The Strange Relation of Poetry to Place

The article analyses my interviews with a number of poets whose works seem to subvert space in various ways. I report my surprise in discovering, within those interviews, a tendency for the poets nonetheless to describe themselves and even their actual poems in national terms. C.D. Wright, for instance, referred in her interview to her having “an American ear,” in spite of her work’s seeming deconstruction of any such broad identities. This leads me to a discussion of the interpellative devices of the nation-state that serve to draw poets into ascribing a national identity to themselves and their work in a range of forums, up to and including the international research interview. But even granting the pervasive ideological mechanisms of the nation-state, it seems clear that the poets interviewed are genuinely reporting back on their experience of compositional work and its drivers, when according a role to the nation and/or geographic space they inhabit. The paper draws on developments in contemporary linguistics to suggest that what they are in fact naming is a localised idiom. It is that which serves to launch them into the kinds of spaces Emily Dickinson evoked, when avowing “I dwell in possibility / a fairer house than prose.” That fairer house – poetic possibility itself – is rooted in idiom.