conversations on the long poem
part one of this conversation can be found here
part two of this conversation can be found here
Ken Norris: Much of The Invisible World Is in Decline is written in prose. Why? Why prose poetry?
Bruce Whiteman: I was in my late twenties when I began The Invisible World and had grown weary of the lyric poem. I’d published three small books of lyric poems—poems about love, sex, etc.—and had begun to want my poetry to engage with larger materials. Part of my thinking about the lyric poem and its limitations was the formal decisions that I as the poet made at every moment, especially line endings, stanza structure, and so on. The prose poem offered an answer, I thought, to that question of how to make the poem less egocentric. I would still have all the musical resources of poetry without having to impose my personal self on the line. I could write sentences rather than lines. Added to that was my admiration for the nineteenth-century French poets who had first invented and then exploited the prose poem: Aloysius Bertrand (whom I got to through Ravel), Baudelaire, and Rimbaud.
On the one hand, Rimbaud’s Illuminations fascinated me for their elusiveness. Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose seemed by contrast rather down to earth. “Enivrez-vous” seemed like good advice! I also read Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror when I was about eighteen, and it left an enduring impression. (Its author forms the subject of a section of Book III.) So I knew how open to different kinds of language the prose poem was, and decided that it would be exactly the poetic structure I wanted and needed. I wrote nothing else for thirty years.
KN: What is “the invisible world,” and why is it in decline?
BW: Well, that’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it? There have been times over the last four decades when I’ve regretted the title. It’s grand enough, but sometimes seemed limiting; and sometimes I’ve had simply to forget the overall title and just write what the muse told me to write. The invisible world—whatever that is—may be in decline—for whatever reason—but I want you to translate Baudelaire’s “Receuillement,” or rather to recover the translation you made fifty years ago and include it in Book IX. What could my answer be but, well, yes, as you say, so shall I do.
The title is not so hard, really. The invisible world is the world of spirits, of God (I would say now), of the Zeitgeist, of intangible human emotions even. As humans, we put so much emphasis on the visible—that’s Capitalism at work—despite the fact that all the world’s religions teach us to keep that emphasis in its place and not to forget that what counts are relationships, devotion, meditation—the intangibles, or the invisibles. In Buber’s terms, we can't have an I-Thou relationship with furniture or cars or luxury items, only with God. It seems pretty obvious that since Nietzsche’s time at least, if not beginning earlier in the Enlightenment, our relationship to the invisible world has declined markedly. Maybe it’s even a lost cause, though I don’t really think so. I immediately loved a sentence I came upon while reading about some Renaissance musical work—I forget which one now—that is drawn from St. Gregory, who was Pope around the turn of the seventh century and is the patron saint of musicians. I put this quotation at the head of Book IX, and it goes something like “Once we come to know the visible God, we shall be embraced by invisible love.” That turns the terms visible and invisible on their heads! I felt it was time, at the beginning of the final book of my long poem, to invoke those two words again. They had not been so “visible” in my poem since Book IV. Book IV was written in France in 1987, and I was reading Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible that year.
KN: Can you talk a bit about how the books have been compiled? Multi-book long poems sometimes tend to have strange publishing histories.
BW: Sure. In some ways its history is not dissimilar to yours, Ken, though the publishers are different. Book I was published by Coach House in 1984. Chris Dewdney was my editor, and he really put me through the wringer—helpfully, in the end, though it felt like torture at the time. He made the book a lot better. He also accepted Books II-IV as a single volume for Coach House in 1989, though that time the editorial process was very smooth. He didn’t change much. By the time that Book V was finished, much later, I guess the situation at Coach House had changed radically, so I moved to ECW Press where Michael Holmes became my editor. ECW has published most of the rest of the poem: Book V in 2000, Books I-VI as a single volume in 2006, and Book VII in 2014. Those gaps puzzle me, looking back. Was there really an eight-year gap between Book VI and Book VII? I guess there was. In any case, to continue, Book VIII was only chapbook length, and after a couple of rejections, not including ECW, Andrew Steeves at Gaspereau Press generously offered to publish it. It came out in 2019. It was a book I wanted out of my sight, in a certain emotional sense, but he made it into a lovely object, as he always does with everything he publishes. Book IX, which will be published this spring, and which is the final book, takes me back to ECW Press, to whom I owe a huge debt for their devotion to my work. Along the way a few bits and pieces were printed as chapbooks, by myself or by others. My favourite is The Forger Contemplates Rossetti, a section of “The Forger’s Confession” from Book V. Erik Voss, a letterpress printer friend in southern California, printed that poem as a commission, and it's quite beautiful.
