The Gamble of Existence: An Interview with Christina Davis
by Patrick Bagley
Alice James Books: I’d like to start with an observation instead of a question, and then get your reaction to it. In the Book of Genesis, Noah sends forth a raven and a dove to search for dry land. The raven never returns, but the dove brings back an olive branch—proof that the floodwaters are receding. Many of your poems are populated by birds, but the poems themselves also seem like Noah’s raven: always seeking, always asking questions, though not necessarily carrying back answers.
Christina Davis: Yes, I think you’re on to something there. The book is not necessarily about a bird per se. Each section reinterprets the Raven as a symbol. The poems in the first section are based on the idea of the Raven as a question, as the mortal test, as that which is sent forth (the old canary-in-the-mine routine) without certainty of return.
The second section is based on the idea of the Raven as the messenger, as language itself—the primordial caw, black ink, the words that are sent forth from our mouths into the unknown. There’s an obvious tip of the hat to Poe’s Raven, which cried the great negation “Nevermore.” Though in certain ancient civilizations the raven’s sound was interpreted as a hopeful noise that meant something akin to “Tomorrow, tomorrow.”
The third section uses the Raven to explore death. Our society has so shunned death, has so turned its back on what becomes of us, has so exiled and suppressed anything that resembles mortality (loneliness, sadness, silence) it has lost out on half of life. In effect that is the thrust of this book—to honor the entire trajectory, the going forth, the gamble of existence through the darkness and the light. That’s a little grandiose, but you get the picture.
AJB: Emily Dickinson wrote that
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul–
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops
at all –
How do your birds relate to hers?
CD: An interesting question. The fact is many poets allude to birds. There’s Hardy’s darkling thrush and Frost’s oven-bird, Eliot’s haunting bird in the garden of “Burnt Norton,” and Robert Duncan’s falcon, and Keats and Shelley and the list goes on and on back to the beginning of time.
I have always been a bit of a bird-watcher, though not in any Audoboned, binoculared way. I suppose they are for me the erasure of the human viewpoint. They act, in my poems and in my life, as a way of denying the “I” its omnipotence or omniscience.
AJB: Please tell us about your fascination with earth and sky, as shown in poems like “Advertisement for the Mountain.”
CD: Well, I guess I live on the earth and breathe in the sky, and therein lies the fascination! But, in terms of that specific poem, shortly before writing it I drove past a roadsign pointing to a nearby mountain. I was in New Hampshire that summer (the poem was written at the same time as the poem “Monadnock”—the name of the mountain means, I believe, “one man”). The advertisement said that the mountain was open such and such number of hours, and I was fascinated by that notion, that we had the right as human beings to say that a mountain would shut like a mall at 8 o’clock. The gall of it was almost humorous. Could you close an ocean?
In any case, I think certain lines by other poets and writers impinged on the poem. Christina Rossetti’s “Is it up-hill all the way?” comes to mind. Life as a vertical, Sisyphean feat. So, the title might simply have been: “Advertisement for Existence.” There’s also the Stevens poem “The Poem that Took the Place of the Mountain,” and H.G. Wells’ wonderful if outdated measurements in his 1922 mini-masterpiece A Short History of the World, which caused me to perform that odd calculation towards the end of the poem.
I was also reading Jonathan Dee’s Palladio in which I remember learning that “advertisement” comes from the root word “ver,” as in verity. So, the poem could mean the truth about the mountain, the truth about life. But of course it’s only a partial truth, a version.
AJB: “In the Shrine of the Holy Dirt” reveals that your favorite word is “humility.” What makes it so?
CD: The first time I was conscious of the word “humility” was when I read Eliot’s Four Quartets, in which he writes The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/ Is the wisdom of humility; humility is endless. Now, I am not a religious person, and so I had to read that poem with a certain filter that I am sure would have appalled him, but nevertheless that line lived for me beyond any particular creed. How he placed it in the poem allowed me to hear its etymology—humility meaning lowliness, from humus, meaning earth. I also heard the relation (albeit a false cognate) with human and humor.
The one quality I have always demanded of myself and most admired in others is humility—I owe this beautiful sentiment to my parents who are infinitely accomplished and infinitely humble, a sense of the finiteness of each life, a feeling that we are each flawed yet inherently worthy, and that we are allied to other creatures and to the earth and are not above them.
