Pia Tafdrup: Over the Water I Walk - 4

[14-15]

In all talk of aesthetics, the birth of the poem is a principal consideration. Writing about how a poem announces itself is very different from what happens when a poem appears. In addition, each poem has its own subtle history, which complicates the whole matter further. It is only afterwards that the reflections are of interest. Why did I do this and not that? Only by standing outside the process can it be described.

On the one hand I may have the sense that the whole thing - or at any rate part of it - was already there before the poem itself came into being, it was just that I couldn' t see it. As though the words were simply waiting to be brought forth. On the other hand, I was the person who put these words together, who gained mastery of new images which I will understand only later, or will never really know where they came from, for that happens too. I have written poems I actually did not understand, or where the process of their becoming visible was unexplained: the sense that something had suddenly been given, something I had to continue on my own.

As a prelude to one of the sequences in my collection Intetfang (Noembrace), I quote Rilke. He described the gaining of mastery as a process that begins before one is aware of it, in a phase in which sense-impressions invade the mind before concentration takes place, and when thoughts and expressions come shooting forth:

Werk des Gesichts ist getan,
tue nun Herz-Werk
an den Bildern in dir, jenen gefangenen; denn du
überwältigtest sie: aber nun kennst du sie nicht.

These lines could be about any of the poems I've written since the angel broke its silence. For it was in that first book of mine that I discovered poems need not refer directly to something that is already familiar. One of the paths in that first volume is built of poems which are based on familiar material, but as poems they're not interesting, because the aesthetic manoeuvring in them usually blocks new perception. The other path is the one I subsequently followed and took as my starting-point in many directions -- the one that involves a surprise, the momentary quiver of something that hasn't been seen before: why did I suddenly write this, and where did it come from? It's about trying to do more than what one thinks is possible, about hurling oneself out into the most challenging places. It's in those places that one has the sense of fear and being overwhelmed, the sense that anything may happen, but it sometimes happens in a region where one almost cannot bear to be.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Over the Water I Walk-1
Over the Water I Walk-2
Over the Water I Walk-3