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[JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING] MICHAEL DENNIS BROWNE: When my brother announced to me by mail that he was going to have a baby, they were going to have a baby, he sent a card. And it said, the card said, "My name is Bert." You see, my family likes to or has to name the fetus. "My name is Bert. I was made in Crete." They had been on vacation. "I'm living in Mimi's belly. I shall come out next year."

[LAUGHTER]

So I sent a card back, which said, "My name is Bert. I was made in Crete. I have tiny hands. I have tiny feet. At this stage, I'm still a bit of a squirt, but one day, folks will shout, that's him. That's Bert."

[LAUGHTER]

BERYL BYMAN: One of the poets to appear at the Minnesota Writers Conference in Rochester was Michael Dennis Browne. Browne is also a professor at the University of Minnesota and was leaving for a four-week stint in China four days after the conference. Dennis Browne talked about himself, his role as a poet, and when he first decided to write poetry.

MICHAEL DENNIS BROWNE: I began to read American poetry in the '60s. I'd always loved poetry. I was raised with poetry. I loved Wordsworth and Blake and so forth. But I began to read American poetry in the early '60s. I read Bly and Wright when I was living in Finland. And I guess it was then I thought, hey, I want to do that, too. I was very excited by the images of James Wright's and Bly's poems and the energy of the poems, and I guess, early '60s when I was in my early 20s. And that led me to exploring ways to come to the States, and I came in '65.

BERYL BYMAN: Even though Dennis Browne publishes prolifically, he does not think of himself exclusively as a poet. Rather, he views himself as a working writer.

MICHAEL DENNIS BROWNE: I don't feel like I'm a poet like a statue in a park. I'm a working writer. I don't randomly or often claim the title poet. I write poetry. I'm a working writer. No, I don't have that solemn sense of myself as some fixed, stable thing, stable poet, almost an oxymoron there, very fluid.

I feel, I feel I'm somebody in process. Occasionally, I can make a poem, but I don't beat my chest and call myself poet. I'm introduced as a poet. I have to put up with that, but that's not, that's not how I see myself. I'm like a snail kind of pushing my way forward slowly, day to day or maybe a speedy kind of snail actually. But no, I don't have this sense of myself as a poet.

BERYL BYMAN: Dennis Browne talked about his Irish and English background and how family themes are important in his poetry. The influence of his father in his poetry is extensive.

MICHAEL DENNIS BROWNE: I like to think my father's listening. As a believing man, I believe he's listening. No, I don't write to bring him back from the dead because I've seen his body. I write to, in some poems, at least, record who he was because he was worth knowing about.

And also, I write to name those things about him that have hampered me in some ways from being who I could be. And we're speaking a little bit in the past now because I don't write about my father so much anymore, except conventionally, lovingly. I exorcize a lot of my pain and unresolved problems, I think, in a long poem I did some years ago. I'm writing about me mother now, me mum, my British mom who intrigues me, who I know I'm bound to in many ways. I don't mean fixated by but certainly bound to.

I've always written about family. I'm very intrigued by these people who are not you, but more like you than anybody else you'll ever meet. The fact that the same blood is in some mysterious way in the veins of both or all of you. Very intrigued by family ties. I've written about my brother a great deal, somewhat about my sisters, about my brother and sisters' children.

"You who love to climb the mountains you live among

Now, you are roped to someone

And when one day you fall as you will,

Why, you've a son to swing from"s

BERYL BYMAN: Although Michael Dennis Browne wrote this poem for his young nephew, he has been writing poems about children for years.

MICHAEL DENNIS BROWNE: I've always done them, that is in my writing life. I think my first ones were written, yes, in '65 before I came to the States. So my children's poems go back 15 years. I think, again, I'm writing better children's poems than I used to. And the Morley things obviously help with that, but I'll always like to do children's poems.

I dread the day I'll have my own children if I do and how many children's-- how many gooey children's poems I'll write. I'll obviously want to. I've written so much to do with nephews and nieces. If I had my own, God help, God help the literary world. I'll just swamp them with the stuff.

BERYL BYMAN: Even though Michael Dennis Browne writes about his family, he does touch on a variety of subjects.

MICHAEL DENNIS BROWNE: I've been writing some prose poems, and I'd like to read one. This is called "At the Picasso Show." This was the Walker show some months ago. What I loved about that was not the show itself only but all the letters to the paper from people all over threatened, it seemed, by this charlatan and really offended by what he was doing. I thought it was wonderful. People got very uptight about Picasso so many years later. Anyway, it's called "At the Picasso Show." This is prose.