The sanctuary at Chimayo, with its sanctified dirt, seemed like a kind of Christianity I could get my hands around. Worshipping dirt! That seemed about right. The final image of a man bending over so that his back reveals his actual stature is an allusion buried deep in the correspondence between Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva, the exact wording of which I have never been able to find again.
AJB: : In “Border Patrol,” you observe that “Sometimes to walk toward anyone/is the wilderness.” And “The Primer” ends with this couplet: “In the history of language/the first obscenity was silence.” “The Raven’s Book” is heavy with loneliness. How difficult was it to capture that isolation, that sense that even though two people might be in a conversation or close physical proximity (maybe even in love), they are still somehow disconnected from each other? Do you feel there is a degree of alienation between people that language is still unable to overcome?
CD: I hesitate to generalize for the human condition, so maybe I’ll just stick to the poems you cite. The line that you brought up in “Border Patrol,” was brought about by a visit (an annual pilgrimage I make) to Walden Pond, which is like taking a trip to Loneliness-Central.
While I was walking there a man approached (a jogger, as I recall) and my whole consciousness prepared for his proximity, his nearness harnessed everything in me and then as soon as he passed my senses subsided. I felt how Thoreau must have felt walking in to Concord after his lonely sojourn—not that solitude was the wilderness, but that in fact nearing another being is the wilderness, the vast unknown contained within 5 or 6 feet of body.
“The Raven’s Book” is based on the disappearance of Osip Mandelstam, and it was incredibly important to me to try to capture the uncertainty that his vanishment evoked in his wife, an uncertainty that gripped so many New Yorkers during September 11th, the never-finding of the bones. The wife’s voice in the poem is therefore being sent to a silence—though of course the poem leaves it ambiguous whether the man is absent or present, as so often in love our voices do not land where they are sent, even when the beloved is in the room.
The irony of poetry is that you (as the poet) have the wonderfully humane opportunity to perfect speech, in some cases even to redeem a moment in which you gravely misspoke, but at the same time a poem is written in solitude, and exists because of solitude.
AJB: Your voice has been likened to that of Emily Dickinson—delivering deceptively spare lyrics that carry a great weight of language. Are you conscious of that influence as you write? How important is it for you to carry on and acknowledge the traditions of Dickinson, Tsevetaeva or Rilke while at the same time making your own way as a poet?
CD: To be likened to Dickinson is one of the greatest honors I can imagine. I wouldn’t say that I was conscious of being influenced by her. Many women (forgive the generalization) write very honed and chiseled verse (there’s a thesis in there somewhere)—Mina Loy comes to mind, H.D., Dickinson, early Plath, Glück. I am conscious of having always been drawn to poetry that approximates aphorism. A poetry that produces lines that cannot be ignored and cannot be lost in a narrative, lines that are almost entirely stripped of context so that they can survive in a naked, dispossessed state.
In terms of Marina Tsvetaeva, I owe so very much to her, a kind of spiritual debt. I have tried to honor that in this book. Her work was a great salvation for me during my lonely years in England, and her anger over passion being kept in a thermos and society’s trepidation around tears and her visceral, unmitigated vocalization of love—well, I can only say that she gave voice to a part of me that had grown silenced. I have tried in my variations (which are far from faithful to the Russian) to resurrect some of the emotion that has gone out of some of the more strict translations. She and Dickinson were both volcanoes in the house and need not be quelled.
AJB: Most debut poetry collections are the result of many years’ work. Where were you as a poet when you began writing what would eventually become Forth A Raven?
CD: It seemed for many years like I would never permit myself to finish a manuscript. I was always changing, morphing, both my ideas and my style. They went hand in hand, and I hesitated to stop them; it seemed unnatural to draw a line and say, “This is the book.” In fact, I’m still not convinced that a book is a natural demarcation.
But, thank god for the MacDowell Colony. I spent the summer of 2004 there, and in that bucolic space, in a cabin facing a forest that I came to know intimately, enough poems cohered around the same questions, around the same images, that I felt it was genuine to say: “It is finished.” As Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse finally draws a single line down the canvas and declares: “I have had my vision.”
