SM: Forgive me for doing this, but I was thinking aloud about the “something else” recently when writing a guest blog entry for the BAP site, and so I’m going to crib myself here and then build on what I had begun to think about:

 

In some ways, I think The White Bride, as a whole book, may be more erotic than Whore, which is pretty bleak—but finally “The White Bride,” which begins as a fascination with something that may be a human being and may be a statue or mannequin, becomes a metaphor for the moon, shrouded in a veil-like cloud, dim—in either case, the image of “The White Bride,” in the title poem, is rather chilly.

 

When I was very young, it seemed to me that God was the moon—there was that face, and the way we could drive for miles and the moon would still be there—as though watching over us. I had a warm feeling about the moon.

 

But in the season of this poem—no, the moon is just a rock, around which we should build no other fantasies. There’s this sense of abandonment, of our isolation here on the planet, of a lack of celestial goodwill—rather, indifference. And below, a nervous world. Nothing protecting us—from ourselves.

 

And withThe White Bride, it was that tone, the way events kept circling around it, that informed the making of the poems in the book. It happened early enough in the process that it influenced the actual making of the poems as well as the pull of their eventual constellation and orchestration.

 

With both books, as they were coming together as books, for me there’s a kind of triangulation between a title and two epigraphs—and really, it’s right in there that the territory gets clear—and it involves a kind of paradox, and a kind of circularity. It’s like these points establish a field within which the contradictions can play themselves out.

 

Without giving the title poem away here, “Whore” is perched on the axis of an etymology that takes us away from the usual, looser, conversational definitions—if you allow one piece of the etymology to lead to another, there’s a tenderness at the center of these roots that seems almost in opposition to the way we normally use the word.

 

In “The White Bride” (the title poem), where we see an almost eerily white vision of what seems, initially, to be a woman, there’s the tracking of a fascination with an archetype that we associate with tenderness that turns out, in this particular case, to have none—to be nearly devoid, in fact, of life, if not actually so. And so here the whiteness connotes not so much a kind of purity as a nearly reflective surface which is finally incapable of giving love, and which belies our associations with the archetype, as well as our hopes.

 

But the tenderness is alive—just elsewhere. Not in those nooks and crannies in which we’re led to expect it. And life is to be found in the areas that are far more colorful, and less perfect, than what we had imagined moving toward, than what we had aimed for.

 

TL: The White Bride consists mostly of prose poems and your agility with the density and brevity of the form and the risks you take result in a fresh and uniquely startling voice. What freedoms or constraints has the form offered you?

 

SM: Well, first of all, I’m thrilled by your response to the work. Thank you. It’s a deeply flattering characterization of the poems.

 

As I said recently to the folks at Poemeleon, I do find that I’m generally with those who suggest that the prose poem is simply a poem that has neither the obligation nor the tool of the line break. These poems allowed a kind of rush of rhythms and lines and sentences that sprawled into a still somewhat condensed space, with frequent dashes making for the occasional breath or caesura. There’s a sense, at times, of the unending line—and this was a lift from Chet Baker, who, it is said, would try for a sense of continually sustained breath in his trumpet solos—as though the breath were going on and on without a pause for inhalation—the illusion of an endless breath. I had this specifically in mind as I wrote “Let Every Heart” but I think it was one of the things that carried over into a lot of the other pieces. Of course it is impossible not to take a breath in the middle of it, while reading it aloud, but I like the idea of it all falling within one very, very long breath that takes in the entire view, the entire, collapsed experience—in all of its many individual moments and newly scattered sights and objects—of the poem.

 

Also, maybe as a kind of argument with the expectations of the paragraph (something a prose poem looks like but really isn’t) I have recently been drawn to breaking up moment-to-moment coherence and unity, so that the surface is sometimes a little more distressed and the poem feels as precariously balanced as a bunch of Pick-Up-Sticks, though at other times I like an almost glass-like surface for something that is inherently emotionally distressing, because the contrast is so unsettling. And so, many of these are rather dense, but I hope they proceed with a kind of propulsion.

 

TL: What have you taken with you from the process of The White Bride that is different—or maybe carried through—from your journey with Whore?