“A Perpetual Process of Moving in and out of Balance”:
A Conversation Between Sati Mookherjee and Jed Myers

JM: Hello Sati! Thank you for your willingness to engage in a dialog to accompany your poems in Bracken. We’re fortunate to have these two pieces from your manuscript Ars Dialectica, just recently named a finalist for the 2024 Orison Prize.

I am presently reading the manuscript, and while fascinated with the unfolding theme, I am taken with the music of your poetic language—it feels stronger, more resonant, bolder, deeper than most current verse being composed in English. I’m wondering if you’re conscious of the power this music might have to harness the dynamic tensions you mean to address.

SM: Jed, thank you so much. I have long admired your work, and your good words mean the world to me.

I am in fact very concious of what you call the “music” of the poems. The poems sound as they do specifically because of the dynamic tensions you point to. So, what are those tensions, exactly? And how do the poems express them sonically? Well, Ars Dialectica means “the art of the dialectic.” I’m using “dialectic” not so much in the logical or rhetorical sense of a formal argument, but in the psycho-philosophical sense, in which a dialectic is the juxtaposition of what seem to be irreconcilable contradictions. I believe the reconciliation of such oppositions is the existential work of being human.

We find a gut-punch of a dialectic articulated in Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods”:

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

This of course may be the most difficult, seemingly impossible, mindbending – soul-bending – riddle of them all, and yet it’s one we all have to solve, living our way (as Rilke said) into the answer. Dialectics are resolved not by picking one pole (thesis) or the other (antithesis), but by synthesis, by finding the (constantly shifting) point of balance between two opposing truths. I love that Oliver uses semicolons, not commas, to separate the “three things”—they are independent truths. My collection explores other—less wrenching, but still fundamental—dialectics, like the need for solitude vs. the need for connection, of growth vs. acceptance, of the pull of reality vs. the pull of imagination.

The collection, then, describes processes of finding and losing balance. As such, the poems are deliberately a little off-kilter in their meter and rhyme schemes; the meter inconsistent and the rhymes often imperfect. The poems occasionally hit a “sweet spot”—with regular meter and/or perfect rhyming—but don’t stay there for very long.

And yet, the collection begins and ends with poems that are very rhythmic and rhyming—qualities often described as “musical” (even as Alfred Corn in The Poem’s Heartbeat argues that “musical” is an “inaccurate descriptive term” for poetry). There are a couple of reasons that I was going for this effect. I wanted the sensation of rightness, consonance, balance at the start and end of the reading experience, but through the body of the book (pun intended!) a feeling of oscillation.

One of the opening poems, “Avoirdupois,” and the final poem, “Synthesis,” describe hypnopompic and hypnagogic states, respectively, so the poems had to have a lulling, soporific quality. Again, I wanted the whole of the middle to evoke a slight unease, where rhyme and rhythm are unstable, inconsistent, moving in and out of reach.

JM: Sati, it’s really something, how very much awareness of the music, how much thought on it, sense of it, is involved in the creation of these poems. That feeling of “off-kilter,” of “unease,” that you consciously bring to this work (that I can appreciate in the two poems we’ve got in Bracken), resonates with your collection’s introductory quote from Robert Kegan’s The Evolving Self. On the matter of the person finding a developmentally new balance, he writes, “Each balance suggests how the person is composed, but each suggests, too, a new way for the person to lose her composure.”

SM: I’m so pleased you sense the feeling of discomfort I was trying to evoke in the two poems in this issue of Bracken. In “King Tide” I think the effect is achieved in part by the lineation, but also in the way the lines occasionally relax into iambs, but don’t stay there. In “Native and Invasive” I think the feeling comes from the fact that although the poem is a sonnet, the beats per line vary, making for a prickliness, just as “sour grass and blister plant rough the prairie.”

