Envy and Dialectic
The *Paris Review* will never interview me.
If they did I’d go on and on
with fractious dicta and dreary nostalgia
of the sort that never get in my poems.
Eventually they’d have to publish
several volumes of interviews
with me,
like those someone did with Milosz
so that he could discuss
the effect of German bullets on strolls in Warsaw
and modern verse,
or the one he arranged so his friend Wat
could reminisce
about his stay in nine Gulag camps.
They are full, such books, of sardonic, distanced,
aphoristic, humanistic wit,
and are read by few
outside their true audience,
which is History itself. Which is not
what marxists or ex-marxists
or even liberal Polish quasi-Catholics
think, but a roaring monster –
the roar so terrible it is the monster.
An aggrieved, outraged roar
like that of an Inquisitor
reading Spinoza, or
a Fox News commentator,
an abuser charged with abuse,
a hundred Kansas fathers learning
their daughters are pregnant lesbian Darwinists.
You can hear it, a visceral rumble,
in everything that happens
and the background of sweet silent thought.
It can’t be, can it, the sensation
I interpret as signals from the muse?
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