Mirrors and Lamps: A Conversation With David Ray - Remembering David Ray

 

Mirrors and Lamps: 

A Conversation With David Ray

                                                                            Nibir K. Ghosh

Reading David Ray’s poetry, essays and memoirs can convince you that he is not simply one of those flowers whose fate it is to be born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness upon  the desert air of Arizona. Like the Grand Canyon, he stands majestically in his grand isolation. He delights in ceaselessly creating, out of the raw material of life, a fabric of exquisite beauty that offers a fine blending of agony and pain,  happiness and cheer.  His works do often mirror a world in chaos and disorder but his prolific genius and his love for truth provide ample light to negotiate such darkness. In this lively conversation with me at his home in Tucson, Arizona, Ray shares his priorities and concerns about life, literature and politics.- NKG

Sharing my meeting and conversation with David Ray during my visit to Tucson, Arizona. The Interview was published in Re-Markings - Special Section on David Ray March Re-Markings, 2004. We, my wife Sunita and I, spent a few lovely days with David and Judy Ray, both of whom have published frequently in Re-Markings. .

Ghosh: “None can usurp this height but those to whom the miseries of the earth are miseries, and will not let them rest.”  Would you, like Keats, confess that your poetry reflects your effort to transcend imaginatively the weariness, the fever and fret of life on earth?

Ray: Your question is a remarkable example of synchro-nicity, as I was just today working on a group of poems with that theme, though I was not aware of it.  You have given a name to it.  “Randomness” is about the meaning to be found without effort.  “I open the book at random and ask,/ ‘What am I meant to see here?’/ And the same question can be asked of the streets and the faces,/ the malls and the mountains….”  Even when idle we are seeking and making discoveries, trying to escape the weariness, fret and fever, the banality of life, and swap it for heaven, Utopia, an epiphany.  Life is at its best when this just happens.  And for that we must let it.  I say in “Randomness” that if life seems like hell, just wait it out and it may be heaven the next day. That is a code, by the way, that has sometimes kept me alive.  In truth we are always “at the brink of heaven,” but we often forget it.  We need constant discipline such as we find in Plato’s dialectic of remembering what you came to this earth with or some other method of meditation.  I was drawn to the Quakers because in their seeking for truth they practice what I’ve long employed as method for poetry, waiting for the spirit to move you, for the truth to be spoken through you. It sounds pretentious, but actually it requires real humility, nakedness before God. Jim Dickey put it more directly. “Stand out in a lightning storm and get hit by lightning.”  People might think you look funny, running around in a lightning storm, but gardeners considered Gerard Manley Hopkins weird because he would stand and look at a tree for an hour, no doubt seeking its inscape.

Ghosh: In a poem from Not Far from the River you lament that "Love dies if you can't get to see her/ or if you see her too much,/ also from the gossip of vile men./ Or from no cause at all.”  How do you account for such unredeemed pessimism?

Ray: That, of course, was a translation, meant to be witty, but even my own pessimism sometimes shocks me, and if I responded to it with emotional freedom I’d have been dead by suicide long ago.  Odysseus had to tie himself to the mast at times.  I do that regularly, having made an ethical decision to stick it out, for I know how deeply survivors are hurt by a suicide.  Edna St. Vincent Millay, in “Conscientious Objector” puts it well: “I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.”  Yet in my memoir I describe that period in my life when I seriously attempted suicide and got close enough to death’s door to learn that the world would not grieve much.  Plath and Sexton may seem to be excessively grieved, but in fact the cultish notoriety of their posthumous careers has little to do with them either as poets or persons.  It’s knee-jerk romanticism, thrill-seeking.  Their readers can project all their own morbid fantasies of making the world stand up and pay attention by such a daring act.  We do everyone a dis-service to glamorize this industry; studies have shown that there are many imitative suicides for any celebrity suicide.  Whether by intention or not, then, public figures who commit suicide cause the deaths of others just as surely as if they leapt from the Golden Gate onto a boat full of admirers.

