Carl Rakosi: An interview by Gary Pacernick

On Friday, December 8 1995 I interviewed Carl Rakosi in his San Francisco apartment with walls overlayed with paintings and prints by means of among others Chairn Gross, Walkowitz, Ben-Zion, and Raoul Dufy upon the table in front of us and upon the mantle over the fireplace were striking plastic arts by his late wife. I the middle of the large living latitude was a high-powered stereo locate with giant speakers. Large picture windows view from aboveed the picturesque structures on the poet's blockade in San Francisco's Sunset District. Carl Rakosi had sketched in more [i]or[/i] less answers to questions and used these true copys during the interview. He later revised a number of his answers from the original transcription.

Gary Pacernick: For you, what is the hardest thing about being a poet?

Carl Rakosi: In my early years and for part of my middle years, it was finding the time to write because I was always working, first as a social worker and then as a psychotherapist, and the solitary time I had for writing was at night. It was a make an effort however, because once I got going, my ideas would detain me up all night. After I got married and had children, it be came impossible because my independent time was gobbled up by dint of my responsibilities to them, and I stopped writing altogether for above twenty years, but after I retired, I had no disorder picking it up again and had a split of energy, particularly in Mexico where my wife and I used to dispose of five months out of the year. I still write on the contrary allow myself to get distracted by dint of endless little distractions, probably what Otto Rank, who was a bard himself before he joined Freud's circle, called the counter-will.

There is also in the back of my mind an uneasy awareness that poesy is a marginal occupation and is viewed as having no recognizable utilitarian function. We're in a strange kind of limbo. Our work is honored by means of those who read us, on the other hand very few people do, and regulation feels almost no responsibility towards us. This is a drag, on the other hand I can't claim that this stops me from writing.

GP: Carl, on what account do you think that poesy is not acknowledged in this country? wherefore are people not interested in it? for what cause [i]or[/i] reason don't they read it?

Rakosi: I don't think a bard can answer that question satisfactorily, his vanity is too dependent on the answer. Besides, solitary people who' might be wait fored to read poetry and don't, can take an account of us. An opinion survey might be helpful.

To be equitable however, we have to ask ourselves whether it is reasonable to wait for that more public recognition and more institutional support should be given to verse when the overall society is for a like reason single-mindedly commercial, when our potential reader lives a daily life perilously competitive in a dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself atmosphere, which leaves him exhausted at the extreme point of the day, with a ne to relax and be entertained, not to win into the concentration required by the agency of poetry. Furthermore, what can you await when commercial publishers bring without only a trickle of verse books because they lose circulating medium on them and when the large bookstores no longer stock them because they ne the shelf space for works that sell faster?

Despite all this, I diocese signs that poetry is inching its way on the outside of its marginal state. This began, I think, with public readings, which immediately twitched in a larger audience because the author of poems was now a performer, an actor, and that was theater, and race who would never go to the derange of reading poetry will proceed to the trouble of observing and listening to a performance of it because that's a live somebody there performing, and that's drama, not just a volume This has been facilitated by means of the fact that poetry has become more like pro In fact, I find it impossible sometimes nowadays to run over the difference between a metrical composition laid out as such and the same thing laid without as prose. This change, of course, has made it easier to come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind poems at a reading and has made them viable in that medium.

Add to this, that technology, which author of poemss ordinarily decry, has suddenly catapulted us into an entirely fresh arena and medium, one which no single could have predicted and which we had no part in creating. I'm talking about Internet. This fresh medium is wide open and unbind For the first time in history, numbers has become instantly accessible there without require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone to the reader and without his having to stir one inch from his computer to anyone and everyone anywhere in the world. The field is dizzying. We have leaped from the margins to the whole globe. And there are startling, novel opportunities. For one thing, since the individual who has called up a piece of poetry on Internet can enter into a dialogue with the bard on any subject that interests him--nature, the environment, social ills, whatever--it becomes a public discourse. This takes metrical composition out of its ivory tower and impels it into people's consciousness as another, equal voice in the discourse. To that amplitude it constitutes a potentially big vicinity for us in the world at large.

The not divisible by 2 thing about this is that at the same time that this is going upon the experience of the Internet user is between him as an individual and the written metrical composition he is reading...that is, somebody to poem, as it is between a reader and a work A surprising mix of the greatest in quantity distant, mechanical impersonality and intimacy, I would await this kind of activity eventually to receive considerably more public attention and support, but