Jared Carter Poetry

Longman Interview

Jared Carter and Alberta Turner first met when the two of them served on the staff of a writer's conference held at the University of Evansville in the summer of 1982. She proposed that they conduct an interview by mail and suggested that they focus on a particular poem, "Mourning Doves." The text of their conversation appeared in Ms. Turner's anthology 45 Contemporary Poems: The Creative Process, published by Longman in 1985.

Alberta Turner: This poem is a declaration of love so full and so intense that the speaker wants to take his loved one into him wholly, even her sleep and her dream, all the way back to his childhood. Is that because the doves mean to him, now, as then, a mystery and a transcendence and a comfort? A transformation of the unknowable and unanswerable into the familiar and the harmonious? A change of aloneness into a ritual sharing, all the more comforting because it is expected and repeated and sung and interchanged between two? And because love, as described here, is all that can give an adult this comfort and can be exchanged only in this half-dream, half-ritual way?

Jared Carter: Half-dream, half-ritual—yes, that says it very nicely. Yet I'm not convinced the persona wishes to take the beloved "into him wholly"; nor do I think the poem suggests that love is all that can give comfort, or that it can be exchanged only in this way. On such matters the poem is descriptive rather than prescriptive: this is what is happening to this particular couple, not what should or could happen to someone else.

But in the main these questions provide useful ways of looking at the poem. I should explain here that even though I wrote it, my ability to interpret it is not much greater than that of the average reader—and probably far less than that of the serious critic or student of literature. The poem pleases me, as do most poems I admire, because I cannot quite get to the bottom of it.

In other words, I'm in the curious position of having created something I cannot entirely explain. Such indeterminacy may not always be one's goal in writing verse, but it is an attractive quality to stumble onto now and then. Aimlessness, in the several senses of the word, seems to me an important precondition if poetry is to flourish.

Turner: In the age of Plath, Sexton, and Lowell this poem is singularly unnarcissistic, retaining its privacy, replacing personal details with more general and abstract words, yet losing none of its intensity and individuality. Were you consciously writing a nonconfessional poem—a love poem more in the tradition of Wordsworth and Keats?

Carter: When I begin to write I am not certain that I intend not to do something—that is, not to use a particular form, or not to accept the conventions of a particular style. Rather, it is a surrendering of all intention except to be receptive. I become aware simultaneously of what will work and what will not work and try to choose what will best serve "the interests of the poem."

Confessional poetry by its very nature risks the charge of narcissism, but the best of it, written by poets such as those you mention, manages to transcend the merely personal. Clearly, I was attempting to do this, but then this inductive strategy—moving from the particular toward the universal—is fundamental to most imaginative writing.

Between my poem and Lowell's "To Speak of Woe that Is in Marriage," for example, or Plath's "Blue Moles," the essential difference is not one of style or strategy but of attitude and tone. These are brilliant poems, but neither is particularly hopeful or encouraging on the subject of physical love. Nor should we expect them to be. What each poet says rings true, and that is sufficient.

My poem sprang from a contrasting situation, one not of isolation and despair, but of connectedness and intimacy. Keats and Wordsworth are plausible influences, as is the Tennyson of "Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal," a remarkably sensual poem. But for models I suspect I must have gone back much farther, to Shakespeare's "Take, Oh, Take Those Lips Away," for example, and especially to Wyatt's "They Flee from Me."

Those are consummate lyrics. I memorized both of them as an undergraduate and have drawn sustenance from them ever since. I don't think I was consciously trying to imitate either one in writing "Mourning Doves," but I am sure they are very much a part of the way I look at love and physical longing. I suppose you might say they got into my blood, and from there into my poetry .

Turner: What is lost to the reader who has never heard a mourning dove?

Carter: It's a difficult question. After thinking about it I find I am of two minds. Let me explain by going back for a moment to the early 1960s, when the Vietnam War was just beginning, and when I was drafted, and the Army, with its inscrutable logic, sent me to France for two years.

I lived off post, and my first wife and I had an apartment in the village of By-Thomery, which is on the Seine, and also at the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, which is the third largest forest in France. We had a lovely time there. In the summer we could walk out into the forest along the paths and there would be cuckoos calling to one another in the trees.

