Archipelago

Bruce Bond

Bruce's Commentary

I started the poem “Archipelago” as a companion to one entitled “Glass Island”—poems wherein the terra firma of both self and world become more unstable, more precisely rendered as such via the language of seascape and lyric mediation.  Just what the general drift might yield, I did not know, but I felt there was something at stake in this journey, something personal and not, something uncanny that drew my fascination to the shoreline.  I knew, half-consciously perhaps, that the imagery of islands and the seas that slowly eat them begs the question: where does an island end, the sea begin.  I also liked the initial resonance of all landmasses as islands, equally vulnerable and capable of wonder, equally grounded in privacy and uncertainty and yet connected by the same sea that divides us.  To write about the paradox of interdependent solitudes, I knew I needed a language that would break down, to honor a sense of selves that are both there and not there.  I knew there was something dehumanizing in assuming either extreme.  And yes, I knew the work of Wallace Stevens and this passage from “Sunday Morning” that I love:

We live in an old chaos of the sun,

Or old dependency of day and night,

Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,

Of that wide water, inescapable.

So much depends upon that comma after “free,” the comma before “inescapable.”  Here was language made radical by precision, made provocative by the beauty and power of paradox and the questions raised in the act of reading, such that reading becomes inextricable from the poem’s more ostensible subject.

    I think my early draft of “Archipelago” stopped short of asking the questions that, however related to the ones that brought me to the page, would lead to more meaningful surprises and a more satisfying sense of transformed perspective.  When I teach vision in poems to students, I find this practice of finding the most productive questions to be critical.  Another thing that can help the poem of curtailed vision is the suggestion to go deep not wide—that is, do not let the associative mind simply spread out or skitter across surfaces that, at the level of deep resonance, are either too related or not related enough.  Or more importantly: do not grow complacent with the notion of the poem, or the line for that matter, as an awakening, a burrowing, a furthering light.  So the first ending of the first version felt increasingly to me that it came too early and had too little new to say.  I needed to intensify the emotional stakes as well, so the introduction of the man by the ocean helped ground the meditative hunger in felt difficulty.  That man was me and not me.  And the me in him led the poem inward.  The poem in the poem asked: what is the difference between world as other and the inner other—the ghost sounds as they fade in one man one particular morning?  Might the inner world enlarge upon the poem’s opening meditation on language in general and the uncertain foundations we take for granted?  Why does this matter?  Does the dream (and our reading of it) give voice to some repressed necessity or give birth to something more radically new: new meaning, new being, or the scared and hopeful expectation of such?  What changes here in the man who cannot sleep, whose words are his and not his?  Is looking, in and of itself, a virtue?  An affirmation?  A connection?  A start?  Is questioning a form of looking?  Who do I speak to when I address the ocean this way?  Who, I ask the poem, is speaking?  And the poem echoes, who?

Bruce Bond is the author of fifteen books including, most recently, For the Lost Cathedral (LSU Press, 2015) and The Other Sky (Etruscan Press, 2015).  Four books are forthcoming: Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan Press), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, University of Tampa Press), Gold Bee (Crab Orchard Open Competition Award, Southern Illinois Press),Sacrum (Four Way Books).  Presently he is Regents Professor at University of North Texas.