Ghosh:  Actually that sounds rather optimistic, doesn’t it? You are affirming life rather than getting caught up in this glamorization of death.

Ray: Yes, suicide is a copout and we should not rewrite personal histories to make it sound noble.  Plath would prob-ably still be around if medications available today had been handy, though she’d have had to go for help, and she might not have.  Sexton, of course, wore out several psychiatrists, some of whom were very foolish, the one, for example, who taped her sessions and sent her home with cassettes to listen to over a pitcher of martinis.  That would bring anyone down, narcissism empowered, approved, sanctified.  There was no way she could get out of the trap of the self.

Ghosh: Then you think we’re a death-worshiping culture?

Ray: Yes, even with our fanatic eroticism.  Both pornography and capital punishment turn the body into meat.  It’s bad enough to see executions casually worked into the tele-vision news or documentaries.  Addiction, be it to sex or drugs (alcohol--ethanol--and nicotine not considered drugs, of course), is repeating the same acts over and over without learning anything.  Robert Bly once wrote an essay about James Dickey’s “The Fiend,” claiming that the voyeur in the poem wanted to climb in the bathroom window to rape the woman.  I thought that was unfair, especially because Bly wouldn’t grant the poet his claim to a persona, but insisted it was Dickey himself, the same man who had written “The Firebombing,” taking pleasure in bombing civilians in World War II.  But whether the poem was about Dickey himself or not, the transition from voyeurism to rape and murder is not unusual.  Sex as we encourage it with promiscuity, orgies, and pornography is heartless, hardly linked at all with love.  I say this not as a moralist but with a sad acknowledgement that much of what passes for sex is just a part of our death worship.  “Why War?” Freud asked.  Listen to the war crimes trials and you’ll find out.  Rape.  Chaos.  Abandonment of  control and of respect for other beings.  We people the earth with mass graves because we refuse to look deeply enough into ourselves and, in the words of a killer I discuss in my memoir, ‘stop ourselves before we kill more.’  Doris Lessing thinks that “we are a race that cannot learn,” and I hope she’s wrong.

Ghosh:  Then your method is exploring self as well as subjects outside the self?

Ray: Yes, and trying to write with objectivity, not the sub-jectivity of narcissism.  I often write almost in a trance, and try not to censor.  My essay about the Wright Brothers, e.g., is unbearably pessimistic and totally at odds with what anyone else has to say about them, but unfortunately I hold that view. Otherwise I think we’d have to deny the millions of dead as a result of their exponential enhancement of our ability to kill.  Just recently a man was interviewed on N.P.R. because he’s invented a gun that can fire around corners so the shooter doesn’t have to expose his body.  He intends, he says, for the weapons to be available only to police and the military—the good guys, of course, not the others.  The Wright Brothers were more forthright.  When asked what their plane would be good for they said “War” and set about trying to sell it to any nation interested.

Ghosh: King Hala’s world of the gatha poets was simpler?

Ray: No airplanes, no bombs, no guns 2000 years ago in those villages.  The gatha you cite reflects the witty acknowl-edgement that love is transitory, but it is in no way a society’s postcoital death worship as our final war is likely to be.  Thank God, though, that love is no more transitory than it is.  I’m hanging on to all I can get.

Ghosh: Your poetic journey is marked by various landmarks in the form of awards and accolades.  Does such recognition motivate you to continue with your “endless search” ?

 

Ray:  Most of the people in my field are infected with viral Awarditis and competition in its many avatars, but my motives are different, I believe, than those of most.  Only a small percentage of my work gets into print--I still get rejections almost daily for both single poems, stories, and essays as well as for book manuscripts.  So for me an award is not an opportunity to rest on my laurels (as it would be for many), but it stimulates hope that my work will find its way out of my files.  (“To have great poets you must have great audiences,” said Whitman, and you know the Keats sonnet:  “When I have fears that I may cease to be/ Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,/ Before high-piled books, in charact’ry,/ Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain….”  We’re obsessed by the question of what we leave for posterity, so if an award improves the chances for my work finding the audience it cries out for, then bring on the award.  But Epictetus reminds us that we cannot make others admire us.  Maybe our friends can, but we can’t.