KN: Chris Dewdney’s The Natural History is a multi-book long poem that was happening in our generation while we were writing Report and Invisible World. I talked about his impact on Radar Interference. He edited the first four books of Invisible World. Looking back, how do you assess his influence?
BW: You and I and Chris were all born within a few months of each other. When I went to Toronto to start grad school in 1975, I remember finding A Paleozoic Geology of London, Ontario in the U of T bookstore and being flabbergasted by it. It confused me, but I also found it fascinating. As I mentioned in our first conversation, I interviewed Chris for the little magazine Harvest, and I wrote a longish piece about one of his books that appeared in Sagetrieb. I don’t have anything like Chris’s scientific knowledge, but his dedication to the long poem was of course something that led me in that direction too. Spring Trances was a marvelous book. Some poems in the early books of The Invisible World now sound to me slightly Dewdneyesque in their diction and their vocabulary. I think the books get better as I start to leave that kind of language behind, or to adapt it by bringing in other kinds of diction, ranging from the lyrical to the essayistic. But Chris was a good editor. He wanted my writing to be mine, not his, even though he must have recognized that his poetry had influenced my own. I don’t remember the specifics, but I imagine that the spiritual agonies I went through when I got his first edit of Book I were probably the result of his attempt to reduce or eliminate his influence on the writing. He wasn't entirely successful, but I don't see it persisting in later books at all.
KN: The Long-Liners conference at York in 1984 was a big deal in the history of the long poem. I was there in the audience. The proceedings were published as an issue of Open Letter. In his presentation, Dudek talks about “the representational” and “the autobiographical” as being main modes of the modernist and postmodernist long poem. He also makes room for a visionary and historical or narrative dimension. Are these categories useful in situating Invisible World? I think Report dips into all of them while not really being reduced to any of them.
BW: I think the phrase in Dudek’s lecture that I respond most to is in the first paragraph: “disintegrated autobiography.” I wish I’d known of that phrase a long time ago, as it focuses a lot of what I was trying to do in the early books of The Invisible World. Despite what I said earlier about wanting to get away from the ego, and the value of the prose poem and the long poem in that process, the autobiographical never entirely disappears from The Invisible World, and Dudek accounts for that in a way when he talks about “meditation and personal reference.” He derogates those aspects of the long poem, but I would not. Personal reference is inescapable in poetry now and has been since, well, since The Prelude really. Even if we as the writers of long poems want to deal with history, with metaphysics, with God even, the personal psychological and physiological elements are a given. But “disintegrated” is good. They don’t have to be primary. In rereading The Invisible World recently, I realized how much of it is about the body—my body, the body of woman, certainly, but also the body as the locus of how we exist in the world, or something like that. In a poem in Book IV entitled “My Lady of the Stars,” I put it this way: “At the margin of your visible body the thousand voices of patient unconscious things address their music into the sweet air.”
As for “visionary,” I would claim yes, from time to time. In Book V, there’s “Your nipples keep the stars in their appointed places.” You’ll allow me “the little forgivable prejudices of poetry,” I hope! Okay, obviously such a line is not visionary in the way that Blake or Swedenborg or Ginsberg can be visionary. Mostly I see what is there, even if it is invisible.
KN: The epigraph for Book I is from F.R. Scott: “The personal pronoun does not count in this tale.” Why is that so, and is that true for all of Invisible World or just the first book?
BW: It appears at the head of Book I and also at the start of Books II-IV; but yes, I thought of it as the epigraph to the entire project, at least at the outset. The line comes from a Scott poem entitled “Archive.” It’s in his Collected Poems.
