Montag: (Q22) Given the ghazal on p. 74 and the "modeled after" sections of "Three American-Style Studies" – after William Carlos Williams, James Wright, and Wallace Stevens – one senses that at least some of these poems were developed in workshop. Were they? How many of them? How did you make them transcend "writing exercises?" How many workshop exercises have you not included?
Benet: The poems you identified as workshop poems aren’t. They were written in response to a course I took on American poets in general, and because the discussion of these poets’ work often made references to the larger culture from which they came and to which they were tied, I felt that as an immigrant I had to play with their form and reference structures in ways in which I could adapt these to make sense of my own past in English and to an American audience who would recognize these forms. I chose these American poets because of the ways in which they bring "news of the world" to readers: William Carlos Williams for his eye (for bringing news of a world of senses in "sensual" images); James Wright for his desire to commune with us (for bringing news of a world of his senses in his almost confessionals of life in Martins Ferry, Ohio); and Wallace Stevens for the light of his mind (for bringing news of the world through "imagined" argument and interpretation in the language of poetry. Image, feeling, thought... to put it simply, is what I tried to study by recasting what I wanted to say in the venerable mold of three classic vessels that have held the spirit of American poetry pretty well over time and across different sensibilities.... Though I have attended workshops (and there is that MFA, too), I don’t workshop poems. I don’t like poetry workshops, and let’s just leave it at that.... I don’t have "writing exercise" poems as such in this book. I don’t do writing exercises. I write. I write many drafts, of which some cease being drafts and move on to their final form - and not always because I am done with them - but only because they have been published. Otherwise, I would keep working on them.... As you can tell, I have my hackles up a bit ... and I would rather not go into the whole topic of poetry workshops. They are fine for many people - I don’t have a quarrel with that; it’s just that they are not for me! At least not at this stage of my writing practice. Montag: (Q23) Does it seem appropriate to you that as an immigrant – dislocated in terms of place – you are attracted to the ghazal's formal disunity; is there a connection? Benet: I think your question may attribute a tad too much here to my immigrant status or that sense of dislocation running through my work in general. I took to the ghazal as a poet first - that is, with a taste for experimentation. The ghazal was just another rake in the shed of poetic forms with which to go out and comb through the debris. Besides, if the ghazal was good enough for Adrienne Rich, who wrote an entire book of them, well, it was good enough for me to try my hand at it. Had I felt some connection between its formal opportunities and my sense of dislocation, there would have been more of them in this book, or among my drafts. As it is, this is the only ghazal I wrote. They are not easy to write - that is, if you want to do it with the fullest respect for the original form! Montag: (Q24) What is one to make of your playfulness in handling your "signature" in the signature couplet of "Ghazal," given its somewhat somber content? (p. 74) Benet: I have no idea what one is to make of my playfulness in handling my "signature" in the signature couplet of my "Ghazal," given its somewhat somber content. What do you make of it? Shouldn’t some discoveries be left for the reader to make? Didn’t someone say already that poetry is that which cannot be paraphrased? Or that which gets lost in translation? I don’t make anything of it... but I did make it, I suppose. I don’t mean to be ornery, but not only do I not have an answer for you here, I also don’t particularly feel the urge to provide one.... Continued at BENET INTERVIEW - 10, below
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