 

Ghosh: What about Dr. Johnson’s statement that great works of art create their own audiences ?

 

Ray: Had Boswell not created Dr. Johnson’s audience, he probably would be known only for his dictionary. And you cite Thomas Gray, with his wonderful lines, “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

Ghosh: Your One Thousand Years: Poems about the Holo-caust makes me recall the agony and the anguish I expe-rienced after my visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washing-ton, D.C. It’s a very poignant description of the crimes perpetuated by man on his fellowmen. What motivated you into the creation of this masterpiece?

 

Ray: You are very generous, but I believe that if you are ever a victim (as I was as a child) you are forever trying to lose your own woes by getting caught up in somebody else’s.  That’s a way of putting your own puny sufferings into perspective.  What are a few abandonments and beatings compared to what those victims went through?  And not only the Jews, to be sure, and not only back in the Forties. Someone pointed out that most of my works are about victims of one sort or another—it’s not a deliberate choice and I’ve tried hard to overcome the hazards of subjectivity, self-pity, sentimentalizing, and so on.  My friend Gerald Stern says it’s very important for non-Jews, too, to discuss the Holocaust, though I’m aware that some believe other-wise.

Ghosh: What drew you into the realm of poetry?

Ray: Tough question to be honest about, but your perception is probably based on the reality that there’s been more positive response to my poetry than to my other writings, though I still pursue other forms as well.  I love poetry and read and write it daily, but I also love other genres.  Right now I’m reading Tolstoy—The Cossacks and Hadja Murad—which document his service in Chechnya well over a century ago.  It’s still the same horrible conflict, atrocities and all.  I wrote a satirical piece a couple of years ago reviewing Hadja Murad as a new novel, and only revealed in the last sentence that it had been published by Tolstoy a hundred years ago.  A Russian soldier could write the same self-lacerating account today, appalled at what his comrades are doing.

Ghosh: Who are your literary ancestors?

 

Ray: Whitman, Lawrence, Williams, Rexroth, Jeffers, Mayo,  Levertov, Stafford, Millay (much scorned today), Dreiser, Hemingway, but they are infinite.  I don’t consciously imitate anyone, but the hunger for insight and wisdom that pervades these workers in the word mines never fails to move me.  I have poems in honor of all of them.

Ghosh: How would you underline what you may term as your ars poetica?

Ray: “Write before you think,” I tell my students, then go on from there.

 

Ghosh: Isn’t that like putting the cart before the horse?

 

Ray: Of course that’s the conventional view, but I think teachers who make people too self-conscious have blocked them at the outset. Creativity is about disinhibition, then some reining in.

Ghosh:  Sartre in Words, James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Richard Wright in Black Boy describe graphically how the artistic spirit finds in adversities of life the raw material for the nourishment of the creative imagination.  Can one look at your The Endless Search: A Memoir from the same perspective?

 

Ray: I’m sure, for in memoir one looks back on the epi-phanies, the crises, the lost faces.  Someone who had read The Endless Search recently told me I’d have to go see the movie “Sea Biscuit” because there was a scene in there that made her think of me and cry.  I wondered what the devil that could be, but all of a sudden this scene came up and I broke into tears.  It was the scene where the parents sell the boy, turn him out to earn his own living.  Though it’s at a racetrack in this movie, I call it “the blacking factory scene,” which Dickens described so poignantly—his parents putting him out to work.  That happened to me even before I was sold off to a sexual predator as described in Search.  My friend Amritjit Singh also pointed out that some of my earlier experiences are similar to those Richard Wright went through.  I had forgotten those scenes, but it is all too true.  I didn’t burn down our sharecropper shack, but I remember chasing a rat, as in Wright’s Native Son.  And as I also confessed in Search I could easily have become a monster like Wright’s Bigger Thomas.

