You told me a few minutes ago that you experience life in paragraphs. When I asked you what you meant by that, you said you would have to write a poem to find out. What gives?

I often say something without knowing why I said it. For example, I woke up from a dream saying, ‘Abandon ship!’ When I was in the Navy we were taught if necessary to abandon ship, but of course I never did and I never would. It bothers me to think that I would have somewhere to go, wishes that I would abandon, because I was afraid of some fucking torpedo. There are many poets who think – not only do they think but their readers think – they have something to say. I don’t write poems because I think I have something to say; I write poems to understand why I said something, try to find the way I said things.

You remind me of Mallarmé’s observation that poetry is not made with ideas but with words.

Right. And there is the music of the poem. The music of a poem is sometimes happier or sadder than the poem itself. Sometimes, there is a profound difference in the music of a poem and the words of a poem.

‘There is secret meaning in rhyme.’

Who said that?

You did.

Oh. I agree with him.

When did you first realise you were a poet?

When I was in the third grade at P.S. 99 in Kew Gardens, Queens, the teacher Miss Green asked the class, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ Some said a businessman, some said a doctor, some said a dentist. I answered last, and I said – I was seven years old – ‘I am a poet, and I will be now and in the future. Whatever happens, I am a poet.’ Then Miss Green said, ‘I knew it. You, Stanley, are a bronze satyr’, and she whacked my erect penis with a twelve-inch Board of Education wooden ruler.

I have a photo of that class. Everyone has their hands folded on the desk, but my hand is up holding my cheek. I’m the only one who didn’t obey orders. My life is somewhat like that.

Your parents took you travelling when you were about this age.

Yes, when I was nine. My father was a high school principal. In 1935 he took a sabbatical and we crossed the Atlantic, an absolutely miraculous trip where I saw the facts and meaning of beauty. Beauty and terror. I saw the poverty of others that frankly broke my heart. We stopped at Málaga, I remember, not long before Franco. We went to Amsterdam, Venice, Istanbul. In Cairo I was bitten by red ants and announced to the hotel – and my parents when they came back a little later – that I had leprosy. By spring we had arrived in Tangiers, which was then an international state. I wandered alone in the red-light district, which had little rooms and beads and tattooed prostitutes. One of them grabbed me and kissed me. I thought that was terrific. One of the adventures of my life that I never regretted. I didn’t know where babies came from. Some twenty-odd years later I got married in Tangiers.

One day on our ship – the Statendam, home port Rotterdam – I saw my father on the boat looking very sad. When I asked him what was wrong, he said we couldn’t stop at Piraeus because of the revolution. ‘What’s so sad about that’, I asked, and he said, ‘In Greece there are some of the most beautiful buildings in the world’. I had a view of the buildings with diamonds and rubies and jewels. Soon the revolution was won and the port of Athens opened. Then I went to the Acropolis, and my idea of beauty changed forever. From there we sailed to Rhodes, where the people were celebrating in the streets. As I went through the beautiful town a ricochetted bullet hit me in the foot. So there I was, nine years old, shot in a Greek revolution. When I went back to Kew Gardens I was on crutches for a while.

What were they like, your parents? Were they big readers?

My mother was nuts.

I remember you telling me that she once mistook Central Park for your back garden.

Yes, she said, ‘Stanley! Where did you get all those bushes?’ I come from two families. That’s a very important point, the difference between the families that make up me. You know, it’s interesting: I always thought I looked more like my father, but as I grow older now, I see I look more like my mother. My mother’s family were barbers, dentists, doctors. They were affectionate, loving, loyal – sweet as can be. They met at Passover and they sang. In my father’s family there was incest, somebody got the electric chair. Most of them were communists. He planned for everything, my father; he did not plan for me. When he heard me cry from my carriage in the nursery he would slam the door. He used to point his finger at me and say, ‘you’re crying, you’re crying, you’re crying’. To understand my father, when I was five my mother came with a puppy as a present named Rhumba. Years later on holiday in Vineyard Haven, he gave away Rhumba to a waitress for no reason whatsoever. Did you ever see my house in Long Island? There was a bay and the ocean and Montauk daisies. We were having dinner, and out of the blue my mother asked, ‘Will you ever forgive us for giving away your dog?’ Two dogs came to the table and I fed them a little – a dog lover’s vice. And I said, ‘no’.

