An interview by Tom Devaney and Oliver Brossard

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

One of my favorite Rakosi stories concerns Carl as a young poet-in his twenties in the '20s-going unannounced into the offices of The Little Review to meet the editor Jane Heap. A trusted friend from Wisconsin named Margery Latimer told Carl that she had "heard" that Ms. Heap, "liked to meet young, unknown writers and just talk with them, really." Carl said it was the "really" in his friend's story that had convinced him. To put this story into its crucial context, it's important to remember that at the time Ms. Heap was publishing Joyce's Ulysses serially along with new work by Yeats, Pound, Eliot, among others. Carl writes in his Collected Prose:

But how do you do this sort of thing? I didn't know anyone who knew her. Do you call in advance? No, I didn't have enough confidence for that. Margery kept reassuring me with an impish smile that all you had to do was walk in on her, that other young poets had done it, and that I was exactly the kind of person Jane Heap had in mind . . .

Apprehensive, I climbed the circular staircase one afternoon to The Little Review office, which was then in the Village. It was dark in the hallway. At one end on the first landing was a small white name-card. The Little Review, and a push button under it. I rang the bell, there was silence for a moment, then the door opened and a pudgy figure appeared in a red velvet smoking jacket, smoking a small cigar, the face very round, the hair bobbed to look mannish. For a moment there was an astonishing resemblance to Oscar Wilde. It was Jane Heap.

This startling appearance, for some reason, at once put me at ease. I simply gave her my name and she invited me in. It was not an office at all but an apartment she shared with Margaret Anderson. She was pleasant, served tea, and we talked, she as to a fellow writer. I found myself stimulated and was not lacking for words. I remember our conversation as lively and straightforward. At the end, she said, "I suppose you brought something with you," and I said, "Yes," and pulled out a batch of poems from my coat pocket. She read them closely, thought for a few moments and then said, "We'll take these."

In many ways, Carl Rakosi had arrived. He began to write poetry a number of years earlier, first influenced by Wallace Stevens and later by William Carlos Williams. But for various reasons, which included his career as a social worker, his young family, and mixed feelings about the relevance of poetry, Rakosi stopped writing for nearly thirty years, between the years 1941 and 1967. Critic Robert Buckeye has aptly described this period saying that, "To be the poet we know, [Rakosi] had to give up poetry."

I owe my knowledge of Rakosi to Allen Ginsberg, who suggested I read some of Rakosi's poems. I confess, I did not begin to truly appreciate Carl's work until a few years later when I discovered his "Americana" series. The poems have a variety of voices and characters, which give them their great colloquial bite.

Though his reputation is largely based on his association with the Objectivists (and my own interests lie mostly with his "Americana" poems and what Robert Creeley calls Rakosi's "ungainsayable plainsong"), it is noteworthy that Rakosi says his favorite of his own works are his "meditative poems," which open his Collected Poems with the title (borrowed from Psalms) "Lord, What Is Man?"