| About this Mont Blanc.
In July 1816, Shelley got his first glimpse of Mont Blanc from
a bridge in the valley of the Arve, near Chamounix. His poem,
evidently begun almost at once, is terse and complex, full of profound
cosmography and subtle psychology. While I had glimpsed Europe's
highest mountain from the air once or twice, my first sight of it from
the ground was in the summer of 1992, from midway up the valley of the
Dranse -- one of the three streams in the Chablais that bear that
ancient name, specifically the Dranse de Morzine, the one that flows
into Lake Geneva at Thonon. My wife Charlotte and I spent that summer
in the Savoy, the latest part of France to join the Republic, a land
steeply climbing up from the shores of Lake Geneva into the high Alps,
a land of ravines and valleys, each with its own dialect.
Throughout the year that followed our summer in the Haute
Savoie, I had an odd, quiet feeling from time to time that I had to
"do something" about Shelley. Little by little, that something came
to connect with his poem "Mont Blanc," which was at the time very
dimly recollected. Finally, a year later, flying from one place to
another that had nothing to do with Shelley, it suddenly became clear
that I had to write into his poem.
The result is a poem of mine that happens to preserve intact,
in one form or another, all the words of Shelley's poem, in their
original order, but with intrusions and incursions and extrusions of
my own. The poem swells from six pages to forty. The subjects change,
the persons vary, the concerns develop in their own way, and a
different stream flows--north where his flowed west--down to the same
sea.
Any decent poem has room in it for us all. The process of
"writing into" someone else's poem is an act of reading, of listening,
talking. Though formally it is a transgression, and may strike the
reader as an arrogance, or an irrelevance to the sweet original
design, in fact this writing-into turns the act of reading into an act
of conversation.
So Shelley's poem is the landscape through which I could move,
and meet France again, and the Alps, and the summer and the quick
downrush of those streams. The poem I have written in his spaces
pleases me, and seems to be a poem that speaks my mind more clearly
than the fortunes of language usually allow. In the text itself, I
have not especially foregrounded the strategy or methods of
in-reading; it is simply there, letting me go on. The printed book
does not explain what the poem is, other than to say that the poem is
inscribed inside Shelley's.
Enough said.
R.K.
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