Conversation with Mike Gannon and Donald Justice

from Gainesville, Florida Yeah, hello, I'm Mike Cannon. And this is conversation. Three quarters of the way through John Irving's recent best selling novel, The Hotel New Hampshire, the narrator asks, Who is this Donald Justice? And how come everything he says applies to us? Well, I can answer that query.

Donald Justice is a real person of Florida native member of the English faculty at this university and in 1980 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his book of selected poems carrying that title published by Atheneum. Poems by Justice have appeared in three other volumes. The summer anniversaries, Nightlight and departures, as well as in magazines such as The New Yorker, Paris Review and Poetry.

In Irving's novel, a budding author, Lily by name, throws herself out of a skyscraper window because she knows she would never be able to write as well as justice. Damn that Donald Justice, she says. He's written all the good lines, a conversation with Donald Justice and a reading of a few of the good lines When I return In a moment, five Live presents conversation from the University of Florida, a discussion of social, political, scientific and religious issues of the day.

Your host is Dr Michael V. Gannon professor of history and ethics, an assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. Don. Welcome to conversation. It's fun to talk with the poet, particularly someone who's native roots are Miami, Florida, and you grew up in that city, attended high school and even attended university in my and That's right and you have a poem, uh, in which you describe the front porch of the house.

Was it your house? The house in which you lived perhaps, were born? Well, actually, I think they're They're two poems. I'm not sure which one you refer to. One is the porch of the house in which I was born. The one you're looking at is as a friend's porch.

But the reason I ask that you had asked very recently if you might return to Miami to visit the house in which you had lived a boy. That's right. You didn't receive permission. Or at least that's right. Well, my father built a house in the early twenties, uh, and in in which I was born, and I I hadn't really seen the inside of it since we moved away in 1930.

And I wrote a letter to the occupant asking if I might look at it. I didn't get a reply. Is, uh, one of the Florida poems that I've marked in this book, perhaps related to that house? Is that our new house on the edge? No, that's the house we moved into in the thirties, which my father also built.

He he was a carpenter and builder. Now this is dated 1936 in the middle of the Depression. Miami, Florida is the place. I wonder if you would mind reading that point about our new house on the edge of town. That's right. This was a Northwest 46.

3 did case, and he knows Miami. It's no longer the edge of town I would imagine not. Our new house on the edge of town looks bare at first and raw. A pink plaster flamingo on one leg stands preening by the lily pond. And just as the sun begins to sink into the Everglades beyond, it seems to shatter against the pain and little asterisks of light.

And on our lids, half closed in prayer over the clean blue will aware. Mm. That has such a soft feeling. Might I try reading the poem entitled Memory of a Poet? Yes, please. Do you hear someone else read something? Well, this is about your friend's house.

That's right. And it's dated Miami 1942. What I remember is how the wind chime commence to stir as she spoke of her childhood, as though the simple death of a pet cat buried with flowers had brought to the porch a rumor of storms dying out over some dark Atlantic.

At least I heard the thing began. A thin skeletal music and in the deep silence below all memory, the sighing of ferns half asleep in their boxes. Well, I thought you read it very well, if I may say, it's hard to know where to place the inflection and where to run lines together.

But I love the way this poem ends, because again there's that wonderful softness about the way you use the English language. I begin our chat in asking about the homes in which you lived in Miami, because when you were a youth about 10 years old, as I recall, you had a serious bone infection.

That's right. It prevented you from following many active pursuits and, uh, instilled in you a certain desire for the intellectual life. Something that you could do. Is that correct? That's the way it felt at the time. It might have happened just so, even without the illness.

But I felt that that got me into the habit of reading long books and return me to playing the piano, which I had studied as a very small child and kept me out off the playing fields for a couple of years. You don't think that that is necessary for becoming a poet That won't have to be introspective or withdrawn?

Not, of course not. But it seems to predispose me anyhow in that direction, and I've known others who had some something strange or significant occur somewhere between the ages of eight or 15, which seemed to turn them in a certain direction. Did you grow up with a taste for words?

You seem to have a wonderful sense of the well tasted, I suppose, is the best phrasing I can use here. Well, actually, I always did like reading and talking, but I don't know whether that constitutes a taste for words or not. Remember when the American Poetry Association and this really dates me in the early fifties chose what it thought was the most beautiful word in the English language cellar door?

