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Full transcript below
In this podcast, Nick and Paul discuss:
Poetry’s Touch by Professor William Waters and its influence on Paul’s approach to lyric poetry
The ‘addressable you’ in poetry
Reflections on communicative intimacy and the idea of authentic understanding between people in romantic or other relationships
A number of Paul’s poems from his published works Lyrical Epigrams, All The Bad Things, and Delphic Deixis
Paul’s relationship with Claudia Alvarez
Artwork in the Chauvet Caves, and human civilization and beings across time
Paul’s experience of being catfished, and the creative inspiration that this generated
New infatuations, muses and poems
Dr Paul Monk is a poet, polymath and highly regarded Australian public intellectual. He has written an extraordinary range of books, from Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty (which resides in former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s library), to reflective essays on the riches of Western civilization in The West in a Nutshell, to a prescient 2005 treatise on the rise of China in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China.
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Dr. Paul Monk
Dr. Paul Monk on the ‘Addressable You’ in Lyric Poetry
00:00 Paul: To whom does a poem speak? Do poems really communicate with those they address? Is reading poems like overhearing? Like performing a script? In this book, I pursue these questions by reading closely a selection of poems that say you to a human being and by trying to describe the reading process as it encounters these instances of address.
00:25 In the diverse poems I discuss here – poems not just addressing different categories of fictive and real persons but written in several different eras and languages – the address itself always becomes an axis of the poem’s concern. The poem persistently revolves around, or thinks about, the contact that it is (or is not) making with the person to whom it is speaking.
00:51 Nick: That was Dr. Paul Monk reading the opening lines from Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address, by William Waters, an associate professor of German at Boston University. Today I’m speaking with Paul about this question of lyric address as it occurs in some of his own poetry, as well as how Professor Waters parses the matter of lyric address in his book, originally published in 2003.
01:14 We’re on Bloom, a conversations podcast about anything and everything, featuring interviews with people who have had interesting and flourishing lives. Paul, it's a pleasure to be speaking with you today. Thank you very much for your time.
01:25 Paul: Thanks, Nick. It's great to be back. These are very enjoyable experiences, these podcasts.
01:31 Nick: So, Paul, perhaps you could start with telling us how reading this book by William Waters affected your own approach to lyric address in your poetry? In your forthcoming book Lyrical Epigrams, your preface echoes Waters, does it not, right from the opening sentence?
01:44 Yes, it does. As we discussed in our conversation about living a poetic life, finding a way to address somebody in a poem, especially an intimate one, is something I’ve wrestled with for decades. By the time I read Poetry’s Touch, in early 2004, I’d written love poems to a number of women, over about twenty years, but I always felt dissatisfied with how I had addressed them; in part because the poems were written in varying contexts to women with whom I did not have a settled relationship.
02:13 It's pure coincidence that actually I read the book in the early months of 2004, which was shortly before Claudia Alvarez arrived in Australia and she would turn out to become my partner in life, my greatest muse, the love of my life, and I've written most of my poetry for her. So, everything else could be seen as a kind of dress rehearsal rag and Lyrical Epigrams is a book addressed to her. Many of the poems are explicitly addressed to her, although she's not named in them.
02:45 I found myself when I wrote the preface to that book thinking very much about William Waters and his book and the preface reflects that in detail. In fact, it's worth sharing the opening paragraphs of that book because it will convey to your listeners the way in which I picked up Waters' concerns and you might say made them my own. The preface begins:
03:09 This book is addressed to you. It’s addressed to you in the sense that it’s an offering. Wasn’t it the traumatized Paul Celan who wrote that a poem is an offering to someone – ‘an addressable you, perhaps’; at any rate ‘an addressable reality’? And, merely by being written and put out into the world, doesn’t a poem, to say nothing of a book of poems, address itself to those who come upon it, however they do so, in the vocative? Isn’t a reader, of necessity, in the second person stance, as the recipient of a poem? So, each of these poems, whomever it appears to address on the surface, is addressed to you.
03:48 But the book is addressed to you, because it is my response, as a language animal, as a man of letters, as a reader, to being in the world. It is my outcry, as well as my song. Do we cry out to no-one? Do we sing into a void? George Steiner speculated, in Real Presences, that the mere fact of language requires the assumption of an addressable you to whom speech acts are directed; to whom, in particular, open-ended speech acts and works of creative diction are directed. But open-ended is the keynote. Such speech acts of the kind within this book are not merely declaratory. They are expressive and seek reception and interpretation. In that sense, and for that reason, this book is addressed to you.
04:38 But it is addressed to you, most particularly, as poem after poem will make clear, because you have called forth the expressive in me. These poems constitute not an inward-turned monologue – even if, at times, some, at least, might be construed as a writer addressing himself: looking back, delving within, casting around – but a dialogue with you; with you who urged me, years and years ago, to put aside the inward-turned sense of inhibition about such expressive writing and to see myself precisely as ‘a writer and a poet’. That, very much, is the you to whom this book is addressed – and dedicated.
05:19 Nick: That’s a wonderful opening few paragraphs to your preface, which speaks to that notion we have discussed in previous podcast episodes, of us language animals, in that outcry or vocative address or song seeking some kind of communicative intimacy and understanding between beings in human relations. How do you draw this addressable ‘you’ into the body of verse? Where does that start, given that the first poem in it, at least in the current draft form, is based on a famous passage from The Odyssey and evokes Penelope and Odysseus?
05:48 Paul: Well, I might say that opening poem is about dialogue. It's about Penelope knowing that a stranger has come into the house and she wants to sit the stranger down and talk to that stranger and listen to that stranger about his voyages in the hope that he'll know something about Odysseus and can tell her about him. What she doesn't know of course is that it is Odysseus. So, that poem sets the scene for what the whole book is about but it is itself about I and thou or about you and about dialogue.
06:24 That said, the first poem that directly raises this question of the relationship between myself as the poet and Claudia is the third poem in the book which is called Before they cleaned you up and Klaus is introduced in this poet in the moment of being born – when I was already twelve and already reading darkly serious political biography, a subject I think we've also discussed elsewhere.
06:59 So, the poem which I'll now read is me reflecting, looking back all those years, on the uncanny significance that, as I was reading about the Great Terror in Stalin's Russia, she was being born into this world, oblivious to any dark realities.
07:15
Just weeks before you emerged
In the usual helpless manner -
Before they cleaned you of blood and fluid
And cut your umbilical chord
And placed you at your mother’s breast -
I was taking summer holidays and reading
Of the Great Terror and the killing
Of countless thousands – tens, hundreds –
In the name of ‘revolution’;
Fascinated by the great purge trials
The Georgian monster concocted –
Framing up his ‘Trotskyite clique’
Of traitors and conspirators
That riddled the raddled Party and its organs;
Peering, leering, squinting,
(From behind his judicious curtain)
As the broken fools confessed
And the craven judges shouted
Again and again, as if it set free
Some avenging god from the
Let’s say ‘the dark side of the force’:
‘Shoot the mad dogs!’
