An Interview
Sherod Santos interviewed John Estes in the spring of 2006.
SHEROD SANTOS: You’re a student in a graduate program in English, so I assume that means you see your studies as beneficial to your work as a poet. I was wondering if you could speak about what you believe those benefits are.
JOHN ESTES: Well, of course no amount of studying is too much. I like the way Howard Nemerov describes Kenneth Burke’s attitude toward what a writer needs to know—“Everything. Preferably all at once.” But that’s not to say that a university is the best place to learn (or keep learning) these things.
SANTOS: Is there a “best place?”
ESTES: I hope not. My answer to your question was a bit reactionary. I have a reflexive resistance to our culture’s near-total institutionalization of the activity of learning, which is grounded in something completely other than the curiosity Aristotle says is the fundamental posture attitude a human is born into the world possessing. We do a good job of grinding that out of our youngest citizens. When “learning” comes too near to equaling our particular (and particularly constrained) system of “school” (which in the name of efficiency it must implement), then the habits of leisure I consider essential to literature—as you defined for me once as “attentiveness, curiosity, enjoyment, and so on”—are curtailed in the name of crowd management and arbitrary standards. These are ideas I tried to implement when I started a democratic free school some years back, hoping to create an environment where a child’s innate creativity could be left alone and brought to bear on the entirety of her life--social, spiritual, and intellectual. I think school is great so long as you one knows how to take what it has to offer, but I’m concerned about what we’re doing to the formation human of consciousness when the instilled attitude toward learning is too conditioned, or narrowed, by institutional constraints. Others have had this same concern about the state of American letters, with so much poetry and fiction being produced in “programs” and within the constraints of tenure-seeking. I don’t honestly know whether it makes a difference—there is a lot of very good poetry being written—but it seems worth guarding against.
SANTOS: So, if you don’t mind my asking, what prompted you to leave the free school and enter a university? In other words, at that point what did you feel there was something missing in your education, something that could only be acquired at a university?
ESTES: I came to the university as a result of learning what I think it took me far too long to learn, which was not only the realization of my limits but a final acceptance of the right limits (a horizon is but a limit). To answer your first question, the school failed for want of students, which was also a want of sufficient trust by too few people. But I now consider having started it a mistake (however much an error of incalculable value) because it was born, in part, out of an erroneous belief that the energies and habits necessary for making poems (as I’d come to experience it) were so firmly rooted after years of growing that they were independent of anything else I did. In the course of running a business, keeping a physical plant, and everything else I had to do to exist in that world I re-learned the truth that, as Aquinas years ago articulated, that teaching is the profession most amenable to the contemplative or artistic life.
SANTOS: So I take it, then, that you would, with those qualifications, recommend this particular form of “training” to other young poets?
ESTES: Sure. I have that rather annoying, but instinctive qualification on the subject of schooling, though, due to my feeling that the way we raise our children is neither humane nor liberating. Few schools remain without an essentially pragmatic assumption about the use of a human life, or that offer a truly liberal education like the sort I think a writer needs. School may be the one of the last places one should go to obtain the “philosophical habit,” as Newman called the ultimate purpose of the university as he understood it. One saving irony might be that now that poets and other writers are granted station within the system, we’re a class of intellectuals—maybe the last—permitted to eschew specialization and concern ourselves with the whole of existence. Where else will students learn to read poems, or to understand that the creative life of words is concomitant to the creation of a habitable world, except from poets and other writers?
SANTOS: Why the “last” place? For example, much of my own youth was spent picking strawberries, washing dishes, harvesting kelp, driving a truck, working as a laborer, and so on. It seems to me that no one who has ever done such work could possibly pretend it helped them obtain the “philosophical habit.” Compared to the hours I spent in those jobs, my university days were like a long walk through Plato’s olive groves.
