Philip Booth

Writing poems is not a career but a lifetime of looking into, and listening to, how words see.

-Philip Booth

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Philip Booth: I think survival is at stake for all of us all the time. It always has been individually, and now it has become demonstrably an issue that concerns all of us. It's become a universal issue for the planet. Wherever we are we "have no choice of refuge left," and we have to think "as though / it were the whole world" to quote from "Sable Island." Not that it's a new feeling that I'm first to express; it's as old as John Donne’s "no man is an island, ... every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." But I strongly feel that every poem, every work of art, everything that is well done, well made, well said, generously given, adds to our chances of survival by making the world and our lives more habitable.

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Berghash: I'm interested in your poem "To Chekhov," where you tell him: " ... you / will be there, waiting, / to tell me where I've been." How do identify with Chekhov, and what did you discover when you read him?

Booth: I can't remember when I first read him, but I do return to him over and over again. One of the remarkable things about a book, whether it's a book of short stories or a book of poems or whatever book it may be, is that it is there for you to go back to over and over again. And I find myself, as many people do, becoming more and more of a re-reader. Not be­cause I've read everything that's brave and beautiful and new, or brave and beautiful and old, but because I want the reassur­ance of the book being there to resustain me, reinvigorate me, literally offer me a kind of recreation by its very being. And I think that Chekhov particularly—though I like a great number of the Russian writers—seems to get to the essence of human experience marvelously rapidly, with total illusion of casualness, in story after story after story. The variety of experience in those stories is as great as anything I can think of. I know that some people feel that his stories tend to be depres­sive. I don't feel that, perhaps because I in some senses have a kind of dark view of the world myself. I was very serious in printing, as a headnote to the poem, for some reason I don't now remember and probably don't want to remember, that there was a November before I wrote that poem when I real­ized I could not read anybody but Chekhov. I tried to read other writers I had read before, and no one seemed to interest me as much.

https://poets.org/text/chances-survival-philip-booth-conversation