47:3 Autumn 2001

ANDREW RATHMANN & DANIELLE ALLEN

An interview with Frank Bidart

This interview with Frank Bidart, who'd read at the University of Chicago in 1999, was published in  Autumn 2001. Bidart's books include In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (FSG, 1990) and Desire (FSG, 1997); he is co-editor of Robert Lowell's Collected Poems (FSG, 2003).

The interview was conducted by Danielle Allen, Professor of Classics and Political Science at the University of Chicago and the first organizer of the University's Poem Present reading series, and Andrew Rathmann, CR's editor from 1995 to 2000.

Rathmann reflected recently on his time at CR:
 
[A]t that time Chicago Review was totally independent from the English Department. This autonomy meant not only that [we] were free to be effective editors, but also that the kinds of discussion that took place during meetings of the poetry and fiction staffs were totally unlike (and hugely superior to) what one encountered in graduate seminars. CR's staff chewed over submissions, even by unpublished writers, as if the world depended on separating the acceptable things from the rejects. In graduate seminars, by contrast, questions of literary value, originality, technique, and so forth, weren't even on the agenda. It wasn't that the submissions to CR included very many deathless masterpieces; it was just that you could learn so much from the conversations they provoked. Of course, staff members couldn't afford to become too attached to the magazine. At some point you had to come to terms with writing the dissertation and going on the job market. But while it lasted it was a lot of fun. I myself spent so many hours in Lillie House that I used to have a regular dream about finding a secret staircase behind the paneling. It led, I remember, to a sort of belltower from which I could look out over Hyde Park. That is how I like to remember the magazine at that time: as a kind of refuge for the genuinely literary, hidden in plain sight.

[ES, 2006]

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