An interview by Tom Devaney and Oliver Brossard

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 2003 by Rakosi, Carl

Much as I find anti-Semitism disturbing and evil, I have to add that I am slightly uneasy about evaluating poetry on the basis of its subject matter. Obviously there's a limit to how offensive a poem can be, but short of that, it's simply impossible to disregard a poem's aesthetic merits or to what extent you can disregard them. If you try doing that, you wind up judging a poem by its social effect. I haven't been able to figure out how to solve this dilemma. Maybe it's not solvable and one simply has to steer a prudent course. It's aesthetic's subservience and obligation to humanity.

TD: It's paradoxical, considering Pound's many friendships and relationships with people who were Jewish.

CR: I doubt whether he had many friends who were Jewish. His contact with Zukofsky, for instance, was mostly by correspondence and they were not friends, and his visit with Ginsberg in Italy was purely literary and they did not become friends.

TD: The other day we were also talking about Groucho Marx's letters. What are your thoughts about the letters between Groucho and T. S. Eliot?

CR: Those letters are interesting and surprising. I wouldn't have thought Eliot, the anti-Semite, would have wanted to have anything to do with a Jew. But people are not that uncomplicated. The other side of Eliot was that he loved burlesque and comedy. We know from his letters to Conrad Aiken that when they were students at Harvard, they used to hang out at burlesque houses. In a couple of letters to Aiken, Eliot knocked off a couple of rollicking, ribald burlesque-style poems. So the chances are that when Eliot thought of Groucho, he didn't see him as a Jew but as a burlesque comedian who had perfected his routines to such a fine art that Eliot considered himself a lesser artist and was eager to meet him personally. "It would be a great honor," he wrote. Groucho, on his part, wrote as if there was nothing unusual about a great poet and a comedian writing to each other as equals.

TD: There's the story about when they met and Groucho wanted to talk about The Waste Land and Eliot wanted to talk about Duck Soup.

CR: Yes, that's interesting. We don't think of comedians as intellectuals, but Shakespeare's view of the comedian-clown was accurate-they're ultra-quick in their perceptiveness.

TD: One writer also included in The Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature, which you had out the other day, is S. J. Perelman. He wrote a lot of the famous screenplays for the Marx Brothers' movies and was a keen satirist. What are your thoughts on Perelman?

CR: Well, pretty much the same thing. Perelman wrote on a very elegant level. He was very precise. Too precise and elegant for my taste, too much of a stylist. You can't breathe in such an atmosphere.

TD: Your work is also included in the recent The Norton Anthology.

CR: Yes, John Felstiner and the other editors did a great job of showing the wide range of writing in so many different genres and styles.

OB: Have you thought a lot about what it means to be a Jewish-American writer?