The Structure, Then the Music

"The Structure, Then the Music"An Interview with Ed Roberson* Randall Horton (bio) Horton: Ed, whenever I am engaged in your work I tend to go back to a line from your first book, When Thy King Is a Boy, which Nathaniel Mackey uses as an epigraph in his collection Splay Anthem. The line comes from the poem "dreaming has made more strict the terms of dreaming" and runs: "because to dream is not to dream / if waking up is never finished." I was wondering if you could elaborate on that in terms of your own process and conception of writing poetry. Roberson: That is a real deep one. [Laughter] I mean that it goes back deep into the beginnings of my work. That line became one of those structures that pilots the development of my work. It is quoted from one of those kinds of poems that you don't have a real explanation for. It's sort of given to you as a koan for the rest of your life. Horton: Yes, we poets tend to take certain liberties with quotes and interpret them in our own way, intuiting new meanings in old language. It sounds like your own interpretations of the phrase have been leading somewhere as they've changed over time. What did it mean then, and where is it now? What are you saying about dream? Roberson: There's always been a quick answer to that, and another we'd have to talk a little about. Horton: Can I get both? Roberson: Well, I'm not using dream as entertainment or escape, of course. The dream here is about vision and the accomplishment. It is creation, the act of creativity, you know, the process of the work, through to the poem itself. That sage who didn't know if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man, to my way of thinking, was actually questioning whether he was busy creating or living his accomplished creation, whether he was writing the poem or living the poem. And by "living the poem" I mean living a life you can feel the poems come out of, or living the given world the poem has brought you to understand—all, I think, by way of the writing. [End Page 762] So the quick answer is that the dream itself, a vision, is created by creating its completion, its accomplishment, creating its waking. Otherwise, it's just sleep. But that's only an introduction to the real question: of waking. Is it waking into the next dream, the next poem? The question is how to wake into the continuum of creating, into life, rather than a dried-up eternal sleep. It's about the life of creation, trying to live a life of creativity—and about the works themselves. Click for larger view View full resolution Ed Roberson Courtesy of Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Horton: The quick answer is going to take some time. So what's the other part? What's the rest of it? Roberson: Those lines are from a poem in my first book. That early, sometimes the poems come and you think they are yours, you think it's you talking and you know what you're talking about. But when I look back, yes, it's nice to see that I had some skills, but it's more honest to admit to myself that even though I had some control, the best moments [End Page 763] in the really good poems were written when I gave over the control to something beyond myself, some larger thing that, at that time, I called the Work or the Art. But later I came to find out some folks call it Martians. Horton: Were you reading Spicer at the time you wrote your first book? Roberson: No, not yet. But I was beginning to feel myself confronted with the problem of how to deal with poetry or just lines that were sort of me yet didn't come bidden by me. I might not have known what those lines about dreaming fully meant, but I knew those lines were true

Psychoanalysis · Philosophy and Literary Analysis · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education · Psychology

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