4/ Conversations about Poetry
Andrea Scarpino and Cynthia Hogue
In Conversation about Cynthia Hogue’s instead, it is dark
Note: the poems discussed here appear at the end
Andrea Scarpino: Instead, it is dark is a collection of poems that deals with war and the aftermath of war, in this case, the Occupation of France during World War II and the experience of civilians during wartime. But it’s also a collection about memory and the survival of memory, and even more importantly, about love. The last section of your book begins with a Muriel Rukeyser quote,” Love,/ The door opens, you walk in.” Could you talk a little bit about how you see love working its way through your poetry?
​
Cynthia Hogue: Andrea, first let me thank you for these great questions and comments. It’s wonderful to have a chance to converse with you (virtually, at least) about poetry, my poetry, and this particular project. I explain in brief in instead, it is dark that the poems in the book were catalyzed by my husband’s massive heart attack in 2015. One feels the love one has for someone most vividly in such extremis. While he was still in the ICU, I began to think about who he is, what he has made of his life so unexpectedly, and of course, all the love I felt for him. So this book about war began with love. Since meeting my husband, my poetry has been infused with something that hardly touched it before, love, although it’s quite true that that theme running like an undercurrent through the poems might seem pretty subtle at times.
In the last decade of teaching, after we’d been married for some time, I began to teach the Transatlantic modernist poets as war poets, and as poets writing of their experiences as civilians during war time. So it was kind of a given that at some point I would realize that I had married into a French family, many of whom had been civilians in war time. Love dropped me on their door step. Love, respect, curiosity catalyzed the project this collection undertook, which was in brief to find out what they remembered and what they made of all they’d gone through, and also to tease out parallels in our own time. It is a testament to my love for my husband, although being an economist, he often finds the expression of my love inscrutable or even embarrassing.
I’ll add that central to the last two collections previous to instead, it is dark—the elegiac In June the Labyrinth (2017) and the pandemic chapbook, CONTAIN—is love as well, albeit different in kind if not degree.
AS: The first poem in instead, it is dark is a three-part poem you call “Witness Triptych (Paris, 1940)” that ends with a haunting repetition: “shadow shadow shadow.” This begins the book in such a beautiful way and calls to mind the shadows of war that stretch long and wide over your poems. But I also keep thinking about how shadows are born from light, that the two only exist together. Even the title of your book, instead, it is dark, calls to mind the absence of light with the word “instead.” Could you talk a little bit about this tension between light and shadow that so many of your poems inhabit?
​
CH: We say idiomatically that something shadows us (death shadows life, or sorrow shadows joy), and we also describe ignorance as being in the dark. The little girl in “Witness Triptych” describes the German invasion of France, which became the Occupation, as not being “real to us.” When her father is arrested for being in the Resistance, she doesn’t understand, but she does perceive and describes it in a threatening image, the hulking “shadow” that overbears her father. The “shadow” foreshadows what’s coming. So it says much more in the image than “my father was arrested.” The poem focuses on the visuality of perceptions and dawning awareness rather than explains anything. In the title poem, “instead, it is dark,” the speaker is waiting to buy bread—it could be in a line today in Bosnia, Ukraine or Gaza it’s such a quotidian and prescient moment. The speaker is going about her day but instead, it is dark. Now she’s in the dark, which is death, with everyone else in line. I’m trying to capture that moment in which ordinary people suddenly find themselves civilians in war time. It’s not real to them and then it is.
​
The last poem in the collection, “The Loire Valley (Solstice 2015),” is set on the longest day of the year, marking the turning of light and the return of darkness. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance in the poem. The setting is a present-day music festival in an ancient grange, which has survived for 1000 years, although there are signs of the more recent war. The ancient fields are now parking lots and the barn is a concert hall (whose walls are permeable to nature, as represented by the owl in the rafters). The concert goes on until midnight, when the sun has finally set, but the full moon “floodlights” the surroundings. In other words, light prevails in this threshold place. As the gates close on the speaker and her companion, there’s a sense of that still point in which time stands still, light does not retreat before darkness, and life-as-reality endures. At the concert, I remember receiving all these impressions and realizing that what I was experiencing that night would somehow become a poem. Although the initial impressions were vivid, they were also inchoate. The perceptions simmered for a time in the imagination. When I began to write the poem, to structure a narration of my experience, the abstract symbols of light and dark assumed their places.