Well, again, this was a kind of directive to myself to feel secure in starting a poetic project in which the lyric impulse would be replaced by something less personal: no “I,” or at least almost no “I.” I see now that the “I” is invoked as the subject of a sentence even in Book I occasionally, but “you”—a kind of impersonal you mostly, not the “thou” of an “I-Thou” relationship, is used. It’s an interesting question, just who that “you” is. I’m not sure I can answer it. But in any case, the “personal pronoun” I had in mind in borrowing the Scott line was the “I,” the ego. And I wanted to get away from it. I wanted not personality, but, as I said in the final line of Book I—a pentameter, I now see—“the bright articulate world.” (If you create pentameter lines, is your ego really submerged?) I would try various poetic strategies to achieve that end, from erasing poems by other poets (Coleridge and Zukofsky) and writing over top of them, all the way to imagining myself as, or confusing myself with, Ovid, to translation of classical music song texts in Book IX. Certain sections of the poem entirely eschew the first person singular, sections like “Tristia,” for example, even though I was addressing the experience of exile, the emotional effects of which I felt keenly when I lived in the States. Even a poem such as “Let’s Live Suddenly Without Thinking,” from Book VI, which is about love and erotic devotion, does not use the “I” word, though I admit it does mention “my head,” its only personal evocation. I should revise that!
KN: In Part 2, we talked about how the first four books of Report are remarkably dissimilar. The only thing they have in common is that they were written by the same author. It seems to me that the first four books of Invisible World are more coherent, both in style and in concerns.
BW: I would say that this is true of Books I and II and of the first section of Book III, “The Heart’s Invisible Tales.” The sentences in all of the poems to that point are certainly pretty univocal and it takes till Book III for me to set out the essential concerns of much of the long poem. That univocality is somewhat relentless, to be frank, so that with the other three sections of Book III, I decided to expand the style and to introduce concerns like authenticity, literary history, nature etc. “A Nature Murder”—the title is an anagram of Lucretius’ book De rerum natura, by the way—draws on natural imagery to talk about the already established subject of personality and going beyond it in poetry. “Kubla Khan Palimpsest,” which remains one of my favourites among my own poems, continues that thrust, but formally it is entirely different. I was captivated by the idea of the palimpsestic manuscripts from antiquity. These consist of vellum leaves that were scraped to remove one text and then reused to write out another. Usually it was a classical text that was erased and a Christian text that was superadded. Cicero’s book on politics, which Petrarch hunted for in vain, was only discovered in the nineteenth century as the lower text on a palimpsest in the Vatican Library, since the erased texts remained accessible through the use of chemicals and now digital tools. Anyway, in those days before personal computers, I typed out “Kubla Khan,” the Coleridge poem, and then used Wite-Out to erase most of his poem, leaving just scattered words and phrases over which I wrote my own poem. If you know the Coleridge poem well, you'll hear the words that come from it. “A Fiction of Isadore Ducasse,” which I know you want to talk about, took a different tack. It’s composed in sentences that are as close to straight prose as I ever get in The Invisible World. Since you mention Book IV as well, I’d just add that it was written in a house we rented outside Arles for most of a year and really focuses on the theme of light. So, as the poem progresses, new themes and new formal procedures are explored.
KN: Yes. I’ve noticed that the early books of Invisible World are mostly sequences, whereas the later books (and Book III, as you’ve described) are mostly divided into sections that have different formal procedures, sometimes quite a diversity of formal procedures. I love the bit about using Wite-Out for the “Kubla Khan” poem. Are the sequences more like serial poems as Spicer described them?
In the larger structure of the multi-book poem, you seem to feel the need for expansion, into new themes and new formal procedures, because the sequence or the serial poem doesn’t quite do enough to sustain a work that goes into books (plural) rather than book (singular).
