An Interview with Frederick Pollack by DM Rice

Neither myself nor Fred Pollack could, at first contact, fully conceive of the nature of our year-long email exchange regarding postmodern classicism and what turns out to be its apocryphal progenitor. “I’m a bit older, and have always described myself as a Beat Classicist” he explains. He describes making, at 15, a pilgrimage to City Lights Books only to be informed by Ferlinghetti that “Ginsberg, Kerouac et al (whom I had hoped to meet that day) had long since departed. It’s very sad: I was too young to be a Beat and too old to be a hippie.” Pollack describes the situation with measured nostalgia: “another aspect of meeting with Ferlinghetti was that, even as naïve as I was then, I had a strong hunch that he was monstrously hung–over … he never quite achieved the vertical. Sheg Sakagawa, City Lights’s No. 2, was there and seemed ready to catch him.”

This was the beginning of a fruitful exchange. We discussed the “fraught and fractured” nature of our personal, invented genres, which functioned as a fun short-hand to describe what sort of work moved us, as much as our continued relationship with the long way through. Pollack was a student of the now infamous Harold Bloom (“We shared, it turned out, a great liking for James Thurber. If anyone had told that class how famous he would become we would have laughed…”), and his description of literary culture in the academy at the time is worth noting: “Bloom was the only rebel, in the sense that he was pro-Romantic; politically he was and remained quite unconscious. To any reactionary excess of the time (all mild, compared to what followed), his one response, uttered in class in his usual sepulchral tone, was ‘Gentlemen, we must remember that we live where motley is worn.’ The Department was still very much in the hands of the New Critics – Wimsatt, Brooks, Warren et al.  I didn’t like these people, felt no attraction to what I saw of academic life. I wanted only to write…” 

Philosophically, Pollack holds many values in keeping with the sensibility that informs Sybil’s editorial and artistic practices, although the touchstones don’t always fully align. “Philosophically I’m a Marxist, with leanings towards unfashionable, even passéiste schools,” he writes, “When I began writing poetry in ’78-’79 I had an elaborate and rather rigorous theory. But for years – to speak frankly – I’ve mainly followed my intuition, tried to challenge and not to repeat myself.” We find an easy dynamic, and camaraderie which is the byproduct of mutual influences. 

Fred Pollack is a poet, former professor of creative writing, and private intellectual. He has several collections available, and continues to work on manuscripts with a tireless, meditative consistency. His poetry on the site can be found here. Our more formal interview is as follows:

What is Beat Classicism? Are you its de facto 'founder' or is it loosely associated with a particular community of writers?

As far as I know, I’m the only Beat Classicist. If someone else wants to use the label, fine, though I’m sure its meaning will be distorted. The term was originally a joke, decades ago  – someone asked me how I would describe my writing; then I thought about it. The “Beat” part comes from the fact that theirs was the first poetic movement to which I (born 1946) viscerally responded; I often say, mournfully, that I was too young to be a Beatnik and too old to be a hippie. I agree with the Beats that anything one thinks, feels, or experiences is suitable for poetry, and that one’s stylistic default should be colloquial and direct. With two provisos: 1) sensationalism per se accomplishes nothing – one should engage readers, not merely assault them; and 2) one should think seriously how one’s sufferings and visions reflect one’s times. Ginsberg achieved these ends in Howl. The “Classicist” part derives from a line of Juvenal’s, which sums up what to me is exemplary in ancient Western writing: “I give you only what you have already.” One could also cite Herodotus’s “Call no man happy until he’s dead; only lucky”; Homer’s “As is the generation of leaves, so is that of men”; Plutarch’s “They make a desert and call it peace.” I think that poets should speak truth, which is best expressed coldly and briefly. The bardic stance Ginsberg and other Beats adopted may be at odds with this, but it’s a fruitful contradiction.

In our discussions you've mentioned close encounters with very important literary figures (Bloom, Ferlinghetti, and Milosz among them). What role has this factored into your work (which seems, especially in poems from 'Landscape with Mutant' to frequently rely on allusion/address as a formal technique)? 