AS: I return again and again to a poem early in your collection called “The Underground Village.” It’s one of a few prose poems in the book and reminds me of Carolyn Forche’s “The Colonel” in its witnessing of a terrible event, in this case, soldiers rounding villagers into a church and burning it to the ground. Why did you choose a prose poem for this particular poem? Was there something about the story that needed a prose line?
​
CH: Often, the poem’s form would be intuitive, just as were the poems’ voices (if there was a speaker, for instance, a narrator). In most of the poems in the first two sections of instead, it is dark, a voice would begin to speak to me (always after I’d conducted an informal interview). It would not be the person I’d interviewed but some emergent persona the interview process created. With this poem, however, there was no interview and no speaker began to speak to me. Instead, I visited the site of the atrocity, which was deeply moving and disturbing. The poem adopts an omniscient narrator who has knowledge of and proximity to the tragedy. As I began to write, the words tumbled forth, breathless, as if the speaker couldn’t dwell on the details and was perhaps still shocked by them. That stream of consciousness took the form of a prose poem, and then moved into the genre of magical realism or fairytale. It seems to me that the fairytale element is analogous to the moments in Forché’s poem in which she veers into high lyric, into imagery that crystalizes and resolves the narrative in her poem. In my poem, a very stark revisionary version of the old folktale, “Stone Soup,” stringently nails the poem shut.
AS: That same poem ends, “Murderers would arrive by supper.” I’m really struck by the plainness of that statement—it’s not in any way sensationalized, which, I think, adds to its power. Do you find that when writing about “big” topics like war, understatement is necessary?
CH: The bluntness of that last line really concerned me, and I sat with it for a long time. One so often “discovers” a closing that is surprising, and at first, I didn’t know what to think of it. I wasn’t sure it worked. This resolution was, as I said earlier, stark, and it was also a genre-shift into folktale. Was the shift sincere (as in authentic) or was it dodging the truth of what happened? As much as I’ve written about war and devastation, however, I rarely detail anything like carnage or atrocity. I prefer a lighter touch in the narration, a refrain from narrating terrible, graphic details that don’t need to be sensationalized. The facts are sensational enough. That very point—detailing the carnage or transforming details through the act of writing the poem—is the essence of the poetics argument Denise Levertov had with Robert Duncan (an argument that ended their close friendship). She included vivid, electrifying imagery of American atrocities against civilians during the Vietnam War, documenting them for an American audience, which Duncan said wasn’t poetry. I’ve written at more length about that debate in an essay, in part because in other works I’ve written, I myself write as a documentary poet. I wanted to clarify my own thinking on the matter. I build a careful defense of Levertov’s artistic choices as an occasional lyric-documentary poet, without condemning Duncan, because in this collection, instead, it is dark, insofar as I refrain from including horrific graphic imagery, I am drawing on his poetic counsel to Levertov.
It seems to me that the poem itself “determines” the method, and will “call forth” the approach. I remember asking C. D. Wright how she came to write her beautiful little essay collection on politics in poetry, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil, and her great engaged poetry, and she said, I had no choice. What she meant was that we live in a time of “political weather,” and that fact affected everything she wrote. Our media-saturated world sensationalizes so much that we can actually miss how plainness itself creates powerful affect. We can see that in Wright’s work especially, it seems to me, in how she bridges the lyric and political via the lyric-documentary. I think you’re articulating an important point in your wonderful question, Andrea, and what I’m saying in my longwinded response is that I agree with you!
AS: As I hope you know, I absolutely adore your poetry and have for decades! You write in your Notes about a “long writing hiatus”—as someone who has published 20 books of poetry, translations, and criticism, how do you stay interested and engaged in the pursuit of writing? Do you ever feel like you’ve said everything you have to say? How do you find yourself on the other side of a writing hiatus?
