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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Not Coming in From the Cold

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation, December 16th, 2010. I'm Curtis Fox. This week, "Not Coming in From the Cold." Cold weather is not all that bad. It may drive us indoors, but if we are readers, it drives us deeper into our books. Winter is the great season for reading, I think. It's also the time of year for darkness, and nobody in American poetry has as much claim on darkness as Mark Strand. In his long career writing poems that, in their austere mystery and beauty, often give a wintry chill, the words dark and darkness pop up often.

Mark Strand: Yeah, I don't know why. "The moon" does too, and "sea," and "nothing." Well, I don't know. Maybe these are the words that define my work.

Curtis Fox: We're gonna listen to a wintry poem by Mark Strand in which none of these words appear, but they nonetheless hover around it like ghosts. Longtime readers of Mark Strand know that they are there, even if they're not. The poem is called "The Idea," and here to listen with me is poet Vijay Seshadri. Vijay, when I proposed this podcast and gave you a couple of Mark Strand poems to choose from, you chose "The Idea," saying it was one of the great American poems. What is it that makes it so good?

Vijay Seshadri: I think it's very individual and peculiar to this poet, but also it has this great existential resonance, which is characteristic of Mark Strand's work.

Curtis Fox: Throughout, yeah.

Vijay Seshadri: It is a real American poem. I mean, I think when I say "great American poem," I should emphasize 'American" as much as "great," because of its peculiar historicity.

Curtis Fox: You're talking about literary history.

Vijay Seshadri: Literary history.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, when he's referencing this poem. So very generally, who is he referencing in this poem?

Vijay Seshadri: Well, I think two great American writers of the past: 1). Herman Melville, and 2). Wallace Stevens.

Curtis Fox: The Stevens I saw. It's very clear what the Stevens is. In fact, I asked him about that, and he said:

Mark Strand: If I'm thinking of Stevens, I'm thinking of "The Snow Man," but I'm also thinking of "The Auroras of Autumn" and the cabin that appears in "The Auroras of Autumn."

Curtis Fox: So that cabin in your poem is Stevens's cabin?

Mark Strand: I took it out of Stevens and put it in my poem.

Curtis Fox: I just happened to be recording Mark Strand last week, and I asked him

about that poem. But Vijay—Melville, I didn't make the connection with Melville.

Vijay Seshadri: Yeah, what's interesting to me about the poem is that Strand has been historically known as a poet of isolation, as you mentioned in your introduction. And this is an interesting poem in relationship to that notion of isolation. And, of course, Melville has that great passage in Moby Dick, where he talks about the "isolato," who lives on his own continent. What I find really winning about the poem is the subtle modulation of that very significant American idea, a transcendental idea, but also an idea with a certain amount of dread behind it, especially in Melville.

Curtis Fox: So, let's listen to it before we talk about it further. Here's Mark Strand reading "The Idea."

Mark Strand:

For us, too, there was a wish to possess

Something beyond the world we knew, beyond ourselves,

Beyond our power to imagine, something nevertheless

In which we might see ourselves; and this desire

Came always in passing, in waning light, and in such cold

That ice on the valley’s lakes cracked and rolled,

And blowing snow covered what earth we saw,

And scenes from the past, when they surfaced again,

Looked not as they had, but ghostly and white

Among false curves and hidden erasures;

And never once did we feel we were close

Until the night wind said, “Why do this,

Especially now? Go back to the place you belong;”

And there appeared, with its windows glowing, small,

In the distance, in the frozen reaches, a cabin;

And we stood before it, amazed at its being there,

And would have gone forward and opened the door,

And stepped into the glow and warmed ourselves there,

But that it was ours by not being ours,

And should remain empty. That was the idea.

Curtis Fox: And we thought it was cold here in New York. It's very cold in that poem.

Vijay Seshadri: I know.

Curtis Fox: So, let's go through the poem a little bit. The very first line immediately raises a question.

Mark Strand: "For us too, there was a wish to possess something beyond the world we knew."

Curtis Fox: Now, who is that to? Who are the other people that are included in this poem?

Vijay Seshadri: Yeah, I think its first achievement is to create a backstory by those first three words.

Mark Strand: "For us too."

Vijay Seshadri: By distinguishing "us" from "them." And there's an implied "them" who wish to possess, just as we, too, wish to possess. But their wish to possess has a confidence that our wish to possess doesn't have.

Curtis Fox: Where do you see that in the language, though?

Vijay Seshadri: Well, in the "too," "for us, too." We, too, wish to possess; we, too, want to belong; we, too, want to transcend. But we know something about transcendence and the possibility of transcendence that they don't know.

Mark Strand: "There was a wish to possess something beyond the world we knew, beyond ourselves, beyond our power to imagine."

Curtis Fox: So, what is it that they wish to possess? What is this?

Vijay Seshadri: Well, I think you have to see it in the context of these two groups of people, these two sets of people who wish to possess. Neither group can be understood except in relationship to the other groups. So, if you're reading the poem and trying to interpret it, you have to make a judgment for your own sake about what these two groups represent. And for me, it really represents the opposition between people who are convinced that transcendence is possible and people who are convinced that it's not. Although both groups wish to transcend, because that's the human condition. So, we have a wish to possess something beyond the world, beyond ourselves, beyond our power to imagine something.

Mark Strand: "Something, nevertheless, in which we might see ourselves."

