An interview by Sarah Kanning

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 2005 by Kanning, Sarah

SARAH KANNING: You've been at work on a new collection of poems. Is it too early to talk about that, or would you be willing to comment on directions your poetry has been going in?

LIAM RECTOR: I've recently finished a book of poems, The Executive Director of the Fallen World, so this is a good time to speak. One thing I've noticed recently, in particular, is how much my current work is committed prosodically to the three-line stanza, which I envision as a tube through which things pass with a centrifugal motion and force, much as water passes through a simple gardenhose with water rushing towards the green world, or through a fire-hose with water making its way towards the fire, for instance. Some of this I learned from A. R. Ammons, in books such as Sphere. It's different from the looser associative vortextual and montage forms I used to so much work with and within (the school of "ellipticism" Stephen Burt has written interestingly about). I love the simplicity, the thru-line, and the sheer propulsion of the triadic stanza, as I've practiced it consistently in the new book.

I also notice that I have substantially walked away from ingenuity of image towards what I would call more "pure voice." I'll sacrifice or add anything that will contribute to the voice (which I also associate with the musics and rhythms) of any poem.

And since I faced several potentially fatal illnesses for a time, I'm now much more intent upon emotion and emotional integrity and thru-line in poems.

I taught with Henri Cole recently at Bennington and we were astonished, given our very different aesthetics, about how much we agreed about the place of emotion in poems. How to put it there, how to move it, and what the enormous consequences are when it's there and what the great poverties and failures are when it's absent.

I don't like the scent or sounds of poetry that seems like mere "writing." After being interested in and even defending so-called "Language" poetry for some time, I find myself now detesting it and its pernicious influence on younger poets. It seems to me it's become a kind of instant Kool-Aid avantgarde pretense and a dead-end, aesthetically.

There are interesting "Language" poets we could all name-Anne Lauterbach, Michael Palmer, Bob Perelman, Lyn Hejinian, and a few others-whose work is accomplished and realized within an aesthetic that is by now definable and retains powerful parameters, even if almost all of it has by now well lost its original suggestiveness. Most of what's now rightly called "Language" poetry debases the currency and legacy of its main modern precursors: Stein, Ashbery, and Creeley. It's B-O-R-I-N-G.

The better emerging poets now have chewed on it, absorbed its moment, digested it, defecated, and moved well beyond it.

I always somehow come back to voice and music. I come back to Rilke's "need to speak," which invariably creates any reader's consequent need to listen. Voice is wonderfully personal, without being a high school display of conditioned jejune "personality," and voice (real voice) is always somehow importantly impersonal, allowing a reader to read for his or her self, without the suffocating need to confront any poet's neurotic need for being liked or for approval. The need for approval is a tragic flaw in a leader. All writers worth reading are leaders to their readers, while servants at the same time.

Character is smarter, deeper, more imaginative, and character goes farther than personality. Character is voice and voice character.

SK: Would you be, willing to say more, about how those illnesses affected your writing and how you see or approach your writing?

LR: In the '90s I had a heart attack one October, followed quickly by a quadruple bypass, and then months later in January I found I had third-stage colon cancer. (Stage four is death.) As the fiction writer Alice Mattison said to me at the time, my life was suffering from an excess of plot. So I was literally laid up for a while, and put the heart stuff on the backburner while I fought the cancer headon, with simultaneous chemotherapy and radiation. My two main battle cries then: Fight to live; prepare to die. I've since walked out of those forests and back into good health.

In any case, in those days and nights when my chances of living were about 20% at one point, I had many afternoons and hours to lie there and think about what had been and what was then important in my life. And all the poems I'd memorized kept coming back to me. Memorization is a kind of key. Galway Kinnell once said that until you've memorized a poem you really don't have it, that it hasn't really penetrated to the deepest layers of your consciousness. I think he's completely right. I don't have "Four Quartets" whole in memory so I can recite the entire thing, but when I listen to Eliot reading it on a recording I always know what line is coming next, so great poems always fire many tracer-bullets into the tracer-bullet of our memory, into what it retains and why it retains it.