CH: Andrea, thank you! If you live a long time, as I have, you have time to go fallow or do other things for a spell, and you have time to wait for the work to take form. In the last several books, I took on book-length, or chapbook-length projects, sometimes because I had something I wanted to explore and sometimes because I wanted to challenge myself, to see if I could pull off what I had in mind. My first book-length project, which was When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina (2010)—a documentary poetic sequence based on interviews with evacuees—began because I was horrified by the stereotyping on the nightly news of desperate people of color stranded on rooftops and in the stadium crying out for help. I wanted to give evacuees a chance to speak for themselves. With In June the Labyrinth (2017), I wanted to see if I could write a lyric book-length serial poem using the central image/symbol of the labyrinth. I transformed my grief for my mother into a kind of mythopoetic sequence. Teaching at Cornell University for a semester brought me back to upstate New York, where I grew up, and it was the perfect landscape in which to draft much of the book.
One way I’ve put it, trying to explain the interview-poems in the Katrina book, is that I didn’t “find” my subjects, but rather, they found me. However long the pauses between periods of writing, if you stay open and attentive, and if you learn to tolerate the silences (cultivate negative capability), something interesting shows up.
Poems discussed above in this conversation:
Witness Triptych
(Paris 1942)
The bombs starting were mostly mortal
I mean mortar but no one knew that
then. Everyone ran from the house.
Somehow we found a deep cave
or grotto and were safe. No one worried
about an occupation. It wasn’t real
to us. We caught our breath, listening
for silence, things to go back
as they’d been. Suddenly Mother cried,
Where’s the baby where’s the baby?
She’d left the baby upstairs and out
she went, gone just like that.
​
*
Here I am, I said. Hungry. Not
in the country where we ate well
but couldn’t stay, but in the city
which was on rations. Hunger was shadow
was enemy cleaving me. When invaders
knocked like death at our door I answered
for I was small and did not understand
what Father was doing with the archives
records lives he created in the little room
downstairs he called his study. I answered
their questions, told them everything
I thought – why should I not have? – at three
being questioned in a language I didn’t speak.
*
What I saw was a huge shadow
with head and hulking back
cast on the wall and looming to ceiling
when Father was arrested.
I was down the hallway from him.
A large man had entered our home,
I wasn’t looking at him but
at the shadow shadow shadow.
The Underground Village
​
There was a village nearby in which everyone herded into the church feared the worst of course they did when an enemy officer was killed but regardless they obeyed as bewildered civilians what else could they do, one bad boy running off and in this way word got out of the church’s great doors being barred from outside, the windows too high up to reach, the boy plugging his ears with tears having to hear them and remain hidden and they who bolted the doors, ordered to rough the people in, listened to all they’d wrought until silence fell, charred beams collapsing when tanks shoved walls in. For the rest of the war no one mentioned the neighboring village that had subtracted—disappeared— itself from a ground surface no longer shimmering greenly with safety for one, obeying without questions, but not the other, unasked. Now not them. Not soundly. The unheard screams entered their neighbors’ dreams, resonants borne by wind, and so, into the vast maze of limestone caves beneath the fields muffling the lowing of the cows corralled below, the singular bark of goats. Above, in the inscrutable farmhouses, old women stirred stone soup in pots over fires they banked, baking an ashen bread. Murderers would arrive by supper.
The Loire Valley (Solstice 2015)
The uncoursed sun, a vulnerable
evening’s chords
of fallow field,
the mounded rows you think at first are graves,
which we traverse to reach
the 1000-year-old
fortified grange.
Somehow it missed the war though everything
near the railroad’s
gone to bits.
Nothing in this place to fix or modernize.
No one to claim it. Someone’s vision
was to fill
the vaulting barn
once a year with music around now.
Silence opens wooden gates
made from the primeval forest
cleared to farm. The pock-marked limestone walls
enclose a cluttered courtyard
in the middle of which
humans mill, perusing
cd’s, having drinks among the cattle stalls.
Inside is Bach,
and tonight an owl
whose contrapuntal hoots
you hear before you see him
land high in the rafters just
like your dream of flying.
