Natalia Carbajosa

     Scott Hightower (Texas, USA) is the author of three poetry books (Tin Can Tourist, 2001, Natural Trouble, 2003, and Part of the Bargain, 2005) which have received unanimous acknowledgment in the American literary scene. His creations possess the eclectic style of the urban lyric, and achieve a somewhat detached, paradoxical balance between present and past, joy and sorrow, the individual anecdote and the transcendent, universal truth.
     Scott visited some contributors of El coloquio de los perros recently in Cartagena; a corpulent, bearded man in his fifties, with blue-grayish piercing eyes and a mischievous smile (yes, there remains something healthfully childish in his demeanour), affable in voice and gesture, openly willing to share friendship and conversation before a glass of wine or a local dish. With him we talked at length while strolling along the town and welcomed his unaffected wisdom on poetry, life, and may other issues.

     —EL COLOQUIO DE LOS PERROS: Scott, I would like to ask you, in first place, about the origins and the reception context of your poetry within the American tradition. You have affirmed that, in a way, you belong to W.H. Auden’s school, as you were lectured at College by some of his former students. Do you see yourself, then, ‘inserted’ in a specific tradition and, if so, in which concrete aspects?

     —SCOTT HIGHTOWER: Historically we spring out of English poets: Shakespeare, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Browning, Wordsworth... Auden. For U.S. English writers, Auden both underscored a reverence for our European roots and at the same time adjured us to write about the marvelous and murderous parts of our present world. Out of Northeast United States, I have drawn from Elizabeth Bishop via Richard Howard and Alfred Corn. Out the Western U.S. tradition I have drawn from Richard Hugo and William Matthews.

     —ECP: Which authors, apart from Auden (American or foreign, ancient or contemporary), do you mostly credit?

     —SH: Marie Ponsot guided me to a stable practice. She also pointed me to Blake and taught me Trilogy and the early poems of H.D. Joseph Maloff, a professor of my undergrad years at the University of Texas, taught me a lot about prosody. After that, J.D. McClatchy was my prosody teacher at graduate school at Columbia. I also draw from ancient tropes: Callimacus, Theocritus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil, Mallarme.

     —ECP: There exist some recurrent topics in your poetry: childhood at a Texas farm (i.e., family and landscape memories, the trouble of growing up), popular culture in urban life (you have been living in NYC for the last thirty years), the Spanish Civil War and subsequent exile, to which you are particularly attached by personal circumstances… how do these and other topics turn into poems?

     —SH: The trigger for writing poems heavily based on historical material is to find my own way in; how can my own voice inhabit the holy space the poem already occupies. It is not an issue of originality. It is an issue of inhabitation and authenticity.

     —ECP: In Spain, for the past decades there has been a predominant, much abused poetic current, which is called “poesía de la experiencia”, partly comparable to the Anglo-American “confessional poets”. In certain ways, your work resembles this kind of poetry, but personally I find in it a quality of subtleness, irony and elusiveness that happily avoids easy labelling. How do you see it yourself?

     —SH: I think people are always finding ways of talking about how a poem gets out of a poet’s head and onto paper; the personal or particular voice becoming public or universal. For me poetry is a two-headed craft tradition... it is part written and part spoken.

     —ECP: All poets are forced to establish a relationship, not always smooth and almost never quite fixed, between language and life. Which is yours at the present moment?

     —SH: As I have said, in my case, at this time, much of my work is with the public
or universal finding habitation in my personal voice. I think the old adage about “show don’t tell” has led some to an anemic poetics. Telling can also be chilling and sometimes beautiful. Equally, some seem overly preoccupied with improvisation and the materiality of the language at the expense of crafted meaning and communication. I personally am enamored with a well wrought sentence. And I like music and lucid meaning together.

     —ECP: You take active part in the NYC poetry scenery, enhancing relationships among younger authors, teaching creative writing and participating in numerous events. Which remarkable tendencies are now developing around you?

     —SH: I write lots of reviews. Translation is a new currency. I have begun writing some personal essays. In the States there is quite a tumult of poetry at this moment. I have been enjoying the work of Catherine Bowman, Kathy Fagan, Rigoberto González, Patricia Spears Jones, Deborah Bogen, William Wenthe, Vievee Francis, Amy Lemmon, Idra Novey, to name just a few.

     —ECP: Part of the Bargain, your latest book, awarded with the 2004 Hayden Carruth Award, exhibits a faustian title that reveals a vital stance. Could you explain it to us?

     —SH: The epigraph to the book is a line from Goethe: «Behold how in the evening sunset-glow / The green encircled hamlets glitter». For me it is a softer but similar resonation as in Jesus’s «...I came not to send Peace: but as a sword». It is about a tension and an integrity that can only be resolved in an act of balance. Yes, “vital”. That is a very good word.

     —ECP: You are working on a new book, Self-Evident. Are your new poems heading for undiscovered paths, or do they still dwell in your usual landscapes?

     —SH: Self-Evident is closer to France and the Enlightenment’s notion of liberty than to rural Texas and the Medieval. Thus it is a small segue into the Spanish Civil War. All the books are really about writing; attempting to correlate human aesthetic expression with earthly expression... varying modes of innocence and brutality... sort of back to Blake again.

     —ECP: This is the last one, Scott. In your opinion, is there an ethos attached to poetry? Is poetry a life choice, a (if I dare say) political choice, a way of defining one’s place in society or before oneself? Or, if not, what is the purpose (or the lack of purpose) of writing poetry?

     —SH: Writing is an activity that I enjoy. It is an activity meaningful to me. Philosophically, I find it very hard to do away with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Writing is a process that blends ethics and aesthetics. It eventually seems to become something about the elegance of fundamentals and refinement. It is only through the artistic work of parsing that my small frame can grasp the full depth and scale of humanness. It is the old thing about “Better to have lived a Self-Examined life”. What’s the choice, the Feral life?

     It has been dark for hours already. At the hotel vestibule, we feel that we could continue conversing for ages. This is the wonder of poetry: time, space and language surpass their usual coordinates and flow across the unique, transparent river of the unexpected encounters. Tomorrow, Scott will set off for busy, multicultural, multi-ethnic Manhattan, and we will stay here, in calm but once (hopefully soon again) multicultural, multi-ethnic Cartagena. There are many worlds in this world, and to feel two of them approaching is part of the little, silent elements of the extraordinary. Part of the bargain, undoubtedly.