"A big country boy with a high straw hat is scratching his head and saying to his brother beside him, that's supposed to be three women. Jean, who's taking me round, says, that's the goat that was made in a day, proudly as though she had participated in the making, though perhaps, too, putting him down for the speed of the thing but somehow proud of it. That's the goat that was made in a day is a fine phrase, don't you think? So many people prodding the Picasso cattle.

Photo of Picasso eating a fish, better than the photo labeled Picasso's eyes, pretentious. Photo of Picasso parading on the sand and holding a parasol over his sweetie who's striding along. Photo of Picasso with a pigeon on his head. Photo of Picasso, huge color photo. Chateau de Vauvenargues, 1958, sitting in the studio near day's end, sitting looking at his stuff. Several canvases, huge side light coming in, honey color light, cedar light.

Let's go uncork some wine, find some chevre, goat's cheese, and some really good bread. Shouldn't have mentioned the goat. Have to get back to the goat. Can't stay away from that goat. It's Peggy Guggenheim's goat. She lent it. Such a bulge of bronze, Mr. Pablo, pretty far from a Greek urn. Nobody touch that goat.

Some preschoolers seated in a half circle in front of a large canvas and a lady saying to them almost apologetically, for some reason, he gave her three heads. Sure, think the kids, no problem, and how about a steamship coming out of a belly button, and why not bananas in her ears? Let's give her a whole bunch of heads and some spiders for fingers. No sweat. Olé.

Collage with some sheet music, part of it a song, [SPEAKING FRENCH]

[LAUGHTER]

de Chirico told once that Picasso laughed a lot. They'd be sitting in a cafe in Paris, and someone would say, look, it's starting to rain. And Picasso would laugh and laugh and laugh. Picasso writes, it should be enough to pick up a stone and say it is a bird. Right on. Sweetie, listen in the reeds, what birds are saying to the wind, how happy they are, the pretty lovers, ah.

Two women running on the beach, two arms held high and hands held, two arms stretched out, the big left breast of each exposed, the sea behind them, a thick sea. They themselves so thick and ecstatic, heavy with the Picasso pressure. I once saw Van Gogh's tubes of paint in the Jeu de Paume. You could see the dents in them where Van Gogh pushed with his thumb and forefinger to make the paint come out. I remember my mother saying once, Picasso used to paint such lovely things, but then he went all strange, poor darling.

I don't know what I'm doing here. I don't know what's going on. I just stumbled in here with a group from Death Valley Junior High. I have to report to the Marines in the morning. I'm just doing this for a laugh. I swam here all the way upstream from New Orleans. That's why I'm completely covered with grease. I can explain these holes in my forehead.

On the way out, I buy four cards of a photo of Picasso with his son on the beach at Juan-les-Pins and will send one to Peter and [? Peder ?] in Wales and one to Tim and Pablo in Finland. No photos of the goat, goat eating a fish, goat's eyes, goat with parasol, goat with sweetie, goat with finished canvases, goat turning into cheese.

I give Jean, who is back at her big white desk, a small card reproduction of two women running on a beach and pinned to the envelope, a tin bird and a tin fish, and write merci in the middle, which is French for thank you. And I leave, and Picasso leaves with me.

BERYL BYMAN: A sense of place is important to Michael Dennis Browne. He has a home on Leech Lake in the woods, which he says is a source of inspiration and strength to him.

MICHAEL DENNIS BROWNE: The last two years, starting in July of '78, when I was beginning a sabbatical, I built, with the help of a carpenter, designer, and many friends, a house in the woods near Leech Lake, 200 miles from Minneapolis. And I spent most of that first there year, and now I spend every weekend I can there maybe three nights.

And I've drawn tremendous strength from sitting there reading, writing down what I see there. Since I mostly see birds, I write an awful lot about birds, but I found that having built my own house-- a lot of it I built myself-- that I have a tremendous feeling of hard to say what. I feel very good working there. I work very hard there. There are no distractions for me there. I know where I am and that takes care of a lot of anxiety. And so I can really--

When you're very lonely, a lot of your energy goes into worrying about your loneliness and that there's less current of energy for other people When where you are physically takes care of all that, all your energy can go out from you into the world. So I think since the house is mine and I've built it, all my energy, when I'm sitting there, goes out into other things. I'm not self-absorbed because the house seems to take care of that.

BERYL BYMAN: About 200 yards from his house is one owned by Robert Bly, so there's a camaraderie of poets in Leech Lake. The influence of other poets have figured strongly in Dennis Browne's life. He talks about DH Lawrence.

MICHAEL DENNIS BROWNE: One phrase I use in poetry, in talking about poetry and what I admire in Lawrence and Whitman and Bly and other poets is what I call the energy of attitude, to use the word energy again. I fault a lot of poems because the energy of attitude is deficient in the way the poet is addressing an experience.