BW: I love Spicer’s poetry. There’s a short section in Book VII of The Invisible World called “After Spicer,” and in my rare moments of self-confidence, I like to think that he would have admired that piece. The first book of his that I read was Language, in a later printing of the White Rabbit Press edition, before Robin Blaser published the Collected Books in 1975. Marshall Hryciuk, a poet and small press publisher, was working at the SCM Book Room when I was a young librarian, and he was bringing in lots of small press books from the States. I found books by Olson, Spicer, Zukofsky and others there. Maybe in fact I was still an undergraduate, because I remember reading Language with my girlfriend, later my wife, on a bus going back to Peterborough, and being blown away especially by the love poems. Some part of the “invisible” owes something to Spicer’s understanding of “outside” and of dictation. After Lorca is a wonderful book too. The Whitman Ode, for example, is beyond great. That book has influenced a thousand poets, I’m sure, not because of individual poems like the Whitman Ode, but because of the eschewal of “collection” for the serial form.
But I didn’t really adopt the serial poem in The Invisible World, because, as you say, a multi-book long poem is by its nature going to be something different, and the individual sequences that make up later books, like V, VI, and VII, tend to be stand-alone compositions to some extent, though they connect in subversive or subterranean ways. The “Zukofsky Impromptus” and “The Forger’s Confession” open and close Book V, for example, but work in completely different ways, the first through erasure again and the second as a kind of fake memoir that is only just this side of straight prose. They are connected through “life writing,” as you’ve called it, though at a far remove from lyric embodiment. (The Zukofsky variations actually connect back in a tenuous way to Marshall. I won a copy of “A” in a bet with him about who would win the Governor-General’s Award for poetry that year! Maybe 1980 or 1981. Maybe the year F.R. Scott won. I’m not sure. But in any case, the Impromptus are based on A-11.)
KN: In the 1980s, a number of writers started to talk more about “texts” than about “poetry.” Did that have any appeal to you at all?
BW: I just looked up “textum” in my Latin dictionary, and it means something that is woven, as in our other word “textile.” “Texere” is the verb meaning “to weave.” I like the etymological element of calling a poem a text, and it also has antecedents in classical poetry; but to me it’s using a term at such a general level—since many things other than literary works can be texts—that it becomes almost like calling an étude or an impromptu “music.” I still prefer “poem,” since a poem is a very particular textual animal that may be hard to define but isn't hard to recognize. The use of “text” presumably comes out of one of the various kinds of literary theory that became popular in Academe in the 1970s and 1980s, all of which I avoided like the plague. It’s not that some of that writing is not interesting. Some of it is very interesting. But with the widespread adoption of theory in universities, it’s like the tail came to wag the dog. It had a bad effect on readers and on writers, in my view. I did most of the work towards a PhD in the early 2000s and deliberately chose musicology instead of English literature in order not to have to get buried in literary theory. Unfortunately, theory had by then pretty much infiltrated musicology too, and I wound up having to read people like Bobba Fett and Judith Butler and Slavov Žižek, all of whom I loathed. No doubt they have interesting things to say, but the writing is terrible. Giving writers like those to undergraduates before they have even read Milton and Tennyson and Virginia Woolf is criminal, in my opinion. It warps their view of literature, possibly forever. The theorist to whom the musicologists mostly bow down is Theodor Adorno, because he is rare among theorists for being trained in music. I disliked his writing too and thought that his influence on musicology was unfortunate.
I see that I have wandered rather far from “text.” It’s one of those trigger words!
KN: Could you talk a bit more about your interest in Lautréamont, and how that factored into your writing of “A Fiction of Isadore Ducasse” in Book 3.
BW: Ducasse, the Comte de Lautréamont, died only 150 years ago, during the Siege of Paris by the Germans, but almost nothing is known about him. He barely exists apart from his two books, Les Chants de Maldoror and the slim chapbook of Poésies I and II, which are not poetry at all but more like the prose sections of Spring and All. Almost every fact known about his life I put into my piece, and it is not long: his birth in Uruguay to a French consular official who was responsible for promulgating the works of Auguste Comte in South America (how’s that for a father?), his mother’s early death, his education in France—including having Paul Broca, the neuroanatomist, as a teacher—and a handful of other things. Even the detail about his cat probably being eaten by a Parisian is not improbable, as it is reliably recorded that the Siege brought on such a food scarcity in Paris that people started to eat domestic pets. We know substantially more about writers who lived 500 years before Ducasse than we know about him.
