An Interview

Sally Ashton | February 2006

David Lehman

Born in New York City in 1948, David Lehman-poet, editor, teacher, critic- embodies the energy of the city he still lives in and writes about, the city that never sleeps. Lehman graduated from Columbia College and attended Cambridge University as a Kellet Fellow. He earned his doctorate in English at Columbia University where he was Lionel Trilling's research assistant. Later he worked as a freelance writer and reviewed books for Newsweek and other publications.

A first book of poems, An Alternative to Speech, appeared in 1986 followed by Operation Memory in 1990, and Valentine Placein 1996. His nonfiction books include The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (1998), Sign of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991), and The Perfect Murder (1989), a study of detective novels, nominated for an Edgar Award. An experiment in writing a poem a day yielded two more poetry collections, The Daily Mirror (2000), and The Evening Sun (2002). His doctoral dissertation on the prose poem prefigured his most recent of several anthologies, Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (2003).

His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. Lehman currently teaches as core faculty in the graduate writing program at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he is poetry coordinator, and taught until recently at the Bennington Writing Seminars from the inception of the program. Wellknown as series editor of the annual Best American Poetry anthology, which he launched in 1988, Lehman recently completed work on a new edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry, which is scheduled for an April 2006 publication. A new collection of poetry, When a Woman Loves a Man, was published in Spring 2005, and a book of sestinas written collaboratively with James Cummins will appear soon under the title Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man.

Sally Ashton: Michael Hainey writes, David Lehman "has a gift for demystifying poetry." Can you say something about what that means to you?

David Lehman: I believe that poetry must be continuous with the language as it is actually spoken and with human nature as it actually is. Poetry does not visit one from high upon Mount Helicon. You have to work at poems, and you have to collaborate with the language and help generate your inspiration instead of waiting for it to descend.

Ashton: What led to your interest in writing?

Lehman: I started writing poems in notebooks when I was in high school. It happened unself-consciously and became a habit.

Ashton: Who was your inspiration?

Lehman: At first there was John Dos Passos, then Hemingway, then James Joyce. Then, as a freshman at Columbia, I joined the literary magazine, Columbia Review. The guys running it seemed terribly sophisticated, not just about literary matters, but about the latest film from Antonioni or Godard. The editor of the magazine that year, Bruce Kawin, recognized my ambition and encouraged me. It was an amazingly happy moment when several of my poems that year were accepted for publication in Columbia Review. It sealed my determination to major in English and become a poet.

Ashton: Did you ever seriously consider another career?

Lehman: Yes. I always wanted to try a lot of things. At certain points, I wanted to host a radio show, to act in plays, to write for or edit a newspaper or magazine. I've managed to do all these things, if only temporarily.

Ashton: You've said that working in journalism helped you not only as a prose writer, but in your verse. Can you explain?

Lehman: There's a certain professionalism that Auden exemplified, which I admire. And I think that in journalism, if you do it seriously for more than a couple of years, you are bound to acquire the traits of professionalism, some of them at any rate. In journalism you accept an assignment, or you go ahead and do something on "spec," and then you write it up in a timely fashion and show it to an editor who may have suggestions to make. The parallel can't be exact, but in poetry, too, you can give yourself an assignment, and work with a deadline. As a book critic and features writer, I wrote more than 100 pieces for Newsweek in the 1980s, and in none of them did I allow myself the luxury of using the word "I." I know I gained a lot from this curious discipline. I think it had an effect on my poems.

Ashton: So which came first for you, poetry or your playful wit?

Lehman: Good question. Not sure I can answer it. But I do know that in my first year at Columbia, there was a moment when I became aware that humor and poetry were not mutually exclusive, but that the one could enhance the other.

Ashton: You've had a career-long fascination with the prose poem resulting in a doctoral dissertation and most recently in the anthology, Great American Prose Poems. Can you tell me how your interest began?

Lehman: A professor I had at Columbia, George Stade, suggested that the prose poem would make a good subject for a doctoral dissertation. He planted the idea. I fed it, watered it, and let it grow. This was in 1974, I think.

Ashton: What do you like best about this form, or would you call it a genre?

Lehman: You could call it either or both. What I like about the prose poem is that it gives you access to all the forms and language of prose-forms not ordinarily thought compatible with poetry. The newspaper editorial, for example, or the recipe, or the classified ad.

