Creekwalker: You mentioned the works of Baudelaire and Bellow. “Untitled Thirteen” contains touches of both poets. Otherwise you sound just
like yourself.
Rice: Well, I wouldn’t want to be thought too derivative.
Creekwalker: Behind these declarations I sense some significant theorizing. What do you say to that?
Rice: Of course, I would like my poems themselves to exhibit my persuasions about craftiness. But among persons who are not quick to think
me pompous, I occasionally hear myself saying “Poetry is a liberation of thought and language from complacency on the one hand and juvenile
or surrealistic exhibitionism on the other. From this perspective, the devices and nuances of poetry are probes into the ambiguities and cruxes of
life in search of clarification.” Or I might quote Proust saying “Art is the opposite of habit and banality.” Or paraphrase Stevens saying “A poem
should divulge itself almost successfully.” I may speak of the integrity of the line, its weight and coloration, its fitness for afterthought, whether
one word or ten. Or I may recommend as audience Eliot’s Hypothetical Intelligent Man. Unhappily, I may render a diatribe against the pseudo-
classical fetishes of formulaic meter, rhyme, musicality, and iconic verse forms such as the villanelle. All of which supposes an extremely limited
audience. That is the risk one takes in support of a worthy cause.
Creekwalker: Can you give us some insight into how you became the poet you are ?
Rice: I entered college with no idea that there was such a thing as intellect, my youthful energies having been absorbed by country-town lore and
manners, by sports and music. Even through college, as a dedicated music major, I recall no significant response to the matter of any formal
course, including English and American lit. Out of awakened curiosity, however, out of an aura emanating from the library, from two faculty and a
half dozen provocative fellow students, I emerged into the Naval Air Corps with a vague but enticing notion of what I would later understand to be
a liberal education.
For two years, when the weather closed in on the flight line, to pass the time, deprived of a piano, I committed juvenilia in a pocket notebook.
Which, in the same vein, I continued during the next two years or so of blundering about as I accepted my incapacity for a meaningful career in
music, until one afternoon on a golf course I had an inspiration. I would go for a graduate degree in literature --- modern American, because I
was already musing on the first of four novels I would attempt before recognizing that I had too little voice for story-telling prose and because I
was carrying with me everywhere an anthology of modern poetry.
Creekwalker: That’s going to sound familiar to a lot of people.
Rice: New chapter now. In graduate school I had a severe tendency to neglect my course work and go wandering into whatever esoterica
tempted me, which could have been self-defeating but which led to what I am unembarrassed to call an epiphany in my personal world. Reading
somewhere in symbolic logic, I stumbled into what I think of as “a sense of the trope,” that amorphous, deeply intuitive measure by which one is
assured that language has become poetry. It is still my essential dictum.
Through the remainder of graduate school and my instructorships in a couple of universities, my first poems were published in several journals.
Creekwalker: Any chance we might post them on Creekwalker ?
Rice: Nope. Then came an era in my life which seems to belie the common observation that poets frequently mature early and exhaust their
inspiration by midlife. I was persuaded away from academia by a series of jobs with educational corporations which took me around the world
and presented me with such challenges that for some twenty years I wrote little except in the conduct of business.
Creekwalker: That's surprising. Was that disturbing to you?
Rice: Absolutely. All that time, memories of the poetic act flickered in my conscience as the most esteemable, gratifying, impeccable occupation I
had experienced.
Creekwalker: We know at some point the poet emerged. What happened next?
Rice: Asked, upon my retirement, what I intended to do with myself, I answered that, since I was finally in repossession of my mind, I was going
to turn it loose and follow it wherever it wanted to go. To my immense pleasure, my “sense of the trope” had been lying in wait, intact, even
somehow enriched. From then to now, I am having my true career.
Creekwalker: That’s inspiring. To continue along that line, what can you say about your working methods?
