"Heavy Trash": A Conversation with Mark Halliday
more, say more, give us more of the underlying complication. Let the poem be less pretty and more true." Good poems tend to be born out of some kind of psychological trouble. Let's not allow the poem to airbrush that away.
LP: "Psychological trouble?" What do you mean, more preciselv.? Most poets realize pretty early on that writing while depressed or upset 路is usually a no-go. Do you mean writing out of that "formal feeling comes" kind of place? After great emotion or trouble?
MH: You're right that a person is unlikely to write a good poem in the very moment of extreme distress-fear or rage or grief or despair. Wordsworth must have been thinking of this when he spoke of "emotion recollected in tranquility"-and yet the word "tranquility" has always seemed too placid in that formulation. When I say that good poems tend to be born out of psychological trouble, I mean that the root of the poem is in something the person feels is not okay as it is. Some aspect of life feels incomplete or askew or ~oo opaque or too silent. The writer wants to remedy this. It's often noted that we tend to resist poems of sheer happiness. "Ah, the joy of living! The songs of the pretty birds, the deliciousness of lobster with lime chutney, the warmth of God's love, the fun of licking my lover's organs ... "We usually are repulsed by poems like that, or our feeling is "That's nice for you but we don't need to hear about it." There are exceptions. Kenneth Koch, a star for me, tried many times to express in poems the joy, or rather the excitement, the thrill of being alive. I like some of those poems, and yet the work by Koch I value most is the poetry of anxiety, self-doubt, regret, and bewilderment. Moreover, I would argue that even Koch's poems of exhilaration have an anxiety-sometimes half-admitted-behind them: a feeling of ''I'm so happy, I'm so fired up, and yet I sense it won't last, I can't keep it at this peak"-or a feeling of "I was so happy and fired up just an hour ago but now at my typewriter I already fee l a bit different." If you have to write about it, then you must be in some way dissatisfied or not at peace with it. And that's at the core of the true poem you can write. This is why many poems of joy or awe or appreciation of Nature ring false, insofar as they pretend to be entirely inhabiting that nice condition. The truth is that the poet is nervously trying to recapture, or ponder, that condition, or to eulogize it, or to prove to us that he/she really was there. Similarly, wisdom poems are often-not always off-putting or depressing. l mean poems that seem to say "Here's something I have all figured out, ~\nd I give it to you with a pretty ribbon around it." If a poem comes at us this way, it damn well better have interesting fresh wisdom to offer. And, l would argue that the best poems of this kind-Shakespeare's sonnet "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame" would be a drastic example-do convey to us
Wimer路 Spring 2008
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