by Srikanth Reddy

from jubilat, number thirteen

Mark Levine is the author of three collections of poetry: Debt (1993), Enola Gay (2000), and The Wilds (2007). F5, a nonfiction account of a natural disaster in the 1970s, will be published in June 2007. He has been the recipient of the Hodder Fellowship in the Humanities at Princeton, a Whiting Writers' Award, and a fellowship from the NEA. His poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Fence, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere; his nonfiction has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and other places. He was born in New York City and grew up in Toronto, and he lives in Brooklyn and Iowa City, where he teaches poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. This interview was conducted during fall 2005 and winter 2006 by Srikanth Reddy.

Srikanth Reddy: In the title poem from Enola Gay there's a moment when the speaker, surveying an absurdist apocalyptic landscape, suddenly announces that "I am with child." For some reason, I find myself thinking of that line often. It's always struck me as totally bizarre, and yet somehow utterly appropriate for the occasion of the poem. Well, it's years after the publication of that book, and I hear you're going to be a father pretty soon! [Applause.] But I'm still puzzled by that line from long ago. When you wrote that, were you anticipating fatherhood way off on the distant horizon, or worrying about how having a child might affect your writing life someday, or somehow testing the limits of what could be said by your presumably male speaker? What on earth could you have possibly meant at the time?

Mark Levine: Your sources are correct. At this advanced moment in the process I am positively big with child. (You should see Emily.) And, as I wrote in the next line of that poem, "This time it's a child." It does seem—not having read the poem in about five years, until your question inspired me to take a look (with one hand over my eyes)—like an outlandish thing to have said. I know that I have always found the phrase "with child" to be wonderfully weird, as though "child" were some abstract, mystical form. (Which, to be frank, at this point, for me—it is.) Where else but in poetry, or in an asylum, can a sort-of-grown man not only say such a thing, but say it and mean it—and feel it to be true? I have always adored Sidney's line, toward the end of the first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella: "Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes. . . ." One doesn't need to have had a child—only to have been one, once, I suppose—to recognize that "The Child is father of the Man," and that we often hang out, simultaneously, in overlapping chronologies (nowhere more so than in poetry), and occupy roles that would seem to be mutually exclusive. Perhaps I just have womb envy.

SR: And do you think that, on some unconscious level, you knew that you were in one sense writing about your future child?

ML: It always surprises me (and sometimes worries me) to realize, long after the fact, how little aware I am—or how ill-informed I am—of what my preoccupations are when I'm writing, and how very partial is my understanding and command of what I'm saying. I would never have believed that, in some ways, I could have been thinking about paternity when I wrote Enola Gay, ten years ago. For several years, the title poem of my new book, The Wilds, was called "On His First Son"—until I made the change recently. Yet I certainly had no sense that I was, to some extent, addressing myself in that poem to the unforeseen prospect of my own future son. I don't know what I thought—whether I was trying to write as my own father, addressing me; or as myself giving birth, so to speak, to a kind of understanding of my father; or neither of the above; or both. It may not be very respectable to admit to being clueless about what could be considered very fundamental questions of subject matter in poetry, but that's how it is for me. It's possible that I would have imagined that to say "mother" and "father" and "child" in a poem was doing nothing more than designating figures. I probably had a well-rehearsed abhorrence of the personal in poetry. I was kidding myself though.

SR: It sounds to me like you're very wary of thinking too much about—or theorizing—what you're doing as a poet while you're in the act of writing.

