An interview by Tom Devaney and Oliver Brossard

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

TD: You took a master's in Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania and then worked most of your life in that field. How did social work affect your ability or desire to write?

CR: It didn't reduce my desire to write but in the end, after I was married and especially after I had my first child, it made it impossible. I couldn't do both. Social work requires intensive concentration and I would have had to do my thinking and writing at night. It was too much and I had to stop writing. It was agonizing to stop and became tolerable after a few years only when I stopped all reading of poetry as well as writing it.

OB: You said that you insisted on keeping separate your social work and poetry. Why was that so important?

CR: Because when you're doing social work you don't want to be thinking as a poet. You have to be thinking as a social worker, which means that you have to be totally practical, literal, observant, identified with the client's needs always and his psychology and not your own, and be thinking all the time of how to help him with his problem.

OB: How did your social beliefs percolate in your work?

CR: Well, it was a part of me so I guess they just came out naturally.

TD: One of the things I admire in your work is the way you handle social subject matter, especially in the "Americana" poems. They have a lot of grace and humor, but also some overt political content. Can you talk about some of the difficulties and possibilities of writing this kind of poetry?

CR: Well it's very hard to do because social issues are always moral issues and the moral point with which you're trying to move the reader is one he's already full of, so if you're going to rise above literary journalism and move him emotionally, you can't attack the subject directly. You have to come up with some new way to look at it, some new way to express it so that it will come as a fresh, transmuted experience. Some poets have had a powerful enough imagination to do that, but not many. The one time I tried the direct approach, it didn't work to my satisfaction. I was left with a poem that was not bad, but was not good enough either. In addition to the imagination, one has to be able to find the elements in the social issue which can be universalized. That's tough going. A different approach, which came to me naturally, was satire. This worked for me for social subjects and, even better, for political subjects. I remember when I wrote my first social poem, Zukofsky strongly disapproved. That was not me, he said; I was a lyric poet. At the time, I thought he might be right. But satire came easily to me and it was fun to do, but not as emotionally fulfilling as my other work. My heart, I guess, is with gravitas.

TD: It seems that some of your most overtly political poems are also some of your most utterly straightforward. In "To a Non-political Citizen" you write,

You choose your words too carefully.

You are afraid of being called agitator.

Every man is entitled to his own anger,

It's guaranteed in the constitution.