An epigraph is a kind of capture that is also a kind of release. Lines from someone’s poem leave a mark on you, and you set out to respond to them. Or you discover lines that chime uncannily with something you’ve written, and juxtapose the two. Is this trespass or tribute? It may seem that two or three lines is a small and respectful borrowing. And yet implicitly you take possession through the connections you establish between another person’s words and your own. The lines you borrow are a metonym for the poem in which they occur, indeed for the poet you are implicitly claiming kinship with. Something not yours takes hold of you, but it also releases new potential in something you think of as yours. Thereby your work is enlarged; so thereby are you.
Thoughts of capture and release are apt in the present instance. My poem “Captivity” draws as its epigraph these haunting lines from Louise Glück’s “Liberation”: “it is impossible / to kill and question at the same time.” “Captivity” was written before I had read “Liberation.” At some point when I was reading “Liberation” its connection with what I was after in “Captivity” struck me with force, and there was no looking back. The poems were now, in my mind, inextricably linked. This led, as the opening line of “Captivity” makes evident (by responding directly to the epigraph) to alterations in my poem, including to one that, as I hope to show, might have been a mishearing of my own voice.
There is serendipity when an epigraph, unsought, is found. There is also a kind of delight, even a feeling of affirmation. With it, too, a concern to retain the fidelity of your poem, and to not allow the connections that you have established, through the epigraph, to undermine your poem’s autonomy. This is of course a concern that poets must feel with or without an epigraph: it is in the nature of things that most experiences, thoughts and feelings are not uniquely yours. Somebody has had them before you, and written about them. Yet, the peculiar combination of these that become your poem, must make it distinctive. Nor can your poem ride piggyback on another’s.
“Captivity” is true to the surface facts that it describes. Through the encounter with an unheeding bird, it is about the dichotomy between a full experiencing of something and the urge to record it by means of a camera—or, for that matter, to pin it down in real time through words, through labels. Does the capturing of experience come in the way of experience? Does the holding of something in posterity, or the attempt to do so, interfere with experiencing it in the quick? These are not rhetorical questions. Their answers are not obvious and may at best be conditional. They tease us out of thought as Keats’ Grecian urn does.
Though “Captivity” ends in something like paralysis (as does “Liberation”) I now slightly regret its final line: “You are paralyzed.” It suggests the fatal indecision of a rabbit caught in a hunter’s flashlight, and snaps the poem shut. This is a plausible way for the poem to conclude but I was actually more interested in the kind of creative suspension in which an either/or gives way to a neither. You are with the bird in the moment, seeking to neither see it more clearly nor shutter it into your camera, seeking indeed nothing at all that would interfere with the moment. This is less paralysis than a kind of shimmering equilibrium.
It might be that the final line came in as a part-echo of the concluding lines of “Liberation”: “And the hunter, who believed / whatever struggles / begs to be torn apart: // that part is paralyzed.” This is a delicate but startling culmination of the dichotomy in Glück’s poem between hunter and victim, both of whom exist within the speaker. But “Captivity” is about another duality, and about a refusal to try and resolve it through choice. This refusal might look like stasis but it points to something else: a stillness that finds a home in poetry. It is a stillness in which the exercise of choosing becomes irrelevant, subsumed as it is by the moment’s fullness. There is no hankering to move off in one direction or another. There is a dynamic tentativeness in this (as opposed to a passive or lazy one) a state of questioning in which there is no urgent seeking for definitive answers, no “irritable reaching after fact” (again Keats). The penultimate line of “Captivity” ends with “questioning,” and that perhaps is where the poem should have ended.
I wonder that I didn’t see this more clearly at the time “Captivity” was being written. Or rather, having seen it, that I chose to conclude with an echo of a poem I admired even though the connotations of paralysis were unnecessary to my poem. Perhaps this happened in a moment of captivation rather than release. This is something to watch out for, because as writers of poetry it is very likely that we are readers of it as well, and that we read poetry not casually but with appreciation. Inevitably our reading feeds into our praxis.