ML: It troubles me a bit that, as poets, we seem to be required to pretend that everything we put in poems emerges from a very supportable rationale. Maybe we've been successfully cowed by those who are hostile to poetry, and have internalized their suspicion that the whole thing is a sham, an elitist attempt to confound and mock the guileless reader. And so we apologetically, or pompously, give in to this rather recent expectation that artists are supposed to talk a good game about what they do. I'll tell you, I once spent a week interviewing the skateboarder Tony Hawk—a bit before he became a multinational industry—and here's what I liked best about him: great skateboarder, not great interview subject. Every time he got on his board it was magic; every time he opened his mouth it was, well, pretty ordinary stuff. His intelligence was thoroughly absorbed in what he did, and to him, talking about it was not only irrelevant—it was almost a violation of the spirit of his sport. This seems appropriate. By now, I've spent enough time around young people who are trying to write poems to recognize the common anxiety, even embarrassment, at simply being a poet, rather than pretending to be a poet and an eager A-student rolled up into a single reasonable package. But why, with all the hand-wringing poetry talk out there—our own, no doubt, included—are there some matters that, it seems, are very rarely aired, even in the supposedly brasstacks environment of the poetry workshop? Embarrassing questions, like: How much do you know what your poem is about when you're writing it? Do you know who is speaking? Do you know what the situation is? Do you know what your themes are? When you get right down to it: Do you know what is happening—what is going on—in your poem when you are writing it? I don't know about you, Chicu, but I'd often be lying if I answered most of these questions in the affirmative. I don't even want to be able to say "yes." If I could, I'd wonder why I was writing a poem.

SR: Maybe we need others to tell us what we're doing as artists (or skateboarders) in order to understand for ourselves what our concerns may be?

ML: A student of mine, a very intelligent one, pointed out to me at a party that my conversation seemed to return frequently to questions of childhood—my own, hers, those of others, not to mention the status of childhood generally. She wondered if I was obsessed with the subject. I was really taken aback, because I always thought of myself as someone who was deeply and distinctly uninterested in childhood, and who would certainly never write poems about childhood—indeed, there was a type of "poem of memory" (what an awful phrase) that I felt I had actively scorned since I started writing poems. But after the student made that remark to me, I took a look at the poems I was writing, and poems I had written in my previous books—and I even thought about some nonfiction I had written, which tended to be on topics that were assigned to me, like skateboarding, and were rarely of my choosing—and I thought, good God, I'm someone who is preoccupied by childhood and memory, and I had thought of myself in completely the opposite terms.

So, to return to a question you posed so long ago you may have forgotten it: I have no idea what effect having a child will have on my poetry. I have been very lucky to spend a second childhood (years twenty to forty) writing poetry, it would seem, out of the first childhood. There's something about that cusp of consciousness that a child is perched on that is powerful to me, much as I'm drawn to the sensation of undocumented, or unconfirmable, memory. Like any parent-to-be, I guess, I'm really, really curious about what I can learn about human beings by watching one develop in front of me. The process seems like poetry to me, though I'm not thinking about it in terms of something as menial as "getting material" for poems. After a while, the only reason I can see to write poems is out of personal need, and it's very hard to say what the need will be once the little guy arrives. But I probably say that only because I am currently so full of terrified anticipation.

SR: As a former baby myself, I find the subject endlessly interesting. I thought it was pretty fascinating (and deeply weird) that you'd been thinking about calling the title poem of the new book "On His First Son" for years before the proverbial twinkle in your eye. And I vaguely remember hearing somewhere that you'd once thought of Debt as being in some ways a book of the father, and of Enola Gay as being a book of the mother, which makes me feel like The Wilds (a book of the child) might complete that family logic?

But what I want to focus on is what you described as "that cusp of consciousness that a child is perched on," and how it shapes your sense of what poetry is. That cusp of consciousness seems a lot like the threshold between knowing and uncertainty that Keats described as negative capability. And I'd agree enthusiastically that this cusp or threshold is the most productive space for a poet to inhabit. But lately I've also been worried that uncertainty lets one off the ethical hook—it lets one, as it were, refuse to grow up. I guess my vague feelings of guilt about not speaking up more about the political situation over recent years has something to do with this. In the lead-up to the war, for instance, I felt uncertain about whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction tucked away somewhere in Mesopotamia (among many other things), and my general reluctance to forcefully decide matters for myself mirrored, I think, a broader failure of liberals to dissent from what our nation is perpetrating abroad. That's a detour, I know, but what I'm getting at is a sense that there is a danger to uncertainty. I'm definitely not advocating a more political poetry—Lord knows I find most overtly political verse to be fairly unliterary—but I'm wondering what you think about the ethics of uncertainty as a poet writing today.

