Montag: (Q4) Let's talk about the grouping principle at work in the five sections of your book. What is the controlling center of each section, and how do they hold together as a book? The section titles are: (1) Wrestling pleasure from the dead calm; (2) Still within site from the house; (3) Wager of spring; (4) The end of daylight savings time; and (5) Raft of words.
Benet: I am not sure I can identify "the controlling center of each section" in my book. I think that’s more a question for the reader, the scholar or the critic. But I can tell you that the "grouping principle" I had in mind when I made the sections, along with the way the poems are ordered in the sections, was that of a reasoned dialogue. Each section and each poem in the sections seemed to me to be part of a conversation. I hoped that this conversation would cover issues raised by childhood (be it from a child’s perspective or the parent’s perspective), marriage (from both spouses’ perspective), art (poem’s relation to language), and faith (art as a spiritual practice). As for your question whether they hold together as a book - well, the publisher thought so, and I hope that some of my readers think so too. When I put together the manuscript, I thought so too. Montag: (Q5) Would you explain the choice of "Instability" as the next to last poem in the book? It seems to me to belong to another book entirely. Benet: "Instability" is the next to last poem in the book because it is meant to return the reader (and the poet too) from the world of words into the "streams of blood," or back to the body - the world of senses. But, given the "grouping principle" of my book, that constant questioning and juxtaposition, it is not enough to leave the speaker or the reader anchored, as it were, back in the world. As a poet, my task is not to reassure the reader or worry about his or her safety. My task, if I have any, is to give the utmost attention to both the world and the words in which I then bring you "news" of this world. So if the poem "Instability" suggests that there is too great a chasm between the spiritual and the earthly, the last poem, "Border Questions," offers a solution by making that chasm, that "brink" a new opportunity for grounding. I know that during our dinner in Madison I seemed to have agreed with you that "Instability" might belong to another book. Re-reading that section, I can tell you now with certainty that for me, as the poet, this poem belongs exactly where it is in the book. It doesn’t belong anywhere else, or in another book. Montag: (Q6) You say memory is "the mapmaker of absences." How would you respond to the suggestion that the poet herself is the mapmaker of absences? Benet: Well, of course the poet is mapmaker and her tool in this business of charting is language. But the territory that needs to be mapped is different for each poet, it seems to me, even when many of them tread on common ground in terms of inhabiting that space in which the human is at home. So yes, the poet is the mapmaker, but, in my case, the territory of absences is the province of memory. In other words, memory is my Magellan or Lewis and Clark, the greedy or driven explorer looking for that which gains shape or boundaries, as well as coordinates only in its absence. Still too opaque with all those fancy words getting in the way? Let me put it this way: I may be the one drawing the map in words, but the only way I can access the field to survey it, is through memory, because what I am charting is a world from which I am absent and which, in my absence, is sinking into oblivion. Montag: (Q7) It might be a stretch to say these poems are an expression of your dark Romanian soul; yet many of them do seem dark and brooding. Why is that? How would you respond to the characterization of your poems as full of sadness and loss? As a poet, you seem compelled to look at old age and loss and death and to ask: What of us? Benet: Hmm, dark Romanian soul... I don’t know about that. Transylvanian, maybe, but certainly not Romanian or Hungarian or ... well, I don’t know if my soul in particular has a nationality - hence my obsession with "absences." A simpler answer to your question of why my poems seem so dark and full of brooding is this: temperament, brain chemistry. Or not enough Prozac.... Continued at BENET INTERVIEW - 4, below
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