I’ve had two or three dogs most of my life. Merwin loved my poem ‘Velvet’. Look it up – very doggy. At one time I had eight dogs and had to give them away, but I wouldn’t give away Nicky, my wife Jane’s dog. She liked to chase deer and whatever and got killed on the road. Finally I found her with her eyes wide open, and I carried her into the house and buried her under a Japanese maple.

My father wrote books, taught history. He knew Greek and Latin. Later in life he told me: ‘What I know of poetry I owe to you.’ He explained that when I was two years old and he was studying for his principal’s exam, he would recite passages from Shakespeare over my head as we walked. I replied that perhaps I owed my love of poetry to him.

Interesting. Eliot – or was it Stevens – has that line about the way that authentic poetry communicates before it’s understood.

Yes, I think there’s something to it. You mention Wallace Stevens. When I joined the Navy at seventeen, I used to wake up an hour before reveille to read, write poems. I had a copy of Harmonium.

Was Stevens an early influence for you?

Absolutely. I met him – first at Trinity College, I think, after a reading – and again with his daughter before he died, at the house of a very rich gallery owner. I remember sitting with them at the table (it was summer), and the host said, ‘Oh, look at the garden, all the trees are white’. I looked at Stevens, and he looked back at me, and we both knew the guy was horribly mistaken.

What impact did he have on your writing, exactly?

Well, first of all, I don’t think the word exactly explains anything.

I regretted it as soon as I said it.

The mystery of what makes poetry go, in the debate with William Carlos Williams, who I also knew quite well (after all, I put his books together for him in some ways), I was on Stevens’s side. Ordinary speech was not my thing. I didn’t write the poetry they speak on the street, like Allen Ginsberg for example. But I wrote about what they speak on the street that others didn’t see, and that others didn’t hear. One thing that’s the case, my parents knew Ginsberg’s parents. They taught in the same school in New Jersey. I think his mother’s name was Naomi. My mother spoke of her in such a familiar way. I spoke with Allen at some event with whatshername... Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles’s wife. You know, I practically rewrote The Sheltering Sky when I was at New Directions. There were full sentences written by me. I never got credit for that. And it was a bestseller.

Let the record stand corrected. Since we’re on the subject, let’s talk about New Directions. You were hired by James Laughlin in 1949. Besides the Bowleses, are there any particular books you worked on that stick out for you?

I edited The Cantos. The ideograms are upside down because of me. And nobody’s ever caught that, including Pound himself.

In some ways Pound strikes me as the last person who would notice.

Merwin went down to meet Pound, Ginsberg went down to meet Pound, and I could have gone down to meet Pound, but I never went.

At St. Elizabeth’s? Why not?

I kept away from him for obvious reasons.

I figured. Did you admire his work?

Parts of it I admired. There were two lines I loved that he wrote. Something about the devil. You know, I’m going through a crisis of memory. When you’re ninety-eight you forget things. It’s no kidding. The truth is I walk around a little drunk without having drunk anything but coffee, tea or water. Another thing to report: when I wake up in the middle – or to the left or right of the middle – of the night, I believe my dreams. It’s hard enough to believe that we believe our dreams when we’re dreaming, let alone for fifteen minutes after we wake up. That can be terrible.

You write often of dreams. Mistakes, too – you seem very interested in Freudian slips, misreadings.

That’s true. I’ve misread words all my life. There’s no question I read words that are not on the page. I might read something goofy like ‘ready’ for ‘reading’. On occasion, I read a poem, misread a word that improves the poem. Crocodiles occasionally eat reflections of fish.

