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HOWARD NEMEROV: The Sanctuary.

Over a ground of slate and light gravel,

Clear water so shallow that one can see

The numerous springs moving their mouths of sand,

And the dark trout are clearly to be seen swimming this water,

Which is color of air,

So that the fish appear suspended

Nowhere and in nothing.

With a delicate bend and reflex of their tails,

The trout slowly glide from the shadowy side into the light so clear

And back again into the shadows,

Slow and so definite,

Like thoughts emerging into a clear place in the mind,

Then going back, exchanging shape for shade.

Now and again one fish slides into the center of the pool

And hangs between the surface and the slate

For several minutes without moving,

Like the silence in a dream.

And when I stand at such a time observing this,

My life seems to have been suddenly moved

A great distance away on every side,

As though the quietest thought of all stood

In the pale, watery light alone,

And was no more my own than the speckled trout

I stare upon all but unseeing.

Even at such times, the mind goes on,

Transposing and revising the elements of its long allegory

In which the anagogic is always death.

And while this vision blurs with empty tears,

I visit in the cold pool of the skull

A sanctuary where the slender trout feed on my drowned eyes

Until this trout pokes through the fabric of the surface to snap up a fly,

As if a man's own eyes raised welts upon the mirror whence they stared.

I find this world again in focus,

And this fish, a shadow dammed in artifice,

Swims to the furthest shadows out of sight,

Though not in times ruining stream out of mine.

A serious young fellow that was.

[LAUGHS]

But still, the point about poetry is it becomes true. I said to a fellow poet, I was probably I was 18 when I read that line of Keats, when old age shall this generation waste. And here it is happening all around us. And the other poet could not be outdone on this occasion. He says, yes, Howard, there's another line that comes through too. They flee from me that sometime did me seek.

NANCY FUSION: Serious one moment, irrepressibly irreverent the next, Howard Nemerov has been writing poetry for 40 years. His 20 volumes of prose and poetry have sparked discussion in artistic circles. Nemerov himself often has been a participant in the debates, and he greatly cherishes, almost feels vindicated by, the belated national recognition which came to him in the late 1970s as a winner of the National Book Award.

Part of his isolation from the general poetry scene has been Nemerov's continuing position within the university community. For years, he served on the Bennington College faculty. Currently, he is a distinguished professor of English at Washington University in Saint Louis. From that venue, Nemerov writes poems which reveal his deep love for classical form and style, but his artistic goals go further. Nemerov has written of the many poets who begin with literature. A few old ones may end up with nature.

HOWARD NEMEROV: It's not going from illusion to reality. It's going from this illusion to the next one. So I wouldn't push it too far about ending up with nature, except that the really big poets make a new language for nature in which everybody talks for a while.

NANCY FUSION: Have you done that, do you think?

HOWARD NEMEROV: No, I'm not up there with Milton and Wordsworth.

NANCY FUSION: Modern poets that you would say have achieved that?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, a different style makes you see the world in a different way. You can demonstrate it more easily with painting than with poetry. Proust said it once and for all. The world is the same for all of us and different for each.

NANCY FUSION: When you observe nature, you're doing more than simply observing, right?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, I don't look at it. I hear what it says.

NANCY FUSION: Well, I was hoping you would say that, since that's the one that everyone picks up on from Howard Nemerov. How does one listen to nature?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, once in a while, a voice says something, usually in iambic pentameter when it talks to me. And you say, isn't that interesting? Well, moderately interesting. Now, what do you put together with that?

NANCY FUSION: A lot of contemporary poets don't hear nature in iambic pentameter. What is it about the language?

HOWARD NEMEROV: I just talk that way. And in all that argument, which I don't wish to get into at all, nobody ever seems to observe that in our language, we either have one or two unaccented syllables between accents. Very rarely more. Three would be an oddity and four almost impossible. So you're either talking iambic or dactylic or anapestic. Or Frost says there's only loose iambic and strict iambic.

NANCY FUSION: Well, but still, it is a matter of controlling words in a way that poets who don't choose to use form or prefer to use free verse totally do. I mean, is it the aspect of control that interests you?

HOWARD NEMEROV: That doesn't feel like you're exerting powerful controls over the language. No. It's just a sort of comfortable way of going. And you have what the other fellows are missing. I think the tension between how you say it and how it's scanned.

So when to the sessions of sweet silent thought, everybody knows that, but it doesn't sound like that. When do the sessions of sweet silent thought. And by the fourth line, he's got such a variation going on the thing that there are seven accents in 10 syllables. And with old woes, new wail, my dear time's waste. Well, I like that, you see.

NANCY FUSION: Is it the beauty of the language, as it sounds to you?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, I do like-- I think there are hidden harmonies in it, that it seems to be inexhaustible, just as the dreaded and hated iambic pentameter, as it's wrongly called. It should be called English heroic line. You would have thought it was over when Shakespeare got through with it, but no. Come up totally different sound in Milton and Pope and Wordsworth. Well, Pope didn't write blank verse, but still, there are five beats.