That was my summer holiday;
My initiation at twelve into…
Shall we say ‘reality’ – starkness.
Only weeks before you sucked
The milk of life in innocence
And opened your little eyes
To gaze upon unhappiness and love -
In preparation for our meeting.
08:17 So, the poem declares that at the point where Claudia was actually being born, I was twelve years old and was already reading about Stalin and the Great Terror; things that would set me up for a life of serious and even agonized preoccupation with the awful things that human beings do to one another and the enigma of the human presence in the biosphere but she, as a newborn infant, was oblivious to all of that and it would be of course many years before we met.
08:42 Nick: So, you lay out quite a bit of your early reading, not only in this first lyric address to her, but in many poems in the book. How do these address Claudia?
08:51 Paul: Well, they do so, by evoking three things: how my own life of reading now appears to me, looking back, in the light of my intimacy with her and her own love of learning and reading. So, it's important to remember that Claus is a passionate reader and a highly intelligent person and of course that's foundational to our dialogue and our love for one another, but also the poems reflect in many cases on how she stepped into my life and became so intimate a part of it; and how I now see her in terms of much of my reading, from Tolkien to Virginia Woolf. That's reflected in various poems.
09:25 So, with regard to the first of these considerations or more generally this whole question of a shared life of reading, there's a poem quite early in the book called ‘The taste for books’ which is an attempt to give expression to this and it goes like this:
09:41
You and I succumbed, from early childhood,
To the affliction that the droll Virginia Woolf
So mordantly suggests must have infected
The colourful Orlando in his cradle,
Wafted out of Greece and Italy
In the floating spoor of asphodel;
The bane of knightly vigour and ambition,
Of pedigree and masterful volition,
Enfeebling hand and eye and noble tongue,
Sapping vital instincts in the young.
The love of literature is a disease,
Slyly quoth that Woolf in writer’s clothing,
Which, of its fatal nature, substitutes
A phantom for reality, such that
The likes of the young baronet Orlando
Lose any sense of their inheritance
And so neglect their pleasures and their duties,
Besotted by the squiggles on a page,
That the lordship and the fortune they’ve been gifted
Dissolve, among their books, into a mist.
Yet it has been quite otherwise with us
Who, lacking lordship of Orlando’s kind
And granted strong immunities from birth
To those conceits that addle noble brains,
Absorbed into our blood the potent spoor
And turned the fateful germ of asphodel,
Which so depletes the force of feudal houses,
Into the stuff of our transcendent dreams
Of well-informed and boldly free opinions -
A greater wealth than manors or dominions.
10:57 As an example of the reading her back into even childhood reading that formed my sensibility. There's another poem, a really romantic one actually which harks back to my love of the Lord of the Rings as a child and it reflects on one of the most famous stories in Tolkien about Beren and Luthien, the man, the hero and the elven princess, and long before I even met Claudia, that myth, that tale had woven itself into my imagination, and in the poem that follows what I'm doing is recalling that and how it shaped my romantic imagination and positioned me in a sense to want somebody, to need somebody in my life and she became that somebody in a very important sense.
11:51 The poem is actually called ‘Enchanted by Tinuviel’ – Tinuviel being the elven name of Luthien, Luthien of Doriath, the elven princess and it goes as follows:
12:03
A Tolkien poem that nothing mars
Lit beauty for me, under stars.
It brought before my dreamy eyes,
Canopied by Doriath’s skies,
The figure of Tinuviel.
Quite as struck as Beren I was,
Though far more haplessly, because
I could not be there at the green
Where music, from a pipe unseen,
Enchanted fair Tinuviel.
I saw her dancing in the glade,
But he it was who swiftly made
A hero’s bid to win her heart,
While I, alas, could play no part
In wooing sweet Tinuviel.
He called her by her Elvish name;
She halted, spellbound, and he came
And took the princess in his arms,
Enraptured by the matchless charms
Of Gondolin’s Tinuviel.
Ah! Long ago they went their way,
Through fearsome dark to fabled day:
To Morgoth’s and to Mandos’ halls -
An epic quest that still enthrals
My memory of Tinuviel.
But I was left in waste and wood
To find another, if I could,
With whom to plunder Morgoth’s crown
And face life’s mortal furies down:
My very own Tinuviel.
13:04 Nick: Beautiful. So, did Claudia become Tinuviel for you then?
13:08 Paul: Yes. I mean, she did in this important sense, which is in the tale, Beren and Luthien/Tinuviel go on extraordinary adventures together. They become partners in dangerous adventures in the wide world and Claudia have in our own way done that and in particular, and this conversation took place before that poem was written, we were in Caracas where she lives and works which is very dangerous. The country is in all sorts of difficulties and she is committed to taking on those challenges politically in the country, and she said to me, using the nickname that she gave me very earlier now in our relationship where she's called me Frodo-Baggins, another tag from the Lord of the Rings. She said, "Frodo, we have to think big," and if we had rehearsed this and we set it up for me to write the poem, then she might have said, "I'm Luthien and you're Beren and we have to think big," but that's the mood of the poem of course.
14:14 But lest people think that I construe my relationship with Claudia only in terms of a fairy-tale, it's worth sharing another poem which was written based on a very real episode in which effectively she proposed to me. You know, it's customary in the old culture for the man to propose to the woman but she and I were out walking one day. We hadn't yet been married, and she turned to me and she said, "There's something that I have to say to you and that is that I'm Alma Mahler and I know a genius when I see one. You're going to be doing some really interesting things in the next few years and I want to be part of it," and as the poem relates, describing that incident, I was astonished that this move, not simply because she'd taken the initiative, but because she'd done it in such an imaginative way to liken herself to Alma Mahler was just...
15:03 Nick: Who is Alma Mahler?
15:04 Paul: Alma Mahler. So, Alma, as the poem will describe but it's best to give the background first so the poem makes more sense - Alma Schindler, as she was originally, was known in her youth as the most beautiful girl in Vienna. She was a lovely Viennese beauty and educated and talented, a musician herself, and she became enchanted by the idea of marrying Gustave Mahler who was the director of the Vienna opera and a great composer and she got her man. Then their marriage turned out to be challenging because he was actually so absorbed in his music that he wasn't all that romantic to live with for her. They had two daughters but she became unhappy in the marriage and she ended up going off with other lovers and Gustave died broken hearted, and so it's a tragic story in the end.
16:00 I knew all that story and I knew that Tom Lehrer, the great satirical song writer of the sixties, had written a song called 'Alma' in which he satirises all of this very jauntily and so I was just fascinated that Claudia would choose that image, that woman, that history as her pitch, and rather than say more about my thoughts at the time, it's now appropriate to read the poem because it provides both that background and a poetic summation of my response.
