Collections

In the first statement of your interview with Silken, you remarked on the necessity of collecting to creation. This reminded me of something Harold Bloom wrote in his essay, “The Art of Reading Poetry,” that the first step in the appreciation of a poetic piece is to commit it to memory—to know at least on a sensory or aesthetic level the bends and inflections (the sulci and gyri) of its acoustics, the way the words fall upon the page, the texture of its particular patterns, and the reactions, visceral, cerebral, and otherwise, this body of information invokes in you. The body itself is in fact a collection that becomes amalgamated into the matrix of the mind. From there, the poem becomes a recollection, absorbed into recollections of other poems, experiences, thoughts: something quite alive, and evolving as the database is updated. The poem is essentially digested and emerges through an anabolic process something more fully incorporated into, perhaps even providing sustenance for your own system. For example, I commit Hart Crane’s “Voyages II” to memory. This is one way of knowing the poem: though I do not know it on a cerebral level yet (perhaps my reasoning faculties are not developed well enough, the semantic background of my education not broad enough either, my life experience limited), I can come to some understanding of it just by folding it into my memory and allowing it to distort the plane, the matrices of my mind. The poem is then ripe for fermentation, my memory a cellar. I can reach for it, uncork it, and rebottle it with new information/collections, leave it to set again. This rather obscure correlation seems incoherent on a purely logical level, but makes sense, at least to me, in an intuitive sense. Moving forward to the question of what “tethers” the concept of/word “collection” activates for me: collection and memory are necessarily bound to one another, for memory is a collection, and collections must be remembered in order to have any significance. I’m sometimes ignorant of direct sensory perceptions and the physical world in general (a grade of myopia, in a way), so that what I recall is not the sensation itself but the reactions it provokes—usually a particular aura or feeling, or if it is indeed sensory, a smell. Collections of olfactory sensations bear the strongest associative ties to other recollections, such as places, people, or a certain time.