Ashton: In your late teens you wrote prose poems before you wrote in lines. You don't seem to write much prose poetry now; none appeared in your most recent poetry collections. Why not?

Lehman: I've written some that appear in my recent book, When a Woman Loves a Man. I think there may be as many as four or five prose poems in it.

Ashton: Great title, especially coming from a man's perspective. How does this title especially fit?

Lehman: I'm glad you like it. While choosing a book title, you want the phrase isolated from the text, and you also want it to name the text, or to sound a keynote or a theme. "When a Woman Loves a Man" is the name of a Johnny Mercer song that Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald recorded. It may also remind people of Percy Sledge's "When a Man Loves a Woman." The book has a number of love poems, or poems about romance and love.

Ashton: What more can you tell me about the new poems?

Lehman: While the new book does include some daily poems, poems that annotate the experience of leading a life in New York City, it is very different from my last two books. It is more capacious. The majority of the poems were written in the last three or four years, but there are poems that were written previous to that. There are a bunch of poems in forms-sestinas, a villanelle or two, a pantoum, couplets, sonnets, a variety of prose poems, a very short play, a pair of double-alliterations, a poem in numbered sections telling a story. There are quite a few comic poems, a number of "literary" poems, parodies and puzzles, and some poems in styles not my own. I've never written a book more various than this one. I feel it shows the full gamut of my interests, emotions, and tonalities.

Ashton: The Daily Mirror and The Evening Sun, the two books prior to When a Woman Loves a Man, are the results of a self-described experiment writing a poem a day. Given your love of variety, did you feel initially somewhat constrained by the routine?

Lehman: No, I didn't. It came as a liberation, this habit of writing a poem a day regardless of how busy I was or what pressures I might be under. I tend to take on too much work, but writing a poem of any length will satisfy the requirement of one a day, and I found that it was sometimes possible to dash one off while doing something else, as an interruption, a brief holiday from some task less desirable than writing poetry. I say "dash off," and I'm going to resist the impulse to change the phrase to something less breezy. I don't want to make this sound too easy. I am very serious about my poetry. Frank O'Hara wrote that he felt his ideas were as lofty as anyone else's, his aspiration as grand, his lyricism as pure, but that this didn't oblige him to make pretentious noises about it. Sometimes a poet will read his work, or her work, with elaborate gestures and much drama, and then he or she will talk about all the different levels of this highly ambitious work. If the person has to talk so much about the poem for you to get it, it makes me wonder whether it's really there. Much as I like some of the poems my contemporaries are writing-poems I've promoted as an editor and anthologist- no one is writing the poems that I want to write and that I have it in me to write.

Ashton: That's an amazing statement in the light of how much contemporary poetry you read. What's missing?

Lehman: I didn't mean that statement as a criticism of my peers. It's just a sense I have that the poems I want to write are not being written by anyone else. That must be one of the reasons for writing poetry: the sense that one's own experience and attitude and imagination are not being expressed by anyone else.

Ashton: Not another word of poetry would be written if that weren't the case. You describe the artist's imperative, I think. But I'd like to hear how you characterize what you're striving for in your work.

Lehman: I can give you some idea-or ideas. In new poems, I am continuing to figure out ways to tap the comic imagination and enlarge the possibilities of lyric verse. I am interested also in developing new forms, or adapting unusual ones, for writing poetry. (Example: I recently wrote a poem in the form of a one-act play in which Jesse James meets Henry James and they converse about their brothers.) When a Woman Loves a Man contains a trio of poems about World Historical Individuals: Napoleon, Freud, Wittgenstein. It might be fun to write more of these biographical essays in verse, or "research poems" as a Polish friend of mine calls them. Finally, the new book has a pair of poems, "Poem in the Manner of Wallace Stevens as Rewritten by Gertrude Stein" and "Poem in the Manner of the 1950s," that represent the tip of the iceberg of a new project. I have now written about thirty "Poems in the Manner of-." Some are in the manner of great poets of the past, others in the manner of something more abstract. I am working on a manuscript whose very tentative title is Poems in the Manner Of.