It was a wonderful sound. The more I listened to it the more I began to feel sorry for those who had heard only cuckoo clocks but never the real thing. I thought, too, of the cuckoo as it appears in various poems—in Shakespeare's "When Daisies Pied," for example, or even earlier, in a poem that stands at the beginning of Eng1ish poetry, "The Cuckoo Song."

Hearing the cuckoos gave me a renewed interest in such poems, one which seems to have lasted all these years. So that's one side of the argument: it could in some instances be helpful to have heard the call of this or that bird mentioned in a particular poem.

Yet this puts us in a quandary. Where does one draw the line? Is it essential to have heard a nightingale or a skylark in order to appreciate Keats or Shelley? The problem is complicated by the fact that traditionally we have a shorthand for some of these creatures. The nightingale, we are told, goes "jug-jug." But does this make any sense either? And does it bring us any closer to an understanding of nightingales or of poems that refer to them? I doubt it.

If a nightingale really sounded like that, would anyone have written about it? (Thomas Nashe, incidentally, has a poem in which he quotes four different birds as they greet the spring: cuckoo, nightingale, lapwing, and owl. According to Nashe they sound like this: "Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!")

I have a few more observations about the mourning dove's call, and its relation to my poem, but I'll save them for the questions that follow. Here I would simply state my belief that ultimately the power of poetry depends more on association than on imitation, on evocation rather than literal reproduction. Not the thing itself, but its presence—much as the cuckoos in the Forest of Fontainebleau, even as they were calling to each other, stayed hidden among the leaves.

Turner: I first heard the doves when my daughter was born, and I often mistook their call for her low-pitched cries. For me they became associated with both meanings of mourning/morning. Your poem of celebration almost removes the idea of mournfulness established by the poem's title. Did you intend that it should, in other words, were you consciously "working" that pun?

Carter: Yes, I think I had always been aware of the contrasts of mourning/morning, and the mysteriousness of this bird for a number of readers. The mourning dove is widely spread across the Middle West and the Great Plains, yet many Americans are completely unfamiliar with it and claim they have never heard such a creature. Of course they have—Midwesterners hear mourning doves all the time, in good weather, but some of them have not learned to identify the call.

When I recite the poem during poetry readings I usually preface it by doing my mourning dove imitation, which is one of two I can do (the other being a cardinal). Invariably, after a reading, someone will come up to say that he or she has always known the call, but did not know the name of the bird making it. Others will say, too, that, like the persona in the poem, they made up their own explanations for the sound the mourning dove makes.

And they frequently have very personal associations with the call. Still others will share bits of folklore about the bird. In Nebraska, for example, it is called a "raincrow," and its song is said to predict rain. Finally, there are those who want to know whether the spelling is "mourning" or "morning."

I seem to have played on this uncertainty in the poem, but rather than attempting to make a pun, I think I was simply trying to allow for some additional ambiguity—to work both sides of the street. The implications of "mourning" are not entirely eliminated; "the newly dead" in line 12 are "rising toward heaven" in the following line. And yet the poem takes place in the morning, a time traditionally symbolic of youth, beginning, and renewal.

Turner: The word "traded," with its connotation of commerce, seems unusual in the context of the last line. Why did you choose it?

Carter: Here the question would seem to be not why I chose it, but rather, once I hit upon it during the heat of composition, why did I allow it to stand? The successive worksheets show that I stuck with "traded" from the first, but that I had a difficult time deciding how that same line should end. Was the song being traded back and forth in the darkness? in the light? the trees? the dawn?

While I was tinkering with these alternatives, I think I kept "traded" because it works, rhythmically, and because the connotation you mention—commerce—seems to me to be rather far down the list. Several more vivid usages come to mind, as when we trade compliments, or insults, or letters or baseball cards. When musicians rehearse they trade riffs or melodies; in everyday conversation we lead and follow, give and take. This was the sense of "traded" I hoped would be understood and the reason why I decided to keep it in the poem.

