An Interview with Frank Bidart

This interview was conducted at the Prairie Restaurant in downtown Chicago on Saturday, October 16, 1999. ANDREW RATHMANN: For me, and I'm sure for many others, one of the pleasures of your poetry is its rhetorical intensity--by which I mean the absence of irony, and your willingness to venture grand statements about life, death, guilt, desire, and so forth. I find this aspect of your work thrilling. But as you know, there is a strong climate of opinion these days that finds such statements either naive or embarrassing in some way, whereas you are not embarrassed. FRANK BIDART: Unembarrassable! Well-- AR: I don't want to ask you, "Why aren't you an ironic poet?" But I would like to know what you make of the turn toward irony, or toward a cooler and more cerebral kind of writing. FB: We live in an armored age. There has come to be astonishing sophistication in producing an armored self on paper--in a way that makes the poems that were "armored" twenty years ago look positively candid and naive. And I think it's a trap, I think it's a terrible trap. Frost says, quoting Horace, "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader." There's a kind of power that art can have--that the art I most love has--that you can't have if everything is presented from an ironic perspective. "Ironic perspective" doesn't say it--from a point of view where the work, as I say, is infinitely protected, but also closed, and doesn't venture connections to the vagaries and range of the emotional life. Maybe I should put it this way: If you can't tell when something goes wrong in a work, that this line is bad or this move wrong, you also can't tell when there's something right. There's a kind of power in writing that has a building sense of a center, that then opens the writer to the objection that something has g one wrong, something has not fulfilled itself, something has not developed from the poem's spine. Without risking that, you can't have the kind of decisive and powerful rightness that I crave as a reader. There is an ancient tradition in Western art--and I say Western because I don't truly know other kinds of art--in which you can talk about a central action in a poem or a play or an epic. You experience its center in terms of that action, and you can think about--you can talk about--how successful it is in relation to the fulfillment of that action. DANIELLE ALLEN: Is there an ambiguity in the phrase "a building sense of center"? When you first used it, I understood something about the poet's own commitment to the world and to a particular interpretive focus that the reader would have to identify in order to assess the poetry. FB: I mean the Aristotelian sense of action. It "builds" in the sense that it has a progress: it's not simply "this event and this event and this event," but the second event has some relation to the first, and both of those events affect what happens later; there's an arc to the action. There's a sense of progressive learning about necessity. Every work of art as it begins starts to define where necessity lies. Revelation in a work of art partly involves learning where necessity lies--what can't be done, what kills you, what doesn't "work." But among other things, I guess you have to believe in necessity. And I do, you know? I think there is a structure beneath things that one can fight, but the idea that it is not there is, I think, illusory. I don't believe we just sort of hop along on a shifting consciousness that has no patterns beneath it--free from patterns that continually get fulfilled. One thing that the kind of art I'm talking about wants to do is to move down through the shifting miasma of second -by-second impressions to the discovery of patterns beneath. The burden is not to come up just with pop psychology patterns, mere banalities or conventions. Or, better: to experience what has become cliche so freshly that you experience again its original force. …