Ghosh: I remember having come across a remark by David Ignatow where he states "David Ray writes poems that are like a man with an injured child in his arms walking from street to street in search of a doctor or a hospital.  He finds none and keeps walking doggedly, and we may tell him, David, such a cure you are looking for your injured faith in the world is in the truth of your poems. They will survive, they will survive."  Your comments?

Ray: Absolutely accurate.  Still true.

Ghosh:  Both parts of it?

Ray: Indeed.  I’m becoming confident some of the poems will survive, at least as long as many other artifacts around us, though they’re not etched in bronze.  But David knew I never expected to survive even my adolescence, and it is a source of daily amazement that I’m still around, now a member of that tenth of our population that’s officially old.  I have an essay, by the way, about David Ignatow’s “Journals” and how they reveal how hard he struggled not to kill himself during his life-long depression.

Ghosh: What rainbow of hope and cheer do you visualize for the world you live in, both real and imaginative?

Ray: ‘That it will turn out to be okay for what it was, is, and will be.’  As I describe in a poem in Sam’s Book, Frost said something like that when asked if he had hope for the future, and he said he had it even for the past, that it would turn out to be okay for what it was.  I don’t think past and future are separable, so the best we can do is hope for both.  Clearly, however, we are not in charge.  We can work hard ‘to do no harm,’ but otherwise it’s out of our hands.

Ghosh: As a poet and writer, what are the experiences of your visit to India  which you can effortlessly recall?

Ray: That I felt more at home there than I do most of the time in America.  Since I didn’t know the languages being spoken around me I was held in a non-verbal and non-judgmental (or so it seemed) acceptance.  Americans reject one another at the drop of a hat—differ with one opinion and you’re blacklisted and all that.  But there were none of those games.  It was as welcome a respite from invidiousness as finding myself in a mountain cabin without television (as we did in the Himalayan foothills).  Americans criticize the caste system, of course, but they’d have more credibility if they didn’t maintain such a rigid one themselves.  Judy and I still have India in the family, a daughter who married an Indian, and a family we were very close to in Jaipur—the Singhs—they’re still family.  They don’t give up on us as easily as do some American friends and family.

 

Ghosh: Would you agree that for Americans privacy to the extent of isolation is an important ingredient in their pursuit of happiness?

 

Ray: Insofar as solitude is essential for mental growth, and happiness is very much a mental achievement.  A Spanish writer, Don Ramón del Valle-Inclán, put it beautifully, worth remembering:  “I loved solitude and, as is the wont of birds, sang only for myself. The sorrow that nobody would listen to me lamenting now became my pleasure. I was assisted by the aid of the Muses.”  We count on those muses as good company and they definitely prefer solitude.

Ghosh: Were you inspired by the Taj Mahal, that beautiful monument of love, during your visit to Agra?  One of your poems mentions you had to rest content with the rickshaw-puller’s version rather than see the monument yourself.

Ray: We did see the Taj, and it is memorable.  My poem about staying back in the hotel instead of going there is not quite true, but you have to see a subject slant or with peripheral vision when it’s so stunning and ineffable.  It was, as I said in the poem, as close to an embodied orgasm as any architectural creation could be.

Ghosh: In Demons in the Diner you have provided excellent  word-portraits of African-American greats like W.E.B. Du Bois and the Delany sisters.  How would you like to view the ‘American Dilemma’ from the perspective of a white American in the 21st century?  Has the color line dis-appeared or does it continue to function within the limits of invisibility as viewed by Ralph Ellison?

