Mukul:  First I thank you for giving your kind consent to do this interview with me. I do believe the Pen Himalaya readers will be delighted to read this.  Duane, you are a photographer, an artist and a poet. Are you planning to go with all these three together or thinking of dropping two of them and going with one in the future. In that case if I guessed you go with poetry, would I be right?

Duane: Since 1960 poetry has been my dominant mode of expression and my reason to be alive.  Earlier in life I dedicated my existence to eudemonism and hedonism. I was encouraged by the reading of Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Latin carpe diem poets.  The poet Lucretius also helped. I sought to discover a mode of life in which in the Victorian Walter Pater’s words I could burn with a gem-like flame. I discovered this superior life style and ecstasy (in the modern sense, not in the John Donne’s Or Plotinus’ sense) in the writing of poetry.

 Painting and photography have always been somewhat subordinate.  When young I painted( Influenced by German Expressionist) and also photographed (specializing in butterflies), but gave both up when I went to study for my doctoral degree and also neglected these two important modes of expression and joy subsequently when I was economically determined to become a professor at a dull and less-than-mediocre university in my hometown.

 Ten years ago after the death of my wife and thus at this time being freed from academic enslavement and its atmosphere that champions mediocrity and inferiority and thus degrades poetry and art, I returned to painting and photography.  I would write all morning, and paint and photograph in the afternoon. 

Soon, my artistic friends encouraged me to exhibit my painting, and these art works began to win prizes, resulting in a number of exhibitions. Recently, Gary Monroe published from University of  Florida press his Extraordinary Visions in which there is a description of my art work and myself as “the quintessential outsider. He has created a world apart from the mainstream--intellectually and emotionally--and makes no pretense of being part of the academic community from which he has retired.”. But, I have decided after my new birth, my moving from my present location to a more artistic and congenial atmosphere, I will give up painting, although I doubt if I will keep my resolution. This decision came during my packing up for moving.  Poems and photos are somewhat easy to transport, but paintings are very difficult.

 will continue photography.  I am currently developing a new mode of photographic expression which I call “Surphotography.”

I have expressed the philosophy behind this endeavor: 

My photos that I call “SurPhotography” during my Tampa days started with trash, garbage, debris, or what people have tossed away. My personal perception and visual experience developed and transformed from this origin.  My obsession was to see what is not ordinarily seen in the seen.
I would transform the origin into what has never been seen before.  I call this a terrestrial illumination, in that it discovers and reveals this earth and this world.  I think of the terrestrial illumination as finding truth through inventive perception and in contrast to the celestial illumination which I consider neurotic or a fantasy.   The terrestrial illumination is derived
from empirical perception that is unique and singular to each individual and expands into the phenomenal and a this-worldly, spatio-temporal mysticism. Being a poet, I avoid in my photos any references to the commonplace literal and do not want my photos to be conceptualized or reduced to representations. My photos are to be experienced as visual communication, not literal or representations, not mimetic renditions of a familiar, common-sense , so-called reality, a reality that in my philosophy is false, due to truncated perception. 

My photography has changed from the time when I lived in the Tampa slums. The vacant lots in this crime section of Tampa were abundant with trash, so I decided to do close-ups of trash.  But when what I call the “Tampa Gestapo,” the city inspectors, forcefully evicted me from my home where I had been living for fifty years, I moved to the superior city of Lakeland, but in Lakeland I could find no trash.  I searched the city but Lakeland does not have any decent trash.  Tampa was overcrowded with trash. 

Now, recently in my Lakeland photography, I have been using as an origin for creative transformation not trash, but flowers and nudes. I also do straight-forward nature photography, white pelicans, anhinga, wood ibis, white ibis, wood ducks, etc.

Mukul: Would you kindly let us know about the background out of which you emerged as a poet?

Duane: The background out of which I emerged turned me into the classic outsider, the alienated, the deracinated, Baudelaire’s “Albatross,” and a passionate and happy skeptic, and from this background I emerged as a poet.

I feel strongly the genuine poet must be a stranger to the beliefs and axiology of the quotidian human being.  He must a mutation of the species deemed homo sapien, although his evolutionary advancement and distinction has not yet been recognized by our current obtuse biological classifiers. Some of those doomed and cursed never to be a poet are the socialites, movie stars, football players, golfers, politicians, the conventional, the non-conventional, the conformists, the non-conformists, the clubwoman, the hero, the barfly, the cowboy,  the tattooed, the jumper on the bandwagon, the flag-waving patriot, a person of prevailing taste, and the aspirant poet praised in high school and praised by his mother.

 One of the main particularized factors of my background from which I emerged was being an only child.  For survival I learned to depend on my own inner resources and not on the praise and blame of a sibling.  This condition of being an only child influenced me to love solitude and to be skeptical about the value of the lives and beliefs of my peers. Thoreau taught me to sense how so many spend their lives in desperation and futility. He also taught me the complete worthlessness of newspapers, and now I never read a newspaper.  

My solitude resulted in my turning to reading as one of my hedonistic pursuits.  Reading was an intense pleasure.  I learned that the most subversive place in any city is its library. My early readings were in philosophy and psychology.  Soon I became anti-Plato, which became the title of Yves Bonnefoy’s first book, and admired Gorgias and the skeptical tradition, Sextus Empiricus, Carneades,  Pyrrho, etc.  Gorgias’s view that nothing exist; if it exists, it cannot be known; if it can be known, it cannot be communicated was one of the most thrilling intellectual discoveries I made in my life. 

My readings in writers such as John Dewey and Bertrand Russell revealed to me the absurdities, the falsifications, the simplicities, the distortions, the dangers and cruelties of the popularly believed religions, and saved me from the hell these religions have created on earth. For a while, I was a Spinozan pantheist, but Spinoza was excommunicated for these beliefs. 

In my psychological readings I admired Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, but hated John Watson and B. F. Skinner. I saw no use or pleasure in torturing dogs and rats to arrive at a formulation of lies. 

I not only had advantage of being an only child and thus being oriented toward the inner rather the external other as a formative influence, I was privileged to have been born on a farm among horses, cows, pigs, and wild foxes and not in a city with its artificial and mechanistic determinates. I was born in a time that was somewhat of a golden age since the radio, movies and television had not yet introduced the trivia that would diminished, degrade, desensitize, desensualize, lobotomize the human body-soul oneness. 

