Yes.
How did your approach differ in terms of content?
[INAUDIBLE]
Sorry, I'm not quite getting it.
How does the approach to writing poetry
differ in terms of content?
[INAUDIBLE]?
How does the approach to those [INAUDIBLE] structure
of those poems differ?
Yeah.
That's another really good question,
because it is the case that I would have answered this
in a certain way while writing my first two books,
and that I can no longer answer it in the same way.
Here it goes-- my first two books were very aware,
our priority, even before hitting
the page of what more or less the subject of the poem
was going to be.
I was going to write about this particular place in South
Africa, or this particular event in South Africa,
or this particular relationship within a family and so on,
this moment in history.
So there was a content-driven dimension
to the origin of the poems.
Whereas, now the question doesn't
apply in anything like the dichotomy that it suggests.
There is no distinction now when I
hit the page, in terms of is this going
to be driven by content, is this going
to be driven by the way the language seems to be moving,
the way in which other parts of the mind are being magnetized.
It's a much more intuitive process now,
in which the distinctions between content and linguistic
energy are becoming blurred.
There's a greater autonomy.
It's as if I want to hear what's coming up
towards me from the back side of the page,
rather than what's coming from me to the page.
Can I listen?
That's why many of these poems are obsessed with achieving
the capacity to listen.
So that's where I am at the moment.
And clearly, once one is in that position--
this would be my dream--
there is a potential for integration,
because you are not hierarchically saying,
I'm choosing this at the expense of that.
To come back to my metaphor of the field,
I'm rather going to be the field in which,
if I listen long enough, the sounds of the field will emerge
and they will be biologically diverse, if we've
got a healthy environment in the soul.