EJ: In your poems, in way that’s related to what you’ve just said, it occurs to me that it’s the work of art – material culture and the object in itself – that is central. This brings to mind, ‘The Prinzhorn Collection’ – a collection not easily canonised – or even ‘My Death as the Wren Library’.

DC: I think it's an interesting matter to raise. I also think it's being much done these days, this insertion into a poem or into any other art-piece of substantial material from elsewhere; sometimes well-managed, often not. I think ‘Prinzhorn’ is a fringe member of this sort of assembly. There's a lot of lines directly presented, in that poem, in their original German, in the written words of the man locked into that asylum for all those years, and it’s important that these words are there, that they’re in the poem in their unchanged form, just as he wrote them in those letters which his keepers never mailed, which his family never saw. It was important to me, to have them among the words I was adding to them, that I was locating them among. Making it at least possible that now, finally, a few people would read them. They had led me to my poem and they resonate, I believe, inside the poem, they convince me the poem can dare to matter.

'Wren' relates rather less to this, I'd think. That poem came directly, some of it came word-for-word, from a dream, during a sabbatical year in Cambridge where I was writing every weekday from 9 a.m. (after I'd walked my small son to school) to about 3 in the afternoon, six hours a day unlunched. I'm convinced that it was this near-total immersion in poem-writing that permitted, facilitated, this dream, where I dreamed in near-stanza form and woke one morning at 3 or 4 o’clock and had the good sense to write the dreamed images down and even to be given, by my dream, the lineation for some of those words. So there’s a borrowing and a putting-to-use not unrelated to your thought of the 'solid work of art': in this case I'm not borrowing from another person's work of art, I'm borrowing from a source which I never did attribute to my own skill or hard work but simply to this gift from a dream. I could never – never – have come up with the thought of my ‘death' turning 'me' into 'the Wren library in Trinity's Neville's court'; let alone my dream-friend's immortal (to me) line 'oh my little bicycle', which more than one correspondent has told me is a line she (two women, in fact) loves above all. I like it too but I have only a tangential right to it.

EJ: Any thoughts as to why so many of your poems take up from others’ work? Can we call this inspiration? Ekphrasis?

DC: When I run over a number of such poems or poem-moments (I haven't thought how many there might be) I decide that it has very often happened (and often happened with no poem-follow-up, no traceable echo) that a writer I'm reading (or often, though less so than in that first case, a piece of visual art; and even more rarely – though now and then – a piece of music (á la Proust's petit phrase) – touches me in a way that takes me deeper into myself than anything in the most recent weeks of my everyday life has taken me. And may then lead to a poem of my own. The most recent event along this line (though it hasn't led anywhere in my own writing and may never) was rereading a passage in W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, which I'd read years ago and liked, but initially liked less than his The Emigrants (I was sent back to The Rings by James Wood's Sebald-essay) and finding a passage of such beauty (it felt unrivalled by anything I'd read or written for years – maybe this was an over-reaction, maybe it will find a more sober place in a while; though maybe not). This kind of thing doesn't invite emulation in any content-sense, but it does starkly remind one of a level of aim, of ambition, that one should remember and demand of oneself, whether one ever gets there or not isn't the point, but the knowledge that it exists, that it has been humanly achieved, and not too long ago either, not merely in ancient time in an Urn Burial or a seldom-thought-on Shakespeare History-play.

This sort of thing has led to a Beckett-related poem which you'll know of; and there's Keats, and I'm not sure how many more.

3

  

Copyright 2008 Disclaimer