AA: Thank you. Again, that poem does that amazing thing of being in multiple points in time at once. You’re in the moment of deciding to leave; you’re already gone and looking back; you’re already in memory. You need that ability to kind of move around in time, even in a small way.
AP: Yeah. It feels like – for me – that there’s a certain [mode of] justification that poetry excuses us from. There’s something I don’t have to justify or make coherent entirely. The edges can not quite line up and the not-lining-up is part of the pleasure. It’s something more wabi sabi about the way that things don’t fit and – thank god they don’t fit because tidiness is so diabolical or … there’s something about everything becoming just right, where we’d never want to be.
AA: Yes, because I read that poem as a poem of leaving and I think in traditional narrative, those separations are always very definite, complete. There’s never any going back. There’s never any space for deciding to leave and then going ‘no’. We need poems like that to bring that truth onto a page.
AP: To stop the knowing being deafening. That we are sure that we know what we [and others] are going do.
AA: Yeah, yeah. Surety being a sort of prison, even though it feels like safety – so weird.
AP: Yeah. I know. It feels like safety and yet it dooms us to a small set of unfoldings. I think that’s because, for me, in terms of the way that we all limit and sabotage our lives along with a self we’re sure we know, or that others have told us that they know … To draw back slightly from that kind of self, that self where we’re certain it’s done and dusted …
You mentioned earlier about your body and whether it’s doing what you want it to do. I mean, this is this question of the ages we live through. I do feel that there’re these scripts for how a life should unfold. These are also wonderful, if one finds happiness in those rhythms, it’s great. It’s easier. But let’s say one doesn’t find happiness in those rhythms, or it’s not the way that the thing – your life – lands or whatever. I think it’s just – until I fall over with old age – reinvention is possible every minute. As long as I don’t decide that – you know – the denouement has begun, then … it hasn’t begun.
AA: Oh man, I’d fully decided that earlier today.
AP: Let’s undecide.
This interview is an edited version of a conversation recorded for the ‘Poetry Says’ podcast, June 2020.