 

Ray: Myrdal and Wright, unfortunately, are as valid today as when they wrote.  Howard Dean got himself into trouble when he said that racism needs to be confronted right on, with no one left out of the discussion.  But that is true.  My family of origin is pretty racist, and my daughter’s African-American child, a wonder, is not spoken of by some of them.  But it’s too late to change them.  They no longer use the N word in my presence, and that’s about as much progress as I can expect.  My father’s racism is mentioned in Search.  Fortunately my daughter lives in an area in Ohio where my grandson is not likely to be discriminated against.  And another of my daughters who’s married to an Indian lives in Los Angeles and since he’s on the police force, I think he can insure a certain level of respect.  Though I am not an Indian, an African, or a Jew, I know what it is like to be discriminated against, treated as less than full value, disrespected, not paid attention to.  I’ve sometimes re-marked that I became a writer because people paid no attention to what I say, and that’s still true to a large extent.  In any gathering (even one where I am present to receive a prize) I am often treated like an invisible man.  I know the feeling.  We are all Palestinians.  Incidentally, Kafka’s story “Before The Law” is an uncanny description of how we can be kept outside the circle for life, teased by those who repeatedly close doors in our faces.  Like “The Hunger Artist,” it’s a writer’s parable.

Ghosh: How would you respond to the most recent contro-versy regarding the Thurmond-Essie Mae Washington episode?

Ray:  Strom Thurmond’s family is rejecting her and they are infuriated that she has told the truth after decades of going along with her father’s lies.  There have been many ex-posures of the schizoid treatment of race in this country.  If there’s one lie there are many.  Clinton’s accusers who demanded impeachment had mistresses.  Jefferson had his Sally, and at Monticello we went through the underground tunnel he used, his secret passage to her.  I have a poem that speaks of how my drinking cronies treated black girls who were under the misimpression that they were being wooed as potential wives when in fact they rarely were.  Racism is a huge fault—rift—line right across our continent, no more excusable now than when it was practiced as outright slavery.

 

Ghosh: Do you contemplate writing something like ‘Poems about the Holocaust’ about the African American experience of three hundred years to depict the collective exploitation and suffering which Blacks have undergone in a predom-inantly white America?

Ray: I don’t choose such subjects with conscious intention, but I’d love to gather my poems on African-American themes and scenes.  Essays too, such as the ones on Mbembe Milton Smith and Charles W. Chesnutt, the great novelist who quit writing because he knew he could never be taken seriously.  He could have passed for white, but he had far too much integrity for that.  His solution for the race problem was intermarriage--genetic mingling--and I felt a certain satisfaction when my daughter gave birth to a brown baby, but in truth tolerance should not depend on anybody muting their color or darkening it.  We should accept people as they are, unconditionally, I-Thou, not I-It.  Then there’d be no more Holocausts.

Ghosh: Do you look at your function as a poet, like an “unacknowledged legislator” in the manner of Shelley or would you prefer to state like Auden that “poetry makes nothing happen”?

 

Ray: I do think poetry makes something happen.  In other times and places it has made a great deal happen.  But even here it opens the heart, enlarges the mind, provokes, can be a gadfly, and a powerful instrument of protest.  The scorn directed at protest poetry is simply a sign of its power.  Defenders of the status quo have to reject it.

Ghosh: How do you view the relationship between art and politics?

Ray: There are many poets whose work relates to little in the real world.  If I worked at it I too might achieve irrelevancy. But it’s just not my line.  For me breathing is a political act and politics is often perverted art though even politics could rise to the level of art as it did with Ben Franklin and at times with F.D.R.

Ghosh: You seem to hate tyranny in all forms.  Does such motivation come from anything personal?

Ray: The landlord was always after us.  We were denied everything, including medical attention we couldn’t afford. Doors were closed to us because of our “status” as “white trash.”  We were raised to live in shame, apologizing for our existence, and ever aware that others have the power of life and death over us.  I’ve escaped, but there are millions of others who are powerless, thanks to a heartless system of welfare for the wealthy at the expense of the needy.  “The sleep of reason engenders monsters,” Goya told us, and it looks like reason will remain asleep well into the millennium.

