1. How did you discover poetry?

I began to write poetry and prose in my adolescence, in the early 1970s, inspired by the novels of Kurt Vonnegut and Herman Hesse, the whimsical writings of Richard Brautigan, the poetry of William Wordsworth and Frank O’Hara, and a television series imported from the BBC, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Music was a decisive influence. I listened to recordings of Bob Dylan and The Band, of Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, of folk musicians like Eric Anderson and a duo called Aztec Two-Step, which took its name from a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. My work derives, then, from a combination of high and low cultural themes, which may account for its mixture of seriousness and humor. I distrust people who cannot laugh at themselves.

Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, televised images of which dominated my childhood, I liked to wander in the woods near my house in northern New Jersey, dimly aware of the changes afoot in our village, which was becoming a bedroom suburb of New York City. The farms were giving way to housing developments, fueling my sense that something precious was disappearing, even as some of my older neighbors went off to fight in Indochina--and one returned in a body bag. My literary consciousness was thus forged in the juxtaposition of a distant war, which ended just before I reached draft age, and the loss of a beloved bucolic setting.

2. Please describe your education. Could you tell us about your professors?

I attended Middlebury College, a small liberal arts institution in Vermont, where I studied English literature. Writing and soccer were my main interests--I played midfield on my college team, which I later coached--and I believe the discipline of training for athletic competition prepared me for literary work, which included a nonfiction account of the 1990 World Cup in Italy. My writing teacher at Middlebury, the novelist Tom Gavin, instilled in me not only a sense of the powers of the imagination but also the rigor necessary for sustained creative work.

I took my masters degree in English at the University of Washington in Seattle, studying with the Welsh poet and short story writer Leslie Norris, the poets William Matthews and David Wagoner, and the novelist Charles Johnson. It was from them I learned the sacredness of my vocation: how to work each day, even when you do not feel like writing; how to listen for your own voice; how to revise--lessons to balance the years I wasted studying with a succession of wretched teachers at Columbia University and the University of Utah. I left both institutions without degrees.

One exception at Columbia was Joseph Brodsky. In the fall of 1980, I enrolled in his graduate seminar, which consisted of three hours of brilliant talk punctuated by an occasional question, our answers to which usually irritated him. He spoke aphoristically, in absolute terms: i.e. "the cornerstones of Western civilization are The Iliad and the Bible." His jesting had a moral purpose: when the Polish Communist authorities declared martial law, he quipped, "Russians have invented a new holiday: Tanksgiving." Even his tirades were instructive. In a discussion of Milosz’s "Elegy for N. N.," when he was asked where Labrador was, he cried, "You Americans have no sense of geography, which means you have no sense of space. And you have no sense of history, which means you have no sense of time." And time, as his beloved Auden wrote, "Worships language and forgives/ Everyone by whom it lives." Like other young poets in the room, I prayed for such mercy. Brodsky had already been granted it.

Forbidden to smoke (at forty, he was recovering from the first of several heart surgeries), he would dive across the table at the sight of a student’s cigarettes, crying, "Please, may I have one?" He smoked with passion, inhaling deeply, silently preparing the next variation on his lessons in "linguistic disobedience." For example, lecturing on Cavafy, he said, "Well, class, now I will tell you how to be great poets." We leaned forward in our seats. "You must become gay," said the man who had just been named to Cosmopolitan’s list of the world’s most eligible bachelors. Yet he had a serious point to make: as an outsider, Cavafy had a privileged position from which to view society. Brodsky, a Russian Jew in exile from his homeland and his language, must have felt the same. The next week he advised us to go to law school to learn not only the logic of law, which in his view was analogous to poetry’s logic, but also another language--this, from a high school dropout who was teaching himself to write poems and essays in English.

After class I would walk down Riverside Drive then across 72nd Street to Central Park, meditating on Brodsky’s words, adopting his version of what he called Auden’s "code of conscience," which shaped my own response to literature. For isn’t that what we take from great poems (and I include Brodsky’s essays among my favorite poetic texts)--a sharper sense of how to live? "Language propels the poet into spheres he would not otherwise be able to approach, irrespective of the degree of psychic or mental concentration of which he might be capable beyond the writing of verse," he said in his Nobel address. "And this propulsion takes place with unusual swiftness: with the speed of sound--greater than what is afforded by imagination or experience. As a rule, a poet is considerably older when he finishes a poem than he was at its outset." I was considerably older when I left Brodsky’s class.

