DP: I've been slow at getting back to you because I can't find my 
copy of The Music so I'll start with a question about 
The Commentaries.

When I was reading The Commentaries I kept noticing the shifting 
pronouns--all of which seemed to refer back to you. 
"I object" starts off "One day you begin to cultivate a personal 
cubism". In title and opening line you have two pronouns 
referring to yourself. In other poems you employ the inclusive 
"we", the third person "he" and even "One". Why all this shifting? 
Is it because commentators can position themselves differently 
with respect to their subjects?

KN: Yes.

 
That's the short answer, anyway. The longer answer would go 
something like this:  The Commentaries are commentaries to the 
poems in the book The Music. The Music was written from 1987-1993, 
which were the years when I was married. In1995, when I sat down to revise 
The Music for publication, I was separated from my wife and profoundly 
estranged from the poems I had to revise. They were written from a reality 
I was no longer participating in, and in which I no longer believed. 
I had strong objections to many of the poems, and my perspective 
had shifted on just about all of them. 

Eventually, I decided that I had to stay true to the poet who
wrote those poems. So the editorial strategy was to let them say what they wanted to say, and just to strengthen them as written constructions. But what was I going to do with all of my objections, changes in outlook, shifts in world view, and my desire to lift the veil of illusion to present what I felt was the actual truth, or truths? All of that energy provoked The Commentaries into existence. And what I was interested in doing in The Commentaries was interrogating those poems. And all of those shifts you are noticing reflect various strategies being employed to take those poems to, or see those poems on, other levels.

There were a couple of books I knew of that had employed commentaries--Spicer's Heads Of The Town Up To The Aether and Cohen's Death of a Lady's Man--and what I remembered from those books is that you couldn't totally play it straight. That there had to be some humour in it, and a multiplicity of perspectives if you were going to generate an interesting text. Otherwise, it would just be interesting for me, but not for a reader. And I guess I was already thinking of it as a supplementary text. Which it eventually became, when it was published four years later.