Ghosh: The events of 9/11 have changed America forever.  As a poet, how were your sensibilities affected or altered?  How would you look at Amiri Baraka’s poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” a poetic statement that deprived Baraka of his Poet Laureateship?

Ray: I haven’t really read the poem so I don’t know if he was writing out of irony, but I know how painful it is (and in his case expensive) to have one’s irony ignored and to be held accountable in the most judgmental and punitive way.  And even if he said what he supposedly said, is there not room for one non-correct point of view in poetry?  God knows there’s enough outrageous (and violent) nonsense in the other media.  Why do we demand so much more of poetry, and why does the average person think he is an expert on aesthetics?  If the men in Washington were held as account-able as Baraka was, wouldn’t most of their offices have been emptied out by now?  The fact is that most celebrities shoot off their mouths in all directions and it never costs them ten thousand a year or an honorific position, nor does it provoke the abolishment of one of the few roles for artists in this country.  (No more laureates for New Jersey!)  So I’d say that Baraka had a right to be a fool or an idiot (in Dostoyevsky’s sense) or an indulger of risky irony sure to be misinterpreted.  A perfectly inoffensive laureate is an appalling thought.

Ghosh: You have been an ardent pacifist. You have been very articulate, almost an activist, in condemning America’s intervention in Vietnam.  What do you feel about America’s involvement in Iraq?  Does it really justify the adage of con-flict between Freedom and Fear?

Ray: Thucydides said that twenty years was long enough for forgetfulness and thus the mistakes would be repeated.  How long people will tolerate the destruction of their environment and the death toll of a needless war as has ever been fought is anyone’s guess.  As long as there are plenty of distractions the creeping fascism may keep ad-vancing.  In 1936 Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here, about how fascism could take over in America.  It sounds just like what’s been happening at a frightening pace.

Ghosh: You’ve written directly about Iraq?

Ray: Some of my work on Iraq, including “The Death of Sardanapalus and Other Poems,” is on the Howling Dog Press website (www.howlingdogpress.com). And several of my poems are on www.poetsagainstthewar.org and in various magazines and anthologies.  I’m against these need-less wars, since as a Quaker I think non-violence can be more effective than violence, and it doesn’t outrage the rest of the world.  Consider the Middle East, for example, how much more persuasive Satyagraha, Gandhi’s non-violence, would be than suicide bombers or wanton destruction of homes in retaliation.  And Iraqi civilians could probably get the occupying forces out of their country if they staged a total national sit-down strike.  As for going after the 9/11 terrorists, we have not even looked in Saudi Arabia (how many of them were Saudis?) or Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden is probably hiding out.  I really believe we could defeat terrorism with non-violent means—isolating, hacking their communications, boycotting, negotiating—and for weeks before the bombing of Afghanistan I thought that’s what we were out to do, and I respected those efforts.  But then came the bombing, which only inspires more terrorists, helps recruit them, just as Israel’s retaliatory strikes create more rage.  We have done little to solve the problems, but we’ve certainly created a lot of new ones, and the world hates and fears us for it. Strangely too, we do not use the withdrawal of foreign aid funding as the tool it could be, for example, in pursuing the Middle East “road map” for peace.  At the end of my poem “Boomerang” I ask if anyone ever threw out a boomerang called War and got back one called Peace.

Ghosh: In many of your poems—“Wool Highways” for in-stance--you have celebrated your love for animals.  I remem-ber reading somewhere in an ‘about the author note’ that mentioned you as living in Tucson, Arizona, “with wife Judy and dog Levi.”  What motivated your interest in such placid and self-contained creatures?