Another strong influence from which I emerged was my intense suffering from acute asthma.  Asthma attacks commenced when I first settled in the city, Tampa, a city which I always despised, and lasted until I graduated from high school and was freed from the Tampa public school system.  Being in the Tampa public system was a period of dread and a daily agony for me. I suppose this is why I developed the insight that to be a poet, one must unlearn almost everything he has been taught and as I have said to college audiences many times, “Never listen to anything your college English professor tells you about poetry.  He is usually a graduate-school brainwashed puppet responding to poetry according to the strings pulled by a puppet-master of whose taste and esthetic erudition he does not understand.  Usually the college professor is a human cipher and slave to au courant bad taste.  College professors and the majority, not all, of poetry magazine editors are the greatest enemies to the development of genuine intense and profound poetry.” 

Asthma, although it was devastating suffering, benefited me by saving me from the dictatorship of the Tampa Public System.  During the first three years of my education, I had to withdraw from the classroom to be educated at home, and thus I was not subjected to classroom homogeneity and standardization. I was saved, as Jacques Lacan might say, of having beliefs and values spoken into my consciousness that were uncongenial to the, as Lyotard might say, to the radical singularity of my unique concrete particularized personal temperament.   

I attended high school, although I was absent over the legal amount of time required for attendance, but the legality was overlooked because I could always make high grades on the make-up tests. 

High school had no influence on my emergence as a poet.  I cannot even remember my high school English teachers.  I left their classes with an unpleasant feeling about poetry, and remember that when I inquired, that none of my high school English teachers had ever heard of Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, or Gertrude Stein.    

The Tampa Public System had no direct or significant influence on my emergence as a poet or an artist, except in a negative, retarding, and detrimental manner.  I do not think any of the teachers in the public school system had the least understanding of what poetry was and only repeated
misconceptions and the egregious taste of their mentors, the college professors.  However, I do vaguely remember a river with a guttural sounding name in Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” and my repellent response upon hearing my teacher with an admiring smile and ardent enthusiasm  read Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” 

This rendition and extraordinary approval of Joyce Kilmer resulted in my first poetic attempt that was a satire on “Trees.”  My poem ended: “Gods are made by fools like you and me,/ but only a Tree can make a Tree.”  When I showed it to my pious teacher, she replied, “Boy, you’ll never be a poet.” 

Many years later when due to my many publications, I was put in charge of the  National Endowment of Arts  local “Poetry in the Schools” project. I was asked to talk a group of  Public School teachers on the writing of poetry. I saw some of my old teachers in the audience, now aged.  I remarked during this period that was a long time ago, I began to read poetry books that were outside the sanctioned curriculum and under the influence of  Tristan Tzara, Getrude Stein, and e. e.cummings piddled with the writing of poems.  When I showed one of my attempts to my teachers, each one would say “That’s not poetry.  Read Robert Frost.”  None of my teachers, although they Scribbled on paper words they called “poems,” ever got published.  One did pay to get a poem published in a project of the National Poetry outfit, but when she died her trunkful of sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, and haiku went into the dumpster. 

I also remember when listening to the mechanical and dull music of Longfellow’s imitation of the Indian mind, asking why we did not read the poetry of  the native Americans, the Indians.  The teacher replied that the American Indians never wrote anything worthwhile.  This was a long time before translations of  American Indian poetry flooded the market, and so many were quoting Somolla, and those non-native Americans wearing Indian head bands were looking for sacred spaces in New England woods and New York City toilets.  

But in college I had one professor, Douglas Angus, one of the only three great professors I had in my entire life of many professors, the only two being Glen Johnson and Ants Oras, who excited my interest in poetry.  The interest developed into a great love and became a salvation. As Antoin Artuad might say, poetry got me out of the hell that people have proudly created on this earth. 

Douglas Angus was at the time a closet communist, and was spoken of as one of the most unpopular professors on the campus.  He was not an erudite scholar who could explicate poets such as John Donne, Richard Crashaw, or Andrew Marvell, but he had an extraordinary sensitivity to the poetic word.The overwhelming majority of students avoided his classes and sought the more mediocre,  less learned, less sensitive professors, but I attended with great joy and learning every class I could of his. 

Glen Johnson was a psychologist and philosopher who was a follower of John Dewey and the Pragmatist, although he rarely mentioned one of my favorite philosophers,  C. S. Peirce and predated another favorite, Richard Rorty.  He was long before the new flowering of philosophy in Lacan, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudiliard, Deleuze, and Guattari.  

Ant Oras, a John Milton and Renassiance scholar educated at Oxford, was the supreme literary man and considered to be one of  the world authorities on English prosody.  From him I learned all about prosody and discovered that all our poetry handbooks and guides mislead with their lack of knowledge and false formulations.   Nothing is more pitiable than hearing the middlebrow college professor talk about metrics.  It is as pitiable as an article on poetic music in one of our established and prominent writers’ magazines.  

From studying under Ant Oras I developed my own poetic music which is based on a relationship of  the actual sound qualities of language. 

Another major influence on my emergence as a poet was my European travels.  These travels came later in my life since in my youth I was too impoverished to travel.  

Moments of my greatest personal happiness were spent in Europe.  For quasi- Twenty years I traveled, off and on, in Europe.  My favorite country was Italy. It was the art, the music, the food, the life-style, and the wine.  Also, I traveled with a sensually and erotically talented woman, who appears as a Slavic-Teutonic blonde in my poetry.  She was appreciative of poetry, although she knew very little about poetry and really lacked the sensibility to understand great poetry, but after all she was a college English professor. 

There are many European influences on my emergence as a poet to even attempt to list. One was my receiving several grants to study surrealism in Belgium, Holland, and France.

European poets became a major influence on my own poetry.  Among my strongest influences are the Frenchmen, Mallarmé and Bonnefoy; the German Karl Krolow, and the Spanish Garica Lorca.

Mukul: In one of your interviews you have said, 'Each individual is a conglomeration of temporary hyper circles.' How would you explain it to us?

Duane: People are always quoting something I said, and I don’t remember saying it.  I am very gratified to know that I said “Each individual is a conglomeration of temporary hyper circles,” but I cannot place where or when I said, or in what context I said it.

