A Walker Walking Too, Walker

March 25, 1969

Dear Miss Batie,

Thank you for your letter. It is always pleasant to learn that someone takes an interest in a work which one enjoyed writing. In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively. Though as for the last, one certainly has to try. However, I liked your letter, and I have a great curiosity about Vancouver, so I'll see if I can think of anything that may be of use to you.

Of the ideas you suggest, the one that seems closest to what I might think is that of "an art where everything is ambiguous until superimposed into an entity." To change your phrase somewhat, I know that I like an art where disparate elements form an entity. DeKooning's work, which I greatly admire, has less to do with it than that of Kurt Schwitter, whose collages are made of commercial bits and "found" pieces but which always compose a whole striking completeness.

I had no religious intention, though I see why a poem whose "idea," if we may call it such, is that of an essential harmony, or perhaps congruity is a better word, might suggest one. However, intention needn't enter in, and if a reader sees things in a religious way, and the work is dogmatically acceptable, then I don't see why it should not be interpreted in that way, as well as in others. In this case, though, I really can't see that purification comes in at all. Part of the point would seem to be that junk like the trucks and the lions, and things that matter, like flowers, the sea, a mother and her baby (in an ascending scale of value) have each its place, and that it is the world in its impurity which is so very beautiful and acceptable, if only because one has so little choice.

As for evocation/communication, I don't find the first separate from the second, though subsidiary to it. The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate. However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it. Someone, I believe, has said that "what a poem communicates is itself." This seems to me true.

I am not quite sure what you mean by the "development" of the poem. If you mean in the sense it's used in music, I hope it's there in the poem; anyway I have nothing to add to it. If you mean how I came to write it, well, let's see.

It was late February and I had very recently returned from Europe, where for the first time I had visited Palermo, and made an excursion to see the temples at Agrigento (where there were also wild snap-dragons in bloom among the lion colored drums of fallen columns), a rather dusty and disappointing affair at the time, but which was a pleasure to recollect. The day on which I wrote the poem I had been trying to write a poem in a regular form about (I think) Palermo, the Palazzo Abatelli, which has splendid carved stone ropes around its doors and windows, and the chapels decorated by Serpotta with clouds of plaster cherubs; the poem turned out to be laborious and flat, and looking out the window I saw that something marvelous was happening to the light, transforming everything. It then occurred to me that this happened more often than not (a beautiful sunset I mean) and that it was "a day like any other," which I put down as a title. The rest of the poem popped out of its own accord. Or so it seems now.

I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem. One tends to write beyond what's needed.

It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience). Often a poem "happens" to the writer exactly the same way it "happens" to someone who reads it.

As for stimuli, I hope you won't "perceive a similar response" in this instance, since what stimulated me to write was the apathy following on the disappointment of a wasted day. However, what seemed like waste then may have been warming up. Who knows? Not me.

- James Schuyler