During the 1980s Whitbeck worked itinerantly as a logger and sheepherder in northeastern Oregon. Since 1991, in addition to wage labor, he has worked a hill farm in Wheeler County, Oregon, in a remote, sparsely populated region east of the Ochoco Mountains. Currently, besides his farm work, he works 87 hour weeks, every other week, as a chain hand on an oil drilling rig in western Wyoming)

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Q. At times your work is political, and at times overtly so. The role of political poetry in the art and in society remains controversial. Can you air your thoughts on this?

A. There's a notion afoot, based on a line by Auden, that poetry changes nothing, that it's impotent. If one accepts this precept, then, so an argument goes, the writing of socially conscious poetry becomes an act, not of artistic expression, but of vanity and futility because it cannot have its hoped-for effect on the world. Of course this is nonsense on several levels. First of all it makes the false assumption that such work always harbors a specific agenda, beyond truth-telling, that it's invariably propagandistic and therefore deserves no quarter in the art world. This is an old polemical trick, to claim the most negative anomaly, like Soviet poetry, for example, is the norm, so the whole genre can be misrepresented and discredited.

Beyond this the argument also raises some very important questions. Were all the European poets who survived WWII, an event of political origin, obligated, for reasons of artistic integrity, to write as though this cataclysm never occurred? Were those who survived the Stalinist purges, the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, the Viet Nam War, obligated by this creed to be silent regards them, to not render those truths, to not surrender to them, to lie to us by omission? Are our black and Native poets obligated to not speak of the slavery and genocide their people suffered? Am I obligated to never mention that my own government has killed over eight million people of color since WWII and has been complicit, through its mostly totalitarian client-states, in the killing of millions more, and that it continues to kill and sign off on killings, though this knowledge weighs on me daily? To accept such arguments and to heed them would require the poet to disconnect from reality, even though analogous states include coma, insanity and death.

Secondly, I can testify that poetry has changed me, not only spiritually and intellectually, but practically as well-in terms of decisions I've made about how and where I've lived. This, because of what certain poets have taught me. I can also testify that I am part of the world, and therefore I can say, just from that narrow, personal perspective, that it has changed the world. And I know I'm far from alone in this. Maybe the sponsors of this argument have a different story to tell, but they didn't kill Federico Lorca and Osip Mandelstam, or torment Yannis Ritsos and Anna Ahkmatova, or drag Thomas McGrath before the HUAC for no reason. They were tormented or killed or incarcerated or blacklisted, as have been countless others, because they possessed power. And this power derived from their art. This doesn't mean, of course, that poetry is in charge, but it is clearly, for better or worse, a player.

Another notion with some currency is that a political poem is by definition a bad poem-that this one aspect of reality, mysteriously, and unlike all others, cannot be apprehended in an aesthetically credible way. This argument is often girded by examples of bad political poems, which, of course, abound. Interestingly, bad love and pastoral poems also abound, but I've never seen anyone apply the same reasoning to them and argue that these genres also deserve to be wiped completely off the map. Nor, to my knowledge, has anyone broadened the argument and driven it to its logical conclusion by claiming, because there are bad poems, all poems are bad. It's a bit pathetic that this debate even exists. One reading of Anna Ahkmatova's "Requiem" should be more than enough to shame these people to silence.

Truth of any kind, captured in resonant language, is a beautiful instrument of peace, justice and survival, the best we have, and arguments such as these, that attempt to truncate language's possibilities, in my opinion, contribute nothing. In this case many modernist masters destroyed these arguments, via their poetry, decades ago, and they were hardly the first ones to do it. That these ideas could persist in the wake of an era that gave us Ritsos, Neruda, Mandelstam, Celan, Hayden, Gordon, Ahkmatova, McGrath, Brecht, Paz, Vallejo and so on, is astounding.

Q. Do you encounter people within the art world who take you less seriously because of your lack of formal training and because of your decades in the blue collar world?

A. Sometimes. Sometimes even those who appreciate my work seem to see me as something akin to an idiot savant, as someone who gets lucky, maybe even poem after poem, in spite of what's assumed to be my intellectual poverty. But it doesn't bother me a lot. It's unfortunate because it's based on a stereotype—that all laborers do, besides work, eat and screw, is shoot holes in empty beer cans. When this comes from people who ought to know better, from people well read and schooled—who should have realized a long time ago that stereotypes kill, sometimes literally-as the murderous echoes of words like "savage" and "gook" attest-then it's disappointing, even pretty depressing. But my disappointment stems from reasons more general than personal.

