ASIDE: I'd like to start by asking you to read a poem, entitled "Bowlers Anonymous."

Dobyns: So you're going to make me talk dirty right from the start?

ASIDE: Oh, yeah.

Dobyns: "Bowlers Anonymous" appeared in a book called Cemetery Nights. I probably wrote it around 1981.

Here comes the woman who wears the plastic prick
hooked to a string around her waist, the man who
puts girls’ panties like a beanie on his head
the chicken molester, the lady who likes Great Danes
the boy who likes sheep, the old fellow who likes
to watch turkeys dance on the top of a hot stove,
the bicycle-seat sniffer, grasshopper muncher,
the bubbles-in-the-bath biter-they all meet
each night at midnight and, oh Lord, they bowl.
From twelve to six they take it out on the pins
as they discuss their foibles with their friends.
I’m trying to cut down, says the woman who nibbles
the tails of mice. I’ve thrown away my Zippo, says
the man who sticks matches between people’s toes.
There is nothing that can’t become a pleasure
if one lets it, and so they bowl. They think
of that oddly handsome German Shepherd face
and they bowl. Their hands quiver at the thought
of jamming their fingers in a car door
and they bowl. These are the heroes, these
grocers and teachers and postmen and plumbers.
They bring snapshots of themselves and Scotch tape,
 Then fix their photos to the pins and they bowl.
They focus on their faces at the end of the alley
and they bowl. They see the hunger in their eyes,
the twist of anticipation in their lips, and oh
they bowl-bowl to remember, bowl to forget,
as the pins with their own bruised faces explode
from midnight to six. While in those explosions
of wood, in which each pin describes an exact arc,
they feast on those moments when the world seems to stop
and everything conspires to push some fleeting
beauty-ripening peach or blossoming rose-
to the queer brink of perfection, where it flames,
flickers, fades, and is never perfect again.

ASIDE: I was particularly interested in this poem because it contains many of your recurrent ideas: the proletarian, the juxtaposition of the profane and the exalted. It speaks of a great loneliness in people, yet offers redemption in the guise of the community of bowling. In the workshop yesterday, you spoke about the classic idea of man at play, and yet bowling is one of the less exalted of sports. Can you comment on some of these aspects?

Dobyns: We all have within us our relationship between our conscious and our unconscious, and then above that, we have the sniping of our superego. Our unconscious is something that is directed by appetite and anxiety. Perhaps a few other things, but appetite and anxiety rule supreme. And it has no moral sense: it wants this and it wants more.

You look at the ads in any magazine. I was amazed recently. I put this in a book, a novel. Looking in Rolling Stone, all the ads in the back for various kinds of telephone encounters: "All Housewives Need Sex." Leather, I mean an endless series of ads. Moving to Boston in this fall, looking in, glancing through the Boston Phoenix, there are more ads. There are a great many people in Boston looking for people to spank them, or to spit on them, or to paddle them, or to whip them. And there are people who are offering themselves, professionals who specialize in spitting and paddling.

These things seem to point to a hidden layer of appetite. When you meet a new person, a new person on the street, "Hi, my name's Bob, I like spanking"--we never hear that. We present always that improved, better self. But what we see as we get to know a person more and more, we see these, we get a larger sense of these appetites.

Well, we don't all engage in these appetites, obviously, but we're all confronted at some point in our life with things we do, things we should not do. "Bowlers Anonymous" is simply, is taking that subject and putting a comic twist on it. A comic twist is not meant to be funny. Something can be comic without being funny.

We have our ideas about perverts. Perverts are elsewhere. I am not perverted. Everyone else has these hidden desires, but my desires, right from the bottom, are a-okay and clean. What is this other? What's being asked about in this poem, finally, is once we understand our own fallen nature, and we all have a fallen nature. I use that term-“fallen” -away from its religiosity. We have a conflicted nature. Our unconscious minds, our subconscious, have appetites, which our conscious mind and society disapproves of. Once we become aware of that in our nature there's that sense of how do you make the egg whole again? How do you put Humpty Dumpty back? How do you re-knit a virgin? How do you find that sense of innocence, which we all imagine we had some place in our past?

The poem tries to address this topic, and it tries to address it through this basically absurdist metaphor. And these people, these comic figures, basically, are creating a community. There's no attempt to mock the AA. But the fact that they've come together, and they've tried to form a community, because their guilt, as it were, has forced them out of this proper community, wherever that is. And it's using comic aspects, using the absurd basically to try and jar the reader off his or her pedestal of complacency.

