Pia Tafdrup: Over the Water I Walk - 5

[15-17]

I don't know who whispers the words, and I don't always know what is being whispered, only that the words announce themselves in order to be written down. I write without inquiring. It is always too late to turn round. There is nothing to hold on to except what already exists in myself, and what is thrown over me in waves as I write.

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The poet's work is linked with an ability to lose himself, to temporarily set himself outside society and history. The writing of poems is a matter of authenticity, of forgetting about other things and other people. And of being oneself, with all that this requires.

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There are situations where for a moment the material takes control of the writer. And if the control is not won back, one goes insane. Or worse: risks death.

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The sensuous and the emotional are not enough to create a poem. At most a diary. It was only when I read Edgar Allan Poe that I realized the degree to which self-restraint and a methodical approach are involved in the poetic principle. The fire must be met with cold.

In "The Philosophy of Composition" Poe comments on the birth of his great poem, "The Raven": 'It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referrible either to accident or intuition - that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.'

These lines express a modern approach that jettisons quite a few myths, as there is a widespread belief that poems only come into being in a state of intoxication, madness or headlong ecstasy. I'm especially familiar with the enabling energy that is a first step in the process, but at some point self-oblivion and direct outreach must be replaced by a very high level of self-awareness.

Poe's method is to set certain goals for himself in advance. That is why there is so little mention of intuition in his writings. I doubt that he is right in what he says about spontaneity. At any rate, I don't have an explanation for every device I have used. Although I like the idea that an essential part of the process is a dispassionate overview, not everything in the process can be explained.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Over the Water I Walk-1
Over the Water I Walk-2
Over the Water I Walk-3
Over the Water I Walk-4