A morning nearly twenty years ago: a day early in the already-warm Arizona spring when Yehuda Amichai sits before a large, rapt crowd doing a Q&A. The audience makes for a motley little encampment — some people having come to hear the political witness, others the lover, and still others the wrestler with God or the former soldier.

At the moment though, the question has to do with poetry — "So, how do you do your writing?" inquires one lovely, resourceful-looking coed.

Amichai smiles. His smile the smile of bemusement, or maybe the mildest sort of annoyance. And because he's heard this question before — many times before, and on any number of continents — the poet takes the easiest and most evasive way out. "A lot of the time," he says, "I go to a cafe that I like, usually in the morning, and that's where I do it." The reply astonishes the young woman. She seems stumped. Isn't that a really distracting place to work? Aren't you always getting interrupted? Well, Amichai shrugs, laughing now, it's not much of a poem if it can't be interrupted, is it?

Of course. For Amichai, life itself had the bittersweet brevity of a moment not much longer than an interruption, a hyphen to be loved and clung to:

The pressure of my life brings my date of birth closer
to the date of my death, as in history books
where the pressure of history has brought
those two numbers together next to the name of a
   dead king
with only a hyphen between them.

I hold onto that hyphen with all my might
like a lifeline, I live on it . . . .
                                             ("Late Marriage")

So maybe it's best to say that the interruptions in anybody's life are actually all there is of life. Maybe what we call consciousness or awareness is simply one interruption after another. And what we call interruptions are only a series of visitations aimed at waking us up to the fact that we're alive.

A poem is a reminder of what's at stake in these visits. It wants to come to us the way all those moments of our waking come to us — sometimes amazing, sometimes comic, sometimes terrifying. It wants us to feel what it's like in waking's slipstream. Which is why Czeslaw Milosz says this, towards the end of "Ars Poetica?":

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

Wakefulness is an awareness in the skin. Somewhere inside us, there are messages being traded between our various amused and sorrowful and tender and violent selves and their guests. The changes these messages tell of are occurring constantly and cascading. They ensure that we will never be able "to remain just one person." And how could anyone possibly keep up with or track these changes, nevermind replicate them in a poem? Milosz puts a question mark at the end of his poem's title for a good reason — it suggests that no poet will ever capture the changefulness of being.

In any case, I go on writing. As Milosz says at the beginning of the poem: "I have always aspired to a more spacious form." The desire will never be fulfilled; but without it, no one would write poems past adolescence. Perhaps no one would pay any attention at all to their "invisible guests," and they would depart to other, more hospitable universes.

I have my guests: rebel rivers, wishes for sunlight, lies told to priests, dogs groaning with satisfaction, readings from Jung, obituaries, conversations with Mormon missionaries, Italian lingerie, the braggadocio of "jar-heads," children's birthday parties, tattoos, the school committee's idiocy, political journalism, Gillian Welch's singing, the idiom of airline stewardesses, smell of wet grass, grocery lists, sound of a painter scraping trim, hurt eyes at a diner, sunset's sputtering solemn resin, blips on the radar of cultural history like the shooting of Versace, bureaucratic memos, the Aqua Velva Girl, the ant-devoured carcass of a squirrel, the jury pool bailiff and his smile of sarcastic welcome. The crippled kids in their wheelchairs positioned close to the sea lion show. My daughter, when she was five, saying "I scratched my momma's bed like a mole." The smell of freshly shined boots. The feel of Michaela's hand just before sleep. Tom's dream of dying in the hospital while he was dying in the hospital. 10,000 other visitors an hour, just like everyone else.

Maybe I write because I would like to make these guests visible, even if only for a moment. What comes out of the writing — the poem — is a ritualized interruption. If it works, the ritual turns interruption inside out, and makes both us and the moment feel boundless. It's a great trick. Maybe the best one we can do. But I don't think it can be willed into happening. It has to be that, as Robert Creeley says, "the writing is an occasion given to the person writing, rather than one demanded by him."

So, more and more, I compose out of fragments I store up in notebooks, looking out for possibilities to suggest themselves in collaged combinations. I tend to write poems in streaks now — for reasons I don't understand and, at this point, don't need to. I improvise quickly, then revise as needed.

This improvisational practice is really dependent on day-in, day-out work in the notebooks. But the notebooks are not simply a storehouse for banking imagery and language. A notebook is a place where I can indulge in attentiveness. In a notebook, I can tune into the generosity of attention.

A notebook is also a lab for formal experiment — a place to build ruins for the fun of it, smashed palaces whose wrecked walls give a glimpse of how other structures might be built. A place where the demands of structure can be experienced in fresh ways. And, for me, that seems to be necessary. I love improvisation and wildness of feeling and imagination, but it all has to find a container for itself, a shape, a body — otherwise the energy leaks out.

For me to be fully inside the body of the poem I have to feel a flex and alertness in the syntax. Otherwise I go around slumping and round-shouldered, and the poem flops. The syntax has to be muscular enough to hold together in the midst of shifting speeds, but flexible enough to make the turns. That speed, that variable propulsiveness, is a thing I trust. The speed gives me a way of narrating experience that depends on elision and compression; but it also mimics the way that one moment of interruption fades into another.

It's a ridiculously limiting thing to say, but the qualities I love most in poetry are bound up with swiftness and change. I love resonance, like the pockets of implied action and feeling that you get in the English & Scots ballads. And I love a certain kind of melancholy, the kind that fuels an expansive tenderness — something like the effect referred to in haiku as sabi, an undertone of aloneness that rises from the transience of all beings.

In short: some days I have to pretend to be Issa writing "Lord Randal" in order to get anything done around here.

The American Poetry Review

Editors:
Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, Arthur Vogelsang
Associate Editor:
Elizabeth Scanlon

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