Were you writing when you were working at New Directions?

I was writing like mad. I couldn’t stand office work. If I was working on a poem and I had to work on somebody else’s book, I thought it was a terrible toil. I was profoundly disorderly at New Directions. I had all the versions of my poems on my bedroom floor. One day I got out of bed and almost broke my leg. I got on very well with Laughlin. When I quit the job he wanted to print a book of my poems. He had some books that he printed in small format – some very good poets. I didn’t want to be printed in small format, so I turned him down. I think I’m the only person in the history of New Directions that turned down publication on the basis that I didn’t like the size of the book. By the time my first collection was published in 1966, there were very few poems from before that time I would have printed. Most of them have never been published. With my current book, Goddamned Selected Poems, I’ve published some poems from that time which I’ve rewritten. I keep finding poems that surprise me. There’s one called ‘Pax Poetica’.

It’s a terrific poem. You’re a fastidious reviser, aren’t you? I’m curious about your tendency to include your older poems in new collections. I wonder if you have a sense of your work as a continuous whole – a single poem, so to speak, a poem of poems.

It’s an interesting idea. Maybe it could be read that way. But no, I don’t think that works for me. As for revisions, you look upstairs and I have files on the poems I write. I write ten different versions – and when I say ten it’s sometimes twenty or thirty. I worked on a poem for fifty years called ‘God Poem’ that was published in Encounter and then I kept changing the final part. Theodore Roethke said it was ‘a pisseroo’. I wrote most of it in Palma de Mallorca in 1953.

Are you conscious of your work belonging to different phases? Stylistically, perhaps?

Some of the poems I wrote early on are very good, though I have written a lot more, and probably better poems since. W.S. Merwin, who was not an idiot, told me that an early poem of mine, ‘The Bathers’, was his favourite poem. I have a poem called ‘Death in Paris’ which contains some very forced rhymes. I wrote it after Auden said I didn’t rhyme.

How did you meet Auden?

I lived in a building with Chester Kallman’s father, who was my dentist. Auden was having an affair with Rhoda Jaffe. He had occasional affairs with women. I was invited to Auden’s birthday party. I had a poem published in Halcyon, I think, and Jaffe asked Auden what he thought of my poetry. He said: ‘He doesn’t rhyme.’ And so I wrote poems that rhymed. Then I went to Rome chasing Stella Adler, and I ran into Auden and Chester again. We had dinner and went to the opera. When I was back in the country I occasionally met them for lunch at a restaurant in Waverly Place. Then Voznesensky came to town. I was one of his translators. It was somehow arranged to have a reading of his work at Hunter College, with me, Auden, Stanley Kunitz, William Jay Smith and a couple of others. There were 2,500 seats. It was televised. I sat next to Auden. After I read and sat down, he said to me, ‘Very fine translation Stanley’, and I rose seven hundred feet in the air.

Who else did you meet in the Village in the late 1940s? I read somewhere that you were friendly with Djuna Barnes. And Dylan Thomas, of course.

Djuna Barnes and I were very good friends. Her last words to me: she waved at me and said, ‘Follow the heart! Follow the heart!’ The last words said to me by Djuna Barnes. I haven’t disobeyed her. Stanley Kunitz and I were both in a club of poets and painters in the Village. For some reason I hit it off with the painters right away. Rothko would show me his paintings. He asked me to be his dealer, but I refused. In any case, Kunitz went overseas and had an affair with Jean Garrigue. After a while I knew Jean too, and we shared a converted coal cellar as an apartment. It had very little natural light. There was one sink and an outside shower that you could share with someone on the same floor. We had one toilet. And so I woke up each morning listening to Jean, who I loved, on the toilet. Listening to Jean on the toilet.