Say, to give a simple example, supposing someone you love dies, and the poem says, he's dead or she's dead. Oh, god, I feel awful. There is minimal energy of attitude. If when someone dies, you attempt to really explore what it means to you to link it to other deaths, to link it to the notion of death, to make some resolve, to use your time perhaps in a different way than you have been, that strenuousness is what I would call imaginative strenuousness, is what I admire in poetry, what I call energy of attitude.

I think, for example, in Yeats's poems, in tackling questions of the Easter Rebellion or what time is or history is, he brings all his intellectual and spiritual forces to bear upon that problem. Think of a scientist trying to discover a cure for, say, cancer, and we have equivalents emotionally for cancers in us. When thinks of a dedicated scientist, spending a lifetime, trying to crack the code, trying to solve the problem, bringing immense energy to that task, I think imaginatively, a poet has to bring an energy of attitude to the confronting of, say, a problem.

BERYL BYMAN: Dennis Browne knew John Berryman at the University of Minnesota. He describes Berryman's influence--

MICHAEL DENNIS BROWNE: And I have some debts to Berryman. I wrote, I've written, I published two articles, and one is about Berryman in the Ohio Review, and it's called "The Debts to The Dream Songs." And it's about how much I and other poets owe Berryman. I met him a few times. I didn't know him well, but we knew each other. I started teaching at the U in October of '71, and he was dead in January '72, three or four months later. But I admired enormously what he'd done in The Dream Songs.

And in this article, I tried to say how useful, how fruitful and fertile this was for me and other poets, finding a persona which was a key to unlocking all kinds of parts of himself that he hadn't been able to write about before however excellent some of the poems may have been for example like "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet." I felt that they were as important for him as, say, "Prufrock" was for Eliot. And Berryman, by the way, has a super essay on "Prufrock" in his book Freedom of the Poet.

So I knew him. I saw him. I was in awe of him as I said in my article. He was John Berryman. People said that about Auden, for example, that when you were with Auden, even people who knew him well, they were always conscious that this was W.H. Auden. They couldn't quite see him as Wystan, Wystan Hugh, or TS Eliot, same thing.

So I was in awe of Berryman, a little scared of him, little alarmed at times by his eruptions of volume or strange behavior. But I kind of loved him in secret. You could never tell him that.

BERYL BYMAN: Was there a particular philosophy to which Michael Dennis Browne ascribed or one single message he wished to relay? He answered this question with a revealing short story.

MICHAEL DENNIS BROWNE: I was telling the story today about after Eliot died in January of '65, there were letters to The Times about him reminiscing, and I was living in England still. And Valerie Eliot, his wife, wrote to The Times, I remember, and she had married him the last few years of his life. And they'd been very happy, and she said, I remember Tom told me this story.

Hugh got into a taxi in London, wants to go somewhere, and was driving along, and the driver was a cockney. And he turned around, and he said, here. You're TS Eliot, aren't you? Eliot said, well, yes, how do you know about that? Oh, he says, I know 'em all, all the famous people, he said. I read the newspapers. I see their pictures. He said, I had Bertrand Russell in me cab once, Bertrand Russell, the famous philosopher. Well, Lord Russell, I said to him, what's it all about then? And you know, he couldn't tell me.

[UPBEAT PIANO MUSIC PLAYING]

BERYL BYMAN: "All the fall, walking in the yellow groves, we said, enjoy this. Enjoy because soon we'll be in for it. There is no doubt our winters can make a grave mess of rural life. Snow drifts in bad years as in 1968 forced us to dump garbage and non-burnables ever near the house until finally in March, there is a semi-circle of refuse nearly at the front door.

Even the German shepherd lowers his standards. The snow around the dog house entrance is unspeakable. This is just a complaint of a homeowner. The worst sufferers are probably the used car lot men. 50 times a winter the snow must be taken off the car."

That is an excerpt from Carol Bly's Notes from the Country, which appeared in Minnesota Monthly. Carol Bly writes both fiction and non-fiction and will soon have a book of essays published. Although Bly writes in a variety of forms, she feels that short stories and essays are her particular strength.

CAROL BLY: But I like essays very much, and I like essays that have narrative in them. And I like short stories that have some essay quality about them, so some sort of a mongrel work of art between essays and short stories.

BERYL BYMAN: So you consider the line between, let's say, the short story and the essay not that finely drawn?

CAROL BLY: I think it perhaps should be finely drawn. And great, great, great writers who are absolutely true to the material and aren't interspersing themselves into the characters they've already drawn, do draw that line, and they keep it clear.

BERYL BYMAN: One of Bly's major concerns is that the writer deal with larger topics, global themes. She explained that the kind of problems we now grapple with are problems that did not exist in Tolstoy's time.

