An odd poem, it's from a series called Baudelaire series
in a book of mine called Sun.
And this series was part of maybe an endless exploration
on my part of the various voices that
passed to me to constitute something
like the voice of my work.
Going back to the figure of Baudelaire
as, in one way born out of pure lyric for himself
is the staging point for the modern lyric self-consciousness
in a way.
And so, through these pages, pass
in a very non-linear and non-narrative way.
Voices like Baudelaire's, like Rilke, Paul Celan,
and there are others.
In any case, this rather strange poem tries to get to that point
beneath, I suppose, representation,
where the language bubbles up.
And I just thought to read it because the phrase came
last summer when I was asked to give a talk here along
with my reading.
And they needed the topic way ahead of time,
as if I knew what I could possibly
be talking about in January.
I said, well, persons of the poem
but I realize that comes from one of my poems.
The persons of the poem.
And they said, what poem is that?
And I couldn't think of the title
and then I realized, the other day, I was looking for the poem
but it was because it didn't have a title.
So.
[LAUGHTER]
And, of course, begins with this phrase snatched out
of the air, which resonates with particular irony at the moment.
Ideas aren't worth anything.
"Ideas aren't worth anything."
That, of course, also brings us back to in one way,
language precedes idea in poetry.
We can't help that the language starts speaking
and whatever ideas we have about the poem
are hopelessly superseded by that.
And it brings me back to the famous quotation
of Stephane Mallarme, the French poet,
when his very good friend Edgar Degas showed up
with some of his sonnets.
And Mallarme read the sonnets, and he said,
but my dear, Degas, poems are made of words, not ideas.
Anyway.
"Ideas aren't worth anything.
We mirrored each other for an afternoon.
The sky is rich with waste.
Waiting is the name of this tune.
Electrons was the name for this tune.
Ideas aren't worth anything.
Today's space is splendid.
The mountains have come loose.
Let's un-make something.
Ideas aren't worth anything.
This is a hazardous bed, called perilous night.
Some blues, some indigos, some reds.
Other colors I forget.
Ideas aren't worth anything.
This is a trace to dry in tomorrow's sun.
Ideas aren't worth anything.
Sometimes, my blood seems to come in jets.
The persons in the poem say this, between liquid spirits
and sense.
A broken jar says this.
I'm writing your letters back to you,
which is a sound, at least, to mirror another sound, where
no other paintings can be found.
Imitate me says the elm.
Give me an azure sky, huge and round.
Give me something in words, for a change.
Something that fits on a page.
The best paintings are on stone.
Ideas aren't worth anything, said the person with two heads,
one above and one below.
Let's think about this.
Let's consider the lace and necklace, or the turquoise
on a Turkish door, or the source of each color at a table
by a wall.
If we're really mirrors in a poem,
what will we call the soul?
I want to continue on your paper like a person in the room
and like the ladder and like the moth, say
the persons of the poem.
The tale is told out of school.
Your eyes are tired, so keep them closed.
Once an image, broken arm.
So it begins there I suppose, in the welter of languages
coming together to make possibly a new language,
a new logic in juxtaposition.
There's Jasper Johns and John Cage
and a number of other people I noticed
are sort of accessed in there.
Jasper Johns, they had a--
John Cage had a piece of music called "Perilous Night"
that was named after a piece by Jasper Johns,
unless it was the other way around.
Anyway.
And it was a kind of sexual in-joke.
This poem is one in a sequence called Baudelaire series,
in a book of mine called Sun.
The sequence, like the book, as a whole is in part
an attempt to interrogate those multiple voices that
echo through us as the poem comes to be.
Voices from the street, from books, from fantasy,
from wherever.
It puts things in motion, however enigmatically
and without true closure and waits to hear from them.
Persons of the poem, we might guess, first of all, very
simply, that there is the writer and there is the reader.
Always remembering that the writer may also be the reader.
And the reader, in a certain real sense, the writer.
Yet both are shadow figures with shifting,
indeterminate, and multiple identities.
As Octavio Paz notes, it is the reader
who makes the poem present by listening or by opening a book.
The reader gives the poem a present,
which more often than not is a radically different present
than the poem once had.
And then, of course, there is the entire theater
of voices that concerns us here.
And that manifests itself in multiple ways
as the words converse among themselves
on doing our intentions.
We'll look at a few of the ways in the course of the talk.
And I'd like, time permitting, also
to examine some literal instances of collaboration
as I've experienced them, and to consider how voices converge
there and modify one another.
We'll be working necessarily an outline, given
time constraints, offering no more than an opening
into a much larger field of discussion and contention.
My remarks will be speculative and informal,
and I encourage anyone with questions or thoughts
to join in.
As for the craft of poetry, I'm not at all sure
that I can offer anything more than might
be useful to learn from the handbooks
or from the classroom.
Poetry in that sense begins where quote, creative writing,
ends.
Since the laws of form, as opposed
to rules or norms of procedure, can only
be derived from the poem itself.
It is probably in the writing classroom of a few years
back that Keats' voice that is deep within us,
from one of his letters I guess, was
reduced to the notion of finding one's voice.
The romantic quest thereby diminished
to a neo-romantic focus on the little self,
of the small speaking subject.
For Keats, on the contrary, that voice was of the poem itself,
not as a fetish object but as one containing
a personal subjectivity in all its dimensions
and tones and folds.
That is, a consciousness that contains the subject
and transcends it.
It is a product of listening, as much as utterance,
and is somewhat more elusive and less notable than craft.
In relation to the above, I now recall a not so
casual aside by the poet, George Oppen, in conversation years
ago.
"I never wanted to be given to the voice I was born with".
In an interview some years back, on the contrary I think,
George spent his life sloughing off the voice
that, in a certain way, his social position
imposed upon him.
And finding a voice more attuned to things of the world.
In an interview some years back, Joseph Brodsky
remarked characteristically against the grain
of the Baroque nature of much contemporary practice,
referring back to the turmoil of the religious wars in Europe
and the emergence of the borough with its tortuous, destabilized
subjectivity.
Its contentiousness, it's often oneiric,
surreal imagery, extreme imagery.
He compared that period to the wars
and displacement and genocidal upheavals of our time.
It's an interesting thought in regard
to some of the writers I'll mention here
and in relation to certain assumptions
about modernist theory and practice.
I'll begin with a couple of unlikely juxtapositions.
The interesting thing about that.