Postcard post-9/11
Author of 32 books and editor or co-editor of 19 others, GEORGE P. GARRETT has published in every genre possible. Shortly after his retirement in 2002 as the Henry Hoyns Professor Emeritus of creative writing from the University of Virginia, Garrett (74) was named the Poet Laureate of Virginia.
He is best known for his trilogy of historical novels, Death of the Fox (1971), The Succession: A Novel of Elizabeth and James (1983), and Entered from the Sun (1990). Among his many honours are the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry; the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction; and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Excerpts from a conversation with JAYA MADHAVAN.
You are a novelist, poet, short story writer, playwright, non-fiction writer and a creative writing "teacher". How would you explain this versatility, which has allowed you an entire range of expression?
It never occurred to me not to try as many things as possible as a writer, hoping to learn from the interchange of forms and hoping to learn as a teacher of literature and writing as well. It seems to me that, allowing for significant formal differences, these literary forms are much alike in that they are addressed to an imaginary reader whose attention and contribution to the experience must be earned.
During your 40-year teaching career you trained thousands of young writers, many of whom have gone on to make a name for themselves as distinguished authors. Now, can writing be taught?
About teaching creative writing, there is no way to transform someone into a writer, just as there is no way to transform someone into an opera singer or a cello player. All the arts, however, including all forms of writing, have elements that can be shared and taught, and that can greatly enhance the development of beginning writers. To this extent, writing can and should be taught; but finally, even with the encouragement and attention of teachers, it falls upon the individual writer to learn the craft and art.
Are you disturbed by the state of the American politics, the terrorist attacks, and the subsequent war/ imperialism? Does the role of Poet Laureate constrain you from speaking out?
What is the tussle about?
Deriving from the poem "Postcard": Like everyone on the planet, I suppose, I am disturbed and troubled by the blazing headlines in the newspapers and the shocks and sorrows of television. Some of these things I have spoken about in poetry and fiction, others I have not. The role of Poet Laureate — since, in Virginia, it is partly my function to create that role — does not inhibit or constrain me from saying anything I want to or believe. Your question is particularly hard to answer since I feel that, despite the waves of information thrown at us, much remains hidden and much is more complicated than we are encouraged to realise. If we read the newspapers with the care that we read a single poem, we might be astonished at how much we don't know or understand that is in fact happening.
Somewhere you have said: "I imagined that by writing I would somehow be immune from the normal course of things, which leads inevitably to contempt for the mundane. So the literary life is, of course, rich with disappointments. It's disappointing that I allow myself to be disappointed." Given your entirely public position as State poet, don't you find it problematic to maintain a public/private dichotomy and within that a dichotomy between "normal" and "literary" life?
Isn't good poetry made from disappointments?
A good question and a difficult one. Yes, of course, good poetry can be and is made from disappointments. It is also, we must never forget, made from joy and the celebration of simple and ordinary and commonplace things and events.
I do not seek to bypass the "mundane". I hope that the essence of my work is the discovery of the poetry at the heart of ordinary daily things. Sometimes this may be "literary", but only insofar as books and poems are an ordinary and mundane part of our experience.
The other part of the question, referring to my "entirely public position as state poet", in a sense I have had to create the duties of the Poet Laureate myself. Although I am not familiar with a great many of the details, as I understand it, the position of Poet Laureate is viewed differently in other states. In Virginia it is not a paid position, and the Poet Laureate is not conceived of as speaking for the state, but rather as a poet being honoured by the state.
Postcard
ONE of these times very soon
I will have and hold a day
blank as a new pillowcase
or a field of fresh snow.
And then and there once again
I will lay down my head, I will
make angels in the wet snow.
I will write words, words words,
as you do, and will sign my
name,
naming my new poems like
children,
calling them home from the dark
George Garrett
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