Primarily, “The Delirium Waltz” is the title of a poem in Blizzard of One by Mark Strand. Strand has been a tremendous influence on my poetry and my thinking in general. At my family’s summer cottage on Kelleys Island, I remember floating out on the lake in a giant black intertube, entertaining myself with a copy of Strand’s Reasons for Moving/Darker/The Sargentville Notebook. 
The bizarre scenarios, artful stanzas, off-beat sense of humor, and haunting imagery… I couldn’t get enough of his poetry. In a way, Strand demonstrates the power of poetry to literally create worlds; I wanted that power in my own writing. I had to seal the book in a Ziploc bag for transport to and from my floating spot a hundred feet or so off the rocky shoreline. Even with this highly technical protective measure, the book became damp, and its crinkled, wavy pages are now a part of my reading experience each time I come back to the text. The memory of floating in a delirious suspension of summer, water, and words is a part of that book and a part of me. While “Delirium Waltz” is not my favorite poem of Strand’s, the title has always captured my interest, and I chose it for this web site as a sort of tribute to Strand. A way of saying thanks for the words that are interwoven with my growing-up years.
When I picture a delirium waltz, I see people dressed in gowns and tuxedos, tumbling and gliding around a grand ballroom. In fact, that is the central event in Strand’s poem. Guests with names like Muffie and Glenn come and go, in and out of the ballroom, dancing and dancing. The dancing happens in pantoums, but prose stanzas are spliced in between each pantoum, as though to narrate the events. The speaker’s memory in pantoum form is very clear-cut, but in prose form it is… well… delirious: “And the rush of water was suddenly loud as if a flood were loosed upon the ballroom floor. I seemed to be dancing alone into the absence of all that I knew and was bound by, […] the smear, the blurred erasure of differences, the end of self, the end of whatever surrounds the self. All that I saw was a vast celebration of transparence, a clear dream of nothing. And I kept on going.” Or, are the events themselves delirious, prior to the narrative account? Herein I find the cross-genre problem of narrating a moment as the moment happens, and this problem is really exposed in Strand’s poem—the problem of bearing witness to incomprehensible, indescribable events.
Like the poem, a delirium waltz is the central event of my life, tumbling, chaotic, set to music and choreographed in the most ambient, unchoreographed way possible. In Strand’s poem, one senses an astounding confluence of time and bizarre weather. He writes, “We moved in the drift of innumerable notes, abstractions and histories and as we passed over the ground it formed for us the shape of the earth. We moved toward the future, or was it the past?” It’s all very disorienting. It’s delirious.
The dictionary provides some great synonyms for “delirium” – frenzy, fury, hysteria, craze, folly… What words could better describe my life? For every loose end I tie, I sense that nine others have come undone. From school to work to family to friends, I always come in under the bar I have set for myself. Yet, what does it mean to set a frenzied state of hysteria… to music? In 1867, the famous composer Johann Strauss II tried to capture that very paradox in “Delirium Waltz” (you can listen to it here, with a few interruptions). It is a beautiful piece that flirts with order and chaos, just as the waltzing folk do in Strand’s poem, “Holding each other and turning and turning.” The etymology of “delirium” offers one last tidbit of meaning. The word comes from the Indo-European root phrase “de + lira” meaning “out of the furrow.” For me, the furrow represents the narrow thinking and false rhetoric that we all encounter in day-to-day life. Personally, I’d rather be out of the furrow, in a state of disorderly delirium, than stuck in the plowman’s linear rut.
