Photograph by LaVerne Harrell Clark 02/17/1971

David Ignatow keeps an apartment in Queens close to York College where he teaches—four small rooms with bare walls. The windows of the living-room look out on a quaint cemetery dating back to the late 1700s. On its far side runs the BMT Jamaica subway line, one of the few remaining elevated trains; every so often one hears the sound of the train approaching the 168th Street station. The sparseness of the apartment does not suggest poverty, but nor are there indications of an aesthetically enriched life: Ignatow has no study. He maintains a modest library, two or three filing cabinets, and a typewriter, all in the bedroom.

Mr. Ignatow, who is now in his early sixties, has grown a prominent silver-white moustache over the past few years which has served to tone down what was a rather severe demeanor. His voice is somewhat high-pitched and hoarse, with little of the accent one would assume from a Brooklyn upbringing.

The poet is a singular instance of a man rising to eminence late in life. He tried for years to be a businessman, a career for which he was not suited. He wrote poems during this time, and much that he observed with a photographer's eye of everyday life in the business world is incorporated in his writing. At first, his career as a poet was no more successful than his business practice. A study of his Notebooks indicates the struggle against academic jealousies and prejudice, and the neglect and hostility of his contemporaries, especially in the forties. Now it appears his time has come. He has written and published, never with great success, but with an increasing reputation (his last two books are Facing the Tree, 1975, and Tread the Dark, 1978) that has brought him honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bollinger Prize, and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters “for a lifetime of creative achievement.”

INTERVIEWER

Do you consider yourself vulnerable?

DAVID IGNATOW

Vulnerable, damn right. But the fear of being vulnerable prompts me into bringing myself forward. It's like being on the battlefield. As you engage in battle, you begin to feel fear; but as you make contact with the enemy, he's almost your friend because he's reducing the fear to excitement and participation. In Facing the Tree there's a poem about Croatian guerrillas who are being executed, and they keep identifying with the executioner. It's strange. It's terribly ironical.

INTERVIEWER

In your poems where you show your anger do you feel a danger in having your vulnerability misunderstood?

IGNATOW

I couldn't care less. This is what I have to feel, this is what I have to write. This is the life, this is the life. I'm living it.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel “visceral” is an accurate description of your poetry?

IGNATOW

Very much so. My poetry is a gut reaction. I've lived a gut life for so many years, and I guess I still do. When we talk of the gut, I mean literally sometimes being worried where I'm going to get the money for the next rent. Always living on the fucking edge.

INTERVIEWER

Anthony Burgess said, “The scientific approach to life is not really appropriate to states of visceral anguish . . . ”

IGNATOW

That's very good. Visceral anguish is really survivor's experience, he who fights his way back from the edge of a cliff or burrows his way out of a locked cage, out of the coal mine . . . a perpetual struggle.

INTERVIEWER

What is the worst thing that could happen to you?

IGNATOW

Well . . . losing my job, being out of money. Problems of love, problems of human relationships are secondary. Emotional problems have a way of resolving themselves.

INTERVIEWER

You write in the Notebooks that pain is your favorite subject. Do you still believe that?

IGNATOW

I have probably passed that point in my life. Things have changed. I don't intend to go on living a life of pain and celebrating pain. I have experienced a tremendous joy in the last three years. I've been fantastically happy in long spurts. This is something I haven't had for many years.

INTERVIEWER

Over the years, you seem to have become more preoccupied with prose poems. Does this visual change in your work correspond to the way you've changed your life? Have you become impatient, or more patient with yourself?

IGNATOW

Well, the lyric has limitations. I've found myself impatient with the lyric form. And that's the reason I changed my style, a rebellion against the traditional, contemporary, lyric form of, say, William Carlos Williams. I had had it that way. I found my language was responding to the form rather than to my sensibilities. I was getting a little too self-conscious about it. So I decided: Cut loose and give emphasis to the imagination rather than to the line. By “imagination” I mean also the intelligence within the imagination, giving the intelligence its opportunity to explore the imagination as far as it will go. Of course it has a form, but it's a form that constantly renews itself because the intelligence is restless. Emotions tend to repeat themselves over and over again, whereas the intelligence is constantly renewing itself, recreating itself. Therefore, I feel in the prose poems the emphasis is on the intelligence with an undercurrent of emotion. In the lyric form the emphasis was on the emotion and the intellect was the undercurrent. I'm also following Pound's rule, that poetry should be as good as good prose. That it's a vernacular, colloquial thing. And vernacular, the colloquial, doesn't sing. It talks. If you want to sing, then you write an elevated line, an elevated language. Occasionally, I'll do that. There are moments. But, on the whole, the contemporary tradition is talking. And if that's the case, then why not come out and use the prose line?

INTERVIEWER

When you started to write, who were your chief influences?

IGNATOW

At first I was very pleased to model myself on Hart Crane. But then I knew I wasn't a Crane temperament; I felt much more closely aligned with Whitman, so I began to model myself on him. Then I found that I couldn't quite grasp the Whitman thing because he was just a little too euphoric for me. So I went away from him and I went to Williams. Williams repelled me at first. He repelled me because he was so . . . I felt he was so literal, so prosy. Where is the poetry in all this? I kept thinking. And then all the praise he was getting from people had me hanging on the ropes. I said, I've got to come back and read him again. So I kept going back and reading him. And I was finding myself in experiences which were shockingly similar to the experiences he was recounting in his work. And when I started to write these experiences, I saw that I was using his techniques. There was no choice. But then, my life diverged from his in many respects. First of all, he was a physician. And my lifestyle went in the opposite direction. So I began to reshape the technique according to my lifestyle. Then I met César Vallejo on the page and, boy, he flipped me out! Then, I said, I'm going to let loose.