Dylan Thomas? He said that I was his best friend in America. New Directions was publishing him. I met him in a bar, in a tavern – we had mutual virtues and vices – with Howard Moss in the distance, who was editing The New Yorker at the time. On Dylan’s 100th anniversary, the BBC sent a crew over to interview me. Oddly enough, and people don’t make much of this, his favourite American poet was e.e. cummings. I don’t know how we hit it up. I remember one thing that I did that attracted him. The bar had a revolving door. A black woman was coming in and I accidentally caught her in the door. I said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry’, and my apology to her attracted Dylan to me. That was one factor.

Simple courtesy.

Right. Princess Caetani once said to me, ‘I don’t see why the head of the Poetry Society invited a “darkie” to be poet of the year.’ That ‘darkie’ was Ralph Ellison, who was one of my closest friends.

Talking of Princess Caetani, how did you end up working at Botteghe Oscure?

I had a letter when I went to Rome from Laughlin – to whom it may concern, may I introduce you – and Princess Caetani said to me, ‘You know, people come to me from America asking for money, and you’re the only one who’s come for a job.’ She was an American lady married to an Italian nobleman, a composer of operas who studied with Liszt. A very old family, the Caetanis. They went back to the fifth century. She had a castle with ancient gardens, Ninfa, where she would invite me sometimes. Botteghe Oscure came out twice a year. There was an English section edited by her and an Italian section edited by Giorgio Bassani. Each issue had a different editor in a different language. There was a Finnish edition and a German edition and so on. I don’t remember what I was paid, maybe $50 a month.

What sort of effect did Rome have on you and your writing?

Enormous. Very crucially, in a restaurant in Piazza Navona – I don’t remember the name – I had an ice cream. Cestile! At a restaurant called Cestile. Piazza Navona is one of the most marvellous places on earth. I sat down for an ice cream to write, and I had no idea what was there: the fountains of Bernini. I was quite poor in Rome. My first wife made a living as a translator and a model. She was a very beautiful lady. She made more money than I did.

Ana Maria?

Ana Maria. After she graduated Barnard she went back to Spain. I had made a bit of money selling an El Greco – a piece of wild luck – so I was able to go with her. Her father was Spain’s representative at the League of Nations. A very distinguished guy. When I lived in Spain – I’ve started talking about Spain now – the fact that she was his daughter gave me entry to all sorts of places. Crucially, when I was nine years old, somebody asked me which side I supported in the Spanish Civil War, and I said, ‘The rebels, of course’. I didn’t know the rebels were the fascists. It took me a week before I found out I had chosen the wrong side.

We haven’t talked about painting. Some readers might not know that in addition to being a poet and publisher, you’re also a renowned dealer in old masters.

How did I get interested in painting? I discovered eight Goyas. I ask myself how, because I never took a course in art history, except I knew the great experts very well. My uncle Oscar was a painter. When I was a child we played toy soldiers together. He had a disease of the ear – easily cured nowadays – which affected his brain. When Oscar came home from the hospital, he would occasionally say something silly, something that didn’t quite make sense, and everyone, including my father, laughed at him. I felt very, very sorry for him. I think perhaps my love and sympathy for uncle Oscar figures in my love of art. My grandmother kept his paintings in the house.

A noble thing. Before I forget, what’s the story with Kenneth Clark?

Well, I knew him, but he wasn’t a friend of mine. I had a contract with the Contini Bonacossi family for a della Francesca with a value of $10,000. They thought the painting was no good, not authentic. I insisted it was the real deal and told them I’d pay $700,000 for it. I got it out of Italy and had it cleaned, and I went to see Kenneth Clark in London to show him a photograph of the picture. He asked me what I did, and I remember saying, ‘I’m a poet who occasionally sells an old master’. He had to buy cigars, so we walked around Albany or wherever it is to the tobacco shop while he tested me on my Auden. He agreed the picture was authentic and told me he’d help me sell it to the Louvre. They sent a guy to my house in Riverdale to see the painting. I used to keep it under my bed, out of the sun. The director of the Louvre said it was the purchase he was proudest of. I had an argument with the Contini Bonacossis. It was a looney family. They couldn’t say that I lied to them – I didn’t lie to them. That’s just part of the story.

