Paulann Petersen

We write to discover, to define

— moment to moment to moment —

who we are, who we are becoming.

This happens as we write.

Because a few direct questions can offer insight, I'm happy to present Fast Five — short interviews with my favorite writers. Life may be short but who doesn't have time for five questions?  

Paulann Petersen, Oregon’s Poet Laureate, is a former high school teacher and author of five poetry collections and four chapbooks. She has led workshops and given readings in hundreds of places — from Powell's in Portland to Omsania University in India — and in nearly every nook and cranny of Oregon. A Portland native, she is a member of Friends of William Stafford and organizes the annual Stafford birthday readings. Petersen’s most recent book is The Voluptuary, published in 2010.

You are an accomplished poet and teacher, and now Oregon's esteemed poet laureate. What do you know now that you didn't know when you first started writing poems?

I know now what I couldn't have possibly known when I began writing poems: how the process itself would buoy and sustain and inform my life.  We write to create ourselves, to discover, to define — moment to moment to moment — who we are, who we are becoming. This happens as we write. Not until I was immersed in the process could I begin to realize its potent effect.

You've been called a writer of embodied poetics, and have said, "I believe in body poems, poems that rise from the body."  Would you please elaborate?

A poem is a creature of sound. A poem comes to us, all poems come to us, through the oral tradition. Yes, a poem has a certain life as mere text on a page. But that life as text is only a fraction of the poem's complete life. A poem can't assume its complete life until it's been given voice.   

A poem has a sound form, it's comprised of a sequence and combination of sounds. A poem has musical devices. A poem has kinetic energy. A poem has risen from the physicality of its maker, and it speaks to the physicality of a listener.

For me, writing a good poem means writing an embodied poem.

You've written five full-length poetry books and taught hundreds of classes. What makes a poem work?

Sound form. Compression. Line integrity. Unpredictability — a little or a lot. A sense of incipient recklessness. A sense of conveying something that's coded in the blood. These make a poem work.

A good poem is a vehicle for transformation. It transforms the listener/reader as she or he hears or reads it.  A good poem, in the process of its making, transforms the poet.

Of all your poems, which is your favorite? Why?

Hmmmmm. I avoid hierarchies when I can. Vertical structures are dicey at best. (Best. There's one of those vertical structure words!) So picking a favorite poem: that's a dicey proposition. But there are two poems that I read frequently when I'm giving readings. And both of them sonically and conceptually feel right to me, even after repeated readings. They are among a group that feel like embodied poems, time after time.  "Appetite"  and "Bloodline." 

Bloodline

The moon is wet nurse

to roses. She suckles

each soft-mouthed poppy.

Blame her for menses.

Rail at her for the craving

to binge and purge.

Please her when you choose

to delay the day for planting,

biding your time

until night has fattened

her silver torso. Praise her

when the fleck of seed

poked down into damp dark

takes hold and swells.

Any girl-child is always

her offspring.

Upbraid her for your daughter's

sass and door-slams,

that hot hurry to be what most

differs from you.

Long ago, the moon decided

on a pathway against the route

stars take. No one else

would dare to walk

the black sky backward.

- Paulann Petersen

I'm a collector of words. What are your favorites?

I'm smitten with noun lists. I use them when I'm teaching writing workshops (workshops designed to generate new writing from participants). One of the noun lists I give to participants contains nouns I took from my own work. I often remark that I couldn't have a noun list that didn't contain blood, magpie, magnolia, ink, salt, skin and moon.

Bonus Question: Is there something distinct about an Oregon poet? or Oregon poetry?

Oregon poetry, like Oregon itself,  is characterized by remarkable variety.

Oregon is mountains, ocean, high desert, rain forest. It's the hotsprings in Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge, the Church of Elvis in downtown Portland, pelicans on Klamath Lake, herons in oaks Bottom on the Willamette. Oregon is abundance; it's variety, vast and gorgeous. Our state teaches its poets inclusiveness and gratitude. Oregon encourages a wide embrace, and its poetry does indeed have a very wide embrace.

Another distinction: my bet is that there are, given our total population, as many good poets per capita in Oregon as anywhere on earth.

Kelli Russell Agodon

Because five questions can lead to endless insight, I'm happy to introduce you to Kelli Russell Agodon. Her poetry collection, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, is easily my favorite book of 2010.

Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of two poetry books, and is editor of Crab Creek Review. Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room was published this month and is dedicated to "those who write letters to the world."

I was delighted to see that many of these poems — and the book title — were influenced by your stay at the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, Oregon, which is very near where I live. Which came first, the poem-letters, or the Emily Dickinson Room?

The poem-letters. I had been working on the collection for about two years when I stayed in the Emily Dickinson Room at the Sylvia Beach Hotel on a writing retreat with friends. It was in that room where I realized what I was writing about and was able to focus my collection and begin to write the poems that were missing. The title poem, “Letter from the Emily Dickinson Room” was written in that corner hotel room looking out at the Oregon coast realizing how much I craved calmness.

How would you describe your writing style?