ASIDE: In your poem, "Bleeder," the perverse desire to make and watch a hemophiliac bleed provides a group of kids

at a summer camp for retarded and crippled children a moment of shared meanness, a temporary escape from private spite. I'm interested in cruelty, the suffering, the spectacle, as used to unite people, and as very religious dimension, and reminds us that communion is a coming together to re-experience the suffering of Christ. Would you speak of this poem, which seems critical to the religious dimension that is operating in your work?

Dobyns: For two summers when I was fifteen and sixteen, or was it fourteen, fifteen and sixteen, I worked at crippled children's camps in Pennsylvania. They were camps run by the Easter Seal Foundation. Both lasted eight weeks. The first summer I was paid fifty dollars for eight weeks. The next summer I got a ten-dollar raise, I got sixty dollars plus my room and board. It was something that the first five minutes of, when the kids arrived, was horrifying, because they were so crippled. Many of them had polio; there'd be braces, and kids who were mobile. There was another camp for people who were not mobile at all. But many were crippled; many had Down's syndrome. They didn't call them that at this point; they were called mongoloids. Others were hemophiliac. Kids from the age of six to twenty, actually. And then you began to deal with it. After five minutes they were human beings. You stopped seeing their limitations, their physical limitations.

That's one part of the answer. Another part of the answer is, after I finished writing, I spoke of the Balthus Poems, which precedes the book Black Dog, Red Dog, from which the poem "Bleeder" comes. I found myself wondering, "Whom am I writing for?" What do I see, what do I expect from the things that I say? I realized that part of me was still writing for that grade school teacher, from whom I learned writing. Miss Day was a great woman from East Lansing Michigan. She had a pet canary in the classroom and if you were a good kid you got to take the canary home on the weekend. I never got to take the canary home on the weekend. She made us all sign the pledge that we would never smoke or never drink. I went home and tore up a carton of my parents' Camel cigarettes, which irritated them immensely. And I poured out a bottle of sherry. At nine years old I was tough. I had a moral fiber that you couldn't break with a Swiss Army knife.

I realized that part of me was writing to be liked. I was censoring my writing … that I wanted the reader to think that this writer is sensitive thoughtful, responsible … a good citizen. I realized that this was really destroying my writing. That it was inserting in that process an act of censorship, that I was making a judgment within the act of writing of what was proper material, what was improper material, what was a proper approach, what was a proper tone, what was a proper subject matter, etcetera. So, in Black Dog, Red Dog, I try and overturn that urge, and take subjects from everything.

And "The Bleeder" becomes part of that honest exploration. Here’s this innocent kid, who is a severe hemophiliac who comes to this camp and who can't do anything. The camp has taken him by mistake. He gets the slightest cut; he'll just drain out like a broken Coke bottle. So he's put in safe places. Well, if you're in the woods of Pennsylvania, there are not a lot of safe places. Suddenly, you realize that you and everyone else would just like to see it happen. What would happen? This perverse … what would happen if he started to bleed? Wouldn't that be interesting? I mean, take this out of any morality, what would happen? And you realize that you and everyone else are thinking the same thought. And you feel immensely guilty--"Oh, God, I shouldn't think this. I should never think this. What an awful thing to think." "Wouldn't it be interesting to see him bleed? No! Don't say that again!" The poem is not the event; the poem is taking that event and turning it into something else. And the actual events of the poem did not occur except the fact that there was a hemophiliac in this camp.

Well, for me, in the writing of that poem, I had to get away from any sense of "Jesus, they're going to think ill of me for this. They're going to think that I was the person. My stock's going to go down. They're going to think, I may not get that gold star next to my name, after all.” The poem also was written in a kind of loose blank verse. More blank verse than I'd tried before. And trying to give the subject matter, the kind of, if I can call it that, roughness, antagonism, and soften nature of the subject matter with an iambic pentameter, a loose iambic pentameter.

ASIDE: I'd kind of like to follow that note of violence with a different question that relates to your mystery books. Do you feel that society might be so chaotic or violent today that the idea of the mystery novel can no longer serve its previous role as a surrogate intimacy with violence? Are you attempting to deal with the banality of evil?

Dobyns: The technical difficulty with movies, and some mystery novels, and the events of the newspapers today, is that we are confronted with increasingly violent images, detailed images of destruction. So how are you going to deal with this problem as a writer? If you're writing a mystery novel that has a simple shooting that happens off-camera, there is an element of boredom to this thing. You have to try and top this.

I can't imagine using the violence for the sake of violence. The violence is always a tool. If you read by anticipating what comes next, then how you, how the writer deals with that anticipation is through surprise. A poem does it primarily through surprise; a piece of fiction does it primarily through suspense. A joke is a form of surprise; it's an abrupt change of tone. A shock is a form of surprise. A hand suddenly coming through the window and grabbing you is a form of surprise.

