Marsh:
Well, in so far as “touch has a memory,” your children remember being bathed right or bathed in this aesthetic caring way—Lee:
—and they carry that with them and they perpetuate it. Other forms of consciousness perpetuate and yield their own kinds of actions and words and create other kinds of value. But I would say that aesthetic consciousness is the thing that we have that is closest to whole consciousness: all consciousness.Marsh:
As your bathing example suggests, you’re really concerned with somehow bringing spirit and body close together, if indeed you ever believed they are apart. Do you think poetry has a special mission to do that?Lee:
I do, yeah. I think that the poem reproduces consciousness in the reader and even adjusts the reader’s consciousness, and so whatever presence we encounter in a poem, if that presence is a deep one, full of passion and accounting for all of who we are as human beings, that’s what we’ve made in the world, and then the reader can encounter that. But if we’re putting out another kind of presence in a poem, then that is what the reader gets too. So if it’s a maimed presence, or I should say, only a maimed presence or only a hurt presence, a wounded presence, that’s what we’re giving the reader, and that’s what we’re putting out in the world. So it seems to me that in the work of art there is a huge foreground to it, where we’re working on our own presence, our own consciousness, and when we bring a poem to fruition it’s everything we are up to that point as much as possible. Hopefully it’s something that the reader can encounter and it can sustain a reader. I know that poems have sustained me in really tough times.Marsh:
Which ones?Lee:
Like “West Running Brook.” I don’t even know why I read that poem over and over and over again, and every time I read it I would feel comforted. There was something about the mystery in that poem. I knew I was close to something mysterious, directive. Many of Phil Levine’s poems too. I know you talked to him.Marsh:
I asked him if he was a religious poet; he said yes.Lee:
I would say he’s a religious poet. I would say that the presence in his poems is a pretty whole presence. It accounts for the fact that the self we encounter in that poem is very, very resonating. Maybe all poems are religious. Maybe we need to take that word back from formal religion. Maybe all art is religious.