I forget how I first heard about him, but even as a teenager I was reading French poetry, and probably noticed the Guy Wernham translation on a list of New Directions books. And in my first year at university, at Victoria College, I found a French edition in the college bookstore. The French was hard for me then—I can remember being puzzled by something as simple as the word "plût" in the expression “plût au ciel,” and finally realizing that the verb was a subjunctive form of “plaire”—“May it please heaven.” Ducasse appealed enormously to Soupault and Breton and the other Surrealists for his amazing imagery and willingness to compose metaphors and other rhetorical flourishes that were truly wild. My interest wasn't so much in his imagination, though I loved it for its profuseness, but in his life story, or lack of it. In the Poésies, he writes: “Je ne laisserai pas de Mémoires,” a sentence I used for my epigraph. He definitely did not leave any memoirs behind. The biographical details exist just this side of total emptiness. I found this to be an interesting parallel to my desire to derogate autobiography in my long poem.
I imagined some local colour in that piece. The “mahogany wainscotting and ceiling of sculpted plaster” of the classroom where Ducasse sits for his natural history lessons are invented. I don’t really know if his teacher talked about the Neanderthal discoveries, but they were made in 1856 and could certainly have been a topic of instruction during Ducasse’s late teenage years. Broca, incidentally, was one of the first self-described “anthropologists” by that name in France. And of course the manuscript of “A Natural History of Invisibility” is an invention too. I admit that right at the beginning of the sequence. It gave me a sly opportunity to add to the Lautréamont canon.
KN: You’ve touched on Book V, which is perhaps the “busiest” book of Invisible World. It consists of six sections or pieces. Could you talk more about the composition of that book?
BW: You’re right that as originally printed there were six sections in Book V. The sixth was a series of twenty-four lyric poems—the first time in The Invisible World when traditionally “lined” poems were introduced. When Book V was reprinted in 2006 as part of the composite volume that included Books I-VI, however, I dropped that section. At that point I reconsidered the use of the lyric and decided against it. Later, I’d change my mind again. There’s a single, three-part lyric poem in Book VII (“Desire”), and there is a section of lyric poems, albeit translations, in Book IX. So my feeling about including lyric poetry in the long poem has been, well, no and yes and no and yes.
By Book V, the poems were occurring as small projects mostly. This was in part an effort to have more variety within the long poem—a continuous stream of short prose poems had begun to feel repetitive to me. Each of the sections of Book V had a generative idea or impulse: the body, the window as a kind of real-world analogy of the human eye, forgery as a metaphor for poetry and failure, etc. At the time, the twenty-four love poems, which I called “Ecstasy,” were included as yet a further alternative to the single prose poem, a decision, as I say, that I later reversed. There is even humour in that book. The series of prose pieces—really, they are not poetry as such—for my painter friend, Milt Jewell, was intended as comic relief, and a gentle pull on Milt’s tail. “Interrealm” is the only section of Book V that is a bit of an omnium gatherum. It includes an elegy for the Polish composer Lutoslawski, who died in 1994, a kind of ode for my wife, a serious poem about writers’ block, which I have suffered from at various moments, and so on.
KN: Could you talk about “Tristia” in the context of Book VI? Why Ovid in Romania, and why exile?
Book VI came out of a difficult period in my life. My marriage was not doing well, for one thing, and one of my children was in a bad place. And I was feeling more than ever like an exile, living in Los Angeles. To be honest I felt somewhat guilty for feeling like an exile, since—unlike Dante, say, or Ovid, or even W.G. Sebald, who is the “poet [who] dies in a moving metal box in a foreign country” in the first poem of “Tristia”—no one had forced me to leave Canada and I was not being subjected to anything I had not myself chosen. And life in Los Angeles had its blandishments. Nevertheless the feelings were real. Maybe I had made a mistake, going to California. I must have read Ovid’s two books of exile poems at that time—Tristia (which means something like sadness or sorrows) and the Ex Ponto—and I came to have a sort of fellow-poet feeling for him. As you know, he was exiled by Augustus Caesar—actually, not exiled but banished, and there was a crucial difference in Roman law—and sent to modern-day Romania, then the furthest eastern point in the Empire, a place where few people spoke Latin and the weather, if we can believe Ovid, was so cold that wine, poured on the ground, froze immediately. He tried very hard to get recalled, by pleading in poems first to Augustus and subsequently to Tiberius. They ignored him, and he died in exile, all for what he called carmen et error—a poem and a mistake, the exact nature of which remains unknown to this day.
