RP: The goal of the favorite poem project is first to make an audio and video archive of about 1,000 of Americans of all kinds of every region in the country, every state, every possible age, ethnicity, profession, with each person saying aloud a poem that person loves, and a few sentences about why that particular poem is important to that person. I hope that the 20,000 letters I've received from people volunteering for that Archive will also be an important document and a useful archive, and I hope that the videos and audios themselves will become valuable teaching tools as well as a kind of historical gift to the future, a little snapshot of the United States in the year 2000 through the lens of poetry.

GC: How can people plug into this?

RP: You go to favoritepoem.org; There is the text of quite a few poems and letters from the welders and librarians and teachers and circus acrobats who chose them and under the story you can hear me and see me describe what the project is, and under the readings you can find what’s happening in various cities around the countries where we had unemployed people and U.S. Senators and Mayors and laborers read poems together. You also can buy the book just out from Norton, America’s Favorite Poems.

GC: You live in a time where the voice can be taken "from here to there" by microwave, satellite, underground cable and digital means. Instead of disdaining this you enter the world and the dailiness of it and change it all to poetry. But above all else you are a poet. How do you describe your voice in the poetry you write?

RP: I suppose that more than most I’m attached to the old roots of poetry as a bodily art, that I’m given to the old traditions of the sounds of poetry.

GC: It has been called "a musical celebration of air" when you talk about poetry as sound.

RP: The poetry I love, poetry as I understand it, has a peculiarly intimate and widely available power because the medium of a poem in my understanding of the art is not words. The medium of the poem is the audience's body. It is the vocal art but not necessarily a performative art. So though the medium of the poem is breath, is air, that is the medium, the thing between the feelings and ideas of the poet and the reader, is the reader's breath, your voice or my voice saying Emily Dickinson's words or Yeats’ words. It's not necessarily Emily Dickinson or Yeats performing their poem, or a trained and wonderful actor performing the poem. It's whoever wants to say the poem and that's seems to me to be primary and it does give poetry a particularly intimate and personal place but it also means the art is inherently on a human scale. It is by its nature on the scale of one person.

GC: John Hollander's book Committed to Memory, out in '96, I feel furthers this. And the poems chosen are 100 poems which people can read aloud.

RP: Well John and I are thinking alike and perhaps we're responding to something in our time. Perhaps many people are responding to it. You know the sales of books of poems are way up. Poetry is kind of booming and I sometimes think that is in reaction to the quite wonderful mass media. The electronic media are very pleasurable, very elegant, beautiful but inherently, on a mass scale. The electronic work is highly duplicable, very rapidly, and maybe that has stimulated us to remember that very basic and primary pleasure that any child takes in the sounds of language.

GC: I thought of you with Elizabeth Bishop's "Sonnet," ‘there is a magic made of melody.’

RP: Oh yes.

GC: ‘of some song sung to rest the tired dead.’ And you celebrate the dead every day by committing yourself to what has been said, by saying it again. Something seriously to think about at this time when we can multiply voices so many places, to so many millions of people.

RP: Yes, we're multiplying the voices of the dead, of Elizabeth Bishop, of Ben Johnson. Not only through electronic means but also in our own bodies when we say the words of one of their poems aloud and take pleasure in it.

GC: The Figured Wheel is a volume of new and collected poems, and it is I guess the latest one published.

RP: The most recent one until this month, Jersey Rain.

GC: One critic said ‘The Figured Wheel allows us to recognize the most scrupulously intelligent body of work produced by an American poet in the past 25 years." Kind of nice words. I call you a Public Poet because you use media as the structure to transmit spirit. There is a price to pay for this because you have to be on several continents at one time and I wonder about your life. How do you manage? What is your schedule? How many times do you tape? Do you have enough suits? You know, all of those things.

RP: Yes.

GC: You may wind up hosting The Price is Right or something. It looks really easy for you.

RP: I think that my preparation for television and traveling around the country and talking a lot -- actually it sounds like I'm just being wise, a wise guy -- but I think that being a poor student in school was good preparation for that. I so often didn't have my homework done that it was a constant process of improvisation and not planning ahead and doing everything a little after the last minute -- training myself to hope for the pop quiz and not the thing they wanted to see prepared well. I think that has helped me relax when I do things that still amaze me like reading Wallace Stevens or Elizabeth Bishop or Ben Johnson on television. I do it because I don't have any better sense. I never planned these things.

GC: How do you choose the topic of the day?

RP: I have good friends who help me and an excellent producer at the News Hour, Jeff Brown. We put our heads together. Jeff and I talk and he goes through his anthology and I have mine in front of me. I have certain people I call and I'll say what do you think would be appropriate for Thanksgiving.

GC: You tie it to an event.

RP: Yes and sometimes we don't get together to tape before the event. You know, there'll be a judgment in the Microsoft trial or something else will happen, and I think I'll have a bright idea and the timing isn't quite right. I was really delighted when the stock market took a dip. There is a great, certainly a very wonderful poem that has the words stock exchange in it and I got to read it on television.

GC: I liked your debate with Roger Rosenblatt.

RP: Roger quoted Tennyson and I quoted Yeats and we were talking about the Yankees and the Dodgers.

GC: It was a duel.

RP: The absurdity of it was fun.

GC: Do you get responses so that you know what goes over?

