Реферат: An Online Interview With W S Merwin

to human experience has people in it, I think. Whether it has drama in it, whether there

are people in the third person is another matter. I think the first and second person are

more common in my poems, probably, than the third person. This may be what whoever it was

who first said that had in mind. Do you think there are people in the poems?

DB: One of my favorite poems of yours is "A Letter From Gussie." That

has people in it. I think it’s a very clever and human poem. So I really don’t agree with

the criticism at all. But I’d like to switch over to talking about the genre confusion

that’s going on now in poetry and prose and what you have said about it. Recently I was

re-reading William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and I sensed that he was consciously

taking the narrative further away from poetry even though he used poetic diction. I was

wondering if you could say some more of things you did last night about how you’re trying

to separate the narrative from the poetry.

Merwin: I wasn’t suggesting that narrative is anti-poetic at all. I don’t even

think of prose as being anti-poetic. What I was suggesting is that I think that the more

imaginative intensity there is in poetry or in prose the more it calls in question the

difference between poetry and prose, so that if you get a great deal of intensity in

prose, rhythms begin to emerge, powerful rhythms, and various things happen in the texture

so that people begin to say it’s poetic, whatever they mean by that. If there’s great

intensity in poetry, sometimes it leads toward a rhetorical thickening of texture, but

sometimes it drives the poetry toward a greater and greater surface simplicity so that it

begins to seems almost like prose. The example that I was giving was Dante–an enormous

freight of meaning and experience and enormous intensity. As Eliot said somewhere, if you

imitate Shakespeare, you’re going to get inflated, but if you imitate Dante the worst

thing that’s going to happen is that it may sound a little flat. I’m trying to say that

from either side great intensity follows this shifting, this undefinable boundary in

question. What is the difference between poetry and prose? You can make a definition but

it’s not going to be applicable forever in all circumstances. This confusion arises out of

the fact that the old categories are getting in the way rather than helping to direct and

to provide energy. I don’t mean that I think there are never going to be categories but