I've heard other of other candidates in car. Nadine, for instance. In car, Nadine Burgundian was a favorite of a friend of mine who fancied himself a poet. Uh, now you think you might have become a poet even in different circumstances? What is it that makes people poet poets?

Is it the determination to use words wisely and beautifully, or is it a gift, or is it a combination? Well, I don't see that those are exclusive, mhm and Auden says, and I think he would have known that a sign of promise. And a young writer is, uh, liking to hang around words and and sort of listening to what they have to say.

And I think that that seems to me to be about as good an indication as anything else that may in itself be the a token of some gift. Mm hmm. Could you read another poem for me? It's the poem entitled A Winter Ode to the old men of Loomis Park, Miami, Florida Islamist park on on the beach or park on the beach or there used to be.

But this one is one in Miami proper near the old Shrine Temple along the river. Um, I don't remember the exact street, uh, intersection, but, uh, it was there all through my childhood, and I last the last time I was in Miami and drove past it was still there.

What would be the date of this poem? This poem goes back to the, I think to the middle fifties when I when I wrote it, I mentioned Fifth Street and Fifth Street, then, uh, did have crowds walking on it again. The last time I drove along Fifth Street.

Just last year, I didn't see a soul walking on it. So Miami has changed. This part of Miami has changed, though. The park was still there. A winter road to the old men of Loomis Park, Miami, Florida risen from rented rooms. Old ghosts come back to haunt our parks.

By day, they creep up fifth Street through the crowd, unseeing and almost unseen, halting before the shops for breath, still proud, pretending to admire the fat hens dressed and hung for flies there, Or perhaps the loan dead. Firn dressing The window of a small hotel winter has blown them south.

How many? 12 in Loomis Park, I count now, shivering where they stand, a little thicket of thin trees and more on benches, turning with the son Juan Heliotrope. See all day O you who wear against the breast, the tortuous flannel under vest, winter and summer. Yet our cold, poor, cracked thermometers stuck now at zero everlastingly old men bent like you're walking sticks.

As with the pressure of some hand. Surely we must have thought you strong to lean on you so hard, so long. Oh, that's very touching. And I suppose the scene you described there would be seen on the South Beach Miami today. I I imagine so, Yes, and many places in retirement communities up and down Florida's two coasts.

That's very, very touching. The old men of Loomis Park in Miami. You left the University of Miami and went about the country ended up at the University of North Carolina, took graduate studies there for the last 20 years or so. You taught creative writing at the University of Iowa.

I understand. In the writer's workshop, Yes, uh, had wonderful students over that time from all over the United States. No doubt. Yes, we attracted students from other countries to How do you teach someone to write poetry? That's a simplistic question. But I suppose I'm I'm searching for some device you might use.

I don't know of any devices, but you encounter. I would imagine a similar problem in trying to teach any art or the composition or writing of any art. And you can teacher or approach the teaching of the techniques involved or the use of the medium, so to speak.

Uh, and of course, you can't teach Native genius. Uh, and there's a sense, of course in which native genius doesn't need any teaching. Uh, so they're they're they're serious questions one can can can raise in regard to the teaching of of an art. But I know from experience that something can be learned anyhow, whether anything can be taught, uh, and you can certainly give encouragement and a, uh, sort of receptive atmosphere.

You can become an intelligent audience for the best efforts of young writers. Uh, such things count for a lot at a certain stage. Tell me if I'm wrong. My impression is that poets are more than usually sensitive to the world around them. They are, as I heard it phrased once the first to shift the sensing, Uh, the first two cents the shifting of the ground.

They may do the other well. I can't buy really any proposal that it claims for poets special privileges. I would like to think of them as being like other people and citizens and human beings. They, they're they're special in that they try to handle this this difficult art, which deals with words and rhythms.

And I don't Some are probably more sensitive than others, yes, but as a as a as a class or group or I and I know a lot of poets. I really don't think it's so. Is there a more than normal suicide rate among poets? That is a canard that is advanced from time to time.

Stephen Spender and others is have claimed that Yes, well, I happen to know of a psychiatrist at at Iowa who made a list of 20th century poets who had committed suicide, including one who hadn't and she got sued. So, uh, there may be I I don't really know of a reliable statistical survey.

