Don Nace- Just Passing Through
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TG: Does The End of Beauty feel like it's simply suspending closure or does it feel like it's doing something else?
JG: No, I wouldn't say it's managing to suspend closure. It might be trying to. But what I discovered in trying to write those poems was that the suction of closure was enormous – the desire to wrap it up into the ownable meaning – and that doing away with it wasn't as easy as I had imagined. That was, for me, a very moving discovery. It was Demeter and Persephone, if you will – with the pull from the end, the suction towards closure, and the voice trying (quite desperately in spots) to find forms of delay, digression, side-motions which are not entirely dependent for their effectiveness on that sense-of-the-ending, that stark desire. Side-motions which actually move off a piece, and do not necessarily feed back into it – in the way I had always experienced poems moving before, sort of wrapping the poem down towards closure.
TG: Those side motions keep the gap alive?
JG: Yes. But they keep it alive, hopefully – or ideally – as a real gap, not one invented for the purposes of extending the delicious moment between the beginning and the ending. The deliciousness of that moment was the thing I was trying to mess with. The imperialist pleasure...
TG: So you want it to be extended because in doing so you gain what?
JG: Let's put it this way: as a gap, an open field, so that one is at least aware of the wages, the responsibilities (as well as the incredible freedoms) of that opening. After all, the sensation of closure is primarily powerful for the ways in which it permits us to inhabit delay and feel that we are safe inhabiting delay.... I guess I wanted it to feel not safe – but real, open. Can we use the word being? The ground of being. The river of rivers. The gash of the present as not simply timeless but as the rip that affords a glimpse into a more genuine reality?
Jorie Graham interviewed by Thomas Gardener in Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining Contemporary Poetry