Ashton: In your daily poems, you've named both Frank O'Hara and Robert Bly as influences. Bly wrote his before getting out of bed while O'Hara generally wrote at lunch. What writing practices helped you?

Lehman: Unlike them, I don't write at one time of day exclusively or mainly. I like writing with music in the background, jazz or classical, but sometimes I prefer silence, and on still other occasions I try writing while paying half-attention to something else, like the news or a movie. The important thing is to do it every day without fail until it becomes a habit. The very idea of writing every day, if you follow through on it, will have a powerful and liberating impact. It did in my case.

Ashton: Do you have other exercises you use to help generate poems?

Lehman: Yes, I do. I love giving myself assignments, and when I assign something to a class, I usually do it myself. Two weeks ago everyone (including me) wrote a "fuck you" poem. Last week we all had to write a seduction poem designed to get someone to want to go to bed with you; I distributed poems by Donne, Marvell, Marlowe, Herrick, and others who wrote effective poems for this purpose. For this week we are all reading the anthology Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, which contains poems by eighty-five poets who comment on the occasion or the form of the chosen work. The assignment: to write a poem in an unconventional form. I've also assigned myself the task of writing poems consisting of twenty-six words each, recapitulating the alphabet.

Ashton: Has your extended daily poem practice-at least five years-changed your basic writing process?

Lehman: In some ways it has. Writing a poem every day for several years will diminish the preciosity of your writing. You find yourself willing to write about things that don't seem obviously poetical in the "kissme- I'm-poetical" sense, as Kenneth Koch put it. And why not write about the view out the window, or the music on the radio, or the random thoughts that enter your mind as you sip your first espresso of the day while ignoring the noise of the sledgehammers outside until suddenly that noise fades and is replaced by the song of the nightingale Keats heard in 1819?

Ashton: What have you noticed in your work?

Lehman: I write with greater ease, I think, and the poems I write seem more continuous with my speaking voice. Also, I've found myself willing to "waste" a poem by trying an experiment that may not pan out- like writing a poem, as I did the other day, in which every line contained at least one anagram of a word contained in the previous line. Though some of these self-assigned exercises don't come off, others do hit paydirt, and you wouldn't allow yourself to try one if you felt you were limited to writing just one poem a month or just one month a year or whatever.

Ashton: In an interview with Tom Disch in 1999, you make a clear distinction between "daily poems" and "other poems." At this point do you still make a distinction, and if so, what is it based on other than when you write them?

Lehman: I guess I would define daily poems as poems that are conceived and written (and completed) on the same day. Mine also have the date instead of (or in addition to) a title.

Ashton: I assume you write poetry on the computer. Have you given further thought to how technology- specifically the computer-has changed poetry itself, or at least your own poetry and writing process?

Lehman: I believe that poetry is always to some extent conditioned by the medium in which it is written. Like Frank O'Hara, who touted the telephone call as a model for what a poem could be or do, I feel that the speediest means of communication will always have an effect on one's work. I know that I have allowed myself and my writing to be affected by e-mails and Instant Messages. And yes, I do write on a computer-though I have never given up on pen and paper, and as a matter of fact, I still carry a pocket notebook at all times.

Ashton: Do you still write a poem a day?

Lehman: Yes, but I miss a lot of days.

Ashton: Poems such as "Times Square" and "Madison Avenue" found in Valentine Place prefigure your work in The Daily Mirror and The Evening Sun. Such poems share a similar breathless pace and hectic imagery found in your daily poems. They assume the same shape on the page, and exude an urban abruptness found in subsequent work. Certainly New York City forms a sort of meta-theme for you. What is remarkable to me is what you abandon from the earlier books: the traditional forms, longer, more linear narrative, a sense of introspection, and a slower modulation. It's actually an amazing shift. How do you account for the change?

Lehman: That's a very astute observation. The emphasis, in the two books you cite, is on speed- speed of thought mirrored in speed of composition. But I think you may find some of the poems in When a Woman Loves a Man to be in that earlier mode.

Ashton: You've developed a speaker with a more specific persona in the daily poems. Would you agree that in spite of speaking a kind of inner monologue, the daily poems achieve a more public voice than a personal one? Or how might you term it? I'm thinking of the speaker in say, "The Interruption" from Valentine Place versus the one in "May 13" in The Evening Sun.

