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Endowment Arts & Letters Editorial Staff Learn about the MFA Program
at GCSU |
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The Mind's Raw,
Gold Coiling : An Interview with Carol Frost
By: Michael
Thomas |
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Michael Paul Thomas:
In Downbeat Magazine, there is a
monthly interview in which the interviewer conducts a “Blindfold test” with
musicians to see what they think of a player in an excerpt from a jazz piece,
played without foreknowledge of the selection. For example, Jazz trumpeter
Clifford Brown from a recording in 1955, and the listener would be a trumpet
player, and he or she would identify the tune and the recording, while also
commenting on the style of the player. I would like to do that with you and
see what you think of these poet’s lines, after I read them aloud. Respond
with whatever your gut response might be. You might recognize the lines. Carol
Frost: Maybe. Maybe
not. MPT: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me
among the angelic orders? And
even if one of them pressed me suddenly to
his heart: I’d be consumed in his
stronger existence. For Beauty is nothing but the
beginning of terror, which we can barely endure, and we stand
in awe of it as it coolly disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrifying." CF: You know, I had a number of ideas about
who it was, and then I decided, since I wasn’t sure that I would let go of
that and just describe it as being
something I recognize as Romanticism—a Romantic sound. The tone is
romantic. It reminds me of Yeats’ Romanticism. It sounds like a fairly young
writer in the latter part of the twentieth century, with some of the older
romantic aspects, which is to say a slightly exaggerated sense of metaphor.
Bringing angels and terror together strikes me as a 20th century
gesture. Alright. So
can we go on, or do I have to tell you who it is. MPT: It’s Rilke. From the First Elegy, from
Edward Snow’s new translations. CF: That sure is an example of Romanticism MPT: Do you think there are younger poets
in the latter part of the 20th century who are doing those things,
in that style or tone? CF: Yes, absolutely. Maybe too much so. I
particularly like Rilke in the New Poems when he is working with an extended
metaphor, with a conceit, after he worked as Rodin’s secretary and he
realized a poem could be made as solid as a sculpture. And that the whole
thing, the sculpture which was this plastic, malleable completely tangible
thing is what a poem could be and it was the thing itself that made the poem,
not an experience about the thing, but the thing itself. I borrow shamelessly
from Rilke. A lot of my sense of metaphor comes from those new poems 1 and 2.
I like Snow’s translations much better than Mitchell’s. And there is a fellow
Herter, but that is much earlier, whose translations are interesting, not of
the New Poems, but just of Rilke. I think I found them when I was looking
closely into Berryman. MPT: How did you find that through
Berryman? CF: I think I was doing one thing and it
reminded of something else, sort of like playing cards and deciding what you
are going to put on a salad later on in the day. But in my view that’s all
connected to a richly invested and richly lived life. Playing cards and
thinking about the salad is a pretty good metaphor for how the mind roams and
how it works in some of its richer aspects. Of course I’m talking about a
kind of association. MPT: Do you think this happens in the
twentieth century, in particular? CF: Well, it does, but I think it happens
with the metaphysical poets. There, you have the violent yoking together of
disparate things, but there is an attempt to yoke. That very much interests
me. MPT: Is that your phrase or somebody else’s? CF: That’s not mine, but I don’t remember
whose it is. MPT: The reason why I was asking about the
younger poets of the late twentieth century is because Mitchell came out with
those translations of Rilke and Rilke became very accessible, and perhaps
there are bad imitations going on. CF: I think when people are imitating
Rilke, they are imitating him in the Sonnets, or imitating the softest
aspects of his work. The parts that have angels, which is an abstraction
finally because an angel is not something which can be embodied. In other
words, you can’t pick up an angel and kiss it. Your arms go right through if
you try to embrace an angel. MPT: Like when Odysseus sees his mother in
the underworld. CF: Yes. I prefer the
shades to angels, unless the angels have tumors or missing limbs. Maybe it's