Q. How has your life of labor informed your writing and your views on writing?

A. I know there are brilliant people who perform labor-not only brilliant at what they do, but also wise, deeply thoughtful people—people who I know will often get written off, based on class and appearances, as white trash, as black or Mexican trash, or as hicks, etc. The complaint has come to me a few times, in my persona work, that there's no way the characters I create, agrarian and/or blue collar, could be that articulate—not eloquent, but just articulate, as if the powers of expression were confined to certain classes. Besides, I was raised among these people, have labored alongside them about thirty years, it's how I've survived, it's the only way I know how to survive, and, to a large extent, I am my characters—so if their articulateness is an impossibility, so must be my own.

People without means or with marginal means, people without the accouterments of prestige, are constantly underestimated and undervalued. A laborer can be possessed of a deep poetic intelligence, as deep as anyone's. And it's often tempered and sobered by hard work and humility, and a profound gratitude for the most elemental things—a chance to rest, a show of respect, rain on a seeded field, a cold beer, a warm meal, a companion, a kind gesture. I've witnessed this too many times to pretend it's otherwise and I've often felt these things myself. Labor over years keeps that intelligence grounded and informed by experience. I don't want to romanticize because many of us are messed up, are badly damaged-are, by turns, ignorant, racist, misogynist, xenophobic—but this is true of any class, including the merchant class, including the intelligentsia. Among poets, Eliot, Pound and Philip Larkin serve as pretty good illustrations of this.

I see special value in writing when it destroys stereotypes, when it humanizes its subject, when it pours light into corners that have long been dark. A great, great example of this is Native Son by Richard Wright. Conversely, when writing unmasks those who bathe themselves in an artificial, self-serving light, as did, for example, The Grand Inquisitor by Dostoevsky, it also has a great value.

Had we, for example, seen clearly and en total masse five years ago, or even earlier, that our current President, George W Bush, is a shill, a con man for merchant-thieves, had we as a people been too wise to be deluded and been able to strip him of his license to kill, we wouldn't now be in this imponderably dangerous situation in Iraq, where, counting us and Great Britain, at least five nations in the area have nuclear weapons, and where the entry of just one or two nation-states from that region into the conflict, or the conflict entering them, could trigger a full-scale catastrophe. Our naiveté about those who rule us, about the nature of the system they man, what it does to people here and overseas, what it does to the earth, translates into undeserved impunity for those leaders, like our current ones, who wield power foolishly and murderously.

And it's mostly people from the working class, all over the world, who these wars grind up and destroy. Even if the United States walks away from Iraq, accepts that it can't deliver it and its oil into corporate hands, can't afford more years of unbridled war profiteering—or, plausibly, at this late stage, accepts that it can't even afford to maintain mayhem there, to keep some Iraqi oil off the market, and thus to inflate both oil prices and corporate profits-and so brings the soldiers home, we all, at some level, know it—that soon our streets will be flooded with people—aimless, homeless, insane, addicted, suicidal—who were sent to Iraq, and that we've again been led down an alley where now that's the best we can hope for and work for-that the hemorrhaging will stop sooner rather than later, that the scale of the disaster be kept as small as possible. We witnessed this after Viet Nam, and many of those vets are still wandering our streets. And horrible as this will be, for the Iraqis it'll be infinitely worse. So, to me, art that unmasks, that opens outward, that reveals the minds, fates and behaviors of modern vassals, rebels and suppliants, of modern kings and slaves and subjects, can have extraordinary value.

Another effect has to do with work ethics. In many jobs I've done, logging, longshoring, roughnecking, also harvest work, one is forced to work beyond exhaustion, to draw on reserves you maybe didn't know you had, to hold up in extreme cold or heat, to endure pain, filth, injuries, danger, etc., and to do it routinely. Extremes are the norm, but there's a rush and satisfaction that comes with it. It's something similar, I think, that one needs to experience to transcend the mundane as an artist—one needs, I think, to pass through some crucibles.

Q. Have writers' workshops played a role in your life and how do you assess their value?

A. I've never attended one, nor an MFA program, so I can't say much about them. But I do believe that in language arts, maybe more so than in instrumental music or visual arts, where people are almost universally employing the medium, namely words and grammar, that someone with just the will to be articulate, to be a meaningful voice, is generally already equipped, assuming some literacy, to move quite a ways forward without much formal help. Kenneth Rexroth was a great example of this, as were Frederick Douglass and Maxim Gorky.

