ALISA HEINZMAN TALKS WITH MATTHEW ZAPRUDER

ALISA HEINZMAN: What words or sentences are most important to you lately? I'm thinking of maybe a poem, some text you've read, or something you've heard. Is there anything that has been taking over your mind?


MATTHEW ZAPRUDER: I don't know if anything has been taking over my mind exactly, that sounds a little scary but also exciting. As far as words, I like to go in search of strange ones. This weekend I was at the bookstore in Fort Mason in SF, and they have a cafe with bookshelves which they have stocked with all sorts of fabulous old books, most of them not exactly literary masterpieces. It's great to pick up some obscure novel from the 1920's and see what crazy words they used. Someone is always standing on a cliff about to jump, or looking at a lake where there is an obscure figure wandering, or sitting on a divan and having a hilariously unintentionally erotic conversation. Saying words like "irrefragable" and "oculist." Also, those books are very beautifully bound, and often they have lovely drawings inside them. I have to stop myself from buying them. They are too dusty.


I always like to read a wide variety of writing, not just because I find a lot of different things interesting, but also because I feel I really need to get inside as many different textures of language as possible. in order to keep moving forward in my poems. The rhythm of that sort of prose, not to mention the unexpected weird vocabulary in a book about some kind of esoteric subject, can be inspiring to me. For instance when I was writing my first book I was really into John McPhee, books like The Survival of the Bark Canoe and The Pine Barrens, and those books resulted in a few poems at least. Lately I have been reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis, don't know if that's going to result in any poems but it's fun to read. Baseball has been on my mind a lot lately (Giants!). Also, I have a little blue Oxford World's Classics edition of Keats's letters in my office, and I have been reading it, and writing down every time he mentions a Shakespeare play (which is a LOT).




A: I love your poem Schwinn, and its final lines are a part of my asking this question:


I will / never know a single thing anyone feels, / just how they say it, which is why I am standing / here exactly, covered in shame and lightening, / doing what I'm supposed to do.


Other people feel things, and you feel things, and they do or do not, or may or may not, correspond. Really, there's no knowing. This strangeness or separation comes up in your poems. Can you say something about why this is important to you? Also--if this is a different question--how this situation affects you?


Z: I really mean the end of that poem very literally. I don't think we really know much, if anything, about how people are feeling, beyond what they say and the way they say it (all sorts of non-verbal cues we get when someone is speaking), which is why I say "how they say it" and not "just what they say." I guess that could be sort of depressing if you look at it in certain ways. But for me personally this is the reason I write poems. Yes I am "interested" in language and excited by messing around with it in all sorts of ways. That's why I'm a poet and not some other sort of artist, because I am interested in and good with language, and not paint or cameras or something else.


Language by its nature contains great reservoirs of crucial knowledge, and when I write poems I am entering into our collective human knowledge by activating language in certain ways that can only happen in poetry. I feel this is good. When I say it is "what I'm supposed to do," that is an assertion of a feeling of purpose for my life which I feel more and less at different times, usually in direct relation to how much I am actually writing instead of wasting time.


A: In Come On All You Ghosts, the reader--or listener--is addressed often. The title poem feels to me like, among other things, a love poem to the reader. Through your poems, what do you want your relationship with the reader to be like?


Z: I feel like what I (hopefully) have in common with the reader is a faith and trust that what the poem is doing is, contrary to everything we are told and therefore everything we fear, really important. We are together in a place of meaning, the sort of meaning you can only have in poetry. I believe that is true, that there is something poems can do that nothing else can, and that this is an absolutely vital aspect of the human experience. I agree with Williams when he famously writes "it is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ but men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there." Die in that case surely is meant literally, but it also can mean I think to be dead inside to what is around us, which is also a great danger. I am trying to keep myself and people who read my poems from dying in that way.



A: The words love, death, and loneliness are in your poems. Not just the words, but they're often subjects. Are you ever afraid to use these words?


Z: Afraid in what way? In a literary sense? If so, no. Or a superstitious one? If so, a little!


A: I guess I'm thinking of fearing these words, in part, because of the number of connotations each has. Now that I write that, though, I'm not sure they have more connotations than other words. They just seem like really big words and big subjects, and I'm wondering if you ever hesitate to address them in such a direct way? Do you pause longer before including the word death in a poem than, say, before including the word Tuesday? Do you ever fear that the poem can't support these subjects?