At this present time, this moment, I would interpret the statement to mean what I will describe in the following sentences: Individuals in their self-knowledge posit a distinct particular self and this mental concoction becomes a fantasy that supplies an illusion of self-importance and protects them from facing the actuality of their quotidian behavioral selves, their behavior that would be repulsive to them if they were sensitive and intelligent enough to be aware of their own behavior. So many have this fantasy of their personality which is not their personality, and in actual behavior do otherwise than what they believe they are doing. 

What this fantasy of self, this self lie about the self is is a “a circle” in the mind, a conception derived from human thought and not empirical experience, and there are many of these circles gyrating in the mind or brain.  I use the word circle in the Euclidean sense, for it is a mental invention that really never existed but is imposed on reality for pragmatic purposes and the convenience of measurement. 

To further elaborate, if there is any constant trait in human nature it is to live by self-deception through a belief in lies.  History reveals each generation has its own lies which are cherished as absolute truths, and if a deviant has the superior insight to sense the mendacity of his time he is usually ostracized to being an outcast or a corpse. 

Since it is natural human nature to live by lies and speak a language of lies,
It is the task of the poet to overcome human nature and through transformation of self or selves turn himself or himselves into something other who can take the language of lies that most of the people speak and turn it into a language of truth. 

Poets should speak like birds or animals, not like human beings, speak a language that has relationship to actuality, and not like human beings speak a language that has a relationship to lies.  Anatole France said that when his cat spoke to him, his cat spoke the truth, but when human beings spoke they lied. 

I suggest that poets study the writings of astute observers of human nature like Bernard Mandeville, Thomas Hobbes,  Niccolò Machiavelli, Dave Hume, and Friedrich Nietzsche in order to aid in overcoming and transforming human nature.  I especially recommend the reading of John Paul Sartre on how devastating a contact with other human beings can be. 

I suppose what I am saying is similar to what Rimbaud said when he asserted that to be a poet one must derange his senses.  Also, it helps if one becomes a monster.  But my view is completely different from Rimbaud.  For the senses of our ordinary and respectable citizens are already deranged, and need to be arranged.  So to be a poet one needs to arrange their senses.  Our respectable and honored citizens, especially Fundamentalists, already are monsters, and a poet really needs to become something else.

Mukul: Thousands of American Universities have creative writing courses and hundreds of thousands of writers and poets are attracted towards them. I myself had a dream to join one of them. Currently I have been accepted by Portland University but can't join because of my personal reasons. But you think 'cultivation of one's life is more important than taking a course in creative writing.' Why do you think so?

Duane: From the answers to the three previous questions it is obvious that I think the cultivation of one’s life is more important than taking a course in creative writing. 

But before starting this discussion I must emphasize that I never had a course in creative writing, I never had a course in photography, but I did have courses in painting.  The courses in painting were a waste of time, but fortunately, the art instructor was so ineffective that he never imposed any artistic views on me.  Since he never imposed his views as he did have any, he was harmless.  Being in his class was the same as not taking an art course at all, and thus was profitable. 

I learned to be a painter by spending much of my life in art museums, first in the United States and then in Europe.  From the actual and expansive  experience of art, I developed a feeling for art, and this feeling that emerged became an essential determinant in my own and unique personal expression. It was the same way with poetry.  I learned how to write poetry from reading poetry and not being taught how to write poetry. 

As William Blake might say, “I was never send to school and flogged into following the style of a fool.” 

What I am saying is that an artist has to educate himself, for others cannot do it, and thus creative writing classes are useless.  I believe that an artist must be one of the most educated of all men, but educated in the senses, as John Keats said, “Oh for a life of sensation rather than thought,” although thoughts aid in the development of the senses.  Actually, I believe all binary opposites are false such as the sense-thought dichotomy.  Actually sensation and thought are a body-soul oneness unity. 

Oscar Wilde had a very interesting perception when he quipped that life imitates art, rather than art imitating life. So many non-poets posing as poets have shown me their scribbles with the proud comment that “This is life.”  What I read was trivia, second-hand concepts,  worn-out language and a non-understanding and mechanical use of  traditional poetic devices, or current colloquial twaddle.  I always quote Mallarmé when he indicated to Degas that poems are made out of words, not life and thought.Poets need words.  With words poet discover and invent life. If a person has a limited vocabulary, he lives a limited life and becomes dangerous. 

Only a few, Stendhal’s “happy few,” really understand poetry,  but much less than this few understand life.Poets who write mimetically, actually due to their limited perception do not have an origin. I often wonder what Aristotle meant by “action” or “praxtis.”

Of most of the young aspirant poets that I have personally met lately, these tyros have one trait in common--ignorance.  These innocents and incompetents attempting to write one of the most sensitive, profound, complex, subtle, intricate, sagacious, sophisticated, arcane, esoteric, and hermetic mode of expression have not read enough poetry to even get the feel of what poetry is and what it requires for composition.  

Those poseurs as poets have no awareness of what extraordinary receptivity, perceptibility, responsiveness, erudition, and empathy that genuine and great poetry requires, but most of these quacks are fools, fools since they are convicts shut in and blinded by walls of exuberant confidence and an egotism that is a stupidity. 

Most of these fools are college-educated and have attended over and over some of the thousands of American poetic workshops.  Some even have Masters of  Fine Arts, or doctor’s degrees in the fine arts.

During my last days of enduring the enslavement of teaching, the students that aspired to be poets were all of the above described type of  blind egotistic fools who puffed that they had extraordinary talent when they did not even have a minor talent.  To day, twenty-years after, every one of these poetic poseurs are abject failures in poetry.  Before, this bunch of aspirant, arrogant, and pretending poets, a long time ago, I had more humble students who have risen to poetic renown. 

I would avoid all creative writing courses, for usually the creative writing course’s greatest achievement is the beer bash that celebrates its termination. 

