NICHOLAS HOWARD Rereading some of your most recent poems like “Marcus Aurelius,” “Artichokes,” and “Nature,” there are references to large concepts such as “Truth,” “Nature,” and “Man.” I found this word choice to be bold and adventurous. Is that something you were conscious of, and why should writers strive to be bold in their writing?
BIANCA STONE There something thrilling to come to these concepts at exactly the right time in your life—not for their so-called poetic sake, but for the sake of your own psyche, which finds itself bewildered before them. The adventurousness you speak of comes with having had a lot of contemporary adventures under my belt, perhaps. What I mean is: Yes, I’ve spoken at length of the vividity of and the streets of Brooklyn and made weird animation films out of poems—but what is this deeper state of existence that threads them into the fabric of reality in the first place? I been considering Nature—as it is me? You get older and begin to articulate a certain deep loneliness. You suddenly find yourself where the ancients found themselves: stirred at the core by some fear and awe you can’t name. It’s a kind of deepening towards the unconscious; its themes. I think too it is for me a return to the German and English Romantics—the consciousness of inner/outer, the world; (dis)orienting ourselves; the bigger investigation of self world, as coming together. We confine ourselves too much in a single idea of self. And when that self is maybe repetitive, destructive, or just feels exhausted, you may look elsewhere for more. I think writers always strive to address these larger concepts, whether or not they use those particular words. It’s the work of poetry to add oneself to the conversation. And of. We understand Truth and Man and Love by how we specifically interact with one another, the strangeness of it all, the tragicomedy. How we look upon World, how we —are we , I mean, in that Rilkean way in which he begs us to: “Don’t you know ? Fling the emptiness out of your arms/into the spaces we breathe” (“First Elegy,” trs. Mitchell). Maybe these so-called grand concepts are the archetypal thread that pulls at a longer, ancient poem, a universality (even if sometimes bitterly evoked, nevertheless they are sincere), and they stand out like capitalized markers in Time. But there are other conversations going on, in other genres, that can really speak to your pursuits, and the fundamental, larger concepts hold true throughout all these various occupations, and can find conversation through them. Our goal is to understand such things, is it not? What are your own empirical truths? How far can we explore our sense of godhood, existence? Why do we do what we do?