Z: I am inclined to say Tuesday is as complicated as death and frankly a lot more difficult on a weekly basis, but I think that would not really be answering your question. You are of course right, those are big words and big subjects, and there's obviously a way they can be just stuck into a poem as sort of a placeholder. That would, I suppose, be the sort of not very good writing we have all seen. I think the reason why I at least would call that not very good writing is because there's a lack of energy or urgency or commitment or necessity there. But I can also feel that lack in poems that carefully stay away from anything big as well.


I think the proof is in the effect on the reader. If the reader feels when she gets to that part in the poem when a big word like that, loneliness or death or love, appears, and she feels like that is authentic, then it's the right thing. Sometimes those big words, in their very overwhelming hugeness that threatens to escape particularity but also does not, are just right. Feeling like "loneliness" is the right word even though it's a big word that you almost don't understand, that's a feeling too, isn't it?


If I am genuinely encountering some big concept like that, I think it can work to let it come into the poem naturally. It doesn't feel honest to me if it's not really what I'm thinking about, but maybe a stand in for something else I'm not quite ready to face, or heaven help me a way of manipulating the reader into sympathy for me. I really don't want sympathy from the reader. I want connection. After my father died in 2006, it took me a while to be able to honestly allow that fact into my poems. It was just too painful or big or something for the first couple of years. And when I was able to start really thinking about it, it seemed absurd not to call his death what it was, especially when it was something I was actually remembering. Then again, I was very aware when he was sick and then after he died of how common my experience was. It's also very common to feel lonely, and also common to feel in love. Of course these emotions are all subject to infinite gradations, and that's really if anything the true purpose of my poems, to honestly examine those gradations, in all their forms.




A: What is it about looking out a window that makes the poem-writing-impulse happen?


Z: That is a great question. To look out a window is to experience the world in a frame, in which we see certain things surrounded by at least a subtle darkness. There is a certain element of arbitrariness to what is in view of a window. And also an element of choice: you have chosen to look out this window, and not another, or to look at all.


This is what a poem does too. It selects from among the universe of things that could be brought into the poem, and brings these things in, leaving others out. We feel both what is and is not present. Some of what is present feels like a choice made by the writer, and some of it feels fated. Whatever is in the window, or poem, by its very nature -- as an object destined, or chosen -- glows with significance.


I get excited and moved by the combination of chance and intention in poetry, maybe because in some kind of way that can never quite be articulated, that combination reminds me of what it feels like to be alive on a daily basis, choosing and also responding to what is given.


There is also usually a lot of regular life happening in what you see out a window: you could look out your window for a long time and not see anything really dramatic. And therefore everything becomes kind of dramatic. I like this too in poetry. There is a wonderful painter Jane Frielicher, who was friends with many of the New York School poets, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler among them, who to this day apparently only paints scenes that she sees out of her window in her house in Long Island and her apartment in New York City. I have always felt very happy imagining that she never gets tired of looking out her window. I think Schuyler was the same way, though I think he might have gotten very tired sometimes come to think of it. But he still kept writing great poems right up to the end.



A: What do you wish would change?


Z: Well, this makes me think immediately of politics, and of the growing inequity in our society between the small number of people who have so much, and the great number of people who don't have enough. And how angry everyone feels they have a right to be. But I will leave that aside. One thing I wish I could change is how distant so many people feel from poetry. It seems sad to me that people are so willing to accept strangeness in film, music, television, and so on, but have so little tolerance for it in poetry. It's ironic really, because humans are so good with picking up on the subtleties of language, it seems as if people would actually have an easier time with poetry than some other things.



A: Do you like living in San Francisco? Of the places you've lived, which have you loved the most?


Z: I do like San Francisco. It's the second time I lived here, and it's changed enormously, but that's a different subject (if you are interested about this you can read the fabulous and harrowing work of Rebecca Solnit). I don't know if I can answer the second part of your question. I miss New York and many other places I have lived, like Massachusetts which is so beautiful and sad at this time of year, and Maryland where my mom, and my sister and her family, still live. A lot of the time in poems I start thinking about a place, but really what I am thinking about is a feeling I had in the place, which probably had much more to do with the people I cared about there than anything else. So for me poems are a private way of going back to those lost times and being once again part of the mundane and marvelous because of their ephemeral nature situations that, for better or worse, once were home.