I would avoid creative writing because, except in the case of a rare exception, the professor is incompetent, devoid of a poetic temperament and personality, his knowledge is extremely limited, usually to the passing and current poetic fads and fashions.  Rarely does a professor have deepened sensibility and the omnibus erudition required to sense and understand profound and genuine poetry.  The professor follows the au courant bad taste of his time, and seeks to impose his limitations on others.  If  Richard Wilbur is in popular ascendancy, he stresses that everyone should distort their unique personal attributes and write like Richard Wilbur.  If  John Hollander is in popular ascendancy, everyone should write like John Hollander.  It is the same with other ascendancies whether it be W.S. Merwin, James Tate,  Charles Simic, Charles Bukowski, Charles Bernstein, or Lyn Hejinian. 

I have never known a professor so sensitive and so honest that he would present a list of a hundred current top-ranked poets now writing to his class and say that we will trash all these proclaimed and established poets and attempt to create a real poetry that transcends the bad taste of our current age.  It might be worth enrolling in such a professor’s class.  Out of the thousands of creative writing teachers in the United States, I imagine that two or three are excellent and could benefit an aspiring poet.  But who knows who these two or three are.  

One of the main dangers of poetic classes is that the students comment on each other’s work.  I doubt if there over ten people in the entire United States who are qualified with the proper sensibility and erudition to make a worthwhile comment on a poem,  and these ten are not likely to be a student in one of the thousands of  creative writing classes throughout the United States. Thus the comments of the students are worthless and often harmful to the development of poetic individuality.  Of course, everyone of these self-deceived students believes himself to be the supreme poetic arbiter.

Mukul: In course of my study of the various poets' writings, I have found some poets blame American poetry being too academic. How would you think?

Duane: Blaming American poetry for being too academic, depends on what "American poetry" means in this context and what "academic" means.

Starting with the word "academic," a word derived from Aristotle's school which history tells us was in a grove, academy meaning "grove," but a pastoral setting is no longer associated with the meaning of this word.

I remember that the word "academic" became an often used word in America poetic circles during the Sixties, and it was used in a pejorative sense. This was a time when Donald Allen's New American poetry was replacing in prestige the previous poetry that was embodied in the other anthology of the long ago days of the two anthologies.  But even then there was new poets in the other anthology who could not understand genuine prosody and were writing less formal lines. These less formal poets in the other anthology often were  condemned by college-based commentators, but became somewhat respectable after through war-profiteering protest poetry won National Books awards.

In these days when something called by critics "raw poetry" opposed something called "cooked poetry," and the closed opposed the open, the so-called "openists" used the word "academic" to derogate poetry that was deemed "formal."  A typical remark of the "openist" was in condemning a poem was "The poem has excellent craftsmanship but lacks a sense of life." Many variation on the above derogation were promulgated.  I never found the sentence to be very meaningful.  To me a craftsman is a writer who skillfully employed devices to achieve effects and achieve effects on based on the non-existents circulated in the language of lies that people speak. The craftsman knows what device to use to get a standard response from a commonplace audience.  The craftsman is understood because he has nothing personal to say and nothing really to say at all.  Since the craftsman's language is empty, he has a great appeal to a commonplace audience who have been believing and responding to an empty language all their lives.

A craftsman is a person who knows exactly what he is doing, and starts from preconceptions; an artist is a person who does not know what he is doing and starts from vague and obscure feelings. Merleau-Ponty has described the artist as being a person who send a vague cry out into world not knowing if it will be understood or not.  A craftsman and inferior poet always strives and struggles to be understood. Now, as I stated previously, only a rare few have any understanding of what life is, and thus even the word "life" has become an empty word in popular parlance.

If the word "academic" is meant to refer to a craftsmanship that I have described above, then I would say American poetry is too academic. But as to craftsmanship, Charles Bukowski is as much a craftsman as X.J. Kennedy.  The two diverse attempters at writing poetry just employ diverse crafts.

In our time, there are a variety of approaches to poetry, one was called "formalism," a type of expression that became an espoused mode of expression after the reign of  T. S. Eliot, written by those poets who had a misunderstanding of  T. S. Eliot.  This poetry was stressed circa 1940's, but there was also William Carlos Williams' "measure."  Then came Olson's Projective Verse when form was an extension of content, whatever that meant;
then Rothenberg's and Kelly's deep image, which never was clearly understood, but exploited widely; Language poetry, again no one is quite sure what this type of poetry is, but has generated a plethora of interesting and exciting discussions of poetry that are filled with the vocabularies of the postmodern philosophers. Now many attempting to write poetry have become self-conscious about being logo-centric, centered, conjunctive, univocal, and having determinate meaning instead of difference as all the old values have become pejorative.

It is difficult to say what American poetry is, for there so many American poetries.

Even the academics keep changing their views on what constitutes the dominant and worthwhile  American poetry.  Once candidates for an academic degree was writing their theses on T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop. Robinson Jeffers, then came theses on W. S. Merwin, Robert Creeley, Alan Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski.  I suppose now academics in our graduate schools are writing their theses on Bruce Andrews, John Ashbery, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Howe, Ann Lauterbach, Steve
McCaffery, and Bob Perelman.

What constitutes an "academic poetry" changes rapidly, and we might say that currently the academic poetry of today is Language Poetry.

When the statement is made that "American poetry is too academic," The statement is probably true, but which American academic poetry is referred to by the speaker.

Mukul: How much of your study of philosophy have helped you write poetry? You have once said that to write poetry one has to unlearn what one has learned about poetry. Do you mean to discourage one to take part in a discussion or workshop about poetry? Is it not necessary for one to learn the current trends of writing to write a good poetry?

Duane: Two things that man has made that has helped me more than anything else in the writing of poetry is philosophy and music, these two existences have transformed with their metamorphic spell my perception and altered my consciousness.  Philosophy and music can change a tepid quotidian constricted cipher into an ebullient virtuoso and even a shamanistic seer.

On the other hand, a newspaper article or a middlebrow or lowbrow article in a middlebrow or lowbrow magazine and what is called "popular music" can degrade its aficionados into self-satisfied fools.

I have been reading philosophy since I was a child and found philosophy to an antidote to the poisonous dullness of the then popular radio broadcast, Amos n' Andy,  Bob Hope, the Lone Ranger( In spite of its diluted scrap from Rossini), Chandu the Magician, Jack Benny, etc. Philosohy saved me From the Hell that people have made out of the world.

I listen to music as a background when I write poetry.  A  Chopin etude, or a Mahler symphony, a Brahms' Piano Concerto, or a Beethoven Quartet Intensifies my perception.