ML: I know what you're saying, but the thought of assuming a certain kind of ethical responsibility in poems makes me bristle a bit. Do you remember when you were younger and some snide kid told you to "grow up"? I think I can still hear that voice. I hated that kid. What he was really saying was: Don't be yourself. Don't have an imagination. Behave. I'm just not interested in growing up in those ways. (On the other hand, I already find myself mourning a certain kind of bygone communal maturity—the days when people could disagree about poetics and politics in respectful and civil ways, without needing to assault each other from the safety of their dreary blogs.) I was once on a little panel about some forgettable issue or other and one of the other members was an ambitious and quite accomplished young critic, a guy then under thirty, who complained that poets in America had lost the value of being "judicious and authoritative" in poems. I was taken aback. He struck me as one of those people in college who wears a bow tie and carries a pocket watch—as someone who has gotten overinvested in a certain model of "maturity." There may be a lot of things wrong with poetry—now and always—but the reluctance to speak with authority doesn't seem to me to be one of them. In my mind, one of the services poets perform, intuitively, is to hold up the authority of poetic and imaginative tradition against other claims to authority. My suspicion is that the recurrent charge that poets are not sufficiently engaged is typically a symptom of one of two things: the right-wing interest in trivializing poetry and misplaced left-wing guilt. I'm not proposing a Peter Pan model of the poet, but my guess is that "not growing up"—if it constitutes a willingness to remain, as you say, "in mysteries, doubts, and uncertainties"—is much preferable—poetically, ethically, politically—to being prematurely pickled.

SR: So it's this cusp of uncertainty that you somehow find to be both fundamentally poetic and fundamentally ethical?

ML: That cusp—I don't know, I think the desire to be there must in part be temperamental. I like basketball games that go into overtime; overtime drives some people crazy. I don't really care about how books or movies end. I like the unresolved. I've always been drawn to the moment "before"—the moment when you have a heightened awareness that you're in the presence of something real, something meaningful, but when the meaning hasn't yet been captured. To me, that's the "intensest rendezvous." In Bob Dylan's terms, it's the refrain of "Ballad of a Thin Man": "Because something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" That's one reason that, for me, striving to write precise, deftly rendered imagery—material that conveys much more, through the senses, than can be expressed in other terms—is vital.

But I understand your uncertainty about uncertainty. (Your meta-uncertainty?) It's something that the uncertain ones among us must grapple with. Doesn't it come down to a question of the authenticity of our uncertainty? If uncertainty is a posture—something we adopt in an effort to make cool poems—it would, indeed, be frivolous. But true uncertainty is a beautiful thing. And my guess is that those (like Mister Bow Tie) who adopt the posture of certainty are far more dangerous, morally and politically—and of course artistically—than those who have fewer answers, less of an agenda to promote, and who try to use their work as a way of shedding a little light on the darkness.

My glib, reflexive take on this problem would be that of an aesthete: that the ethical task of a poet is to write as well as he can, as accurately, forthrightly, and courageously—to be as uncompromising as he can in relation to poetic truth. But that is a tall order, an ideal against which one always falls short. Also, of course, excellence is not value neutral: is the ethical task of a nuclear bomb maker to make the best bomb he can? Um, no. But in that case the problem is that the medium itself—nuclear bomb making—is morally corrupted from the start. Whereas I have cast my lot with those who believe that the poetic tradition is, at its height and in its impulse, noble, resistent, and self-scrutinizing. So, yeah, I think the world would be a much better place if we all listened to each other the way poems listen to us.