At midnight, sun dipped down at last,
the full moon
floodlights the watch tower.
The gates closing, we’re cast out
to the carless field, nor other farmstead near
to dim the sense of
not belonging here.
Cynthia Hogue hails from the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. Her book, instead, it is dark (Red Hen Press, 2023), is her tenth collection of poetry. Her ekphrastic Covid chapbook is entitled Contain (Tram Editions 2022), and her new collaborative translation from the French of Nicole Brossard is Distantly (Omnidawn 2022). Among her honors are two NEA Fellowships and the Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets (2013). Hogue was the inaugural Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She lives in Tucson.
Matthew Lippman and David Weiss
Email Conversation About Two Poems
Apr 12, 5:28 PM
Matthew Lippman to David Weiss
Brother. I am sending you love and this crazy fucking poem but you are my best Jewish Comrade.
I hope you are well and enjoying spring and all the silences that comes with lilacs and crazy sparrows.
Thanks for reading.
Just for the read.
If you got something new, lay it on me.
Xoxo Matthew
​
IN THE GREAT AMERICAN COFFEE SHOP OF HUMAN HISTORY
for Gerald Stern
Every day on the Instagram feed
an ad comes for the Jewish Star.
Buy the Jewish Star, it says.
to adorn your body.
Some algorithm figured out that I am a Jew.
Who knows what a Jew is?
Gerald Stern told me he was a Jew
at The Great American Coffee Shop in Iowa City
then said Genug
like he knew Yiddish.
He didn’t know Yiddish.
He didn’t die in Buchenwald.
He grew up in Pittsburgh and walked the earth
like it was his Jewish Earth.
In The Great American Coffee Shop
in the middle of the great American country called Iowa he said,
My earth is a Jewish Earth.
He’d never been to synagogue in his whole life.
What algorithm would have come up on his Instagram feed if he were alive
to have an Instagram feed?
A road map of Pittsburgh by way of an American sonnet that landed
in a bowl of borscht?
I am sad this morning in my Jewish sadness.
In my poetry sadness.
In my fatherly sorrow.
In the sorrow of all the continents of this whole earth.
Outside my classroom door in this Modern Orthodox school where I teach
a 12-year-old walks up down the hall
in his black hat humming his liturgy.
He comes to visit me at my desk and asks,
What do I do now?
He says, I already davened.
I say, Read Soap.
He says What’s Soap?
Soap is a poem by Gerald Stern about The Jews
who were killed in the camps
their dead bodies melted into bars of soap
by the Nazis.
He says, I am tired of talking about the Nazis,
the pogroms, the black boots, the gas, the gulag.
He says, Can’t we for once
make motzi with the world
while the world makes motzi back with us?
It’s 12 days till Passover
and I want to cry again.
Instagram wants me to cry again.
Instagram wants me to buy a Jewish Star to hang on my neck.
Gerald Stern wants me to learn Yiddish but I miss him too much
to know where my vowels are.
The anti-Zionists want to yell at me
and kill me and all my Jewish brothers and sisters.
That’s an exaggeration but it’s never an exaggeration.
That’s the problem with the unimaginable,
it’s imaginable.
Jerry, I say, what you taught me….
He says, What did I teach you?
He’s sitting here with me in the body of a 12-year-old yid who says,
Mr. Lippman, I already davened this morning,
what should I do?
And I take it back. I don’t want him to read Soap.
I want him to keep closer to singing his songs than he ever has because
later, I will go on Instagram and buy myself 2 Jewish Stars.
One to hang on my neck, the other to give to a stranger named Gerald Stern
in The Great American Coffee Shop of his death,
that is The Great American Coffee Shop of this Human History
and we will bathe together
with the lilac and lavender soap from Bodyworks
and we will smell so good
that the oceans will never devour us
and we will never be devoured.
​
APR. 13TH, 8:15 AM
David Weiss to Matthew Lippman
This is a strong and lovely poem, Matthew, lovely in its complexifying, lovely in its tonal restraint, in its slowish, pinballing evolutions, in the way you make the cat's cradle of its binds, of the warps and wefts you lay down. You're cooking with Crisco here.