When I stated that one must unlearn what one has learned about poetry, I was asserting that what is popularly assumed to be a profound and established truth about poetry is often superficial or false. What in our current poetic situation is honored as being supreme poetry is usually fashionable mediocrity, venerated by an influential critic, and his veneration echoed by his lickspittle followers in the college professors' 
profession. For example, we in the United States have a series of honored poets, honored as the best poets, our poet laureates, and all of these revered writers are low-mediocre or less poets.

Received, popular, and prevalent opinions about poetry can never be trusted. In the past if prevailing opinions had not been trusted and disobeyed,  poets such as Walt Whitman and William Blake would not have had so much difficulty with public publication.  Andrew Marvell might have more than the three poems that were published during his lifetime.  John Donne might not have waited until after his death to have his collected poems published in 1633. Shakespeare might not have been discontented with what he did best.  Mallarmé might have believed that he wrote a great poem before he died.

As Jacques Lacan has pointed out that most people live false and inauthentic lives (see Jean Paul Sartre) because they live by what has been spoken into them by others and do not live from a basic foundation of personal inwardness.  As current psychologists and sociologists say people are primarily outer rather than inner directed so most people live unreal, false, illusory lives. Most people are what T. S. Eliot in his early work called "Hollow Men."  Unfortunately, these "Hollow Men" are the most vociferous asserters of opinions about everything including poetry.  The savants, the intelligent, the sensible, the knowledgeable are rarely audible.

Poetry discussions and poetry workshop are usually led by "Hollow Men," even if the hollow man has a title such as "Distinguished Professor of the University," or has been the recipient of a Pulitzer prize or National Book Award, but on the other hand, there might something of a miracle and the leader has a true understanding of and sensitivity to what he is talking about or teaching.

So far in this discussion, much has been mentioned about the relationship of the teacher to the student.  A long time ago on a television show all the other professors talked about they taught the craft of writing.  When I asked "How do you teach the craft of writing?"  I replied that I do not teach the craft of writing, I do not teach, I inspire aspirant poets to perform miracles.

I think one of the most interesting accounts of the teacher-student relationship was in the early writings of Augustine when he implied that the teacher should stimulate the student and then disappear. His logic was that a teacher cannot teach any one who does not have the capacity to learn, and thus the capacity to learn is the true teacher and not the actual teacher present before the teacher.

From my observations of Americans when it comes to poetry writing, most do not have the capacity to learn, and thus these incompetents write a dilute substitute that is passed off as poetry.  As an economist would say when bad money floods the market it will replace good money.  Appropriating this economic observance to apply to poetry, a flood of bad poetry will replace good poetry, and bad poetry will dominate.  People began to believe that bad poetry is good poetry.  Bad poetry is glorified as being great, and good poetry is neglected and overlooked.  I would say the condition just described is the state of poetry that now exists in the United States.

I think one should be aware of all the current trends in writing poetry, and he should also be aware of all the past trends in writing poetry.  The student should be aware of Michael Palmer, Anne Carson, and Marjorie Glen, but he should also be aware of Sir Philip Sidney, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope.

But the aspirant poet should be skeptical of all trends whether past or present. He should ask himself are Ben Jonson, Edmund Waller and George Gordon Byron really poets.  Are Richard Howard, Donald Hall, A. R. Ammons, Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komunyakaa really poets, or are those are this list merely part of the current tendency to substitute bad poetry for the good.

Mukul: You say you are never led by any theme. You never write with any preconceived idea or theme. Have you ever come across it when you are en route to a poem?

Duane: When writing a poem, I never start with a theme or preconceived idea. I cannot believe that poetry has any connection with themes or ideas. Themes and ideas are external imposition on poems.

I do not believe that poems are mimetic in copying themes or ideas. Poems are progressive verbal constructions that become linguistic realities and engender responses and feelings.  Poems do not engender themes or ideas.   Themes and ideas are static and limited and are imposed upon the fluid motions and unlimited unfolding of the poem.  A theme or idea is never the poem and is always external to the poem, a theme is something else.

Themes or ideas tend towards precision, finality, and the determinate.  Poems tend toward imprecision, openness, and the indeterminate.

When a reader reads a poem for a theme or idea, he is misreading the poems. He should read to receive feelings and responses from the words and their configurations.

The subject of "misreading" is now a very important subject in advanced academic circles since Derrida and Paul DeMan. Stanley Fish's writings suggest all readings might be misreading. But my major concern is with the writing and creation of poems, not reader-response criticism.

Now, if a reader reads Sonnet 116 of Shakespearce as equivalent to Castiglione's presentation of Platonic love as invented by Peter Bembo he is reading for themes and ideas and is not reading for poetry.  He is misreading. He should read the poem as a linguistic reality. If a reader wants themes and ideas he should Castiglione and Bembo, not Shakespeare.

No, when I write a poem I never discover a theme or idea.  If I do I immediately discard the poem or if I keep it, I regret its composition. I am not saying that my poems do not have meaning, for they have poetic meaning--not conceptualized meaning.

My poems are my emotional and perceptive response to an origin, and are not conceptualizations of that origin, and do not distort or limit the origin to a theme or idea.

My poems start with words and these words configure and develop into an origin and this origin gives birth to what follows.  The follow-up of the origin is never pre-determined or pre-conceived, but is discovered by the actual writing, by my feelings, by my response to my words.  So I do come across something in my en route to the poem, but it is too mystic or mysterious, too large to be reduced to explication.

When in high school, my teachers taught me to read poems as if they were illustrations of ideas, and I thought why read the poem, just read the idea. If one reads poems for theme, why not just read the theme and forget the poem. Why not just write themes and not poems.

My poems start with words spontaneously leaping into my mind, and these words elicit new words, and so on.  My poems are never pre-planned. My poems are insights, not ideas. When I was an editor of poetry magazine, one of my dictum was "Do not send me  any of this theme and execution poetry."

 Mukul: How much is the revision, chiseling or retrospection necessary for a poem to have a graceful finish?

