JM: What about this book you're writing on the New School? What's happening with that?

DL: It's sort of a book about cultural history, literary analysis, and biography. It's mainly about the New York School of Poets: John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, James Skyler, and Kenneth Koch, and some others. But it's also about them in the context of New York City as a cultural capital and art center - and the context also of the avant-garde, and how it, as a concept, had become triumphant in NYC after World War II. And the great art movement of the era was abstract expressionism. So I've got this great subject of these poets and the painters they were friendly with and the older painters who had scored big in the world, and I have the subject also of NYC and the whole milieu of NYC and how it sort of supplanted Paris as the world capital of art.

JM: When will you be done?

DL: Well, I've written the manuscript, but now I have to restructure it. (I'm making some coffee). Whenever I finish a manuscript of prose like that, it's like 750 pages of raw material and then you decide, "Hey Chapter 3 really should be Chapter 1 and Chapter 1should be Chapter 2, except half of it should be Chapter 8." I've gotta do that.

JM: What about the next Best American Poetry - you have something special planned for that?

DL: First of all we have Best American Poetry of 1997 coming out in September and that's going to be a great volume. James Tate is the Guest Editor. It's full of narratives, a lot more humor than usual, a lot of prose poems, and a lot of . . . a wonderful poem by the late Joseph Brodsky, a wonderful poem by the late Allen Ginsberg, we have an elegy for Brodsky by Derek Walcott . . .

JM: So Tate is definitely taking a different approach than Adrienne Rich took in the Best American Poetry of 1996, then?

DL: Oh that's the beauty of it: you get to do it differently every year because you are honoring the different sensibilities of the different Guest Editors. You know Adrienne has a vision of poetry, and it's her vision - and a very specific vision that's very well-defined. And the book that she edited is very much a monument to that. And then Tate has a vision of his. And anyone who knows their poetry won't be surprised that Adrienne's poems are a poetry of social conscience, political poems - poems of social engagement. Jim Tate's poems have a lot of wildly extravagant goings-ons, prose poems, a lot of comedy, a lot of lyrical hijinks as well as beauty and nervousness together. But as is the case every year, what I am delighted by is that we have very well known poets like Denise Levertov and Donald Hall side by side with people I had never heard of before who were just discovered - and who are great. And they rub off each other.

JM: In your critical prose such as The Big Question or The Line Forms Here do you find that you devote the same sort of creative energy as in your poetry? Does one necessarily preclude the other? How does one kind of writing affect the other?

DL: So you're asking about the relation of critical intelligence and the creative faculties?

JM: Absolutely. And how the processes are different.

DL: I feel that in America we often overspecialize and we expect people to do one thing only. But I like doing a lot of things - I always did. . . I like the fact that different activities of mine can engage my mind at different times . . . It keeps me interested; it keeps me awake. If I hit a snag a with one project, I can turn to another - there's never any fear of boredom. I feel also that any writing you do helps any other writing you do; I feel that it's a pity that many poets cannot write prose. That always makes me a little suspicious of them because I think prose is the art of putting thoughts together in a consecutive order and reaching an audience. And verse may be different, but being able to do one well should not limit you from doing the other thing.

JM: I think I'm gonna have to end here - if that's ok with you.

DL: You're going to have to?

JM: Yes, I'm going to have to.

DL: You're going to have to what?

JM: End!

DL: Oh.

JM: Are you having trouble hearing me . . .

Jodie Marion I teach Composition at UCF while also studying for my Master's degree, which should be completed--hopefully--before the turn of the century. In the meantime I write for the Central Florida Hispanic (Education section) and especially dig reading Lawrence Durrell. Other Articles I've Written