Here's one in return, brother.
​
Crossing the Line
You’re done they say
when you take
out the commas
you’d just put in
dissatisfied with it
either way
a simple example
of how
you never
get it right
And probably
there is
no right to get
There’s just
that chimera in
your mind
flashing past like
an ivorybill
woodpecker
last glimpsed in
Arkansas’s
Big Woods
only
a blurred video
to show for it
It may not exist
any longer
the species
a hurt different
from the one
you felt
on hearing
that Alexei Novalny
was dead
assassinated
murdered
(a word that
better
expresses the brutal nastiness
the wrong
of it)
So much
should never happen
although
a truer way to
put it
is
so much should
never be
allowed to happen
which is why
archival ink
awaits
and why lignin-
and acid-
free PH balanced
paper
should be used to
document
and preserve
in order to
say
and continue to say
that this act
done
in cold blood
or this miraculous
winged
restoration of a bird
like the cleaning
of the pastel
frescoes
of the Sistine Chapel
has happened
and that
the evidence
of it
will not blur
or degrade or
lose
legibility over time
Even something
as inadequate as
this poem
that I cannot seem
to make
other than the
groping-toward
thing
it is
belongs
for better or for
worse
to the processes
of yellowing
and fading
and growing brittle
until
the perfect binding
cracks
and pages
slide out and scatter
unsequenced
to blow away
Oh, if I could believe
that everything
of value
is not only
inside me now
wrote Miklós Radnóti
exhumed
from the mass
grave
he was shot
into
on a forced march
of slave
laborers
in the fall of
1944
a black notebook
smudged with
dirt
in the pocket of
his coat
Bees drone . . . plum
preserves turn cold . . .
The end of summer
bathes in the sun . . .
Fanni waits for me . . .
All this could happen!
The moon is so round today!
Don’t walk past me,
friend. Yell,
and I’ll stand up again!
There are
no right words
only wrong ones
to evade
The good lord
bird
spreading wide
its wings
keeps its own counsel
​
Apr 13, 10:15 AM
Matthew Lippman to David Weiss
Papi.
There are
no right words
only wrong words
To evade
The good lord
bird
been sticking with me all morning in my walking the dog morning, sun shining morning. And those yellow pages and all of the words from Radnóti's notebook. Your poem puts me on a journey that is inside and outside. It's so beautiful and fun, though it's so damn serious. We hold nothing and we use words to hold everything and they are always the wrong ones. This is one of my favorite poems you have shared with me, that I have read of yours, because it disarms me and makes me feel held at the same time. The inadequacy of the poem 'groping-toward' the yellowing but even still, it has to be done even in its inadequacy. The inadequacy of words. You taught me that, still teach me that, and what you have always said, But we have no choice. That is, to write. All of that is here and it moves me deeply in my guts and groin because the poem is all about the private parts. This poem, any poem, but this one for me this morning. There are no right words but everything is inside of me. Everything has always been inside of you and this poem is that--that everything.
Keep the Crisco on the kitchen counter.
All love.
Apr 13, 10:38 AM
David Weiss to Matthew Lippman
Of course, for Radnoti the most fervent of wishes is that what is inside of him must have its real life outside of him. It's the prayer of anti-solipsism. In your poem, there's a clash of solipsisms whose anti-solipsism lies in the clash, in the plurality of solipsisms, in your candor about the shatteredness of the vessel. So, we might say that that is the dream of poetry: to make what is real on the inside be real on the outside, which might be what the dream of an ideal reader is about.
Apr 13, 10:41 AM
David Weiss to Matthew Lippman
Maybe we might publish our two poems together along with our emailing about them (whatever else we might say, if anything). We could do this in Nine Mile, if you like the idea.
Apr 13, 10:50 AM
Matthew Lippman to David Weiss
You just blew my mind. I am going to the gym now to sweat a bit and feel it all and I agree with you so much— to make the real inside real outside.