CAROL BLY: Let's say that it's 1850. You can write something in 1850 about human cruelty to other human beings, for example. And you can say, well, no matter how cruel they are, and these characters I've just described to you in this long novel have just lived their 80 years, and now they're dying, but nature always goes on. And the grass will always spring up, and the sun will shine. So at least, there's that.

Now, we haven't got that confidence. Now, we may have ruined the world, and now, there isn't anything to count on. Everything is up for grabs, the sky, the earth, the crust of the earth, the core of the earth. And our weapons are so gigantic that there's a sort of malaise around at all times.

Now, a responsible major fiction writer, I think, ought to have that malaise if he or she feels it in some way in the story so that we're not writing stories as if that didn't exist because if we're doing that, then the stories don't apply to our era. And they don't touch our heart's fears. They may touch our heart's desires.

You can write a 400-page novel still about love and death and fear of cancer, private life, and that will take care of some of our heart's desires and our personal fears. But since public general group fears and group immorality and group responsibility are a major part of our lives now, not to be able to handle it in fiction, I think, is a major loss to the people. So I'm interested in that and would like to do it. And I've ruined any number of budding short stories by trying to do it and failing.

BERYL BYMAN: Carol Bly brings a variety of experiences and backgrounds to her stories. Where she lives and has lived is important although she feels her stories do not have an easily identified location. Her New Yorker story, "The Last of the Gold Star Mothers," is an example.

CAROL BLY: That story couldn't have been set anywhere by the description I gave it specifically because everything is a little bit wrong, but basically, it's somewhere between Esko, Minnesota and West Duluth on the escarpment of Lake Superior.

BERYL BYMAN: People talk now about writers having a sense of place. Is that your place, the northern part of Minnesota?

CAROL BLY: I have two places. One is the prairie country of West Central Minnesota, and the other is that northern part. In the prairie country, I've spent 25 years, and I know those fields. And I know what the stars look like at night, and I know what kind of trees are about the riverbanks and what the blizzards are like there.

And then my childhood place and my present place is Northeastern Minnesota, the old Northwest territory part of the state with the disused dairy farms and people selling snowmobile parts in order to make it and the odd people set back into the woods who want to live there instead of living in the Twin Cities.

BERYL BYMAN: Mhm. Is this the kind of background from which you draw your materials for writing?

CAROL BLY: Right now, that's where I'm drawing them from.

BERYL BYMAN: What exactly are you doing now in terms of writing?

CAROL BLY: Right now, I'm writing a short story with the help of the Bush grant, which I have, and the Minnesota State Arts Board grant on the stealing of bad art from English churches. And that story will be set in Suffolk and Essex in England. And two weeks ago, I was working on a short story, which was set in, near Moose Lake, Minnesota. And next week, I will also be working again on a short story set near Sturgeon Lake, Minnesota.

BERYL BYMAN: Well, you mean to say that you are working on three stories simultaneously?

CAROL BLY: Well, all through the years when I was having children, I planned short story plots, and they're in my notebook. And now, I'm mining it.

BERYL BYMAN: You didn't write then when your children are small? Is that correct?

CAROL BLY: I wrote a little bit, but not much and never one whole sustained piece of art of any kind. I wrote essays for Minnesota Public Radio, and I wrote one short story when the youngest of my children was about four or five.

BERYL BYMAN: You really started writing then when your youngest was four or five?

CAROL BLY: No, I started writing when I was about 21 years old. I wrote a novel about General MacArthur, and it was a wonderful novel. It was one of the worst novels that I've ever seen in all my life. It had perfect integrity as a bad work of art. And then I wrote short stories as well, and I published an essay in True Confessions.

BERYL BYMAN: So it was more or less a freelance effort? Is that right, or--

CAROL BLY: Yes, one could say that, yes.

BERYL BYMAN: And then you began writing seriously about when?

CAROL BLY: It must have been about 1975.

BERYL BYMAN: What was the impetus that got you started on it? What made the difference for you?

CAROL BLY: The youngest child got old enough for me to leave the room without his being in physical danger.

BERYL BYMAN: Bly draws on a landscape that is larger than Minnesota. She is currently working on a story, which is a far cry from the snowy climes of the upper Midwest. This story is about stealing artworks from Westminster Abbey and other cathedrals in England.

CAROL BLY: I've lived some years in England, and while I was living there, I lived in a little town which, whose vicar of the church received one night while we were at choir practice, an extremely bad painting. And he was instructed by a lady what's her name, who gave it, that she would like to have that painting on the West wall of the Lady Chapel. And we all in the choir looked at the painting, and we murmured kind things.