Now all this functions on the page. I think then in a mystery novel, I was saying yesterday about Chekhov, that Chekhov in a story wants to enliven a pool of blood that he's put on the floor, and he enlivens it by putting a small white boiled potato in the center of the pool of blood. I would approach it as that, as to language and image, rather than through making the crime even more brutal.

On the other hand, I say, on the other side of this, this novel I have coming out in May, called The Church of Dead Girls, begins with a description of three girls, tied dead girls, tied to chairs some place, and they've been there for a long time, and their clothes, they have handmade clothes that have been put on them. And there are candles all over the place, there's a pseudo-religious appearance to it. But it's very detailed in describing their faces. One of them has been there for three months, and so on. But it becomes, all of this becomes, at some point, dealing with the material. I have information that I am trying to get from my head to the page and into the reader's head. Do I take their attention by making it bigger and louder and noisier? That was Elvis' way. Or do I try and do it through the form, through the writing, through the detail? And there are plenty of mystery writers who, as I say, make it bloodier and bloodier and bloodier. And there's no end to that; the world can always top you. So you have to find a way of language, and the same thing with a poem: it has to be done through language, has to be done through image, must be done through skill with manipulating words. It can't be done by excess.

The one thing that Aristotle points to as being failure in the tragedy is spectacle. The tragedy, the play that depends on spectacle is the weakest of them all. And the temptation is always to go towards spectacle. Because that's easy: just slash a throat, make a dirty joke, whatever. That's the weakest way; it's a betrayal of the language. And I cannot compete with the movie. I cannot. Sometimes you have a movie where this guy's cracked up a train, and he's got this bus rolling downhill and there are flames shooting all over the place, and there's a plane crashing; I can't compete with that. I have to simply put a small white boiled potato in a pool of blood.

ASIDE: Your 1993 novel The Wrestler's Cruel Study is a complex philosophical work in which early Christian theology is counterpoised with Nietzsche, and in which professional wrestlers act out precepts of Gnosticism and Manicheanism. In your earlier interview having to do with the detective novel, you said that the detective novel is not a fully developed argument. It seems to me that The Wrestler's Cruel Study is clearly a fully developed argument. Of course if you could have said it in any other way, you might not have needed to write the novel, but I wonder if you would tell us something about this extraordinary work's conception and development, specifically as to why and how you combined philosophy with the rather unlikely spectacle of professional wrestling.

In the original stories of the Bible, in Genesis for instance, the snake is not the Devil. The snake is just a snake; the snake is just a guy seeking to make trouble, snake being snake-like. What you have in the book of Revelation, the book of Revelation is in some sense the most improbable book, but it ends out the story of the Bible. It makes the devil into a bad guy, and it makes it clear that this has been a narrative from the beginning to the end. And it forces this narrative on all these different books, which come, which are written, in the earliest of the twelfth century B.C. to the books to the New Testament. Saint Augustine himself had been a Gnostic. He believed that good and evil had been formed spontaneously together.

And then he has a conversion. But in his conversion he remains a Gnostic, so he has good is formed, and a nanosecond later, evil is formed, evil coming from pride. But he separated them. So then you look at, how do you talk about man's responsibility to his fellow creatures? Anybody's responsibility? And looking at metaphors for this then, wrestling, or what passes for wrestling, contemporary wrestling, is clearly Gnostic: it's the forces of darkness against the forces of light. And we see this in the most bizarre forms, and it's hard to be, how can you write hyperbole about contemporary wrestling, when it in itself is the most, how can you exaggerate what has been exaggerated to the end?

The main story is of this wrestler, of his being educated to accept his dark side, his going through a process of education, which will allow him to embrace his dark side, to embrace his totality, basically. At the beginning he is purely this comic book figure. He believes he cannot hit a person, cannot hurt anybody. And therefore he is a fragmented human being, and this book is the story of his education, of his learning to get to the point where he can embrace his own darkness, his totality. It's drawing then on metaphors from different places, and it's working then on different kinds of tone, on using the comic in different ways, the seriously comic, the absurdly comic, all different things. And then it's done; it's a big pile of pages, and I loved doing it. When you wake up in the morning, and you're lying there looking at the ceiling, and your mind's saying, "What in the hell is it all about, Alphie," and slowly you see the day creeping over the windowsill. And you're looking at the big problems and little problems, and there's a way that, in your writing, you're addressing all those problems, you're addressing the world, and you're addressing your own small, private disaster. And you're taking those things and you're making something that is finally separate.