I also believe, very conventionally, that focused readings, for example, of Milton, the King James Bible, Shakespeare, etc.—of those who have masterfully wielded the language, will deepen a person and make that person less inclined to be seduced by the mediocre-that there's a tremendous amount one can do, even if one can't get over the very formidable financial barriers these workshops and programs seem to present.

Q. How do you assess the current state of poetry in this country?

A. I might not be that well qualified to address this question. If I read several poems, say ten or fifteen, by a decorated American poet and no sparks fly, I don't hang around, don't study, critique, assess and so on. I just move on, thus my reading of it is by no means encyclopedic. There are so many writers in so many fields who I wish to study, and there's only so much time, so I devote very little of it to poets who bore me, who fail to challenge me, no matter who they are. Also, I read pretty broadly within poetry, read poets from other eras and nations, much in German, much in translation, which also limits the amount of time I have to devote to the Americans.

Generally, though, it's clear that the United States, as an empire, is in decline, is amassing more enemies and debts than it can readily dispose of and is heading, barring tremendous public wisdom, great institutional flexibility and political leadership, for some sort of crash, as empires are prone to do. In addition, the planet's under ecological siege, the maldistribution of wealth and political influence here and worldwide is beyond scandalous, as are the plethora of abuses, including very violent ones, by those who possess them—and this, devolution and decay, is the broad context of American society right now, and the marquee American poets I've read, with notable and important exceptions, seem to me disturbingly indifferent and oblivious to the history that's unfolding before them, to these things which effect everyone, which could even kill everyone—they seem too often insular and woven, almost hopelessly, into a narrow and comfortable world, and then write almost as if that were a universal, a spoken or unspoken given in life—when it's really a world that has a pretty limited connection to the very harsh and arbitrary one most people are living in. I don't expect every poem to address these issues, or even wish for that, but for so many of our well-known poets, some with pretty formidable powers of articulation, to remain completely silent regards our collective life and to ignore the public arena in poem after poem, magazine after magazine, book after book, year after year, seems very strange to me, especially at this juncture in history.

It's, for me, in light of this, refreshing to read some of my contemporaries who write with a relentless topical focus, or magazines which publish poets who aren't jaded beyond giving a damn. Of course they are among those relegated to the underground, but at least we have them—some poets and editors who have these passions, who don't want the world to be fucked up on their watch.

Q. What do you attribute this obliviousness to?

Assuming its not feigned, or deliberate, because of careerist motives, one factor might be just a lack of intellectual courage—no willingness to look out, to stare into the voids, to take note of the facts. To do so is harrowing as hell, and it's worse if you set foot in these voids, worse yet if that's home. It's more alluring for many to look away, to be trivially witty, to write slick or bizarre gibberish, to whine about lovers or parents, to be a hipper-than-thou ironist, to compose the two-millionth banal outtake on Orpheus, etc.

What I see too often are reams of arational, unrevelatory poetry—not occasionally, but consistently and willfully meaningless, work whose point, one-hundred and thirty years after Rimbaud, now seems both obvious and dull, more archaic than avant garde. These are not the works of a diamond cutter like William Bronk who did epistemic work, who explored the limits of knowledge and perception. It's instead often the work of rock crushers, spitting out pile after pile of largely undifferentiated gravel—to me, not poetry, but only the ore out of which it might emerge, the stuff of notebooks, not of books-work of almost no import to people who wish to see visions bound to meaning, ideas and emotion, nor of import for people who wish for their kind not only survival, but also something far more beautiful than this staggering and violent chaos we call the postmodern world-a malady which, if one has the will to study it, possesses a somewhat knowable etiology. It's a world that is malleable and still reparable, and capable of being ensouled by the imagination.

We still have remnants of nature, as evidenced by our continued presence on the planet, and we have among our inheritances the ones of tolerance and human decency. In spite of this much of our poetry has opted prematurely to jump in the grave, has opted to be the static, or the last sit-com, before the TV crashes.

I personally felt so much truth and saw so much meaning via language as a boy, long before I encountered all these largely clichéd deconstructionist notions, that it would be impossible now for me to feign that much sophistication. If I hear Odetta, for example, sing Pastures of Plenty, it still rings true, rings poignant, is wonderous, has meaning and moves me. Reflected from those few simple words, resonating through her voice, I see and feel a vast procession, both sad and lovely, of human lives and souls. I can't help it, can't imagine hearing it otherwise.