16:36 The poem is actually called 'Our Ringstrasse moment'. The Ringstrasse being the great boulevard in Vienna where Alma and Gustave, the promenade and where she caught his eye, quite deliberately of course, and so that's folded into the poem as well, but the poem reads:
16:55
That was quite a pitch you put to me -
Walking north in sunlight, years ago.
It’s graven still, upon my memory -
In words at once so colourful and bold
That even now they win my wonderment:
‘There’s something that I have to say to you
And that is this,’ you suddenly announced.
‘That I am Alma Mahler and I know
A genius when I see one. You are set
To do things of which I want to be a part.’
Or words to that effect - without a stammer -
Fully formed and confident, as if
You’d meditated long upon the thought;
As we strolled, so freely, through that southern spring,
Our own Ringstrasse and surrounding streets.
‘Alma?’ I almost burst out with a laugh.
‘Are you for real? As in Tom Lehrer’s song?’
Am I, then, Mahler, Gropius or Werfel?
Or someone else in your sublime beguine?
Alma?! Ah! You took my breath away!
We’ve had, since then, of course, our replica
Of Alma’s life with Mahler in Vienna:
Two girls and many compositions, right?
A love that struggled long to find its way
Then rose, at last, above their tragic fate.
For you’ve been less the Alma of Vienna
Than the Muse I’d longed for - more than for a wife -
My Anima, my soul, the gift of life,
Who, since she would or could not simply stay,
Has raised me up to dream and fly away.
18:10 Nick: Like Alma and Gustave, you and Claudia have had a love that has struggled long to find its way. Your romance and love over the last 15 years or so has not been straightforward or conventional. Can you tell us a bit about that, basing the actual story on several of the poems you’ve written?
18:26 Paul: Yes. There were several reasons why it wasn't conventional or straightforward or simple and why we had to work very hard to figure out how do we make any kind of intimate life because she realised several things in the few years we actually cohabited. One was that she couldn't really make a life in Australia. She was Venezuelan. She was passionately committed to her own country and she felt she needed to go back there, to speak her own language, to work for her own country's good, to be able to see her family.
19:04 Now you can imagine the automatic reaction of most people to that when we say, "Ah, well, then how can it be a romance at all?" Well, therein lies a central part of this story because what we discovered, certainly what I discovered and she would avow the same now, is that instead of being a point of departure where we said, "Well, then it's not a relationship," we have discovered that we are really soul mates. We have grown closer and closer over the eleven years, not further apart, despite the fact that she lives in Venezuela.
19:42 But naturally it's been hard work and the rewards for that work have come in recent years where we just share everything. We think about each other all the time. We talk, we share songs. We've travelled all over the world together. We plan together, we talk about our projects.
19:58 So, what we've got in the end is a very fertile and committed relationship beyond, if I may put it this way, the conventional routines into what we would regard as successful marriages settle, where people have children and they pay off a mortgage and the relationships become very conventional.
20:18 Nick: Yeah, and I suppose it sheds light on new aspects of romance in itself because your love is non-locative. It's not dependent on being the same city or the same continent even, but also in terms of sexuality, but the love of the soul, the Alma is there...
20:33 Paul: Yes, I think you've made a very good point in saying the Alma, the soul, because, as many of your listeners may not realise, the word Alma means soul in Spanish and Claudia is Hispanic.
20:47 I don't know to be honest that she chose the identity of Alma Mahler with that subtlety in mind but she could have done, and it has absolutely been an education on what it means to love another person, to discover that despite those obstacles, we have grown deeper in love and we now are very special and important to one another.
21:08 But one of the things that also I think impeded the intimacy from my point of view early on is that, just as I said in that poem about reading the life of Stalin when I was 12 years old, it was very much the case by the time I met Claudia that I had a dark view of the world and I was not at all sure that love and intimacy served any particular purpose. I felt that the world was very dark and I was preoccupied with simply trying to understand it and I have given expression to that in quite a number of the poems.
21:44 One of them which is indicative of that as much as any but which addresses her as well very intimately is called 'If, at Babi Yar'. So, some of your listeners will be aware that Babi Yar is a location outside Kiev where in 1941, when the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union, they took 33,000 Jewish citizens of Kiev and they shot them all into pits in a ravine called Babi Yar outside Kiev.
22:13 Nick: Appalling stuff.
22:14 Paul: Appalling incident in a wider context of the Holocaust, and it's famous and a notorious one, and I've known about it for many years and I found myself writing a poem called 'If, at Babi Yar' where I import into that appalling situation this sense of well what would you do if you were caught up in that with your beloved?
22:38 Nick: Most people were.
22:39 Paul: Indeed, exactly so. So, it goes as follows:
22:43
When I contemplate the hecatombs of violence
Done by human beings to one another,
Going all the way back to our collective
Invasion of the hominin worlds beyond
The Africa of our long genesis;
When I contemplate, in sharper focus,
The atrocities of just our scientific century,
From the Belgian Congo via the Somme
To the Cultural Revolution and Rwanda,
My fear and nausea become personal.
No abstract principle or religious icon
Enters the picture. No, it’s you:
The dread thought of such brutality
Being visited upon your singular beauty -
And my being helpless to avert it.
If, at Babi Yar, the Einsatzgruppen
Gunned down thirty thousand helpless Jews
Into a forest ravine, within two days;
What is that, among the tens of millions?
Only fearful empathy stirs one’s horror.
Such empathy arises, like a bloody mist,
When I imagine us among the thirty thousand,
Shepherded out of Kiev by the SS,
Dread misgivings growing as we’re marched
Into the Wald on a fell morning.
You I want to shelter with my body.
You I’d shelter by any means at all.
Your slaughter is the inexpiable crime;
Mine the inextinguishable lament -
If, at Babi Yar, I cannot save you.
24:00 Nick: Two things stand out for me there. The first is your analytic and serious interest in human affairs and history, and the second is your capacity for emotional and moving reflections on love and human relations through poetry, instantiated by your profound love for Claudia. It makes for very powerful reading.
24:16 Paul: When I read it, I get emotional. It's extraordinary because it does bring those two things together, my decades long preoccupation with the horror of what has so often happened in history with this extraordinary partnership with Claudia and the knowledge that so often in history, and not least in the past 100 years, so many such couples who genuinely love each other have been murdered. It's just appalling what's happened and just how excruciating it would be to be in that situation where more or less you know what's going to happen and you can't do anything about it.
24:55 Nick: Being very recently in love myself, I have found myself imagining me and my beloved in that dreadful circumstance and it personalises history. It allows you to imagine yourself into past events and situations. It's a work of historical empathy and imaginative empathy too.