Ray: A reviewer of my first book, X-Rays, said that I seem to confuse animals and people.  That’s going a bit far, but I agree with Swift that horses are nicer than most people, and there was a lovely letter to the editor about dogs in The New York Times (December 20, 2003)--“Dogs Deserve Respect.”  Jeanne Isenstein listed many services dogs perform and concluded that they “provide humans with a unique and valuable gift—unconditional love.  Let’s stop merely exploit-ing dogs and give them the respect and honor they de-serve.”  I agree. When we treat animals with I-It mean-ness, the transition to treating people that way is an easy one.  Cats are great too, but as a bird lover I’d recommend tinkly bells as the cats climb trees around the neighborhood; too many people think feline killing expeditions are amusing.

Ghosh: This sounds as if you're getting close to Gandhi's doctrine of ahimsa.

Ray: I consider that quite a compliment.  I don't think my pa-cifism is quite that pure a philosophy.  And consider this:  if one believes that violence is not the solution then one must take very strong steps to prevent the need arising.  You don't let a Hitler or Saddam build up his power while you sleep or even aid and abet (as was done in both cases), then send out the bombers.  You don't ignore the root causes of crime, then think that executing a monster like Bigger Thomas will solve the problem.  In an essay called “Is This Child Our Enemy?” I express my brand of pacifism—I can't approve the murder of a single child, whether a Jew, a Palestinian, an American, an Iraqi.  There's a writer named William T. Vollmann who, in a New York Times interview, "offers a systematic rationale for why and when to use violence."  He explains that "Shooting really is the quintessentially Ameri-can experience," and he wants "to create a simple and practical moral calculus which would make it clear when it is acceptable to kill, how many could be killed and so forth."  He sees the freedom to kill as an entitlement, saying "we are constantly confronted with situations not of our own making which entitle us to acts of violence."  Now that's the kind of attitude, I fear, that rules today.  But are we really entitled to impose violence as earlier empires have? It's never worked in the long run, and has brought those empires down. Why should we, how could we, be the exception?

Ghosh: Does poetry stand a chance of surviving in high-tech America?  May I refer to your poem “Millennium Madness” in which you make a very interesting statement in this context: “who/ would wish to hear of war, famine, and pestilence/ when one of the marvels of television is that/ it is bright and glowing and only mildly radioactive”?

Ray: Well, that’s one of my ironic remarks about denial, mis-leading perhaps.  But we do indeed live in a world of denial, and contemporary poetry reflects the preference for Voice over Content (as our current Poet Laureate puts it) and a disdain for responses to current history.  The previous Poet Laureate scorned those of us who wrote about 9/11, and proclaimed that poets have no responsibility to current history.  That’s quite a change from when Tennyson was a Poet Laureate.  There’s certainly little positive response to poetry of conscience.  Here’s an amusing and symptomatic example.  In a recent reading of New York poets at the Poetry Society of America (here I quote The New York Times for December 5, 2002), “There was only one poem with a direct reference to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.”  The poet explained “that he had started to write the poem before that attack and it was about the siege of Troy.”  He acknowledged the incidental contemporary parallel, but clearly took no pride in that relevance.  The Trojan War, though, was a legitimate subject.  But why the silence of all the other poets on this incredible event that changed all our lives?  Someone reviewing a poetry antho-logy a few years ago pointed out that you’d never have known from its pages about the wars, ecological problems, disasters, etc., of the decades represented.  Is it that sort of avoidance that earns a magazine its hundred million dollar grant from a drug company notorious for price gouging?

Ghosh: You’re suggesting there’s a fear of politics, of commitment to truth?

Ray: A fear of truth, a constant effort to maintain the status quo and the comfort level.  We’re like a big dysfunctional family that fears the child who will blurt out all the secrets. And that’s why having a writer in the family is not really desirable.  Thomas Wolfe found that out, but so have I.

Ghosh: As a writer where would your preference lie—polit-ical dissent in the form of parables such as Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four—or direct action/assault?