And afterwards, when they'd all left, I was the last to leave from the vicarage for choir practice. Father Jack said, well, what do you think? And I said, well, if you left a painting on a wet night like this when it's raining near the door and forgot to lock tonight, a thief could probably steal the thing, and you'd never, they'd never be found because no one's out on a horrible night like this. And I remember he gave me a very long look, and he said, no, Carol, that won't do.

Then I realized right away it nearly would do. And if there had been an organization that started at the time of Henry VIII and stole bad art ever since, that would explain why English churches are not crowded and ugly and jammed full as some countries' churches are.

And so I imagined an organization that systematically could be called with something like an 800 number, and you'd call up and you'd say, we've been given an awfully lovely virgin statue. She's purple striped, and she's standing. And the sexton's awfully ill. He hasn't been able to lock up for the last week, and there's 50 quid in the culvert north of town.

And then the person said, well, that's awfully nice. I'm so glad you've got that. I'm sure everything will turn out very well for you. And next Thursday night, when the sexton is still ill, the thief comes and takes the painting and goes up to the culvert and picks up the 50 quid. And it's very nice for everybody. So that's the original plot of this, and I'm now working on it with a crew of people helping me with the research.

BERYL BYMAN: Last year, Bly won both the Bush Foundation and Minnesota State Arts Board awards for literature. I asked her what impact these had on her life.

CAROL BLY: It's been simply marvelous. The impact has been that all the fear of moneymaking and of feeding the children disappears. And so I spend many more hours a day planning, planning work and writing work, and I've written much, much more simply because I don't have to race around taking so many hours of other jobs. I work on a time base as a humanities consultant, and now I take fewer of those jobs as they come up because of this. It gives me more time.

BERYL BYMAN: Carol Bly's interest in the humanities does not end with writing essays and short stories. She translates her concern for issues through her job with the Farmers Union. She does not believe that she will ever be able to make a living solely on writing nor is that her goal. She feels that doing work other than writing makes her life more interesting. I asked Bly if she felt pulled between writing and her other activities.

CAROL BLY: No, I find that part of the excitement of getting up in the morning. There are all those things to do, and I like the job as the humanities consultant. And I like-- I own a small business myself of crossword puzzle making, and I like that. And I like the dealing with it and the worry of it.

And then I like the writing, which has no financial worry right now. Thank goodness. But it has all its own horrible sets of worries, and I like that, too. And when the day is over, it's been very, very stuffed full, and I like that.

BERYL BYMAN: Do you find that when you do all these activities, does-- is the writing prominent or does it, let's say, take last place in all your activities?

CAROL BLY: It's always around. It's like-- it's like living in a cave and hearing constantly a lion roaring outside. And sometimes, you'll hear him in the undergrowth, and sometimes, you don't. And sometimes, you just hear the roar at twilight. But it's always there, and you know that the moment you exit from the cave, you have him to deal with. He's in the area.

BERYL BYMAN: So she will continue to write and also be active in other activities such as the Farmers Union and writers' conferences and workshops. If she has a philosophy she wishes to express, it is an attempt to have people think independently of popular trends.

CAROL BLY: Well, let's say, for example, one of them might be a topic that's very current now that people are very aware of, which is the split in temperament and in taste between openness, permissiveness, and ease in social commitments, and what those people in turn call the rigid, judgmentalism, which is a right and wrong approach toward life. And those two people or those two kinds of people are at each other's throats often, particularly in sociology and in religious groups.

Now, there's a third element that I'm interested in that ought to be considered, and that is if, for example, therapy is nothing but openness and not suggesting to people that they are followers and that you are a leader and they must think as you think, and then you'll do the thinking, if that is so for therapy, the opposite of that is not rigid judgmentalism or goodness and badness and taking moral responsibility on purpose. The opposite of it is advertising, which says, I'm the leader. Think as I will condition you to think.

So those are the two right enemies going on now. And I'm interested in that kind of subject and would like to see it handled in essays and see it exemplified in short stories.

BERYL BYMAN: Essayist Carol Bly.

[UPBEAT PIANO MUSIC]

The movie Ordinary People has just opened up around the country. Based on the best selling novel by Judith Guest, Ordinary People describes the life of an upper middle class family confronting the tragedy of a suicidal teenage son. Returning home after a stay in a mental hospital, the boy attempts to lead a normal life, but his older brother's death in a boating accident leaves him feeling guilty.

How this guilt and lack of communication in the family affects him is the focus of the story. It is a story of loneliness, despair, failure, and the inability to express real feelings. The film version of Ordinary People was directed by Robert Redford. Judith Guest believes that the film is faithful to the idea of the novel and was involved in the final production. At the Minnesota Writers Conference, Guest described when she began writing and when she started taking herself seriously.

