Donald Revell: An interview

Tod Marshall: You've spoken of a "lack of generosity" as a failing point for some poets and poems. Who among the moderns do you see as least generous and why would you dub them so?

Donald Revell: The modernist enterprise is fundamentally ungenerous because it is conceived in opposition to time. And since time is where we live, is what everything we do is made of, setting up shop contra time is explicitly ungenerous. I find myself moved by how several of the moderns became post-moderns, sort of understood that their original idea of time as degenerative mode, time as destroyer, as chaos, us unmaker of civilization, needed to change. Ronald Bush's book on Eliot talks about this a lot, how the Eliot of The Waste Land is a very different creature from the Eliot of Four Quartets because Four Quartets moves toward an affirmation of time. April is not the cruelest month; there is no such thing as a cruel month. Whose ruins are they and who says they're fragments? To say the word fragment itself is to imagine a preexisting whole, and what was that and why are we privileging that which does not exist over that which does?

Stevens I find, because of his insistence that art provide durable forms of happiness and pleasure, ungenerous. I think he's so fundamentally disappointed with the world that he overprivileges art and, in doing so, is ungererous to what actually happens. And I believe he realizes this in his later poems. What makes Stevens's later poems his best is the fact that they confront the failure, the parsimony, of his attitude towards change and the world.

On the other hand, Williams understood that time is a mess, the world is a mess, and therefore time and the world are simultaneous. To affirm anything real, whatever it is, whether it's a painting or a piece of broken glass in the gutter, is to affirm time. Williams is generous to the medium that includes all media. It's in useless opposition to time that Stevens and Eliot take themselves out of the creative, i.e., the generative, genital realm. Eliot is an uncreative writer. Stevens, until late, is an uncreative writer because he abjected the very medium in which creativity occurs. It's like saying, "I love to study fish, but only when they're out of water."

T.M.: And The Cantos?

Revell: If you read The Cantos you can see a progressive change. Pound is in hell when he opposes time. The first movement of The Cantos, which Pearlman calls "the inferno cantos," is hell because of Pound's attitude toward time. And as the poems go along they reach Paradiso, they reach paradise which is a paradise of the affirmation of time-in The Pisan Cantos he looks out of the cage and says, "O Moon my pinup/ chronometer." That's when he gets it, that time is all right, and then he can go on to write those beautiful Drafts and Fragments. "I cannot make it cohere; i.e., it coheres all right." It was a modernist fantasy that order could somehow be imposed upon reality, when in fact reality always imposes order of its own, and if we fail to see as much, that's our problem. Pound is happy in the later cantos because he loves time. Time works for him; he understands it as a benign, loving process, and that's where Eliot was beginning to arrive in Four Quartets, understanding that eternity exists only because at certain points it intersects the temporal.

T.M.: Certainly someone who changed her work over the course of her entire career, who revised incessantly, is Marianne Moore; Marianne Moore was very resistant to the notion of finishing the poem, of putting a final layer of finish on it. How do you read her? How does she fit in?

Revell: I like her mind better than her poems. I think she was trapped because she was such a counter of syllables. She never trusted her lines to duration. She had a musician's heart but a sculptor's craft.

T.M.: The matrix was made before the music came into being.

Revell: Yes. She never was trusting in that way. I think there is something self-mutilated about Marianne Moore. I like the idea of her better than I like any of her poems simply because all the poems panic and fall back onto number, onto counting, onto some sort of sculpted-however eccentric, however unique-form of aesthetic.

T.M.: Do you see her use of quotations as a generous invitation to enter the poem or as an exclusionary act?

Revell: I like the fact that she is willing to find and understand that art is more finding than it is making. I think a lot of what differentiates postmodernism from modernism is this understanding that mostly we find things because if you say that you find your poem then you've already said that time is where it happened. Anyone who finds anything finds it in time. So Marianne Moore, like Joseph Cornell, has this trouvere mentality that is wonderful. But then they put it into boxes. They somehow panic at the critical moment and seek to contain. Marianne Moore containing it through her numbers, counting syllables; Cornell literally containing it in boxes; whereas you get someone like a Rauschenberg or a Jasper Johns and he's not interested in containment. Just put it out there, put it on the floor, tack it to the canvas.