Goya figures in your poems as a sort of surrogate father, Falstaff to your Henry. You call yourself ‘Goya’s child’.

I do and I do not. Goya had a special way of painting. Right on the wall there, what’s that one?

Devota Profesion

Can I see it? There are two others in the next room. There’s one with Sancho coming out the ass of a donkey. And another on the fireplace, with a man using a baby as a set of bellows. He suffered so much, Goya. There’s one with children playing, and if you look you can see they’re playing with fireballs. There’s something painful in everything. I think there’s something of those ironies and contradictions in what I write.

Do you remember the first painting you sold?

The first painting I sold was one of myself, by the famous American painter Marion Greenwood. I got $125 for it. At Yale I told a friend I had an affair with the most beautiful lady in the world. ‘That cannot be,’ he said, ‘because I saw the most beautiful lady in the world with a young man in a Spanish tavern.’ I was that young man. Marion’s husband was stationed in Hong Kong. He came back after the war was over and she went back to him. When I was at Yale, I would get off the train at New Haven and walk up to the campus with the wall against my back. I was so frightened and in so much pain. It damned nearly killed me. I have a poem about that, the passion I felt for her. I don’t know the lines.

What may be is that all those loves filled a common need I had, and in that way the women I loved were alike. There’s something to that. When I first met Stella Adler and it was clear we were having an affair, her mother, who was very wise and a famous actress herself, said: ‘You must remember, Stella belongs to her audience’. I had other affairs. ‘We’ll always have Paris’...

A strong hint.

You know, beyond my relationship with other poets – Yehuda Amichai, Stanley Kunitz, Ted Roethke, F.T. Prince, Robert Lowell, James Laughlin, Norman Manea, Yusef Komunyakaa... well, the truth is many of my poet friends are dead. Yusef and Norman are close friends. I haven’t seen Norman for over a year because of the plague. He’s living in the city and I’m up here, but we write to each other and send love. I write him poems. I had dinner a few years ago with him and Philip Roth. The two of them were very close. Philip said he wasn’t going to write anymore and asked us what he should do. I told him to get a dog. He was buried soon after in the graveyard at Bard. I read that Norman will be buried next to him. Wherever I’m buried, I want to be buried with the ashes of my dogs at my feet. I have the ashes of eight dogs in the next room.

Where was I? Beyond my relationship with other poets, there is also my relationship with actors. In some ways, the question of what has influenced me really is the theatre. And the poem is the play. I can’t get away from that.

You cast yourself as Lear’s fool.

That’s right. And other wise men occasionally. Point of interest: I’ve seen perhaps fifteen DVDs of Hamlet with various actors in the last few weeks. Clearly I love the play, and each time I’ve seen it, perhaps twelve times in live performances, I’ve loved the play more, learned more, and seen and heard what I hadn’t seen, heard, or learned before.

You were working on a poem recently – Hamletta?

A little experiment. What if Hamlet were a woman and her mother was murdered? I’ve thrown the notion out the window. My fantasy of changing the play to a silly poem is disgustingly arrogant and stupid. The lesson might be, be careful if Stanley loves you, he’ll change your sex. The world would be a carnival of changing sexes. There was a medieval woman pope. Someday there may be another.

You mentioned Lowell a moment ago. Can you tell me about him?

One thing about Lowell... you know, he was crazy.
He proposed to a stewardess on an aeroplane. So I had to deal with that. There were some things I paid to silence and others that were corrected. I first met him and Elizabeth Hardwick sometime in the mid-sixties, at a dinner organised by Kunitz. I had an assistant named Sandra Hochman. Lowell was very much in love with her. He was living on 69th Street in those days, I believe, and he would come to my house and make love to her on a big wide sofa. I still have that sofa – I can show you. And then there was Caroline Blackwood. Caroline got mixed up with Lowell when he was teaching in England. She had been married to the famous painter…

Lucian Freud.