Lehman: I agree that "May 13" is the more "public" of the two poems. There's an interesting paradox in the idea of a journal in poetry. The journal is a personal form, yet if you do it in a certain way you may achieve a true public dimension.

Ashton: Would you say then that the journal as a form succeeds because of its speed, the way, as you've seemed to describe, that it dives in and embraces whatever the moment is?

Lehman: That sounds right. I would add that for a poem in the form of a journal entry to work, it has to transcend the "I" and include the "you." And I'd also add, in addressing the change in my work that you've commented on, that "Times Square" and "Madison Avenue" were-like many of the poems in The Daily Mirror and The Evening Sun-written in New York City. No doubt the tempo of the city is what drove some of those poems, not only as a subject or theme, but in their pacing.

Ashton: I was wondering how you'd say place impacts your poems.

Lehman: It seems to me that many writers have a sort of default setting in their work. Mine is Manhattan, a landscape of fire escapes and water towers. The wind is blowing a page of a tabloid carelessly tossed near rather than in the waste basket on the corner. The snow on the street between the cars and on the edge of the sidewalk has turned as many shades of color as autumn leaves in October. A couple of drunks are harmlessly singing. A boy is walking past them, past the blood bank which always made him feel queasy, past the orange-brick synagogue, past the newsstand where cigar smoking men in caps gather and chatter, and in the boy's mind are songs by Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, George and Ira Gershwin. That's what he hears as he walks with long strides and quick pace, and the buildings on Broadway are moving past like trees and telegraph poles seen through the train window by the future novelist in his long blue coat and scarf.

Ashton: So when you're in the woods or at the beach, it's still Manhattan for you?

Lehman: Something strange happened in 1986, during my wilderness years, or so they felt to me; I was living in Ludlowville, a little hamlet ten miles outside Ithaca, walking distance from hidden waterfalls and canyons and brooks. One day I walked into the woods with my friend Tom's coon-hound Bruno, and we sat at our favorite spot among rocks where three streams meet. A bird chirped, but in my brain it was a phone ringing, and I knew then that I would have to return to the city, to civilization and its billboards. I have something of the city within me that goes wherever I go. But lately I have managed to find places where Manhattan recedes into a temporary nothingness.

Ashton: You recently traveled to Poland. Was it a literary trip?

Lehman: Yes, I went for ten days: four cities, and in each I gave a reading or a lecture and sometimes both. It was a pleasure meeting the Polish writers, editors, and "Americanists" (scholars in American studies), at whose convention I gave the keynote address. Some of my poems and essays are being translated into Polish and will appear soon in Literaturze na sweice, their avant-garde literary magazine, whose offices we visited in Warsaw. We had tea with six staffers, some of whom speak as many as five or six languages; the editors double as translators. The offices were avant-garde in a sort of old-fashioned way.

Ashton: How do Polish poets respond to the New York School?

Lehman: Frank O'Hara was a liberating influence, when translated in 1986 by Piotr Sommer, not just for the usual reasons, but because his work and style were seen as a form of resistance to deadening Soviet hegemony. One fascinating thing that is going on in Poland is the phenomenon of "covering" poems, not exactly translating them, but covering, say, O'Hara's "Day Lady Died."

Ashton: You noted in The Last Avant-Garde the essential role collaboration played in the work of the original New York School of poets. How is this true of your own work as a poet?

Lehman: I love collaborating with other poets, and sometimes with nonpoets. I used to do it all the time. When you collaborate with another writer, and it goes well, it's as if you've created a third entity, a new poet, one who exists only in some abstract and hypothetical plane. I think I could collaborate with the ocean and feel as contented as a wave waving in the white distance approaching the shore.

Ashton: What's the most sustained project you've worked on in collaboration with someone else?

Lehman: Jim Cummins and I have written a book of thirty-nine sestinas, Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man. It's an homage to the form and to our friendship. And others got involved. The painter Archie Rand contributed thirty-nine illustrations and the cover. Beth Ann Fennelly wrote a sestina in response to one of mine in which Jim and I are identified as bartender and bouncer of the "sestina bar." Denise Duhamel wrote a foreword, and Bill Wadsworth collaborated on one of the poems. We had a ball. Also, Judith Hall and I recently collaborated on what she calls a "pl'em," a combination of play and poem for which she made a stunning series of collages. That, too, was great fun.