just the step after perfection, and unity, and wholeness and radiance—those
things one imagines needs to be in poetry and I take that from my sense of
what Thomas Aquinas has said about beauty. And also from a very important
source for me, which is Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. I was
looking for that definition of the imagination today. All I can really
remember right off hand is the reconciliation of opposites. The imagination
is that unifying faculty, basically is what he says, and I do think that
unity is a part of the finish that we think of when we think of poetry as an
art. I’ve become interested in aspects of unity which are not symmetrical, or
which include the symmetries as we think of them, the sudden introduction
into a poem of an image that only because of its extraordinary beauty will
seem to belong, to be a quality of the whole poem. That is another way of
saying what Coleridge was asking us to do when we exercise imagination and
bring the unity into the poem—reconciliation. MPT: I wanted to ask about the title of your
New & Selected collection. I was thinking of Baudelaire and his idea of
opposites and of his poem, “Correspondences.” Is there a unity between “Love
and Scorn”? CF: Oh, sure. An uneasy pairing. A
tension between the two. They are the familiar emotions, it seems to me, that
poetry tends to address, like love and joy, good sex. MPT: Do they deal equally with scorn? CF: No. I think not. But you know that I
do think that the speed of time in the latter part of the 20th
century is that what seems new or what is new becomes old very quickly. MPT: In poetry? CF: Yes, in poetry. I think so. So that
uneasiness or that dis-ease that I was talking about. MPT: In your New & Selected Poems, you
arranged the poems in alphabetical order. How did you finally get to the
arrangement of that book? CF: I think the least interesting aspect of
the book is the way it’s arranged, although people seem to be making a lot
about it. MPT: Including people like me. CF: I started out with the alphabetical
arrangement because I wanted to make a severe cut. I wanted to be sure that I
didn’t put in too many poems that in the context of my general history as a
writer, my autobiography as a writer, would in the context of their original
books would seem important to have. By putting them alphabetically, the only
real context is something that we recognize as unimportant, that the letter C
comes after A. It was easier then for me to decide which poems not to have in
the book, after I did it alphabetically. I wanted every poem in the book to
be equally strong and after I arranged them this way, I could get rid of a
bunch of them. Then I thought this is probably unmanageable. I put the book in three sections. David St.
John suggested it would be important to put new poems together. The
standard way to put a New & Selected together is to go chronologically
forward or chronically backward. Or to put the new poems first and then go
chronologically backward. Someone told me that both Auden and Ashbury ordered
their poems alphabetically. Anyway, then I wanted to put those “Abstractions”
together, those 11 line poems, and one of the reasons I wanted to do that was
I published those 11 line poems in two different books. It
is a kind of nonce form and is only nominally 11 lines. The first, most obvious aspect is that they
are 11 lines long, although it is true that I have a 5 ½ line eleven-liner in
an earlier book and a 13 line eleven-liner. Even though there was a
description of this form on both of the books where the poems appear, people
seem not to realize that the poems went together or what it was they were
doing, so I thought in this book, I can going to put them all together. Then
people might see what the project was, which was to make a sort of poetic
lexicon for abstractions, which I find ineffable. Most of the world, most of
meaning is ineffable. Well,
I don’t know if the word ‘beauty’ is more or less ineffable than ‘rabbit.’
There are many different objects which could be called “beautiful” or
representations of beauty, including some beautiful rabbits I suppose. Even
the rabbit that one thinks one could describe and know completely—you could
eat rabbit, you could dissect a rabbit, you could rub your nose against the
rabbit’s nose, you could pet the rabbit, you could have the rabbit be a part
of your household, you could see it in the wild, and you could just add up
experiences with the word rabbit. The
natural history of rabbit. One of my favorite books is The History of Fish. I’m sure there is a history of rabbit, too.