NANCY FUSION: Were you always interested in the rhyme and the meter?

HOWARD NEMEROV: I always kind of loved it. I've been a modern poet when I was just starting out. I was a real modern poet. Very morbid, fashionably morbid. It took a while to get out of that.

NANCY FUSION: One can find merriment and satire in Nemerov's parody of a Mother Goose rhyme called Manners.

HOWARD NEMEROV: Prig offered Pig the first chance at dessert,

So Pig reached out and speared the bigger part.

Now that, cried Prig, is extremely rude of you.

Pig with his mouth full said, wow, what will you do?

I would have taken the littler bit, said Prig.

Stop kvetching then, it's what you've got, said Pig.

So virtue is its own reward, you see.

And that is all it's ever going to be.

At least in old age, you'd like your muse to be anonymous and merry as Mother Goose.

NANCY FUSION: Some of your critics don't think that.

HOWARD NEMEROV: No, I know.

NANCY FUSION: What do you say to the--

HOWARD NEMEROV: The standard and expectable review that says, well, if you'd only stop all this joking.

NANCY FUSION: Well, all right, as long as you brought up the joking, Hayden Carruth said-- aha. One of the critics who tends to think not too much of the constant or consistent joke quality. Said, "I read Howard Nemerov and I read the jokes and they become wisecracks and platitudes. They break into two parts."

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, you know, if you're good enough to invent a platitude, you could probably commit an original sin. Platitudes got that way by being uninformative and true.

[LAUGHS]

NANCY FUSION: Why the humor? Why should a poet invest that much time and energy in humor?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, I can always fall back on Shakespeare's doing it and Auden saying good poets have a fondness for bad puns.

NANCY FUSION: And you don't feel that it in any way lessens the impact?

HOWARD NEMEROV: No, not at all. It's part of-- if there is an impact, which is not my business to say, but that's part of it.

NANCY FUSION: The other charge is over intellectualizing. Howard Nemerov, overintellectualizes, doesn't have the emotional commitment.

HOWARD NEMEROV: If they think I'm an over intellectual, they must be poor, dumb slobs, mustn't they? I mean, I know I'm an elderly slob. I used to be a boy intellectual.

NANCY FUSION: What was the transition?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Life, he said portentously.

NANCY FUSION: Yes, I was--

HOWARD NEMEROV: My God, If one could be over intellectual, that'd be magnificent. But, boy, nobody knows enough to do that. I guess Paul Valery maybe if there had been one, but even he sounds sort of funny now and again.

NANCY FUSION: But it's a tricky business getting just the right level of wit and still making a point.

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, I said once that the advantage to writing poetry of wit nowadays is there's so little competition. People are fond of saying mere cleverness, but you never hear them referring to mere stupidity, which is much more widespread.

NANCY FUSION: Does this mean that Howard Nemerov is immodest or defensive?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Me? Little me?

NANCY FUSION: In terms of your position, you've remained in academia all these years. Another element of some of the charges are he's an ivory tower poet. Would you care to comment?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, the ivory tower has got more holes in the roof than it used to. But I do want to escape from reality as much as possible.

NANCY FUSION: Is ivory tower academic poetry an escape from reality?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, I don't exactly know what it is. I do not go for these vast generalities.

NANCY FUSION: Why have you remained or always had the teaching element in your life?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, the second date I had with my wife to be, she said thoughtfully, as if not directed at me at all, I think that even if a man is a poet, he should support his family. And I said, yes, ma'am. And after the war, when we came back to New York and found out how much tougher civilian life was, I had to have a job. And I fell into teaching by accident, quite by accident. It's a long, dull story. And I found I could stand it and stayed there. After all, it's a place where they pay you for reading books.

NANCY FUSION: Has the teaching affected your work?

HOWARD NEMEROV: I'm sure it has, but I wouldn't be the one to say how. Except that, you know, what I do is based in part on considerable amounts of reading around.

NANCY FUSION: Scattered among the humorous, poetic jabs and the forceful images of nature, there are Nemerov poems that deal with political and social problems, such as this one called continuous performances based on Nemerov's study of World War I.

HOWARD NEMEROV: The war went on till everything was it.

The girls in forage caps,

In army coats from other wars,

Their skirts dragging in dirt

Where they went parading for world peace now,

Till everyone who was against the war was also in it.

A tiny, nameless part of the war,

Doing what one called his thing.

Whatever one did,

It was something the war could use.

Turning to hand the talents of novelist and newsboy,

Shoe clerk and soda jerk,

Everyone had something to contribute

All his own that would nourish the war,

The growing war already sponsoring movies about itself

To let the children know what it was like.