ESTES: I’m certainly not glorifying shitty jobs. But surely we can agree that universities by and large market themselves for their use-value, and trade in cliches. Most meaningful education that takes place happens in spite of the institution, at the hands of caring, passionate teachers who take the time to connect with individual students. The average Academy has little interest in asking the kinds of questions Plato asked about the nature of human life, questions I would hardly limit as advantageous only to poets. But we’re talking about the ideal “Education of a Poet,” right? Those questions, or the aspiration toward them, on hopes are part of a poet’s nature, and maybe it’s superfluous for me to wish upon young poets a hunger for experience, for adventure, rather than hoping to be credentialed and institutionalized at age 25 or 26. Your comment reminds me of a recurring writer’s trope: this list of their odd and various jobs held as preparation for the “Real Work,” as Gary Snyder (whose list is impressive and a standard part of his bio) called it in “I went to the Maverick Bar.”
SANTOS: What you’re describing seems to be a kind of prep school, this famous school of hard knocks, which prepares a person to better receive and integrate the more formal processes of education. But doesn’t that idea contain its own hidden sentimentality? For example, it seems to me we rarely acknowledge the fact that what one does to earn a degree is “work,” in the “real world” sense of that term. No more or less “real” and demanding than that “other” kind of work we tend to refer to as “real.” As mentioned, I had to work my way through school, yet I never heard anyone suggest to me that, by going to school, I was enlarging my appreciation of whatever crummy job I held.
ESTES: You’re right, certainly about the risk of sentimentalization. As “a student in a graduate program in English,” there’s plenty that’s difficult about it, up to an including the specific tasks we’re asked to complete. I allude to Snyder’s phrase/poem to use the term as he does, meaning not just his vocation as a writer, but as one connected to the land and a set of people, to the world of committed relations (including the land) and practical labor. I’m not sure he privileged writing poems over building a house (or helping his neighbor build his) but in his ethic saw them as being part of a whole life (which includes school, of course, and depending on how one takes his citing Lenin’s essay party membership).
SANTOS: So the question we seem to be coming around to is: Given the choice between this and something else, anything else, what would you recommend?
ESTES: Everyone has to find their own way, of course, and I hope they do. I don’t have an informed read on the culture or anything, but as I said earlier it seems prudent for a poet to be skeptical of any “official” status, even if we may need it to get our work done. That status can make things happen that otherwise wouldn’t, but can prove a liability, too. In real experience I know it’s more complicated than that, but I’m all for what preserves the sources of one’s poetic vocation, which I understand to be rooted, as all good things, in the wild and free. For me—because I want to teach and I need books and conversation—that means developing some stance toward this position, or a niche within it, that preserves and extends my freedom (or illusion of it!). Speaking specifically of the doctorate in creative writing, though, I’m incredibly grateful for its existence. I mean, few in the history of letters wouldn’t have jumped at this chance to have unfettered access to books, to mentors, and one hopes to a few friends who share your love for literature and ambition to carry on its work. Not to mention the opportunity to make a living as a teacher immersed in a work that for most of history has asked artists to compromise themselves to patronage and poverty. But maybe the University (for professional training, the Ph.D., not necessarily for an undergraduate, liberal arts degree) is the “last place” a poet should come, after she has learned well enough, is rooted deeply enough in her own habits, how to retrieve its gold without awaking its dragons. In that regard it’s kind of a first place, too, if I can have it both ways. All things are ends and starts.
SANTOS: So I take it you see your “life as a poet” as one and the same as your “career as a poet”?
JOHN ESTES: It’s probably clear from my answer above that I agree with Robert Frost that being a poet is a condition, not a profession. I made a decision early on that I’d work without trying to publish, to give myself time. One of my uncertainties as an adult has been how to channel my energies efficiently between several kinds of desires, how to express various parts of my personality of writing is only one. Now that I’ve thrown myself into this direction, where craft and career coincide, I’m still adjusting to the culture and its demands. But yes, I’d consider it my good luck to earn a living doing those things I am most suited to do and most enjoy. A career, however, appears to me as a thing that others make, with some cooperation, grounded in forces mysterious to me. It’s probably no accident that the word “career” literally means a wheeled vehicle, which reminds me of an image the Fool uses in King Lear to describe a relationship to Fortune: “Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with following it.”
SANTOS: Your comments in general make me wonder if young poets should be discouraged from thinking of themselves as “Poets”—a difficult mantle to assume, in any case.