JM: I was powerfully influenced by Kegan’s book myself many years ago. It provided a framework in which evolution, development, therapy, and artistic process all naturally belonged. I want to ask if you find that your own creative process, in music or in poetry, serves you as a kind of cauldron or scaffolding for the resolution, at least briefly, of your own conflicts, ambivalences, or inner contradictions.

SM: “Cauldron” is an interesting metaphor because it suggests transformation, like a chemical reaction, as in a cooking pot, or something magical like alchemy. I think “scaffolding” feels better to me, insofar as the creative process (in writing; I don’t know anything about music) is a way to investigate the subjective experience of tensions, polarities. The poem itself is a space where contradictions can be juxtaposed, and regarded, with or without explicit resolution.

I know Kegan’s work only superficially; I selectively read the parts of The Evolving Self that speak directly to my preoccupations as a writer. I’ve also been so taken, at a personal level, with his formulation of balances, of life as a perpetual process of moving in and out of balance. Certainly that matches my subjective life experiences of parenting, of being a partner, of working at a job—sometimes everything flows smoothly, you and your child or spouse understand one another readily, you briskly cross off your to-do items—and then the next day the gears are gummed up again—the being at cross-purposes, the misunderstanding, having to work late into the evening. It’s really interesting to recast those experiences not as lapses or failures but as the natural flux, the way a sine wave rises and falls around its midline. It was kind of a big deal for me to realize we’re perhaps not meant to live at the steady baseline but to pass in and out of it as we move forward in time.

I’m curious, though, Jed, specifically about how you understand and use Kegan’s book in terms of the psychotherapeutic process and also artistic process? I think these are two distinct questions (with distinct answers)…but is that how you see it?

JM: Sati, I appreciate your curiosity, and the fascination of the matter you note. Are the dialectics of therapeutic process different from those of artistic process? Or, posed another way, how might these two processes be different and how might they be essentially the same?

Regarding therapeutic process (in which I was immersed for about four decades, until my very recent retirement from that career), I learned, perhaps first on reading Kegan while still in training, that conflicts are not so much resolved as reworked, cyclically. What looks like a sinusoidal oscillation from one angle (from the side, so to speak) might be a spiral of recursive progression from another. I recall first recognizing my own long “back-and-forth” between perfectionism and slapdash spontaneity as not simply a back-and-forth but a gradual circular to-and-fro synthesis of the two tendencies, neither so adaptive without the other. I still see this looping in my current life, but now it’s part of a larger evolution, in play in my aspirations to love well, to write well, to better sense when to be more careful or more casual in my communications. 

So you can see I’m tending to recognize this commonality, the dialectical form of growth, in art, therapy, history both personal and cultural.... In poetry, I wonder about the concept of “the turn,” that juncture (which may occur once or more in any given poem) at which perspective, or tone, or meaning shifts, and the poem becomes a process of discovery or of change. Is the poetic turn an instance of dialectical process? I’m not enough of a scholar to know if anyone has discussed this!

In the final stanza of your poem “King Tide” here in Bracken, it seems there is perhaps such a turn: “I turned to home. Leonine / ocean underfoot / growling softly at my boot.” The ferocity of the sea’s destructiveness is now quieted, and seems even perhaps tamed, the self of the poem having gained an enhanced presence with the embrace of all that’s been witnessed. This feels to me like the psychological shift we sometimes go through when we find it possible to reckon with unstoppable forces reshaping our world—when we come to work with rather than against  change or loss. I wonder if you see this in your poem.

SM: Oh my, so much to respond to here! First, by rotating and making three-dimensional my sine wave into a “spiral of recursive progression,” you are describing a helix. Kegan suggests that development itself—as described by Piaget, Erikson, Maslow—is helical.

Your description also makes me think of the work of Nathaniel Mackey, whose Splay Anthem I just read (National Book Award, 2006), who has been writing two poems, “Song of the Andoumboulou” and “Mu,” for almost 40 years. In the introduction to Splay Anthem he explains, “By turns visibly and invisibly present, each is the other’s twin or contagion, each entwines the other’s crabbed advance.” In effect, these two braided, circling strands—the voices of mythic, journeying ancestors—are a helix, a driving, binding DNA, life-making and coded.