SR: I do think you've got a point about misplaced left-wing guilt motivating the politicization of poetry today. In fact, one could probably write a whole book about the hidden role of political guilt in shaping American poetry from Whitman all the way through to the confessional poets. But then again, who except Mister Bow Tie would want to read it?

I'm also mulling over what you said about "the authenticity of our uncertainty," which seems to me like a useful way of thinking about the special kind of knowledge poetry might have to offer. Maybe poetry is where we can weigh our uncertainty, to make sure it's earned and not just an easy way out of (political, emotional, or philosophical) problems. This is pretty abstract, but it leads to the even more abstract question of what secures or grounds that authenticity. I mean, how do we know if somebody is just play-acting their angst or whether it's the real deal? One answer, I think, is the very unabstract answer to be found throughout your poems—namely, embodiment. A person who physically enters into his or her poetry seems to me more vulnerable, more exposed, and therefore more authentically uncertain than somebody who writes from a disembodied perspective. After all, I'm much more likely to believe that somebody falls upon the thorns of life if they actually bleed. This question of embodiment is one that's always struck me as a major concern (conscious or not) in your poems. Peculiar things happen to bodies throughout Debt and Enola Gay—the speaker's head becomes a zipper, a woman's breasts are replaced by stone—as if you were desperately trying to bring the human figure into representation, and somehow discovered that the most authentic way to do this might be by wounding, burning, breaking, or otherwise damaging it.

Anyway, we're a long way from babies now, but I did want to ask you about this focus on the human figure, because it seems to me like the body enters into language in a different, maybe gentler way in the new poems: "watched the kneeling girl/twist upward into shape / a stem twined round her / she is out of milk / that flows from her in the song of spring."

ML: I guess we've arrived at the always troubling question concerning authenticity. Well, I have a hard time believing that authenticity doesn't lie near the root of what many of us—despite having been reared in the strange pieties of postmodernism—really value, whether we are talking about authenticity in poems, or in friendships, relationships, politics, most everything. I do believe, as you're suggesting, that poems provide us with an incomparable medium for discerning authenticity, and for helping to locate and hone the authentic in ourselves. (One of my favorite nuggets from Dickinson: "Microscopes are prudent / In an Emergency.") Maybe this sounds flaky. I'm not talking about absolute truth. I really don't know anyone (in my small circle of intimates) who is a believer in that oh-so-easily-reviled construct. But just because it's easy to make a hash of absolute truth,once one has overheard a few phrases of theory, it seems to me ridiculous to pretend that it's not possible to move toward the genuine, the true—however elusive it is—in ourselves and in poems. And I guess I wonder what we're doing with ourselves if we're not doing that. Of course I'm aware that poems, like everything else made by human beings, are artificial, but I don't believe that excludes poems from approaching authenticity, and partaking of it—as far as I'm concerned, poems routinely do that, and that's a big reason that we read them. One thing that's so moving about poems is that we know they are artificial, but still we invest them, and their materials, with the force of the real. We need to do this, because we need to feel the reality of our lives. When I write the word tree, I don't just see a word or construct—I see a physical tree. And if I'm not being particularly lazy as a writer, I'm going to do more to specify the reality, the tree-ness, of that tree—not only as a way of writing a "nice" poem, but of specifying, and thereby sharing in, the reality of reality.

SR: So "no ideas but in things"?

ML: It's easy to talk in abstract terms, which always makes me uncomfortable, because I'm drawn to the physical experience of poems, not their ideas. You asked whether, in reading poems, we can begin to distinguish between the appearance of authenticity and something that smacks of the real deal. Don't you think we rely on being able to make that distinction, however provisionally? I have to believe it can be done. The poem makes a claim—"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense," for instance—and, after submerging ourselves in the poem, we can ask, "Do I feel the truth of the claim in the poem, or does it just seem like a convenient or clever thing to say? Does the poem, in its rhythms, syntax, imagery, and so forth, grapple with drowsiness, numbness, and pain, or not? Does the claim feel abstract or, as you say, 'embodied'?"

