What is the source for your novels?

My novel begin in the private excitements of my mind, images, musical phrases, half heard remarks, ideas of justice 

Loon Lake came of the experience of riding in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York State and passing a sign on the road with those two words - Loon Lake. The loon is a north American bird, a large black and white diving bird that feeds on fish, very ancient as bird species go, with red eyes and a primordial beak night you will never forget it. I'm not sure if such a bird id found in Europe. (I'm not sure if there are any birds left in Europe.)

Ragtime came of listening to the piano rags of Scott Joplin while staring at the wall of my study.

The Book of Daniel was inspired by a photograph of the electric chair at Sing Sing prison. I happened to see this photo in 1968, when the anti-war and counter-cultural youth movements in the United States were at their peak.

Billy Bathgate grew from the image in my mind of men in tuxedos standing at night on the deck of a tugboat. I wondered what they were doing there.

And so on. All my books are acts of deduction from these unbidden images or private excitements of mind.

.

In Poets and Presidents you are taken by the American Constitution. Is this document a true role model?

Everything written has a voice. The voice of the American Constitution is of course legalistic. It assumes the legal diction of the empire - Britain - it has just supplanted. But it is more profoundly a scriptural voice. It is futuristic. It assumes for itself the power endlessly to give law, now and forever. It is a voice from on high, prophetic and self authenticating. It ordains, as God ordains, but in the name of the people. The ordaining voice of the Constitution is scriptural, but in claiming its authority from the public consent, it presents itself as the sacred text of secular humanism. That is its genius, and why as nothing more than a piece of paper it has managed to structure this otherwise unruly nation. With the appended Bill of Rights and antislavery amendments, it is our indigenous sacred text, and like all sacred texts it is subject to commentary and interpretation that becomes an additional body of law that grows up around it, just as the Torah has produced its Talmud, the Koran its hadith, and the New Testament its apostolic teachings. We strive, not always happily, to live up to our Constitution. We haven't yet. But it is undeniably our conscience, residing even, one hopes, in the souls of our worst demagogues and most intolerant men or the cloth.

.

Can a poet be President?

No American poet has ever come close to being a President. The highest rank for us is customs inspector - that's what Herman Melville was and Nathaniel Hawthorne for a while. Writers of the United States are not considered seriously for office. Our diction, our means of communication, is too textured, personal, unpredictable. We have imaginations. American politicians are not supposed to have imaginations, or use words in a way that is illuminating. In the Fifties, Dwight Eisenhower, who could hardly speak a grammatical sentence, won in a landslide over Adlai Stevenson, whose spoken English was like music. Americans will elect a man who speaks in clichés and lies in simple forthright language.

The Czech people are lucky to have Václav Havel, and he is lucky, as a poet, playwright, essayist, as a political philosopher, to have the Czech people. I note one crucial difference between Mr. Havel's career and that of American politicians: His imprisonment preceded his election to office. In my country, politicians assume office first, and then they go to jail.

.

Prague – New York, January 1997

.