* Below you will find the second half of the two-part interview Zach and I began a few weeks ago. My questions are in bold–his answers follow. Zach discusses timelines like a subway line, interior clocks, and compression. Enjoy! CP
Dear Zach,
My question(s) arose out of your questions for me. I would like to know how you see time working in and on The Shadow of Sirius. In my mind, there are many ways in which Merwin directly and indirectly deals with the self’s sense of time in this collection, as well as the way it manifests itself in the actions of poetry, language, listening, looking, and waiting. Generally, I am wondering what you might say about how time (as measurement, space, suspense, pace, or life) is occurring for you in this book and in your own poetry. . .
1) How do you see Merwin’s sense of time in The Shadow of Sirius confusing, disrupting, complicating, or fragmenting the poems in this book? What might you say about the various ways in which Merwin complicates moments by conflating the sense of time in which the dead–or voices–are speaking to Merwin as if they are present? Or the time that is reflected upon through pure memory or autobiography? Or the time that is stretched and disturbed and turned in his unusual syntax? Or the time that seems eternal, artificial, or magical in part based on his lack of punctuation (no ending=no death?)? Or the time (lack of time) implicit in old age or youth? Or the (implied) fact of his having known many of the people in his poems for quite some time? Discuss.
ZS: I like how your question begins by suggesting time that is between the poems in the book, or around them, not just within them. There’s a sense of enjambment in how we move poem to poem, sure, but also of intervals that imply greater or lesser lapses of calendar and clock. In The Shadow of Sirius, consider only the first lines of the poems from page 22 to 31, for example; each both locates its poem in a specific time and also puts the poem into a temporal relationship with the ones before and after it: “It may have survived to this day somewhere”; “Time unseen time our continuing fiction”; “Almost to your birthday and as I”; “Believing comes after”; “After days untold the word”; “Later in the day”; “Papers already darkened.”
These first lines launch us into the time of each poem but also locate in the book’s emerging time-scape, a dioramic time-line on which particular poems touch down like a feather toward an updraft from a grate. If these first lines are an x-axis that helps grid time in Merwin, giving a timeline like a subway line under each scene, there’s also a y-axis: the first words of his lines, the steep stairway down into the station. A few nights ago, some friends and I compared the first words, the left-margin words, of Emily Dickinson to the full poems of some contemporary poets who use intentionally jolting, fragmented styles; Dickinson’s “just first-words” were, of course, more jolting, sensible, fragmented, and startling (you should try it!). We added some sonnets from Shakespeare to the mix; perhaps because of the meter and rhetorical stitching in his sonnets, his first words were typically ho-hum, but the second words, read from top to bottom in a spine, often provided a fairly accurate and evocative version of each sonnet (you could wonder: do Shakespeare’s first words launch toward the coming ones, while Dickinson’s just launch?).
Merwin’s first words often foreground time, so that each line launches and locates, as the first lines I mentioned above do. This locating is also dislocating: it says we are in a slightly different place or time than before. Consider these first words from “Europe,” a poem I will focus on in detail below. They make a pretty good poem; what they preserve is not a ticking clock but a feeling of a calendar the wind blows forward and back through months and years, a slide show sort of timing. The: “After / comes / tomorrow / see / ever / to / which / I / the / trying / how / and / from / that / to / I / on /that /and / low / like /a / from / when /and /there / that / and / there / one.”
This version echoes the whole poem: we begin with staging about how specific yet idiosyncratic time (“After comes tomorrow”) lets us glimpse an “ever,” then shift into some autobiographical trying, and then conclude by treating the past (“from when”) as a source that leads to the particular (“there that and there one”).
2) In your own work, do you attempt to conflate time, disrupt it, ignore it? Are you writing for your contemporaries, or for the ages? Do you think that there is some marked difference in your poetry through the passage of time? Do you notice a “maturation” of your work? Continued themes? Do you hold tightly to old ideas? Abandon last lines in search of new windmills? Do these ideas have any effect on your process, form, line length, subjects? Also, does the time period in which you live transform your writing? How does your process manifest itself in time (are you a fast or slow writer? do some projects take longer?) And on and on and on“
I didn’t address most of your first question and can’t hope to answer this one completely, either. My first instinct was to say that Merwin “exports” time, producing and distributing it through signals like those I mentioned above, so one is left with the kind of trembling anything seen in a time-lapse film has, a sense of trembling-time you can apply more generally to yourself or another subject; I leave Merwin able to see time like that, like he’s injected a particular dye into the time-stream. His poems produce time and pass on the savings to me.
I think my first poems tried more to “import” time into themselves, to leech a time sense from readers to lend subjects/images/ideas more motion and heft by staging them with narrative, before/after approaches, and appeals to relationships and processes that could serve as an interior ticking clock I could wind and watch wind down in a poem.
I still believe in those approaches, particularly in the idea that poems often need to import or supply a clock, particularly so readers don’t assume a duller time frame; for Poetry Northwest, I recently devised this pitch for a contest in which I ask people to write a poem that finds something that is not a clock that can serve as a clock. You can get more time into your poems. But then what do your poems give out?
I think my work still “imports” time but now more through seasonal observation and the incidentals of nature’s processes. I often compose while walking, which adds time, and I guess have started to think of my poems as compressed time, trying to use sound (in the most recent ones) to press harder on the bicycle pedal every time there’s a somewhat regular rhythm, to feel one’s muscles exceeding mechanical pace for a moment. This might be a heave past dying. I don’t know.
Most basically, I guess I think of time as the real subject, that one writes in a time unaware of how that time is marking his writing (see our favorite fonts!), using writing to both be in that time more fully–these words, these images, these ways of thinking–and to reach past it, since as soon as you understand or see a time, it flies. (Merwin: “if I could make it stay / as I want to it would turn into pain.”) And form changes this in all the ways: consider this blog post, the time between other obligations of the day I have to do it, so I need a style that is in time with that, with the time of composing“
But even this ambiguous relationship to time–one can’t see it; one writes to make parts of it visible, which makes the unseeable aspects more apparent; it changes or is transcended for an accelerated moment; it depends on circumstances–forgets what Merwin shows in “Europe”: the time will come when we see even this ongoing process as a single act, a moment “and recognize it / there we were all together / one time.” This point of view is astonishing: seeing all of time does not obliterate time but brings it to a point, to the big resounding OM of a bell chiming the hour forever.
Yours for all of time,
Caryl