by R.P. Burnham
LitbizI always start off an interview with the most important question that one can ask any writer. Where did you study writing, where are you teaching writing, and what valuable contacts with editors has this led to?
WSGood question, and you’re absolutely right. My first publication, a long poem called “Venus and Adonis,” was printed by a classmate at writing school who’d started a litmag —
LITBIZI’ve read it. A wondrous piece, ornately poetic to such a degree that to my mind it’s the best satire on pompous poetics I’ve ever seen.
WSThanks. In my work I’m interested in the way language can be used to close off the world and refer only to itself or to other literary works. Reality either bores me or appalls me —
LITBIZIt bores and appalls me too.
WS— so “Venus and Adonis” was an attempt to shock the reader into realizing that poetry was language, that that’s all it was and ever can be. We can’t change the world, but we can write and if successful get a job teaching somewhere. That’s what it’s all about.
LITBIZRighto. Which leads me back to my original question …
WSCornmeal. Yes, the Workshop at Cornmeal University is where I studied. My first twenty poems were published by classmates who’d started litmags. I started one myself to publish their works.
LITBIZWas that Quid Pro Quo, the litmag dedicated to the daring proposition that poetry was language?
WSWe carried it one step further and boldly stated that fiction was language too. But if I correctly judge the implication of your question, you’re asking me if the notoriety I gained from printing the journal helped my career. It’s hard to say. There was a rival school of thought back in those days that maintained that poetry was words, and they viciously attacked me for maintaining that poetry was language. Ultimately I emerged from the controversy unscathed, but I did have a few bad years. For instance, I applied for a teaching job at Sourpickle University, but the dean was a words man and turned me down. I owe all my success to writing school, though, and so I consider the loss of a good position early in my career to be a small price to pay for what I learned about writing at Cornmeal. I arrived on campus with an enormous bundle of juvenilia — plays like Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, which thanks to my instructors’ advice will never embarrass me by seeing the light of day.
LITBIZWhat did they object to about these plays?
WSOh, that they were over-written, pompous, morally earnest, filled with writing that might actually move an audience to consider their common humanity. All good, sound critical objections. To tell the truth, I’ve only kept them because my instructors did like the touches of bawdy humor I’d thrown in, and there’s a scene in one of them, Lear, where a fool, a madman and Lear have a mock trial. Friends tell me it’d make a great absurdist drama and I’m planning on working on it soon.
LITBIZWhat will be the main idea?
WSWell … I suppose that life is absurd and pointless, but … ah …
LITBIZDo you have any specific ideas you try to convey in your work, or do I gather from your hesitancy that you mistrust ideas?
WSI suppose there are ideas waiting to be discovered in my work, but when I write I’m strictly thinking only in terms of images and the rhythms of language. If there’s one thing I’ve learned at the Cornmeal Workshop and which I constantly emphasize to my students, it’s that ideas bore and appall me —
LITBIZThey bore and appall me too.
WSThe world is there to offer us metaphors, and I suppose when one uses a metaphor it expresses one’s deeper self and therefore contains an idea, but …
LITBIZYou once said in an earlier interview that all literature is autobiographical and that it’s a way of hiding and revealing the self that is every self simultaneously. Could you offer us an example of what you mean?
WSBe glad to. Let me quote my poem, “Shall I Compare Ya to a Summer’s Day.” It’s recently been chosen for inclusion in THE BEST LOVED POEMS OF THE CREATIVE WRITING TEACHERS OF AMERICA ANTHOLOGY, and is, I think, an apt example of what I mean.
Baby, you look better than a summer’s day to me.
Rough winds shaking, lifting
the skirts of May
the peek I get
as bright as the sun
burning
burning
Now the actual incident that inspired the poem was a female student sitting in the front row of my poetry class, but by the time I actually got the rhythms and images just right, the poem assumed universal significance. That’s what I mean when I say that literature is both autobiographical and hides and reveals the self that is every self.
LITBIZYes, I see. That’s perfectly clear.