Alisa Heinzman lives in Chicago. She received her MFA from Saint Mary's College of California, co-edits CALAVERAS along with Sara Mumolo, and is the Managing Editor for Octopus Books. While living in Oakland she would sit at the book table during Studio One Readings, and now she misses it an awful lot.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon), recently selected as one of the top 5 poetry books of 2010 by Publishers Weekly. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Open City, Bomb, Slate, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Tin House, Harvard Review, Paris Review, The New Republic, The Boston Review, The New Yorker, McSweeney's, The Believer, Real Simple, and The Los Angeles Times. He has received a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Currently the Holloway Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as an editor for Wave Books and a member of the permanent faculty in the low residency MFA program at UC Riverside-Palm Desert, he lives in San Francisco.

Emily Kendal Frey talks with Alisa Heinzman for June 4th's reading

EMILY KENDAL FREY: If I described your poetry as "hesitatingly brave" would that resonate for you?

ALISA HEINZMAN: I feel like I don't know what brave means. Actually, I feel like I don't know what a lot of words mean lately. Calling the poems brave feels really funny to me. They address events that I found and find painful, so if that means they're brave I would think it's in a way that a lot of peoples' poems are.

EKF: Your poems, especially those from the "Brother in the Field" series handle biography with such quiet command, and I appreciate so much the way your images offer themselves to the space they occupy. For example,

Our grandparents,
kind in their distance.
The hard-starched collars, the flag-heavy video.
Am I late? It seems I am.


These lines are bald, unflinching, and evenly applied-- the softest opaque. People (grandparents) and things (collars, flags, video) do exist. Your world is an actual world. But the speaker seems to float within this real world, neither judging or participating in it fully. ("Am I late. It seems I am.") There's a resigned bravery there.

AH: I think that's a nice way to put it, sometimes floating within the real world. That seems like a common yet totally weird experience, especially during intense and difficult times, right? Like telling jokes in hospital waiting rooms, or feeling like you have to have a decidedly sad face at funerals. It's just impossible to feel fully and properly at the times you're supposed to. So then when do you freak out? In the bathroom, on the bus, at the grocery store. It's been years since I've read it, but isn't that a part of Camus' The Stranger? The guy's mom dies and he can't seem to act properly like "a grieving son". Most of these poems are written about memories of my brother going to Iraq as a medic, and as I wrote them I realized that in pretty much every situation I felt inappropriate and inadequate. Too aware of myself as a part of this public event with so many other families going through the same thing, but also, of course, feelings of terrible privateness.




EKF: What's it like to write poems like these? How do you approach biography in poetry?

AH: Honestly, I'm really looking forward to not writing poems like these at some point. Or at least not poems that overtly address events I was involved with with my family. It feels really complicated. The poems are about me, about my feelings and responses to events because in many ways that's all I can write about here. I'm not in the military and all I can know about my brother's experiences is what he tells me. So there's some of that, things he talked and wrote about, but I tried to deal mostly with myself because that's all I can really know.

EKF: What do you do with the personal when it intersects the political?

AH: The issue of the political, and the political where it insects biography is an ongoing source of anxiety. I've had so many terrible feelings about it. Like using the words war and soldier and deployment and uniform...these words are just huge. They are so difficult. But the public-ness and the political aspect of these experiences are integral to the experiences, so writing poems that completely ignored this--poems that just addressed an absence or something like that, or abstracted the events--felt all wrong. I had so many fights with myself like, "really, are you really going to use the word war again?" and "why can't I use the word war? It's a war isn't it?" But the big words feel distancing, so I was/am always conflicted.

I think it's hard, too, because political poems (and really, I'm not sure what exactly constitutes a political poem) get a bad rap for a lot of good reasons. There's the risk of being a sort of "speaker outside the event" that looks in and judges without being culpable or present. I don't know. Lately I've really liked looking at Wave Book's State of the Union. There's this great range of poems there that deal with the political, the public, whatever, in really thoughtful ways.


EKF: How do you include someone else in a poem without being exploitative?

AH: I really have no idea. This has also been such a concern for me in these recent poems. If to exploit is just to put to use then I'm trying to think of it as, In these particular poems, I put my memories to use and my memories involve other people. Really, over and over, I keep thinking that the best solution I have right now is to focus on myself, be certain the speaker is always a version of me, which sounds, maybe, selfish. But really, if what's there is what comes in through my own eyeballs and ears and hands, then I can be responsible for that, or at least I can answer for that in some way.