We are, in our nature, tremendously flawed. We like things that we should not like. There was a bare midriff in that elevator coming up to the fourth floor that took me away from thoughts of literature, and kindness, and how one should properly live. How do we accept that? And literature is a way of dealing with these uncivilized desires. If we imagine that we are good, if we imagine that other people could commit the Holocaust, and not us, if we imagine the Nazis were a different breed of person, and that we could never push somebody into a gas chamber, then we guarantee that it will happen again. ASIDE: The Wrestler's Cruel Study does seem somewhat anomalous in comparison with some of your previous work. In a previously published interview, you remarked that you were a writer of realism. Yet The Wrestler's Cruel Study seems a departure into a fantastical sort of reality, and I was wondering if this is what you've been working toward throughout your novel-writing career, or whether it will continue to be an anomaly.

Dobyns: I don't think they're anomalous. I think that the elements of that book are also in "Bowlers Anonymous." And there's a previous book called Cold Dog Soup, which is in some ways a forerunner of The Wrestler's Cruel Study. Cold Dog Soup takes place in New York City. It's about, takes place in a nighttime, a twelve-hour period. And it's about two guys trying to sell a dead dog in New York City. And New York, being what it is, you can sell almost anything, and these guys were trying to sell a dead dog. It's very absurdist. I mean, a guy goes to, meets this girl, goes to her house for dinner, her mother's there, her dog, her elderly dog is there, the girl makes it clear that we've just got to get the mother to bed as soon as possible and then we can have sex. But then during dinner the dog dies and the mother has a fit. And it's Saturday night and nobody will pick up the dog, they can't do anything with the dog, all the city relief societies say is that you'll have to put it in the closet until Monday. And the mother says, "Please get rid of the dog," and the guy realizes that he's not going to have sex until he gets rid of the dog. He tries to get a cab … he can't get a cab. The theaters are just letting out a Haitian cab driver, a gypsy cab driver picks him up. He's got the dog, with the dog's bowls, collar, and a few dog toys, in a series of black plastic garbage bags.

The Gypsy cab driver says, "What's in the bag? What's in the bag?" and the guy says, "I've got a dog in the bag." And the driver says, "What are you going to do with the dog?" And he says, "I'm going to bury the dog," and the Gypsy cab driver says, "Bury it? This is New York. You can sell it." And so they go off on this adventure, which takes them through the night.

And it's a moral tale. And there are other things going on too. Well, basically that's another tone, another way of looking at reality. We look out at the world, what do call this, what is this thing? You see that cup the same way I see it? You see that cup or a different cup? You're sitting in a different place. You don't see that cup as I see it. You can't see it. Also, you're seeing that cup through the filter of your own history, blah, blah, blah.

We'll obviously both pick out the same cup. But there are differences to that cup. Well, whether you treat a subject matter with pure realism, or pure absurdity, these are all different cues on a scale that you choose. These are your tools, man. How are you going to approach this subject? What tone are you going to use? Gregor Samsa awoke after a night of uneasy dreams to discover he had been transformed into a giant insect. Hey, that's pretty impressive stuff. How does Kafka decide to begin that line? You wouldn't accept that sentence any place else. Kafka must have been so happy when he hit upon that. He must have stepped away from his desk and rolled on the floor. But he has something that he wants to tell us about our existential nature. What if a guy woke up as a cockroach? What's he going to do?

The other thing that pleases Kafka in that is to make the reader swallow it. If you can take this story, of a guy waking up in the morning as a bug, and having to deal with life as a bug, you can do many things. Kafka is working out a complicated, serious, intricate philosophy. And he's just giggling at the same time. And he's doing other things. He's writing the story. He's putting words together. All this together, and that becomes part of the joy of it. You have material; you're working toward a poem. You're working toward a novel. These ideas are coming together, you are thinking of metaphors that you can use, and at some point you think of tone. Of the language you're going to use. Of how this is going to be set, what's the most effective presentation for this. And that determines how you select these things.

ASIDE: In your collection of essays, Best Words, Best Order, in the essay “Cemetery Nights,” you say that a poem has the ability to sensitize people toward themselves and to the world around them. This makes each poem a political act. Even though I expect no results from these political acts, it keeps me writing. What is the role of the poet as we face the year 2000? How would you like to see the world transformed?

Dobyns: Well, to write in a vacuum, to write things which stop with myself, which do not communicate, which are written so obscurely, in such a private language, that they do not transcend myself, has all the drawbacks of masturbation. Language is always a communication. If I'm writing something, I'm also then writing something that I want to be read. It doesn't need to be read today, but it holds out the promise to me that it will be read.