25:12 Paul: Yes, but conversely, I wouldn't want to convey the impression that I was holy depressive or that I only wrote dark poems about...
25:27 So, there's another one which I wrote - and all these, which I may have said earlier, were written in the last few years. These aren't poems that were written over the last 17 years but all of them since 2016. I wrote other poems for Claudia in the past but all of the poems in Lyrical Epigrams are recently provenance, but one of them which is much more playful, if you like, and romantic and literary is called ‘Proust’s way’ and, even if one hasn't read Proust's vast novel 'In Search of Lost Time' the poem is fairly self-explanatory. So, I'll simply share the poem because I think that it speaks for itself.
26:06
You, my love, and no-one else,
Unless, perhaps, it was Roger Shattuck,
A year or so before you first arrived;
Introduced me to the world of Proust.
You used to claim, to my bewilderment,
‘I am Odette de Crecy’ – with a smile.
But, strange as it now seems, all the while,
I thought you said, ‘Odette the Crazy’.
You, my love, and no-one else,
Not Shattuck, much less de Botton,
Must have been, therefore, the very first
To murmur Proustian nothings in my presence.
You, however, did become Odette –
Hence some poems I wrote you years ago,
About lost time and feeling I was Swann,
Conversing with Marcel beside the Seine.
You were long gone when I actually read
The whole six volumes of the master work,
While ill and all but corked, like Proust;
Dwelling on remembrance of things past.
You, if no-one else, will understand
How passages from each volume now inform
The Proustian reworkings of my life
The autopoiesis I’m embarked upon.
When, in Swann’s Way, Proust wrote of floating flowers
Or in the pages of Within a Budding Grove
Compared bewildered love with lack of causal science,
Or when in Sodom and Gomorrah he described
The Luxor obelisk as pink nougat, the Moon a bitten orange,
He wrote for me – and you – and no-one else.
27:24 So, her and I have now travelled widely together, Claudia and I. In fact, I realised during 2020 that we couldn’t travel because of lockdown, but we have been together now on every continent except Antarctica.
27:35 Nick: Amazing.
27:35 Paul: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and of course Australia. The poem I'm about to share was written after we had been in Rome a couple of years ago on our way between Washington DC and Marrakesh - so, there's three continents for a start - and it speaks to the difference that her presence, her company, made to my experience of visiting Rome, where I had been many times myself before, alone or with others. It’s called ‘Being in Rome’.
28:08
If they document our lives at any point,
That day in Rome will surely have to feature;
Although, in fact, the ‘they’ don’t do such things,
Neglectful both of being and of time.
Will even we agree on what took place,
Between Testaccio and the Arch of Constantine?
Here’s my take, beloved, for the record:
After croissants at the Café Barberini,
We set off past the ruined Gate of Paul;
I gestured at the mass of Aurelian’s Wall
And spoke of where the Gothic camps had been,
But led you on across the Aventine.
How much did I relate of that Hill’s tale,
Conscious of our evanescent parsing?
I mentioned Roman mansions, I recall
And their looting, on the City’s fall –
My mind aflame with histories that I knew,
But what do all such histories mean to you?
Beyond that one of seven fabled Hills,
We came, as we had purposed, to the Baths;
And there, as I had hoped, your awe awoke.
For there the soaring arches that remain,
The hints and hollowed haunts of ancient marbles,
Sighed ‘ROME!’ to you, with all that that implies.
I’ve written of the Baths of Caracalla
And been immersed in their imagined glories;
I’ve dreamed for years of concerts in their gardens;
Of Shelley’s sojourn there and other stories;
But your gratitude and shining, chestnut hair
Have quite transformed my sense of being there.
29:27 Nick: I love the term you used in the poem just before last about 'autopoiesis', a sense of generating an autobiography through poems about one's own life to understand you and your history but also the life you've shared with Claudia, but you did think, for a few years, didn’t you, that you would not survive to grow old with Claudia and that your poetry about her was your swansong in many ways. So, how does that find expression, especially towards the end of this book?
29:54 Paul: Yes, that's a good question but, to put it in context, I should remark to your readers that as it happens within a few months of Claudia arriving in Australia, I was diagnosed with melanoma and I was only finally cleared of it in March 2018 and, by that stage, she'd been back in Venezuela for eleven years.
30:14 So, our whole relationship developed in the context of my having melanoma and I was in and out of hospital for years. I had many operations. I had anti-cancer drugs. So, that was another thing that shaped my perception of what was possible here and what it's meaning was.
30:37 However, of course I survived and by the time I'd wrote most of these poems, the cancer was done. I'd won that battle. What I wasn't sure of is well I felt low on energy and I wasn't sure that I would live terribly much longer and so the concluding poems in Lyrical Epigrams are intended to convey the sense that the book has now been written. It hopefully will long outlast me but that might happen relatively soon. I might only last another five or ten or fifteen years but hopefully she, and others who read the book, will have it long after that.
31:18 The poem that or one of the poems that encapsulates that sense is 'This book is Chauvet Cave’ and Chauvet Cave is a remarkable archaeological site in France where it was discovered, only in the 1990s, that there were cave paintings that went back 32,000 years and which had been immured in that cave, buried due to a paleolithic rock fall 30,000 years ago, but wonderfully preserved. They are ice age paintings of beasts, many of them now extinct.
31:55 Nick: Sabre tooth tigers and...
31:58 Paul: Yes, and creatures that have long since ceased to exist in Europe as such and alongside them - this was the single most remarkable thing, it completed lit me up with I read about Chauvet Cave years ago - they found the footprints of a young boy who had walked through the cave carrying a torch. Such are the wonders of archaeology; they could reconstruct these remarkable facts after 32,000 years or more precisely 31,000 years because they date these things to 1,000 years after the paintings had been done - and he had with him a wolf hound because the hound's paws were there. The fact that these would be preserved, the fact that they could be reconstructed and dated is itself extraordinary but, for me, it immediately became a metaphor of the role of a reader reading a book and that the torch that's used there is the light of understanding. As one gazes at the paintings, in the case of the boy, reads the meaning of poems, in the case of the reader of my book, and so the poem gives expression to this.
33:07 Nick: There's so many layers to that as well. I mean, the boy himself coming into the cave, looking on artwork done in millennia with his wolf hound in tow and then here we are 32,000 on, imagining the boy looking at the artwork.
33:20 Paul: Yes. So, it's a very luminous image, an altogether extraordinary thing to have recovered and one could discuss at some length what that tells us about us, that we are able to reconstruct that past in a way that would be literally unimaginable to the boy himself or the painters of those cave paintings 32,000 years ago.
