Re: KB interview

[J Eric Roskos <think!harvard!topaz!peora!jer>]

> I've written a little bit of (bad) poetry.  What's really strange is
> that often I just write what I think is nonsense.  A bunch of phrases
> that pop into my mind, with images and vague symbols -- but nothing
> coherent.  Then I might find the poem in a pile of junk a while later,
> and when I read it, I know exactly what it means.  So, did I put that
> meaning there unconsciously when I wrote the poem?  Or did I just read
> that meaning into the poem later?

It's hard to know.  I say this partly because it's hard for me to know
exactly what *I* was thinking when I wrote something, especially with
regards to meter.  Actually this makes me wonder sometimes about the
mechanisms of writing the poetry; it requires a particular frame of mind,
which is difficult to attain.  Thus I tend to suspect that it *does*
involve a sort of subconscious thinking, or at least a thinking in
parallel.  For example, in this part of a poem I wrote recently:

> No.  Not only is time stretched into
> This hour as empty as before,
> But I must measure it too?

I had two distinct meanings definitely in mind for the word "measure".
Yet, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the opening line of
the poem, "Another hour outside of time" was also involved in these
lines, since an hour outside of time (besides being paradoxical in
itself, unless "time" means "history", which in a sense it did) would not
be measurable.  I am not sure if I intended this or not.

However, I've been thinking a lot about the interview and why she said some
of the things she said there; when I have time (i.e., when I'm not at work)
I will try to remember to write more about that...

							-- jer