Doppelganger
I am one of those people who mourn their adolescence as wasted time. I developed my imagination but little else, and even the imagination thrives best on action. My middle-age is full of incident, trouble, and pleasure. I think of those concentric circles I've seen sociologists draw, but the schema seems inadequate, for my life now has at least four epicentres--family, work, church, and art--and they are more like fractals than points. I haven't the mathematical muscle to realize such a trope but I do dream the equation that would make bright shadows of that figure dance on a VDU. Even to dream such imaging gives me a centre of calm motion and grace out of which to write.
The essence of my technique I learned from Yeats, the persistent doppelganger of my adolescent loneliness, but I have no interest in the alternative states or beings which preoccupied him. Orbiting about those fractal epicentres has shown me there is more than enough reality to hang the words on. Thus, when I set out to write these poems I chose three topics--sex, meaning and money--but when you write poetry you don't write about topics. You collaborate with the words. That much Yeats taught me. What emerges is more than the writer's intention. It is a revelation that luckily happens to include the writer. By this luck the writer is privileged, more so than any reader; she therefore has a duty not to corrupt the words by either dominating or submitting to them. But there's nothing mysterious here--no muse, no inspiration, no daimon, no trance.
Think of the words as probability waves in a semantic field. Each packet draws, synchronically and diachronically, on both the culture and whatever reader or writer happens by. If a good poet is in an altered state he seems to me to be more like a good mathematician or a poised entrepreneur than a priest: alert, at least, or perhaps in a higher orbital, where more of those precious probabilities can dance at once in harmony on the VDU.
Tell me, quickly! How many critics can dance on the point of a metaphor?