33:43 It's altogether extraordinary and in that alone, you have a sense of what it means to be human and of what we mean by progress and civilisation and technology. I mean, it's really an amazing story and so I play off that in the poem which goes as follows:
34:02
Did you know that, well within our years,
They found the hidden galleries of Chauvet:
A cavern, love, that stone-fall sealed abruptly
Twenty-seven thousand years ago;
Immuring so its ancient mural wonders?
‘Chauvet Cave’ are words to conjure with,
Or are once one has come to contemplate
The artistry with which some Ice Age hunters,
Just five millennia before the fateful fall,
Depicted the great creatures of their time.
The subtlety and deftness of their art,
Recaptured from so many years ago,
Must prompt the realization on our part
That these painters, seen in time’s long flow,
Were kin and not remote in kind of mind.
That they could apprehend and then depict
The moving forms of hulking Ice Age bears,
The animated shapes of fighting rhinos,
The eyes and mouths of horses, lions’ heads,
Makes for startled, time-lapse recognition.
Imprinted on the Aurignacian floor,
At Chauvet Cave, were found the stunning trace
Of one boy’s footprints, partnered by a hound,
Who passed that way, a flickering torch in hand,
With wonder etched on his illiterate face.
Imagine, now, you are that vanished child;
My book of verse the opened Chauvet Cave:
What is your torch but wit, or what your wild
Imaginings, at all I here engrave -
And what will be the footprints that YOU leave?
35:27 Nick: Yeah. Wonderful poem, Paul, thank you. I just would note in the poem, it cites 27,000 years and I think in the conversation you said 31,000 since it was interred in a way with the rock collapse. What's the discrepancy there?
35:39 Paul: Yes. No, you're absolutely right and that occurred to me as I read the poem. It was 27,000 years. In other words, there were 5,000 years and 1,000 years between the painting and the...
35:52 Nick: The boy sighting it...
35:53 Paul: The boy seeing it and it was 1,000 years after he saw it, if my memory now serves me correctly, that the rock slide sealed the cave. That's where the mistake came in, and when I first did this reading and I wrote this up, one of the things that struck me was that 5,000 years. So, they're painted 32,000 years ago and then he sees them 27,000 years ago. So, in both cases we would say, well, that's a really long time ago. They sort of bunched together but 5,000 years, that's the equivalent for the whole of recorded history. So, writing was invented 5,000 years ago. Everything that's written in terms of stories, tablets, things on stone, things on paper, it's all been recorded in the last 5,000 years and 5,000 years took place between those paintings at Chauvet and that boy seeing them.
36:45 Nick: And probably presumably very little happened in terms of the evolution of human civilisation in that time too which is 5,000 years of much of the very same and then, as you know, within recorded time - 5,000 years - civilisation has sort of shot up and done remarkably innovative and huge forward leaps of progress.
37:03 Paul: Yes, absolutely. I mean, what springs to mind whenever we contemplate human evolution or what we call the paleolithic is that after the ice age, which the last place on Maxim is about 15,000 years ago, our ancestors emerged from that kind of environment and since then there's been this exponential increase in our technology and innovation, our mastery of the biosphere and of course the explosion in our numbers, and that's what we refer to as history.
37:38 Sometimes people say history really should be dated from the time we invented writing because there's no records prior to that of what people thought. We don't know what they thought. We don't know what this boy thought when he was looking at these paintings. We can only guess.
37:52 Nick: Well, one thing is about whether he was gazing upon artworks which were contemporary to his society, therefore familiar, or whether it was like 5,000 years looking at a different civilisation. I mean, imagine if we had had that sense of opening a cave from 5,000 years ago and it was a completely different missionary and Greek society we were gazing upon which we were only seeing for the first time.
38:15 Paul: Well, indeed.
38:16 Nick: A sense of resonance, but also a distance and alienness to the different cultures you're looking at.
38:20 Paul: Yes. I mean, there's no question that there would be far less difference between the culture of the painters and his time over 5,000 years than between our culture and that of 5,000 years ago anywhere in the world because an immense amount of change has taken place in that 5,000 years, the second 5,000 years.
38:39 If we went back 5,000 years for example in Egypt, the first dynasty - Nama has just unified up on lower Egypt - and that's at the dawn of what we generally think of as history. Whereas when our boy walks through Chauvet cave, it's conceivable that he was from a different tribe or people. Entirely conceivable. 5,000 years is a long time, but it's just as conceivable and we can say this particularly a Australians, knowing of the very long habitation of this continent by Aboriginal Australians, that his folk had been there for all those 5,000 years, but what's striking is it's only the footprints of that one boy that we have in a cave. There aren't footprints of other people. There's no signs of gatherings there, of comings and goings, of the painters themselves. There's the paintings without footprints. There's no other footprints, that are still there at least, but there's his. Just the one instance, it's haunting. It's quite extraordinary So, it's conceivable that actually that cave had long since ceased to be inhabited by human beings, that his people lived somewhere nearby, but he just wandered into that cave by chance.
39:41 Nick: And stumbled upon this mausoleum.
39:44 Paul: This art gallery, yeah.
39:46 Nick: Beautiful stuff. So, to come back to centre frame, Claudia is not the only muse you've had since you've recovered from cancer, is she? There have been at least two others that we've spoken about. Would you like to tell us and our listeners about them today and the poetry that they inspired?
40:01 Paul: Yes. I won't say a great deal about them as individuals for reasons that will become apparent in the poems, but there have been instances certainly of the theme that we're exploring in this particular interview which is how do you address a person in a poem?
40:16 So, whereas my poems for Claudia are directed to a partner whom I've known for years, who I'm very close to, with whom I've travelled very widely. We share so many interests, we read things together, we share songs. That's not true with these other two individuals for very different reasons.
40:37 One in the first instance is a person who I've never met, who got in touch online and cat fished me. So, most of your readers perhaps these days will know what a cat fish is, but essentially, it's somebody who creates a fake identity online and uses it to try and fool targeted people, either for fake romance or to entrap them, to bully them, to defraud them. There are all sorts of things that go on and there's a lot of this going on.
41:08 Once I realised that whoever this way, they were playing some kind of game, I had to choose do I simply cut them off and say, "I'm not playing that game," or do I explore how the game is played and make sure I win the game, and I decided that whoever this was seemed sufficiently interesting that I would play the game, but I play to win, and I did.
41:31 The poem that I'll share, it's one of 17 that I wrote for this person - a woman I should add and whose identity I eventually discovered - but that's the codour to an account of all this I've written up in book form which will be published soon, but along the way I wrote the poems, and the poems were again and again addressed to the question of, "Who are you? Why are you playing this game?"
41:54 Now, it so happens that the name that she had used, the identity that was being projected at me, was Rachael and this was in 2019. In November of that year, I was really pondering so who is this Rachael? Is she real? Is it even a woman? Is it a different woman? Is it a group of people? Is it a male? Is it a foreign intelligence agency?
