TITLE--Question and Answer (?)by Denise Levertov and Sharon Olds
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The following is an edited transcript of Levertov and Olds responding to audience questions at a conference held on May 15, 1986, in honor of the centenary of Emily Dickinson's death.
Sharon Olds: [answering a question about the relationship between poetry and politics] I'll give a personal answer. When I was first writing poems, I cared enough only about people that I actually knew to write poems about them that I would like enough to ever show anyone. Then it began to happen that I began to care enough about people that I didn't know, so that then their lives and what was happening hit me not as if it were happening to my own child, but a lot more as if it were happening to someone I knew. I suddenly realized how real it was and then I started writing about anything that came and struck me in that way. And certainly Muriel Rukeyser, Denise Levertov, many poets, and many of them women, were my teachers in that way. Denise. . .Denise Levertov: I don't think I can improve on Sharon's answer really. If one is a person whose poetry has always emerged out of one's life experience, which seems like a truism, I mean what else is it going to arise out of? What I mean is, if one's poetry has arisen out of a fairly wide range, then, of one's life experience. I think there are poets one could think of whose subject matter is very narrow, very restricted. But if one has always written about various kinds of things and experiences, whether literal, daily experiences or experiences of the mind and spirit. Then if one is a person who is concerned with politics and if one is a person who is concerned with political actions, naturally one is going to also write poems about those things. When I say "if one is concerned with politics," I think that there is no real distinction to be made between politics and morality or ethics. Any serious writer is going to have some kind of concern with basic, universal, human, moral questions. In our daily life we come up against them in the shape of political stance and what we do about it. So if one is a poet, one is going to write poems about it.
I've never believed that one has an obligation to write political poems because poems written out of a sense of obligation are going to be terrible poems; they're going to be doggerel. I do think that a person who is a poet, especially if they're published and have an audience, has the obligation to, if they cannot write poems that are discernably political poems--that's ok; but that they should never feel that they have the obligation not to suppose that because they're writing beautiful poems which people appreceiate that that lets them off the hook. They've got to do everything else that as simple citizens of earth they should do. In fact, maybe a little more because they have an audience; so they can at any rate talk to people, they have a platform. They don't have to do it through their poems. They can do it through their actions, through their teaching, through their conversations. They've got more opportunities than average.
Part of your question was about how Sharon felt that there was something essentially political about Emily Dickinson's poetry. That's a question which I certainly cannot answer because I don't understand that--I didn't understand what Sharon meant and I wish you would address that. Sharon, could you?
Olds: I'd be happy to. I think that anybody who's writing about parents and children is writing about power relationships, how people treat people, how the powerful treat the weak, how the very large treat the very small. I look at Emily Dickinson and I see the way in which power relationships were important to her. I think of her as having been potentially political. If she lived now, that sealing in of her life, that sealing in of her obsessions and her loves might not have happened in the same way. If she had had a chance to live it out, act it out more, who knows what else she might have written about, how much more explicitly "political" she might have been. What happens when you have that chance is then you suddenly look around and you see everyone else who's there. And you wonder what's happening to them and you begin to care about what's happening in a way that obsessed and sealed people perhaps are able at the beginning to do only in relation to themselves. Does that make sense?
Levertov: Well, yes, but I think it's an injustice to Emily Dickinson to assume that her isolation was not voluntary. I mean she didn't not have the chance. Her chances were different from our chances today, but she still--she didn't have to be as isolated as she was. That was her choice. She chose a certain kind of solitude. I think it falsifies her life to deny that, as if someone else was keeping her captive. They weren't. She made a very definite choice and retained the freedon of solitude by that choice.
Olds: In order to write.