 Duane: I rarely revise a poem after it is finished. My revisions occur while the poem is in progress.  If the words that come to me spontaneously do not seem
to cohere with the previous words, I revise until I discover the words that cohere.  By coherence, I mean that the configurations of the words that I have found beget a feeling in my inwardness of  being right and speaking what otherwise could not be spoken.  I do not employ rational judgment in what words should be kept and what words, but depend on my inward intuition. My choice is an act of the unity of the body and soul, and in this unity, the body is no longer separated from the soul. It is like a Buddhist state when the body and soul function as one, not as separates and when the subject and the object are untied and function as they were one.

The writing of the poem is the search for the terrestrial illumination, and it is actually a this-worldly mystical experience. I am seeking to produce a terrestrial illumination, not a graceful finish.  A terrestrial illumination intrinsically and naturally has a graceful finish.

I do not think poems can be created from work or effort.  Poems are gifts from one's inwardness, but to have this inwardness requires work and effort, but the work and effort comes before the writing of the poem and not during the process of writing.  If one has to work to write a poem, he should examine himself to learn if he is really a poet.

Poems are really as easy to write as it is to breathe.  When I speak of this ease in writing I do not mean the ease of the Cavalier Poets.  Their ease came from superficiality and not depth.  The "ease" I speak of can only come from depth, from a cultivation of one's life, that is not a following of the consensus and the status quo, that is a seeking of excellence, the seeking of the numinousness, the inextricable, the enigmatic, the intricate, and mystical in every thing. A poet is a person who can find infinity in a grain of sand, And if a person can do this, poetry writing will become easy for him.

Mukul: How do you maintain your creative flow of writing five poems a day? Do not several mundane schedules come in the way? How do you manage them?

Duane: During my period of writing five poems a day, I do not know how I maintained
this pace.  I would just start writing in the morning and soon I had five poems finished.  Then I would devote the afternoon to nature walks and photography.  At night I would listen to classical music, opera, or lectures on philosophy and religion.

During my stay at Lake Morton plaza in Lakeland and at my present location in Lakeland my mundane obligations are at a minimum. I have found that such things as no longer owning a car is a type of freedom and the car's care and maintenance no longer intrudes into my awareness and crowds out more valuable thoughts or daydreams or blank periods such as the Yogin's one-pointness.

People often remark how energetic and vital I am for an old man.  Recently four different doctors in my physical check up commented that for my age I was the healthiest man they had ever seen.  Perhaps, it is this health that allowed for writing five poems a day.  But I think it is my intense enthusiasm for living.

At present time, one of my activities other than the creation of  my arts is study.  Recently, I have been studying such things as the Christian Scriptures that never made the orthodox New Testament at the Council of Nicea, religions in the Ancient Mediterranean world, and the philosophy of John Duns Scotus.

Tomorrow I plan a nature walk with my girl friend, the classic blonde as she is called,  in a secluded place where there are night-crowned herons, limpkins, alligators, and a vast variety of butterflies. She loves nature as intensely as I do. We both worship trees. We are extremely happy together.

But I still don't know how I could write five poems a day.  What started me on this project was hearing that William Stafford wrote one poem each day. I said if he can write one, I can write five. Once I went to see a play about Van Gogh, and in this play it was said that Van Gogh once painted three hundred pictures in a year.  I said that I could surpass that.  Eight months later I had painted over 300 pictures. At the same time, I was painting this pictures, I was writing five poems a day.

Mukul: How often do you travel and how often do you attend literary programs? I guess you must receive numerous invitations and that too often keeps one away from creative mood and study of literary books.

Duane: I no longer travel.  I have not traveled in several years.  I suspect that the excitement and happiness I found in my past travels cannot be repeated. Circumstances have changed. I have changed.  I am content to stay in one place, especially content here in Lakeland being near Lake Morton and Lake Hollingsworth where there are an abundance of birds and butterflies.  Now the white pelicans are returning, and these birds will be flying over the lakes in flocks of hundreds.

I now no longer have the hunger and urge to travel.  I only desire to create poems and do photography, and do the other things that I do in Lakeland.

I never attend literary programs.  I have no interest in what such programs have to offer.  When I attended such programs it was from youthful excitement and naïveté, or the duty of an academic slave.

Once, a long time ago, I was a director of COSMEP, served after being elected by the poetic community on grants committees of CCLM, but in retrospect have found such activities to be useless and a waste of time. Such organizations really have to do with the encouragement or preservation of a poetry that is worthwhile and matters. These organizations are more attuned to business than to art.

I would say that attending literary programs destroys or diminishes the creative mood, for it brings the poet in direct confrontation with those who control publication, taste and reputations in poetry but who are not in the least qualified to do so. It disillusions the poet by making him aware that the power structure that controls poetry is incompletely inadequate and devoid of poetic sensibility and really does not know what poetry is.

I would say that the best thing a poet can do to maintain his creativity is avoid all poetic conferences, and especially avoid them if the conference takes place at a college.

Mukul: Is writing poetry a craft or inspiration or a gift?  How do you take the practice of writing poetry in particular mold naming erotica and the like? Does this practice bring out good poetry?

Duane: Writing poetry is a gift, but the problem is: who is the giver? I would say that the giver is the cultivation of one's life, but the problem here is: what type of cultivation of one's life does it require to turn oneself into poet.  I have hinted at various particulars that help in cultivating one's life to be a poet, but I know no overall system.  No one will ever find or formulate the method of cultivation, for there is no method. 

Perhaps or more-than-likely much of this cultivation of one's life that will turn him into a poet is accidental and not willed. But even accidents never remain accidents for the accidents are modified through the perception of one's inwardness.  Nothing is fixed, for in mental awareness the outer and inner fuses and become something else than what was supposed to be objectively perceived.  There is to the particular human mind and its awareness no objective actual existent externally present, there is only a subjective objective.  What is called an object is something perceived and thus has a different existence in each different consciousness. The attempt to find fixity, an absolute, a universal, a unitary principle of thought, a transcendent nonempirical concept have throughout history failed.

People always crave final knowledge, but final knowledge cannot be had. To overcome this plight, the weak invent definitions, but definitions never correspond to what they define. Definitions are mirages or mental drugs. There are hundreds definitions of poetry, and not a one ever defines poetry.

Poetry is incommensurable, and the giver is incommensurable.