JUDITH GUEST: I write every day, and I've written since I was about 12. And I view myself as a student of the craft, and I think I always will. I hope each day that I get to be a little better at what I do. I do it in this room that's about 9 by 12 with a desk and a bookcase and some shelves with all sorts of notes written on it and a buffet that sits in the corner with all the unanswered mail waiting for me. On top is a letter from my mother saying, are you dead?

BERYL BYMAN: Guest's writing career was not planned. She never really thought she would be writing for a living. Even though she has now completed her second novel called Second Heaven, she was as recently as 10 years ago teaching school.

JUDITH GUEST: I was teaching fourth grade in Birmingham, Michigan, and I would go to class. And about once a week, I would get this feeling like I had this stuff that had to be written and how could I do it because I was trying to conduct a class. So I discovered this really neat way of doing it. I just said to the kids, well, now, let's all sit down and write for half an hour. And then we'd all sit down and write for half an hour.

BERYL BYMAN: One of the biggest problems beginning writers have is finishing what they start. It came as a surprise to know that she, too, experienced this problem.

JUDITH GUEST: The goal I set was to finish something. As I said before, I'd written since I was 12, I never finished anything. I wrote to the emotional moment. I wrote when it just-- things just sort of built up, and I felt like I had to get it down. And then I'd write until I'd written myself into a corner and didn't know how to get out of it, or I got bored with what I was writing about, or something came up in my life that was more immediate and needed my attention. And then I'd just stick it in a drawer and go on from there.

So when I wrote Ordinary People, I decided that it was about time that I got some outside information. I'd never let anybody read anything that I'd written. It didn't strike me as an occupation. It really seemed more like a bad habit, just something that you couldn't help doing, and you had better do it in the closet because nobody's really interested in this other than you.

And then when I started feeling the pressure of wanting to communicate, which I think at some point when you're writing, that happens to you, it's not enough anymore to write in the closet. You want, you want somebody else to read it and see what they think of it and be interested in it.

BERYL BYMAN: Guest is not a prolific writer. She writes only novels and does that very painstakingly, laboring over every draft.

JUDITH GUEST: I'm also very meticulous and slow. I only work on one thing at a time. I don't write articles. I don't write poetry. I don't write anything but the thing I'm writing on at the moment. So since I've been working on this one for about five years, I don't see myself as being particularly prolific and publishing 10 or 15 or 20 novels in my lifetime.

I think maybe I've got three, maybe four, and if I do that, I'm doing real good. Maybe I'll try some short stories after this just to get a little quicker. You know, it's an awfully long-term thing, writing a novel, with not too many rewards. You've got to give yourself the rewards.

I'm pretty much a creature of habit. I like to do things the same way every day. I always write in the morning. After everybody leaves the house, I might read for a while and then go in and work. And I work until I get tired. I work until 1:00 or 2:00, sometimes 3:00, sometimes more than that.

I'm actually writing more than that now because I'm working on the final draft, and it seems to require it for some reason. I seem to be able to spend more time there without getting as tired as I do like, for instance, if you're working on first draft material, which I think is the most tiring of all.

BERYL BYMAN: In addition to being a writer, Judith Guest is also a mother and a wife. How does her family fit into her life as a writer?

JUDITH GUEST: I write on the weekends because I used to not write on weekends. I felt that it wasn't fair to my family, but I don't care about them anymore. It seemed like the natural thing to say. Actually, they're busy with their things, and they don't care about me anymore.

No, what I discovered was that if you break the rhythm, it's very-- I found like Mondays were really hard, and I realized that Mondays were hard because I hadn't written on Saturday and Sunday. So I had to, like, re-press the button and prime the pump and go through all this, this, this mechanism to get myself going again. Whereas if I would work, if I would just work every day for a certain amount of time, I wouldn't have to do that. It would be right there, ready to go the next day.

And then when I finished writing, I use the rest of the day for what I call filling myself up. I write, I write an occasional letter. Again, my sister, I could feel her standing on my shoulder laughing. And I run my errands, and I drive the kids places. And I straighten up the house and cook and make phone calls like everybody else does. And I find that a real necessary part of the process.

I think writing is a draining process and an emptying out. And then what you need to do is live the rest of your life so that you fill yourself back up so the next day, you get up and you have something to say.

BERYL BYMAN: Guest readily admits that her lifestyle allows this leisurely approach to writing. She does not have to hold a full-time job. Writing only as she can.

JUDITH GUEST: I quit teaching to write Ordinary People. I-- to me, it's amazing that people can teach and write at the same time, and I have just untold admiration for people who can do that because I think from my own experience with teaching, it demands exactly the same kind of energy. And I don't have that much energy.

