Robin
Behn is the author of Paper Bird, winner of the AWP Award Series, (Texas
Tech, 1988), The Red Hour (HarperCollins, 2004),
and Horizon Note, winner of the Brittingham
Prize (Statement
In my work I’ve always been drawn to extended projects and preoccupations. My first book is an extended elegy; my second a meditation on grace; my third an investigation of the beginnings and endings of life. I’m drawn to human stories, but, the more I write, increasingly wary of anecdotes. Narrative has become for me more an atmosphere than an engine.
My first training was as a musician: I went to Oberlin to study the flute. From all the practice and ensemble playing, I learned a few things that seem to guide me, still, in writing. I often hear poems’ sounds before I know the words for those sounds. Sonic patterns, both in the microcosm of the line and the whole field of the poem, lead me forward. For me, the written poem is a kind of score for the more present poem, the poem out loud. But it should be a beautiful score; when you see it you should hear it with your eye because of how it looks.
I like to think of a poem as a model of consciousness. The “modeling” part especially. In my next life I think I’d like to be an architect. For this life, I like to make structures with my poems, places a reader can move into, move around in, navigating or settling down, by sight and sound. I like how Eliot says in “The Music of Poetry” that all art consists of the fixed and the variant. It brings to mind the 000s and 111s that make up the code behind the word processor; the way in which a really good pair or group of rhyming words have a torque between their similarities and differences that flares out into the poem around them and teaches it where to go next; the way a voice in a poem can step aside to say something out-of-voice; the way a repeated line is a different reading experience the moment it becomes a repetend.
As for the consciousness part of that modeling of consciousness, I began, early on, writing from something close to my own consciousness, trusting the language to lead me to a web of thought and feeling and spirit I could not access otherwise, and leave behind a record, a model, as it went. I wanted to speak about the unspeakable, not just to approach it or mention it, but to dwell in it and keep on speaking. Now I see, or hear, my work as less speech-based. In my more recent work, I feel like a maker more than a speaker. Within that making, a variety of voices may come through, sometimes even in polyphony, sometimes as a chorus. And sometimes there is no voice at all, just slabs or angles or collection of words built up into a form. I am just finishing a book called The Yellow House in which I invited myself literally to build a house, to build it again and again, layer upon layer, into a shifting setting that is a kind of character, that speaks in its own right, even while it houses a collection of characters, each of whom has his or her or its own voice and story, too. I began writing the book at a time I was collaborating with a choreographer friend, Cornelius Carter. Working with his dancers, I imbibed the sense of forms always in motion, flowing through momentary meanings. The yellow house has some of that kinesis—sometimes it’s a houseboat, sometimes it’s floating in space like a “saffron cube comets lick,” sometimes it’s a plain old house on a hill by a river. I also allowed myself to create a wholly mythic creature—a horse—who comes to create and then dwell in the house alongside the human inhabitants. I had the thrill with this book of continuously creating and recreating the ground upon which I was standing. It became a place in which I could write about the nature of desire, its insistent nature—the fixed—and its shifting incarnations—the variant. Throughout, I decided to subscribe to “yellow” and “house” as known, repeated elements. Like anything you commit to in writing—a way of proceeding, a choice of meter, a patch of voice, an abiding question—having one thing that is fixed can give way to the recognition and practice of a greater wildness.
I’m drawn to working in the interstices between the arts. I come out of music, originally, and have worked with dancers. My most recent project is a collaboration with the abstract painter Mirjana Ugrinov whose paintings I find so commanding, so all-knowing, such gorgeous complex universes. In the presence of her paintings, I feel like I am translating for the species. She makes me want to try to say what is true, not just for me, or for now, but for all time. She makes me feel not like a flute player in the midst of an orchestra, but like the whole orchestra. To me, form, music, color itself has a kind of holiness. Working with Mirjana, I hope to bring some language into the presence of that holiness.