It's such a pleasure for any artist to talk about one's art.
That's a lot more fun than a whole set of other things.
I have wanted to make each book of poems
very different from what I did before.
I have consciously thought, what haven't I not done?
What have I not written about in the way of material?
What kind of feeling have I not generated?
And Jersey Rain, in a way it's the first book of mine
that has the title that is not ironically grandiose.
You know, my first book was called Sadness and Happiness,
and my second book was called an Explanation of America,
and then I wrote a book of poems called History of My Heart.
So there's always this slightly teasing relation to ambition
and to subject matter.
I think I grew up with a skeptical relationship,
not only to religion but to reality.
There's a kind of mental illness in my family.
My mother had a head injury.
To this day, I don't know how much to treat it
comically or tragically.
And you ought to have your head examined.
Well, yeah, in fact.
You should see a psychiatrist.
If only we had been from the right social class,
should have.
So that it's hard for me to talk about reality.
It's easier for me to just spritz.
And one of the challenges in that book
was to try to talk more directly and less ironically
about a whole host of things-- deprivations.
And I was very aware that before I had the word "artist"
in my vocabulary, my daydream--
I had daydreams like other kids of being an athlete
and things like that, but much of my daydream life
from when I was quite small consisted of things
that we would call art.
Whatever it is that makes the child come home
from the preschool with a paper plate on which the child has
glued some dried beans and macaroni and painted it
and says, put it on the refrigerator.
It's very strong in me.
I was the kind of kid if I saw a Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire
movie, I'd come out wanting to move.
And I tried hard to be a musician.
Probably one of the few things Helen remembers about me is I
was the saxophone player.
In my graduating class from high school,
I was not voted most literary boy, definitely not
voted most likely to succeed.
But I guarantee I was voted most musical boy.
And as I've said before, as I said, yeah,
today I would be a distinguished professional musician today
if it weren't for the single obstacle of a want of talent.
So in Jersey Rain, instruments play a big role.
The piano that I loved, really the piano was my mother.
That piano took care of me for a certain number of years.
And I drowned myself in it.
I used that piano for comfort and for escape.
I write about television.
There's a poem about the record player
as if to use an archaic expression--
phonograph.
So in that book a certain directness
and an interest in instrumentality with language,
including the alphabet as another instrument,
and instruments that make instruments.
So making those are all things in Jersey Rain You know what?
Rain is tears, it's also life giving.
My line about that title and about that title poem
is that rain is like the past.
It's universal, sooner or later it comes up or down.
It's life sustaining, you can't live without it.
And it can ruin a weekend.
And my past like my rain is a New Jersey past, a New Jersey
rain.
So those are some reflections on the nature of that book.
And what I'm trying to do now--
for a long time I've had a book almost finished.
In fact, there's a chapbook coming out
in the spring called First Things to Hand.
Do I have to write a poem about the next thing I touch?
Which is another form of arbitrariness
like the alphabet.
And there's some ingredients still missing.
A lot of the poems have to do with a kind
of social or political dissatisfaction
with the country.
I try to approach that more directly
than I have in other poems.
It needs something singing in it,
and I haven't quite found that.
There's enough in bulk.
But I can sense I need to make something aah.