diary form to a higher level of artifice. I don’t
know exactly how to say that, but I wanted to
make it a more serious form, and I wanted to see
what one could do with it in poetry and still have
it be entries. So all that was behind the next group
of books, but they’re still structured the same
way. There’s the past, the present, and the future,
but larger. And so is the last one. I still don’t
know the name of the last trilogy, but that’s
on top of the second trilogy, so you get an
inverted pyramid. It’s the same pyramid but
larger each time.
So, to answer your question, they’re all doing
the same thing, which is a kind of radar echo, I
suppose, of theDivine Comedy.You know, I
don’t even like to bring those words up, but—
the way James Merrill had three books inThe
Changing Light at Sandover,and the way Pound
was trying to write one, the way a lot of people
do—that’s the thing the sonar is coming back
from that you can never see and never approach.
That’s why I saidAppalachiais not a para-
diso, because I seem to be incapable of writing
one. Though mentally, perhaps, certainly spiritu-
ally, it’s become a book of the dead, because I can
give a pep talk to those who might be true
believers, which is what most books of the dead
are, the Egyptian books of the dead. That’s why
it’s the last one, and, I guess, why it was written
so quickly in terms of my usual production.
Chickamaugatook five long years to write, and
bothBlack ZodiacandAppalachiatogether took
three years and four months. I saw the end in
sight, I saw the conclusion of what I was trying to
do. And when I didn’t do anything for months
and months and months, I realized I really was at
the end. I wasn’t just kidding myself. I had had
something I was trying to do, and I did it, and
that was it. Now I can sort of shut up again, I
hope....
AndAppalachiaseems to be a conclusion not
only to this trilogy but to all of them. There are
references throughout to your earlier books.
There are things inAppalachiathat go all the
way back to the first trilogy, particularlyChina
Trace, because that’s its mirror book. That’s on
purpose, not because I didn’t know what else to
say. That’s why I said the trilogies are all doing the
same thing, only differently, more expansively.
Some of these poems seem even to look like
the earlier poems. There are a number that are
completely left-justified, with none of the trade-
mark drop lines.
I don’t know why. It’s just the way I was
hearing it. Maybe once I sped up and saw the
end, the lines moved faster. What I’ve been
working on since Appalachia is this thing I
started in March, and I’m still...Ihave a couple
of stanzas, each about six lines, and one or two
of them will be dropped. I do know that every
once in a while inAppalachiathere seems to be a
spate of them with not too many drop lines. I
don’t know why that is.
How do you decide how the poem will move
across the page? How do you decide between a
drop line and a line break, for example?
I don’t have a program for the way I use
them. It’s the way I hear them. If it’s coming
together and springing, then I’ll drop it down. If
it needs to have a little push, I’ll drop it. If it
seems to be breaking under its own weight, then
I’ll drop it to the next line. If it doesn’t, I let it go.
I don’t have any program: ‘‘Out of every five lines
one or two must be dropped.’’ It’s not like that.
No, but there is an amazing sense of structure
in your work—which is surprising, when so much
of it seems to be an argument against narrative.
Not really. Do you mean professionally or
in my own stuff?
In your own stuff. I don’t think you’re being
dogmatic. But there is a tension between your
resistance to narrative and this overarching archi-
tecture—in each individual poem and in construct-
ing a twenty-seven-year cycle. And so many of
your books move forward in time, in strict alle-
giance to chronology. Explain the difference, in
your mind, between structure and narrative, and
between chronology and narrative.
Overt narrative tells a story. Covert narra-
tive also tells a story, but in a different language.
Everything has a narrative to it; don’t get me
wrong. It’s just that I’m no good at storyline.
My story is always underneath, always covert.
Chronology perhaps is a way of helping move
that mole under the ground, and you watch his
little pile behind him as he goes. Structure, of
course, is my substitute for storytelling. I guess
I’d like to be like Robert Frost and spin yarns in
beautiful blank verse, but I can’t do it, so I have
to make up my own prosody. Out of a deficiency
I’ve tried to make a positive thing. And I talk
about it so much that people think, ‘‘Even if I
don’t like it, at least he knows what he’s doing.’’
But structure long ago became paramount to me
in forming my poems, because narrative is notWords Are the Diminution of All Things