Whatever it is, the story, poem, whatever, is also then a kind of argument. It works as an argument. It works as an argument in that it's meant to convince. It's not necessarily analytical, but it means to convince. So, if my question is, "What to does it mean to be a human being? How does one live? What's one's responsibility to one's fellow creatures?" I don't think about that when I'm writing, but that's the question that's back there. Then, that's going to affect the making of this thing, where I start, where I end, all these choices.

Humans try to live in one moment of time, a moment when we don't worry about the past, don't worry about the future. We’re just in this moment; we're in mall time; we're in casino time. Daylight twenty-four hours; glitter, glitter, wherever we look. Nothing changes, we don't age, and our mortality is taken from us. We use life as constant distraction. We don't age. Art takes the curve, art tries to remind the reader or the viewer or the audience, of the curve of human life: where you've come from, where you're going. It doesn't do this moralistically, but just, this is part of the information of the work, where you've come from, where you're going.

In that way, it jars the person off that pedestal of complacency, or it has the possibility of toppling. And leads the person himself, herself, to think about that question. Not that the reader's arm is being twisted necessarily, but it forces the reader to think, "Now, what would I do if I woke up as a cockroach? Jesus, wouldn't my landlord be pissed. What would I do in this situation? How would I do this?" And it does this often through identification. In a novel, there's always someone who's the reader. In a short story, there's always an event that engages the reader. You don't necessarily identify with a character in a short story, but you identify with his condition. You identify with his sudden, in a classical short story, his sudden moment of epiphany, when he realizes, when he says to himself, my life is fucked up pretty bad. And in that moment, you catch on, someway.

Well, the fact that it teaches us something, I mean I want to take that out of a dogmatic context, really, but it's always there, it's always part of our pleasure in the reading. The story or novel that is no more than the sum of its parts, the novel that is no more than the sum of its parts, is finally no more than decorative, it's like wallpaper. You go back again to that Kafka phrase, literature should be an axe to smash the frozen sea of the heart, that's interesting. In order to live, we have to give ourselves really thick skins. We see awful things all the time, and our skin gets thicker and thicker. Literature or art should not nag us, but it should lead us to think of the entire arc of human life: who are we; how do we live; what's our responsibility to one another. Beyond that, above that, more important than that notion, art has to be fun. First it's fun. It's a pleasure. Otherwise you could just take castor oil all day and you wouldn't have to read.

ASIDE: In Saratoga Hexameter, Lucy Feinstein, a character described as a novelist living and teaching in New York, says that a writer is a good disorderer of information, while an academic is just the opposite. She goes on to say that a writer fits into an English department about the way a fox fits into a Spartan boy's tummy. Do you agree in any way with your character?

Dobyns: Well, I'm afraid I use Lucy Feinstein a little bit too much as my own soapbox. I think that what she says is true. If you're engaged in the investigation of human totality, then there're certain things that you constantly come up against. This isn't simply the English department, but any collective group, for instance. It means then that you are beginning to question or not take as sacred those things, which that collective has to take as sacred. Which can be simply, I mean, the tremendous emphasis on diversity for instance, now. I share that emphasis on diversity. Every human being should have his or her opportunity to fulfill his or her potential as a human being. Yet at the same time there is our crazy nature: someone slips on a banana and we laugh.

Now, it's not politically correct to laugh. Well, if you pretend that you are the sort of person who would never, never laugh when somebody slips on a banana, you are engaged in a pretty serious sort of self-deception that's going to send your soul straight to hell. So, if, as a writer, you are working with students, and are saying, "You have to explore this totality; it's not saying you should laugh or not laugh, it's to allow this totality to come out, so you can look at it." You too, as I said in an earlier question, you too, might be put into a situation where you might shut somebody into a gas chamber.

Or let's take it to something like that situation in the movie, or that book Alive. You are part of a rugby team that's crashed in a plane in the Andes, and you think, "If I live, I can only live by eating my chum's thigh." This is a pretty big dilemma. A lot of us would say, "Oh, I would never do that." “Jim, I like you, but I would never eat your thigh. If you were dead there, I would die before I would eat that thigh.” If you're a writer, you have to explore the possibility that you would eat that thigh. Not because, taking it out of any moral dimension. What you're doing as a writer is exploring the totality of a human being.

So, I have a student in a workshop that writes a poem. This happens many times. A guy writes a poem about a guy seeing a girl walk down the street, and he whistles at her. A very simple poem. I've been in occasions when he's been attacked in a workshop for writing a sexually, a politically incorrect poem, a sexist poem. Well, he feel guilty. He gets up in class and says, "You're right, I should not have whistled at this girl, this all comes out of my personal experience. I saw this young woman, she's nineteen, I'm nineteen, she's beautiful, I don't have a girlfriend, but I shouldn't even have thought that way. I just should have taken my pecker out of my pants and slapped it left and right and shoved it back."