As to the practice of writing poetry in a certain mold such as erotica to me is another practice that results in the failure to write a poem.  Erotica is just another theme and an imposition from the external and misconceptions of the erotic. The erotic is as incommensurable as poetry and the giver, and thus the writer of erotica merely imposes as a theme, the lies of popular hearsay about the erotic, on the poem and we have another example of the language of lies that the people speak.

Mukul: Reading your interview answers what I have felt is each of your answer is a complete piece of critical writing or a powerful essay. Apart from interview answers have you written any piece of prose? Have you any plan to write essays of criticism as T.S. Eliot ?

Duane: Yes, I have written in the past many pieces of prose, but most I cannot remember.  I have them all stored away in my archives, but I rarely explore my archives.  Writing prose in the past has never excited me like writing poetry.

I do remember one of my essay on Louis Simpson's poetry is in some archive of immortal criticism.  It was cited for my introduction of the concept of the phenomenal image, but I cannot remember all the details. I doubt if I will ever reread the essay.

No, I have no plans to write essays of criticism as did T. S. Eliot.  File after file of my notes on literature were lost when my library in a bungalow collapsed.  People who found some of the scraps were excited by them, and encouraged me to write critical essay.  But writing criticism does not at this time appeal to me.  I don't want to start playing the critics' or the scholar's game again.

I have often thought I would write prose when the poetry ceased leaping forth, but the poems are still leaping forth.  The prose I planned to write would be personal essays, not critical or scholarly accounts of others' works. I am planning on writing a prose journal, "Journal of Lake Hollingsworth" in which would be my personal reactions to varied subjects such as my current love relationship with this classic blonde, my nature observations, my thoughts on the goddess Inanna of whom I have already done over a hundred photographic interpretations, and many other topics, but only rarely do I have the time to record my daily reactions in this journal.

I never feel obligated to write, or I never force myself to write.  I just without forethought write for the sheer joy of writing.

I have often been asked if I write to attract an audience.  No, I never write to gain readers.  I do not even consider what my audience might be when I write.  I write, and hope someone with a kindred temperament will respond to my writing and we can share a type of strange companionship. This has happened many times. Also, this is why I like to publish in many different places, for it takes many attempts in many places before my works find some rare person with a kindred temperament who responds to my work with pleasure.

Also, I have been asked what I think about my immortality as a poet or visual artist.  I have replied many times I prefer recognition while I am alive, no matter how old I am, and if some girl reads my poems after my death, and with ardent love kisses the pages, I will not feel her lips.  My fleshless buried bones won't feel anything.

Mukul: What are the reasons behind your condemnation of the university professors and editors of literary magazines as insensitive and destroyers of poetry? What are the reasons behind your intense dislike of Robert Frost and Earnest Hemingway?

Duane: Throughout this interview, I have made many comments on my condemnation of college professors and literary magazine editors as insensitive destroyers of  poetry, but now I will more particularize the discussion and elaborate. The reason behind my condemnations is my personal experience, my contact with these college professors and literary magazine editors.

So many, the overwhelming majority, of college professors are foundationless, which might be a good thing, for foundations often lead to dogmatism and insularity, but these foundationless professors have foundations, even if temporary.  Their foundations are dogmatic and insular but are constantly in transition. I remember one professor, along with many others, condemning on its appearance Ginsberg's "Howl," but when it became popular and the ideal of the new drugged generation and college students wearing cut-off faded blue jeans with torn places over each knee, and sniffing cocaine before each classroom lecture, the same professor begin to say, "Well, there are good things in Ginsberg." When Ginsberg's poems appeared in a thick book by an established publisher, this same professor proclaimed Ginsberg as a great poet and put his work on the professor's required reading lists.  I concluded that this professors criteria for great poetry was that the poet was published in hard covers by an established publisher.  This is the esthetic criteria of so many college professors.  By the way, I doubt if the professor I am talking about ever read Ginsberg.

I have not  had seen this professor for a long time, but the last time I saw him he was condemning John Ashbery and since he accepted the common, prevalent rumor that Ashbery was a Language Poet, he condemned all Language poets without reading one, not even Ron Sillimen and the New Sentence.  Now since Ashbery is in the ascendancy and the Language poets have become the current dominant movement, I know that Ashbery and as many poets as he has heard called Language poets are on his required reading lists.

This professor was not the quiet and contemplative, but assertive, totally arrogant, and always spoke  ex cathedra.  Of course, he was the editor of his college's literary magazine that mainly published the works of editors of other poetry magazines plus poets that were lauded by Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler.

I might add one more item about this professor.  I do not think he ever read a poem he published. He just looked at the name.

The tragedy of the deficiency of the college professor teaching poetry is that the only contact that most people have with poetry is in college, and the professor's mediocrity, his insufficient poetic erudition and more destructive and dangerous, his lack of poetic sensitivity, the middlebrow or less, professor presents a misrepresentation of the whole art of poetry and thus degrades the art.  The professors established bad taste in his students.

His arduous Ph. D. training has conditioned the professor to be a "Yes Man," who says "Yes" to anything that will benefit his gaining his goal, the degree, the rank, the promotion, and tenure.  So professors become "Hollow Men" saying "Yes" to whatever is fashionable at the time, and do not even understand  to what they are saying "Yes."  The professor becomes a stooge, no longer having a personal opinion or any feeling attached to his assertions. He speaks only as a puppet for profit. So if someone like Robert Haas becomes poet laureate, he praises Robert Hass, most of the time without reading Robert Haas.  Perhaps, if he read Robert Haas and had any deep personal feelings, he would not have liked Robert Haas at all. This professor never questions the status quo, and never would examine himself by saying is his response to Robert Haas genuine, something he deeply feels, or it is just his ingrained stoogery--an empty assertion just to be in with the temporary and vague power crowd.

So many professors do not read poetry due to their love of poetry, but poetry to them is something written by someone to whom the professor is completely indifferent in order that he can write a paper to be read at the MLA club.  If he reads enough of these papers, the authorities at his university who have never read the papers, will grant this reader a salary raise.

Of course, there are exceptions to the "professor," and these minute few are the one that encourage a future of genuine poetry. These minute few are the only hope for poetry to be worthwhile.

