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I don’t think I write through transition periods. What happens to me is that something stops, something ends, something is brought to a closure. Then I have nothing—I’ve used up whatever it is that I had and must wait for the well to fill up again. That’s what you tell yourself, but it doesn’t feel like a sanguine experience of sitting quietly while the well fills up. It seems like an experience of desolation, loss, even a kind of panic. The thing you would wish to be doing, you can’t do. I’ve been through a lot of those periods, and what seems to happen, or what has happened in the past, is that after a year or two, or whatever the duration, another sound emerges—and it really is another sound. It’s another way of thinking about a poem or making a poem, a different kind of speech to use, from the Delphic to the demotic. Suddenly I’ll hear a line—you can’t hear this yourself when I read, because my voice tends to pasteurize everything—suddenly I’ll realize that I’m being sent some sort of message, a new path, and I try it on. That’s how things change for me—it’s never that I work my way through it. I have friends, great poets, who seem to make extraordinary use of a daily ritualized writing practice, but for me that doesn’t work at all.
Oh, I don’t think of that as truth but as literal occurrence. Truth, to me, is that which lives within experience. Sometimes you’re working from things that have happened to you in life, but you realize that it would have more force if someone other than you were speaking. Exactly transcribed lived experience will not always make the best poem possible, partly because your conclusions about what you’ve already lived are made before you start writing. What you want to have happen is that on the page you discover something. That’s when the electricity comes, so you invent stories in order to come upon discoveries, insights you haven’t yet had. That’s what I believe in.
I became quite obsessed. There was a period of two years when I read nothing but gardening catalogues. I really thought my life as a poet was over. Then I wrote The Wild Iris (1992), a book in which flowers speak. I could see that a lot of the prose from the catalogues came into the poems. One of the things I feel most strongly—and that book taught it to me—is that you have to allow yourself your obsessions. You can’t decide they’re not literary enough, or not elevated enough. I mean, it’s not that I had given myself permission to read the catalogues, but it was all I could put my mind to. I realized subsequently that this was the catalyst for a book that seemed to me at the time the best thing I’d written—it doesn’t now, but it did then.
Lately, I’ve been watching a whole lot of television, and I’m sure it will get into my work—maybe not the fact of its being television, or maybe that too, I don’t know, but the point is that I don’t feel I have a choice. You must trust that impulse in yourself, because your work is going to come out of what absorbs you. Your work is not going to come out of things you decide should absorb you.
I hate that kind of vocabulary, because it presumes that there should be an uninterrupted fluency. Block is not a word I would use, because I think there is a necessity to be still sometimes and let life happen to you, to let your manner of being in the world be changed by what happens to you so that you will have a different self out of which to write and different news to tell from that space. I’m unhappy, mostly, when I’m not writing, unless I’ve just written something, in which case I’m euphoric because I don’t have to try and write something again, but the fact of being not happy doesn’t mean that I think that I can put an end to it. I think it’s an ordeal I have to live through. I feel kind of pious about this. I keep records of what I write—I started doing this in the sixties—and I can see in my little charts that there were these years when nothing was written, an X for every month, and then when something was written it was so different from the last thing written two years before. I don’t think I could have gotten to that doing busywork for two years. I think I got there because I shut up and waited. I could be wrong—maybe that’s not why I got there and maybe I would have gotten there faster—but my sense of my experience is that you have to wait out certain nadirs. You just wait them out, and if you continue to want to write, you’ll write, and if you stop wanting to write then you’ll have a small gift, and it’s just as well to be informed of that.
There were a lot of people there. Cool, distinguished, at the top of their cool, distinguished fields. I was very intimidated. My clothes were far too formal. I kept being introduced to people and nodding sagely as they spoke their names then forgetting what they’d said five seconds later. To douse my nerves, I drank a lot of Black Death, far too much as we stood around, and far too much as we sat at the dining table. It tasted delicious, so crisp and cold. It was like drinking the cold air beyond the window.
