Michelle Bailat-Jones

Included at the end of Jan Zwicky’s collection, Chamber Music, there is an interview between Warren Heti, Darren Bifford, and Zwicky about her poetry that I return to once or twice a year, and I did this morning after reading a few of my favorite poems in that collection (“The Geology of Norway”, “Cashion Bridge”, “Epistomology”, “Small Song for the Voice of the Nuthatch”)

Zwicky is a hesitant interviewee, because, in her words, “…it seems graceless to talk about one’s own work.” I very much agree. But Zwicky does go on to talk about how a poem is both created and received by the poet – she doesn’t want to give the poet all the credit, nor does she believe the poet is only a conduit. It seems to me that great writing is always wedged in a balance between craft and raw inspiration; they must go hand in hand. And Zwicky has a nice baseball metaphor about catching a fly ball.

The interview goes on to talk about something I’ve mentioned in passing in other posts, this is her reflections on the idea of lyric availability. Her point is that a writer needs technique in order to make something of the way in which they perceive the world, but the initial perception (or attention) is key. She uses a notion from Charles Simic to explain what she means by that perception:

…an eye for the similar and the significant… most of the time poets, like everybody else, stare at the world in incomprehension; and occasionally they don’t, occasionally, for reasons we don’t understand, poets and other lyric artists are suddenly available to the connections—the real, significant similarities—that are actually there in the world all the time.

And she goes on to describe what this availability means to her specifically, how some aural or visual scrap of memory or attention will stand out to her and she feels compelled to do something about it, to honor it in her way. Later she calls it a “haloed being or situation”.

All over the margins of this little interview, I have written the names of the writers and poets who do this – who come to a kind of raw emotional attention at “something” and then find a way to create something out of it, narrative or poetry or something else entirely. I am enjoying the fact that I cannot provide a concrete definition of this “something” as it will be different for any writer. But the experience is the same, I think, of a very definite and attuned focus that is transposed into words.

Zwicky goes on with wonderful difficulty to explain the idea further:

Most of my experience of availability is indeed simply of image-complexes—individual things, or situations, or events—standing out against their backdrops. Invariably, though, if I can stay under long enough, I sense—well, more. And it’s not until I sense that more, until its shape, too, begins to be discernible—that’s not quite right: until my availability is stretched to extend to it, too (although that’s also not quite right: it’s often more like achieving sufficient interior darkness for some dimmer trace to register—nothing so active as stretching)—anyway, it’s only then that the haloed image-complex stands stably in my perception.