the perversion of use

The uselessness of poetry is in fact its resistance to the perversion of use that we live, and in this it is, without submitting to any use, as it always should refuse to submit, supremely useful. “It’s a jungle out there,” a man-made mechanical jungle, we’re always complacently told, and we are prone to fall into being “realists,” into accepting it. Rather than that aphorism, its opposite, and its beneficent healer: “Building the beautiful house for the piteous sufferer” (William Blake).

- A.F. Moritz, from his essay "What Does it Mean to be a Poet in 2018?", as published on the House of Anansi blog. You can read the whole thing here.

Whitman or Mallarmé?

I think of myself as the unity of my tensions, a unity forever sought, and one of my chief tensions is, Should I be Whitman or should I be Mallarmé? Should I include everything explicitly, which is so beautiful a thing to do, so powerful, so right, or should I severely essentialize, going deep, deep to the very end of depth, through one tiny jewel of approach, making as little concession as possible to any verbal elements other than the strictest needs of refined poetic expression—which is so beautiful a thing to do?

- A.F. Moritz, in interview with Evan Jones over at Canadian Notes & Queries. You can read the whole thing here.

it's not an ability with language

I’m a proponent of the tradition of inspiration, like Octavio Paz and like Breton and the surrealists. To say I’m a “proponent” is, I suppose, a concession to civilized discourse, in which you’re supposed to admit your position may be arguable. It would be more honest of me to say I’m certain from direct experience that poetry is a mode of expression (which is to say a mode of existence) of the ongoingness, energy, essence of life and non-life. It’s not an ability with language. It’s a seizure of the substance and surface of language by language’s depth, which is simultaneously the depth of everything: “The everlasting Universe of things / Flows through the mind,” as Shelley puts it.

- A.F. Moritz, in interview with James W. Wood over at PRISM international. You can read the whole thing here.

this may wind up ruining the earth

Samantha Ainsworth: Your writing surprises the reader with visceral, gritty elements and is non-apologetic to the squeamish. Can you speak about this aspect of truth-telling, and the importance of being true to oneself?

A.F. Moritz: It’s good of you to take such a golden attitude towards this aspect. I often find myself glancing ahead through a poem I’m planning to read to an audience, and thinking, “Uh oh, maybe I’d better turn the page, or at least give an advance warning: X-rated”. There’s a poem of Hardy’s in which he’s responding to the charge of pessimism he always received, and he says that to see the best “exacts a full look at the worst.” Czeslaw Milosz says in one of his poems, “What has no shadow has no strength to live.” Well, everything has shadow, but human cussedness can and does try to eliminate it from the things under our control, and succeeds in doing so, for a time and to the extent possible.

This may wind up ruining the earth. At the very least, one can get a bowdlerized life. In the streets: death hidden away behind walls or moved to elsewhere. But everyone will have to face it. The only choice is whether you do it willingly or you refuse until dragged to it by time and events, and even then closing your eyes. This is a choice between living your existence and trying not to.

In books: the evil and the problematic can be left out, or, more frequently, changed into a cartoon reduction, and one result of this is a picture of human triumph that is a joke, because everyone can see that the resolutions come against paper tigers and straw men. The other result, which culturally we suffer from very badly today, is a constant fishtailing between ridiculous extremes. First, a reduced art that only pretends to address reality. Then, in reaction, an enraged art so hungry to shout sex and violence that it thinks that’s enough. Then, back to the cute and clean. And so it goes.

- A.F. Moritz, in interview with Samantha Ainsworth for The Malahat Review. You can read the full interview here.

essential to sound social organization

Here is a poem Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote for his mother in her extreme old age:

I wish I could carry you in my arms
from your life to nothingness
the way you carried me, when I was a child,
to the cradle from your breasts.

Notice the role of desire: I wish. The loving dialogue, a man speaking to his mother, giving back the care he received. The powerful, defiant transformations: the poet turns approaching death into a woman’s breasts, and nothingness into a cradle. Notice too the near hopelessness of the desire and the way the poem holds out, not eliminating hopelessness but never defeated, maintaining life in the face of annihilation. This poem is a primary political document. In addition to and because of its rich human meanings, it has greater relevance to public action than any work of political philosophy or political science, any constitution, bill of rights, speech, or policy paper. In fact, a society’s health might be measured by how it understands and admits that such a poem is essential to sound social organization.

- The opening of a great article by A.F. Moritz in the November 2009 issue of Poetry. Read the whole thing here.