Ashton: The New York School style is also known for its use of collage or accretion wherein bits of life, conversation, billboards, personal or product names, and quotes can appear. While I'd say this is a hallmark of your work as well, in a recent poem, "Havana," published in LIT, you leave things out instead. For instance, the first stanza reads, "There was / and in the corner Avenida / the missing year he spent / how do you I" What can you tell me about the structural decisions you made here, which include the use of quatrains?

Lehman: Leaving out is underrated. In "Havana" I wanted to give the sense of what would be left if time scratched out much of the text. What would be left of the narrative after the eraser of memory had begun its work? Organizing the fragments into quatrains lends at least the illusion of order in a process that leaves so much to chance.

Ashton: You seem more comfortable than many poets writing today leaving "so much to chance," as you put it. What do you value in this approach?

Lehman: It approximates life.

Ashton: I agree. There is a sense with a poem like "Havana," that by omitting narrative, or simplifying the language, you create a more complex poem in terms of meaning. Do you see it that way, or how do you think about this paradox?

Lehman: In "Havana" I wanted to suggest a lot while stating very little. Sometimes you build with intimations rather than declarations, and sometimes you can multiply the possibilities by dividing the number of words. I'm interested in the fragment as a sort of form. Certain overheard conversations are interesting because we're hearing only fragments, and certain works of art appeal to us because they are incomplete or in ruins.

Ashton: On the other hand, Marianne Moore often employed a collage technique with found lines of prose to create elaborate narrative. She chose to annotate her sources extensively. Poets today seldom use her generous quotation marks, but such borrowing can be confusing for a new poet who wants to avoid the dreaded "P" word, plagiarism. What would you say are the limits of lifting in poetry?

Lehman: That's a very difficult and complex question. I would need an essay to address it properly. All I can say quickly is that collage is so accepted a technique of composition that the line between acceptable larceny and ugly plagiarism has grown ever harder to define.

Ashton: As series editor for the annual The Best American Poetry, perhaps a type of extended collaboration, how closely do you work with the guest editor?

Lehman: It depends on the year and the guest editor. Some of the editors prefer more contact, some less. With all of them I try to be as responsive as possible to their wishes. On a regular basis I send the editor a packet of poems culled from magazines that have impressed me.

Ashton: How is the guest editor chosen?

Lehman: In consultation with a number of people including my in-house editor at Scribner, my literary agent Glen Hartley, and various trusted friends. I like to think that the past editors constitute a sort of informal board of advisers.

Ashton: The Best American Poetry series is such a success. What have been the surprises for you along the way?

Lehman: Poetry in everyone's mind is so bound up with failure that the popular success of the series came as the most wonderful surprise to all who worked on it.

Ashton: In what ways is compiling an anthology similar to writing a poem, or vice versa?

Lehman: Both making an anthology and writing a poem involve working with a form, working within constraints and exigencies that help impose a shape and character on the finished product. The annual Best American Poetry compilation is limited to seventyfive poems. While that's not exactly the same thing as saying that a sonnet has to have fourteen lines, the effect is similar.

Ashton: You had the opportunity to edit the new edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. What was the experience like?

Lehman: A big responsibility, and a huge amount of work, and at the same time I feel lucky and really blessed, actually, that I got to read or re-read as much of American poetry as the mind can hold.

Ashton: It seems an amazing task both in quantity and variety of material. Can you tell me any insights you've gained in your reading?

Lehman: I've discovered, or re-discovered, all sorts of tremendously gifted poets who were eligible for previous editions of the Oxford Book, but were invariably overlooked. Among the underrated are such poets as-I'll name ten off the top of my brain-Leonie Adams, Josephine Miles, H. Phelps Putnam, Samuel Greenberg, Mina Loy, Charles Reznikoff, Joseph Ceravolo, Ruth Herschberger, May Swenson, and James Weldon Johnson. That's an incredibly various assortment. It excites me to know I'm in a position to spread the word about them.

Ashton: Is there a poet or era you've seen in a fresh way?