So “Tristia” comes in part out of that identification with Ovid, an identification which would return in Book VIII, with a notable difference. I interpolate some phrases from Ovid’s Tristia, and otherwise elaborate a lot of the sentences thinking of the flora of southern California. I was deeply struck by the weirdness of some of the plants that grow there. When they are not incredibly lush they are the opposite—desert plants that are barely identifiable as plants, like lithops, which, while not native to California, can be seen, as I saw it, at the botanical gardens of the Huntington Library in San Marino. There are other succulents too, that have adapted to a very dry climate. I was in a frame of mind to see all of this as somehow alien, which lined up well with my own feeling of being an alien in that place. (You’ll remember that legal immigrants used to be called resident aliens in the U.S.) The final quotation from Ovid in that sequence is “Est fuga dica mihi.” Exile was decreed to me. That embodied the experience of a low point in my life, though in the poem I generalize it and suggest that it's simply a feeling that all poets have. “Abandon” follows, and not in the good sense of the word.
KN: Multi-book long poems can swerve and pivot in a lot of interesting and different ways. The writing in Report was constantly changing, but the formatting remained the same. Every book had a number and a title. In Invisible World the format is numbering, until Books VII and VIII. Book VII is titled Intimate Letters and Book VIII is titled The Sad Mechanic Exercise, which I believe is a title taken from Tennyson. Why are these books suddenly being given titles?
BW: Book I is somewhat contradictory about the value of the personal. On the one hand, I write that “the personality slips its leash and disappears over the back fence”—bad dog!—while saying elsewhere, though in a very complex prose poem, “your personal life is the only measure of truth.” The personal or lyric self is always threatening to return to the long poem, though it is mostly kept at bay until Book VII. Giving that book a title was meant to mark that change, I think. I took the title Intimate Letters from the composer Leoš Janáček, who appended it as a subtitle to his String Quartet no. 2, a piece he composed late in his life as a kind of musical memoir about his feelings for a younger woman with whom he had fallen madly in love. It’s a piece I adore. That such an occurrence was personal for me is registered in the final section of Book VI, “As It Is in Heaven.” In Book VII it falls apart, most desperately in the sequence entitled “Invisible Ghazals,” which is full of pain and incomprehension, honestly. I think I added “Desire,” whose affect is the total opposite in every way, just to provide relief for the reader. I did not want to end the book in such a dark place. I mean, for heaven’s sake, in one poem I beg melodrama to give me a hand! How bad can it get? “Desire” is a lyric poem, and it has some unusual features. The second part is composed in heptameters, for example.
That return to the personal continues in Book VIII. You’re right, the title (The Sad Mechanic Exercise) is borrowed from In Memoriam. That book was written and put away at one point, with the thought that I would return to it when I had more emotional distance to work from so I could continue writing it. It’s extremely bleak. But when I returned to it after a year or so, maybe longer, I realized that I really was a different person and could not continue in the same vein. So it became the shortest book of The Invisible World Is in Decline and was issued as a chapbook. Ovid returns for a repeat performance, with Tristia once again providing some apposite quotations to help out the poet, trapped in the T place—Toronto, obviously—in his quest to find his centre once more. Lines in one of the poems match your sense, Ken, of history as private experience. I refer to an emperor who wants to “flay history, history which despite his illusions is made by women tending stewpots in smoky rooms, beautiful underdressed children playing in the snow, men at their deal tables composing poems and letters home to their carissimi, the people they love.” Of course, the scene is Ovidian, the poet in exile in a cold climate.
KN: What told you that Book IX is the final book of Invisible World? I always had a number of books in mind with Report, but I don’t believe that you did. What informed you that this poem you’d been writing for almost four decades was ending? Did you feel in any way that the pandemic was forcing you to end the poem?
BW: No, it didn’t feel like the pandemic was making me bring the poem to a close, though it definitely forms an element in Book IX. It would have been surprising if it hadn’t.
