This newest book of poems arises in many ways from bird
watching and noting in spring the way
that various birds built their nests, which
is not of anything they make but of what they
find, be it all dead grass, mud, grocery seeds, tinsel.
And it struck me that the notions
that I had learned to think about poetry as voicing
of some original thing and myself was perhaps
wholly mistaken and that I was doing
this other activity, a very birdlike activity,
a nesting activity, of taking these words that everyone
speaks--
all of us share 99.9% of our vocabulary--
and finding a way to stitch it together
that it became not just a thing of thought or beauty
hopefully, but a place of dwelling, a place of nesting.
It also made me realize that it became a foolish thing to value
words that I wrote over words others wrote,
and that somehow, it could be a valid thing
to write a poem by pulling in texts
from other people, other sources, and simply having them
there and find a way to stitch them all together.
And so this book is not only a sort of collage in that way
but itself mimics the structure.
There's three sections, each with a fourth part
that twines together all the themes that it mentions,
the first section being in some way
just the sheer wonderment of being in a world that
apparently exists, and the second part being worried
about that apparently, and the third part
trying to do a work of finding a way to think about the,
as Oppen would say, baffling hierarchies of word and world.
I don't have any good way to read this book.
And so I'm just going to kind of choose a path through.
You'll hear words that aren't my own.
And you'll maybe give me credit that isn't mine.
There's sections from Dorothy Wordsworth's journals,
in particular, her paying attention to the difficulty
and illness, the fever that William
would feel in composing.
There is Milton, in particular his letter
that recounts his going blind, Dickens from Little Dorrit.
Thoreau is littered throughout here,
as are Emerson, Simone Weil, Martin Buber, Wittgenstein,
Heidegger, Edward Taylor.
I don't know.
I kept track someplace, but I don't know.
There's an index.
It's probably faulty as my indices tend to be.
"A fine wild innocence, not ease.
We hear when we cannot see.
The wood deep shade where the aster grows,
William went into the wood to compose.
William cut wood a little.
William wrote out part of his poem and endeavored to alter it
and so made himself ill.
William composing in the wood in the morning.
William had slept better.
He fell to work and made himself unwell.
William, sadly tired and working still.
William was very unwell, worn out with his bad night's rest.
He went to bed.
I read to him to endeavor to make him sleep.
William slept well, but his tongue is feverish.
Deep within I turn from reading.
The day outside the page, a sort of rainbow
seemed to obscure it through which the birds flitted
with a sort of sleepy heaviness, their bright bodies interwoven
with it.
Some ashy light in my eyes forced me to put down my book
in my ambitions therein.
My eyes, both night and day, and my comfort, if comfort it was,
I saw in the pages that closing, narrowed the whole day
into a minute quantity of light as if through a crack.
And I had no way to speak of it.
And then it was done."