Yes.
But to poets who read for comfort, and would be pleasant,
pleasure, or?
I wouldn't say.
That's another great question because in fact, I'm
sure this is true for many people,
that the poets that they read for comfort
are the toughest poets.
You do not get comfort, unless you're
an imbecile from entertaining poetry.
You just don't, it's diversion, it takes your mind off stuff
that you ought to be attending to.
So, if comfort means comfort, has to work F-O-R-T,
fort which is strength, right?
It's the same word as a fort, fortification.
Comfort, when Yeats says is there any comfort to be found,
he's looking for something that is
capable of finding fortification in the face of the worst of it,
inside and outside.
So, the people that I read for comfort about the tough poets,
those who have survived, those who are not interested in being
popular or cracking jokes, or getting away with stuff that
is diverting.
They are Mandelstam, they are Solon,
they are Yeats, late Graves, they are Hardy.
They are very often bleak, but within them
is a much greater sweetness that is truly what
we seek as spiritual beings.
So yes--
[INAUDIBLE] contemporary North American poets?
Contemporary North American poets.
This is not-- the silence is not to suggest the dirt.
OK, I'm just thinking.
There's a range, right?
And, it's going to go in ways that may not be immediately
obvious to people in the audience,
because it goes from very traditional formal writers
on the one hand, to much more experimental writers on the other.
And, it is the case that the kind of comfort of the tough,
has been something that I found in the work of [INAUDIBLE],
so I think of them as contemporary,
in the world particularly in the 1960s, events
we get to call the [INAUDIBLE] especially.
Very formal, very traditional, but very fortifying.
And yet, in the same generation almost,
the amazing pleasure and comfort that I
derive from much of Ashbery's work where
you can see the capacity of an imagination
to associate, to not be bound, to move with kinds of fluences
that are enormously--
not just delirious, and not just aware of pain and nostalgia,
and of the impossibility of satisfying certain demands--
but not capitulating to them, nevertheless
allowing a kind of brio, kind of magnificent disregard
for what seems to be apparent forms of rationality
so that even in the experimental moments,
I find poetry of that kind very much
in this vein, of which you ask, what do you
read for comfort, pleasure?
There are other writers, but maybe there
are other questions, but many between that,
I'm just sketching that out as a spectrum, so between those.