There was a generation, the generation before mine, which did number quite a few suicides among it, and I'm sure the rate was high in that generation. But I there are other generations in which didn't happen. I'm just thinking that in the complex world in which we live today, we might well call upon the talents of poets to help us understand the world around us.

We appeal to the sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists of visionaries in the field of high technology. But do not the poets have something to say that would help explain our present predicament and perhaps a way out of it? Well, that's a tough question. I don't, uh certain poets might, but it would not be, I think by virtue of their being poets, it would be by virtue of their being very intelligent human beings, um, which might have helped making them poets.

But no, I don't make that kind of association. But really, as I say, I know a lot of poets and I would hate to be led by by most of them. uh, I would in any insight, I can get anywhere I'm glad to listen to. And of course, poets do have much.

Poetry does come from a kind of sharpened perception or awareness of things. And if the poet is good at articulating that, then the poem is likely to contain it. Uh, in that way, our sensibilities can be instructed and made more keen, but is for solutions to problems.

I'd almost as soon trust a sociologist. Alright. The poetry that one normally sees today in books of quality poetry such as yours is of a different sort than I studied when I was in elementary grade school and high school. They're the poetry was in iambic pentameter, some rigorous form of rhythm and rhyme.

And today one doesn't seem to find very much of that form of poetry. Well, it's certainly what used to be thought of as experimental. Poetry is the main stream in in American poetry now, but I happen to be a traditionalist. I've I've written a good deal of I am pentameter.

I've written in some very intricate forms and there are others who do that. But, uh, now it's it's all open. One can write anyway when please is one more important difference, I think. Is that the poetry that I remember getting in junior high? It did emphasize a kind of aspect of poetry, which I don't think most poets are interested in any more, uh, the kind of uplift side of it, you know, like how how lovely everything was or how how it was important to be a good person, et cetera, the sort of, uh, the inspirational character.

Exactly. Yes, and there certainly has been some shifting of that ground. Sometimes a person will pick up, and I've done the same, picked up a poem, read it and then asked, What does it mean? And then I'm reminded of Archibald MacLeish. His statement in one of his short poems.

A poem should not mean but be What is your view? Is that a simplistic victim? Well, it's it's half of half of the equation. I I see no reason why a poem can't both be and mean, and that's what I would prefer. But in order to avoid the poem, which is of what you described as an inspirational a kind, uh, the emphasis might as well be put on its being rather than its meaning.

That would be a healthy change at a certain time. How does one become a published poet? Let us assume that one has mastered some of the basic skills. If that's the correct terminology, Uh, one at least has has impressed the teacher that there is quality now in what is put to paper.

How does one go about finding a publisher? Uh, does one throw it over the transom of the New Yorker or, uh, find an agent or send out 500 copies of the poem to various magazines named in The Writer's Digest? What kind of advice would you give to people who think they may well be poets?

Well, the usual course is to submit poems to magazines. My advice generally is not to directive, that is, I would say, What magazines do you like looking in? What, what magazines do you like the poems in? And, uh, why don't you try sending your work to those magazines first?

At least I also recommend sending poems by by promising young points to the very best magazines rather than the very worst magazines, which are much easier to be published And of course, I am a firm believer in starting at the top. And, uh, so far as book publication goes, that's very complicated.

Now, uh, commercial publishers will handle books of poems, but most, uh, new writers are published in book form by university presses, which are doing a pretty good job. You started out writing for magazines. How were you discovered to be better than ordinary? I don't know that I sent poems to magazines and some of them were accepted.

And, uh then gradually more were accepted I But did you start out with the best magazines such as poetry? Yes. I think the first, uh, the first point I had published was in Mademoiselle, which used to publish poems more often than I than it did the last time I looked at it, which was years ago.

What I published, I think the second magazine and published memoirs, poetry. And yes, I I think that's the course to phone. That would be the advice you would give. What is the difference between poetry and verse? Well, no, you can elaborate. A whole series of distinctions.

I'm willing to say there is no difference, but, uh, I I suppose verse would be what is written in in in meters, or perhaps even in standard meters, traditional meters and poetry would be that and a whole lot else. Mhm. When you look for inspiration, is it a conscious effort, or do you rely upon instincts that are automatic or well up in you without any provocation?

