Ron Price in 2000. (Photo by Sue Richman)

ON a bright fall day in October, I had lunch with Ron Price, the poet-in-residence at Juilliard, to discuss his recent trip to India. The U.S. State Department had invited him there as part of a program that sends American scientists, artists, and intellectuals to other countries. During the three weeks that Price spent in India, from August 24 to September 15 he traveled all over the country. As one Indian journalist put it so poetically: "He came from the Mississippi Delta, wafting through Mumbai into Mother Teresa's Kolkata, and from there into the Brahmaputra Valley, south from Guwahati to the East Kashi Hills of Shillong, then traveling to Delhi, and from there to the hot dusty plains of Aligarh, down to the rocky shores of Pondicherry, and back to the seaport of Chennai—to talk of peace." My conversation with Mr. Price ranged from the differences between cultures in the East and West to the respective roles of poets in society.

Mr. Price began by explaining how he ended up going on this trip in the first place.

RP: What I think happened was this. I wrote to a few poets in various parts of the world last fall about a course I was going to teach on terror and the imagination, hoping someone might suggest a poet I hadn't thought to include. I'm interested in how poets of the last century respond to terror—not only state or international forms of terror, but also terror based on gender or sexual preference, on race, on spousal and child abuse. Word got back to someone in the State Department, a poet, who became interested because he was already planning events in India to commemorate 9/11. So the Bureau of Cultural and Educational Affairs asked me to give a series of readings and talks as part of those plans.

The commemoration in Chennai included a computer video exchange between six students at Barnard College and six students in India. After the exchange ended, an auditorium of students watching it started asking us questions. Their characterizations of America sounded like a series of clichés derived from the Indian equivalent of Fox News—but underneath those clichés was a noticeable anger about the coming war with Iraq, which kept mounting as the questions continued. There was very little awareness among those students of dissenting opinions in America about the war we're heading towards, or concerning the Bush administration in general. They're smart students, and know a fair amount of American history up through the Gulf War—but not so much of our artistic and intellectual history during the past 25 years. Given the nature of the British-influenced educational system, they get most of that (or don't) from journalism.

JW: Journalism in India?

RP: American journalism is no better. Look at the shoddy coverage of what's been going on in Gujarat, where Hindus have been butchering Muslims. There are home videos documenting the carnage—videos made by citizens, not journalists. The journalists have done little beyond reporting the official government denials, until people like L. Satchidanandan began to write about the killings. Satchidanandan is a famous Malayalam poet, but he's also an Indian citizen, and his prose helped to offset the official denials that enabled the carnage to continue.

JW: Why are these massacres happening?

RP: After the British partitioned Pakistan from India with Kashmir, there was a massive migration—Hindus fleeing Pakistan for India, Muslims fleeing India for Pakistan. There's not a recent history of peaceful co-existence, and politicians are whipping up the antagonisms for their own purposes. Kerala is one place where a true multicultural society predates modernism, but apparently it's an exception that proves the rule. That's a thumbnail background. And there are great economic disparities, not to mention the predictable friction between Islamic fundamentalists and Hindu fascists, but it doesn't explain why the massacres are happening. Everyone's hands are bloody in this thing.

JW: So, it seems you felt as if this trip was more of a learning experience than a teaching experience for you.

RP: It felt somewhat ludicrous for a poet from a culture that's 200 years old presuming to lecture a culture that's over 5,000 years old. So, yes—I went there as a student. Poetry readings are not as common in India as lectures by poets, not at the universities. I was asked to talk about a specific subject: whether poetry can create a culture of peace and non-violence.

India has a significant literary history of poets who were what we might call activists, dating back to Kabir and Mirabai. The United States doesn't have such a literary history, and in any case, I don't believe the topic is a possibility. But I don't agree with Auden, either. He has a line in a poem: "poetry makes nothing happen." That isn't true. The Vietnam War ended because of protests all over the United States, and those protesters included groups of poets giving readings against that war. In the 1980s some of those same poets, along with a younger generation, organized readings against the use of nuclear energy, and they were able to help stop the further development of nuclear plants—although that may be about to change. It's not that poetry makes nothing happen; poetry participates in the making of whatever happens.

JW: How has this trip influenced you in your writing, or in your ideas on the world?

RP: I have a lot of memories drifting around in my head, images of squalor and the staggering beauty of that country, but I haven't written anything yet. I don't understand that well what possesses me to write a poem, but it is a form of possession. I can't simply decide to make a poem, sit down, and make one.

I was in Paris just before going to India and it made the contrast between East and West even starker than it might have been, juxtaposed with New York City. I was staying in a palatial hotel in Calcutta and had the morning free, so I went out for a walk. The poverty and desolation outside the walls of that hotel were staggering. I saw a child—2, maybe 3 years old. In the middle of endless crowds of people coming and going, there was a child at their feet, sitting in a mud puddle. Maybe the child's mother or father was nearby, or maybe not. A blank expression on his face; flies on his ears, on his nose. That image became, for me, an image of Calcutta. I don't know what the image means. I know it's not the whole truth of Calcutta, but it gave me a more disturbing sense of what the phrase "conspicuous consumption" means.

JW: So, you saw a big divide between those who are cultured and wealthy and those who are neither—the haves and the have-nots?

RP: There are the very poor and the upper classes, and not much in between—although the upper class is defined more by education than economics. And there is a dynamic oral tradition in India. It's not that the poor are without culture; there's a very dynamic folk culture.

JW: I think that, if I went over there, I would feel that poetry would be so frivolous—like you should be going out and helping feed people, instead of giving poetry readings and lectures.

RP: The readings didn't feel frivolous. It felt frivolous whenever I had a little free time to walk around a town or city. What could all this blab about creating a culture of peace possibly mean to a mother begging for enough food for her and her child to live another day? On the other hand, if you're awake, that's a question as likely to come up in New York City on your way to or from Juilliard. And it's a valid question.

I thought about it in relationship to the course I mentioned earlier. During the last couple of centuries in Europe—especially France and England, and to a lesser extent in the United States—there's been this sense that religion has hollowed itself out, and art was going to replace religion. That's what happens when our belief in God, or the gods, dies. By extension, no doubt, artists would become the new priests. It's an idea that found credence in the same circles that divide the world into the elect, who can understand great art, and the philistines, who are too stupid to get it. It's an idea whose time is ending now. The notion of artists becoming priests is beyond laughably pretentious. But one way of understanding that idea is seeing it as an attempt to answer a question: What is the social function of art? What is the role of an artist in society? Those questions have been asked a lot, it seems to me, in the last couple decades—at least, by poets and novelists and playwrights—and that tiresome dialectic between elite and philistine hasn't been broken yet. Perhaps the longing to break it must precede the vision to accomplish that break.

Art can do lots of different things. It can be funny or serious, vulgar or beautiful; it can entertain or irritate. It can have an historical dimension, a personal dimension, a political and a psychological dimension; it can address the body and it can address the spirit—but it's not a religion. Poetry helps us grasp what it means to be human. It counsels us when we are in danger of being seduced by that voice that whispers into our ear: the gods are dead and therefore nothing is real.