42:19 I decided because her name was Rachael, that she was using the name Rachael, to watch Blade Runner again. So, the original Blade Runner which had been released in 1982 starring Harrison Ford includes notably a character called Rachael, a woman who is in fact a replicant. That is to say, a cyborg, not a real human being.
42:40 Very early on, Harrison Ford who plays the blade runner, the replicant hunter, Deckard, is asked to put her through what's called a Voight-Kampff test to try and establish to his own satisfaction is she real or is she a replicant.
42:56 So, I watched Blade Runner again and I was astonished to discover when I put it on that Blade Runner is in fact set in Los Angeles in November 2019 and it was November 2019 by complete coincidence when I put the film on, and that in itself prompted a couple of poems where I took the role of Deckard.
43:16 But prior to that, I wrote a poem which addresses a you and the you in this instance, as you'll see with the poem, is not Rachael. It's in a sense almost me talking to myself but it could be any reader who picks the poem up. So, it's another variation on the theme that William Waters raises as to who is the you that's address in a poem and it goes like this:
43:43
What do you do when a hot woman
Sends you roses, sends you flirtatious messages,
Saying she’s a continent away, but
Wants your attention; loves your writing?
I mean, what would YOU do?
What do you do when this femme afar
Seems to work in the intelligence world,
Travels to the Gulf, deals in rare earths,
Says some Iranian bureaucrat in awe
Called her a Straussian woman?
That’s Straussian as in Richard Strauss;
But she says she’s a Wagner chick,
Who likes fucking to the sounds of Bayreuth.
(Funny both composers were called Dick);
But sing me what YOU’D do, in such a case.
Having tantalized me with such tags
And texted that my voice was quite ‘delish’;
She then played hard to get. She hinted
That she’s all but unattainable,
But texted, saucily, ‘I want a poem!’
Whimsically, I dashed one off for her.
Would you have done as much, on scant acquaintance?
But even then, she still played cat and mouse;
Evading even basic conversation,
Though saying that my poem made her wet.
At last I thought, ‘This woman is a catfish.
She’s not the person she purports to be;
She’s playing games of some clandestine kind,
Which don’t bode well, as far as I can see.’
Would YOU play games like this, both dumb and blind?
44:57 Nick: Yeah. So, clearly that poem is not addressing Rachael but, I mean, perhaps yourself in some sort of reflective tone or address you're making to yourself, perhaps other people you're looking around the room for council and instruction.
45:11 Paul: It's a quite fluid you, isn't it, in that sense and so...
45:14 Nick: It so often is.
45:15 Paul: It's a nice illustration of what Waters is driving at when he says, "Who is the you that's addressed in a poem?" The answer is quite frequently and certainly in that case, it's a multiform comedian like you, and it's a variable you and I don't think anybody would read that and think that's Rachael because plainly I'm talking to some you about Rachael, not addressing Rachael, but who the you is of course is.... Well, we do have conversations with ourselves at times, as if we're two people.
45:56 Nick: What are you doing, for instance, when you say that to yourself?
45:57 Paul: Yes, exactly. This is...
45:59 Nick: Pull yourself together.
46:00 Paul: Yeah, exactly. So, that's partly what's clearly going on in this poem, but because of its construction any given reader could feel addressed by it and their being asked, "So, what would you do?"
46:14 That was fun and given that explanation, it might be worth sharing one of the Deckard poems because there Deckard is addressing his Rachael and I wrote this addressed to, as it were, my Rachael in order to put her in that frame of reference and ask, "So, are you any more real than the replicant Rachael?"
46:38 Nick: In Blade Runner...
46:38 Paul: In Blade Runner, and those who know the story of Blade Runner will relate to the details in the poem, but I hope that it's otherwise intelligible anyway just as a little drama.
46:50
Rick Deckard shot down Zhora Salome,
A stunning replicant on the lam,
Fugitive humanoid without a home;
One of the off-world Nexus rebels,
Reaching to Earth for life and meaning;
Hurling her through shattering glass.
Leon nearly had said Deckard cold,
Hard fingers set to shove his eyeballs
Into his dutiful, blade runner brain;
But tearful Rachael, in her glossy mink,
Retired the vengeful Leon from behind,
Using Deckard’s flung and disregarded gun.
All this was in the darkling film noir streets,
Of Philip Dick’s dystopian LA,
Where hovercraft and vast electric signs,
Huge pyramids of opaque glass and steel,
Conjured out of strange Egyptian memes
By Ridley Scott, set troubling puzzles.
The acts in question, filmed in eighty-two,
Took place within the month we’re in right now;
And so I dwell on Zhora’s Kristallnacht;
Then the deaths of Leon, Pris and Roy;
But chiefly now I dwell on dark-eyed Rachael,
Whose vital shot made Deckard her protector.
He triggered that, with their prolonged exchange
Concerning Voight-Kampff questions of those eyes:
Not twenty, not just thirty, all cross-referenced,
But a hundred, probing who and what she was.
She’d eyeballed Deckard, studied and composed;
Then fled to him, as Zhora fled to Earth.
48:05 So, that's of course communicated to Rachael. I sent her that poem and she responded, instead of with the question, "Who are you addressing this poem? What makes you liken me to a replicant?" Instead, she texted me saying, "I went straight home from a party I was at when I heard your voice reciting that poem on my voice mail and I put on Blade Runner and watched it again with your stunning words rolling in my mind."
48:35 So, there's a person who has been addressed by the poem and yet not in a straightforward way, because the poem itself is the narrative of what goes on in the movie.
48:47 Nick: Yeah, there's a resonance that she intuits and feels.
48:52 Paul: Yes, and so the question in my mind is what an interesting response, when she's not owning that she's so to speak a replicant, that she's a fake identity. She is not even explaining why exactly she found the poem stunning and if, what she's saying, is that she found it stunning simply as a reader of the poem and it had nothing to do with her or her and me, then it's also really rather remarkable. You might say a very cool response and it intrigued me. It was because Rachael was intriguing that I kept playing the game, but I kept sending...
49:29 Nick: In a playful way, not a genuinely romantic way as you're addressing Klaus for instance.
49:33 Paul: Oh, no, it's completely different. It was not romantic in anything like the sense of my communication with Claudia who was so real, and we had such a relationship which was developing and deepening. No, on the other hand, Rachael was an intriguing figure. I'd never been cat fished before. I'd never had somebody ask me to write her romantic poems, who was plainly intelligent but wouldn't talk on the phone, who wouldn't for many months give me an email address, who refused to meet but would talk about the idea of a clandestine meeting, a secret meeting, a possible meeting, and whose projected image at least - and this turned out, I found in the end, to be accurate - was of an attractive woman, no question, sexually attractive and clearly intelligent, but somewhat troubled and manipulative.