EKF: What's your relationship to reading? I know that my relationship to reading (poetry, and all texts) shifts constantly, and I'm always in conversation with myself as a reader, not just a writer. Any current favorite poets or writers?

AH: Reading is definitely a big part of writing for me. I think this is especially true when I'm trying to work through difficult parts of a poem, or think about how to approach the sometimes vague poem-blob in my head in some way...to think of how someone else did it in a way that felt successful to me. The books of poetry that have affected me most strongly in the last several months would definitely be WS Merwin's The Lice, and more recently, Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract. I memorized a couple of short Merwin poems last month and have been thinking about how reading impacts my writing most when it really inhabits my brain, my day to day thoughts when I'm waiting in line or something, thinking about how a poem looks or feels or wondering at a really weird, magic moment in it, and then trying to bring something of that love to my own writing. Of course, it doesn't always transfer.


Emily Kendal Frey lives in Portland, Oregon and teaches at Portland Community College. She is the author of Airport (Blue Hour 2009), Frances (Poor Claudia 2010), and The New Planet (Mindmade Books 2010).

Alisa Heinzman lives in Oakland. She co-edits the journal CALAVERAS with Sara Mumolo, and is the poetry editor for MARY Magazine. She will graduate from Saint Mary's College of California's MFA program this month and has several poems forthcoming in the SF Public Press.

Friday June 4th with Alisa Heinzman and Sandy Florian. Music from Mark E. Deutsch.

check it out:


Alisa Heinzman lives in Oakland. She co-edits the journal CALAVERAS with Sara Mumolo, and is the poetry editor for MARY Magazine. She will graduate from Saint Mary's College of California's MFA program this month and has several poems forthcoming in the SF Public Press.



Mostly interested in being honest and playful, Mark E. Deutsch is a musician whose genre could best be described as Personal Soup Pop. Instead of ignoring other, lesser genres, Deutsch tends to imitate and use various strains of popular music (e.g. broadway jazz ballads, reggae, blues rock) and thereby transform them via homemade low-tech techniques and his own casual delivery. As Paul Simon imitates South African pop on Graceland, so Mark imitates Paul Simon's imitation of South African pop on Graceland and keeps the old Wheel of Cultural Anthropophagy a'spinnin'. Deutsch recently finished an album called Soft Outfit, as well as a recording project for his baby nephew called Song for the Sabra. Currently he's working on an album/performance called Karaoke. Much of his music is available for free at markedeutsch.bandcamp.com and you can follow his blog at januaryhairs.blogspot.com.

Sandy Florian is the author of 5 books of prose poetry: Telescope, 32 Pedals & 47 Stops, The Tree of No, Prelude to Air From Water, and On Wonderland & Waste. She lives in San Francisco where she is an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts and one of the "other" editors for Tarpaulin Sky Journal.



doors 7
reading 730

donation for entry!
365 45th st
Oakland
bart: MacArthur

Sara Mumolo and Alisa Heinzman Interview Julie Carr

Mumolo & Heinzman: Often, you cite other texts and the words of your poems tend to engulf the borrowed text (the cited portions are not set outside the body of your texts). Then, rather than point or respond to the quotations, the poems seem to move along with them, using the citations as integrated lines. I'm thinking of your works cited, but especially of moments similar to your use of Whitman's Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking in 20. of 100 Notes on Violence

"Out of the cradle endlessly--shameful--out of the rocking the
mocking-bird's throat--bludgeoned the musical, the musical
shuttle--out of the parents the child from bed--"

Here, Whitman's words have been melded with your own. Can you talk about your relationships to Whitman and Dickinson in the book? And, possibly, also as part of your own aesthetic history as a poet? What, as you see it, is the relationship between quoted texts and your own words in the poems?

