DETRO: Your wife has told me you’ve been writing daily since about the age of twelve. Is there a point you can identify when you became a poet, or have you always been of that sensibility?

PATCHEN: That’s a difficult question, and therefore a good one. I’d say I had a consciousness of being a poet when I first realized that the medium of writing had something in it more than just communication—the kind one had with friends or family. That one is very fortunate—something happens, and I suppose it had to do with, you know, with being a poet and writing poetry.

The thing that’s always grabbed me with your works is the very high and highly refined degree of magic. Do you work for it—or does it just happen?

It’s interesting you should say that, because that which is called a sense of magic is to me the great strain which separates versifiers and writers of poetry. Now I’m not talking about my own work, or making any assessment of it—I’m simply talking about magic as I think of it, and this is associated too with the only possible reason I can think of as a cause for my beginning to write. That is, my grandfather who was a Scot and who had a wonderful sense of humor, and a tradition going back to the time of Burns, whose poetry he knew thoroughly, whose poetry he read to me when I was a little boy, had this bardic strain very definitely; and in the stories he told me, in the sense I had about him, there was what you call magic.

And the old druidic thing, poet as priest?

Exactly.

I was rereading some of your work the other night, and which poem is it that refers to—I take it to mean levels of being and where we are now must always attempt in honesty to match up with another version of ourselves. What do you mean in that poem?

You have me stumped. I don’t offhand know which of the poems you have in mind. I would think that almost any poem of length of mine would have something of that theme, the ascendency of person out of chaos and non-being through feeling, through love.

Here we are—Cloth of the Tempest. ‘The one life must be attempted with the other, that we may embark upon the fiery work for which we were certainly made.’ That seems to me to be an extremely priestly statement, in the sense where using the word priest—

You are hitting close to home with almost everything you say—in that, for instance, what you’ve said just now reminds me that my mother had the thought and the hope that I would become a priest. I was raised a Catholic, and Mother is a very devout Catholic. And the poem you mention and the levels of being in it, I think it refers primarily to the miraculous which is in the commonplace.

But there was no strict reference to another level of being that’s concurrent with what we’re doing right now, here and now on the temporal level.

No. There is always, of course, between words and the meaning of words, an area which is not to be penetrated. I think this is, once again, the region of magic, the place of the priestly interpreter of nature, the man who identifies himself with all things and with all beings, and who suffers and exalts with all of these.

I’m wondering, as you are a major influence upon me and many other poets of my age, what are your own influences?

They are as varied, I imagine, as your own, and as difficult to pin down. I would be hard put to say whether I was more influenced by poets or by people in general. I have found that oftentimes a poet’s work had meant something more to me as it is revealed by association with a person.

I don’t quite—

I mean that in many cases the poem misses its mark with me, but very rarely do people miss the mark.

 Many poets are concerning themselves more and more with legitimate theatre and films. I have always been of the opinion your Journal of Albion Moonlight would make a magnificent film. Have you done anything in this are yet, or a script?

Not in any fashion satisfactory to me. I wrote a play which was performed but which was never satisfactorily developed. I mean, as it happened during the performance of the play, things beyond my control made it impossible for me to make certain corrections from the performance on the stage which I thought necessary.

Are you speaking of your physical ailments?

Yes and no. But in any case, the plat you refer to had not been published. I’ve never felt that it was in publishable form.

Are you working on the play now?

I would hedge on that by saying that should an opportunity arise where I could work with a dramatic group in close association, I probably would complete the revisions. In other words, the play which was produced is very far from being the play which I now envision—or envisioned. It’s the sort of thing that happens, I guess, to poets, probably more often to poets than to playwrights, but revision seems to be sort of the order of the animal.

They’re not written but rewritten.

That’s exactly right.

Do you still write daily?

I have in the last—oh fifteen years, as you know—done a great deal of graphic work, and it happens that very often my writing with pen is interrupted by my writing with my brush—but I think of both as writing. In other words, I don’t consider myself to be a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend. It gives an extra dimension to the medium of words.

 Who was it—Margaret Rigg?—wrote that your work with paintbrush and words reminded her of the Keltic Illuminated Manuscripts. I think it’s really much more basic than that—in fact, I’ve seen many of your paintings and they seemed to be original in the strictest sense; that is, they incorporate people, and what a person is to a high degree what he’ll see in the painting. Is this a conscious effort on your part?

What I say now will probably sound like false modesty. I don’t mean it to be, but what you have been kind enough to call originality in the painting is, from my point of view, the result of ignorance. In other words, were I a painter I feel that this particular aspect of my work would not stand out as it does. This is to devalue it, of course.

Then your poetry and prose will never take a back seat to your painting?

No. This does not mean that I value one medium over the other. It’s just that I feel my own nature, temperament, talents or whatever, are more verbal than visual. And I would think that in the cases of the greatest painters there is, once again, and this will refute what I have just said, a quality of searching, of clumsiness in the craft almost—like Van Gogh for example, whose breaking with tradition seems almost as though he didn’t know what to do next. And I think this is the stance of the creator.

I think he was pretty much controlled by things, forces, that he could neither understand nor control.

