Are you interested in lyrical tension (versus lyrical harmony)?

What an intriguing question, a musician’s question. Well, in music there are refrain, variation, counterpoint, and changes in tempo that create tension. How we create it in a poem is usually by manipulating the line length and the line break. In a prose poem, which is what I have been writing, almost exclusively, for a number of years, one loses the line break and has only the syntactical movement within a sentence and the movement from one sentence to another to create rhythm or tension, something I have spent a great deal of time studying in the works of others I love, such as the prose poems of René Char. I would say that, formally and contextually, I am more interested in movement rather than either tension or harmony, the movement between varying degrees of speed — syntax and phrase length — and the movement from one image to another, from the exterior image to the interior one and back again, movement from one speaker to another, one tone to another, one thought to another. For example, listen to this one sentence from a prose poem of Char’s, translated by Mary Ann Caws:

Born from the summons of becoming and from the anguish of retention, the poem rising from its well of mud and of stars, will bear witness, almost silently, that it contained nothing which did not truly exist elsewhere, in this rebellious and solitary world of contradictions.

In my own poems, I am trying for this kind of harmonic feeling, as in the striking of a chord, where many tones or speakers or images are chiming at once to create resonance. I see that same kind of movement and resonance in the collagist work of C.D. Wright, especially in Deep Step Come Shining and One Big Self.

The Nine Senses, your new collection of poems, contains a series of dense and beautiful crafted prose poems. Their combination of image and movement is different from your other poems that may contain more silence and space. How does that feel, this change in energy and drive?

It feels exhilarating. I think of The Nine Senses as my ecstatic book. Freed from the line, I became less somber, more playful, able to attempt to speak in the language of flowers, to attempt telepathy, to veer off course, to add four more senses to my way of perceiving the world. In a way, I think the ongoing line without end stops, the completely enjambed poem, which is what a prose poem is, mirrors my attempt to fuse the inner and outer worlds into a, if not cohesive, at least harmonic or resonant whole. Fuse is not quite the right word. I am letting the image lead in these poems, inviting it in and following it as it moves — in my mind as well as in the phenomenal world — to another image or to emotional statement or question to intellectual revelation. In the poems, I don’t have to distinguish between them. No image or statement is there to explain the previous one; rather, they come out of the previous one. I trust their progress. It’s a way, for me, of reading the world at the same time as I am participating in the writing of it.