3. Please tell us something about your meeting with Blaga Dimitrova.

Encounters with true poetic spirits are rare. Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, W. S. Merwin, Brewster Ghiselin, Tomaz Salamun, Agha Shahid Ali, Blaga Dimitrova--these poets impressed me with the scope of their vision, their openness to experience, their technical resources. Their purity of intent was as bracing as water from a mountain stream. They left indelible marks on me.

I met Blaga Dimitrova after a reading in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1996. Our time together was, alas, all too brief. But I knew her poetry--she has been translated into English by the husband-and-wife team of Niko Boris and Heather McHugh--and so we wasted no time on small talk but rather traded ideas about the writing process. She did not possess much English, I had no Bulgarian, and yet we seemed to understand each other. Of all the writers I met in that emerging democracy she most embodied the democratic spirit she celebrates in "Of Bach and Harmony":

 Bach gave to all an equal right--
 no voice is made to serve as mere
 accompaniment or background for
 a privileged superior.

 And so through time a prayer ascends
 in single spirit, and in many senses:
 power in a unity depends
 on little independences.

Blaga Dimitrova is fiercely independent--one reason why her poems ascend "in single spirit, and in many senses," prayers that bind us together in a new vision of our collective destiny.

4. What is your opinion of the poetry of Sylvia Plath? Do you agree that "Edge" is her best poem? Isn’t Emily Dickinson the greater poet?

I confess that the school of American "Confessional" poets--W. D. Snodgrass, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, et al--generally bores me. Describing the contours of the self is a more limited poetic enterprise than exploring the infinite recesses of the Other, which may take the form of God, the beloved, nature, or the language. Elizabeth Bishop was right when she said that Lowell’s pedigree made his confessions inherently interesting, but this is hardly the stuff of poetry. Note the decline from Walt Whitman’s celebration of the self as a figure for democracy to Plath’s narcissism: her complaints seem petty when set next to any passage from "Song of Myself." For example:

 I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,
 And accrue what I hear into myself--and let sounds contribute toward me.

 I hear the bravuras of birds, the bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks    cooking my meals.

 I hear the sound of the human voice--a sound I love,
 I hear all sounds as they are tuned to their uses, sounds of the city and sounds out of the    city--sounds of the day and night,

and so on for twenty-two more verses. Whitman’s catalogues reveal the plenitude of being, while Plath revels in its impoverishment. The problem with our confessional poetry, as I see it, is that it listens only to itself, when what is most needed is the ability to hear "all sounds as they are tuned to their uses." And it is instructive that for some time now the most influential poet from the era of Lowell and Plath is the least confessional of all--Elizabeth Bishop, who meticulously described the world around her until it began to shine with music and meaning.

Plath’s "Edge" is a chillingly perfect poem, which depends for its effects upon the juxtaposition of startling images--dead children coiled like snakes, etc.--with a melodramatic subject. Plath employs a crisp diction suitable for representing emptiness--a hallmark of her distinctly minor poetics--and the edge she describes, between life and death, is sharpened by her pitiless gaze. What the reader feels, however, is not so much the quickness of lived experience as the attraction of the end. This is indeed a hymn to Thanatos, which repels as much as it draws one in.

I prefer to meditate on the work of Emily Dickinson. My kinship with her derives not so much from an accident of history--we both come from Amherst, Massachusetts--as from her brilliant exploration of the country that lies between this world and the next. The lines you quoted--

  I never spoke with God
  Nor visited in Heaven--
  Yet certain am I of the spot
  As if the Charts were given--

are crucial to me, because they distill a lifetime of thinking about last things. If Whitman was the father of the democratic impulse in our poetry, Dickinson was the mother of our poetic search for the divine. Her poems are reliable charts to the hereafter.