Turner: The form of the poem—its long lines, long sentences, long stanzas, the running over of stanza 1 into stanza 2, the repeated use of -ing words and words ending in vowels or soft consonant sounds, both at the ends of lines and within them—creates a sustained hum suggestive of the sound of the doves, and of the dreaming, stretching, and breathing of sleepers just beginning to wake. How much of this congruence of sound, structure, and mood was happy accident, how much conscious craft?

Carter: The answer lies within the congruence itself— again, the poem, rather than what I might say about it. I do find writing to be a "happy" process, to use your term, and much of it is a process of discovery, as distinguished from the craft one later applies to the impulse, and the factual knowledge one brings to it. But I don't see any of this as "accident," to use another of your terms; though it might lack direction initially, it brims over with purpose, with seeking.

In one sense everything I write is intentional. And yet in another, since it happens in a trance, a kind of daydreaming on paper, I'm not accountable for any of it, am I? Whatever is there flowed through me on its way from somewhere else. And I'm far more concerned with where it's going than where it's been.

Having made such disclaimers, I can look back through the finished poem and agree that, yes, it does seem to possess the characteristics you describe, and these in turn suggest the activities taking place within the poem. If I could sum it up, I would say there is a languorous quality about these stanzas. I have a dictionary at hand which explains that one of the meanings of "languor" is "an air of soft or wistful tenderness."

Before that frightens you away, let me add that "languor" is related to "languish," which has the connotation of something which is "slow, lingering." A reviewer discussing my first book said that some of my poems—"Gathering Fireflies," for example—possess a kind of "tolling sound," and I suspect this quality is also characteristic of "Mourning Doves." We come back to your notion of "congruence" again, since this lingering, bell-like progression is very much like the actual sound made by mourning doves. Let me talk about that for a moment.

Earlier I suggested that one need not have heard a mourning dove in order to appreciate the poem. I'll now contradict myself and go on to say that if one has heard such a creature, or if one is in a position to go out and listen to one for a while, one might pick up a certain awareness that could conceivably be of help in interpreting the poem. Just as, I suspect, there is a scholar somewhere who has listened carefully to nightingales and skylarks, and who has brought that knowledge to an examination of the respective poems by Keats and Shelley.

There are five notes in a mourning dove's call and these occur in a low-high/low-low-low pattern, with the first low note at about B below middle C and the single high note at E. It's a perfect fourth, and it becomes a diminished interval when you hear the last three low notes, which are somewhere between B and B flat.

The mourning dove regularly sings these as half or quarter tones, rather in the way that jazz horn players "bend" notes in order to achieve that special blues sound. This improvised bending gives the mourning dove's call its distinctly unresolved quality.

Now, all of that simply describes the pitch, but there are many other factors to consider. The first two notes have the greatest intensity, for example. They are followed by a pause, and then the last three notes are decrescendo, sometimes trailing away until you cannot hear them at all.

As one might expect from a member of the dove family, the notes are rounded and rather like the flute stop on an organ, barely opened. This is a hushed, solemn sound, with little tremolo or timbre, and its overall effect is haunting and elusive. Correspondingly, this lingering, this slowness, which at times seems to fade out altogether, is hinted at in a number of ways by the poem.

In the first half of line 4 the procession of spondees retards the forward motion, and there is an echo of the rhythm of the call in "times-lost / in-the- wind." In the last line of the third stanza "comes back" suggests the low- high part of the call, while "to the same stillness" resembles the trailing off of the low-low-low portion.

There are other echoes of the call in the poem. None of these effects is exact, of course. As I pointed out earlier, the aim should be evocation rather than mimicry. The poem barely manages to imply the rhythm of the mourning dove's call; the many additional characteristics of that call are left to the imagination.

Nevertheless, these rhythms, combined with the other elements you mention—long lines, long sentences (there are only five sentences in the poem)—serve to bring out that languorous quality I sense lurking here and there among the bedclothes.

I use that last word advisedly, because, after all, this is what is happening in the poem, on another level— languorousness in relation to foreplay, to the drawing out of the sexual experience in order to heighten it. This is in itself, of course, a time-binding process.

