Garth Greenwell on Frank Bidart's 'Borges and I'

In a conversation with Joe Fassler published at The Atlantic, Garth Greenwell talks about Frank Bidart's prose poem, "Borges and I," and the ways that Bidart has "has remained an especially potent source of inspiration." More: 

Garth Greenwell: I first discovered Frank Bidart when I was studying vocal performance at the Eastman School of Music. In the first semester of my junior year, I took a course with the poet and critic James Longenbach at the University of Rochester, who very kindly let me into his poetry workshop, even though I had never taken a writing class before. One of the books he had us read was Frank Bidart’s Desire, and the experience of encountering Bidart’s work was absolutely overwhelming. It convinced me that poetry was the most noble thing one could devote one’s life to.

I’m drawn to the seriousness and relentlessness of Bidart’s work—the sense that he is using the best tools he has, and inventing new tools, to ask the most important and difficult questions he can of life and of himself. To read him is to experience someone writing utterly without defense, with a kind of lacerating honesty. There is one line in particular, from Bidart’s prose poem “Borges and I,” that for years has been a kind of motto for me: “We fill preexisting forms and when we fill them, we change them and are changed.” It’s a refrain that’s helped me develop my sense of what artistic innovation is, and what it means to innovate in a meaningful and exciting way.

It has always been my prejudice—I wouldn’t want to present this as any sort of objective principle—that one is incredibly unlikely to make something great in a particular medium if one doesn’t know the great things that have been made in that medium before. When one, say, writes a sonnet, when one fills up that form, of course the form conditions how one can think within it. But one wrestles with the form too—one tries to stretch it, to make it accommodate new thinking, new feeling, and the form is changed by that. The sonnet is not the same form after Shakespeare, not the same form after Milton, not the same form after Hopkins. At the same time, you, the artist, are also transformed. This sense of reciprocity with the past—that the past and the self are not monoliths but dynamic things that change through their encounter with one another—is the idea of tradition that strikes me as most beautiful and most true.

Continue reading at The Atlantic.