If you’re asking about my style as in my method or process then my writing style is to write as many poems as I can and revise the ones I like best.  (And to try not to over-revise, something I’m quite good at.  I have killed many a poem by over-revising it and sucking out all of its energy and every spark.)

If you’re asking about my writing style as in characteristics or what is my voice or distinct form and/traits, then my writing style is conversational, sometimes surreal, sometimes narrative, sometimes humorous, usually accessible and with a dash of darkness for kicks.

Or maybe my writing style is glasses plus casual Fridays and black boots.

What is your favorite poem in this collection? Why?

Great question!  I like having to think about this as my easy answer would be, “They are all my favorites…”  But if I have to narrow it down to one, I’d say, Questions at Heaven’s Gate is probably my favorite because it was an underdog poem that I stood up for.  When my manuscript was accepted, I received some great advice on edits and suggestions on what poems to take out to make the collection stronger. This was one of the poems that was on the suggested “remove list.”

I remember feeling a deep gut instinct inside me that said: This poems needs to be in the collection.  On a personal level, this is very deeply an autobiographical poem about my father’s death and who he was, and in a certain way, how I’ve dealt with it (imagining him speaking with God, etc.). I love that I had to speak up for this poem and was glad I did.  I think it’s my favorite because it was almost not included.

Questions at Heaven's Gate (an excerpt)

I

When my father meets God

he says, Let me introduce myself . . .

When my father meets God

he says, Am I too early? Too late?

When my father meets God

he says, Do you serve drinks here?

When my father meets God

he says, It was easier not to believe.

When my father meets God

he says, I can see my house from up here.

When my father meets God

there is only the sound of my father

falling.

When my father meets God

he says, I can breathe again.

When my father meets God

rain returns to the city.

As an editor of a literary journal choosing from hundreds of poems to publish, what do you love? What do you loathe? 

I love poems that surprise me (and not in that shocking, swearing, taboo words/subjects way), but in fresh language, new images and putting the extraordinary into the ordinary. Anyone can write a poem about a shocking topic and have it stand out because it’s about a tragic occurrence or because of the nature of the subject, but I’m interested in writers who can write about a shopping trip, the forest, an experience in a way that connects me and makes me stop and pay attention.

There’s little I loathe beside people being unkind or poor manners. There’s more to love in poetry than to dislike.

I’m a collector of words and have my students collect words, too. What are your favorite words?

Hipsway, lollygagging, inky, salsa, penlight, oaf, shenanigans, tangle, moth, humdrum, hipbones, madronas, whiplash, bamboozle, numbskull, foxtrot, and prayer (though not necessarily in that order).

My least favorite word is filibuster. 

Mark Thalman

An English teacher for 26 years, Mark Thalman has an impressive body of work as a Poet-in-the-Schools, an assistant poetry editor for Northwest Review, and a board member of the Portland Poetry Festival. His book of poems was published this summer. He was born and raised in Eugene, Oregon and now lives in Forest Grove, Oregon.

Congratulations on the publication of Catching the Limit! You have been widely published in journals and anthologies. Is this your first book?

Yes. It’s been a long journey getting this manuscript published. Holding the book in my hands almost doesn’t seem real. Like so many writers, it’s difficult finding a publisher or winning a contest. This manuscript has been a semi-finalist for the Walt Whitman Award and a few other contests. Four years ago, it was selected to be part of Bedbug Press – Fairweather Books, Northwest Poetry Series.

Why is Catching the Limit dedicated to your parents and grandparents?

My parents were always very supportive and positive about getting a good education. When I was growing up, they gave me a lot of opportunities: snow skiing, playing golf, fishing, guitar lessons, taking us on trips around Oregon. My mom read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to me when I was about five. She loved taking my sister and me to the public library to check out books. My grandparents, who were great story tellers, used to own the Willamette Pass Ski Area and had a cabin at Odell Lake. That’s where many of the poems in the second section of the book take place.

Please tell us about your writing process.

I write like an artist paints. (If you visit my website, you can also see some of my paintings.) Some poems may take a few months to finish, others have taken 16 years. A lot of times, a poem will be almost finished, but I am waiting to learn or discover what it needs to give it that finishing touch. Some poems go through a lot of revisions, others don’t. If I can write a few good lines each time I sit down, I’m satisfied.

What is your writing style?

I write lyrical poetry. Each word has its own music, and a poem has to sound right and have a presence on the page. I like to have internal rhymes, but not hard rhymes at the end a line. I love good similes and metaphors. It’s probably just easier to read you a few lines from “North Umpqua, Summer Run” so you get the idea.

In a smooth flash of motion,
deft as a blade, the fish strikes
and the surface explodes.

Trembling violently in air,
amid spray and foam,
the steelhead blazes like a mirror catching sun,
falls back, extinguishing the fire,
only to lift again,
a flame out of water.

Your poems have such a rich sense of landscape and place – specifically Oregon. Do you consider yourself a regional poet, a nature poet?

Someone said that all writing in some sense is regional, but when I sit down to write, I don’t think of myself as a regional or nature poet. Catching the Limit is about the Oregon Coast, the Willamette Valley, and the Cascades. Sure, I am interested in how a whole forest continually renews itself as in my poem, “In the Silence of a Pine Cone Falling”, or how different trees decompose in “Blowdown." There is a lot of nature in the book, but hopefully the themes and the “human condition” will transcend any regional boundaries.

