DON MORRILL: Everywhere. I think subject matter is everywhere. It's mostly a way of seeing. You recognize that something is a subject.
Part of the great pleasure of poetry is that it takes what seems not to be subject matter and makes it into subject matter, makes it, connects it to other things to which it's never been connected before, or we're showing it from a different perspective or a different angle. Suddenly a world is opened up out of seemingly nothing.
A poem like Douglas Dunn's Ode to a Paperclip. Here's the most common place thing in the world and yet he builds this grand, wonderful song about this object of infinite connection that does the quotidian work of holding things together. Suddenly the world that we inhabit appears different to us. And we feel somehow we can see into the life of things, the connection between things. And we have a heightened receptivity, we the readers. We become a little bit more like the poet. And we're living in a more again, more alert and kind of intoxicated, or the intoxication of that alertness is what we encounter.
So as I said, I'm a notebook keeper. I always am jotting things down. You just never know-- and the more you do that, the more you get in the habit of seeing and noting, you're driving along in a cab in Rome and you're right going along the Tiber and suddenly you're businesses are flashing by, storefronts or flashing by, and suddenly you come past a terrace of a restaurant and you see parasols, or the umbrellas at the tables there and they're folded up and they flash by very quickly. And you just in that fleeting instant recognize one of them, they look like Venus de Milos, right?
And here's this most commonplace thing in Rome, this most commonplace thing of everyday pleasure. And then this iconic piece of art. What do you do with that connection? I don't know yet, but you've made that connection. And you need to make sure that you note that and that you keep it.
I have encountered people who have, for example, talked about illness, and their own illnesses. And have said, this is not a literary subject for me. They purposely said, this is not a subject. I think that's very insightful that they are essentially saying, I'm going to decide that this is something I'm not going to pay attention to with this lens, with this set of eyes, because for whatever the personal reasons might be. But the reverse of that is you can say, I mean I the history of poetry in many ways is the history of searching out your subject matter.
Moving from whatever we think of as the appropriate poetic subject matter to what is either forbidden or just seemed anti-poetic and non-poetic. It swings back and forth in the same way that it swings back and forth between whatever the official poetic language has been and a forbidden or again, unpromising language, or a vulgar language. And that's where the vitality in writing comes from. And of course, the vitality that we derive from reading works that reveal the world to us through these things.