This Time

"No one else writes poems like Gerald Stern’s poems. Their wildness is different from the wildness of a Levis poem, though it can have some of the same surreal image-making qualities. The wildness, for me, in a Stern poem is one of emotion. If Doty sees more deeply than most, and Dunn and Wright seem to think more deeply, then Stern ‘feels’ more fully or more extravagantly. Of these three broad poetic features – seeing, thinking, feeling – feeling came last for me. It isn’t that I’m a cold person: it is that I am exceedingly suspicious of poems that make me, as a reader, feel like a voyeur. This would be the knock against many ‘confessional’ poets. Hence, for a long time, I tended to write poems that were too understated with regard to their emotions. Stern’s poems, on the other hand, explode off the page with expressive gestures (weeping and hollering are common activities, for example). Yet I trust Stern’s feelings, meaning I believe he feels them. I don’t think, even in their extremity, that they are inauthentic. I needed to see how far a poet could go with something like raw feeling. A poem without an authentic emotional engagement on the part of its maker will be a boring poem. It may be fabulously wrought, but no one will care. I go to poems to be moved; Stern’s poems move me very, very much. I often weep and howl when I read them. And I like that. I wanted to write a book that was in some way different from Correspondence, and I only half-achieved that, which feels fine to me. I had a general idea, after writing the series of poems in response to Marcus Aurelius, that I wanted to think in very broad terms about imperialism and its relationship to technology and also the basic idea of possession. But, of course, everything human falls into those categories so that wasn’t a very limiting vision. But the Jim Jarmusch film Dead Man – which stars Johnny Depp and which is how he ends up with a cameo in one of the poems – seems very much about the American Dream and the nation’s westward expansion. Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo is also a film about people in places they don’t belong doing truly insane things they ought not to be doing. These characters are every bit as tragic and ridiculous and emblematic as they are likable and heroic, though I’m not sure that there is much of a hero in Depp’s character. He seems largely a victim of circumstance, which I suppose makes it a work of realism in some way, despite its strangeness. The Eternal City is meant to be a metaphor for the mind, a timeless landscape in which the past and present, the fictional and actual, the elevated and the quotidian live side by side. Johnny Depp lives in my mental landscape as does Marcus Aurelius and Walter Benjamin. Benjamin lives in the best house in town, in fact. I never get tired of visiting him! I’m not very prolific: there weren’t many poems that were excluded from the collection. If I begin a poem, I tend to work on it quite diligently. I’m not someone who abandons a lot of drafts. Most of the poems that I managed to write between 2005 and now are in The Eternal City. I think that precisely because it is a busy world people ought to make time for poetry. Poetry demands that readers and thinkers slow down. Just as a poem emerges out of careful attention, it demands and re-creates that kind of attention within the reader. Poems are the antithesis of the sound bite; they are antidotes to polarisation. A good poem does not seek an easy answer or a single way of looking at the world. A good poem attempts to reopen within us our understanding of how varied and multivalent our experiences are, how complicated the world is. It also often asks us to consider perspectives other than our own and to locate our humanity within a larger context. I am not a person of conventional faith, but there is much that feels sacred to me. Our moral obligations to each other and to the planet are sacred responsibilities. I don’t want a poem to speak in a preachy way directly to those obligations, and there are certainly no quick fixes on the horizon, but poems encourage and cultivate an interior life in which our awareness of those obligations is less easily avoided. The attention of the poem reconsecrates not only its immediate subject but also the act of attention itself. And poetry reconsecrates language, which, as we know, is always under siege from those who would like to empty it of both its meanings and its beauty."