You know, I loved it when I did it. I really did love it, but I found that I was giving myself I was giving myself completely away, and I didn't have anything left for me. And I just got real selfish. But, you see, I could afford to do that. I mean, I've got a husband who supports me, and some people aren't that lucky.

BERYL BYMAN: If Judith Guest has a philosophy of writing, she feels it is best expressed by novelist John MacDonald.

JUDITH GUEST: A book written for oneself to meet one's own standards, to gratify and satisfy and entertain the toughest one-man audience a writer can ever have. Such a book has a good chance of acceptance anywhere.

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JOHN JUDSON: "I dip my coffee water now from the spring

An earthworm crawls across this floor

And I have two thick hinges made of brass

Fastened above it to the weathered hardwood door

The water seeps up through black leaves

In a hole I helped time hack from the Earth

Beneath the boulder dropped by the glaciers melt

It is older than any ideograph of man

Or the walking Chinese eye of their verb to be

Who would believe me if I said,

I have never been more happy with life"

BERYL BYMAN: The poem Morning Song by John Judson, another poet at the 1980 Minnesota Writers' Conference. Judson is also a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. He spoke about his background and the events that led to his becoming a poet. Although Judson has been writing poetry for 22 years, he did not always want to be a writer.

JOHN JUDSON: I started off becoming an engineer. I was a physicist and a geologist at a particular time. Then I worked for a great deal of time in electronics. I'd quit college and gone into the Air Force and then came out and worked for Norton and for a laboratory of electronics.

And it was only through coming back to college and altering my major rather late in life on the basis of a course in Shakespeare from a very fine teacher that I really altered my life and became an English major. And a very dear friend who is now a fine experimental novelist was the first one to say to me, you're a poet.

So it wasn't really until I was about 28 or 30 when I became aware of the fact that maybe I had some talent because up to that point, the only imaginative preoccupation I had was between tetrodes and diodes and calculus.

BERYL BYMAN: Judson defies the stereotype of the poet as an effete intellectual. In fact, he almost went in the other direction for it was chance that prevented him from becoming a professional athlete.

JOHN JUDSON: Well, I was a high school athlete, the multi-letter man, like 14 letters. And I was a track man and a baseball player and a football player. And I went to high school. I went to preparatory school in the East on a track scholarship and on a baseball scholarship. And then I got into college on the same.

Fortunate for me, it was a very fine school in New England, and I at the time was playing with a possible option at that time with the Braves and the Athletics and the Senators. The Senators have since become the Minnesota Twins, so I'm in the ironic position of being in the neck of the woods, where if I persisted in my original career, I might have been just playing center field.

I was-- the day that I was to go to spring training with the Twins, I received word to report to the Air Force and think I went to Korea instead.

BERYL BYMAN: Judson talked at length about the role of the poet. How much of the poet's magic is conscious, and how much is intuitive?

JOHN JUDSON: Poet is-- never really understands fully that which he transmits as we were talking about in a class. A poem which comes through you, many times, the poet himself does not understand. I was always afraid to say that until I heard Robert Lowell say it. I don't understand my poem. He didn't know what the poem was about. He became the vehicle for it, and that was legitimate enough for me then to, at least, come up and be courageous enough to say, yes, that's true of me also.

It shows you how much lack of courage I had in the beginning, but I think that's true of most poets. When you really ask them where the beautiful poem comes from that they have written, they cannot take full credit.

BERYL BYMAN: What is the role of persona in poetry? John Judson defined the word and explained the role of persona in his own poetry.

JOHN JUDSON: The persona is another person whom you imaginatively embody. Now, that allows you freedom from your own aesthetic, philosophical, moral restrictions if they are restrictions and an assimilation of his.

Now, no one really ever gets completely free of himself. So you always are dragging part of your moral paraphernalia and your imaginative paraphernalia to another person. But you change sex, or you change age. And you change philosophical perspective. And now you can say things and see things differently. All right?

Where did they come from? They had to be in you to articulate them, or else they had to be visited upon you. And then that's the dilemma that we're in. But the persona allows you that kind of freedom in life and yet a submission to the discipline of another point of view that life doesn't allow you. It's a severe restriction because you cannot then alter the personality you're speaking from.

As soon as the poet starts to moralize through the mouth of a persona, the persona dies. And only the poem is a good poem that has a persona that achieves a human nature that doesn't violate the speaker's personality, the speaker's philosophy. And you're thus left with a strange thing that you have articulated.

In this case, The Button Man, I have articulated something a man 25 or 30 years my elder has said and seen. Now, how did I have access to that information? Well, obviously, I've known and loved my grandfathers. And I've known other people and old men, and I've delighted in this.

"Michael Butler, the button man

Moon eyes is what I cut

More than anyone

And out of clam shells

I held the records for the finest and the most

What else is there?