50:27 So, I wouldn't call it romantic, but it was erotic. It was fascinating and it was an engaging game and the game for me was to thwart any agenda she had to fool me or mislead me or beguile me or bully me or anything else, but to inkle out why is she doing this and who is she really and, in the end, I did, and she spat the dummy and I wrote a book. So, that's quite a story in itself.
50:51 Nick: The other major muse you've experienced is of a more recent nature but does not involve any cat fishing.
50:58 Paul: No, no cat fishing at all in the third case and some real acquaintance but very little so far. Now, this is a case of a kind that many people will relate to this. This is a woman that I met in the last couple of years and immediately found very appealing, very striking, very impressive in all the ways that, if I may say so, a mature and intelligent man would. She's beautiful, she's intelligent, she's gracious. She's very competent at what she does. She works in a field close to many of my interests. We've met, we've spoken. So, there's a reality to this that was simply never present in the goings on with Rachael.
51:45 Then what I discovered is I had feelings for her that I was very hesitant to express to her because I thought whoa, this has just over taken me and I'm not sure what to make of it and I'm not at all sure how she would respond. So, what I did in this case - and this is where it plays into the theme we're discussing from William Waters about who does a poem address - is how do I think this through.
52:12 I wrote a quite long poem, which I'll shared in a moment, called 'Secret Poem' which is, the listeners will see, begins and ends with the statement, "I've got to keep this poem a secret because if I don't, if I send it to her, it could land like a bomb." Not because it's offensive, but because it would come as a big surprise and...
52:32 Nick: Overwhelmingly intense and romantic and...
52:35 Paul: Yes, all those things but nevertheless, it's an attempt to express the nuances of what I'm going through and how I feel about her and how I'm thinking about that, and since it's not sent, then the question becomes well who is the you that's actually being addressed here, as distinct from being talked about. So, it goes as follows:
53:03
This first poem for you must be a secret,
Since, if I share it with you fecklessly,
I fear that I would simply spook the horses;
When, following our first real conversation,
I’d prefer to play the canny horse whisperer.
You called! You called! You spoke to me;
Declaring how ‘fantastic’ it had been
That I’d accepted your official invitation,
Eighteen months before, to the iWar forum –
Aye! War forum – but this is love!
Is all, then, fair in love and war?
Ah! What does fairness have to do with those old games?
All of life’s most ancient strategies
Were bundled into how you spoke to me –
Oh, how, since then, my heart has been on fire!
You must have sensed, from what I sent to you,
How ardently, if mordantly, I’d burned,
Before your call and quiet voice
Heaped every kind of fuel upon the fire,
But still consumed my psychic energy.
Now, when I walk, I breathe in your warmth,
Like oxygen itself, to feed the flames;
Exhaling, step by step, the doubts and fears
That must attend an unexpected fall
Into longings, raptures, wonders I’d thought done.
You’ve enchanted me, as hasn’t happened
In more years now than I prefer to count;
How so? Ah, in truth, since you embody
Everything that I have ever loved
Of beauty, charm, intelligence and grace.
Yet even when I sent my lines of worship,
You responded, after giving them some thought,
I such a measured way as to encourage
Leaping hopes of future intimacy
That now have me afraid of writing more!
Ah! Lovely one, if we were in a play,
I’d court your company with clever rhymes;
I’d sing some song like Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’
And speak to you of living on the edge;
But this, as we both know is no mere play.
This is now the forum we both spoke in -
On iWar in the roiling outer world,
In which the schemes of charlatans and powers
Lay traps for the unwary, to undo them -
Transferred to our inner shadow worlds.
Such iWars wrack the inscape of the psyche,
Which fractures into memories, hopes and fears;
Where each of us, as I, will apprehend
The black-clad knights of ghost wars from our pasts
And so raise up suspicions and defences.
Your eyes, your smile, the gracious way you move,
The gentle, candid tenor of your voice,
The fact, alone, that you reached out to me,
And spoke of progress on your PhD;
Should set at ease my veteran, wary heart.
Instead, I find I’m pondering the art
Of how one draws such beauty to oneself,
Caresses it and whispers to its wildness
To win its ease. That’s why I murmur:
This first poem for you must be a secret.
55:47 Nick: So, thinking back to William Waters, who was really being addressed here?
55:50 Paul: Yes, before I answer that question, I probably should explain that I had said earlier, that I wouldn't send the poem because it might - well, as a poem itself it says 'spook the horses' and yet I mention in the poem that I'd sent lines of worship. So, it's probably worth explaining that in the book I described earlier about Rachael, I refer, because it's a true story, to being at the iWar Forum in October 2019 and the woman that I'm addressing in this new poem was the one who invited me to that conference.
56:23 So, one of the answers to your question is the poem addresses her, but we'll come back to that, but what are these lines of what I call worship? Well, in telling this story about meeting her at the conference, I say that she was beautiful, intelligent, gracious. I was smitten and I played with that a little facetiously in the draft book about Rachael where I say at one point that I entertained this sort of fantasy, that perhaps the mysterious Rachael or whoever it was, was actually this other person and this was an intelligence training exercise and I'd been made a target. I thought there's a part of me that really wants that to be true, but then I commented no, look, it's highly implausible.
57:13 I sent those passages to her to review saying that I hoped they wouldn't make her feel uncomfortable. I'd like to think she found them entertaining, and it was after reading them that she called me, and we had a perfectly sensible, very pleasant conversation about it all. So, that's what's being alluded to in the poem, but the irony of it was that that conversation so enhanced my admiration for her that then I thought I'm not sure what to say next because I fear putting a foot wrong here, getting this wrong or coming on too strong.
57:47 So, to revert to your question about who is being addressed, clearly at the superficial level at least she is being addressed, but she's being addressed in secret and she doesn't know she's being addressed and that of course raises what you might call the Waters' question. So, if she's implicitly being addressed but she doesn't know she's being addressed, then in a sense she's not being addressed, so what are we talking about? That's the magic of poetry, that we create - this poem creates an imagined conversation with a projected idea of the you, and it's trying to construct a thought experiment as to how would you react if I actually told you these things, these things which I'm confessing but you're not reading because I hesitate to send them to you.
58:44 Waters does a lot of that analysis in his book. He does it beautifully and one of the best examples is a reflection on a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke called Lullaby and I'd say, as much as any of the poems that he analyses in his book, it's his analyses of Rilke's Lullaby that really got me thinking about precisely what's an issue in this poem.
59:10 He says with the Lullaby for example - Waters says that the paradox of a lullaby is that it's something addressed to say a child but in the expectation that the child will fall asleep listening and so actually won't hear out the poem. So, there's an overlap between that and what happens in this poem where one is ardently addressing a person who one finds very attractive but hesitates precisely because of the intensity of that attraction to directly address them at all.
