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.
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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