Finally—big thing, and I’ve written a lot about this in the essay The Root of Saying—poetry is a place where we get to see (to sense) afresh—to go back to something like original perception, before names, if this is possible—which I think it must be, because for the first couple of years of life we do not communicate with words—and so there’s a way in which we get to un-name and rename the world of our experience, or the experience of the poem itself, as we understand something about the sensation of what is wanting to be evoked—and we’re better off, I think, if we don’t demand to know what that is, exactly, as it’s happening, but rather simply allow it to occur. We use words, and silence, and space, and rhythm, to trace something, to inscribe something—but often there’s a greater sense of immediacy if we allow some slippage between word and thing.
OK, here’s a fourth: pay attention to what you’re paying attention to. Often, this will become the way into a poem.
A fifth: don’t edit yourself out of business.
TL: The blurb on the back cover of The White Bride describes the poems as “composed of sentences as serpentine and sinuous as they are prone to interruption from the fragmented consciousness of inner and external worlds,” works influenced by “everything from old record covers to . . . street scenes, music and myth.” Considering the tenor of this description, do you feel it fits to describe your work as influenced by the modernists? How have literary/artistic movements, such as modernism, influenced your work? And, how do you feel about such comparisons?
SM: I was obsessed with/fired up by the moderns in college—not just the writers, but the artists, the composers. So of course, necessarily, there’s this influence and then, lurking behind/before modernism, symbolism. Also, the deep imagists had a profound impact on me—and maybe this is part of where I found a great sense of early permission for a kind of quiet surrealism—and I see more and more how it was the act of translation (for example, of folks like Trakl and Rilke and Neruda and Lorca) that allowed them to understand that even beyond rhythm or rhyme, image, and the leaping between levels of consciousness, as Bly would have it, translate into something that can give us a sense of the uncanny, the magical, that place where the hairs on our arms stand up. In high school it became clear to me that what felt like a “poem” had nothing to do with rhyming. It had to do with being carried into a certain deep space. I’ve broadened my definition, but the poems that move me most are still the ones that allow this kind of transport.
Others sources of inspiration from the past: I think Valery hit a vein that I could travel on for years. I am interested in what philosophers like Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau Ponty investigated. I am currently fascinated by the poems of Celan.
I try to stay open. I never know what is going to inspire me. Influence is unavoidable. The point, maybe, is to try to stay radically open to possible influence, and to have faith that all things will shake out in an original way, or at least a more interesting way than they would otherwise.
How do I feel about such comparisons? Flattered, I guess, because some amazing things went on at the turn of the last century, both just before and then after.
TL: What do you want to offer the reader with your poems? Conversely, how important is the reader in your process?
SM: Because my favorite poems to come across, as a reader, are ones that give me a sense of transport, I would wish the same experience for a reader of my poems, but it’s not my place to say whether that occurs, and I don’t know how consciously one can really aim for that.
My main job is to be receptive to “the voice,” to those lines that seem to begin somewhere between the ear and the brain, as they emerge. My main job, in other words, is to listen, to transcribe what I hear. It’s true that I’ve written some poems—love poems, for instance, where there was a definite “you,” and perhaps I wanted to drive that you to utter distraction. But I still have to let the poem go in order to find itself. And so I cannot pay attention to some imagined reader or, in a way, even to my own conscious predilections, or hopes, in the moment of a poem’s coming into being. And I can’t jimmy anything. Once I had to wait several weeks for a poem to continue, after it had begun to knock. I tried to force my way into it, out of impatience, and had to cut those lines because I knew they were not the poem. Finally, the lines that belonged to that poem arrived, while I was taking a bath.
I do revise, at times, sometimes heavily, other times not. I sometimes come across words or phrases years later that are finally ready to be part of poems. And, I do court the chance entrance of words or phrases or images—I remain open to that. I do not think that all of my poems make “sense,” if by sense we’re talking about something that can be tracked in a logical, step-by-step way. But the poems do finally come to a point after which I can no longer argue with them, and they demand to stay in that shape.
TL: When talking about Whore in a 2005 interview, you described your approach to your work as one rooted in “a huge taste . . . for exploring paradox,” citing “The White Bride,” in-progress at that time, as “not such a rosy poem” in that it “is a metaphor for something else entirely.” The trope of the feminine and femininity perform powerfully as the central metaphor in many of the poems in The White Bride, including “Woman Chained to Fire” and the title poem. In regard to the relationship between paradox and the themes you find yourself exploring, what is the “something else” at work for you behind these particular images of the feminine?