This is true. I would withdraw his name. You are probably thinking of the difficulties which led him to the miserable years in the asylum, and so on. I would withdraw his name and insert in its stead the name of almost any creative artist, and say once again I feel that in the act of creation there is always a losing of contact with the medium; and when this happens to a marked degree, as happened in the case of someone like Picasso at a certain point, it leads to a breakthrough. In other words, what the artist has no though of becomes what other artists are full of—that is, if the creation is successful.

Then if you’re true to your own medium you will communicate. Or are you talking about a gestalt kind of thing?

No. I’m talking about a type of creative person who is closer to me than some others. For instance, a man like Paul Klee. I feel that every time he approached a new canvas it was with a feeling that ‘well, here I am, I know nothing about painting, let’s learn something, let’s feel something’—and this is what distinguishes the artist of the first rank, the innovator, the man who destroys, from the man who walks in the footsteps of another. You cannot express yourself without admitting, it seems to me, that no true self-expression is possible. It’ll have to be left until tomorrow, you’ll have to try it again. Another man will have to try it tomorrow.

It seems to me that you’re saying—well, despite the huge amount of work you’ve done, are you saying that nothing is ever enough, that somebody else will have to finish the job?

Of course your own job is one thing. The moment the artists is asked about his influences he of necessity flounders, I believe. Because it is not the nature of the artist to know what his true influences are, or what they have been, and I’m not by this statement saying that it remains for a third party to know. I think that the mystery of life will ring in the work, and when it rings most strongly, truly and honestly, it will ring with a sense of mystery.

Wonder—

Of wonder, childlike wonder. I think of someone like Kelderly who, like Van Gogh, ended his life in an asylum. He had a sense of wonder, a sense of identification with everything that lived, with everything that had its being around him, much in the way that, to take an extremely different personality, Immanuel Kant—

This country still hasn’t got over its seemingly native distrust of the poet, Capital P. I know you’ve been through some rough times, and it is hard for any poet to keep a roof over his head through poetry alone. How have you managed to retain your sense of wonder and have such a nice environment around you?

My only answer to that is to say that I cannot conceive of any way in which I could lose the sense of wonder. To me that would be death.

Then it’s obviously the reason why you don’t use painkilling drugs despite your back injury.

That is the reason.

Are you in pain now?

Yes.

Your collection, when is it coming out?

The selected poems, my first, is scheduled for publication with New Directions. It’s been a sad task for me to make the choices and to assemble this first collection because it meant choosing on of three poems from my published works—in other words, I had to exclude two of every three.

Was it commercially impossible to bring together all of your published poems?

I think the answer lies in the fact that this will be a volume which is not of a size usually attempted today by/for commercial reasons—it will run upwards of 500 pages, and will represent roughly a third of my published works. I emphasize the published works, because I have a great volume of work which is unpublished as yet.

At this point in your career do you submit for publication, or is whatever you approve acceptable to your publisher?

Yes, everything I do finds ready publication. I would put it that way because at the moment I have, and this has been try now for some ten years, I have three publishers.

I didn’t know that.

Yes, the problem of publishing is one I have never had.

Who did the old Padell books—they were of beautiful design.

I have, as much as I could manage, had a hand in the design of all my books. More in the case of the Padell books which were done when I lived in New York City than the books which were done when I lived at a distance—such as books that are appearing now from New York.

Standard type of question: what, besides how to get a good job—what advice would you give to younger poets?

I would advise the young poet in no way at all. I would offer no one advice. This again seems, suppose, an evasion of your question—but I have consistently refused to comment on the work sent to me. Not that I’m not concerned, and vitally concerned, with the work of young poets, but I believe it is no service to them to have someone they may have a special feeling about make a black and white statement about their work. I think this is not helpful—it is again a personal thing with me. It was not something helpful to me when I was a young poet. I think of the tragic case of Hart Crane who not only asked for advice but accepted it. And he accepted advice from poets who were diametrically opposed to him temperamentally—in a craft sense, and in every possible way. Of course I feel, too, as a footnote to that, that every true poet is one who cannot be successfully imitated, and those who fall into the error of such imitations usually end with a product of their own only after struggling to throw off influences. In other words, it’s very natural for the young poet to admire older members of his craft and to consciously and unconsciously imitate them—but as he gains confidence in his ability to express what he wants to say and as he finds what I’d call his own voice, all of this sort of falls away, and it becomes then a question of the poet saying: yes, I admire, I very much admire the work of such-and-such a poet—but the discerning listener or critic will understand that this does not by any means imply that he is imitative of that poet.

Your effect on my work, I’d say, is not technical, but more of a conceptual thing opening up areas of consideration, and this happened many years ago. Something that has bothered me is your political poetry—it’s a stuffy idea of mine that poets are simply apolitical, or should be.

I would react to that by saying that I have never written political poetry. I know what you have in mind, the fact that when I started to work in the field of poetry, strictly when I started to get books published, there was a kind of great depression in this country. No one had jobs, no one had hope, no one had anything, and particularly was this true for the young. There seemed no way out at all, and this was reflected in the work of the times, and as time passed much of the work acquired the label of proletarian literature, or political writing, or what have you.