Personal Life Tags Used in Events

Do I want to ask you anything? Well... how about, uh... aside from success, about---

Happiness?

Yeah.

Marital?

Well, just call it a lightness of heart.

Okay. In other words, you wanna see if you're going to get your wish. Your heart's wish, I mean---

Yeah, maybe even know what my heart wishes is.

Yeah. 19 cards.

You're undecided about what you want, at this point. And I think it has a lot to do with you're a little upset about money, too. Yeah, that doesn't add to your love life. It's in the cards again, this guy loves you. Your sister's in the cards. Oh, you're going to have a very good wife! '84, there's your wife.

Really? That's my wife?

Well, that's the only one in the deck that could be Chinese, or similar to that or whatever she is.

Okay.

Isn't that funny?

That is interesting.

Yeah. She came in very good.

Came in there, did you say, in '84?

No, she's very happy with you. But '84 will be better---there's a change around her, too. There's gotta be some kind of a change, definitely. This is a house later on. I think you want to buy a little house, settle down. You were undecided some time about your marriage.

Mhm.

You still are, that's very sad. What, are you thinking of separating or something? I'm so shocked!

Are you really, Kathy?

Yes.

I thought that's what the card says.

No, I am. I didn't think that I'd get a divorce in here.

Is that what you're getting?

You're not happy though, you're not happy. Now you're going to have to change, you know what I mean?

Uh-huh.

I never expected, no, I never expected to pull the divorce.

That one here?

Yeah, that's what it is. It's a very dramatic thing, you know. You've got to think about this before...

Oh, yeah, no I'm doing a lot of thinking.

Yeah, but you're not happy, you know.

Yeah. Mhm. That's what you're getting here.

Oh god, yeah. They're not good cards.

Did you go through a divorce, Kathy, ever?

Yes, several. It's heart rendering but it's sometimes for the better, if you can't make it together. I'm not seeing it that you're making it together now.

You're not seeing that?

No. She's unhappy, she doesn't see enough of you. That's one of the things. She's an unhappy girl. And then you're turning away from her, so that means you're not happy. You're not completely satisfied so it's ridiculous to carry it through. It leads up to you now. Give it a lot of thought, you know. But even if you give it a lot of thought, you're not going to stay with her.

Is that what you get?

Exactly what I get.

Because it's not your wish. It's is your wish, and it's---these cards are---not good cards. Plus it affects your health a little bit, and you can't do that. Yeah. Nourish, you're not allowed---it's not good for your aura. And you know, when you're torn like this it's no good. So you have to make up your mind one thing or the other. In '83 you have to decide what you want. You should know completely by May.

You think so?

That's what you get? This, uh, there was, at least at that point, there was some happiness for her, somewhere.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of happiness. She too has changed a little bit. I mean, you know? I wouldn't dwell on it but if I were you I wouldn't---I wouldn't exactly stay with this.

Mhm, mhm.

Does she know this is the way you feel?

Yeah, we've been---

Discussing it.

Yeah, since Christmas.

It really threw me for a loop. I thought it was such a happy thing.

You what?

I thought it was such a happy marriage, I really did.

I know, when we used to come in here.

Yeah, it was a whole different scene. And I'm picking stuff up from you lately that you're not yourself, you know?

We haven't, we haven't seen each other.

Oh my goodness. That's interesting. Children. Later, much later.

Later?

This is how it works. Good results. You're married again. Marry another. American girl. Let me see how many children you'll have. It'll be a little while until you make up your mind what you want.

Mhm.

Definitely. See, this is definitely a divorce. Three children in the house. Very easy, if you think you can afford them, you better start working right now.

[Laughter]

You better start right now. Definitely, that's your nerves, yeah. You gotta watch those nerves, yeah. The only thing troubling you is money. And that would be the only thing keeping you from having a child. I don't think your wife was anxious to have a child, was she?

Yes, she was.

At one point.

Yeah.

That's your wish.

That's the wish, there?

In other words, you have a child. Two children or three. But I know you'll have children, because I know you'd love to have a child. And you know somebody already? Another girl?

Mm, no.

Well then you're going to meet someone. She has brown hair.

Yeah?

Why are you blushing if you don't know anybody?

[Laughter]

Sometimes you gotta play cards close to the chest.

[Laughter]

Her cards.

Her cards.

Yes. It's excellent. That's your marriage. Well, that's a lawyer. Have you gone to a lawyer already? You're thinking about it, though.

Mm, no, not really.