Julie Carr: Whitman and Dickinson are important to this book because they wrote through and, in very different ways, about the Civil War. Their approaches to writing about violence are as contrasting as their poetics: the one public, direct, political, the other private, metaphoric, metaphysical. The Civil War is almost a metaphor for the book’s central concerns, which are domestic, local, and intimate violence. I wanted both Whitman’s direct engagement and Dickinson’s metaphysical questioning to be part of how I addressed violence in this book. When Whitman writes,
“Long, too long America, / Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn'd from joys and prosperity only, / But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not” (which is the poem of his I most often refer to), he directs his poetry and his readers to acknowledge these “crises of anguish.” He asks for a poetics of honesty and engagement and he assigns himself the role of “show[ing] to the world what [America’s] children en-masse really are.” I took his words as a challenge. Then, in the last line of Dickinson’s poem #442, written in 1862, “Creature—Shall I—bloom?,” you get the full weight of her uncertainties, her capacity to write through doubt and despair. “The Frosts were her condition,” it says earlier in that poem. I felt it was crucial to include the fullest emotional range that I could discover, and certainly questioning one’s right or ability to bloom (given the conditions, given the realities), occupies one end of the emotional spectrum, while taking responsibility for showing the world who its children are might be another.

The book is woven with other voices. I wanted to record my own reading experiences, but also to reveal how violence is a communal problem, one that preoccupies all of us, one that we are collectively engaged with.

As for my own history – I read Dickinson first when I was probably about seven. My mother had a selected in the house, and I was drawn to it. From then on I loved and always read a lot of poetry. I think that early exposure to the lyric as a mode of internal inquiry has left its mark on me pretty indelibly.



M&H: There is a tension between what I observe as the personal and the public in your poems. In Equivocal you address Memory, which often coincides with the private world, and History, which often coincides with the public in the "Wrought History" and "Wrought Memory" poems. Of course the two subjects overlap and intertwine. A recurrence of this tension between private and public (if these are even the best terms to use) happens in other areas of Equivocal as well: grief, gender, family.

Grief (9): "Private griefs become public when theorized: I cannot get it nearer me" p9

Gender (64): "Burying my ancestry requires so little / I've lost touch with other mothers, // lost touch with my sex"

Family: Scenes of family reappear throughout. The family seems to be most people's initial experience with the individual's relationship to the collective, where it touches and where it divides. Maybe all of this has something to do with loneliness, language, and the difficulty of writing poetry as perhaps a transference of personal to public. Is it even possible to talk about when/how these tensions between personal and public appear in the consciousness of you-as-the-poet writing the poems? How do you think the individual's relationship to the collective manifests during the act of writing?

JC: This is a big question! I think the answers will vary from one book to the next. Equivocal is more private (to me) than 100 Notes on Violence, and I was definitely directing myself to reach farther outward when I began writing 100 Notes. But I never think of the act of writing as a private or purely personal experience. I am always reading as I am writing – books are always open on the desk. I hear the voices of others in my head as I write. I don’t believe I am moving inward as I write – that’s not the metaphor that helps me. Instead, I think of myself as engaging with what is before me, with whatever I am capable of engaging with. My hope is that I will engage with more and more: more people, more texts, more history, more of the natural and more of the made world. That said, I do believe in such a thing as “the individual,” and I do believe that each individual’s perspective matters and is, in some sense, unique. So I don’t, and hope to never, think of myself as just a “sampler.”

I think your question is also about audience. My sense of readership must also vary from project to project. There are certain poems or sequences that are written with a small audience in mind (sometimes an audience of one). Others are written with a broader readership in mind. I don’t think we always have to be speaking to as many people as possible. That would severely limit our possibilities. At the same time, if we always speak to the same group of readers, we also limit our possibilities. I suppose what I want more than anything is to be open to many possibilities.

The family is my ground. I published my first book, Mead, when my son, Benjamin, was six and my daughter, Alice, was 2. The book dives right into domestic and familial experience as a place of great tension and intensity. As Robert Duncan said, the domestic is the true wild. I wanted to explore the sense that my borders were no longer clear: the “inside” and the “outside” were trading places all of the time. Now, that no longer seems surprising to me; it is just a fact of existence. Equivocal was written during the year after that, and is always in conversation with Alice’s language acquisition, and my mother’s loss of language through dementia. It is a book, then, that is curious about how language is and then also isn’t how we know a person, how we experience intimacy. So, you are right to notice that the family is the site at which the individual and the collective come together and come apart.