NANCY FUSION: Poetry that does have a political view, a political slant, a political purpose. You have not been particularly enamored of that kind of poetry, have you?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, poetry is liable to be very political, even when people think that it has nothing to do with the real world. Like Hamlet and Lear, all the tragedies are about how power is passed from one generation to the next or fought over between the contemporaries, the brothers, Cain and Abel. There's a distinction, isn't there? Political poetry that's like squibs and satires and lampoons about people on the scene. At present, I've done very little of it. Not interesting enough.

NANCY FUSION: Why? Why not interesting enough?

HOWARD NEMEROV: The people aren't. I mean, the people who run the world are not very interesting people.

NANCY FUSION: The idea that it's also dated?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Yeah, well, it will date some, certainly. Or you might raise somebody like President Nixon into a mythological figure who would be remembered for 3,000 years.

NANCY FUSION: But those who write with causes, specific causes in mind. And I guess we're talking about--

HOWARD NEMEROV: They're writing editorials and it doesn't matter in the least if they're in verse. They're just probably very bad editorials because by the time they get poeticized enough, nobody will in 10 years what they meant to say or which side they were on.

NANCY FUSION: And yet you have said that poetry is subversive. I don't know whether you meant it in a political sense.

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, look, is this political poetry? It's Swift On The Death of a Late Famous General. He means the Duke of Marlborough.

Behold, his funeral appears.

No orphans nor no widow's tears

Want at such times each heart to pierce

Attend the progress of his hearse.

What of that, his friends may say.

He had those honors in his day.

True to his profit and his pride,

He made them weep before he died.

That's political in a way, but the Duke is dead. Not really going to have much effect on the next one. Or here's a little epigram, which the first line is a riddle. It's called Power to the People. There's a political statement, isn't it? And I'll give you the first line, then you can try to answer, but you'd have to be crazy on exactly my frequency.

Why are the stamps adorned with Kings and Presidents? A moment of silence. Why are the stamps adorned with Kings and Presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads. Political, subversive, who knows?

NANCY FUSION: You have called poetry the sport of intellect. The sport of intellect.

HOWARD NEMEROV: Blake said it first.

NANCY FUSION: Well, right. Is it a battle?

HOWARD NEMEROV: I've never seen it that way. No, my battles are with the silence. I write in bursts very fast and then it goes away and I can't do anything for, I guess the world's record is two years.

NANCY FUSION: Two years. An awfully long time.

HOWARD NEMEROV: I mean, I keep up the correspondence and write comments on my students' papers, but I don't write verse.

NANCY FUSION: Does a poet get worried when it's been two years?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Yes, he does. Though after 20 books, it's a little harder to take the worry quite so seriously. And by this age, you begin to say, well, if it never happens again, you still had a pretty good run. It's been a very happy way to live.

NANCY FUSION: You've talked about the poet as an adolescent, because most of us do end up writing poems.

HOWARD NEMEROV: Probably most of us stay adolescent to a considerable degree, anyhow.

NANCY FUSION: Is Howard Nemerov an adolescent?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, I suck at pre-adolescence. I'm 10.

NANCY FUSION: [LAUGHS] What was it about 10?

HOWARD NEMEROV: I don't know. Before you got into girls and all that stuff.

NANCY FUSION: Were you writing at an early age?

HOWARD NEMEROV: No, no, heavens, no. Didn't start really till I went to college.

NANCY FUSION: What was it that sparked you?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, I got to college, and all the smartest, most precious, and arrogant sons of bitches said they were poets. So I said, well, that must be for me. So I rushed around the bookstore and got my copy of TS Eliot, of whom I had first heard that day.

NANCY FUSION: And that was it?

HOWARD NEMEROV: That was it. And a wonderful high school teacher in senior year who gave a seminar in world literature.

NANCY FUSION: Is there a sense of letting go when you write?

HOWARD NEMEROV: There is so little sense of anything when I write that I'm not even there. I'm sort of dizzy and my hands are doing it on the keyboard.

NANCY FUSION: Is it something that happens in an instant?

HOWARD NEMEROV: It thinks. I don't think. For me it happens in, well, a rather prolonged instant. The instant has to be long enough to get it put down. And I do revise a lot, but generally in such a hurry that I forget about it.

NANCY FUSION: Do you ever stop revising a poem? Is a poem finished?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Yes. Yes, I've never subscribed to that. I think it was Valery's notion that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. When I finish it, it's finished.

NANCY FUSION: Have you ever abandoned?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Oh, lots and lots. Once in a great while on a rainy Sunday, you look through those liquor cartons full of abandoned projects and notes and lines. You weep and say, that kid had talent. Where did it go? And once in a very great while, you find something and say, oh, I see what he was about. Now I can do it.

NANCY FUSION: What ever did happen to the kid that was Howard Nemerov?