5. Do you believe there is a distinction between masculine and feminine literature?

Writers work in particular contexts--historical, political, cultural, religious, racial, sexual; their use of the language is the record of their encounters with otherness; the voices they hear, from the bottom of the well or crying in the wilderness, take recognizable shapes--male, female, black, white, Jewish, Christian, Muslim. Nevertheless it seems to me that the great works of literature aspire to a condition in which the individual stands for the universal. To return to Whitman:

 I celebrate myself,
 And what I assume you shall assume,
 For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

Thus whatever I write as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male (the most fashionable group to attack in American academic circles, I might add) will succeed only insofar as it speaks to, say, an Iranian woman. It hardly matters that Shakespeare was a man or that the author of Middlemarch was a woman. As one of my college professors said, "George Eliot knew everything!" And isn’t that what we demand of writers--that they understand us to the core, despite our differences?

6. In which role do you feel yourself truer and more influential--as a professor, a poet and translator, a journalist, the director of the International Writing Program, or as a husband and father of two children?

An impossible question to answer! But it gives me a chance to reflect on the various roles I play. In my poetry I want to honor the language, as a translator to introduce new elements into literary discourse, and as a journalist to shed light on heretofore darkened areas of life. As a professor I hope to guide students toward a richer understanding of literature and the writing process. And as the director of the International Writing Program I try to create for the visiting writers favorable conditions in which to undertake creative work and engage in fruitful discussions. My domestic life? Any attempt to influence a spouse’s behavior is doomed to failure, a lesson I have learned, repeatedly, in nearly twenty years of marriage to a classical violinist. But certainly parents must teach their children proper values, a good work ethic, and respect for others, as well as how to enjoy life. As for the role in which I am most truthful? That is for God to decide.

7. The Turkish poet Enis Batur writes: "If ‘Death’ didn’t exist, Mankind would never write poetry. He would never need it." The Iranian poet Soufi Mostavi writes: "Everyone fears death: Poets fear it more." How do you interpret this? To what extent do you agree with it?

Death is the spur to what is most noble about mankind--literature and art, music and dance, mathematics and science, theology and philosophy. It defines the borders within which we create our variations on the theme of Life. As a young poet I was deeply influenced by Garcia Lorca’s writings on duende--the idea, taken from flamenco dancers and guitarists, that in the presence of death the mind associates faster, propelling one into new spiritual terrain. "But like love," Garcia Lorca declares, "the archers/ are blind." Poets are wounded by the arrows of the blind archers, who take aim at love, at death. To quote Whitman one more time:

 ...Sure as life holds all parts together, death holds all parts together;
 Sure as the stars return again after they merge in the light, death is great as life.

8. What do you think of anthologies of love poetry? I think it takes the hearts out of great poets, as if the rest of their poems were irrelevant. May I also know your feelings about anthologies of social and political poetry?

Great poets should indeed be read in their entirety; reading excerpts in an anthology is like eating hors d’oeuvres--an agreeable prelude to the feast. But the Greek anthology, for example, has inspired countless writers over the ages, and anthologies introduce readers to poets they might otherwise neglect. The Poetry of Surrealism, an anthology edited by Michael Benedict, shaped my own literary apprenticeship; his anthology of prose poems I carried everywhere until it fell apart; and in Another Republic, edited by Charles Simic and Mark Strand, I discovered poets crucial to my own development--Ponge and Michaux, Herbert and Milosz, Celan and Popa. Anthologists play an important role in identifying literary trends, and just as a dinner party profits from the host’s decision to bring together new and old friends so an anthologist’s juxtaposition of poets can create vital connections to be pursued at greater length, in a more intimate setting.
 Indeed I am a biased observer, having edited an anthology of contemporary American poets on the subject of nature, The Forgotten Language, which inspired a national reading tour of writers concerned with our fouled air and waters. Not that I assembled The Forgotten Language as a political document. But in my introduction I noted the political dimensions of the environmental crisis, an idea that resonated with the Orion Society, which has brought poets and writers to dozens of settings to read their works, meet grass-roots activists, and consider the nexus between environmental politics and literature. Without placing too much emphasis on the political worth of poetry (a tiresome argument in American literary circles), I would suggest that anthologies of social and political poetry can direct our attention to genuine problems, give voice to heretofore underrepresented populations, and spark new thinking, all worthy goals.

