Meeting

In Defense of Anonymity

(Letter to George B. Moore, denying him an interview)

I don’t know why we write, dear George.

And at times I wonder why we later publish

What we’ve written.

I mean, we throw

A bottle into a sea filled

With garbage and bottles full of messages.

We’ll never know

To whom the seas will deliver it, nor where.

What’s more likely

Is that it will succumb in the storm and the abyss,

In the sand below that is death.

And yet

This grimace of a man adrift isn’t so useless.

Because one Sunday

You phone me from Estes Park, Colorado.

You say you’ve read everything in the bottle

(across the seas: our two languages).

And you want to interview me.

How can I explain that I’ve never given an interview,

That my wish is to be read, not “famous,”

That what is important is the text and not its author,

That I don’t believe in the literary circus?

Then I receive a long telegram

(how much must have been spent to send it).

I can’t answer and can’t not answer.

And these lines come to me. It’s not a poem.

It doesn’t aspire to the privilege of poetry

(it’s involuntary).

And I’m going to use verse, as the ancients did,

As the instrument for

(anecdote, letter, drama, story, agricultural manual)

All that we say in prose today.

To begin not to answer you I will say:

I have nothing to add to what is in my

poems,

I’m not interested in discussing them, my

“place in history” (if I have one) doesn’t concern me

(sooner or later disaster

Awaits us all).

I write and that’s it. I write. I provide half of the

Poem.

Poetry isn’t black signs on a white page.

I call poetry that place of the meeting

With another’s experience. The reader

Will, or will not, fill out the poem I have only sketched.

We don’t read others: we read ourselves into them.

It seems a miracle to me

That someone I don’t know can see himself in my mirror.

“If there is merit in this,” Pessoa said,

“it belongs to the lines and not to their author.”

If by chance he’s a great poet,

He will leave four or five worthwhile poems

Surrounded by failures and discarded drafts.

His personal opinions

Are really of very little interest.

Strange this world of ours: each day

It’s interested more in poets

And less in poetry.

The poet has ceased to be the voice of his tribe,

He who speaks for the speechless.

He’s become one more entertainer.

His drunken bouts, fornications, his medical

History,

His alliances or rights with the other clowns in the circus,

Or with the trapeze artist or elephant trainer,

Have guaranteed him numerous fans

Who no longer need to read the poems.

I keep thinking

That poetry is something else:

A form of love that exists only in silence,

In a secret place between two people,

Almost always between two strangers.

Perhaps you’ve read that Juan Ramon Jimenez

Planned to put out a magazine fifty years ago.

It was going to be called Anonymous.

He would publish texts, not names

And it would be made up of poems, not poets.

Like the Spanish master, I want

Poetry to be anonymous because it’s collective

(that’s how my verses and versions are).

Possibly you’ll say I’m right.

You who’ve read me and don’t know me.

We’ll never see each other, but we’re friends.

If you liked my poems

What’s the difference if they’re mine / another’s / no one’s.

In reality the poems you’ve read are yours:

You, their author, who invent them as you read them.

  ~ Jose Emilio Pacheco