And how does one embody the experience of one's poem? There must be as many ways as there are authentic poems (i.e., not that many). First off, I suppose, one believes in the reality of one's own imaginative event. One orients oneself to a position inside the poem—one lives in and through the poem, rather than hovering above it, using it as a way to say something that makes one seem clever, or as a vehicle for producing nice poetic effects, which, once you've read enough poems, are not as rare or interesting as they might first appear. I've found, myself, that focusing, in particular, on imagery, has helped me to "feel" the poem by employing my (generally underused) senses, rather than trying to direct the poem with my often enfeebled brain. I've always been puzzled by the relative thinness of imagery in the English poetic tradition, by the way in which sensory experience has tended to get subordinated to rhetoric or theme, for which the imagery is expected merely to offer support. Only with modernism does the situation begin to change, and not in a lasting way. Perhaps because I came to poetry as a way of getting outside my head and its limitations, I've been inclined to enter a poem by drawing some broad strokes of imagery, believing in the provisional physical reality of the image, and then believing that, since it's real, I have to deal with it, explore it, be respectful of it. The function of the image, for me, is not to serve my purposes in the poem, but rather to allow me into the poem, to provide the site for an action to take place. It doesn't mean I'm going to write a good poem. That's not really what I'm after. As my three or four readers may confirm, it's entirely possible that I may not, personally, have the stuff to write a good poem. But I've still got to try to live as richly as I can.

SR: One artist who comes to mind in hearing you talk about representation and reality is Francis Bacon. Maybe it's simply because of the violence brought to bear on the body in his painting—which, in a way, reminds me of the startling deformations of the human figure in Debt and Enola Gay—but somehow I often think of Bacon's images when I'm reading your poems.

ML: Bacon's work and process are exemplary to me. I love the way he deploys traditional values—of form, structure, line, color, modeling, and subject matter—to explore what he calls his "nervous system." He also talks, in his interviews with David Sylvester, of using traditional techniques and materials of painting to capture, even trap, the real. Reality is the outcome of his process, not a known quantity that he enters his process wishing to depict. I really think that's why his work seems so alive, so authentic. Then, of course, there is his sheer skill. And his genius. Last year a student gave me Deleuze's book on Bacon. (You can guess who is educating whom in my classes.) I thought Deleuze had some fantastic things to say about Bacon's capacity to produce the sensation of a variety of forces impinging on our bodies. You could tell Deleuze really felt the sensation, himself, in Bacon's work. To me, he was approaching the paintings like a poet (or a painter), allowing the work to overwhelm him. And he suggested beautifully that Bacon's ability to express force in paint was the result of feeling those forces operate on him—that, at his best, Bacon was painting out of his body, and crossing over into the canvas. In that way, I'd say, every Bacon painting is a kind of self-portrait. And of course I believe that to be the case with forceful poems, too.

SR: "Reality is the outcome of his process"—I like that a lot. In fact, what I like most about Bacon's painting—which I don't know well enough to speak about at all, really—is the way it exhibits the trace of its own process. (Somehow the blurs and smears on his canvases seem to me like a document of perception, or, rather, a document of the process of trying to perceive an unruly subject that won't stay still). One thing that I often think about from those snows of yesteryear at Iowa is your emphasis on process in the classroom. And, though I know you're wary of terms like "ethics" in talking about poetry, it seems to me like there is a strong ethical component to your way of thinking about the writing process, which to a certain degree involves relinquishing control over one's material in favor of a more exploratory or unpremeditated relationship toward one's subject. To my mind, this way of thinking about how to write also opens onto a way of thinking about how to treat other people. But I'm willing to drop my ethical hobbyhorse in favor of looking a bit more deeply into this process question. Could you tell me a bit about how your own process as a writer has developed?

