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| PULITZER WINNER FOR POETRY | |
 April 10,2002 
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| ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH:
The winner in poetry this year is Carl Dennis, for his collection "Practical
Gods." Dennis is Professor of English at the State University of New
York at Buffalo, and author of seven other volumes of poetry as well as
a book of criticism. He was born in St. Louis and received his doctorate
in English literature at the University of California at Berkeley. Thank
you for being with us, Mr. Dennis. Were you surprised at the news you'd
won a Pulitzer?
CARL DENNIS, Pulitzer Prize, Poetry: I was surprised. I didn't hear anything about it until yesterday, when someone from associated press called me. I still haven't heard anything from the Pulitzer Prize people. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Really? CARL DENNIS: I assume they'll get in touch with me eventually. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: It's something you must sort of have thought about, and yet I suppose you're too modest to have really expected it. CARL DENNIS: Well, you know, if you're a writer, you're... you have to have a combination of humility and ambition. I mean, you have to be humble to know that you don't know anything and need to put yourself to school. And on the other hand, you have to be ambitious enough to believe that if you really do put yourself through school, you will do something worthwhile. So, you know, you have to... when you get a call like that, you, on the one hand, your humble side says... you think of the many people that you admire who haven't won it, and then your ambitious side says something like, "Well, you know, it's not a miscarriage of justice." ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: (Laughs) I love the title of this book: "Practical Gods." There are poems about Saint Francis and the priest of the god Hermes. Why "Practical Gods" as opposed to any other kind of gods? CARL DENNIS: Well, I'm not interested in theology or mythology for their own sake. I'm interested only in what I can... how I can use, really, this perspective to help clarify my own more secular stances toward things. I mean, I want to enter into dialogue that I... I can... I can make use of in my own life. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Would you read the last poem, please, "The God Who Loves You." CARL DENNIS: "It must be troubling for the God who loves you to ponder how much happier you'd be today had you been able to glimpse your many futures. It must be painful for Him to watch you on Friday evenings driving home from the office, content with your week -- three fine houses sold to deserving families -- knowing as he does exactly what would have happened had you gone to your second choice for college, knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted whose ardent opinions on painting and music would have kindled in you a lifelong passion . A life 30 points above the life you're living on any scale of satisfaction. And every point a thorn in the side of the God who loves you. You don't want that, a large- souled man like you who tries to withhold from your wife the day's disappointments so she can save her empathy for the children. And would you want this God to compare your wife with the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus? It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation you'd have enjoyed over there higher in insight than the conversation you're used to. And think how this loving God would feel knowing that the man next in line for your wife would have pleased her more than you ever will, even on your best days when you really try. Can you sleep at night believing a God like that is pacing His cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives, you're spared by ignorance? The difference between what is and what could have been will remain alive for Him even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill running out in the snow for the morning paper, losing 11 years that the God who loves you will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene unless you come to the rescue by imagining Him no wiser than you are, no God at all, only a friend no closer than the actual friend you made at college, the one you haven't written in months. Sit down tonight and write Him about the life you can talk about with a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed, which for all you know is the life you've chosen." ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Mr. Dennis, you've written that what matters most in a poem is the voice, the personality inviting the reader to listen, which I want to do when I hear your voice. Tell us about it. How do you get it? How do you arrive at this tone and this way of inviting me in? CARL DENNIS: I can't really describe the process, but, you know, I want to create an individual voice that the listener will find it worthwhile to engage with, and an individual talking to individuals, to an individual, I think that's what the situation of poetry is. I've been very moved by something that Emerson wrote in his journals. He said he tried to write always for the unknown friend. I like "friend," of course, because you want a reader who's sympathetic and discriminating. But "friend" in the singular, not the plural, because you don't want a corporate entity, you want to be talking to an individual; an unknown, because you don't know... you can't pitch your poem toward any easy appeal in terms of class or race or nationality. You have to try to reach something more fundamental than that. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: When and how did you decide to become a poet? CARL DENNIS: Well, actually, I think I was about 28, and I was already here teaching at Buffalo. And I found that writing poetry-- which I didn't have a lot of time for then, because I was a new teacher-- was the thing that gave me the most pleasure, the thing I felt most alive when I was doing. So I... I wanted to do as much of it as I could. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Is it partly to affirm this individual voice that you just talked about that you wanted to become a poet? It's... there aren't that many places where the individual voice is so affirmed as in poetry. CARL DENNIS: Well, I would agree that it's... it's the medium or it's the kind of literature where you have a most intimate and direct relationship between writer and reader. You don't... you don't come at the reader with ideas and opinions, you try to bring a whole person into the poem, and you have a sense... when it works, you have a sense of immediate contact with another person. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Do you think that winning a Pulitzer will make any difference in your work? CARL DENNIS: I don't think in my work. I mean, in my life, just because I will have more readers, and very practically, I won't be able... I'll be able to assume that my... I won't have to fight for another publisher. I will assume that my present publisher will be interested in my next book. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: (Laughs) Carl Dennis, congratulations, again, and thanks for being with us. CARL DENNIS: Thank you. |
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