It's because so much of it reminded me of my own family. I mean, Aunt Willie was - not exact, but pretty close to my Aunt Ruth. My mother had four sisters and two brothers.

Yeah.

I'm wondering, I won't get back to my family too much, but my, my uncle, legend, always had it, was a, was a, a boxer at some point. He ended up was cutting cloth somewhere in the garment district.

Yeah.

But he was actually close to being a Golden Glove boxer.

Yeah.

I accepted that on faith. But I, I, I've never seen a picture of him in a boxing ring, y'know? He's long dead now. But, that was a family legend.

Well, if they told it to you, it was true.

Okay.

Maybe he wasn't as good as they said. Maybe he didn't get that close to Golden Gloves

Well, if they told it to you, there was a, a good measure of truth in it, you'd say.

Yeah. I think so.

I mean, it's a question of how many, how many sales, I suppose, Lily actually made.

That's right. But my, but my mother claimed, and my mother was not, would not have said that she, she took over Lily's route when Lily went to California. did pretty well. She made a good living.

I mean, heritage, yeah, and it, and it's centered on, and it, and it, the first story is about an actual inheritance, but I think everything is my, from them is my inheritance, and it's how I, how I know the world, or knew the world early on, anyway.

And they're all dead now?

They're all dead, yeah, they're all dead. My cousins are alive, but, uh, my last aunt died about three or four years ago.

How did your father let himself get fooled by the, con-man. Was that a characteristic trait, or…?

Well, I think, I'm surprised, I was very surprised, at old age and infirmity, um, had some effect. The guy was, the guy knew what he was doing, and he knew how to get to my father, and the, and the, the sadness for me was, not only that he was giving everything to this guy, but that I didn't know how to get to my father. This guy knew how to do it. He knew how to flatter him, he knew how to play on his, on my father's greed, and, and, and miserliness. Um, he knew how, and also, also, the fact of the matter is, that if I'd had children, it would have been different. I think, if I'd had children, I, or my children, could have gotten to my father, and it wouldn't have happened. I think the fact that I denied him of grandchildren.

Would your father have cared about grandchildren?

Oh, yeah. Very much.

Very, very much. He, um, at some point in my life, I called them to tell them that I'd gotten a good job, or I'd gotten a raise at work, and he's, and I, talking to my mother, and he, I heard him in the background say, I said, Mom, I've got good news, and she said, the kid's got good news, and he said, she's pregnant. So, yes, he cared.

But, you know, when I think about it now, and not having children, I think about the fact that I was so much a daughter. I didn't -

Adored?

A daughter.

A daughter.

A daughter. I didn't want to be other--

Only child?

Yeah, an only child. I didn't really want to bedisplaced as a daughter. It, I think is one aspect of, of not having children. Because I was a veryimportant child. I was the child.

In such a large family

In such a large family. Well, my grandmother had nine or ten. My, and, but the next generation, my mother's generation, only had one or two.

It's amazing why that generation had so many, I mean that's…

They couldn't avoid it. I mean, they didn't have contraception. They didn't, uh

And had a lot of sex.

And, I guess, a lot of sex. At least nine or ten times. it would have been, they couldn't afford it if they had this

It's hard to imagine what this -- Grandparents, yeah, sure, but the idea that they couldn't afford it, yet they had this enormous family. On both sides, in fact.

Yeah.

Amazing.

Everybody in your family is dead? I mean, of your, of your parents' generation. Your aunts and uncles?

They're all dead. Yeah. Some cousins are, some cousins still alive. But yeah, that's about it.

I think that grudges are enlivening. In my family- .

They sure are

Yeah. Yeah. And I was really glad to see that in my family, grudges never ended. People would die, and the surviving person would maintain the grudge. And it animated her life. And I intend to maintain this grudge against Bob Gottlieb-

that's good.

for the rest of my life.

But there are all levels of grudges, too, I think. Let us keep that in mind. There are grudges and grudges.

Yes, there are grudges and grudges. My grudge against Bob Gottlieb is, I think, on a fairly high level. I don't think I have any other grudges that match it.

I'll look it up. Tell me about, uh, is it Lily's husband Ben? Is that his name?

Who?

Ben.

Ben who?

Lily's husband Ben.

Oh yeah, Ben, my husband, Lily, my Aunt Lily's husband was, was Ben.

Was he a strong character in your childhood, or just a…?