ML: When I started writing, what I was looking for was a way to be wild—to say the things that seemed forbidden (by school, family, girlfriend, etc.) but true. My first poetry teacher, Philip (no relation) Levine, was a great inspiration to me. He told me I could write poems without being polite. So I practiced being blunt and, in my terms, literal. Even if the landscape of my poems was surreal, I was going to treat that landscape as something real and try to be genuinely affected by what went on there. No more metaphor for me. At an extreme, this meant that instead of saying something along the lines of, "I am like a zipper" (i.e., I open and dose, I get split and reattached, etc.), I would say, "I am a zipper" and mean it, and try to inhabit that sensibility in the poem. A lot of my first book is composed of poems in the mode of "I do this, I do that, I see this, I touch that." Lots of action, and, as you said earlier, a nasty, sort of punkish aversion to thinking, even a stance of ridicule toward "emotion recollected in tranquility." I thought tranquility was the enemy of poetry—who knows, it might be—and that recollection was a form of fraudulence. I wanted everything to be present tense, and present.

It's hard to imagine now, barely twenty years later, but a lot of my peers found those poems in my first book to be not just daring, but almost incomprehensible, and in violation of the protocols of poetry. Of course, I enjoyed being an enfant terrible for a minute or two. I believed I was participating in a great avant-garde tradition by building my poems on a series of exclusions—expunging anything that might reek of explanation or self-justification, including the syntax of logical connection, and the rationality (A equals B) of metaphor, and the cohesiveness of theme, and the authority of narration, and the consolation of any rhythm that might seem modulated. Thus did an otherwise well-behaved twenty-five-year-old write a book of poems.

But here's the thing about prematurity: I was ashamed of that book right away. (I would be lying if I didn't admit that, these days, I've made my peace with it and am sort of impressed with its audacity.) Over the next several years, I tried to figure out how to avoid imitating myelf and how to avoid writing poems that felt dictated by a stance towards poetry that became stale quickly. I moved to Montana for a teaching job, and two things happened. First, I discovered the natural world; second, I began reading the English poetic tradition in a completely different, less disinterested way—the result, in all honesty, of being required to teach a course in traditional prosody to the writing students each semester. Previously, I had been a single-minded protégé of modernism; but I began to feel—no doubt through a misguided and idiosyncratic reading of the tradition—a deep and personal connection to Shakespeare, Wyatt, Donne, Keats, Hopkins, Dickinson, many others. It struck me that for daring, for density of language and thought, for true modernity, the tradition had a whole lot more to offer than whatever one might find in this month's poetry journals. I began to read the tradition for insights on poetic process and technique.

Gradually, I came to write longer sentences, to use syntax that I had forbidden myself and, above all from my point of view, to introduce diction that I would have rejected previously as "poetic" or "beautiful." I wanted something that was located deeper in what I took to be the lyric core of the experience of consciousness, so I made an effort to strip away the scaffolding of story and incident that I used to rely on to get myself into a poem. I moved toward a poem that was distinctly more honed, more crafted, than those in my first book. My other objective was to disallow myself the privileges of the ironist: I didn't want to use tone as a way of interpreting and narrowing the experience of the poem. So my poems became both more traditional and, I suspect, harder to get a handle on. I also imposed on myself—in reaction to my first book—formal variety. I already knew that my work was not going to develop by artificially changing my subject matter—I really believe that one's true subject matter is given, not chosen—so I was going to focus, instead, on changing, and improving, my technique.

SR: It does seem to me like there's a kind of quiet but forceful shift in your process with this new book. Process seems more apparent—more on the surface of the poems—in The Wilds than in your previous collections. This means, on one hand, that the poems feel more raw and less resolved than before. (The endings of the poems, for example, often seem to question or trouble the gestures of literary closure found in many other books of poetry today, or, for that matter, the senses of ending in Debt or Enola Gay.) As you say, this seems to have something to do with grammar—one might think of it as a new grammar of feeling that wasn't apparent in the earlier collections. And on a technical level, in The Wilds this new process becomes visible through the edgy, peculiar, and utterly unpredictable unfurling of syntax across poetic lines, as in the opening of the poem "Triangle":

If not for
the triangle accompanying
my newborn to
his father's mother's
scheduled excavation I
would have spilled
him mistakenly down
the banister where
I ought to
belong having squandered
my grip elemental
as my syntax
was.

