SOURCE: “An Interview with David Ignatow,” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, Summer, 1987, pp. 143-62.

In the following interview, Ignatow discusses the influence on his writings of various poets including Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams.

Leif Sjöberg

Why does Whitman play such a large part in your poetry, especially in your earlier work?

Ignatow

Whitman has never ceased playing a large role in my poems. One has only to read the more recent book, Tread the Dark, published in 1978, to recognize how importantly I take him and his work and ideas. Also, it seems to me that my mode of direct presentation openly arrived at, that is, letting the incident speak for itself in the rhythms, cadences, and idiom of its occasion, which most often is of the language of ordinary speech, derives from Whitman. I can say that this mode...