Views from the Loft by Daniel Slager

Author:Daniel Slager
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2010-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

She keeps the child in reality. It would be wrong to sing only of the butterflies and beautiful flowers. You use reality to cure yourself of reality. This is what a poem should do.

“Poetry purifies. It is like recycling sewage water, using it again to water the fields. Poetry is the recycling plant of the language. It is often abused, it is polluted by television, by journalists and politicians. Our language is so cluttered. We overuse certain words. A woman asks a man, “Do you love me?” And he says, “Yes.” Then she asks, “Do you really love me, really?” We use words to reinforce lies. Language obscures. The poet should enable words to become what they used to be. He uses words in a context that makes them believable.

“We all have our roles: the chemist, the psychologist, the poet. The chemist observes that when you peel an onion, you cry. The psychologist comments on how we feel when we peel an onion. The poet describes the tears.

“As a poet, you enjoy everything in life twice. It is a kind of double take. You pass something, you say, ‘Just a moment. I want to stay here for a moment. I want to stay here for a moment.’The poem takes you back to the experience.

“In a sense, a poet is a traitor. You go through life and use your experience. You don’t tape-record a conversation with your lover—that’s like spying. But you may publish a beautiful book of love poems after the affair has ended. Then you hope for another affair—how can you go on writing if everything is happy? That’s a sort of romantic trap we fall into.

“Imagine a poet sitting in his library, a beautiful young woman comes in and gives him a kiss. He pushes her away saying, ‘Please don’t disturb me. I’m writing a love poem to you.’ Art is always a secondary thing. If we make art the first thing in our lives, we lose both art and life.

“Poetry is discovery. The poet sees something others do not see. What is inspiration? How do we select from our many experiences? We all want to write a minimal poem, to compress everything into two lines. Then there is this other urge in us to describe very broadly in seven-hundred-page novels the whole realm of experience. We are always torn between the two. Actually, poetry should start when someone says, ‘I can’t describe it in words. It’s beyond words.’ But then of course we reach the end of poetry.

“Remember the first astronaut who made his space walk? All he said was, ‘It is wonderful up here, wonderful.’ We should know that there’s a limit to language, just as there’s a limit to human beings. We use the same words over and over. ‘I love chocolate chips’ and ‘I love you.’ That’s a great challenge for the poet.

“People say to me, ‘You speak so much about God. Are you an orthodox Jew?’ And I say, ‘I’m Israeli, but I’m not observant.

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