Right, Freud. And then she met Israel Citkowitz in Venice. They both liked garlic a lot and liked to drink a lot, so they fell in love and married. I used to go up and play chess with Citkowitz in his apartment above Carnegie Hall. And he cheated at chess, I’m sorry to tell you. Caroline went into a depression. At that time a non-American citizen could only bring something like $7,000 into America, so she rented a room in a rather rundown house. One day I went to see her and she was having breakfast, but there was nothing on the table but whisky. I lent her $350 so she could get something to eat. One day in Long Island I was talking to her son, Sheridan, and she asked me to be executor for her kids. Just like that. As heirs to the Guinness fortune there was millions of dollars involved, and I had to deal with the bankers as they got older.

Sheridan wasn’t circumcised. Neither was my son.
I had all sorts of problems with my son’s mother. I wasn’t bar-mitzvah’d, but I was circumcised. I’ve spent more time in churches than synagogues. I went there to see art, in almost all cases. I wanted my son to be Jewish because of my respect and love of being Jewish. Not for religious reasons. In Italy once I was in a church with my son, and he said, ‘What if I asked you for a candle so I could pray to that Madonna, would you give me the 100 lire?’ And I said yes, I would.

I have a quote for you: ‘He is without religion but preoccupied with God. There is hardly a poem that is not in some way devotional.’ Do you recognise these lines?

That could be me on Stanley Kunitz.

It is, and yet the observation seems equally applicable to you.

Well, I have anti-God poems, and my anti-God poems in the end are religious. I have a poem where I say that on my tombstone I want it written: ‘He made God laugh’. There’s a nice letter I have from Lawrence Joseph where he says it takes a great poet to do that. And what’s the book called? Goddamned Selected Poems. A friend of mine thinks this a sinful title that many will object to. I know that the Lord’s name should not be used in vain. I merely meant some of the poems were very difficult to write while drinking coffee or having a margarita.

Hayden Carruth memorably described your work as ‘an argument with God’. Who’s winning?

God’s winning. God wins. But he doesn’t win everything. Not till he collects his winnings.

You’ll turn ninety-nine in June. It’s easy to see how readers might register a growing awareness of mortality in your more recent work, but then it strikes me that death has been a presence in your writing at some level from the very beginning. I mean, you were already ‘going through death’s laundry’ as far back as The Wrong Angel in 1966.

The going through death’s laundry sounds original, but in fact I worked in a ship’s laundry room, so I really did go through death’s laundry. But yes, that’s true. I had a bout with death when I was nine days old. You know, when Zhou Enlai was asked if he thought the French Revolution was a success, he said, ‘It’s too early to tell’. So you have that whole sense of time when you’re ninety-eight. You only catch trains that are delayed. Oh, thank the Lord, I just found the situation somewhat amusing. Now suddenly I’ve thought of the trains I’ve taken – New York, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, China, Japan, Mexico, Egypt, Greece, Peru, Turkey, Morocco, Ethiopia. Enough.

You founded Sheep Meadow Press in 1977. What made you decide to become a publisher?

Rather amusingly, I worked in some editorial capacity since I was thirteen. I edited page two of my high school newspaper. I was poetry editor at Halcyon – you can look that one up, it was run out of Harvard – and then I edited the book section of the New York Herald Tribune. Later I got a job as poetry editor of Ted Solotaroff’s New American Review. It sold 50,000 copies and paid very little. I published Louise Glück’s first book for The New American Library. I recommended her to Peter Jay at Anvil. It was through Peter, I think, that I first crossed paths with Michael Schmidt, who became a great, close friend. Somehow Michael arranged for me to do a reading at Oxford. That’s a long time ago.

