Narcissus

Is there a specific moment that inspired you to pursue poetry?

I found it impossible to start until other things had stopped. I studied poetry as an undergraduate, then in graduate school, and then as a career. During all that time, I never seriously tried to write any poetry at all. It would have made me terribly self-conscious. That changed quite quickly when I changed lines of work. Writing poetry felt feasible and desirable, and the fact that the first efforts were fairly bad didn’t seem catastrophic. One explanation could be that the pursuit of professionalism, or critical distance, or something like that, was inhibiting for me, although I know many brilliant people who do study poetry and write it at the same time. The other explanation would be a sense of loss. Having spent so much time around poetry, I suddenly had no relationship to it that I could name. So I found a new one.

What inspired or motivated you to write this poem?

I love the history of language because it brings something enormous and strange into our immediate lives. Words that feel stable and familiar archive the hangups of ancient societies. Because different ways of looking at the history of language point to different conclusions, thinking about these archives also means finding traces of yourself. I think I had the first inkling of this poem while reading The Greek Myths by Robert Graves. As historical scholarship it’s a bit disreputable, but Graves is a great literary critic, and his idea that Greek myths and poetic figures are marked by past conquest and settlement felt very contemporary to me. I suspect this was true for Graves too, working just after the major period of British imperialism. So I wanted to write a poem that would dramatize the puzzlework of philology – so many fragmentary pieces, so many ways of putting them together. But I also wanted a poem that suggests the tectonic layers that line up in a single word, and maybe one that lets the word look back at us while we look at it.