Rice: I imagine that many poets proceed much as I do. Provoked by a subject, an evocative line, a structural device, I begin accumulating
potential language at random, postponing draft decisions until I better understand how the piece wants to present itself, in a sense, working from
inside out, steadily holding to tones and contours that recommend themselves and feeling my way toward effective opening and closing verses.
In this process I find very useful a kind of journal I have kept for years, consisting of whatever adroit expressions or vital information I happen to
think of or come across in my reading or listening --- evading literary theft by ample paraphrase.
Creekwalker: Poetry can lose its way through self-indulgence. In contrast, your work conveys an impression of intelligent rootedness in the
perceivable world.
Rice: A very interesting and complex matter. Despite its hazards, such indulgence can be an advisable, even essential aspect of experiments in
locating a personal idiom, and in its ongoing evolution. Perhaps one cannot reach his fuller achievement as an artist without at certain moments
recklessly trusting his talent.
Creekwalker: You lived and worked in Singapore during a period where, in your leisure time, you collected, co-translated, and edited a bilingual
volume of modern Malay verse. What influence did that experience have on your writing?
Rice: My temporary residence at two sites in Africa and the one in Southeast Asia contributed vastly to my perception of the kinds of things that
happen in a life, made me feel more worldly, and provided me with vital points of comparison between foreign cultures and my own. In time, with
the aid of appropriate research, I felt more secure in responding to one-world settings.
Creekwalker: That is evident from scanning a list of your publications. And that list promises wise advice young poets would be eager to hear
from you. Yes?
Rice: I’m sorry you ask, because I want to say nothing or to be very honest, which will sound forbidding. First, therefore, I must admit to my
complacent belief that making poetry can be the loftiest of human activities. Here, however, are some somber observations.
Masses of people write well in prose, because there are almost universally accepted standards and even some rather widely held variables for
preeminence. Veritably no one can definitively describe the novel ---- or poetry --- or creative writing, for that matter --- “creative” meaning
overreaching the standards, but in unstated ways. Yes, one can say to a student poet “acquaint yourself with what has been and is being said,
and in what manners, so that you know what originality is.” Not easy, but more or less doable. One can define an array of literary terms. Can
identify worthy models to emulate and point to some ways in which they are innovative --- “emulate” meaning copy, which process may be only
very minimally creative. One may praise aspects of the student’s early work which have flair. But then what is there to do beyond sending him
back to his lonely room with admonitions to write, write, write.
He is on his own in a search for his natural subject matter and a distinctive voice.
No one “knows” what a “good” poem is except the poet himself, perhaps,. the editors who consent to publish it, and the readers who come to
admire it because it fits with their preconceptions --- rigidities like my own which I described earlier in this interview. Dozens of editors may
already have rejected the poem. Millions will shrug if it is brought to their attention.
Furthermore, there is almost certainly not a living in it. No book of poems has ever been a best-seller. Even the magazines that pay at all offer
pennies per hour for your labor. The culturally disgraceful circumstance in the current epidemic of lottery-like contests mounted by literary
journals for their own survival is that the poet is petitioned to subsidize his own gratuitous enterprise.
Creekwalker: All that is true, Oliver, for the great majority, but there are some exceptions.
Rice: Yes, and deservedly so. One in ten thousand aspirants, because of supreme talent, coincidental exposures, and the mysterious workings
of reputation, find early and lasting reward. Their ear for expresssivity has coincided with that of a segment of cultivated readers, with whom they
enjoy a consensus of regard. All honor to them. Even they, however, often must look elsewhere for groceries.
The final good words for young persons who find unfinished poems in their heads are: learn to accept the likelihood that you are working for
glory, not money, and cherish your nobility of character --- persist, persist, persist --- and trust your talent until it prevails or decides to give way to
a more promising gift.
Creekwalker: Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts on the craft of poetry with our readers. On that hopeful note, Oliver, I want to
wish you a great new year.
Rice: Thank you for the opportunity to address whoever this very enjoyable conversation reaches.
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