Mostly the latter. If you're in the habit of writing poems or even just lines that might become poems, you just become sort of aware of possibilities and of that sort, then much more than if you've never done it before. You set out to write a poem and then find a case of writer's block, the blank piece of paper with nothing to put down.

Well, sometimes, But generally I don't get the piece of paper out till I have something to put down. So in that particular for it. So it's different from the type of writing that some other authors do. Writers of novels who have to face that typewriter every day and turn out their required 1000 words if they are too keep to schedule and convinced themselves that they're making progress in the telling of the tale, but that's not the way of knowing work.

My hypothesis or theory is that it's much easier to write poems. For that reason, it's not nearly so much the same as hard work. Day after day. Now there are poets who set themselves schedules and work every day, but mostly they are outnumbered by the laser.

Your breed. Do you throw yourself into the middle of a poem, or do you find it necessary to begin with the opening sentences or structures? Usually, I begin at the beginning, Uh, which then may not end up as the beginning. But I begin at what I see is the beginning mhm and for an end, do you anticipate what the final passages or thoughts will be, or do you discover them as you go?

Almost never do. I know where I'm going to end up, and there's a well known utterance by Frost, which I can't cite exactly. But he says if he knew where he was going to get to at the end of a poem, he would see no reason to begin it.

And that's a natural way to feel I think about is because a part of the pleasure of writing is discovering things is being open to thought and experience and just the way words act. And if you know the conclusion you're going to reach you, I don't think you're quite as much alert or where or open as you are.

So the writing of a poem is a creative adventure for the poet himself. I hope so. That's the way it feels when it's going good. Now you have a poem that you've just completed, and are you reading it for the very first time? No, no, no.

I've read it a few times, but it is a recent poem, and I thought of bringing it because it is set in Florida. Good. It's a part of a group of short poems about the South, which I've been working on, and I think this will be the last one of them.

It has a longest title I've ever written on the train, heading north through Florida late at night and long ago and ending with a line from Thomas Wolfe midnight or After, and the little lights glitter like lost beads from a broken necklace beyond smudged windows lost and irretrievable.

Some promise of romance the southern night never entirely keeps. Unless sleepless, we should pass down dim corridors again to stand braced in a swaying vestibule alone with the darkness and the wind out there, nothing but pines and one new road, perhaps straight and white, aimed at the distant gulf.

And here, from the smoking room, the sudden high pitched 20 of laughter passed from throat to throat, and the great wheels smash and pound beneath our feet. Mm. That's marvelous. It evokes so much of the romance of travel by train, which we've mostly lost. We've lost.

Yes. And I can hear the Clickety clack now and, as you say, the pounding of the wheels against the tracks and the stands of pine outside the windows endlessly passing by and the little lights. And if you're 16 or 17, it's very thrilling. Well, did you write this from a memory of long ago?

Uh, a memory is a big subject with me these days. You go back. Well, obviously, if you wanted to return to the house in Miami where you were raised, you would like to see it thinking that it might you called to mind some emotion of long ago Well, I think it would do that inevitably, but not necessarily in connection with writing in connection with life first and then perhaps with writing.

Are you an emotional person? Would you say No, I wouldn't. But I may be wrong. You are an intellectual in the sense that you're thinking through ideas rather than expressing feelings. Well, in when I write poems, I I don't doubt that I am articulating feelings, but I don't like to think of that directly or primarily.

I think that accompanies the subject and the and the verbal manipulation and all that I like to think of. Uh, I like to focus on something else so that that aspect of it can come out more naturally. And as it were, inevitably, it's going to come out.

I believe that it's a little tricky to concentrate on on writing something that's very moving. You're likely end up very sentimental or even foolish, I think. Do you plan a volume on Florida? No, I don't know that I have that much to say about Florida. I'd be happy to if I could, but I do have many memories about Florida, and since I'm writing about memory now from memory.

Uh, then surely there will be a good deal about Florida and anything I write for the next few years. Don, thank you very much for being with me on conversation. My guest has been Donald Justice, Pulitzer Prize winning poet and member of the English faculty at the University of Florida.

Thank you for being with me on conversation. Yeah. Uh huh. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah, yeah.