The poem is bigger than me

Thomas Kennedy interviewing Pia Tafdrup

By : Thomas E. Kennedy

- In your book Walking on Water: Towards a Poetics (Over vandet går jeg: Skitser til en poetik) (1991) you describe the process leading up to the production of a poem as ´spontaneous, unreflective and completely irrational stages in which unknown energies are at work´. To what extent can the poet understand what he/she writes? Is poetry created beyond consciousness or intellect? Do you understand your poems while you are writing them, or do you have to return to them later - as if to the work of another poet - to try to fathom their significance?

    The origin of a poem has a special fascination, not least because each poem has its own process. This process deals with nothing short of giving name to the nameless, articulating the inarticulate and finding one´s way to the place where the light lies buried.
    The noble, the awful and the paradoxical is that even the most leathery of poets always has to start from scratch. It is not from experience, but from the blank sheet of paper that the poet sets out. It is from here that, every time, a new world has to be constructed. It is therefore interesting to investigate the stages which one as a writer goes through. This is what I try to track down in the first chapter of my poetics.
    While each poem has its own genesis, there are stages which are experienced time and again: for example, the spontaneous, unreflective and irrational stages to which you refer, which I have looked at. It is interesting that they are about the readiness which is the poem´s prerequisite, often about a degree of attention which is almost unbearable. At those moments when the greatest leaps of consciousness occur, integrity and personality disintegrate. The writing-self is infused and saturated. The self is faceless from the instant the sum and substance presents itself. Absolute abandonment of the self is at one with absolute participation. Strange as it may seem, passive capacity is bound up with an active force which takes over the moment the situation is grasped. Many of us will have seen violent, almost superhuman energy surface in people shortly before they die. Although ill and weakened, they are suddenly able to perform enormously physical acts such as moving otherwise unbudgeable objects. In its own way, the invasion of vigour which occurs during the creative process is an equivalent physical transformation. This is where the creative undertaking becomes seriously compelling, alluring - and risky for the practitioner. This is precisely the encounter which leads the artist either to plunge into the process time after time - or to give the desk a wide berth, because the price to be paid can be too high.
    It goes without saying that as a poet I am not conscious of everything I do while the process is underway. After the first, often emotionally-charged draft, I go sober-mindedly to work in order to tighten up and sharpen the voice. This part of the work is, to me, enormously important. Very few poems succeed in a single draft, most need a great deal of adjustment. As a rule, I leave the poems for a couple of months and then decide whether or not they measure up. Time is a good judge.
    Nevertheless, new understanding can emerge when the poems have been published and I read them to an audience. And it is not unknown for a reader to draw my attention to something in my poems which I had not noticed, but which I have welcomed as utterly convincing. It is a fundamental lesson to learn, that something I thought I knew inside out, because I had produced it myself, can still take me by surprise . . .
    The poem is bigger than me, it is only in flashes that I am abreast of it.

Thomas Kennedy has edited a number of literature anthologies.

The interview was published in Weekendavisen 16 - 18 September 1994

Translated by Gaye Kynoch