9. Unlike many contemporary poets who never listen to anything but the loneliness of their heart, you involve yourself in the disasters of the modern world and sympathize with victims of war and of Imperialism. Has this moved you away from poetry as a form of art or has it taken you closer to the true essence of poetry ?

It was poetry that led me into the Balkan war zones. In November 1989, when the Berlin Wall was coming down, I met a young Slovenian poet, Ale_ Debeljak, who became a close friend.  In the winter of 1991 we translated his book of prose poems, Anxious Moments--a prophetic work, as it turned out, flush with images of the wars to come: military convoys, razed villages, white phosphorous lighting a soldier’s eyes. He invited me to walk across what was then Yugoslavia’s northern republic, and I envisioned writing a book about two poets wandering in the mountains, in the wake of the Cold War. But I arrived in time for the breakup of Yugoslavia, a tragedy that I was compelled to write about, not least because many poets and writers played a prominent role in laying the groundwork for the wars, delineating national myths at the expense of the whole, while others bore eloquent witness to the carnage, risking their lives to provide what Ezra Pound in another context called "news that stays news." This was a story I thought I might be able to tell, having explored the nexus between politics and literature in a number of poems and essays. But only the language knows whether it brought me closer to the essence of poetry.

10. What influence did your work as a war correspondent have on your poetry? What would you have lost if you had not had that experience? Do you believe that a writer must write as a witness, not as an observer?

It is difficult to say how my work has changed. But I do know that the Balkan wars darkened my view of the world. My newest book is meditation on last things, a function not only of age but also of my experiences in the war zones. War is the great clarifier, in which the inescapable fact of one’s own mortality puts a premium on one’s every thought and action. The privilege (and I do not use this word lightly) of covering the breakup of Yugoslavia carried with it an obligation to write about the people caught up in tragic circumstances--a literature professor in Sarajevo who started a country-and-western radio show in order to play his favorite music and to talk about freedom, democracy, and individualism; a Bosnian poet who chose to stay in the besieged capital and write; an architect touring the ruins of her own flat. This was above all a war against civilians (the joke in Sarajevo was that soldiers had the best chance of surviving), which shook my belief in basic human decency. The bloodshed sent me on a search for God.
 The distinction between observation and witness is subtle. Certainly I tried to be objective in my reporting, traveling to all sides of the various conflicts raging in the Balkans, attempting to understand the motivations of even the most reprehensible war criminal. But I am human, and since it was impossible for me to ignore the needs of the victims--ordinary men, women, and children, for the most part, who wanted nothing to do with the war--I did not hesitate to help out in ways that, strictly speaking, violate a journalist’s vow to maintain a neutral stance--bringing mail into Sarajevo, for example, or arranging for a child’s resettlement in America. What is more, I rarely stayed in hotels, preferring to rent a room in a house or an apartment, and once I traveled to Sarajevo as a humanitarian to deliver a series of lectures to English and American literature students, which drew me deeper into the life of the city. Indeed the real action was in the city, not on the front lines, which did not change much during the longest siege in modern history; living in medieval conditions, without gas, water, or electricity, the Sarajevans who invited me into their homes refused to give up hope; their courage amazed and inspired me.

11. All over the world, there is a gap between artists and politicians. They are vastly different in their ideals. It seems in your country this gap is widening. How do you feel about America’s big-stick policy toward third-world countries?

Ours is a curious position: never has a country acquired such military and economic strength. And our legacy in world history will be a function of the judiciousness with which we use that power.  The unilateral approach to foreign policy, the international court, and the environment favored by the current US Administration has cost us dearly--no country can afford to act without regard for the sentiments of other nations, a notion enshrined in our founding documents--and I pray that President George W. Bush and his advisors come to their senses (after all, they claim to be strict constitutionalists) before they turn the entire world against us.