Turner: How did the poem start? How many changes did it undergo? Of what kind, in what sequence, over what period? If you have saved the worksheets, may I see a copy?

Carter: There was a proximate cause and a remote cause. The latter is explained in the opening lines. The mourning dove has always been a personal totem for me. When I was beginning to write, I was not sure why it interested me, but I sensed that in time it might become useful material— rather in the way that Rilke describes in Malte. I accepted the task of watching and waiting, and I continue to do this, almost every day, for many things, natural and man-made.

In the winter, for example, I go out and look at flocks of migrating starlings when they're in the neighborhood. The starling is, for me, an extremely interesting bird. Or, in the fall, I find an Osage orange tree, and collect a sack full of the fruit, and bring it back and set the oranges on the railing of my porch, and look at them, and touch them, and think about them, without knowing precisely what I'm doing, or why. You never can tell; something might come of it, sooner or later.

My earlier poems involving mourning doves, undertaken in this manner, were unconvincing, but the writing of them enabled me to store up a considerable amount of observation and lore. One thing I noticed was the curious sound—an aleatory music, really—that two or three of them make when their singing overlaps. It's marvelously arhythmic and atonal. You can hear something resembling the rhythmical complexity when two woodpeckers are working in the same area, but the mourning doves are musical, too, and far more stately.

So that was the remote cause: a longstanding interest in mourning doves. The proximate cause is rather obvious and is described throughout the poem. We were in bed. I had just awakened and it was one of those tremulous mornings when everything is leafy and green and full of light. The curtains were drawn and for some reason we had the day off. We could sleep late, we could do whatever we liked.

While I was becoming aware of all this, I heard a mourning dove somewhere outside in the trees, and it seemed to be connected with what we would probably be doing within the next ten minutes or so. Again, I didn't realize this in a conscious way. I wish I could say, following Castaneda, that the bird seemed to be speaking to me about that moment, and about all those things that subsequently came out in the poem, but that really wasn't the case.

Previously, almost everything I knew about mourning doves was observed phenomena. I had not yet noticed a poetic equivalency, an additional set of phenomena to which I could yoke the bird and its call in a convincing manner. In other words, I had not found the right metaphor. Nor did anything as clear as "Aha, now I have found it!" run through my mind.

The manner in which the two sets of phenomena became poetically related was something that later worked itself out as I wrote the poem. At that particular moment I simply sensed—and it is far better to use that word than to say that I knew, or I understood, or I figured out, because it was none of those—I sensed there was something similar about the two. About mourning doves and lovemaking. That's all.

It was an extremely fleeting impression. I didn't dwell on it and I didn't pursue it at the time because I was, after all, not on the verge of writing a poem but of doing something else, something equally creative and fulfilling.

I was fortunate in having sensed not simply the metaphor itself, but the possibilities of the metaphor—that it would allow me to talk poetically about matters of interest to me, some depending on years of observation, others deriving from the passion and urgency of the moment.

The metaphor in itself was nothing, and even the sensing of it was no more significant than, say, Keats walking through the British Museum and suddenly realizing that, yes, there was something peculiar about that vase over there in the corner. What counts is what each of us managed to do with the metaphor as we wrote our respective poems. And that is precisely what cannot be explicated by either critic or poet. The how, perhaps, but not the why.

Later, when I sat down at my typewriter (on which I compose directly), it was one of those rare, mysterious poems that appears on the paper almost effortlessly—at least in comparison to the work that sometimes goes into the others. I number worksheets and date successive drafts rather carefully.

The version reproduced here is the second draft and the first is preceded by thirteen worksheets in which I developed the four individual stanzas. A notation on this second draft indicates that it took me four hours to reach this point, by which time I had finished the poem in all but a few minor details. For me, that is a very quick study.

Turner: How do you view this poem in relation to the rest of your work?

Carter: When I look back over the process of composition just described, and when I read the poem again in the light of the questions you've asked, it occurs to me that this particular poem is a product of a career-long interest of mine in achieving synesthesia in what I write. I seem to have been working at this for a long time.

