Has your background in linguistics influenced your approach to writing poetry?
Actually, it is quite the opposite. Linguistics is a scientific enterprise, much like mathematics or physics. I wrote the poems at a difficult time in my life when I needed some way other than scientific discourse to express myself. I found that writing poems let me put names to nameless emotions. Once they were named their intensity vanished like an early morning fog as the sun comes up. In this sense doing linguistics and writing poetry might be seen as parallel enterprises. Both are trying to get at the truth/silence that lies behind a noisy world.
Could you tell us about a place in the world that has substantially affected your work?
As a theoretical linguist, the place that I think of as the turning point in how I looked at the study of what it is we must know when we know how to speak was the steps of Harvard University’s Widener Library. That was where I first met Noam Chomsky. We walked across the street to Nedick’s for a cup of coffee. That day changed everything I had ever thought was true about the study of human language when Noam told me about the work he was engaged in with his colleague and friend, Morris Halle, a man who was to become my mentor and friend for over half a century.
Little did I know that fifteen years later, I would be head of MIT’s first Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. When we met in the halls, Noam would pass by and say “Hello, boss.” One day I stopped him in the hall and told him that at long last I know why he calls me boss.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because it is double SOB spelled backwards.”
He never denied it.
What does a perfect day look like to you?
Every day of this precious life looks perfect to me, especially as I am deeply into the endgame. I’ll be 90 years old in two months. You may recall that on April 19, 2014 you were at the Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport, MA to hear Paige Stockley’s magnificent performance of your suite for solo cello, August Ruins. You and my wife Nancy and I had lunch at a nearby restaurant before the concert. One week later at just about the time we had been having lunch, I was rushed into the ER of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, having suffered a catastrophic spinal cord injury that took me out of your world forever. A doctor predicted I would never walk again. He was wrong. I can manage a half mile to a whole mile circling our dining room table with stops along the way. But for all that I am a very lucky fellow. My brain didn’t suffer. I have written four books since the accident. I am playing the trombone better than ever—though that isn’t saying much—and I have lived to hear the magic you have bestowed on my poems. So what does a perfect day look like? Just like today.