RP: On the News Hour, it's about 95% very encouraging, very approving. A very amusing 5% says, ‘What's this guy doing on television. I want the news. I don't want poetry on the news. I want the news.’

GC: Do you think you might go on after your term as Laureate? It was good that Robert Haas stayed with The Washington Post. A contribution.

RP: It's a wonderful column. That Poet's Choice column that Bob does is syndicated in other papers too.

GC: You’ll continue?

RP: I think it will be similar. I assume I'll probably go on for awhile.

GC In love with media and poetry. I remember when you were poetry editor of the New Republic for about seven years and now you are poetry editor for Slate, an Internet magazine. That's another technical question I have. Carol Muske told me that she gave you a poem for Slate. She said she sat in a studio and read into a microphone. And I asked what happened to it then. She said she didn’t know. How does it work?

RP: Well Slate's publisher is Microsoft.

GC: Right.

RP: A company you might have head of that has a lot of technological capacity and they take the recording of the poem and digitalize it and they post it. It used to be in a real audio format. I notice now it's in a Windows player format of some kind and anybody with a sound card and the right software, some speakers, clicks on the poem and they hear the poet read it aloud. Sometimes with poems by dead poets you’ll hear me read it aloud - so the reader of Slate sees the text and also can hear the poet read the poem. And the nice thing about it is that it is all archived. It's all there. Not only the poem of this week. You can click on the archives and you can now get a few years worth of poems.

GC: Is storage space infinite?

RP: In the world of digital storage many things go wrong. It's an ephemeral form of storage but space is not a big worry so they can pile all those poems up

GC: And you understand it? You gave a talk on digital technology. Did you memorize it the night before?

RP: Oh I don't claim to understand it.

GC: I saw you interviewed on the Internet where people asked you questions and you answered them. And I read that and I thought how does this happen?

RP: I've done several, actually many, live on-line interviews. The most recent one was for Barnes and Noble. People at their computers log onto the site, then send in questions. Questions appeared on my computer screen.

GC: They were smart questions too.

RP: And I answered them. Oh it was wonderful. I like that format very much.

I like the challenge of typing an answer very quickly and in a very short space.

GC: You like anything difficult. I wrote an article about you called "The Love of the Difficult."

RP: I think that human beings do like difficulty.

GC: But first and foremost you are a poet, an American historian who brings in American culture with broken pieces of windows and little knobs on green pianos. There is nothing that you will not use in a poem. You preserve the ordinary and it is something William Carlos Williams did. In fact didn’t you just win a William Carlos Williams award?

RP: I did, I did a couple of years ago. And it was a great pleasure to win an award with that name. He certainly is a very important model for me as well as a fellow citizen and resident of New Jersey.

GC: I'm from Trenton, you know.

RP: Yes, I remember that.

GC: I think it is remarkable how easy it must be for you to calm down. When you are with someone you act as though you've been no where else, you pretend as if you have no where else to go.

RP: Thank you for that.

GC: I heard you read a new poem, which has 26 words in it, arranged in alphabetical order

RP: Well it's having the 26 words of the poems correspond exactly to the 26 letters of the alphabet.

GC: Don't you have enough to do?

RP: And no prepositions or articles allowed. I am sure it’s a proclivity of people to want to do difficult things, solve math problems, build boats in their basement. The human animal likes to engage difficulty and cope with it.

GC: If that were natural, wouldn’t all young people be good students then?

RP: They are all good students. Not necessarily in school or with subjects studied in school. They are students of fashion or of sports or of evil alas or of street fighting or of music of some kind. But I think young people are studying many things all the time and the challenge with school is to have them study the things that we think will enrich them and will let them enrich the world.

GC: You said as a young person that you would look around and think ‘I'll never be able to do all this. Look at all those machines making all those things that make all those buildings. Who is going to take over when these people die.’

RP: It still seems amazing to me that we do pass these things on from generation to generation.

GC: And you approached Dante with this ferocious love for the difficult.

RP: That was a beautiful challenge, trying to make a readable rapid clear Inferno in an English version of the ItalianTerza Rima . Once I knew that I could deal with that, it was one of the best feelings I've ever had.

GC: Ever?

RP: Oh, absolutely. It was so much like writing. It was writing except you didn't have to think of what to say next. The greatest poet who had ever lived had already figured out what to say next.

GC: There was initially an assignment from a publisher to translate the poem, giving cantos to several poets, and you wrote one, and another poet could not do another one, so you picked up his, and then you did three and you said ‘I'm a tenth of the way through.’ What a way to look at it . Is that a true story?

RP: Yeah, after I finished those two I did one just because I liked doing it, just the way you would do a crossword puzzle or turn on the radio or go outside and hit a tennis ball. I just felt like doing it. I was about a tenth of the way into the project before it occurred to me to do it all. It sounds strange but really is true. I thought well maybe I'll do a few cantos.

GC: And you said you did as if you were a metrical engineer.

RP: That was my contribution.

GC: Are you mathematical?

RP: When I was a kid I used to do quite well in objective math tests and I used to enjoy math but when you don't do any homework you quickly fall by the wayside in math.

GC: But you know what? You turned out ok. You have a steady job, a roof over your head and enough to eat.

RP: Knock wood

GC: At the Library of Congress, I think of your poem "Library Scene."