Wonderment.

STRAND

[We] live with mystery, but we don’t like the feeling. I think we should get used to it. We feel we have to know what things mean, to be on top of this and that. I don’t think it’s human, you know, to be that competent at life. That attitude is far from poetry.  

SHAWN

An experience of total immersion in mystery that I once had was reading the first half of Heidegger’s Being and Time. You know, it was really totally up to you to sort of create this world in your own head, and whether what was in your head was what was in Heidegger’s head—who could possibly guess?  

STRAND

Well, when I read poetry I can’t imagine that what’s in the reader’s head is ever what was in the poet’s head, because there’s usually very little in the poet’s head.  

SHAWN

You mean . . .  

STRAND

I mean, I think the reality of the poem is a very ghostly one. It doesn’t try for the kind of concreteness that fiction tries for. It doesn’t ask you to imagine a place in detail; it suggests, it suggests, it suggests again. I mean, as I write it. William Carlos Williams had other ideas.  

SHAWN

But do you suggest something that you yourself have already pictured?  

STRAND

I’m picturing it as I’m writing it. I’m putting together what I need to have this thing be alive. But sometimes it’s more complete than at other times.  

SHAWN

When you say that when you write language takes over, and then you follow it, you’re implying that the experience of writing is one in which at least to some extent you’re in a passive role. Something is coming to you from somewhere, and you’re receiving it. But where is it coming from? Is it just the unconscious? That would be psychoanalysis. It’s coming from somewhere else, isn’t it? Or . . .  

STRAND

I don’t know where it comes from. I think some of it comes from the unconscious. Some of it comes from the conscious. Some of it comes from . . . God knows where.  

SHAWN

I think the “God knows where” part is quite . . .  

STRAND

Poems aren’t dreams. They just aren’t. It’s something else. People who write down their dreams and think they’re poems are wrong. They’re neither dreams nor poems.  

SHAWN

As you write, you’re listening for something. But then you at some point take an active role in creating the poem.  

STRAND

I get caught up in where it’s going because I don’t know where it’s going. I want to know, I want to push it ahead, a little. I add a few words, and then I say, Oh no—you’re on the wrong track.  

SHAWN

But the type of poetry you’re describing can be frustrating to the reader. A lot of people I know would have to admit that their basic model for what reading is would be something like the experience of reading The New York Times. Each sentence is supposed to match up to a particular slice of reality. If that’s a person’s expectation about reading, then your poems might be . . .

STRAND
Well, sometimes poems aren’t literal representations of anything. Sometimes a poem just exists as something else in the universe that you haven’t encountered before. If you want a poem to say what it means, right away, clearly—and of course the poet who writes that kind of poem is usually talking about his or her own experiences—well, what happens when you read that kind of poem is that it puts you back in the world that you know. The poem makes that world seem a little more comfortable, because here is somebody else who has had an experience like yours. But you see, these little anecdotes that we read in these poems and that we like to believe are true, are in fact fictions. They represent a reduction of the real world. There’s so much in our experience that we take for granted—we don’t need to read poems that help us to take those things even more for granted. People like John Ashbery or Stevens do just the opposite—they try to explode those reductions. There’s a desire in Ashbery, for example, to create perfect non sequiturs, to continually take us off guard. He creates a world that is fractured. It doesn’t imitate reality. But, looking at it from another point of view, you could say that it’s simply a world that is as fractured and as unpredictable as the world in which we move every day. So there’s an element of delight in these people who rearrange reality. We usually hang on to the predictability of our experiences to such an extent . . . and there’s nowhere else where one can escape that as thoroughly as one can in certain poets’ work. When I read poetry, I want to feel myself suddenly larger . . . in touch with—or at least close to—what I deem magical, astonishing. I want to experience a kind of wonderment. And when you report back to your own daily world after experiencing the strangeness of a world sort of recombined and reordered in the depths of a poet’s soul, the world looks fresher somehow. Your daily world has been taken out of context. It has the voice of the poet written all over it, for one thing, but it also seems suddenly more alive—not as routinely there.

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