What are we doing as writers? If our question is "how does one live?" you have to explore that totality. The moment you start exploring that totality you're overturning definitions of correctitude and propriety. Not to change it, you're looking under rocks, basically. You have no moral interest in this except as investigation. If you're in a closed society, an English department, and are doing this, it can simply create a lot of friction, a lot of friction. You look at the history of any word, there are periods when that word, like "lousy," there's period in which that's a dirty word. Or you look at the change of any word, the word "cute" originally meant "precise." Acute, the most precise thing. You look at the history of the word "fuck," and how that comes out of different languages. How that word is, or how any word is, at any moment of time, is governed by all kinds of historical forces around it.

As a writer, you have to attune yourself to that, because they're all notes that you're using. If I choose to use a word, I have to anticipate exactly how that word's going to enter a reader's ear. If I say something that the reader says "this is offensive," I have to know exactly that this is offensive, because again I am dealing with a reader who is anticipating what comes next. I am creating patterns of tension and rest in order to affect that reader's journey forward in the poem. And my choice of words, my choice of diction, my choice of tone, my choice of pitch, all is designed to effect that reader's forward progression.

If you go fishing, you play a fish, you have that fish on the line, give it too much slack, keep the line too tight--you've got to keep that line just right, just right.

ASIDE: Another of your characters, Frank McGuiness, a poet in your book, says that a critic is like a eunuch who feels required to describe the nature of sex.

Dobyns: The function of a critic, a great critic to my mind is this guy Graham Huff, who wrote many, many books. He's a British critic. He taught at the University of Singapore before the war. He was seized by the Japanese, put into an internment camp. He had two books that he went in with. One was the collected Yeats, which he read in prison for all those years. And the other book was the collected Wordsworth. And he says at one point, "I tore the Wordsworth in half, and traded the late Wordsworth half to another guy for a pair of socks, and I never regretted the decision." He's making a critical remark about Wordsworth's later poems.

Huff is really a humanist who is looking at literature as a close reader and as a pragmatist who is not putting any "ism" between him and the page. He's trying to put as little "ism" as possible. So when he attacks the New Critics, he says if any knowledge of a writer's life can help you understand a poem or piece of fiction, then you have to have access to that knowledge. The work of art, the work of literature or story or whatever, does not exist in a vacuum. A human being made it. I mean, he's not a popular critic anymore; he's fallen into silence.

Much criticism now, it seems to me, it does several things. One, it tries to diminish the whole idea of literature; it tries to replace literature with secondary texts. At its most radical it tries to do that. It tries to ignore the whole question of what is art in society. It tries to argue that language is so imprecise that nothing can be said. Although if you sat in a room with them and shouted "fire, fire," you would see them get up out of their chairs. Now there are many ranges of this, certainly. For me, the best critic is a close reader. What is the writer trying to say? Why did the writer write this book? And is not trying to replace the writer.

The other weakness in criticism, and is the weakness that I attempt to satirize in that particular book, is the critic who requires a poem, story, novel to be of great obscurity. Because then the critic is then called upon as the interpreter. The more work obscure the work the more work there is for the critic and the more chance the critic has to shine. One critic describes the role of the critic as being like the role of a conductor of a symphony, who is interpreting the score for the audience. This puts the critic in the position of a middleman, much like a realtor, stopping any communication between buyer and seller.

I also feel that it creates a certain kind of literature important. What becomes important in the critic's imagination, this kind of critic, is a kind of literature that opens itself up to interpretation. So critics have tremendously ignored an American poet like William Carlos Williams. He's certainly celebrated, but it's very difficult to write about William Carlos Williams because the poems are so clear. You don't need to interpret a William Carlos Williams poem. The poet who was the darling of critics for a long time was the poet Charles Olsen, whose work needed to be interpreted. But he was only important for a group of critics. Olsen has some nice poems, but he's not the major poet that many critics tried to make him into.

But he was easy to write about. Charles Olsen did the wonderful Christian act of enabling a whole bunch of assistant professors to get tenure. You see the same thing in the poems of Jorie Graham. All are poems of a certain obscurity that require interpretation. They are celebrated because they enable deserving young men and women to get tenure. Now, does that mean that these are the poems that we should read? Well, that's a whole other question. Are these the poems that work as an axe to smash the frozen sea of the heart?