Why, I used to crimp the hooks and cutters

In my hand the way a jeweler works

Then drill holes so small

You could pick up a dozen on the tine of an oyster fork

Like small oiled moons

Jeweled in an inner sheen they made themselves

From that sweet muck and calm

Where the rivers sturgeon and catfish prowl

And get caught by the size of their hungers

Why some eat themselves into hollows

They can never swim from

They wait until they die a hulk

Fat in the girth and in the head like

Like Martha Foley who worked next to me

For seven years until she grew so big

Her chair stood back where her bifocals couldn't focus where they ought

And she started trimming small pearl circles out of her nails

Life's like that like Martha and the cats

You stay so long in one place

You do yourself out of moving room

That shows how much you can trust

Your will and the worlds around you

And the first thing that happens

When any living thing gets squatter's rights

Is that it wants too much

Catfish start on kin, eating them

Men consume their kids with their own old ideals

Or by some quirk in the river

Sand starts coming in

And though we're bred to muck in water

One day, we were ground

Our bones beached, becoming

Dead-ended like a slew sloughed off

Now, land or man or river

All is the same

Each has currents,

Seasons, depth, and range, but

None of them is permanent

Not a god-damned man or thing

Well, you take buttons, for instance

First, it was Japan

Our company got them cheaper there when unions

Made the quotas in our lives predictable

Then it was plastics

And then age got to my fingers

And my knives couldn't move with the quickness

My mind had spent a lifetime gaining

The only thing that stayed with me then was the,

The moon and the dye stamp

It once gave my sight.

I always cut by that

And I cut some as small and perfect

As a pin-sized platinum dowel sliced razor thin

And others tinted or tainted large

As a blue giant's thumb

Now, I'm done

But I gave the world something it didn't count on

Something from my head to keep my spirit clothed in

Well, I showed some to my grandson yesterday,

And he saw the shapes of colors of them

Cutting their way up there between his eyes

You can always tell when that right's happening.

Well, why not extend our loves, I say

I got mine from my mother's night needs

And my father's smoothness with her then

And the way he used to say her name and mine aloud

Look here. You see this one?

How soft and pale it is

Outlined like a moon in mist

About 5:00 AM at Peepers Slew down by Farnum's Marsh

Almost lost in the sky

Like a heron's stillness

To a shallow eye"

BERYL BYMAN: If Judson has a philosophy of writing or a message he wishes to convey, it might be expressed in these lines, "on both sides of us, the silence rhymes." Judson explains what these words and what this particular book means to him.

JOHN JUDSON: Sometimes, life hits you with things that you don't think you can take, and ultimately, you have to. That particular book was Ash is the Candle's Wick, and that was written as a means of therapy. Our oldest son had been killed in a skiing accident aged 19, and the only way I could really hold myself together was to write in the mornings.

And Ash is the Candle's Wick was that testament, and that little excerpt that you just quoted to me was a kind of haiku that came out of one morning, talking about the relationship between the worth of life previous to after. And it's meant a great deal to me. It's led to that sense of silence, which we talked about earlier, out of which all the mystery comes. And I think people have to be aware of that silence. Maybe one of the things that we find it difficult to do in our culture is to feel comfortable in its presence.

BERYL BYMAN: Reading poetry is yet another art, and clearly, John Judson has mastered it well. He has a musical quality to his readings that he admits is deliberate.

JOHN JUDSON: I think what you're saying-- and I take it as a compliment-- is that I found a kind of voice, a rhythmic correspondence. And that, I hope is true because it's been a long struggle, and it's been a struggle-- well, let me put it this way.

If someone says write in iambic pentameter, and you're always hearing another music, sometimes that iambic pentameter intrudes upon that other music. And sometimes, therefore the two don't want to go together. So you have a moral dilemma. Do you do what the teacher told you to do? Or do you listen to the inner music?

And consequently, the learning of that inner music is a difficult, is a difficult thing. Sometimes, however, you're fortunate. You are told to write in iambic pentameter, and by writing in iambic pentameter, you free that inner voice, or you give it a new set of ways of coming through. And I was fortunate enough to come to poetry late enough in life not at least to abandon some of my New England willfulness.

And so when someone said, write in iambic pentameter, I did it. And I found, strangely enough when I started to write in meter, I could hear my voice in different ways that I couldn't. So I've consciously tried to get at what I hear inside. And when I listen closely to that, I then became aware of what a line was.

And I think that's one of the most important things. I think it's the only thing that a poet has to take what he does away from being prose. Poetry is written in lines, and until we understand the nature of the lines of our poems, we don't understand our form.

BERYL BYMAN: Lacrosse poet, John Judson. I'm Beryl Byman.

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