Essays
Wallace Shawn

The Lost Art of Conversation – Too often in our daily lives, conversation is turned into a twisted competitive sport with friends and colleagues knowingly and unknowingly mimicking the blustery dunderheads of cable television, elbowing one another in a sort of verbal roller derby to make a point about me, me, me. There is precious little listening, digesting, and asking further questions or offering informed opinions to reach greater mutual understanding. Perhaps that’s why the interview between Wallace Shawn and the great poet Mark Strand included in this book is so illuminating – and refreshing. It’s a joy to read the rich conversation between these two men. They speak of life, death and poetry. A snippet –

Shawn: “But you don’t find it sort of awful that our society doesn’t even respect poetry enough to allow poets to support themselves through their writing?”

Strand: “I think poetry would be different if people could make a living writing poetry. Then you would have to satisfy certain expectations. Instead of the inherited norms by which we recognize poems to be poems, there would be a whole new set of constraints, and not such enduring ones, having to do with the marketplace, having to do with what sells, or what engages people in the short run. So perhaps poetry is better off having no monetary value.”

And the value of this conversation? Priceless.