12. At what time of day do you usually write? What are your special habits?

I write through the day, although the early morning hours seem to be my most productive, before the phone begins to ring. My only special habit is to drink either tea or espresso, with a blanket wrapped around my legs. For inspiration I keep several books nearby, along with maps and photographs of the places I write about and objects collected in my travels--a painting on a shard of glass from Sarajevo, a bracelet from Mostar, a miniature box from Istanbul, icons from Mount Athos, a portrait of a T’ang dynasty woman, shells and seaglass from the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Outside my window are tall white oaks and the yard in which my daughters play, where a Samoyed named Latte spends most of the day sleeping.

13. You have published translations of other poet’s works in your books. Do you believe the translation of a poem is in fact a form of recreation by which the resulting poem belongs to the translator and not to the poet?

Translators are no more than servants of the poems they render into their native languages, and I publish translations in my books of poetry as a way of paying homage to those spirits who have inspired my own work. What translation offers is the chance to embody another poetic vision, to transform yourself. It is a spiritual discipline analogous to prayer, demanding the closest possible reading of a text and humility: you pray to hear the other voice well enough to bring it into your own language. And when you introduce the work to your readers, which is akin to introducing a new friend from abroad, the conversation almost always becomes more interesting.

14. Please tell us about the International Writing Program. Why were you chosen to direct this program?

The International Writing Program (IWP), which grew out of the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, is a unique residency program. For ten weeks every fall we host 25-30 well-known writers from around the world. They write, give readings and panel discussions, work with translators to render their works into English, and participate in Iowa City’s lively literary community. We call the IWP a United Nations of writers, and indeed the writers’ interchange of ideas is uncommonly interesting. During the last residency, for example, we had a Palestinian poet, an Israeli short story writer, and an Israeli Arab playwright, who became good friends. Which is not to suggest they agreed about the causes of the political turmoil in their homeland; rather, they accorded one another the respect to calmly discuss their differences in several public forums. Ghassan Zaqtan, co-founder and co-director of the House of Poetry in Ramallah, which was destroyed by Israeli forces soon after he arrived in Iowa City, liked to say that two novels were being written about his land, mutually exclusive. Etgar Keret, the author of The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God and the first to come to Ghassan’s side when his office was leveled, said that Israelis and Palestinians would not make peace until they had exhausted themselves. And Aida Nasrallah, who had curated an exhibition of Israeli and Arab women artists titled Common Threads, wondered how to build bridges between the two sides. It was, in short, a fine example of the power of the word and reasonable discourse to create meaningful dialogue without which no enduring peace will ever be possible. Ideally, the writers leave with new work completed, new friends, and new understandings of the literatures and peoples of the world.
 The IWP fell on hard times some years ago, and I was hired to rebuild the program, partly because of my administrative skills--among other things, I once directed the Santa Fe Writers’ Conference--and partly because of my experiences abroad. But my reporting from the Balkan war zones did not prepare me for the politics of academia!

15. How do you interpret the September 11th tragedy? What do you think about a classification of American literature before and after the tragedy?

The terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington represent a defining moment in American history, which dramatically altered our political and cultural landscapes; the tragedy will surely reverberate through our literature, though in the nature of things it will take our best writers longer to distill meaning from the event. What we can say is that the twenty-first century began on that Indian summer morning, when the clear skies turned murderous and an idea we had come to think of as impregnable--our financial and military might--was shaken to the core.
 The World Trade Center was built during my childhood, and I have vivid memories of traveling into the city with my parents at Christmastime, with the twin towers rising against the skyline. My father worked in a bank, in a sea of desks, and from an early age I viewed the city as a mysterious place full of possibility, perhaps because I once saw a bank guard wheel millions of dollars into a vault. This sense of possibility took a different turn when as a teenager I began to sneak into night clubs in Greenwich Village, eager to hear the latest folk singing act, and later still when I embarked upon a literary career, working for the Freedom-to-Write Committee at the PEN American Center. New York was, and is, my lodestar. For it is not only our financial capital but also the center of our cultural and artistic life. Which is why I have no doubt that the terrorist attacks will eventually find adequate expression in American letters.
 Someday it may be possible to speak of September 11th as a dividing line in our literature. Certainly many writers are concerned with the meaning of the word in the wake of these brutal attacks. A kind of innocence has disappeared from our national discourse--and perhaps from our character as well. But it will take time for this to manifest itself on the page. Although more than 150 books will appear this fall to commemorate the event it is safe to say that enduring literature is still in the offing. No American poet has yet risen to the occasion in the way that, for example, Thomas Hardy memorialized the sinking of the Titanic in "The Convergence of the Twain" or W. H. Auden marked the start of World War Two with "September 1, 1939." This may be a sign of our collective bewilderment. But if this is a failure of the poetic imagination we should remember that Emily Dickinson did not flinch before the dark facts of the Civil War, writing more than half of her poems during those years. She knew that after great pain "a formal feeling comes"--and how difficult it is to outlive "the Hour of Lead." We have yet to waken from our stupor.