As I sit with your questions, I wonder whether these are the defining features that make a poem a poem. First, poetry uniquely and generously makes time and space for the act of observation, including, as we’ve talked about already, the recognition of contradictions and ambivalences.  Second, this art form also allows for movement, transformation, from a self to a “self…enhanced.” My first book, Eye, made the argument that the act of attention is a sacred and creative act. Of course we know from our own empirical experience that what we observe—those inputs—can alter us. We also know from experimental physics that the act of observation can change what’s observed. And this circles us right back (helixes us forward?) to Kegan’s framing of development as a constant renegotiation of “how differentiated the organism is from its life-surround, and how embedded.”

As an aside—I’m realizing that my favorite novels are also deeply engaged in this very work. I’ve always said that I don’t read novels for plot, but I could never articulate to my own satisfaction what I was reading for. Language, yes, but something more. I realize now (thank you for this therapeutic interview, Jed!) that that “something more” is the spiraling / unspiraling—however subtle or grand—of subject-object, or self-other, balance.

Back to poetry. I love your idea of the turn as “an instance of dialectic process.” Is the volta the fulcrum of the balance, Jed? In the introduction to a marvelous book called Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns, its editor Michael Theune explores how a poem relies on its infrastructure to realize its sparkling enchantments. Theune suggests the turn is integral to most kinds of poetry, and explicitly so in what he calls “dialectic poems” —poems that have two turns, from thesis to antithesis, and then from antithesis to synthesis. He uses “dialectic” in the sense of the word that refers to rhetoric and reasoning.

In Ars Dialectica, I nod to that tradition…the opening poem is called “Self Portrait as Thesis and Antithesis,” and the closing poem “Synthesis.” Also, of course it is not an accident that the poems in this collection are largely formal, and largely sonnets (though their voltas cannot always be precisely located, for reasons which are probably clear by now). My intention was to arc from thesis/antithesis to synthesis over the course of the manuscript, and also that each individual poem embodies, or contains, some manner of internal contradiction.

In a later chapter of Structure & Surprise, John Beer speaks explicitly (and elegantly) to dialectics in the Hegelian sense, as you and I have been using the term in our conversation here (Hegel is the source of another of the framing epigraphs to Ars Dialectica). Beer describes how a poem might develop, “finding by turns new possibilities of reconciliation.”

Looking at the poems in Bracken—yes, in “King Tide” I did deliberately end with the feral ocean under the boot, “growling softly.” Has it in fact been tamed? Of course not. Our world changes, and changes again, and we keep trying to find our way home.

There are different flavors of self-other balance the speaker in the poems is grappling with…self as wife, self as mother. Another through-line: self as immigrant. I was born and grew up in the Pacific Northwest, but my parents are immigrants and I spent my childhood summers in India. So there was a constant imbalance for me, both here and in India, between belonging and not-belonging. Both Bracken poems hold that native/foreign tension.

Jed, whether we’re talking about poetry or therapy, I think it all comes down to one thing: making meaning. So often, whether I’m speaking to general audiences or to poets in particular, the questions or comments are about meaning: “I don’t understand poetry…I don’t know what the poem means,” or, if we’re talking craft, “what does it mean for a poem to ‘make sense’?” We come to therapy wondering how to make sense of our lives, our feelings, our actions—or, of how we were acted upon, each of us an “organism in a life-surround.” Kegan, again: “Meaning…is the primary human motion, irreducible.” And poetry, or art, more broadly, is one wonderful, rigorous, human way—just like the wonderful, rigorous, human disciplines of scientific inquiry and faith/spiritual/religious practice—of meaning-making.

Interview conducted by email, January 3–20, 2025

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