I have always argued that the difference between prose an...

I have always argued that the difference between prose and poetry in our age is quite different. Some of the best
poets are prose writers, that is, they do everything that poetry
used to do and doesn’t now. Poetry is prosy now, and not as
interesting as prose, I think—not even close. I’m also reminding people
that this is a homemade object—the cuckoo clock, it says
something, things speak themselves as well. That’s because I’m anti
writing as merely written. I want the oral tradition. You go back to
John Donne’s prose, or any of those writers, you get plenty of
that, you get rhyming, alliteration, you get all kinds of other
connections, all other devices of suggestion, and echoing, and so forth,
because they were talking to hundreds, sometimes a thousand people
in a church. Their sermon had to go out verbally and they had
to use all the mnemonic devices they could, because they wanted
to embed the so-called message. It was the word, it was the “living word,” and all that, that they wanted to stress. It was the
same time the opera begins, masques and so forth. They were
trying to figure out how music and its nature, and language and its
nature, could cohabit. It is for me a great moment because of that.
Ford Maddox Ford has a good passage in one of those endless
books he wrote on the history of English literature about how
prose changed after the protestants won the war in England, how
prose went down the hill as the [former] king of the
hill.

[...] 

When you put things on the margin, as
poetry and fiction have certainly been, you free them in many
cases, in many ways, and it’s great to be over there, in a sense, but
it also causes damage. It’s a great incentive, if you’re over on the
margin and feel you should be the center, and then those who are on
the margin, know they’re on the margin, that’s the way it’s
going to be, and they have their desperate little ways to pretend
that the margin is really the center. And there’s the final thing
when the novel was in the center for a while, people like Dickens,
and even up through late James. There was a sense of the social
responsibility of the writer, the impact—people paid attention. Recently,
in Latin American literature, novelists were attended to. A little
anecdote: While talking to Carlos Fuentes about that sort of thing,
and trying to get at why there was such an explosion in Latin
American literature, he said, “We are making our literature. We are
behind the times.” Gertrude Stein said that the United States was the
oldest country in the world because it’s been in the twentieth
century the longest. And they were just getting to this, and Fuentes was
right.

The novelists were celebrated people, and are, even still.
The weight of being somebody who is attended to. [When a writer] came
out on the stage, an athletic complex, usually, to read, the
place would be packed with twenty thousand people. And when they
finished reading, bouquets of flowers would be piled at his feet, and
so orth. And the writer, serious writers would be read by half the population. 

In China, the same sort of thing. I was introduced to a
young woman, whose first book had just come out, and she was sort
of disappointed in its sales. She sold a hundred thousand
copies of her first book of poetry. Everybody in China reads. You would
see people everywhere, perched somewhere, reading. And they would run
out of paper, the whole country would run out of paper there
were so many. But the problem is that only in less developed
societies are novelists and poets valued. The Russians are losing that
fast. And they should be, because we writers don’t know what we’re
talking about. Some writers are wise people, I guess, and have
something of intellect to offer to society, but no more than any other
group. You want to listen to Tolstoy? I don’t think so. But then what?
What are the young writers writing for? They’re writing for their
peers in their seminars, the workshops, that’s who. It’s pitiful.

Barth was writing for the greats of the past, whom he had
read, and, again. Fuentes or Vargas Llosa, they read Don Quixote,
I mean. And they’re given ambassadorships, they run for president.
They are important people, so they have to do important things.
And now what we do to something important, we sign a petition
not to arrest a Chinese radical. Big deal. I think it’s
naturally a very difficult thing. 

One last thing, when you make less grand the activity, it
becomes a hobby, and it actually multiplies the number of people
writing poems, tons and millions of people are writing poems, all
kinds of people are writing novels, because it’s not hard. The
Yeats poem “Adam’s Curse,” we’re down on our knees scrubbing the
kitchen floor. No, we’re not. They’re writing little poems about
being mistreated by their husband or wife. At least the
Restoration poets wrote about getting into bed. 

[...]

When Valéry was in a similar position and was called a Symbolist,
he said, “But we all write differently. What is in common? We dislike
the same things.” That’s true of this group, too. We share
certain dislikes.

I’m on Adorno’s side: that real change has to be structural or formal. And that’s why he
favored Schoenberg over Stravinsky. Stravinsky was a perfectly
bourgeois composer, and he borrowed his motifs, and of course people
held that against him, I don’t—as long as you’re good, that’s
fine. And Adorno and his friends are wrong to say he shouldn’t do
that. 

Schoenberg had another structure, and that had, as it’s
merits, not being Stravinsky, or the tradition, the eclectic quality
of Stravinsky, too. You take Schoenberg, however—he was
dictatorial. The positive side of Schoenberg was not very good, I think,
as a model of other things. And to defend the twelve-tone system you just have to point to the fact that you can write
masterpieces with it. It doesn’t mean you have to use it all the time. Fact
is, it’s a rather a specialized occasion, type of formal design. It’s like the
Bauhaus: military, chilling, or the tendency of modern architects to
say, “Live in my house! It’ll be good for you!” These architects
thought that they would make better people. Even Frank Lloyd Wright did.

[...]

You remember the anecdote about Gertrude Stein and the
little bell ringing in her head that told her when she was in the
presence of a genius? And it rang for her with Picasso and Alfred
North Whitehead. Well, it rang once for me: Wittgenstein. It was
just as well to be tongue-tied in his presence because he didn’t want
to hear from you anyway. What we did was listen to him. He
would talk about an issue as if we weren’t there. When I repeat
it, describe it, it sounds so phony, but we listened to him think out
loud, for our benefit. It was, in fact, genuine. It was as if you
could suddenly follow [Wallace] Stevens, say, deciding whether to keep or
remove a word. We listened while he struggled with the pros and cons
of some sort of interpretation of some epistemological problem,
mainly. I was very skeptical, but I immediately saw, I think, that
this guy was something.

William Gass, Rain Taxi interview