By synesthesia I simply mean the substituting of one sensory image where another would be more expected in logical or physiological terms—as when we say, for example, that we "see a sound" or "hear a color."

In lines 6-8 the "dark room" is "lit" both by the sound of the doves and the woman's breathing. Of course that's impossible; sound doesn't give off light. But this sort of substitution can make for interesting poetry. An earlier poem of mine, "Shaking the Peonies," is almost entirely given over to such substitutions and crossovers between the senses.

I do this enough in my writing that I've begun to suspect that I'm slightly synaesthetic myself. It's either that, or the fact that on both sides of my family there are a number of painters, draftsmen, musicians, weavers, dancers, and so on, and growing up with them provided an excellent education for a poet attracted to sensory images.

My earliest attempts both in prose and poetry centered on the sense of vision—trying to show what I saw in the physical world. Next came the sounds of words and their interrelationships with the sense of hearing. I would not begin to claim that I mastered any of this, but while I was working with such notions I also became more aware of the relationship between words and the sense of touch.

I was fascinated, for example, by the fact that we write with our fingers, where much of the tactile sense is concentrated. Our fingers hold a pen, or press the keys of a typewriter, or—the manner in which I'm writing at this moment—manipulate the keyboard of a word processor.

All of this is coordinated by the eye, of course, and sometimes the ear. But there is a relationship between touch and the very texture of words as they appear on paper or on the screen. One might say, following Bachelard, that there is not only a poetics of space, and a poetics of material substances, but also one of fingertips, of skin. If one is to call upon this in a poem, however, it must be accomplished with words alone.

The last two senses have remained the most elusive, but lately I have become more aware of how certain words and syllables taste. We take note of this in our everyday speech when we say, for example, following an unpleasant experience that frequently involves some sort of sharp verbal exchange, "It left a bad taste in my mouth."

There is also that peculiar crossover between meaning and the gustatory sense which occurs when you are attempting to remember a word or a phrase or someone's name you have momentarily forgotten. To explain that "it's right on the tip of my tongue" is to acknowledge that you're trying to retrieve it from a long-term storage area in your brain normally reserved for memories of the way things taste.

You're looking in the wrong pigeonhole, in other words, although anatomically they're probably very close together. I believe there are words and combinations of words that play on this shunting and that can effect such synaesthetic crossovers in a poem.

In "Mourning Doves" the persona's admission that he doesn't quite know what's going on is akin to the experience of not quite remembering but at the same time almost tasting the word that is wanted. The fifth sense, that of smell, would be quite simple to evoke if one took a direct approach— just throw in a few lilacs or some wisteria—but it may prove to be the most difficult of all if one attempts to achieve it indirectly and relies on crossovers from the other senses.

To sum up, I trust that nothing I've said in response to these questions detracts from the poem itself. As indicated, I'm not really concerned with what it means, or whether it means anything at all. It is ultimately not something written but something meant to be spoken aloud— that is, speech. I wanted it, following Auden's remark, to be memorable.

Toward this end I've always been encouraged by Housman's comment about Shakespeare's lyricism—how, in the songs, he sometimes poured out his loveliest poetry in saying nothing. Housman quotes "Take, Oh, Take Those Lips Away" in full. "That is nonsense," he observes, "but it is ravishing poetry."

Not much contemporary poetry is admired on the basis of its being thought "ravishing." That criterion has certainly gone out of fashion. Which means that one of these days it will just as certainly come back in.

Yet even that is not what intrigues me about Housman's comment, since there will always be changes in fashion. Rather, it is that if one accepts his dichotomy, one can assume that it may be as much of a challenge to write a beautiful poem as it is to write a meaningful one.

About the Interviewer

Alberta T. Turner (1919-2003) published eight volumes of poetry, including Learning to Count, Lid and Spoon, and A Belfry of Knees. She was the editor of several books on the writing of poetry, including To Make a Poem, 50 Contemporary Poets, 45 Contemporary Poems, and Poets Teaching. In 1964 she began a long association with Cleveland State University, where she was director of the CSU Poetry Center from 1964 to 1990.