The Happiness Experiment

Lisa Fishman

An author’s statement

Q: The Happiness Experiment starts with the long, unnumbered sequence, “Midsummer,” and ends with the single-poem section, “Infinity.” Is that movement suggestive of your experience of time as theater, myth, insect body, alchemy, self-divison, self-doubling, synchrony, gestation, figment?
A: Yes.

Q: The poems feel pressed into argument, premonition and song by the apparational forces of Renaissance masking, Romantic making, nursery rhyming and “the rural through a sudden view.” Do your poems come forward from the echo chamber of thought and lyric?
A: If so, not systematically.

Q: In some of your poems, such structures of meaning as those invoked by calendars, horoscopes and alphabets, for example, are felt to be mercurial and liminal. Do they enable transformation, transcendence?
A: NO. Transformation and transcendence are not sought, but rather transmutation and occasional immanence. I like Shelley’s notion of “transitory brightness” as a way of describing something about poetry.

Q: The obscuring of the self and its doubles (Queen Elizabeth, King Lear) under conditions of pregnancy and quest, and the gains of misreading the Italian of Dante, are summoned in the twin poems, “Oscura Selva.” The houses of memory, theater of eros and myths of naming emerge in “Midsummer” and other sections. Throughout, the seductions of vision present themselves in ways sympathetic to Shelley and Blake, who, among others, inhabit your book as ______?
A: Internal necessity and interior paramour.

Q: In a complex and dynamic ecology, the raw materia of the physical world jostles the interplay of act and vision by way of the invention of insects, the staking of apple trees, the marking of birdcalls.
A: I suppose so.

Q: In the penultimate section, “Creature,” live the spirits of Lorine Niedecker and John Clare cross-written on the ghosts of Hopkins and John Dee.
A: Okay.

Q: In your poems, is it true that the “animal life / already is felt to be at hand,” as the poem containing the book’s title remembers or foretells?
A: Sometimes.