Now, editors of poetry magazine, are in a diluted form very similar to professors, but are more enthusiastic and respect poetry more than professors, although only a few editors, a rare few, have the erudition and poetic sensibility to be able to make a proper choice of genuine and deep poetry for publication.  Most editors, especially the arrogant and confident ones, the ex-cathedra editors,  are not endowed or have not acquired a poetic sensitivity that grants them ability to select and publish the best poetry; so these self-proclaimed supreme esthetes and arbiters publish mediocre or less poetry.

Most editors publish poetry magazines, because they could not get their own poems published until they start publishing editors.

Now as to my intense dislike of  Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway.

To me, Robert Frost's popularity is due not to his poetic merit, but his being a stooge of popular opinion, the opinions of those who have lived their lives in self deception and have spoken all their lives a language of lies.

The attitudes that emerge from Frost's poetry is the false attitudes on life that are prevalent among the quotidian majority, the speakers of a language of lies.

First, there is the lie about the tough man and the oversensitive woman. The sensitive woman cannot fire a hired man, or bury a dead child.  These unsavory tasks are done by tough-minded, less emotional men.

Mainly, Robert Frost, often called a nature poet, is not a nature poet.  He is a hater of nature and exploiter of nature.

What I hate in Frost is the bending of tree branches.  Why not leave these trees alone.  A poet would contemplate the tree, until the tree and the poet become one in the consciousness and mental awareness of the poet.  Frost does not love nature.  Nature is something to be manipulated, keep bending birch branches.  Frost's sensibility to nature is similar to that of a lumber company executive.

Also, with those apples.  The apples have to be picked.  All the apples have to be picked.  Exploitation, not love of nature. Frost is certainly not a this-worldly mystic seeking a terrestrial illumination through his love of a tree. When there is a stopping by a snowy wood, the coward does not have courage to enter the darkness and become transformed.  He merely thinks of practical things, the quotidian things, the anti-poetic things.

Frost's anti-poetic qualities have made him very popular with readers who pretend to appreciate poetry but do not have the requisite personal qualities that allow an intense love of poetry and thus are anti-poetic.

I dislike most about Ernest Hemingway is Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway the big-game hunter, and the worshipper of bull fighting. I disdain anyone who is so limited and conventional that he has get his pleasure from the pain of another.  I have noticed in human relationships that a great pleasure in companionship is causing the other pain. It seems to be human nature, and of course, I believe we should work and live to overcome human nature and turn ourselves into something superior, a species, a species more like other animals. I often believe I was not born a human being, a homo sapien, but am the result of some unrecognized mutation that made a homo poeta.

Also, I despise the Hemingway style.  It is a simplicity designed to appeal to the lowest of human beings.  The lack of vocabulary shuts a person off from complex, profound, and animal experience.  The whole Hemingway mentality is that of one who is a victim of the language of lies.  It is that of an obtuse human being.  I would call Hemingway, anti-poetic and thus his great appeal to an anti-poetic audience.

Mukul: I believe you have made an in-depth study of oriental philosophy and also the literature of Asian countries. Which writers of the east are your favorites? Have you read any Nepali writer or poet? Would you find any difference between the poetry of the east and the west?

Duane: As to this question on my oriental background, I have been thinking throughout this whole interview that will be published in Nepal, I have answering from a limited Western viewpoint and even a limited American point of view.  Even in the beginning, I forgot to mention as one prime forces that influenced my emergence as a poet was oriental.

For years, my middle years, I was a practicing yogin.  The guru would have me join him in giving yoga exhibition of asanas. The exhibitions were mainly at resorts along our Gulf Coast Beach area.  At the age of fifty, I could do such positions as "the cock," which the American youth that accompanied were not flexible enough to perform. At that time, I would start like Nehru each day with a head stand.

The main thing I gained form Yoga for my writing of poetry was the intensification of empathy.  Empathy is one the main attributes that a poet needs to be able to write worthwhile poems.  As  John Keats said that when a sparrow pecks he pecks along with the sparrow.  What I admired most about Malarepa was his turning into a snow leopard.

Although Americans reduce Yoga to a mere physical exercise, it is a profound spiritual-body discipline.  When in the lotus position, your personal  awareness of your self as a distinct physical existence separate from nature is overcome and you become and exist for a moment as vegetation, as a lotus in your inward awareness.

Also Pantajali's Yoga Sutras was a formative influence on my poetry.  It was in America for a time for poets to boast that they wrote from their unconscious,  But I adopted Pantajali's term super-conscious as being the basis of my creation.

I also studied Taoism, Confucius, and Buddhism.  Some of the Buddhist practices had a direct formative influence on my poetry. I employed some of the Buddhist methods that trains one to come in contact with the real, make the real an acute part of the consciousness rather than fantasies or conceptions.  I was especially fond of Buddhist methods to subdue and overcome conceptualization. I even taught these methods to my students who were aspirant poets. I read much in Tibetan mysticism, and assimilated it to my temperament and my poetry.

I practiced varied form of Eastern meditations to expand the consciousness, Appropriated Kundalini for use in the creation of poetry.

Statements such as this one from Milarepa were very influential in the formation of my poetic mental set: "He was the truly learned Master who understood all external phenomena to be internal phenomena of the mental world."

Chinese poets have always been among my favorites.  I doing this interview without notes or my library, and I cannot recall the names of all my favorites.  I do remember the name Li Po.  Also, Tu Fu.  It seems the name of a poet I admired much was Wang-Wei, but I am not sure.

Of course, I had to read these poets in translation, and whether or not, I was reading any thing like the original poem, I don't know.  Recently I had five poems translated into Chinese and published in China.  I had a Chinese girl read them to me.  When she translated, I recognize my poems, but the sound when she read them in Chinese was not my sound.

Because I cannot read oriental languages, there will always be something missing when I read oriental poems.  Since my 5,000 book library was destroyed, I cannot remember if I had Nepali poems or not, but it seems as if I did.  I am not sure. Right now, I must say I do not know any Nepali poems.

The only difference I can see between Eastern and Western poets is that Eastern poet write poems as an art and to realize their inwardness, Western poets write poems as a business and write to please others and gain reputations, get established.

Mukul: Do you have anything more to say about your creative life? Do you have anything more to share with the readers of poetry and emerging poets?

Duane: At this point, I conclude.