I wrote this poem one morning while seated at the desk of the late poet James Merrill in Stonington, Connecticut, where I had been generously granted a fellowship that allowed me to live and work in what had been Merrill's house. I had been reading the poems of C.D. Wright who had died suddenly and unexpectedly, and whom I had known and whose work I esteem. I was struck by the way these two poets were somehow alive to me there, in that house--their voices in my head, their poems so vivid and indicative of their fine minds and sensibilities that it seemed absurd to me that they weren't actually alive. This poem is written in a voice I think of as posthumous and it imagines the speaker as being gone, but still capable of recollection, still holding onto memory. It is also based on Wright's marvelous poem "Our Dust."
Mark Wunderlich on "To Whom It May Concern:" |
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