ESTES: That question, or assertion, is similar to a statement you made to me once, which went something like, “At times it seems to me you place more emphasis on being a poet or a thinker or an ‘anti-student’--or whatever it is--than in poems and the making of poems themselves. In other words, you risk making your poems behave the way you see yourself, and when one takes oneself too seriously one risks afflicting one’s poems with a kind of somberness and purpose that poems instinctively try to overthrow. You also seem to monitor what you learn and who you learn from.” I wish I knew what I said, or how I’ve behaved, or what in my poems leads you to make some of your conclusions about me, but what irritates me most is that, like your beloved Plato, you’re never completely wrong. I do think about the figure of the poet, maybe too much, but not at the expense of writing poems. But maybe I’d write better ones to think about it less. But when one has, as I do, a fairly flexible sense of the self, its manifold ethical possibilities take on a fascination of their own. You’d probably agree that the poet has certain responsibilities to the world.
SANTOS: Only because I’m as old as I am would I presume to say such things, but it remains my hope that you’ll come to find as much delight as you do difficulty in the work itself. Or, to put it differently, that you’ll come to love the difficulty.
ESTES: No doubt I reveal—I’m sure it’s a theme of my work, formally and thematically—a general anxiety, a persistent crisis of confidence about resolving, once and for all, how to make right choices, how to pursue one thing over and above all others. Coming to the Ph.D. program has been an important part of reducing my number of unresolved questions, but it came only within a personal logic of working out my self-understanding and squaring up against the nature, the necessity of that sacrifice. I have acutely--too acutely--felt that, as Allen Grossman put it, “vocation is all,” and either my genius or my incompetence has kept my armies in too many lands. I wish I could have dedicated myself to the writing life with the same grace I recall you describing in one of your essays (the one on Robinson Jeffers maybe?), that there came a time at which you realized that writing poems was a good way for a man to spend his time. Then you got to it. I admire that. My line has been rougher, with more irritable reaching after facts, with bouts of revolt and refusal. If I didn’t love it I’m sure I would have settled the questions earlier, and differently.
SANTOS: It would be hard to ask more of a young writer, and I hope you know how much I admire your passionate devotion to the art. But I’m happy to let Keats’ blessing close that part of our chat.
ESTES: That’s kind of you to say, but what I like about you is that you do keep asking for more. I agree we should move on. Maybe this would be a good place to talk about the experiment you proposed for me which was, most succinctly, to “Just sense the world, don’t think it.” As I understood it, you felt much of my work you were seeing was too internalized, self-conscious maybe, that the poems were using the matter of the world to do its thinking rather than respecting (and representing) the essential otherness of the world and my engagement with it. I finally understood what you meant when you would tell me that I needed some humility in my work, how my poems are all about myself even thought I rarely write about events biographically. As I’ve thought about this, and tried to do what seems straightforward enough, I realized that in some respects what you were asking me was a mode of representation that some time ago I had consciously rejected: direct description, positing myself as a character with my experiences as events, invoking the external as a means to the internal. Much of the work of mine you’ve seen has been written during a time when my poems existed in an almost entirely internal landscape, and I understand why you’ve not responded so well to them, why they don’t do what to you poems can do.
SANTOS: In thinking about the “voice” in your poems, (and of course I may be wrong), it doesn’t seem to me that you write the way you speak, which suggests that the “voice” in your poems must be different from the “voice” we hear in conversation.
ESTES: I’ve made no effort to model the voice of my poems upon the way I talk, but it (or they, since I don’t think I have only one voice) does sound like the way I think. I may make a gross error in aesthetic judgment to assume that that voice is more compelling than if were to attempt a more naturalistic sound. But I in no way make a defense that I completely understand or adhere to consistent aesthetic aims: I still have many questions about the operation of poems, and their possibilities. As you’ve pointed out to me, I might be operating under a real misunderstanding of what constitutes the personal and what the impersonal, especially in so far as how a poem can uniquely render or evoke those metaphysical categories. My methods have been, for me, exploratory and aiming toward just these kinds of discoveries, but I’m sure I’m not wise even to my own schemes.
SANTOS: What terms would you use to make that distinction between the poems you’ve been writing and those you worked on as part of this assignment? Is one more “honest” than the other? More “you”?
