How do you know when it’s done?
I just know. It abandons me.
Does your wife [Seidel’s wife, Mitzi Angel, is the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux] have any involvement with your work?
No, she’s not involved in the work. No one is.
How did you meet?
A phone call. I was trying to find out how I could help a friend with something in publishing, and it was recommended to me that I call her—she was at Faber & Faber—and I just thought, What a wonderful person—incredibly kind, thoughtful, smart, helping me graciously—and then I met her.
Was there anything to the fact that she has one of the greatest names in contemporary human history?
Everything is in that fact—I mean, for heaven’s sake!
In your Paris Review interview some years ago, you described yourself as “a provincial who moves into the fancy world with a feeling of unease and awe which lasts for about eight seconds. In the ninth second, the place is mine and I’m no longer interested. I’m bored.”
Did I really say that? How charming. [Laughs.] I mean, probably true—I lament the loss of that kind of wonderment: Here I am at Claridge’s. Isn’t it remarkable? Look around you—what a staircase. For a split second, or maybe a couple of seconds, or maybe a minute, or five. And then it’s gone: It’s mine. I live here. There’s something lost in the losing of the awestruck “aw, shucks.”
You’ve written a lot about motorcycles in your poems. Is there something about them that is conducive to poetry, or are they just part of the raw material of your life?
There’s something about them that, for me, was conducive to poetry.
If we’re to believe what we read in your poems, you like to ride very, very fast, sometimes in ill-advised areas—small, winding roads in eastern Long Island and such.
Yes, exactly.
Arrests, traffic tickets?
Stopped quite a few times, but it always ends up: “That’s some machine you’ve got there.” Never got a ticket.
And when did you give it up, or why? Or have you not really formally given it up—you just don’t ride much anymore?
