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THE MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
That poem was written after my first trip to Spain; the Atocha Station
is a railway station in Madrid. My poems aren't usually about my
experiences, because I don't find my experiences very interesting as
a rule. When they are about them, they are so in a very oblique,
marginal way. It was really nothing for me to be leaving this particular
railway station. It meant nothing to me at the time except that I was
in a strange city going somewhere. But it strikes me that the dislocated,
incoherent fragments of images which make up the movement of the
poem are probably like the experience you get from a train pulling
out of a station of no particular significance. The dirt, the noises, the
sliding away seem to be a movement in the poem. The poem was
probably trying to express that, not for itself but as an epitome of
something experienced; I think that is what my poems are about. I
mean it doesn't particularly matter about the experience; the movement of experiencing is what I'm trying to get down. Does that make
it any clearer?
POULIN: Yes, I suppose. The poem, then, is simply about the
experience of leaving a particular station. Is this common among the
rest of your poems? The fact of the poem being its own experience?
ASHBERY: Most of my poems are about the experience of experience. As I said before, the particular occasion is of lesser interest
to me than the way a happening or experience filters through to me.
I believe this is the way in which it happens with most people. I'm
trying to set down a generalized transcript of what's really going on
in our minds all day long. We're sitting here, presumably having a
nice discussion about somebody's poetry, and yet the occasion is
something else also. First of all, I'm in a strange place with lots of
lights whose meaning I don't quite understand, and I'm talking about
a poem I wrote years ago and which no longer means very much to
me. I have a feeling that everything is slipping away from me as I'm
trying to talk about it-a feeling I have most of the time, in fact-and
I think I was probably trying to call attention to this same feeling in
"Leaving the Atocha Station" and in other poems as well. Not because
of any intrinsic importance the feeling might have, but because I feel
that somebody should call attention to this. Maybe once it's called
attention to we can think about something else, which is what I'd like
to do.
POULIN: Everyone speaks about the difficulty of your poetry and