16. Your poem "Exiles" reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s The Rock. I find it a very beautiful epitome of Eliot’s thoughts. What is your own opinion?

This is a connection I had never considered, and my gratitude for your observation is tempered by the knowledge that it would be foolhardy for me to imagine I could adequately summarize Eliot’s thinking, especially in a play as important as The Rock. His work was a decisive element of my education, and when my graduate studies came to an abrupt end--I left without my doctorate to become a caretaker of an estate in Santa Fe, New Mexico--I may well have had his rhythms coursing through me as I wrote "Exiles," which dates from my first experience of the high desert. What I remember of that autumn was the mingled sense of freedom and terror I felt in the face of an uncertain future. But a dam had broken inside me, and I completed my second book of poems, Fevers & Tides, in a matter of weeks. "Exiles" was a crucial poem, because it allowed me to use my antic humor to address a serious subject. Exile is the essential human condition, is it not?, whether we imagine ourselves to be exiled from childhood, our homeland, or paradise. Eliot was not afraid to confront the existential abyss created by the secularization of the modern world; his religious imagination, a contemptible feature of his thought, according to many American academics, gives me the courage to consider the kinds of questions that Paul Gauguin inscribed on a painting in 1897: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

17.  What is the relationship between literature and religion?

Literature describes the human condition, including religious experience--which is for some the most important experience of all. If the traditions of poetry and prose ultimately derive from the wisdom literatures of the past--the visions granted to the prophets and saints of the world’s great religions--then there is perforce a connection between revelation and writing, even if in our time the majority of writers no longer recognize such a link. But this is for me the most vital link. John Donne and George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins and T. S. Eliot--these are the poets who nourish my soul. I might add that for a long time I contemplated becoming a seminarian. My calling, however, was literary, my theme, increasingly, religious.
 In a prose meditation titled, "Why Religion?," Czeslaw Milosz argues that we live in a time in which the human imagination has been drained of its religious content: "After two thousand years in which a huge edifice of creeds and dogmas has been erected, from Origen and Saint Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and Cardinal Newman, when every work of the human mind and of human hands was created within a system of reference, the age of homelessness has dawned. How could I not think of this? And is it not surprising that my preoccupation was a rare case?" I too mourn the loss of the homeland of belief--the subject of my recent work.