Reading these poems, I feel like I'm watching the syntax feeling its way toward a destination without any sense of predestination. I know that sounds awfully pretentious, but allow me to adjust my bow tie and elaborate. It's like the grammar unfolds—in real time—a sense of what the poem is. Does that even come close to making any sense? And if it does, I was wondering if you might be willing to talk about the role of syntax in the process of composing a poem like "Triangle," and how this process differs from your earlier methods of composition. And for extra credit, could you say something about the role of lineation in staging the grammar of the poem as it was written?

ML: After Enola Gay, the process of working out the next stage of poetry for myself once again took several years, and lots of trial and error—more error, certainly, than success. As you say, the major shift in the poems in The Wilds involves, finally, the relationship to syntax. I don't know why or how it happened. Maybe it's because I had started writing so much prose over the years, and I am perpetually frustrated by prose's demand that we say one thing at a time, one thing after another, when what our bodies really want to do, I think, is to experience conflicting states simultaneously. It may be, as you say, that the process in these newer poems is more exposed—I certainly hope that's so—but on the other hand, this process is rarely referred to, as it was in my first book. In the poem "Triangle" that you mention, I suppose the most basic way in which process is invoked is that each line is composed of three words—a triangular, and always shifting, syntactical fragment, connected to those surrounding it. It seemed interesting to me to measure a line based on the quantity of words—trying, somehow, to have something happen in each trio of words—rather than on the basis of rhythmic stresses or counted syllables: I thought there might be a lot of possibilities for variation within the sameness of each line's measure. But to be honest, that decision didn't emerge until I was well into writing a draft of the poem and was chiseling away at it. I believe, surely, that I had in the back of my mind an old favorite poem, the "Little Triangle" series by Vasko Popa, but I also know that at the time I was trying to figure out a way to write entire poems in a single sentence (a very different shape from that of the closed geometry of a triangle) and was exploring how far I might be able to stretch the materials of a sentence and still keep the sentence intact. In the interest of full, self-contradictory disclosure, I should tell you that the months in which I was making this single-sentence effort were those that involved the build-up to the war in Iraq, and the beginning of that war, and in my mind the desire to keep speaking without interruption felt somehow connected—in conflicted ways—to the politics of that moment. A few of those one-sentence poems survive in my book, but some became collections of fragments that sort of drift into and collide with each other, and others simply start and stop without syntactical boundaries. "Triangle" is one of the more tight-assed poems in the book.

SR: So what is the "triangle" that's being referred to in the poem?

ML: We started out by talking about my forthcoming trinity, didn't we? One likes to think that in every pairing there lingers a third, unarticulated term. It would be easy to assign it an identity—the Third Party, the Other, the Alternate, and so on. But when I wrote that poem I think—I know—I had in mind a walk I took with Emily on a dirt road through woods in Maine, passing a beautiful salt marsh before going over a hill and dropping to a secluded beach—and I had the image of the two of us walking with a triangle around us, around our waists, like a big belt, if that makes sense. Of my 435 favorite lines in "The Waste Land," my most favorite might be, "Who is the third who walks always beside you?" That third term, in this poem, is the point outside our pair who makes of our pair a triangle, and it is the triangle itself which includes us, and is invisible to us but present, and points both to ground and to sky, past and future, and which is a real thing to us—a being, a shape, something we made in the course of our walk, something like a poem. In that way the poem is entirely autobiographical, as all my poems are these days, autobiographical and also full of made-up stuff.

About the Author
Srikanth Reddy's first collection of poetry is Facts for Visitors (University of California Press, 2004). He has published poems in various journals, including APR, Fence, Grand Street, and Volt. He is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago.

jubilat
University of Massachussetts, Amherst

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