Volume 24 261
Lacan, this movement tends to suggest an otherness
we seek; we always seek to know ourselves in, iden-
tify with, the Other a double.
What you say is very good, and it ought to be
included. But I have nothing to add because you
really answer it yourself.
How do you see yourself figured in the poems?
In other words, what is the relationship between you
and your voices, narrators? Sometimes your per-
spective changes in a single poem, such as “Susan’s
Photograph,” where you are razor, wrist, photog-
rapher, the friend, and so on. UItimately, then, this
is a question about voice, its varieties and modula-
tions, about the ways you throw yourself, aspects of
your self that are real or imagined, into the poems.
One thing I feel sure of about the use of the self
is that while there are poems that may use the “I”
with very little of the “real self” in them, there are
no poems that present the “real self” precisely, “as
is,” as one would try to in, say, an autobiography.
I think the relationship between me and my
voices, narrators, is the common one: I am trying
to move into an other, into others; to move out of
the private self into an imagination of everyone’s
history, into the public world. This is what I most
want to do—maybe what every lyric poet most wants
to do. This effort in no way means to exclude the
eccentric, but to enlarge what is human. (Here
Emily Dickinson and Whitman both come to mind
and the wonderful southern poet of our own time,
Eleanor Ross Taylor.)
What is the nature of the “messenger”? It
seems a sort of metamorphic entity. I think, for ex-
ample, of “Beka, 41,” where you tell the girl that
the messenger is like her brother,
like the penguin
who sits on the nest of pebbles, and the one
who brings home pebbles, to the nest’s edge in his
beak,
one at a time, and also like the one
who is lying there, warm, who is going to break
out soon:
becoming yourself; the messenger is growing...
I think also of “Turn (2): After Years,” where
the name of the absent friend is presenced at the end
by uttering the two words “other” and “thou” al-
most as if to bring them together, as if to presence
the absent other, to bring the messenger close. Could
we talk, then, about the “messenger” and the “you”?
Yes, in “Beka, 14,”the messenger is a meta-
morphic figure: I tried to use the changing figures
as messengers coming, gradually, to call the fourteen-
year-old child to her adult life, including, at the end
of the poem, her leaving home to go her own way.
A series of callings. Whether the “messenger” is
thought of as internal (as it becomes, halfway
through this particular poem), or as an external fig-
ure, doesn’t matter, I don’t think: what matters to
me in the poem is the figuring of the person’s com-
ing into possession of his or her own strongest
desires—something which Father William E
Lynch, S.J., writes so clearly and so healingly of
in his book Images of Hope.
In “Turn (2): After Years,” I hadn’t thought
consciously of a messenger figure, but I do feel the
absent friend “present at the end” of the poem, yes.
The two words Otherand thouare trying to express
closeness and the redemption of a harmful past. In
this way, the poem is (maybe like many poems)
part recognition and part talk, real or imagined, to
another person.
Your poems, especially inThe Messenger, defy
paraphrase perhaps as well as any I know. Yet there
is a certain “path of saying,” as Heidegger calls it,
that can be followed in poems. For him, this sort of
movement is an undercurrent or underplot that must
be participated in and that goes below the surface
of the words. It is something like a “gesture” of lan-
guage. I think that all the things we have been talk-
ing about so far are the elements of this underplot.
Could you speak to how this works in poems or
something like it that you might have experienced?
I like Heidegger’s notion and his phrase for it.
I’m more familiar with the process you bring up here
as a teacher than in my own writing: to try to hear
a poem with students, rather than to encourage a kind
of structured puzzling out of the poet’s “meaning,”
which ends up being reductive. But this can be a
tricky business, because in the poems I most value,
there is meaning, and very precise meaning, at that.
Barthes called texts “infinite cipher” because
for him their ultimate meanings were unresolvable,
unfathomable. Would you say that a poem should
strive for this (from your own point of view), and
that the techniques of fragmentation, shifting per-
spectives, and so on that we discussed earlier are
means of achieving the character of an infinite ci-
pher? How much of what goes on beyond the words
is the poet aware of? to what extent?
I haven’t read Barthes, but from what you tell
me here, I’d go on with my last sentence, in the pre-
vious question, to disagree with his idea of a poem
as an “infinite cipher,” etc. For myself, I’d always
want a poem to have mystery, yes, but also to be very
clear. That tension matters as much as anything to me
in a poem—as much as the music of its language, say.Seeing You