1. Name some writers who have affected you and how they have affected you?
I am inspired by innumerable poets of past and present, including some of the little known. E.L. Mayo, whose Collected Poems I edited after his death, is still a favorite, and among the living I enjoy many others who have not been hyped up – I don’t mention their names as I would leave out too many. As an editor of magazines and anthologies (and as a reader for publishers) I have published hundreds of writers, and not one inclusion was for any reason other than the excellence of the work. Robinson’s poem about George Crabbe says it all, how a book long neglected is worth the attention. I guess I automatically give some extra points for the neglected and take off a few for the over-rated. My awareness that the future will turn current reputations topsy-turvy gives me some welcome and amused detachment from the current scene with its vicious polarization imposed by critics who control current fashions. But their fiats are just another example of hubris, and the way our words are modified in the guts of the living will one day be beyond their control.
2. Do you read more poetry or fiction?
I read more poetry than fiction and more fiction than poetry-that’s the only way to put it – and a great deal of history, philosophy, and biography-there’ s no particular agenda. As a restless, ceaselessly browsing reader I stroll down the aisles in libraries and pluck at random. It’s a method that’ s served me as well as others are served by Oprah or the Book of the Month Club. I consume (often translations and sometimes originals, e.g., the classics found in a great anthology by Angel Flores) without noting titles or authors, though usually I’m aware (with translations) of where they came from–German, French, Scandinavian, Indian, Australian, or Greek. Recent discoveries include John Cowper Powys and a book on a death camp in France by Michel Borwicz, a book that’s inspired me not only to translate it but to write poems based on the last words of those executed by the Nazis at Drancy. Often a subject will turn into a fascination and I will be inspired, as I have been with my book of poems about Hemingway and my novel about the Lindberghs (both unpublished), to explore the little known and often darker episodes in their histories. I think part of the problem in finding publishers) for such deconstructive work is that there’s an almost conspiratorial vested interest in protecting the reputations of such iconic figures in our gallery of heroes. We don’t want to think of Ernest Hemingway shooting prisoners of war (as he did both in the Spanish Civil War and World War II) or Charles Lindbergh lying to convict an innocent man of kidnapping and murder (as he did) or gunning down the Japanese on a Pacific island when he was forbidden even to participate in combat. Both Hemingway and Lindbergh were in a very real sense war criminals, entitled to wear no uniform or partake in action, yet they happily fired away as they used their celebrity clout to evade the rules. We don’t want to acknowledge that Lindbergh’s service of the Nazis was deliberate and very influential in delaying England’s (and thus our) weighing in against Hitler. Lindbergh’s speeches were clones of Goering’s, and his grossly exaggerated distortions of German air power figures were the result of his pro-Nazi ideology. He was not a na•ve and gullible good guy, as we are supposed to believe. To have written of this and even of Anne Lindbergh’s support of THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE (Hitler’s version of natural selection, “rearranging the map of Europe”) in 1940 is to resurrect a history the highest authorities have buried very deep (deep enough to hide or destroy revelatory documents in the Library of Congress and elsewhere. It’s an interesting phenomenon-encountering a deep-seated tacit conspiracy to preserve and protect historical lies. Much of the work of our institutions-religious, governmental, military-is devoted to that agenda. Like busy little ants bureaucrats slam their CLASSIFIED stamps down, slip paper into shredders, testify with lies, and get a head start on distorting history by correcting the president’s grammar and malapropisms, a service even The New York Times provides for him. Had accurate transcripts been printed during his campaigning the election might have come out differently.
3. When did you first realize that you wanted to write creatively?
I didn’t, I just started doing it, and my addiction grew as the need for escape and seeking clarity in solitude grew. Had I not been tortured by abuse and neglect (in the orphanage, foster homes, etc.) I might have opened a bicycle shop or become a postman. Both were ambitions nurtured when I was still reading Classics Comics. I cannot claim precocity, and fully confess to a lack of talent. Like George W. Bush I owe it all to persistence. When a friend told me recently he felt like an imposter I told him there were many of us. We are bare forked creatures, frightened and tormented with fantasy. Few of us are willing, as Borges reminds us that Democritus of Abdera did, to tear out our eyes so that the spectacle of reality will not distract. Neither are we willing like Origen to castrate ourselves.
4. How do your experiences impact your writing?
A one to one relationship, inseparable. I leave nothing out, have no program or agenda other than being responsive (and responsible) to leadings, what Henry James called the donnee, what someone else called the write aboutable.
5. What was the last book you finished? Did you like it?
I’d like to say A SUITABLE BOY by Vikram Seth, which my wife Judy enjoyed, but I haven’t got to it yet. I’m sure I’d like it – I’ve loved his poems, and had the pleasure of reading with him out in Australia (and co-writing a poem). In the meantime, I’d have to list something by Jorge Amado or Wally Lamb, or Henry Roth, Toni Morrison or Janet Frame, whom I consider worthy of the Nobel. I recommended Chinua Achebe for the Nobel Prize twice, then left off when Wole Soyinka got it because I knew they would not pick another Nigerian in my lifetime (or Chinua’s). These are all recent readings or rereadings. I’ve never finished a Saul Bellow novel, and am not one of the seven people on earth who has read Finnegan’s Wake from cover to cover. (We know who they are, since they never quit bragging about the achievement.)
6. How often, and where do you write?
Pretty much any time, any place. I prefer morning solitude, and some classical music when I remember to turn the radio on. In the University of Arizona library I have a tiny room called a carrel, private as monastic solitude, but with a view of the mountains. I am very happy there, though usually I plunge into writing at home and don’t take the mile walk to the library. It’s an embarrassment of riches, having so many good places to write. On trips I usually settle down in a booth at a franchise joint, preferring Wendy’s or Burger King to McDonald’s. One word, by the way, about “retirement.” Writing was always a full-time occupation, and I don’t know how I crowded in the other distractions-editing, broadcasting, teaching. I loved those tasks too, but they made the focus and centering necessary for “creative” writing far more difficult to manage.
7. Do you have any big writing projects planned for the future?
I’d like to polish a number of novels, stories, and poetry sequences that are in my files and my head, but new work keeps crowding out those rewriting and editing tasks. >From genesis to revelation on my average poem or story can be ten minutes or thirty years. The other day I ran across a poem written in the mid-seventies and saw that it had the same concern as a poem I was working on. (William Bronk’s theme of “Trees are very big, but they are helpless.”) I merged the two in a rewrite. That is not atypical. A random passage from my chaotic notebooks when I browse in them at random can leap out demanding to be given a new frame and form. The process is obsessive, and if I could give it up I would. My doctor says that I should at this point (age seventy) rest on my laurels, but he just doesn’t get it – the existential commitment. He just wants to reduce the Angst – after all, that’s his leading. A leading is a command to follow it, be true to it, until Death intervenes. Intellectually I am aware of the futility, and more than aware that I have been kept out of the circle of the Elect, just as I was as a child, but it is my life – and like Macbeth I am in too deep to turn back.
David’s work was included in Midnight mind Number Three and Midnight Mind Number Four.