Lehman: Many. I'll give you one example. Everyone knows a part of Emma Lazarus's sonnet "The New Colossus." That's because of the famous sestet now inscribed on a plaque at the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..." Many people don't realize this poem's historic significance. It gave meaning to the Statue. It was not inevitable that Lady Liberty would come to stand as a symbol of welcome and refuge to the world's refuse. Lazarus's poem made that happen. "The New Colossus" is one of a number of terrific sonnets that Lazarus wrote. She died in 1887 at the age of thirty- eight. She deserves a lot more recognition and attention than she is getting now.

Ashton: Your enthusiasm reminds me of what you say in your intro to The Evening Sun about Frank O' Hara, how he "understood that poetry was meant to praise the things of the world that reward one's regard." I think the same can be said of your work in its attention to the quotidian and familiar, in its playfulness, which seems a type of praise. Your poem "November 30" is a fine example. It begins, "What a night, what a light, what a moon," but goes on to catalog the day's earlier catastrophes, yet manages to conclude, "and thee, O silver moon." Can you talk a little more about this celebrative quality in your poetry?

Lehman: Simply put, I believe that poetry must celebrate creation as one of its highest imperatives.

Ashton: Yet, your parents were both Holocaust survivors, and two of your grandparents were killed by the Nazis. How does such horrific catastrophe inform your poetry-poetry which generally embraces the comic and witty, the celebrative?

Lehman: I've written a number of poems and prose pieces about my parents' experiences. I suppose the quick and I hope not glib answer to your question is that the comic is a defense that permits life to continue under even the most awful of conditions.

Ashton: Such as 9/11. Many contemporary poets chose not to respond to the tragedy in their poetry, at least initially, citing that it was too close or too soon to attempt. You, however, wrote the poem "September 14, 2001." Did you write it on that actual date?

Lehman: Yes.

Ashton: The poem is more successful than most I've seen dealing with 9/11. It begins in indirection, imagining an interview with the crash pilots, and how the speaker might have perceived a plane crash before this event. Of the destruction itself you simply suggest, "all you have to do is / look up and it's not there." What can you tell me about writing this poem?

Lehman: I wrote a poem each day that week, but the ones for the 11th, 12th, and 13th didn't seem any good. The one on the 11th began: "History resumed this morning / in rush-hour New York / after a twelve year layoff / which may someday be called / the phony peace." Then I ran out of gas. But in the middle of composing "September 14," something happened-the poem seemed to pivot on its own, and enter territory uncharted and unplanned by me. That's when I think I knew I had something that might work.

Ashton: What are the differences from those first three attempts that enabled "September 14" to succeed where the others did not? What were you going for?

Lehman: Sometimes you know a poem is working when you lose control of it. And in my memory that is what happened when I wrote "September 14." But memory is unreliable. I just reread it, and I think what really happened is that the first couple of lines came to me-"Before September 11, / I would have written it / one way"-and were the impetus I needed for the poem. It was less about September 11 than about what was coming next.

Ashton: Obviously the epicenter of 9/11 was Manhattan, your home, but as a poet did you feel that you should write about the incident as some larger responsibility?

Lehman: No. I believe that "should" is the enemy of poetry.

Ashton: Apart from such cataclysmic events, in terms of the vocation, what would you say a poet's responsibilities are?

Lehman: I guess I should amplify my previous answer and say that we have a right to certain expectations from our poets. We turn to poets for their poetry, not for their political opinions or their moral certitude. If I told you that Wallace Stevens was politically far to the right of center, would it diminish the pleasure you took in his poetry? Probably not, because his political convictions do not enter his poems. His poems offer us the pleasure of a mind contemplating itself in its relations with the world: there is extraordinary intelligence there, and depth; an amazing focus on certain essential philosophical questions; and a marvelously distinctive and enchanting style. One would have to say that Stevens did a great deal for poetry and for humanity simply by writing his poems, his aphorisms, and his few essays. In contrast, when poets subordinate aesthetic criteria to political ones, the results are often dismal.

I don't want to legislate for other poets. But speaking for myself, I feel that my vocation imposes certain absolute demands on me. It is not a job; it is a life. You don't stop being a poet when you finish dinner or when you go to bed. You never know when the poem will hit, and you have to be available to your imagination. You need a strong ego, or you'd never survive the bruises and rejections, and at the same time you need to be able to negate your ego and live amid uncertainties. And then if you do all that, and you work hard at your poetry, and if you're a real poet, and you're lucky, you'll have contributed something enormously valuable to the culture.

