Gerke: The “pause” seems very important in your work. When you read out loud in public, you do so very slowly, with a perfect calm and in this poem there are extra spaces in the lines to slow the reader down. Can you talk about pauses and spaces in terms of what you want them to do and how they affect the words and phrases on the page?
Powell: For me, silence is a reminder of certain kinds of absence I perceive in the world. I don’t know that I would want to enumerate them. But I do feel them as palpable forces in my work. So much of poetry is an act of calling. And so much of poetry is a balance between calling and responding. This is the third way: calling, responding, reflection. The reflection can come as a well-placed caesura or as an articulation of discovery. It’s not necessary to prefer one form over the other. But just as much as we honor insight and intellect, we should honor feeling and inarticulateness. None of these need supplant any of the others. Poetry has room for both voice and silence.
3 comments:
Silence in poetry is a dramatic, performance-oriented affect. It can't be represented on the page with any precision.
This is why I question the whole notion of "silence" in composition. It's a question of time in performance, not reading. What prompts a pause in reading is an especially strong proposition, a sentence or paragraph so profound or astonishing that it makes you stop to think and consider, ponder.
Making pauses in a live reading is a gratuitous form of acting. That's theatre, not poetry.
You don't think that certain line breaks or mechanics of speech-as-written require pause? The caesura is as old as poetry in English.
Powell uses extra spaces in his lines the way that Hopkins (and then Hill) used accents, as a sort of emphatic controlling element.
I think the "time" Powell is talking about is the 1-3 seconds of delay between the speaking of one word and the next. In paragraphic progress, it's a little more than the pause between the end of one sentence and the next. Line breaks aren't "delays"--they're splices meant to signify a lapsed breath, or a division which has formal meaning.
In reality, the eye can put separated words (on the page) together with great rapidity--again, for formal functionality, not aural. Take a poet like Eigner, his poems are visual dances on the page, but the rate of the reading has nothing to do with "silences"--it's merely a rhythmic signature. The "space" surrounding the words allows them to be set apart, but not experienced as delays. The syllabic flow--and contrast among syllabic sequences--is the real point.
Again, these "silences" Powell is referring to, have really nothing to do with silent reading. They're about dramatic speech. All very nice, and subject to differing "interpretations"--but not a phenomenon of silent reading.
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