not linearly but radially

Eamon Grennan: I always have a shadow narrative. A phantom narrative or a shadow narrative, for me it’s a sort of grounding.Maybe the best deflection of a poem being abstractly about something is to locate a story, an action, which will carry the facts, and the facts will then offer you some abstractions. In more recent work I’m trying to get rid of narrative and just deal with what I would call lyric fragments. But there’s a fractured aspect to any narrative I have. 

Student: Why is it important to fracture?

Grennan: Because I don’t feel that the narrative itself is what I’m after. I’m not attempting to tell that story; I’m attempting to embody the procedures of that consciousness. I suspect what I’m trying to do is work not linearly as narrative but radially. To work out of a center. To radiate out along spokes of implication and spokes of connection rather than proceeding on a line of narrative. That gives it another kind of spatial shadow. 

 

- Eamon Grennan, in conversation with Pearl London and her students in 1995, from Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with America's Poets (ed. Alexander Neubauer, Knopf, 2011).