HOWARD NEMEROV: I just don't know where he went. I looked at the journals he kept at age 20 and I said, I have nothing in common with you except the habit of thinking in words all the time. And I imagine him saying, you mean to tell me I'm going to turn into you? Impossible. I thought if I could, I'd write letters back to him and he'd write letters forward to me.

NANCY FUSION: What do you think he would advise you?

HOWARD NEMEROV: I just do not know.

NANCY FUSION: What would you advise him?

HOWARD NEMEROV: It's too late, just as for him, and it's too early for me to advise him. I mean, I thought of saying, you will get through the war, you will marry, you will have three boys. But you're forbidden to tell him that. Life wouldn't be of any interest at all after that.

NANCY FUSION: What interests you these days?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Oh, I don't know. I like to read in physics and biology a little bit so I can understand the little bits that aren't in math.

NANCY FUSION: You've always kind of been--

HOWARD NEMEROV: The comic books of the subject.

NANCY FUSION: [LAUGHS] But you've always been interested in the technology end of things.

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, not always. Perhaps, well, since about age 40, I guess.

NANCY FUSION: What is it about technology that intrigues a poet?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, that it's happened. That's one thing. It's fantastic if you tell the history of the world from that point of view. And also because all those things come out of the mind and get put back into the mind as figures for the soul.

NANCY FUSION: Are we on the verge of--

HOWARD NEMEROV: Sometimes they're very silly.

NANCY FUSION: Are we on the verge of being overtaken by technology? Have we succumbed?

HOWARD NEMEROV: I don't know what that means exactly.

NANCY FUSION: Well, is the role of the poet to mediate?

HOWARD NEMEROV: The role of the poet is to write poems. He doesn't have to be interested in technology. My friend, wonderful poet, Maxine Kumin, isn't interested in anything more technological than a horse, about which she knows a great deal.

NANCY FUSION: Well, if your job is only to write poems, surely you have to write about something and the something is the world. And can a poet accomplish anything in terms of changing the world?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, if he could, he'd probably change it for the worse, wouldn't he? Most changes--

NANCY FUSION: Would he?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, there are more side effects than effects. It's Valery. I seem to be thinking about him too much this morning. But he said, suppose you had absolute power and absolute justice and were given command of the world. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] What are you going to do now? So I think how happy America is that I'm not president, but they rarely think about it.

NANCY FUSION: What do you want to be doing in five years?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Living.

NANCY FUSION: Does that incorporate writing?

HOWARD NEMEROV: Well, I mean.

NANCY FUSION: Is writing living?

HOWARD NEMEROV: It's a good ambition. Remember that as I keep remembering every morning, that even given the scriptural allowance of threescore and ten, I'm on the 10.

NANCY FUSION: Do you worry about that?

HOWARD NEMEROV: It's very hard to worry about. I mean, once in a while you can wake up terrified, shaken by the throat, by the thought, and other times it leaves you alone. And sometimes you say, given what this world is, we'll be glad to see the last of it. I'll be still be dragged kicking and screaming to the emergency room and intensive care, no doubt. In fact, I thought that my creator probably gave me arthritis just to show me, get me in practice for what's coming. The pain Olympics.

NANCY FUSION: Is it going to start getting into the poetry more and more, do you think?

HOWARD NEMEROV: What is it?

NANCY FUSION: Death.

HOWARD NEMEROV: I guess it does probably. I mean, when you get old, you're privileged to speak with the authority of age. The author to his body on their 15th birthday, 29th of February 1980. I was leap day child. So I've had only 15 birthdays, though the usual 60 years, just like Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance, but older. And it's prefaced with a remark by someone known to history as the insight lady, who said to me one morning, there's never a dull moment in the human body. And this is about what you're asking about, death and old age. The Author to His Body.

Dear old, equivocal, and closest friend,

Grand vizier to a weak, bewildered king,

Now we approach the Ecclesiastian age

Where the heart is like to go off inside your chest like a party favor

Or the brain blow a fuse,

And the comic book light bulb of idea black out forever,

The idiot balloon of speech go blank,

And we shall know if it be knowing the world

As it was before language once again.

Mighty fortress may be already mined

And readying to blow up grievances

About the lifetime of your servitude.

The body of this death,

One talkative saint wanted to be delivered of, not yet.

Aggressively asserting your ancient right to our humiliation by the bowel

Or the rough justice of the elderly lechers

Retiring from this incontinence to that.

Dark horse, it's you we've put the money on regardless

The parody and satire and the nevertheless forgiveness of the soul

Or mind, self, spirit, will,

Or whatever else the ever unknowable unknown

Is calling itself this time around.

Shall we renew our vows?

How should we know by now how we might do divorced?

Homely animal in sickness and health

For the duration,

Buddy, do you know the drill?

NANCY FUSION: Poet Howard Nemerov. This is Nancy Fusion.