18. What do you think about this line: "the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven" (Matthew 12:31)?

It is important to remember the context in which Christ uttered these words. His healing of a blind and mute man--demon-possessed, writes the Evangelist--angered the Pharisees, who credited His powers to Beelzebub, the ruler of the demons. Christ replied that He cast out the demons by the Spirit of God; to suggest otherwise was to blaspheme not against the Son of Man but against the Holy Spirit--an eternal sin. Do I believe this? Let me put it this way: I am completing a book titled Things of the Hidden God, a chronicle of several pilgrimages to Mount Athos, in Greece, the monastic center of Eastern Orthodoxy; and in the course of my journeys I have come to believe not only, as the Psalmist tells us, that "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," but also that all we know about God is that we know nothing at all. If Christ says that hardening our hearts to God’s loving-kindness is wrong, who am I to argue? And if blaspheming against God is an eternal sin--a central tenet of every monotheistic religion, if I am not mistaken--then I would be very foolish to risk eternity (and who am I to say there is no afterlife?) to satisfy my own pride.
 It is said that after devoting his literary career to creating what he called a supreme fiction, a poetics predicated on the notion that God is dead, Wallace Stevens made a deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism. I once asked the poet Mark Strand why he thought Stevens had turned his back on his entire oeuvre. "He wasn’t taking any chances," said Strand. Nor am I.
 Which brings me to Salman Rushdie. I have, as you know, written about the fatwa issued against him--one of the darkest chapters of modern history. I repeat: we cannot know what God is; hence we can hardly presume to know what He will label as blasphemy. I may be offended by an artist’s decision to place a Christ figure in a jar of urine, but perhaps God views this as a way to revive the faith; for the questions that Andres Searrano raised about representations of the sacred led many Americans to reexamine their beliefs. Only God knows what blasphemy is: how can mortals say what will offend Him? In my reading of the Koran it is God, not His earthly representatives, who punishes blasphemers, both in this world and the next (9:74). I am on shaky ground here with respect to Islam, but I am certain the death penalty, which in my own country I oppose with all my heart, is not the solution for blasphemers in any land.
 In addition to offering aesthetic pleasures, literature can fulfill a sacred function by raising questions about first and last things--questions that unsettle some readers, even as some viewers are unsettled by Serrano’s visions of Christ. It is not far-fetched, then, to suggest that Rushdie is in his own way a religious writer, if only because the controversy over The Satanic Verses, as I understand it, has spurred some Muslim thinkers to imagine other routes for Islam to travel to modernity. Who knows God’s will? Certainly not I. And is it not possible to imagine that even blasphemous portraits of Christ or of the Prophet are part of God’s plan?
 I should add that my best friend for nearly twenty years was the late Kashmiri poet Agaha Shahid Ali, and we often discussed the fatwa, a subject about which he was very passionate. At the risk of speaking for him now that he is gone, let me try to summarize his argument. Like many Muslims, he was offended by Rushdie’s invention of the Prophet’s dream, believing the novelist wrote it just to anger the clerics; nevertheless he defended Rushdie’s right to create such a fiction, recognizing that no good comes of censorship. Indeed the central tenet of American democracy (and Shahid became an American citizen just before he died) is that speech, even hateful speech, must be protected. This is where our views collide if, as you have intimated, my defense of Rushdie will distress Iranians. I am prepared to believe the novelist blasphemed, in which case God will judge him. But I insist that a cleric should never have passed a death sentence on him.

19. You have written in one of your letters to me that you wish to visit Iran. Is there any special reason for doing so?

Iran is a vivid presence in my imagination for literary, political, and professional reasons. I wish to visit a place that figures in St.-John Perse’s Anabasis, a central poem for me. Meantime I have taught Kapuscinksi’s Shah of Shahs (my students have but the vaguest notions about the Islamic Revolution), and I would welcome the opportunity to write about your country, which shaped my own coming of age (the student takeover of the US Embassy in Teheran occurred in my last year of college, when I was just becoming conscious of the world beyond our shores). And I very much hope that Iranian writers will participate in the IWP someday.

20. Which Iranian writers are you acquainted with?

In America we know more about Iranian cinema--I am thinking particularly of films by Mohsen Makhmalbaf--than its literature, although in neither case is our knowledge deep. Cultural contacts between our countries, of course, declined after the Islamic Revolution: the losses on both sides are incalculable. But in addition to this shared history of mistrust our countries are connected by underground poetic currents: Rumi is an immensely popular poet in America; editions of his work, in the translations of Coleman Barks, sell better than those of almost any other poet except for Rainier Maria Rilke. Indeed I am in the habit of quoting these lines:

  Inside the Great Mystery that is,
  We don’t really own anything.
  What is this competition we feel then,
  before we go, one at a time, through the same gate?

The Great Mystery is what we share, no? Poets understand that in their bones.

21.  In what state would you prefer to be during the last moments of your life?

Surrounded by my family, with someone reading aloud the Psalms.