LIFE OF THE POET(INTERVIEW)

Anonymous
BZ Niditch- the poet

A. You are a poet of time and place. Am I correct?

BZ. Writing and living in New England in 1972 at a time of confessional poetry. It was no

accident that there is a subsequent decline in confessional religion in the American Sixties as it

happened in England in the 18th century with the rise of Blakeanism and romanticism and the

beginning of a loss of theism, Manichaeism, and subsequent Methodism, and in Russia with

Blok, Mayakovsky in the twentieth century and the emergence of modernism was the loss of any

Russian religion. You see with a void of religious sensibility becomes a void of sense.

A. How did you inform yourself in your dramatic and traumatic era of like minded poets.

BZ. I studied with fine critics like Helen Vendler who liked my poem on Auden.

A. You like Auden and Eliot.

BZ. Yes their conversations and conversions had a consuming influence.

A. You lived in the Fifities with Mccarthy and Stalin  still around.

BZ. Gorky knew in his maxim "America and Russia, just across the Bay."

A. The peaceniks were popular as well.

BZ. Any war of words served like borscht cold and hot made few of us lukewarm to explore our

soup full of generic poetry.

A. What has happened to American poetry ?

BZ. Identity politics took away the poet's self motivation and casts out imagination. That takes

away your ambiguity. Also such identity politics marginalizes and homogenizes a poet and

then to make it generational was worse when the son or daughter of a poet tries to play a

part and take the role in a future nepotism , like the political dynasties it's all over. Our

individuality is our safe self hood in which the state does not confer its motivation on our state of

mind and leads to a state of a soulless despondency and state despotism.

A. Who did this?

BZ. The media taking its cue from Antonio Gramsci decided who was the best fit to destroy

the idols of capitalism yet with its best kept secret, its language which is our last defense of

culture as Orwell well knew. The media penetrate and perpetrated its values everywhere in the

culture in the name of social justice. It sounds so noble.

A. What of Russia?

BZ.  Look what the Stalinists did even earlier with Freudian or Western psychiatry by giving out

poison pills to alter its greatest minds and its hardened life savers to the masses sensibly and

ostensibly to alleviate their long suffering revamping its medicinal and mind altering chemicals

into a world of tranquilized torture system which the dissidents exposed so brilliantly about its

system, how the state bureaucrats took over Marx's sociology to become Lenin's economic hacks

which potentially and eventually gave us the reality which gave birth to a Stalinist genetics fraud

like Lysenko as the culture collapsed except for its brave dissidents. Look what happened to

Doystoevskian, Tolstoyan, Berdyaevian or Soloviev's Russian Christianity and to the humanity of

Russia after the Revolution.

A. And what happened to America?

BZ. When Russia was a nightmare America was still a life of dreams.

A. And now?

BZ. Gorky's maxim comes to mind , Russia and America are just across the bay.

A. So we are approaching the Russian model? Are you serious?

BZ. Narcissism is close to the cult and occult of fascism.Sadly it began in earnest of the Sixties.

We are still walking through the same hall of mirrors. The media and camera tell it all.

A. Is that what your novel "Movie Brats" of a movie within the reality of a movie is about.

BZ. Yes, how Hollywood has a Russian -American plot always on the set in America as she

invests her life in the so called master minds of the mass media and goes down the tubes.

A. How can it be changed?

BZ. There must come a new Samisdat alternative to mass popular culture.

A. But it would be a minority of one.

BZ. One who believes in the individual soul has the life of the poet within,leading to the survival

and revival of a culture.

A. What has been your literary interests? Did it coincide with your political thought?

BZ- I probably take a French view for I share Faulkner's hopes that through Christian brotherhood

Southern whites and people of color would embrace. I myself marched with Dr. King. Jewish

people were in the front for equality. But to witness some in the black community embrace a

race based  sympathy for a Farrakhan Islam of fascism and anti-semitism and to have such

people not realize the black slave basis and racism in Islam and to turn on Jewish people was

shocking to me. For a fan of Ellison  and Baldwin, it's unimaginable that there would be

such a literary arbitrary backlash toward the Jews. That the Germany of Beethoven and Mann

would embrace Herr Hitler or the Russia of the great novelists and play writes would have Stalin

in power for so long sometimes still confounds me. I'm like an enfant terrible.

A. You take a French view of culture?

BZ. Pascal, Stendahl, Proust, Mauriac, the Maritains, Gide, Sartre, Weil. Then down the road to

deconstructionism. Critics have pointed out to me Beckett connection in my plays and prose.

A. What has happened to France.

BZ. A segment of North African immigrants go along with Jihad; hence a cultural divide, racism

and anti semitism.

A. You were in your youth a Roosevelt liberal.

BZ. Then after the war we started to see in the U.S. students from Spain arrive and I hoped to

meet a Republican. But Dulles brought in the sons of Franco followers. I met one fellow whose

father fought in Russia for Franco. Franco had some Jewish sympathy within his genes he knew

every Spanish soul has some Jewish roots, even himself.

A. You have Sephardic roots.

BZ. Mendes, on my mother's side, we received Pierre Mendes- France at Brandeis when he lost

his seat in Grenoble to a Gaullist;have a stamp of him, a hero of France.

A. You became more conservative?

BZ. I stayed a classical liberal.

A. Are you in shock now.

BZ. To see the party of Roosevelt embrace racism of a different color and the Moslem

Brotherhood, Hezbollah etc. is to lose face and faith in the democratic divide.Yet French

writers are speaking about Islam's demographic desires in novels and are well aware of it as

in the popular novelist Houellebecq's "Submission".

A. Which Italian writers do you like?

BZ. Svevo, Moravia.

A. And English?

BZ. Dickens, Orwell, Graham Greene and the Anglo- American, Henry James.

A. Jewish writers.

BZ. Enjoy the Israelis except when they are consciously self-haters and berate themselves

for the other narrative which is false. It's sad to read non believer Israeli writers.

A. You hid yourself for many years.

BZ. I do not like public posturing or any pose imposing on me.

A- Do you write every day?

BZ. Poetry,plays, fiction, maxims.

A- Did the internet help.

BZ. I enjoy feedback from my readers.