59:39 Nick: That's in the veil of secrecy and...
59:40 Paul: Yes, and yet it's not a deceit. It's an honest and heartfelt effort to think through an imaginary dialogue or think through rather the paradox that you want the dialogue and yet the dialogue seems inadvisable at this stage.
59:57 Nick: So, I suppose thinking about all that, where does this lead because the last line of the poem is 'This first poem for you must be a secret'. Potentially there might be subsequent poems which might be out of the veil of secrecy.
01:00:11 Paul: Yes, well I'd like to think so. I mean, I guess this happens at an early point in any romance, whether or not the romance becomes a mutual romance, a relationship of some kind or other, and I'm at the point in this instance, very, very early where I've got to figure out, yeah okay, I'm dazzled but who is this person really and how receptive would they be to anything I might write because I really, as that poem says, I don't want to spook the horses. I don't want to make her feel uncomfortable or harassed in any way.
01:00:46 But there have already been more poems, equally in a sense as secretive as that first one because none of them have been sent to her and, depending on how things go, they might never be sent because I'm not going to, as it were, push them or myself at her. I'm going to be very sensitive about this for all sorts of reasons.
01:01:04 However, there's a beautiful piece of music, a two-minute little composition by the French composer, early 20th century French composer, Erik Satie, called Gnossiennes 3. It was one of a set of these poems called Gnossiennes which he composed, and he invented the term 'Gnossiennes'. When I read it, I think of Gnosis and so on. I think one is probably supposed to, but it's not itself a dictionary word. He made it up.
01:01:37 As I was listening to that composition and I listened to it again and again, the mood of it, the way it's constructed, seemed to me singularly apposite in the circumstances to the mood I was in, in trying to think through these passionate feelings that couldn't readily find a comfortable outlet, except in secret poetry.
01:01:57 So, I wrote a much shorter poem than the secret poem called Gnossiennes 3 which just reflects on that, but it reflects on the fact that, whereas I hadn't sent this woman the poems, I did send her a clip of that music, of it being played, without comment, just that in an SMS.
01:02:18 Of course, I've been wondering since, "So, what did she think about that? Did she like the music? What did it tell her about what I might be thinking? What did she start to think about what I was trying to communicate by sending it at all and sending it in particular?" So, this poem goes as follows in rhyming couplets.
01:02:38
Why did I text you Gnossiennes 3
To listen to at night and think of me?
Answer with a kiss, when we should meet.
Such music would roll back my long defeat.
It’s melancholy, meditative tone
Expresses my dream of you, when I’m alone
The liminal Satie, desole, neglected
Captured like a bird, recorded, resurrected
A prolepsis of the mystery that your eyes
Should only now, but only now arise
So Hesperidean, at the sunset of my being
With memories folding inward, futures fleeing.
01:03:18 So, what's implicit I suppose in that, even to somebody who doesn't know me or know her, is that she's substantially younger than me, that I'm not a young man, that my life is in a lot of ways set and that I think it's probably implausible that an intimate relationship will arise between us. I'm conscious of that. Nevertheless, I'm struck by her beauty as a person and wonderstruck really and so I'm reflecting on that.
01:03:54 The mood of the music is somewhat melancholy because the mood that led me to listen to it, to send to it and then to write the poem is wow, you can entertain the fantasy of it, as it were, the idea of intimacy with this beautiful person. The probability is that's not going to happen, though there may be perfectly civilised contact and communication. There already has been.
01:04:24 So, it's addressed again to a you without any doubt but it's not itself sent to that you. It's a reflection on the implicit but very private sense of dialogue with another person who is actually not there.
01:04:44 Nick: So, we started this conversation of reflecting on communicative intimacy and the idea of authentic understanding between different people who are in a romantic, platonic or any other kind of relationship and so I wonder whether the poet can know, in this specific instance, with any confidence whether this third muse thinks anything of your love or perhaps whether, if your poetry never directly addressed her, she might intuit it in some way in the same sense that someone might intuit Picasso being inspired by them and painting beautiful paintings which are not directly addressed to them or representative of them, but address them in a more roundabout kind of way.
01:05:28 Paul: Yes, it does raise interesting questions. I mean, since you ask, it takes me back to an experience many, many years ago when I was still a young man, and I met a young woman. She was an instructor at a gym I used to work out at, and she was just delightful. She was beautiful. She was very pleasant. She was sweet natured, and I used to hang out just to go and do an aerobics class with her as the instructor.
01:05:59 What I discovered is that she was engaged to be married to a guy her own age - they were younger than me - but I couldn't altogether contain my feelings and I wrote a couple of poems. They were love poems addressed to her and, without signing them, I left them for her at the gym on Valentine’s Day that year with a rose, and then a really charming thing occurred.
01:06:31 She and I were sitting on exercise bikes one day, just cycling and chatting away, and I was just chatting as if it was the most normal thing in the world which of course in a sense it was, and she started to say to me that she'd had these mysterious love poems sent to her and she was still trying to figure out who had written them.
01:06:51 So, finally since she seemed relaxed in my presence, I said, "Look, I've got to confess it was me." "Oh," she said. "I didn't think it would be you because you seem so relaxed. We just talk normally." It was - I've never forgotten this.
01:07:06 Her boyfriend then approached me - not that day but soon afterwards - and he said in a calm, pleasant sort of way, "Look, she and I are going to get married, and I know why you find her attractive because I do, and we both love the poems," he said. "We've got them sitting at home on the hi-fi like Christmas cards but we're going to get married." I said, "I understand." I mean, that's a given. I just wanted to express my feelings. So, that was a quite charming incident.
01:07:38 Now, I would like to think that at a minimum something like that might occur in the present case, if or when the woman to whom these poems are implicitly addressed ever gets to hear about them or listen to them or read them, but I also think that this is a different set of circumstances. I'm much older than I was then, much more experienced. We have shared professional interests which was certainly not the case really with the gym instructor all those years ago, and so I'd rather like to think that there will be further communication and I'll just work out my feelings as I go in a civilised way, but that because that happens there will come a time where she can listen to these and not feel in any way uncomfortable about them, in fact be deeply appreciative that they were written.
01:08:31 I have some warrant for believing that because she's already written the lines that I drafted in my book and responded very warmly really. So, I don't think that there's a grave problem here but I'm just trying to be sensible in the way I approach it and that's why, to round things out I suppose, the question of the addressable you and addressable reality that I referred to in the opening paragraph of my book, Lyrical Epigrams, is so apposite. It's why this is a really interesting experience of that for me as a poet as well as a human being.
01:09:14 Nick: Well, thank you very much for your time today, Paul. It's been a pleasure speaking once again.
01:09:18 Paul: Yes, it's been a lot of fun sharing the poems and I hope the listeners find them moving in their different ways.