I still don’t believe that I know or would know what rabbit is. It would
still be ineffable. I think that truth is ineffable, that tangibility is not
a heck of a lot more reliable than intangibility. MPT: If you had to choose among those ways
of “getting to know rabbit” what would you choose? CF: All those ways. I wouldn’t choose one
over another. Although I do like the taste of it. MPT: Me, too. CF: But not domestic rabbit or raised. I
like wild rabbit, the kind that you shoot. And then fry. Or more
politely--saute. One time I shot a rabbit and I left it on the back steps—I
don’t mind gutting an animal as much I do skinning it, something about
skinning an animal that’s even more intimate than gutting it. Except for fish,
but I don’t mind gutting fish either. Anyhow, I left it on the back steps and
when I came out, two creatures had evidently crawled out of its ears. I think
they were slugs, but I need to look that up. But see, I have just finished a
rabbit poem and I don’t think it is intimately involved enough with “rabbit.”
I think a criticism that I would give myself of my newest work is that I am
at a sort of distance, a sort of physical, emotional and intellectual
distance from what it is I am trying to write about. I have no idea why that
is in this writing period. I didn’t recognize it when I finished drafts of
the poems, but I realized it today. So I have a lot of work to do. MPT: You said that in the poem, “The Gross
Clinic” you are taking a lot of risks. What are those risks? CF: Well, in “The Gross Clinic” the main
risk is changing the topic, or seeming to. It’s probably more pleasant and
might even be a more recognizable aspect of beauty to stick to the point.
When we think of a beautiful object, we like for there to be a kind of
sameness or symmetry in that object. That’s one aspect of beauty. How do we
reconcile or acknowledge or make the sensibility allow for unsameness and
unsmoothness. The metaphysical poets did it by sheer power of intellect, by
making a compass and two lovers seem so much alike because of the very care
of the composition of the poem. There
must be other ways to do it. I think one of the things I am trying to do in
that poem is to find new ways. It has to do, partly, with energy. Energy must
be an aspect of beauty. MPT: What do you mean by “energy”? CF: I think a poet creates energy with
syntax, with metaphor, with the space around lines and words. MPT: So what other risks are you conscious
of in that poem? CF: To go from talking about a veterinarian
fixing the septic wound of wolfhound to a reminiscence of Nestor trying to
convince Agamemnon and Achilles to agree so that the war could continue. That
big rupture in the seam of the narrative, yet I think it is apt and just
because there is this great distance between our time right now and their
veterinarians and the time that Homer is talking about in The Iliad. What I mean
is this—I think the best way of trying to organize a poem, if you are using
any kind of Nonce form is to imitate things that naturally occur in the mind,
the way we naturally think about the world. The most obvious way we think
about the world is in narrative, which I think is one of the reasons why
people love narrative poetry above all other poetry. It is a familiar way for
the mind the to understand the world. MPT: Is that a false order? CF: No, it’s not a false order, but it is
just a firmly practiced and familiar kind of order. In film, there are cuts,
from one scene to the next, but that is an imitation of something that
actually happens to us. We pay a great deal of attention to something, then
it’s as if we pay no attention, then we are again focused again on something
else. That fuzz is the cut, I think. The motions that the mind makes interest
me the most in poetry. Elizabeth Bishop, in a very early essay of hers, talks
about the timing of disclosure, which is also a process of mind and something
that has become of interest to me ever since I read that about fifteen years
ago. What she had to say made me realize that I could determine the pace and
timing of disclosure in a poem, of revelation in a poem. Although I do
believe that there probably needs to be an overriding or unifying principle
in the poem. That’s one of the great things, or one of things that’s most fun
in poetry is—to try all of the different ways of measuring out that space
that the poem allows itself. If
you were to say, ok, a sonnet is a room, no, a sonnet is a short street and
it’s fourteen units long and you look at Shakespearean sonnets what you
notice is that some of them pace themselves through as if there is a
Lamborghini going very fast for the first twelve blocks of time and then it
slows down at the end. The thing I think about any sequence, any series, is
that whatever the space is, whatever the measure or shape is, what the writer
is experimenting with is how to fill that shape, which has to do with pacing,
and what kind of car you are driving—I prefer the Lamborghini to the Daewoo.
