![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
|
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
|
DP: When I read Songs for Isabella I'm reminded of Romeo and
Juliet. The first poem, "Isabella's Body" has--for me--echoes of
Romeo's "Arise, fair sun and kill the envious moon" but with the
day/night relationship reversed. You long for night and she "brings
the moon up full and naked./silences the sun". Did you have
Shakespeare's play in mind and behind that ideas of the tradition of
suites of love poems?
I was especially thinking about Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and
A Song of Despair. I was thinking about that so much that I built my
poems over the substructure of that, in a similar way to how Bowering
used Rilke in composing his Kerrisdale Elegies. I would read Neruda's
poems and write my poems on top of his. And there was a bit of a
personal joke in that. Neruda, a Chilean, had taken his pen name from
a Czech writer, Jan Neruda. Now I was in love with a Czech woman,
who was twenty-one, so I would write my twenty-one poems over
the top of a love suite written by a Chilean with a Czech pen name.
And I would turn the "song of despair" into a love poem too.
And obviously the "songs" in the title comes from the "song of
despair." I was also trying to write, in a serious way, about that
older man--younger woman love affair. That was different from
Neruda. Neruda was a young man writing about a young love.
I think he was nineteen or twenty when he wrote that book.
The woman I was in love with was around the same age as
Neruda's lover had been, but the poet was a lot older.
That makes it quite different from the Romeo and Juliet situation as well.
KN: I don't think I consciously set out to write a nocturne, but I think it's perfectly reasonable to see it that way. Night certainly predominates. Other times of day are referred to, and sometimes written about, but probably three-quarters of the poems have a nighttime setting. The poem in the "song of despair" slot is called "Last Morning" and is about the nights ending, the end of the affair. Daylight sends us back to our separated lives. Night is celebrated as the time of lovers, and that's pretty traditional, as is, I think, my identifying Isabella with the moon. |