find the point where that is.

W:        So where do you find consciousness residing?

J:          In me.

W:        Me? Here we are back with the white horse? Me means Jack Gilbert?

J:          Inside me. Deeper. The brain, but the whole body.  

I’m not really a professional poet. Most poets are , it’s sort of insulting to say, most poets are making a living. To do that they usually teach poetry. They don’t do it because they love poetry. They mostly do it after a while to feed their families or to satisfy their vanity. But it’s a professional thing they are doing.   I like thinking of poetry as a love affair. A great deal of my poetry has never been printed.

W:        You don’t want to print it?

J:           I’m indifferent. I don’t write poetry to be celebrated. I don’t do it, basically, for money. I write poetry whether I  publish it or not, because I’m in love. And a lot of poets hate it after awhile, poetry, because after you get to be 25, 35, pretty soon you don’t have any poems anymore. You have to turn out what looks like poems, but the nature of things is that it’s extraordinarily hard to fake. They all write poems. They turn them out. They know all the rules, but the magic is gone.   It’s not their fault. It’s like, “Why does a woman’s looks change?” It’s not   her fault.   That’s the way we ’re built.

W:        How do you work on a poem?

J:          First I have to have a poem. I don’t go to the desk and sit down and say I’m going to do six poems today. Basically I work with the poems I have, that come to me.

W:        Sometimes you sit with an idea and let it unfold?

J:          Oh, sure. But I mean it’s not a business.

W:        And how do you know when your poems are done?

J:          I know! A poet should know.

W:        And you go back to them a year later and you say this is still done or you some times move it around a little bit?

J:          Oh, some die ,  even. And it’s almost impossible for me to read a poem over without changing it a little bit because that’s my way of writing. I don’t get the idea and them make it nicer and nicer and nicer.   If you saw my poems you’d see they’re written over and over.

W:        You don’t make it nicer and nicer?

J:          Not essentially. No.   If it has flaws I’ll work it out. But what I’ll usually do is to make it more and more alive.   More and more the poem I was hoping to have, that I was going to have.

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