ESTES: I’m sure I’ve moved aesthetically in the direction I have because of my uncertainties about what “I” am. One thing that I’ve wanted my poems to do is reveal their process of making (which is a self-making, of course), to be an event more than to represent one. To be revelations, which is, at best, the feeling I have while writing them. It’s the process that’s most important, most life-giving to me, but I’m also convinced that the better one writes, the more life comes available in the creative act. The result is that much of my work over the last few years has tended to be, to use Harold Bloom’s phrase describing Stevens, “heterocosmic”: abstract, antimimetic, creating closed aesthetic spaces concerned with the imagination’s action upon the world which demonstrates a plastic, indeterminate consciousness. I might call those poems aspiring toward the visionary (sometimes too much so), desiring to reveal through the made thing something about the order/disorder behind and within made things otherwise unknowable. This is in keeping with Vico’s verum factum principle—that all truth is made--which has been an important aesthetic guide. What I’ve been thinking about with your assignment, though, are some the consequences of this poetic. It’s not strictly true, as this aesthetic assumes, that language is the sole however dominant) medium of perception, and so your challenge has been helpful: one ramification might be to conclude that the world doesn’t exist--a kind of idealism that the world exists only as imagined or because perceived--which is not a conclusion I would want my work to make. Nor would I want my poems to reveal (exclusively) that other dominant strain of Romantic thought, that objects are the sole bearers of the soul of the world. If possible, I’d prefer to leave that an open question, because surely the answer is “both at once” and “I don’t know.”
SANTOS: So do you see the artifice you describe as heightening or inhibiting the truth of what you’d like to say?
ESTES: I’m not sure I’ve put so much value on having a truth to tell as I have worked toward making poems that might, by some accident, say something truthfully. If I knew what it was I wanted to say I’m sure I wouldn’t write poems. I militate against the incursion of dogmas into my thinking, whether it be critical, ideological or otherwise and do my best to trust the imagination to reveal what it will. Despite the perception that I’m overly serious, I’d characterize my dominant poetic modality as play. My work habits are similar to Stafford’s in that I just start writing, with little sense of where I’d have a poem go or be about. The danger--to extend the figure of play--with a dry sense of humor like mine is that no one laughs at your jokes. As Steve Martin says, comedy isn’t pretty—which I take to mean because one must risk so much in the hopes of a laugh, one often fails. Extrapolated to poems: in what other art is the risk of failure so high, the isthmus of achievement so narrow and elusive? A laugh is easy compared to joy, or to grief, or joy in grief. Of course all art is artifice, so the question for me is how much attention to draw to that artifice. I’m willing to agree with you to say that one can only have so much of this; at what point does this style or technique while drawing attention to itself as a poem, an artifact, become banal and self-absorbed however energetic or inventive the language? How much one can lean on form and technique to carry the emotional stakes of a poem is a good question. At some point we can work to mitigate those disjunctions. Maybe that’s what you mean by a poet’s compassion? But this work I’m talking about has its merits too, and I don’t suggest it be so much abandoned as integrated. If one of the poet’s responsibilities is to witness (maybe a valid weakness of poetry that draws attention to its language), this integration is vital.
SANTOS: What might this realization suggest for your future development?
ESTES: In one of your lectures you talked about how the poem uses its silences, its secrets, to mean. This emphasis on otherness, not possible so long as the poet remains confined within an elaborated aesthetic field, strikes me as a necessary method of limitation. At some point in the workshop here my style was branded with the term “editorial”—a designation I don’t really endorse—but which must say something about my particular approach’s inability to keep its own counsel. I think immediately of Elizabeth Bishop, who made a shift toward similitude in her mature work. As I said above, I don’t think about abandoning one style in lieu of another, but rather having at my disposal the ability to discern what is necessary for the work as it unfolds in its exigency. I thought my work revealed the kind of pressure the real put upon me (creating such an exigence) but now I’m not so sure. To return to Erikson, and the idea of maturity: the stage just before the one I identified earlier as my current task he calls “Isolation vs. Intimacy.” This is a false choice, of course, as isolation remains an ever-present existential phenomenon, even as one moves more and more toward communion, community. But maybe what’s revealed here is a choice toward the latter which--however much Rilke might be right in describing intimacy as two solitudes standing guard for one another--intimates a promethean possibility to our god-like distance from one another. Maybe the poem is something like a fire theft, or maybe it is one.