Marianne
Boruch is the author of five poetry collections, Descendant,
View from the Gazebo, Moss Burning, A Stick that Breaks and Breaks, and Poems: New
and Selected. She has published two books
of essays, Poetry’s Old Air and, most
recently, In the Blue Pharmacy. She teaches at Purdue. Statement of Poetics
I’m not sure what a statement of poetics is. A description of process from no to maybe to a full yes and its maybe? An itinerary? An aerial view? A wish? A regret? I regret that I don’t believe that people really change—which is probably why I don’t write fiction. It’s those stubborn bits in us, the unyielding eternal and hopeless bits; they're the ones that stay in the side vision, dark spots hanging on after the flash of the camera. Of course, now cameras don’t always flash. They purr, make small intricate noises, then stop. And the photographer suddenly looks up at the world. But it’s the dark spots that most matter to me.
Which is to say, images haunt. I understand that most of my poems are driven by images though more and more I’m drawn by voice and what I do now seems a looser thing, a more meditative act. My work involves the most daily odd things I see—the run-over, road-kill glove in the street, the sound of a child crying in an elevator when I stood last fall waiting three floors below, or the workmen outside my mother’s hospital room not long before her death, how intent they were, fixing the roof. There’s a small paring knife at the heart of these images, a complication, a stirring, a danger. I recognize such things as the beginning of poems. Maybe the beginning of poems. Which must mean I do believe in the part and the mysterious way it suggests the whole. But nothing is whole though that’s the human dream. Poems are never whole or, as was once famously said, never finished. I’m drawn to the truth in that. So this peculiar genre continues to fascinate. It’s humbling. No one on the planet really knows what a poem is or can be.
What’s crucial is time and patience though a poem can flash, can quickly fill itself in. Some very fine poets begin with a mission, with a sense of cultural and political expanse. I admire that a great deal. But to be honest, for me it’s mainly what I call the "begging bowl" theory: you empty out and work with what comes, careful to hold back intention. First, an image. Maybe an idea. And there’s a voice, of course. One goes quiet enough to follow these things where they might go. One is conscious and not conscious at all. It’s a strange negotiation. Intimate. Often unnerving. I hope, in fact, for unnerving. Then there's revision. Imagine sitting with a friend who has lapsed into a coma. You sit there and wait for any turn of muscle and nerve, a sign, a change in breathing that might realign everything. A lot of simple staring is involved: where the heat is, the weight, something that shifts or cuts at an angle, painful or not. Discovery is probably too large—I can’t call it that exactly—though the words self and world are involved. It can be small. Or it can, for a moment, seem huge.