MELINDA CAMBER PORTER
79
poetry I seem to have faith in destiny or chance. I don't know how
a poem is going to be begun and how it is going to end.
Mep:
The freedom you allow yourself might account for the new
forms you create. For example,
Monkey Grammarian.
I have never
seen or read another book in that form.
OP:
I am very flattered. I love the idea of creating a new form!
Mep:
It was indefinable to me. And I wondered if you sometimes
thought of the form first (like Gerald Manley Hopkins, who thought
very precisely about what kind of rhythms and forms to give
something in advance).
OP:
Very difficult, very complicated. I have used both systems. For
instance, I wrote a love poem called
Imperial Soul.
I wrote the first
ten lines without knowing what I was writing. I knew more or less
that I was writing something about loving. I didn't know which
direction I was going. Then I had to interrupt when I could no
longer write. Then I tried to follow the spirit of these ten lines, to
consciously work on recreating those feelings that were given.
And then I stopped. I had to make a trip. When I returned to
Mexico after two weeks, I had written another fifty lines. Then I
was upset about taxes, the office, and about every place I tried to
write. The poem was a strange combination of something given
and of something constructed. Little by little, it was finished in a
kind of collaboration between the given and the constructed .
It
was very strange. The use of a rhythm probably helped me. In
Spanish, I use a very classical meter without rhymes. Blank
verse-of Wordsworth or Milton.
Mep:
Or Eliot?
OP:
Occasionally, in a very long poem, I calculate everything. Or I
will know the form, but not the idea .
Mep:
So it's as if you are
given
part of the poem and your work con–
sists in constructing the totality.
OP:
But it is very difficult if you write short poems. In poetry you
must take everything away, leave only the essentials. You take
out the connectives. Prose demands more conscious work.
Mep:
You talk a lot about your relationship with words, as do most
modern poets. I was wondering whether at times you might feel a
sort of unity with language. !fyou like, an oceanic feeling that one
also feels when in love? At any point in your relationship to
words, do you feel that it's like a big sea to merge with and even be
submerged in?
