“The Secret Life of Books”

[Note written for an Indian literary journal at the request, as far as I can recall, of Pradeep Trikha]

I wrote “The Secret Life of Books” in 1987 and, to be honest, after all this time I can no longer remember what occasioned the poem, though it is likely — and appropriate — that it was something I read in a book. I can remember, though, that the poem was intended to be a somewhat playful exploration of a line of thought, which I didn’t necessarily believe myself. Poetry is so often regarded as the expression of the heartfelt feelings and beliefs of the poet and I wanted to show that, like a novel, a poem could equally engage with notions and ideas that the author does not personally hold.

So the poem shouldn’t necessarily be taken too seriously, but to the extent that it is serious, I suppose, as the reference to the selfish gene implies, it explores the notion that human beings are not always, or even at all, the independent actors they take themselves to be, but are the vehicles for forces unknown to themselves. And I suppose that, if the books of the poem are taken as a figure for the sum total of human experience, since nothing is new and all our feelings and actions repeat what innumerable earlier people felt and did, all our lives are in a sense quotations from or allusions to a pre-existing text.

“The Secret Life of Books” appears in Corrupted Treasures and can be read here

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