Interview

Please talk about the relationship of Wittgenstein to your work—why do you think poets are so drawn to philosophy?

In something I once read, someone snippily declared that philosophy was where language went to take a vacation. To some extent I believe this, because a lot of the philosophy I've read has always ended up in mental terrains so far away from actuality that one wonders what philosophy was meant to offer in the first place. We live in what Stevens calls the "malady of the quotidian"; we're helplessly bound to earthly things while we're alive. But my sense of philosophy is that it wants to be as far away from the quotidian as it can be, away from the azaleas and the lard pail and the blackbirds. And yet, as the example of Stevens underscores, poets love philosophy because the language of philosophy yearns for a sublimity that poetry hungers for. Poetry is that paradoxical thing in that it wants to draw the ideal from the chaotic, the beauty out of the things in the dump. To quote Stevens once again, he says that "Things seen are things as seen"—which is a playful way of saying that any thing or any experience is always seen through the particular lens of the person living the experience. Poetry maps that "as seen" territory wherein the world out there and the world in here account for each other. As for Wittgenstein, he fascinated me not as a philosopher but as a figure of art: here was a powerful writer and thinker and yet, as the biographies will attest, you don't see the full extent of his desires in the things he wrote about. In this way Wittgenstein seems emblematic of some of the limits philosophy has. I'm referring here specifically to Wittgenstein's homosexuality. It fascinated me that that doesn't make it into his deliberations, and I wonder about why that is. I don't put a positive or negative light on that absence, but I do wonder about it.

Your title comes from the lines "Then the darker fall, gust / of whiteness. The tree a lung / spread on the window" in the poem, "Montale." Why did you select this triad of words to name your book?

When I was casting about for a title for the book, I asked my fellow poet Brian Teare to look at the manuscript and see what he might find there as possible titles. When Brian gave me his list of choices, the phrase "The Darker Fall" sparked off the page and it had, to my ear and eye, an immediate rightness. Many things about it felt right. I liked the punning you could get, if you wanted to, out of the word "fall"—the associations with autumn and the Biblical fall that were available there. I liked the iambic cadence of it; I liked the seriousness. I liked the seriousness because it made me begin to read my own poems as "serious" poems. Many of the poems were written out of the impulse to delight in something—whether an object, or a texture of language. But I always thought this celebratory mode somehow excluded the melancholy tones I associate with seriousness. I'm mistaken in thinking this, of course. I know now that there are many dark poems in my book, even if their first impulses came from airiness and song. To my mind "The Darker Fall" is a sort of playful ruse: it announces something troubled, when in fact what I was going for was cheer.

This collection is almost Keatsian in its tender approach to things and its acknowledgment of desire, especially the hopelessness of being free from it. Could you talk about this?

Desire, as Robert Hass has famously said, is "full of endless distances," by which I think he meant that desire can be overwhelmingly grand, and, like the weather overhead, it can be mercurially, inexplicably sweeping. My sense of what it means to write poetry is to find the specific images and gestures which give an understandable scale to that desire and to experience. What I love about Keats is that he gets that balance between the endlessness of longing and the preciseness of the world at hand. There's a huge ambition and a decorum working together at the same time. Elizabeth Bishop also has that balance. Czeslaw Milosz, too. A balance, finally, that has at its heart the understanding that one's living hand partakes of the same generosity and peril which the nightingale and the sacrificial heifer are subject to. Keats is profound to me because he's generous to himself without involving his ego in that generosity; it's the same painstaking generosity of eye and heart he gives to everything around him.