Xox
​
Apr 13, 11:11 AM
Matthew Lippman to David Weiss
I didn’t see second email till just now. Sorry. Yes. Can we do that? I’d love that and I have more to say. Stretching now before elliptical machine. I am interested in this anti-solipsism and believe it be the crux of the matter. More soon but let’s do it. The older I get the more collaborative I need to be.
Apr 13, 12:40 PM
David Weiss to Matthew Lippman
Great. I have some further thoughts as well.
Apr 13, 3:18 PM,
Matthew Lippman to David Weiss
When I was at the gym, on the treadmill, thinking about your poem, and reading it again, on the treadmill, I was looking around at all these bodies next to one another—flabby, tight, tattooed, sweating, in shorts and spandex, all these bodies working to keep things alive and healthy. Outside the new springtime forsythia, blooming ecstatic yellow, and I thought, you know, these bodies are going to die but the forsythia, if the soil is good and the rain keeps on coming, will still bloom in spring 50 years from now, 75 years from now, and most of us in here will be gone. That was the poem. The inside of the gym, the outside of the forsythia. It's messy, I understand, but I was also thinking, at the same time, or simultaneously, I was thinking about the opening of your poem. The ivory bill woodpecker getting close to extinction and the murder of Novalny and commas. Then, I started thinking about Philip Roth's American Pastoral, that passage about how we always get one another wrong, we just run over other people like Sherman tanks, getting one another wrong, and that is the thing we need to celebrate, which is what your poem does. Getting stuff incorrect. Your poem celebrates putting the comma in the wrong place or taking it out and how the poet/speaker/you feel so differently about loss--the ivorybill woodpecker, the murder of Novalny, and how far apart they are, how close. What I find astounding is how the speaker's heart is so full in these moments. I mean, that is your gift as a poet and of this poem. I can feel your whole big emotional mindful heart. The inside making it to the outside working off of one another. It's anti-solipsistic. The forsythia, I mean, the bird, I mean, and they resonate so much for me because that's what we should be looking at, the thing outside of the poem when we read the poem, when we are done reading the poem. I read your poem 4 times this morning and I couldn't stop reading it because it made me think of all of these other things, outside of the poem, and that is why the poem is so fucking great. Because it's not about itself just like we are not about ourselves, we are about the bodies next to us and the forsythia outside the YMCA, blooming, ecstatic yellow, your poem, Crossing the Line, ecstatic yellow.
​
Apr 13, 6:15 PM
David Weiss to Matthew Lippman
I like that you've brought forsythias into this. It is their season, their moment in the season. Wallace Stevens has a great phrase about them: babyishness of forsythia. Which he calls a snatch of belief. And that belief is the rebirth — out of winter and old age — of the outside bringing back to life the inside. And what is that inside? Well, it's the impulse to say babyishness of forsythia, to see it that way, a new way. It's no different from Emerson's Rhodora blooming unseen in a swamp. In your poem, it's the wish "to bathe together" that does the work of forsythia (or of the nearly mythic, meaning extinct, Ivorybill woodpecker) which becomes an outrageous and transcendent thing, not so much a fantasy (yes, of course, a fantasy!) but a recognition of what the deep desire is that keeps us, if nothing else, honest and willing to say that impossible thing out loud.
​
Apr 14, 8:16 AM
Matthew Lippman to David Weiss
I think I have been trying to say the impossible thing out loud since I was a boy. The beauty of that trying is that I will never be able to do so and that is why it's so much fun. I am always writing poems in my head to capture the thing that can't be captured and we'll never get it right. Not to be sentimental, but that's the joy of it all.
Here's to the forever magic of Forsythias and Ivorybill Woodpeckers!
​
Apr 14, 9:34 AM
David Weiss to Matthew Lippman
I'd say (and this speaking from the wings) that it might be better to say in lieu of "fun" that to capture what can't be captured is "thrilling"; it feels like you need a word that does justice to the crazy ambition. It is, I think, one of the great and secret projects of poetry. How to have the thing you can't have. Like Keats in the Grecian Urn ode who fixes the perfect moment as almost, attaining one's desire (to win near the goal, as Keats puts it) because to consummate one's desire is to extinguish it. That's what you do: push to the limit in order to name the wish without obliterating the dream of it. That moment is ecstatic but not fun, and that's probably because the knowledge of its impossibility casts a long shadow like the sun before it sets. It led Keats to yearn for the philosophic mind that he found in Shakespeare: to preserve the wish in the midst of tragic understanding.
