TM: Are your nature poems less conversational than the others?
MK: More rarified, more polished - a pretty image with a little meaning attached. Minimalist work with a nice image and an insight.
TM: How much is place an element in your work?
MK: A lot. Everything has to be placed. We live in the world. You could say we live in a bicameral world where you've got the place and you've got the spirit of the place. You've got the coffee and the meaning of the coffee cup. Place is in everything - you have to anchor the poem. Even if it is only a personality sketch, the place would be in that person; and the transcendent meaning of the person would be the other half of that poem.
TM: Talk about the place of poetry in the world. What is poetry's role? What is the role of the poet?
MK: An extension or evolution of the shaman. I've thought that since I was in my late teens or early twenties, that back in Day One the poet was the keeper of the oral history, the guy who memorized ten thousand poems that told you which mushrooms were poisonous, who killed whom, and where people came from. As things got more complicated and specialized and technology took over, one person no longer had all those jobs. The jobs got farmed out - you'd have historians, librarians, rock and roll musicians, scholars, poets. As things got more complicated, you had to have different specialties.
The poet should renew things, refreshen daily life with symbols. For the person who doesn't read a lot, he should at least realize that the poem can make life a little richer, a little more meaningful, that it can make him look at things in a fresh way, take him out of the humdrum ordinary. Especially in the factory age we live in, it should refresh, and say "Here's why you're doing things, here's why it's important." Music has taken over much of that role because musicians, rock and roll people and country singers use accessible language. People can understand. Plus you don't have to think when you listen to music.
TM: Should poets use accessible language?
MK: If they want to sell their product, yeah. Poets sometimes piss and moan because country musicians are getting all the money. Well, it's because they're selling what people want. I'm not saying you have to trot out a bunch of tired cliches and add a three chord progression to the damn thing, but what you should do is at least make sure people can understand what you're talking about. If people can't understand you, they won't give a shit.
TM: So John Ashbery, who is complex and obscure by some standards, would not be your model for language and line?
MK: Hmmm. Not if you wanted to communicate something relevant to the average person.
TM: Are there times you don't want to communicate that, times that you would be obscure or complex or be "beyond" the ordinary person?
MK: Well, I would almost have to say No, because the purpose of writing is to communicate. You learn that in Journalism 101. Once you move away from that - well, you're just humoring yourself. Whom are you serving? If you're going to write just for your own benefit, do whatever the hell you want, but don't expect people to read it or care.
TM: But you're not writing three chord progressions and country-western cliches in your poetry. How are you going to communicate with people who are interested in rock and roll?
MK: Journalists do this every day. They take very complex world events and make them explainable to people. They don't dumb down the information but can explain it on the evening news or in a magazine article, if you pick up a political magazine. It's the poet's job to communicate something complex through a metaphor, through a symbol, through an anecdote. That's the great skill.
TM: With the goal of refreshing....
MK: Daily life.
TM: Making the world new for the reader?
MK: Sure. Every generation has to re-make everything. Every generation has its new poems and songs about love and death, this and that. That's your job. In twenty or thirty years, someone will come along and my stuff will be replaced by the next guy making it relevant for the next generation. The same classic themes in the clothes of that age. Like the muse in a mini-skirt: the goddess has a different wardrobe every twenty years. Look at Elvis and look at what's being played today. It's the same thing, but with differences for the different generations. The poet is in charge of the symbols, the human archetypes. Human symbols are eternal, transcendent things.
Continued at Part 4, next....
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