My encounter with Bloom was close; those with Ferlinghetti and Milosz momentary. (Both are funny stories.) Re Bloom: In 1966 I took his seminar on Romantic poetry from Spenser to Stevens, and passionately identified with the figure of The Poet as Bloom portrayed him. (To this day, my favorite line in all prose is the beginning of Yeats’s essay on Blake: “There have been men who loved the future as a mistress; and the future lowered her hair about them, and mingled her breath with theirs, and hid them from the understanding of their times.”) A few years later, a needed corrective was administered by a late friend, who enlisted me in philosophical Marxism: “You must understand that, as far as the ruling class is concerned, what you have is a hobby.” In some poems I’ve invoked that friend or other remembered people. Far more often I present dialectical arguments between my persona and a symbolic or representative figure, or between such figures.

I'm especially interested in this notion which came up in our discussion: ' that whole atmospheres of literary and cultural theory can be similarly reduced [to grammar]'. I certainly understand how this functions, or is perhaps inevitable, given a post-modern orientation toward language. It may not be much of a question, but between the underlying (dare, I say, sophist?) power-inflected reading, and the perhaps more 'liberal' context of a new-globalist cultural relativism, where does this conceit fall for you? Maybe a better articualtion: how do you write poems which seem to be very palpable and real, and yet meaningfully participate within the headier atmospheres of literary and cultural theory?

I’ll take up these questions in reverse order. The first thing I need to say is that I’m a Marxist, and a very old-fashioned one. Intellectually I have very little use for “theory”; in my work it appears as an occasional sparring-partner. One of the few reviews I’ve received said that I seem to feel no anxiety about language’s capacity to name things in the world. I accept that, and refer to what I said earlier about “classicism.” “Reality divided by reason,” said Hegel, “always leaves a remainder.” For me poetry – and, more generally, art – is that remainder. Poetry is about something, because language is about something. Accuracy and precision are hard to achieve, for the artist as for the scientist, and will always eventually be shown to be inadequate to new facts, insights, and visions. But pursuing accuracy, the most precise expression of a given fact or vision, is what both artist and scientist do. Much contemporary poetry strikes me as either wordplay for its own sake or a narcissistic wallowing; these to me are opposite sides of one ideological coin. In my work, I try at once to see the microcosm (my past, fears, hopes, and emotions) reflected in the macrocosm (history, society and its conflicts) and vice versa. Derrida has not helped me in this effort. Adorno, Benjamin, and John Berger have.

 What Wittgenstein said was that “whole clouds of philosophy can be reduced to a drop of grammar.” Leaving aside the fact that the “Ordinary Language” philosophy inspired by him has generated clouds of grammar, the remark has some validity. The endless contradictory implications that deconstruction finds in specific phrases may be there – but where, exactly? It seems to me that ambiguities, alternate readings, even inversions of the meaning of concepts (like “the individual,” “freedom,” “democracy”) are important only insofar as, and to the extent that, history – real conflicts – make them so. Truth is relative only because it is a process, never completed. To replace it with a thoroughgoing relativism can only be a front for some unstated ideological motive. As I understand it, poststructuralists starting with Derrida have agreed with this – which suggests to me that poststructuralism is at most a tool, not an insight.

Between what early modern scholars call 'the cult of fame' (fixed within the confines of a performative authorial persona) and a more transcendent (more grounded in the real?) ideal do I read the following lines from 'Opus Posthumous':

"I've long since reconciled myself to being
only remembered subatomically,
my work a potentially retrievable
algorithm, a merely structural
element, like cement. But lately

I had a vision: future readers reading
and weeping over my crass,
sardonic oeuvre, even resurrecting
print and paper for its sake, seeing only
sighs and love and fleeting beauty."
Might you elaborate on this sense of time/timelessness?

I’m not sure what a “performative authorial persona” is, but I suppose I have one. Poststructuralists and Language poets tried to tell me at some point that the author doesn’t exist, or is no longer a viable category. I’m afraid I have to disagree, and see no deep quarrel between my egalitarianism and a wish that my work was more recognized than it is. In my work I play with various versions of transcendence; I must stress that “play” is not belief. One is an afterlife, another the basic myth of Gnosticism; another is the idea, promulgated by some cosmologists, that “the universe never forgets”: that information is never lost, however many black holes inherit space. The first stanza plays with this wistful hope, the second with another, which Wallace Stevens phrased thus: “that underneath every no / lay a passion for yes that had never been broken.”