Vijay Seshadri: And that "see ourselves" has a resonance, too, that's very deep culturally. "Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!" The famous opening lines of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." One of the things that I really like about this poem is that it's not a single isolated individual, here you have "us."

Curtis Fox: Yes.

Vijay Seshadri: "For us." And there's something very, very touching—and a little kind of softening of that sense of isolation in a wilderness which is so central to the American imagination. It's not me alone.

Mark Strand: "And this desire came always in passing, in waning light, and in such cold that ice on the valley's lakes cracked and rolled, and blowing snow covered what earth we saw."

Curtis Fox: The desire is only an occasional desire in extreme conditions.

Vijay Seshadri: Exactly.

Curtis Fox: What do you make of that?

Vijay Seshadri: I don't quite know what to make of that. I would say that there is something about the condition of the speaker and the condition of those with whom he identifies that suggests that they have gone beyond wisdom into a kind of disenchantment. Here is the point at which the poem grazes the ethical.

Mark Strand: "And scenes from the past, when they surfaced again, looked not as they had, but ghostly and white, among false curves and hidden erasures."

Vijay Seshadri: That's really interesting, because there is sort of a way in which our isolation is such that we even misprision the past. We can't even trust our own memories. The slight intrusion of these ethical terms, like false, and hidden erasures, there's something there that's behind something else. So, we can't trust what we see, because there's something that's hidden that's been erased.

Curtis Fox: That's a brilliant phrase. Erasure is where you can't see . . . but hidden erasure suggests some force that has hidden it.

Vijay Seshadri: Exactly.

Curtis Fox: And then it goes on.

Mark Strand: "And never once did we feel we were close until the night wind said, 'Why do this especially now? Go back to the place you belong.'"

Curtis Fox: That's hard not to read the night wind as one's conscious self-saying, what are you doing out here in the blasted cold?

Vijay Seshadri: Yeah.

Curtis Fox: Is that how you read that?

Vijay Seshadri: I guess I see that in technical terms. I think the poet, in the writing of the poem, has to break the monotony of those long, anaphoric phrases.

Curtis Fox: So, there's a technical problem he saw over there?

Vijay Seshadri: And the one way to kinda break it and give the composition a little complexity is to have someone speak in the middle. I've always kind of gone over those lines. I've felt their rhetoric without parsing them for their meaning. Because right after that, you have the big turn. You have the break.

Mark Strand:

And there appeared, with its windows glowing, small,

In the distance, in the frozen reaches, a cabin;

And we stood before it, amazed at its being there,

And would have gone forward and opened the door,

And stepped into the glow and warmed ourselves there,

But that it was ours by not being ours,

And should remain empty. That was the idea.

Curtis Fox: It suckers me every time I read this poem, because, sucker that I am, I always expect the speaker in the poem to go into the cabin. It's a warm place, that's totally the expectation that it sets up, and continually disappoints you in the end. So, what is that cabin? We heard earlier that Mark Strand said he stole it from Wallace Stevens. But what does that cabin really mean? And why doesn't he go in?

Vijay Seshadri: That's a good question, Curtis. Why doesn't he go in?

Curtis Fox: Why doesn't he go in? I mean, one reading of this is that the artist has to be always on the outside looking in.

Vijay Seshadri: Yeah. I think in some sense, all of Strand's poems are about the situation of the artist. I mean, I think he sort of sees the situation of the artist as being coextensive with the situation of the human being. Or the situation of consciousness itself. Consciousness aware of itself, and aware of its own incompletion, in some way. And the idea of a place that possesses all of those values that will remain intact if we don't mar it and try to possess it. "But that it was ours by not being ours." That the only way we can have the thing that we want, the thing that we crave, is by somehow repudiating it. And there is a paradox there. But the poem doesn't stop there, interestingly enough.

Mark Strand: "And should remain empty."

Vijay Seshadri: And then, here is the second sentence of the poem.

Mark Strand: "That was the idea."

Vijay Seshadri: So, it's an idea.

Curtis Fox: This cabin is an idea. Or the way you don't go in the cabin is an idea.

Vijay Seshadri: Well, "that it was ours by not being ours. And should remain empty."

Mark Strand: "That was the idea."

Vijay Seshadri: I read this poem when it first came out in the New Yorker. I think it must have been in the late ’80s or so. And I thought that ending was strange, and I read it again and I said, "Oh, you know, it's a little joke." There's a pun there, right? The pun is, well, "What's the idea?"

Curtis Fox: What's the big idea?

Vijay Seshadri: Yeah, what's the big idea? And that transformed it for me. A little ghostly joke, very tiny. I mean, you look at it syntactically and the whole poem is just one long sentence except for that. I thought that was just a marvelous piece of invention, and sort of at the heart of something, you feel a little wink that you didn't expect at all. And you're going, wow, that is really a cool effect.

Curtis Fox: Vijay Seshadri, thanks so much.

Vijay Seshadri: Thank you.

Curtis Fox: You can read poems by Vijay Seshadri in the current issue of Poetry magazine. And you can also hear him read a few in the December Poetry Magazine Podcast, which you can find in the iTunes Store or at poetrymagazine.org. Next month, in the January issue, you can read some new prose poems by Mark Strand, and he'll also appear on the Poetry Magazine Podcast. More poems by both poets can be found on our website poetryfoundation.org. Let us know what you think of this program, where our motto is:

Mark Strand: "Why do this, especially now?"

Curtis Fox: Email us at [email protected]. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. For Poetry Off the Shelf, I'm Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.