“The Death Issue” December 2015 1

language and kind of professional acquaintance, if you see what I mean. I remember I had
a conversation with Joseph Brodsky once, and he was talking about how strange it was for
a poet to be in another language community, and that was early on when he was writing in
English, and he felt as because he was no longer in a community of Russian speakers,
idiomatic Russian speakers, he had to try and write in English.
OV: are you perhaps more aware of that language now that you're not exposed to it all
the time?
JB: I'm not sure because I don't think it's so much linguistic as about the musicality of
language. I've been reading German poetry while I've been here and also poetry by Rilke
in French, for reasons that I can go into. But I've been thinking more about musicality of
language, so that's one thing. But also, something conceptual about the way German –
German history is full of people who think in a certain way, and it's very interesting to me,
someone coming from an Anglo-Saxon background, Celt or Anglo Saxon, whatever, but
there's a kind of limitation and pragmatism in British culture, you know. It's something
that's served the British empire, and it's also the foundation for certain kinds of scientific
thinking. but I'm doing a lot of thinking about Goethe’s science and the Naturphilosophie,
where the idea of nature isn't so much comparable to the English romantic one that says,
oh here we all are in our towns and cities, and that there is nature somewhere
OV: out there
JB: out there, yeah. I mean, you go there and visit and you theorise it in certain ways, and
I'm a little bit tired of that kind of wilderness, [there’s] less and less, there's still some there.
But again, there's a separation between the natural and the, the
OV: rational, the cultural
JB: all that.
OV: I suppose in a way your poetry has always been quite ambiguous about landscape.
It's not this kind of knowable, observable thing. There's a lot of mystery, even anxiety
JB: yeah, the mystery element I suppose is more to do with metaphysics, or something to
do with our innate desire to read in to the natural world something that is significant to us,
which may or may not be there. I don't know, I'm really kind of following - If I'm exploring
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