I keep dancing around. I don’t think I have answered one question. MPT: Well, not my questions. (Laughter)
Keats’ aesthetic ideal was “Negative Capability.” Is there some type of
terminology you would use regarding your artistic principles? CF: I go back to Rilke here, and Letters to a Young Poet, when the
grand expert, all of twenty-eight years old is writing to the young poet, a
younger officer who is all of six years younger, and he says, you are trying
to ask me to answer your questions and you have to learn to live the
question. That is a rewording of Negative Capability and I very much ascribe
to that notion. I don’t want the poems to be wishy-washy. I don’t want things
to be obscured or unclear, but I also don’t want to tell it the way it is, as
if it is the only way it could be. I want there to be more uncertainty in
coming to whatever the truth is. I think I am more absolute about my sense of
beauty than I am about truth. MPT: What is your sense of beauty? CF: It has to do with what I was saying
before about a kind of organic mix of symmetry and asymmetry. Symmetry is not
beautiful to me, symmetry alone. I think that is the standard for most
people. People expect symmetry. My aesthetic sense in my poems allows for,
and even requires, some asymmetry. And I even have gotten to the point where
sometimes I think the standard should be asymmetry, discord, tension, and
then just a slight bit of symmetry. This is a reverse of what I used to
believe, which was mainly symmetry and little bit of tension, discord, or
asymmetry just to add a kind of spice like putting pepper on your food. I
wonder what it is. Is it because my taste buds have become worn out from
pepper all these years and now I need more and more pepper? MPT: What about Blake’s “fearful symmetry”? CF: First, I think we recognize the form of
the “tyger,” and the form of the “tyger” is fearsome. Form is almost always
for us, left-handed, right-handed, left-eyed, right-eyed. It is a two-part
form. Something about the way our brain is wired makes symmetry important.
Even our faces are not perfectly symmetrical, yet our eyes make a symmetry of
it. So, I do think we have a two part seeing, left and right, and we create
out of that two part seeing, a symmetry. And that’s the form—the form is
symmetrical. When we recognize a thing, a symmetry, it can be something that
we automatically associate with beauty or we associate with fear or we
associate with youthfulness or joy.
The notion is that God creates order and symmetry is order and here is
something, the “Tyger,” which is fearsome and deathly and God created
it—which is probably the primary impulse for the poem. MPT:
If you had to give one phrase or sentence from your own poetry that defines
beauty, what might that be? CF: “The
mind’s raw gold coiling.”("The Part of the Bee's Body Embedded in the
Flesh," from I Will Say Beauty) It
just appeared in my mind. Although it is a version of metaphor that I used
before—the suggestion of bees. The bee metaphor keeps coming back. I think
the most personal thing about poetry is that the reader can figure out how
that poet’s mind works. What can be more personal than that? –to try to make
what the mind does palpable, and by mind I mean imagination and emotion,
thought and feeling, in what ratio I’m not sure. That is what I keep trying
to find out. It’s something that the mind fashions. It’s
not external. It’s internalized and it’s created continually. The mind
swerves toward and away from it. But
then, I might say, I can’t give it one phrase. That’s why I wrote the whole
book. Finally, I am more comfortable with the metaphoric revealing of any
truth. That’s essentially what I am writing about. How we put together our sense of reality of
the world has everything to do with how emotion and imagination fertilize
across breeds (to go back to bees). In the summer of 1991, the poet
Carol Frost critiqued my poems while we sat in a rowboat on Since 1996, I have met with Carol
every summer, though our dialogue has turned in many directions with a range
of purposes. As Assistant Director of the Catskill Poetry workshop, I am
often solving some administrative problem we face, or simply thinking through
possible changes that might enhance that week for students and faculty. One thing
has remained--besides our long friendship--and that is her mentoring. The content of this interview is
filtered from many hours of conversation conducted either at Carol divides her time between
Cedar Key, |
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