[Ttha-potm] "Who's in the Next Room?" TTHA Poem of the Month for June 2008

[Bill Morgan]

	When I say that the poem is best understood as an interior monologue
in the mind of a single narrator and that the presence in the next room is
Death, I don't mean that by articulating those points I think I have
articulated the "meaning" of the poem.  Quite the contrary.  I think I've
articulated the literal syntactic structure, what could be called the
armature of the poem (like the structural framework of a sculpture).  The
"meaning" or what the poem delivers to a reader, the central experience it
offers, is the frisson of perceiving the para-normal--a presence that feels
real but can't be verified by the usual conscious attention to the senses of
sight, hearing, etc.  

Bill Morgan