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?
Julia McCarthy: I’m not sure what ‘theoretical’ means in this context... I often feel my way through certain ideas in poetry, ‘idea’ in the Greek sense of a shape or perceptible form and the means by which we see. A kind of insighting. I am interested in and concerned with the line, the breath, and its music; the image uprooted from imagination, that animal mundi; metaphor... the braiding of the visible and invisible through a poem. Language itself (how it simultaneously reveals and conceals, its ambiguity) and its relationship to experience, to how we see; being and nonbeing are preoccupations, which of course, imply time which brings us back to rhythm. Duality fascinates me. Every word contains a philosophy, even ‘and’ and ‘the.’ As a meeting place, I’m not sure the poem is interested in our answers or questions... just in us showing up, listening, labouring to bring it into being and witnessing the zinc-flash of its emergence.
- Julia McCarthy, answering rob mclennan's 12 or 20 questions over on his blog. You can read the whole thing here.
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