 

Ray: I have written some parables, including my recent “Rumi Jesus,” and I’d love to be able to work at the level of Orwell or Swift, or Lafontaine for that matter.  But that’s far beyond me.  I certainly prefer subtlety to “assault,” though. Still, sometimes shock has its value, as Ginsberg knew.  He got a startled response from his readers at first, though in time they quit reacting, the way animals will run from spotlights but then become accustomed to being intrusively observed, or the way people get used to noise in public places, an incessant jabber of what I call noise and some call music.  It’s ubiquitous now.  I pity the people who must work under these conditions.  In restaurants I will ask “if the noise can be turned down,” and am always informed that it is “not noise, it’s music.”  I still say it’s noise.  In her memoir, Under My Skin, Doris Lessing says that “young men are prepared for killing by stirring marches,” and so on.  Theo-dore Roethke wrote that “The Devil today takes the form of noise.”  And there is no defense from the  war planes over-head or the rumbles from Iraq.

Ghosh:  You agree with Lessing and Roethke? 

Ray: Absolutely, we must acknowledge subliminal seduction at work.  In agreement with Roethke, Lessing says we’re torturing ourselves with music.  The F.B.I. blared music at the holdouts at Waco and at Ruby Ridge, and we endure a more subtle torture in stores as we are lulled into a trancelike submission to impulsive buying.  With all the subliminal techniques appealing to our senses we have only a slim chance of avoiding the fate of the brainwashed multitudes, the millions of Americans who are happy to have the wool over their eyes.  Watching television, we sit as if the lids on our skulls gape open, letting anything the corporations choose to pour into our heads come right in, unfiltered.  Within the first hour of waking we’ve had a hundred brand names and propaganda clichés embedded in our heads, like it or not.  Actually, a hundred is an understatement if you turn on the radio, TV, or thumb through the newspaper.

Ghosh:  You admire Lessing, then, for consciousness raising?  Even in so-called trivial matters, the writer speaks truth to power?

Ray:  In truth there is no trivial matter, but we like to deny that and regard people who care as crackpots.  The role of writers has become one of giving comfort to the military-industrial and corporate establishments, for that’s the road to comfort and success. In sending out my book manuscript about 9/11 recently, I prefaced it with acknowledgment of this reality.  “Although poetry in response to contemporary events has been put down soundly by some of our leading critics and fellow poets, some of us do—for better or worse—express our reactions in poetry, with hope that our work will rise above polemics.”  The manuscript embodies this hope.  In these poems I draw upon my feelings of grief and rage at the event, but also try to put it into an historical context.  Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace that in under-standing recent conflicts we never go back far enough, deep enough.  Bill Stafford put it this way: “the darkness is always deeper.”

Ghosh: Do you want to be known primarily as an activist poet?

Ray: Not at all.  That is a small part of my work, and I’m grievously disappointed if I am perceived primarily as such.  Much of my poetry is lyric, love poetry, transcreations from the poets of the past whose intensity has been under-appreciated by English readers, work on a wide variety of subjects, and in several genres.  It’s very unfortunate that there’s such a passion for typecasting.  I could name any number of poets who benefit from this in the sense that their work is wholly consistent.  You can always recognize their styles, their subjects, their techniques.  Sometimes I envy and admire their containment, their narrowing of focus, but I couldn’t do it.  I have to be open to what I feel and see.  I simply cannot make such a strategic decision to limit my style to a chatty, non-controversial, witty, urbane, pleasantly charming persona in order to assure the kind of success I see in some cases.  Nor can I suppress my views in order not to offend those who pass out the goodies.  For me writing is a calling, a spiritual quest, and I can’t betray it for success.

Ghosh: Thank you. It has been my pleasure to speak with you.

• Dr. Nibir K. Ghosh is currently Senior Fulbright Fellow at the Department of English, University of Washington, Seattle, USA.

Copyright Nibir K. Ghosh