M&H: A related tension in 100 Notes on Violence exists when one's (either reader or citizen) vulnerability exposes through their interaction with the book, the material itself. For example, from note 30: "This is just a book. It does not weigh very much. It is easy to hold and to destroy. Scissors, a knife, a pen, water, your hands. Like a body." Here the speaking voice reduces the sizes of images until the books' theme of violence actually is the hands of human culpability. I read this as questioning what it means to write a book about violence: the book as a material and the poems themselves. Can a book--or any material--attend/effuse a vulnerability akin to the human figures inhabiting these poems, figures that are also acting out violently or are acted upon violently in the world?

JC: Can a book be a perpetrator? Can a book be a victim? Dickinson wrote, “There is a word / Which bears a sword / Can pierce an armed man—” Yes, of course language enacts violence, does so all the time. One of the questions I ask throughout the book is to what degree speech can be violent. In a long poem in which I question my own motives for writing this book, I describe being beat up as a child and then, as a young woman, being nearly raped. But then I say “but this was still nothing compared to my mother’s insults, though I do not remember them.” Here and elsewhere in the book I try to highlight the violence that language can do.

I began to see the book as vulnerable pretty early on. A book is such a quiet thing and so unobtrusive. It just sits there not demanding much. I began to refer to it as “my compass” for how it (the project) kept me on track, kept me focused, but also as a term of endearment. At one point I call it “sweet compass.” At the same time, when I think about the impact of books on my life – more like magnets than like compasses, they have shifted my direction entirely – refocused my orientation, changed my mind. One of the reasons to value poetry is for how quietly it enacts cataclysmic change: one reader at a time.


M&H: One interesting polarity in 100 Notes on Violence is the nursery rhyme/lullaby heritage that some of the sonic structures inhabit against the collection's title theme--stories and images of violence. Can you talk about negotiating these interactions?

JC: I think of these sections as lullabies. I started this book when my third child, Lucy, was an infant. I was often singing her to sleep and thinking about how lullabies are these prayers against fear: fear of sleep, fear of being alone, fear of the dark. But the songs I was singing, “Sweet Molly Malone,” “Rock-a-by-baby,” “Hush Little Baby,” these songs were really about death, disaster, the failure to comfort. So oddly, the lullaby sounds soothing, but it expresses how one can never really be soothed. They are like the Blues in that way. They comfort through acknowledging what is. I included these lullaby-like poems in order to calm down the narrative strains, to keep the book from getting hysterical (which it easily could have done), but also to indicate the fear at the heart of the lullaby.

M&H: What, if any, connections between the individual and a larger community are currently being disrupted in the world of poetry? Do these seem to be shadows of larger crisis' in the world or are they insular poetic disruptions? Or, are they crisis' of time, a constant struggle of a conscious being? How do you see language relating to crisis?

JC: I’m not sure what you mean by crisis here. What comes first to mind is that poetry’s relationship to a larger reading public is in crisis. But it has been that way for decades (though not centuries). This is, I think, sad, but not tragic. It’s sad for those people who say, “I don’t read poetry.” It’s sad for the kids who are not being taught how to read poetry in school. But it’s not necessarily a tragedy for poetry. I think poets have always written to each other, have always been involved in a communal activity. That has not changed, and perhaps because we are less concerned with the larger market, we are saved, in a way, for each other. The poetic communities that I am part of are thriving, filled with vibrant exciting people creating unexpected and striking things. But maybe you are referring to other kinds of crises—global, political, economic.

How does poetic language relate to these crises? Oscar Wilde said that life imitates art, not the other way around. He said there was no fog in London until the painters made it so. I think artists, and poets as just one breed of artists, have to keep that hope: that what they are creating will help to invent the world. If you think about how reading has changed you, you as just one individual, made you more at peace, or more curious, or more aware, or simply more alive, then you can readily agree that art has made you who you are. It follows then that art invents communities of people and thereby invents the world. How that happens is multitudinous. There is no one way. Perhaps it is true that new sentences, new grammars, new syntax, can expand our way of thinking, can act as a form of resistance. Or perhaps it is true that song, more than any other aspect of poetry, affects us because it reaches past cognition to the body. And perhaps it is also true that individual narratives need to be told, sometimes directly. All of these things seem possible to me and all have seemed true to me at different times in my reading experience. Perhaps poetry is a kind of listening, paying extreme attention in order to record, not the dominant narratives, the ones we already know, but the understories, the things we don’t usually want to, or know how to, hear. The one thing I don’t believe in is silence.