ASIDE: I want to back up just a second and get your comment about the moral component of art. What is your take on language poets, and must art have a moral component to transcend the idiosyncrasy of the private? Dobyns: Idiosyncrasy of the private? Poetry has moved back and forth, since the beginning, between two poles. One is that it's received. That the poet is no more than a kind of radio that picks up a signal as in Plato's dialogue with the poet. Socrates is telling the poet, Ion, "this is what you are. You pick up a signal. This is all that you are." Socrates does not in fact use the term cosmic radio, but he might have.

The other is that the poem is something made, that you take language that you form and that you move the words around, which it exists then as a made object. Baudelaire says that everything beautiful is the result of reason and calculation. Every beautiful made thing is the result of reason and calculation. And you see this in Baudelaire's turning to Poe, and Poe's "You have to make it, every word is chosen for a reason." Baudelaire is reacting to a period of French poetry that was all spontaneous. "I feel. I am. Baudelaire laughs at these poets, and he says that these poets believe that they throw the words up at the ceiling, they'll fall down as a poem to the floor.

These two poles go back and forth, back and forth. So Ginsberg, for instance, has this phrase, "first word, best word." Well, what is this? This is again celebrating the idea of the received, that the poet is something to which cosmic things come. Cosmic images, impulses, whatever. The symbolist poets were very much this way. The reader did not have to understand the late symbolist poets. Everything related to something else, and what was good for the reader who did not have the slightest idea of what was going on, but the reader was made better simply by being in proximity to the confusion. You stood next to the fire.

I don't believe that. I believe the poem is something made. I believe the poem is communication between human beings. The language poetry for me is like decorative wallpaper. It is bright, shiny. I walk in, I walk out. It does not do anything, finally, for my life. It's something that begins and ends with itself. There is much conceptual art that does that as well. Something which comes out of the imagination of a maker but which does not transcend the imagination of a maker to reach the life of the observer.

This is overstated, and there are different kinds of language poets, there are poets, certainly, who write things that I can find my way within, which I can admire, etcetera, etcetera. But at its most extreme, where there is no communication, where no communication is attempted, it doesn't carry.

A poem, I think, has to have some kind of emotional center. I assume that the person wrote the poem because that person was unable to remain silent. They make a small intellectual, emotional construct out of words that recreates the feeling that compelled them to write the poem in another human being. That's why I go to the poem. The person wrote this because they couldn't keep their mouth shut, and if they're driven to such a point that they write it, then I want to see what they said. If their impetus to write a poem is the same impetus that one has picking up a peanut, then it's not quite as driven, it seems to me.

I'm no longer interested in having an educator's knowledge on all aspects of the question.You asked me about the language poets: I'm never going to be fair to them. At the most basic level, I just write something else. I have a political sense of what a poem should be, a poem has to engage the reader and the writer in a kind of new combination … that the final poem is made both by the reader and the writer … that the writer makes a poem, that the reader in reading the poem asks questions of it, why did he write this thing, what does this mean, what's happening here, what's this image mean, and in the answering of those questions the poem comes to life for that reader; it becomes the reader's personal experience.

The two of you read the same poem, you're both going to have a separate experience of that poem. You're going to both know that Wordsworth is writing about the death of his daughter, but you're going to have a different experience. Or you're going to understand the poem by asking questions and that final poem that you have is something you made with Mr. Wordsworth. You don't have that in a language poem; you don't have that in a newspaper article. You have that only in poetry to such an intense degree.

I like poetry because you can communicate more precisely in poetry than in any other verbal medium. And that you can create a moment of intimacy with the reader that is higher and more profound than in any other verbal medium. This is the potential, this is the carrot that keeps me trotting down the muddy path. Plus, you can push via formal choices. Shakespeare writing sonnets is constantly pushing the edges of the genre, the form; what can you do in those fourteen lines, it's amazing to read those sonnets and see him doing that. This is one of the pleasures of any writing. But in the poem, something "Bowlers Anonymous" again, of challenging that form. That poem is an elegy, an elegy to one's past life; an elegy to one's dead innocence. You can write that poem in the gloomiest of terms, yet it's trying to challenge the limits of the genre.

I love form, I mean I love the limits of the sonnet. Because it allows me to try and beat the shit out of it, to get within it and see how I can break in or out of it. That becomes one of the pleasures of it. ASIDE: Following up somewhat on that answer, our most recent visitor, Eve Shelnutt, is rather gloomy about the state of contemporary fiction. She thinks that the presses, even the small ones, are excessively influenced by the market, and are, as a result, turning out derivative, take-no-chances fiction. Do you have any thoughts about the state of contemporary fiction? Dobyns: I've been saying that I went to Graceland Saturday and that I went to Faulkner's house on Sunday. Poor old Elvis. He was only alive in the doing of it. But he thought, I am doing this for a great reward, and that guy got a tremendous reward. And not a penny of it was worth it. He was only alive up there dancing his silly dance. And Faulkner was only alive typing that thing out, bringing all those threads together. Finish that book, went on a binge.