​
Apr 14, 10:37 AM
David Weiss to Matthew Lippman
Back to "babyishness of forsythia" for a moment, that emissary of nature that brings Stevens back to life whose rebirth is the awakening of the metaphor-making mind. Forsythia is working that way for you too. His way of thinking about the endangered impossibilities, how to use and protect them is this: "The mind is . . . . a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality." I think that's a strong way of talking about what we're about. You know, when I was writing "Crossing the Line," I didn't know how the poem would end — just as you didn't know either how yours would, although my guess is that when "and we will bathe together" took shape under your fingers you knew you were getting close — in my case, it was sudden: it was ending with the Ivorybill, but I was aware that I had to protect that bird and the image of it, which are my version of impossibility, and then "keeps its own / counsel" came to mind with a feeling of inevitability, that I had done it some justice. That I had preserved its right to judge us or be itself. And maybe too how much more important it is to evade the wrong word than to find the right one or believe that there is just one right one.
​
Apr 14, 11:22 AM
Matthew Lippman to David Weiss
That moment in your poem where you address, report, on what was in Radnóti's black book is magnanimous. It's not reporting. It's poetic reporting, or, who knows. It's the act of taking what you see, what resonates from him, into your consciousness and spirit and giving it back as something new. The whole modality of the poem shifts in that space and maybe that is what brought you to the sudden finale. This process, though I might be projecting, of changing modalities to get at 'the thing' in a new way within the poem as it is happening, making itself, you making it, is what I find, to use your word, 'thrilling. “Don’t walk past me, / Yell, / and I’ll stand up again!” The word "Yell" is an eruption. After, we get to the last three tercets which slam the door shut in its opening and there we are, back with the bird, keeping its own counsel.
​
Apr 14, 12:27 PM
David Weiss to Matthew Lippman
That's wonderfully interesting what you say, Matthew. Radnóti materialized in the poem, I think, because of how shocking I found it that in the murderous and brutal extremity of the forced march when he is coming to the end of his strength, he thinks of home. It's a desperate comfort, but it is the imagination pressing back against the worst of realities. And then he thinks: what if what I'm remembering no longer exists. Maybe this is the missing link in our conversation: Oh, Radnóti writes, if I could believe / that everything / of value / is not only / inside me now. It is the world that the mind brings into palpable presence or, maybe better put, the world that the mind needs to "press back against the pressure of reality." Everything / of value cannot only be inside us now. If that were true, then we are left with solipsism, to come full circle. Radnóti preserves the necessity of this endangered everything / of value by saying if I could believe. This isn't far different, if different at all, from your future tense of and we will smell so good. They have a kinship in the struggle not to be devoured.
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Apr 14, 12:37 PM
Matthew Lippman to David Weiss
And to your point about solipsism. Yes, I guess. I mean, there is the self and modification of self-identity through memory, that we are always messing with our memory (and our desire) to what? Get closer to our being? To ‘know ourselves’ and be in contact with what makes us tick. After a while, though, it’s enough. Genug. The world takes over.
So, yes, there is this constant static in my poetry, in poetry, in existence, that constantly bothers me. Don’t want the poem to be too much about me but me is all I know soI gotta get the world into the poem. That back and forth is the dance. The forsythia. And, again and always, the Ivorybill woodpecker.
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Apr 17, 1:10 PM
David Weiss to Matthew Lippman
Yes, the thing to acknowledge, then, is that mind and world are not merely oppositional and not merely engaged in a feed-back loop, but that the world is in the mind and the mind is in the world, entangled and tango-ing.
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Apr 18, 7:37 AM
Matthew Lippman to David Weiss
Beautiful.
Should we end it here? On devoured, or, not being devoured?
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Apr 18, 8:51 AM
David Weiss to Matthew Lippman
Yes, I think so. On your last words.
