poetry is for the nighttime

rob mclennan: Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

William Vallières: Theory is important in helping us understand reality. I read theory and philosophy avidly. But I think, in the end, they’re for the daytime. Poetry is for the nighttime. Poetry is about “always working / beyond your own intelligence,” as Les Murray put it. [Italo] Calvino talks about keeping your cards close to your chest.

mclennan: What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Vallières: The role of the writer should be to remind people how to be free. Gary Snyder said: “Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they like the cage they were tricked into entering.” Poetry should smash the cage and build a nest instead.

- William Vallières, answering rob mclennan's 12 or 20 questions over on his blog. You can read the whole thing here.

on poemes

My idea was that in any human creation there's going to be a participation of the dream mind as well as the logical, daylight waking mind. And there's probably also going to be some kind of participation of the body. They're all going to be enacted in some way. And the more vigorously and simultaneously they're enacted, the closer the approach to the condition of poetry.

Everybody's got a few magical things in their lives. They can talk about them as if they were rational and logical, but in fact their heart is poetry. What's the poem of your life? Well, one of them is your marriage, quite often. One of them is your favorite hobby, or hobbies. And a few other things. Your political affiliation and dreams in that direction. There usually won't be too many. There'll be a few small ones, and a couple big ones. That's the standard equipment of a human soul. I call them poemes. It's a word derived from the same sort of language as "morpheme" and "grapheme" and "phoneme" and so on.

- Les Murray, summarazing his lecture "A Defense of Poetry" in an interview with Image. Read the whole thing here. Thanks to Zach Wells for pointing this out.