Coming back to Sheep Meadow, I made some money selling a painting, something like a million dollars. And I had friends who deserved publication, so it was a way of spending the money. It was also tax deductible, but that wasn’t the reason. Arthur Gregor, Édouard Roditi, Aaron Rosen – I published people that I liked, people who for some reason were having a tough time. I have some influence of Celan, who I published and read very carefully. I think my poor ability to read foreign languages meant that fine translations excited me. I had friends who were Arabic translators, Hebrew translators, German, Romanian, Chinese, Japanese. Crucially, what’s going to happen to Sheep Meadow now? There’s a question of what books people will read. Are they going to read at all?

What do you make of the state of poetry today?

I don’t know if I read a lot of contemporary poetry. Occasionally I see something that appeals to me and I read it, but there’s a lot of just plain dreck. I saw a very good poem in the New Yorker today. One of the problems with much contemporary poetry is that they have MFA classes throughout the United States, and they’ve got a few hundred thousand people who think they’re poets. In San Francisco, I think, out of all the people who registered to vote (I don’t know the number) something like fourteen thousand of them registered as a poet.
I remember Kunitz saying: ‘There’s only one poet in the room’.

What advice would you give to younger poets?

The devil generalises, angels are specific. And I never want an extra word or syllable. Auden said somewhere or other, and I follow this almost one hundred percent, never three unaccented syllables in a row. I follow that. I think that the best way to teach poetry is to teach a poem that excites the reader. Shakespeare really excited me. Lorca excited me. Excitement is an interesting word. There’s sexual excitement. I think that a good poem should excite you sexually, a little, little bit, or it’s not a poem. I’ve never said that before.

Your new collection, Goddamned Selected Poems, is published by Carcanet in May 2024. What’s next?

Well, I have some new poems. This week I wrote a poem almost every day. Of course, there is a serious question: Will I ever write another book? I don’t know anyone who wrote a book after his ninety-ninth year. Stanley Kunitz lived to 100, but published his last book a year before he died. One of the things I want to do, although this is a very bad time to do it, is to write a play about a former slave who ran a Shakespeare theatre in New York that got burned down. You know, I took every course on playwrighting it was possible to take, and I never wrote a good play. I think the reason is that I didn’t write emotionally: I wrote intellectually, too much from what I knew and not from what I guessed. Anyway, the play would have little chance of an audience. What would be the audience of my plays? There were plays in Shakespeare’s time just written to be read. I’m sort of up in the air about that.

Do you feel strongly that poetry should be read aloud?

I feel strongly that poetry should be read aloud, but I respect those poets who don’t. John Ashbery didn’t.

Perhaps I’m alone in this, but I have a kind of allergy to hearing poets read their work. Present company excluded.

The one that’s really terrible is Yeats. I have Auden reading on the machine right now. If you hear Auden reading ‘As I walked out one evening...’ Wonderful.

My final question comes courtesy of your friend, the poet Greg Miller: ‘You defend liberty and attack tyranny. You often write of growing up on Liberty Avenue. Can your poems make the United States, or the world and the people in it, freer?’

Well, that’s what I want to do. I think it’s awfully arrogant to believe that, but I have to believe it. I must say that many people want to make the world like them, and they don’t give a damn unless it’s useful to them. I think that’s the problem we’re having in the White House. Usefulness. But yes, I wouldn’t write unless I thought it made a little difference, changed the world a little. If you see my poem ‘Song of Introduction’... Can you read it to me?

Ancient of Days,
I hear the sound and silence, the lumière
of molds, disease and insects, I believe poetry
like kindness changes the world, a little.
It reaches the ear of lion and lamb, it enters
the nest of birds, the course of fish, it is water
in the cupped hands of Arab and Jew...

You know, when you read these lines to me it makes me feel better. It wakes me up.

On which note, I regret we must call it a night. My head is still on UK time.

As you wish. The truth is, everything we eat, dream, remember, stays in our head, and that’s why everyone’s head swells a little as he or she gets older. I have hats that used to fit me that don’t fit me anymore.