an interview with Adam Dickinson

CV2: Would you talk about your experience of writing poetry as "revelational"? And if so in what sense?

This is an interesting question because a lot of lyric poetry centres on epiphanic moments. I am very interested in the question of wonder. What are you doing when you are amazed by the world? There is of course the very long tradition of the Romantic sublime where the poet stares in amazement at a mountain or a waterfall and then comfortable fits the experience into a pattern. Rather than thinking of the sublime as the transition from confusion and fear into the stable certainty of knowing, however, can wonder interrupt our understandings of the world, can it impose confusion, can it in short become an experience of the Other? I don't know the answer to this question, but it seems to me in some ways that it is possible for wonder to make our worlds larger. I am definitely interested in revelatory moments within the poem and their operative dynamics; however, I really don't know yet how to think of them. How do we approach mountains poetically, for example, without being crushed under the weight of the sublime, or flippantly disengaged by ironic subversions of the experience? Even within metaphor itself it strikes me that there is often wonder in the face of a startling connection that you hadn't thought of before, that makes you look at the relationships between things differently. However, does this open us to the world, or simply draw attention to the cleverness of the author as some critics have claimed? Is wonder an ethical moment? Is our encounter with the face of Levinas's Other an epiphany? I don't know, but the poetic implications of these questions fascinate me.