BURT KIMMELMAN INTERVIEW ON RAIN TAXI

Eric Hoffman conducts an in-depth interview with Burt Kimmelman for RAIN TAXI!  Here's an excerpt from "Arrangements of Language":

 I first set eyes on Donald Allen’s watershed anthology, The New American Poetry, in 1965. A decade before the Allen book, Charles Olson had published his ground-shaking essay "Projective Verse" (1950); that essay was given pride of place in the poetics section of Allen’s book. So, for a fledgling poet like myself, the question of writing free verse was not a no-brainer so much as moot (I had written some sonnets, haikus, a couple of concrete poems etc., and did get great pleasure out of set form, but was not at that time in a position to have any particular form work for me in any kind of creative or generative way). Olson's astonishing essay (to say nothing of his amazing poetry, an exemplar I took to heart) explained, so to speak, how to leave free verse behind for something rigorous but not formal in any sense except the sui generis sense—as Robert Creeley had said, “form is nothing more than an extension of content.” 

To speak of how I and other young poets were transformed or at least ignited by the Allen anthology is not amenable to overstatement. We were of course reading Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams et al. but not in any college courses because they weren't in them. I discovered Oppen a year or so later, not yet Zukofsky or the other Objectivists who were aesthetically the sponsors of that anthology; and I had met and begun a correspondence with William Bronk, and also with Joel Oppenheimer, another early mentor. Decades later, however, I gravitated toward syllabication both because I was feeling tapped out a bit with the “new American poetics,” and because I found myself wanting to respond in kind to a pond near an ocean in Cape May Point, New Jersey. 

My family shared a summerhouse there with Fred Caruso and his family. One summer I started jotting down brief percepts of the life in that pond—the water, weather, and wildlife—brief statements I thought could use the unobvious rigor of syllable counting (in various patterns, sometimes of unequal line lengths—I was to settle into uniform lines, though I was appreciative of John Taggart's later reminding me of other syllabic possibilities, and on another basis of Cid Corman's cautioning to stay away from adjectives, in a letter boasting of having published an entire collection without a single one). This poetics comported perfectly with what Fred was doing. He had brought a watercolors set to the shore and decided he'd do paintings of the pond in just black and white. In conversation we realized that a collection of the paintings and poems, both about the pond, would be nice, since a shared sensibility was emerging, a quality both his water colors and my brief syllabic haiku-like poems exhibited. We worked on the poems and paintings for a little less than three years, during winters from Fred’s photos; The Pond at Cape May Pointappeared from Marsh Hawk Press in 2002. From that point in time I've been writing syllabic poetry almost exclusively.

You can see the entire interview HERE.