This week, I read Vera Pavlova’s poem, “To Converse with the Greats”. In all honesty, it took me a couple times reading it through to begin to understand it. The first two lines read as follows: “To converse with the greats / by trying their blindfolds on” (Pavlova). I understood this as walking in someone else’s shoes and seeing things from their perspective. “to correspond with books / by rewriting them” (Pavlova) are the next two lines. To me, these had the same meaning as the first two; that you have to be able to paraphrase and understand books in order to have a relationship with them.
The rest of the poem reads, “to edit holy edicts, / and at the midnight hour / to talk with the clock by tapping a wall / in the solitary confinement of the universe” (Pavlova). This is where the motif I found didn’t really match the poem anymore. I searched my brain for an answer, but I just can’t seem to figure out what these last lines mean.
