An interview by Sarah Kanning

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

Some writers are outsiders, some are insiders, some take no sides, some are getting split open by the many sides, and some move through the porous, iron, and ever-moving membranes and manacles that constitute for any historical moment what the inside and the outside are. The slow one now will later be fast, etc.

Anyone who's ever been an outsider wouldn't wish that absence of communion and sympathy upon anyone (witness Richard Hugo's humanity in having come out of his wilderness). It's usually the preening insiders who so toy with the term and who are all too anxious to hoist the dubious crown of outsider status upon their own heads?

It's like the word compassion-those who overtly use the term seldom have any?

And, as Hugo once wrote, I think both affectionately and ruefully, "No rest from the weird."

SK: Hoiv have you come to terms with becoming an authority in your work life?

LR: After avoiding and resisting authority for many years, under many guises, after backing into authority by working at such "established" cultural institutions as the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts, somewhere along the line I decided to embrace the responsibility of authority. (The word authority shares some of the root meanings of the word author, yes?)

The two most pleasant-jobs I've had, by the way, aside from the current one, were at the Folger Shakespeare Library and at a San Francisco deli, where I first washed dishes and later graduated to sandwich-making (where I made some very mouthwatering Ruebens.)

I embraced the anxieties and pleasures of authority, as I recall, about the same time I became a father. I was raised partly in the politically gnarled state of Virginia, and at some point I took up what I take to be the most strenuous of the Jeffersonian axioms: Govern or be governed. The point is to earn authority and exercise it well. Administering and writing may indeed use different sides of the brain-I'd be the last to argue that-but I don't see them as antithetical. They go to war with each other, they play in the sandbox with each other, and they often shape-shift and morph into each other. As Etta James sings it, "It's a thin line between love and hate."

It seems to me that the notion of balance is largely an illusion. Balance is the answer to everything and therein and therefore the answer to nothing. It's a somewhat desperate con perpetuated by those who don't want to establish priorities, make choices, and live with the inherently good and bad weather consequences of things, the decisions made and the paths then not taken.

Like the term avant-garde, balance is a term best used in retrospect? There is seldom balance; there are always choices.

SK: How did the graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington come about? How did you decide to try this particular experiment, afier having worked so many years in public administration roles and as a policy advocate? And how did you convince Bennington, which was having some fairly severe financial problems at the time, to bankroll it?