No, he was a, he was sort of a joke in the family, nobody took him seriously. But he had, he had grudges. And Ben's letter- Ben, Ben was a writer. Ben wrote, Ben thought of himself as a writer, he thought of himself - is it, can you hear, can this pick up, with all the background noise? you just pick up with all the background noise?

Well, yeah, your trip back five years after your parents died, you went back. You went to Romania.

Yes, I went to Romania. My friend Sylvia Plachy, the photographer, had an assignment in Romania. I don't know if it was an assignment. She's doing a book on Eastern Europe. And she's Hungarian and she knows that - And she goes back to Budapest very often and to Romania, especially to Transylvania, where they're Hungarian-speaking, quite a bit. And she said, "do you want to come with me?" And I said, "sure." And we went to Romania. Her mother was born in the Ukraine, not too far from where my mother was born, and we had this notion that we would somehow from Romania get to go to Ukraine. Turned out to be impossible. We just couldn't cross that border. Without- And also, everybody said, "don't go to the Ukraine. They'll steal your car. They'll rape you. They'll," you know, "bury you in the fields." So, and that was the year that the, while we were in Romania, the Ruble collapsed. So, things were really desperate. But, yes, we went to Romania and it was a revelation for me. And I would like to go back. I'd very much like to go back to Eastern Europe.

But you didn't actually go to where your mother was from.

No, never got there. Nor did Sylvia. But, you know, close enough somehow.

Well, I wonder what it would tell you, honestly. My brother actually went back to the town where my father was born and grew up in, in Lithuania - Pumpénai Lithuania, he went back to it.

Yeah.

And found the mud huts and therefore decided his father-

Found the mud huts?

Well, kind of like it.

Something, it was still standing?

Similar, similar.

Yeah.

There was one still like it, he thought, and he decided his father was, therefore, a peasant. And he came back and, like, he was born a peasant and, therefore, and I said, our father was not a peasant in any sense of the word. He was, he was kind of, he was a, he was dapper. He was a dandy. He wasn't a peasant. My brother couldn't understand that. He was born a peasant and, therefore, he always had this sort of peasantry - I said "you've got it all wrong"

You know it's an unimaginable world they came from

Well, it is. I mean, actually, he was born there. It is. I must go back sometime, myself.

Really, we can't imagine. We can't imagine what life was like-

Just a generation ago.

Yeah, just a generation ago. The world.

And what if they hadn't come over?

And what if they hadn't, they'd be dead. And we wouldn't be here.

Yeah, that's fair. Or, if we were here, we'd be there.

No, we wouldn't be there.

We wouldn't be here at all.

They would have been killed in the Second World War, not before.

Well, in my case, they were flying from the Cossacks, I guess, is what it was.

Yeah, yeah. But if they'd stayed longer…

My father actually wrote his autobiography.

No kidding.

Yeah.

What sort of, where is it?

It's, it was published-

What is this? Water.

It's my water, you're having some and that's fine.

Thank you.

And it did fairly well. He self-published it and then Ballantine re-published it for him.

No kidding.

It was called Chaia Sonia, and it was about his mother.

It was called what?

Chaia, C-H-A-I-A. Chaia Sonia, which is his mother's name.

Yeah.

Russian, immigrating to America, fleeing the Cossacks.

Yeah.

Going through Warsaw with him and his brother, leaving all the daughters behind to abandon them.

So you've got a great beginning.

He wrote his book.

I know.

But he made it up.

But you have - he made it up?

Well, no, partly. I mean, he reconstructed, reconstructed conversations. It was a good book, but it was, we always thought it was partly invention.

When I was writing, Vincent was alive, and he was coming down, stopping by almost every day. But, you know, he had absolutely no interest. I would talk to him about it. He was, cancer is a terrible thing. It made him, it makes everybody, it shrinks everybody into their own skin.

He didn't want to know about the book? Is that-

No, he really, he and Ben would talk about movies.

And they would argue, and Vincent would be very testy.

I think Vincent was testy.

But, um, illness just shrinks you into a world of your own.

He was a darling man.

[Laughs] "Daddy li- I know that Daddy likes it, because he said something to somebody that you'd written a book, but..." No. He would never have said anything. And he wouldn't have been happy with his last, with his last, with the first story. He would not have been happy. But you know, I don't know. Who knows? I don't know. They're dead. I mean, I can do what I like with them.

They were live, you said.

Yeah. They were alive. And now they're dead. And now I can do what I like with them.

Yeah. But now they're alive in your book again.

Yeah, I hope so. I hope so. I meant to make them live.

Aunt Lily lives.

