WEBVTT

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Yes.

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But to poets who read for
comfort, and would be pleasant,

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pleasure, or?

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I wouldn't say.

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That's another great
question because in fact, I'm

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sure this is true
for many people,

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that the poets that
they read for comfort

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are the toughest poets.

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You do not get
comfort, unless you're

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an imbecile from
entertaining poetry.

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You just don't, it's diversion,
it takes your mind off stuff

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that you ought to
be attending to.

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So, if comfort means
comfort, has to work F-O-R-T,

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fort which is strength, right?

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It's the same word as
a fort, fortification.

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Comfort, when Yeats says is
there any comfort to be found,

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he's looking for
something that is

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capable of finding fortification
in the face of the worst of it,

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inside and outside.

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So, the people that I read for
comfort about the tough poets,

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those who have survived, those
who are not interested in being

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popular or cracking jokes, or
getting away with stuff that

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is diverting.

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They are Mandelstam,
they are Solon,

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they are Yeats, late
Graves, they are Hardy.

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They are very often
bleak, but within them

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is a much greater sweetness
that is truly what

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we seek as spiritual beings.

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So yes--

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[INAUDIBLE] contemporary
North American poets?

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Contemporary North
American poets.

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This is not-- the silence
is not to suggest the dirt.

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OK, I'm just thinking.

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There's a range, right?

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And, it's going to go in ways
that may not be immediately

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obvious to people
in the audience,

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because it goes from very
traditional formal writers

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on the one hand, to much more
experimental writers on the other.

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And, it is the case that the
kind of comfort of the tough,

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has been something that I found
in the work of [INAUDIBLE],

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so I think
of them as contemporary,

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in the world particularly
in the 1960s, events

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we get to call the
[INAUDIBLE] especially.

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Very formal, very traditional,
but very fortifying.

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And yet, in the same
generation almost,

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the amazing pleasure
and comfort that I

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derive from much of
Ashbery's work where

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you can see the capacity
of an imagination

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to associate, to not be bound,
to move with kinds of fluences

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that are enormously--

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not just delirious, and not just
aware of pain and nostalgia,

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and of the impossibility of
satisfying certain demands--

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but not capitulating
to them, nevertheless

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allowing a kind of brio,
kind of magnificent disregard

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for what seems to be
apparent forms of rationality

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so that even in the
experimental moments,

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I find poetry of
that kind very much

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in this vein, of which
you ask, what do you

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read for comfort, pleasure?

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There are other
writers, but maybe there

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are other questions,
but many between that,

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I'm just sketching that out as
a spectrum, so between those.

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