So, it's hard to say that you have to give yourself to the language, without ever hope of publishing it--that's a decision that each person has to make. But I think that if you give yourself to that language passionately, and write for the sake of the writing, and put away all these constraints--the editor will not like this, I used the F word, the editor will not like this, blah, blah--then you have killed yourself, that you first of all write for the writing of it, and be passionate about that. Be caught up in the philosophical dimension of it, and the pure game of it. And then maybe something will come of it. But if you look at that market--and I suspect that Eve Shelnutt's right. But if I think about that, I'll stop writing. And then what am I going to do? Go back to drinking?

If I can screw girls on a motorcycle going a hundred miles an hour, pardon my French, I might not write. But since I can't, then the writing for me is the next best thing. It has all the momentum, has all the glitz, all the rush, all the pleasure. If a reviewer says, "this sucks," I had a good time doing it. If he says "this sucks," he's hurting my ego, basically. If I have done this thing as well as I can, to the best of my abilities, at the height of my powers, whatever they may be, and have not lied to myself, or lied to myself as little as possible, then the fact that he says "this sucks" will not matter. ASIDE: Your narrative poems, such as "Bleeder," "Education," "Careers," display a novelist's sense of plot twist, a point of view that shifts from heightened realism to self-reflection, and endings that contemplate the social self. What is your take on the poetic aspects of this marriage of narrative and the lyric? What makes a narrative poem a poem, rather than a story or an anecdote?

Dobyns: My only reason in using narrative in a poem is to set up certain lyric moments. There's no interest in the narrative as narrative, what you might call story interest. You don't necessarily read those poems for story interest in the same way you might read "The Ride of Paul Revere," say "Hiawatha." What you're looking at is a way of using narrative to set up links between lyric moments, and trying to work in settings to intensify those lyric moments. I could take those poems, perhaps, and remove all those narratives, and to set, simply, the moment by itself.

But another thing the narrative does, then, is become a hook for the reader. It draws the reader along a path and invites them open a door to the lyric moment. That's how narrative functions for me. It becomes a tool to set up a lyric moment.

You cannot get away from narrative. Any moment, you have two moments of time, you have an element of narrative, and this happened, that happened. The pure lyric exists in one moment of time. So, it's almost an impossibility. Even in your most lyric poem you have a faint narrative element, which is simply time passing.

On the other hand, you cannot have a perfect narrative; you cannot have a narrative without any lyric moment at all, any emotional moment at all. What's the degree of lyric and what's the degree of narrative? But to my mind, the narrative is simple a pathway, a way to get to that lyric. It's not presented for the story interest. Audience member: I was interested in your statement that poetry is based on surprise, and that the novel or fiction was based on suspense. Are you working on these two things simultaneously? How do you get inspiration for one, or is there subject matter that lends itself one way or another?

Dobyns: You don't necessarily read the poem to see what happens. I talk about this in an essay. Philip Larkin has a poem called the "Explosion." And you would in part read the poem to find out what happened in the explosion. But the whole narrative fact that there is a mine explosion is entirely unimportant to the poem. He needs it to set up a lyric moment. Poetry, then, if you're trying to jar the reader's expectation, you think it’s going to go left and the poem suddenly goes right, the poem will produce surprise for the reader.

On the other hand there have been occasions when things have worked both ways, where I've used details that I've used both in fiction and in a poem, which can have that surprise thing. Now, a poem for me always begins with noise, as well. And a novel does not, necessarily. I hear a noise. I hear a toy. I hear something I try to recognize (He snaps his fingers.)

ASIDE: (points to his watch) I hear something too, the lunch bell. Thank you for a lovely morning conversation.

The interview was conducted by Jim Harrison, Brandon Rauch and Ron Jenkins.

Jim Harrison, a native of Tennessee, currently resides in Virginia with his wife and son and teaches writing at Emory & Henry College. He is currently working on a book about his Appalachian Trail thru-hike.

Brandon Rauch is currently attending the MFA program at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. He is the winner of the 1998 Memphis Magazine Fiction Contest. He lives with his cat, Juan Sanchez.

Ron Jenkins has studied at the University of Tennessee and the University of Memphis. He currently lives and writes in Orlando, Florida.

© Stephen Dobyns