Aunt Lily lives. Aunt Sally lives, you've forgotten my Aunt Sally.

Aunt Sally lives.

And I had been associated with Betty for a good many years in her various activities and she came down to see me with an idea. And her idea was very simple. She thought it was time for New York City to have a public library devoted solely to poetry. In other words, a poetry library. And it was amazing really to realize that New York didn't have one. It never occurred to me, actually.

No, I mean poetry in the largest sense as a spiritual force. And I equate it with myth in that. Poetry and myth. The myth of a culture, the myth of a civilization, is what perpetuates the state as a state and as a power in the world.

They are born in the sense of what they are born with the capacity for becoming poets. But what fortune deals to them in their early days, their early years, is I think an important factor. Maybe more important than your genes. I think the sense of the natural world, for example, the delight in being alive, and the knowledge of one's mortality, are all involved in the making of the poet.

I believe above all, I suppose, in the web of creation. The sense that everything alive is interconnected and that the so-called natural world is ours. Now we belong to nature just as much as the bears and the locusts and the elephants and the horses. One doesn't learn that by being taught it. It's part of the, maybe the accident of fortune.

You've written, so I gather, often about mortality and I wonder if I can ask you a somewhat personal question. How much does the fact of your father's death, how much of that makes you a poet or made you a poet?

I think that was central to my sense of loss, my sense of yearning. You know Henry James' wonderful phrase in one of his letters when he says, "the port from which I set out was the port of my loneliness."

I was curious, going through your collected poems, I found a number of poems about suicides. It did strike me. And it was Rothko and Levy and...

We're getting far away from Poets House but can you understand suicide? What provokes people to--

Oh yes, yes. It's perfecty intelligible to me. It's not anything I would be inclined to do, maybe I'm speaking to early, but I love life too much.

But I could imagine why one would do it, and I don't consider it by any means to be a criminal act or a immoral act.

Well , except, would you agree these suicide bombers...

That's something else again. To kill others. And I'm a pacifist by conviction.

Right. But in terms of killing yourself, that's your own decision.

Yeah. Mhm. If you have to kill anybody, it should be yourself.

Very early, yes. And I was lucky in a way, aside from the misfortune of my talk of suicide, in that I had teachers who told me I was going to be a poet from the fourth grade on.

Do you write mostly here or in your summer place? Or is there no difference there.

Do you still have your garden up there?

I still have my garden up to me. Uh-huh. And to me it's a part of my creative life just as much as language is.

Part of your alliance with the natural world.

Well, that's the privileges of age.

I think so. One of the few I ask.

No other privileges of age?

Privileges of age are, I think that one has earned a certain degree of independence that one can do what one pleases. Even with one's work. And one isn't likely to be challenged in the way you are in your youth when you first publish your poems and get a response that is usually called diffidence.

You suffered from diffidence at one point. You outlived diffidence.

Of course most poets, I think, feel that the Times is not as supportive of poetry as it should be. And I tend to agree with that.

I'm glad you're doing this piece, and I know that it means a great deal to Poets House and therefore to the perpetuaton of poetry in New York, which after all is the capital of poetry in the United States. And there are so many fine poets living in this city. I'm really amazing whenever I'm part of a gathering of poets, how superior they are to any comparable group that might have gathered here in any other period in our history. And I think nearly all poets feel that New York is the capital of the poetry world.

Yes. I don't know all of them but many of them meet me in the street and invent themselves or present themselves. Who knows what. But it's an extraordinary experience to be walking in the village here these days and the number of persons who greet you. And I don't think of myself as a public person but obviously poetry is part of the life in this village, as I guess it always has been, and it's the reason I came here in 1928, which is a long time ago.

I came to the village immediately. And in fact I found a basement apartment on 9th street between 5th and 6th. I was paying $25 a month because I was in the back room with the basement and there was a noisy tenant in the front. The noise lasted all night, and one day I pounded on the door and, much to my amazement, the door opened and there was a bartender in his white jacket and he said, "Buddy, what's the trouble?" And I said, "I'm trying to sleep, that's the trouble." And I was working, and I had an office job. And he said, "Well, I don't know what I can do about the noise, but I tell you what: anytime you want a drink,"--this is a speakeasy, of course--"just come in. I'll be glad to give you anything you like." That was our agreement, and it worked out very well. And I slept better ever after.

Both of whom I got to know eventually. Both of them.

Cummings I knew very well. He was a good friend. And Marianne Moore was one of the first to publish me in The Dial. I've ever been grateful for her. I'll tell you another story about her.