In the beginning I did not plan the number of books. I wanted the poem to go on until it felt finished, or even until I died. I guess that, early on, I thought vaguely that it might constitute ten or even twelve books, like The Aeneid and Paradise Lost. But I left it open.
There was the curse of the tenth to think about. This is a phrase from classical music. Several composers—Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler, Dvorak—completed nine symphonies, but when they attempted to write a tenth, died before finishing it. Mahler got the furthest. He finished the first movement of his Symphony no. 10 and drafted the others, but the work was not playable until other people “finished” it. Perhaps it seems weird to have been conscious of this, but nevertheless it did occur to me. But more than that, the final section of Book IX really did feel like a concluding gesture. The book begins with a one-liner: “I’m still not sure where this line is meant to take me,” with the word “line” being a bit of a pun: it’s both a path and a poetic line. And the final word in Book IX is “eternity.” The first words of Book I are “The world.” So it felt like the grand arc of the whole poem and smaller arc of the final book had been executed.
KN: Given that it’s the ninth book, it makes sense that the nine muses are invoked. At the end instead of at the beginning. Did you see this as an opportunity to talk about poetic inspiration as a way of summation?
BW: I’m always qualifying stuff, you know? While the final word of Book IX turned out to be “eternity,” one of the three epigraphs, the one from Godard's film Pierrot le Fou, suggests that our sense of the eternal may be based in the real world, in this case “the sea, gone with the sun.” It’s that oceanic feeling we have sometimes. I propose that kind of qualification with the Muses too, because even Hesiod, who was the original Greek poet who wrote about the Muses, in the Theogony, states contradictorily that they were the daughters of memory—Mnemosyne—by Zeus, but were conceived as a way to forget evil and as “relief from anxieties.” That’s in my first epigraph to Book IX. I’ve always said that I was a Muse poet. I like that in both Greek and English the word “muse” is etymologically connected to “music.” I don’t remember whether Yeats or Spicer talks about the Muse, but obviously it’s an idea connected to dictation, to poetic inspiration, as you say. So yes, I did want to be more direct there, at the end of my long poem, in evoking the source of poetry. I even go so far, in the section called “Euterpe,” who was the muse of music and lyric poetry, as to cite a musical score, Ravel’s Piano Trio, which I realize will be obscure to many if not most readers. I really wanted that literal example there. If poetry is musical at its heart, which I think it is, the endpoint of that alliance is to shade language into music, into pure sound without denotation.
And obviously it made sense to evoke “The Nine” at the close of Book IX, as well as at the end of my poem. I guess it’s also a kind of farewell to what I call in the closing lines “the adagio truths of poetry.”
KN: In his Long-liners presentation, Gary Geddes said the following:
“The poetics of the long poem should concern itself less with debating the relative merits of linear and non-linear forms than with discovering the strategies necessary, or useful, in holding a reader’s attention over many pages.”
I don’t know if I quite agree with this. But it’s maybe an interesting point to mull over.
BW: If we’re at the audience question, then I guess we’re wrapping this up!
We all want readers, even if the audience for serious poetry is small. On the whole I can’t say that I think much about readers when I am writing or publishing. I recognize that, especially with the long poem, the hope that one will have devoted readers who will stick with the work and bring enough intelligence and sensitivity and cultural history to it for their reading to give pleasure and to make sense of an extended composition, may be somewhat vain. Even relatively unreadable long poems like Aurora Leigh and The Ring and the Book had multiple editions in the nineteenth century. Of course, the Brownings had no competition from other media, but still, it strikes me as amazing that once upon a time there was a serious audience for poetry whose members could deal with difficult material. Books only got reprinted if they had a readership. There was no Canada Council back then or an equivalent to support “culture” independent of its commercial appeal.
But today? It would be kind to say, “less so,” in the age of social media and Instagram poetry. Gary’s idea of “holding the reader's attention” is not unimportant, but at the same time, I have to write what I have to write. I hope what I write is both accomplished and convincing, because if it is, the readers will come. Maybe not in the millions or even the thousands, but some at least. And if they do come, what can a poet say, but “bless ‘em”?