It turned out the Black Death was stronger than hell. It was so strong that after a while I began to hallucinate. The paintings on the wall were moving, I thought. Lava fields, in motion. A man, smiling. I was not only drunk but off my rocker. It was a really bad situation. There were a dozen people around me, maybe more, and now their facial expressions seemed antic. And possibly insincere. Were they acting? I was just trying to work this out when Alda Jónsdóttir slapped an enormous dish onto the center of the table. As she did this everyone exclaimed, “What a beautiful salmon!”
cracks me up
My father’s beliefs were so rigid that once, when my parents came to visit me at Barnard, I suggested we walk down Fifth Avenue to look at the shopwindows and he refused. He was almost viscerally offended by the idea of frivolously spending money, and of accumulating wealth. To this day, almost everything he’s earned goes back to impoverished relatives and charities in India. Also, waste was a crime. My father had witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, when the English starved Kolkata. Growing up, I’d be anxious about inviting my American friends to the house for my birthday parties, because my parents would always comment on all the unconsumed food they’d throw away. When I was a child, almost every purchase my parents made was deliberated over. We arrived in Kingston with a few suitcases, a couple of pots and pans. I don’t want to exaggerate, but there was a frugal, bare-bones quality to my upbringing, and a feeling that we were just passing through.
cool
Night has fallen by the time we reach the service station, and there’s a line for the pumps. It’s a Friday in the busy season, and amid the noise of car doors opening and closing, people talking and shouting, my parents do what they can to keep me from waking. Very slowly, Mom moves out from under me, lays me down on the back seat, and covers me with my yellow blanket.
She leans forward and whispers, “You want some coffee?”
My father turns and looks at her. He gazes at the hair falling long and loose over her chest. After this trip she will always wear it short, and she’ll stop sharing a bed with him, sleeping instead on a mattress on the floor of my room. My father is so tired that he is slow to answer.
“Coffee it is, then,” whispers Mom.
<3 the prolepsis really hits me
Finally, the day he had been so desperately waiting for arrived: October 25, 1995, a Wednesday. At precisely five o’clock, he walked into the Ecole’s packed lecture hall, where thousands of students were talking noisily in all kinds of languages—as though the children of the builders of the Tower of Babel had gathered there. Then came a sudden hush—Hazrat Derrida was about to appear. Puffing on his pipe, carrying a heavy bag, he made his way toward the desk in the middle of the stage. Derrida Sahib was wearing a great many layers, and as he approached the desk he began removing them one by one, hanging them on the back of the chair. He peeled off a raincoat, a jacket, a cardigan, a vest, a jersey, until his muscular torso was clothed in only a light sweater. The act seemed pregnant with meaning—a gesture toward the task before him, the layers of meaning that must be stripped away in the course of the seminar. Then Derrida took his seat, drew his papers from his bag, and lay them down. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “I assure you that what will be said over these weeks will be nothing other than the sum of the words of fictional people brought to life for a moment, and that their words will not bring us face-to-face with the possible. It is the impossible, instead, that we must confront. We will try to bring about something else, something ‘other,’ through an indefinable course that will be the source of our discussion—its goal—but that will forever remain outside its bounds. We will touch the impossible.”
why do i love this
I’ve kept one for decades—it’s the font of all my writing. I recently taught a class on the diary at Barnard, where we read real ones by Pavese, Woolf, Sontag, André Gide, and Carolina Maria de Jesus, as well as work by Joyce, Ernaux, and others. These days people are more excited about digressive, almost unpresentable writing, the kind that exists in some private, intimate dimension, but for a long time, there was a sense of a literary hierarchy, with the novel at the top and any record of real-time experience, especially women’s experience, at the bottom—you know, “There she goes, pouring her heart out again.” That mode, which involves carving out a space in which no one is watching or listening, is how I’ve always operated. I remember that during an event for Interpreter of Maladies in London—this was before it won the Pulitzer, but it was a pretty big crowd—someone asked me, “Who do you write for?” And I stood on that stage, this incredibly green writer, and said, “I write for myself.” There was total silence.
lol
One day, at Jim Wesson Jr.’s encouragement, Paul and a couple of the agents on his team set up a booth at a community fundraiser at a racquet club. It was vaguely environmental in purpose, raising money for wetland and mangrove preservation while being sponsored by several of the companies responsible for their impending extinction.
this is a little cheap but i did chuckle a bit