This is from the "teaser" on the website.
INTERVIEWER You treat some of the great novelistic themes–war and peace, power and class struggle and oppression in society, the shifts of luck and fortune with time–in your poems, particularly in your long poems.
LEVINE What I regard as novelistic about my work is the telling of tales, which is utterly natural to me, and so is the presentation of characters. The other day when I was testifying in court in a civil disobedience case, the district attorney objected to my presentation because, he said, it was narrative. The judge sustained the objection; I tried to ask him what was wrong with a narrative, but he wouldn’t answer. I was deeply wounded. How can a poet or fiction writer tell the truth in court if he or she can’t present the events in a meaningful sequence, which is what a story is? The message is, Stay out of court.
Ponder this--how can the rhetoric of Q/A help/hurt poem--idea of a poem told as an interrogation (Mark Strand poem as an example) and idea of the same poem as a narrative. Idea of interlocution.
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