"Interview with a Ghost"

I: What was your greatest failing?

G: You mean the failing that made me great? Or my worst deficiency?

I: Yes.

G: I believed in love, I never learned to sublimate, I never crocheted things or substituted God for my earthly desires or felt the need to jump to my feet when they played “The Star Spangled Banner,” even my poetry I used as a way to entice Eros, Freud tells us that those who live under the sign of Eros suffer suffer suffer though for me it was really more pleasure than suffer suffer suffer… I’m sorry, certain words get stuck in my throat, it’s what happens in death, it’s so hard to get your breath sometimes.

I: Do you think your poems will be read by posterity?

G: Posterity, a quaint concept there, we don’t think about the future that way, it’s too sequential, here everything is a bit like a circle, though that’s not right either, more an ellipse, so that one minute it’s noon, the next it’s three in the afternoon, all rather disorienting…. But to answer your question in a way that your readers might appreciate, I was much too skeptical, or too hedonistic, to believe in “posterity,” only people who have visions—and a lot of money—believe in the future, look at Shelley, all that “Triumph of Life” business, then look at Keats, when Keats had a little money, you know how he feels, two glasses down, well, why not me, why shouldn’t I be counted among the great English poets, but at the end, coughing and coughing, cheated out of his inheritance, having pinched and scraped and barely got by, he ended up disillusioned, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” though of course once he’d given up on posterity it came to him.

I: Can you tell us your views on autobiography as a mode for poetry?

G: I can’t remember the details of what happened only an hour ago, here we really do take short views as Sydney Smith said we should, well, I’m not doing that badly, Sydney Smith, imagine, odd the things that stick, though many things are uncertain here, but as for autobiography, you may or may not believe in it: either way, in the best case it throws up possible ways of thinking yourself into a more truthful, if not a healthier, state of mind, and in the worst case, well, why elaborate, we all know the worst case.

I: Would you elaborate?

G: Just imagine living your life as if it were a factory that churned out poems, so many poems a year, so many publications a decade, so many honors and prizes to hang around your neck, well at least death is good for something, you don’t have the impetus to lead your life in the hope of writing poems about it, though in comparison to the others here, my life seems more concrete for having been written down…of course the disadvantage is that my memories stick a little tighter, it makes me blush to think of the lies I told myself, lies about simple things are the worst, that I didn’t like butter when I really loved it, only the calories made me anxious, now why didn’t I write that down somewhere, fear of being loveless, so much time wasted in fear, well the expiation goes on forever, and my facelessness grows more absolute every moment… still, how odd to hoard the past in order to spend it in a poem.

I: Would you say that poets nowadays don’t worry so much about the past?

G: Perhaps I brooded too much on how my past would look to me, five years, say, from having written it down, but what poets do nowadays isn’t exactly my concern.

I: I think you shortchange yourself.

G: Suckers, the living are often suckers, so easily taken in, praise, praise, praise, always that hunger for praise, and there you are in the middle of it trying to make the life you laid down in your twenties and thirties stretch to cover your necessities in you sixties and seventies, just remember when Socrates uncovers his face as he’s dying of the poison and he tells Crito that he owes a cock to Asclepius and asks that the debt be paid, well, Asclepius needs to be paid, he’s sitting there waiting for his drachmas or whatever they used back then, not drachmas, maybe fish, fish was a rare commodity in those days, the Mediterranean isn’t exactly teeming with fish, but look, poets today tend to be suckers, they buy into the present, what has the present done for any of us lately, but there they are shelling out what they don’t have, they think they can buy off the past by making up the present in their own image, but why write if there’s no past to look forward to?

I: You sound a little bitter.

G: No, no, that’s my realism, how old are you, twenty-five?

I: I should warn you that my generation is sick of greybeard generalizations about us.

G: But there are ways that I was younger than you at my death than you are now.

I: You mean my generation is worried about health insurance just in case one of us happens to go mad?

G: That wasn’t what I was thinking, but yes, if you say so.

I: What do the dead think about, anyway?

G: For me, it’s questions of realism, I mean what’s more real than the body once you don’t have one, when you’re dead you think very hard about the body, especially since the face is so hard to envision, it keeps blurring and dissolving, those of us who think the hardest about the face have become my best friends here.

I: Why the face?

G:  Facelessness is the rule here, and in contrast the face is where poetry happens.

I:  Not the soul?

G: (Laughter.) You really must be twenty-five.

I:  Actually, I’m twenty-nine.

G: Still too young to have had a gall bladder operation.

I:  I wonder if you’d think better of me if I had a brain tumor?

G:  Do you have a brain tumor?

I:  Not that I know of.

G: I like the way you leave room for doubt.

I:  Do you have any advice for young writers?

G: I need to be going now.

I:  Actually, I do have a brain tumor.

G: Then maybe we’ll be seeing more of each other some day soon, won’t we?

I:  You know, if you were alive, I’d probably be in love with you. But in the end, I mean when I died or fell in love with somebody else, I’d have to abandon you.

G:  Then it’s a good thing for both of us I’m already dead.

in memory of Thom Gunn

From Interview with a Ghost. Copyright 2006 by Tom Sleigh. All rights reserved.