KL: There is no uncanny without some sense of the canny, but that ‘wobble’ is really strong in your work.

RA: There’s something haunted about this space between what you know and what it is to be known. And that could be even as literal as you’re in a room alone, but suddenly, you feel that you’re not alone. Maybe you hear something in the room, you know, and it’s behind you. There’s that sense of the uncanny where there’s a gap between what you thought was happening and what might be happening – what could happen. At least, I think a lot of the uncanny starts in this gap. But doubles are also uncanny. Where does one leave off and the other begin? So, uncanniness has to do with the relationship between familiarity and strangeness. I have yet to work out what it is exactly.

KL: ‘Narrative,’ the poem you read before ‘Forests,’ was one of the ones you thought of in relation to the uncanny. The second section of that is a sentence: ‘In fiction, time / runs both ways // and the past is legible, / harmless.’ And then the next bit is:

Question:

How are beauty 
and meaning 
connected? 

Beauty seduces meaning. 
Meaning stalks beauty.

Beauty breaks down 
into meaning.

Meaning breaks down 
into dreams.

In Renaissance rhetoric, that figure is called gradatio. The last word of one line becomes the first word of the following line, the stepping stone.

RA: I didn’t know that. Thank you.

KL: That’s in Puttenham, gradatio or the stepping stone, I think he calls it … in one sense, it’s a grammatical and line-by-line stepwise enacting of sequence – this and then this – that’s a way to speak of narrative. That’s what narrative is, ‘this, this, and this.’ But you’ve already said:

In fiction, time 
runs both ways 

and the past is legible, 
harmless.

So, implicitly, what follows, the question: ‘How are beauty / and meaning / connected?’ is addressed to poetry. Poetry’s not …

RA: Not necessarily harmless …

KL: It’s not like fiction, not harmless, not legible in the same way maybe?

RA: Well, when we talked about the canny and the uncanny, it has to be partly legible. It must be canny to some extent. I think at the end there, ‘meaning breaks down / into dreams’ … if this went on, then the following stanza would start with the word ‘dreams,’ but since it doesn’t, ‘dreams’ just kind of hangs there at the end. And seems like a step into the unknown, I guess.