Ashton: You've said that when you were a student, Kenneth Koch's writing course was the only creative writing course you had, and that it changed your life. How so?

Lehman: It's one thing to write poetry; it's another to be a poet, to embody in your person a certain attitude toward experience and the world. If you had a class with Koch it was quite obvious to you that he was unlike all your other professors in his manner, his presence. He was a poet; he stood for the imagination as a value in itself and in concert with the intellect. In his writing class, Koch required people to do a lot of reading, and to read in a different way. In other classes you learned to read analytically, critically. Koch made you see that you could read poetry from a poet's point of view, and that your criteria for judging the quality of a poem reflected that aesthetic stance. He also made you see that, in the end, judgment was up to you-that you could dislike an approved work, and embrace someone unknown and uncanonical if you felt sure enough of your taste and aesthetic convictions.

Ashton: How has his teaching affected your own?

Lehman: I've stolen some of his best methods.

Ashton: Such as?

Lehman: Koch had us imitate the writers we read, and he had us write in form-sometimes a convoluted form like the sestina, sometimes an ad hoc form with rules contrived for the occasion. I don't give exactly the same assignments, and I don't require imitations of the same authors, but like Kenneth, I believe strongly in the idea of the weekly assignment. As Kenneth did, I favor interventionism over the laissez-faire model of creative writing instruction. And again like Kenneth, I emphasize the literary rather than the therapeutic in creative writing.

Ashton: Within the literary community, there does exist a certain disdain for writing programs and degrees. In The Line Forms Here you call a graduate degree in the writing of poetry a curious proposition since in terms of employment it only offers the opportunity to "enter the work force of aspiring creative writing instructors," a burgeoning work force I might add. Have you noticed anything in your years teaching in creative writing programs that might temper that statement?

Lehman: There is something more to be said in defense of writing programs, and that is that they carry on the work of literary education. English departments in colleges and universities used to instill in students a love of literature and an interest in its traditions and its history. Maybe some still do. But the academic study of literature has been theory-driven for twenty-five years, and one result is an extraordinary neglect of the great traditions, the classics, the poets and philosophers of the past. At Bennington-and in the graduate writing program at the New School-many students have impressed me with their tremendous curiosity about books and writers. When I learn that somebody has not read a certain great book or poet, I always say they're in the most enviable position, they have a big treat ahead of them. We writers have an obligation to both past and future. It is as though we have received the baton and must in turn hand it off to the next runner. It is up to us to keep alive as much of the past as we can and hand it to the next generation of readers and writers-with the tools they need to make sense of it and see why it has lasted this long. That is an important mission, and I believe that writing programs do more to perform it than do conventional academic programs of study.

Ashton: How do you hope your students remember you?

Lehman: I hope they will think of me fondly as a teacher, one who is generous and imaginative and does not impose his will on them, but helps them realize their own aspirations.

Ashton: You enjoy an amazing number of involvements: critical writing, editing The Best American Poetry series, serious journalism, keeping up a fairly steady output of books. You teach at several universities, and you're the poetry coordinator of the New School's graduate writing program. You've edited the new edition of the Oxford Book of American Poetry, co-hosted a weekly poetry series at the KGB bar in New York, and you're giving this interview, to name some of what I'm aware of. You must have terrific time management skills. How do you find time to write?

Lehman: The wonderful thing about doing something you love, like writing poetry, is that it creates its own space-often as a holiday from other obligations, an aesthetically sophisticated way of playing hooky.

Ashton: Do you enjoy this pace or simply find it necessary?

Lehman: The faster the pace the better I seem to like it.

Ashton: What is your best word of advice to new poets?

Lehman: Remember what made you a poet in the first place-and fight against the very human emotions of envy and bitterness and resentment, which are poison to the poetic impulse.

AWP

Sally Ashton's recent poetry and reviews have appeared in many literary magazines. She earned an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars, and writes and teaches in California. She is editor of the DMQ Review, an online poetry journal <www.dmqreview.com>.These Metallic Days was published by Main Street Rag.