Your work wonderfully combines your specific experiences/observations with universal understanding. How do you do this, and is it intentional?

(Laughs briefly and good naturedly.) Sometimes “art” happens! I can only think of a couple of poems where it is intentional. Such as the last line in “On the Dock at Evening” where the narrator says, “I have lived my life for just this moment.” That line is a response to James Wright’s well known poem “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm . . .” where his narrator claims, “I have wasted my life.”

One of my favorite poems is one I read several years ago in Ingrid Wendt’s,  Starting with Little Things: A Guide to Writing Poetry in the Classroom. I’ve used your poem, “Born in Oregon” in numerous writing workshops with youth, and it was such a treat last spring to meet you and hear the poem in person.

Born in Oregon

Some days I am a fir. Squirrels eat from my limbs.
Other days I am a rhododendron. My genes are coded
as cuneiform. Toadstools and moss grow in the caverns
of my lungs. I am accustomed to the sky,
gray as wax paper.

What is your favorite poem in Catching the Limit and why?

I don’t have a favorite. It depends on my mood. My poems are like children, and I try to treat them equally. I like it when people tell me what their favorite is. Everyone has their own experiences and perceptions they bring to a poem.

Do you have a tight group of poet friends? And how would you suggest others cultivate a writing network?

Yes, I have a group of poet friends, most who I’ve known for a long time. However, people have become so spread out, its really the Internet that makes staying in touch possible. Over the years, my wife, Carole, has become one of my best editors, because she’s seen so much of my work and understands what I am trying to do. As far as cultivating a writing network, if a person attends writing workshops, they might find some like minded poets who want to start their own poetry group.

Where can we get your book?

Presently, Catching the Limit, can be ordered from my website, markthalman.com. Unfortunately, Tony Gorsline, my publisher, passed away this summer from cancer. With Tony’s passing, Bedbug Press – Fairweather Books did not survive, so I don’t have any small press distribution at this time. However, I will be giving some readings at bookstores, and I’ll be signing books after my reading at Wordstock (in Portland). In a few months, you should be able to find it on Amazon.com. However, if you purchase it from my site, you will always get an autographed copy, and I’ll ship it to you right away.

Rhett Iseman Trull

I want to go back to the winter I was born and warn you

that I will flood through your life like acid

and you will burn yourselves on me

— from The Real Warnings Are Always Too Late

 Rhett Iseman Trull's first book of poetry,  The Real Warnings, won the 2008 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2008, and Prairie Schooner. She received her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she was a Randall Jarrell Fellow. She and her husband publish the literary journal Cave Wall in Greensboro, North Carolina.

 In choosing your book for the 2008 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, Sheryl St. Germain says “Open this book up anywhere and you'll find a poem of fierce and uncompromising energy and insight . . . I've never read a poet who understands more fully the brutal paradoxes of love and of loving damaged things.”  What influences or inspirations led you to poetry, and to these ‘fierce’ poems?

My biggest influence always has been reading. In fact, before I could read, I used to listen to my storybook record of Disney’s The Fox and the Hound over and over. I can quote it still: near the end, there’s this moment that goes, “Sometimes, on warm summer nights, Tod and Vixey would leave the forest and climb the hill overlooking Copper’s house. As Tod looked fondly down at his friend, the voices of a little fox and a little hound seemed to echo in the breeze…”

That sentence did something to me as a child. I could feel the words go straight to my heart and move me in some mysterious and vital way. And I think all of my writing, ever since, has been an attempt to recapture the kind of feeling that ran through me when I first heard those words.

I started by writing short stories and novels. But when I was twelve, I discovered poetry. I was in a summer musical, Annie. I got to be an orphan because I was little and cute, not because I could sing. I wanted to sing, though. I yearned for that world of musicals. More than anything, I wanted to be a Broadway star, but I knew I didn’t have the talent for that path. Singing in musicals lit that same fire the The Fox and the Hound ending did. I think what led me to poetry was that need to sing.

An older girl in the musical that summer showed me her notebook of poems, which she used as a kind of journaling device, pouring her deepest wishes and pains into these poems. I had never thought of poetry that way, as a kind of whole-body song on paper. I was hooked. I went home and started my own poetry notebook.

I like that word Sheryl St. Germain used: “fierce.” I’m honored by that word. Emotions that are fierce are hard to capture in language, and yet that’s why I write poems: that driving need to try to turn whatever I feel with ferocity into some kind of music.

What is your favorite poem in this collection? Why?

That’s a tough one because each poem is special to me for different reasons, and my favorite of the moment changes often. Right now, Heart by Heart the House is my favorite, I think. I wrote it as a challenge and promise to myself to try to live more in the moment. I tend to be a catastrophic thinker, always worried about what awful thing is going to happen next. Most of us live that way, with our minds more in the future or past than the present. I’m learning to love the moment and enjoy the moment more. Heart by Heart the House is a kind of love poem to my husband, Jeff, and to our life, to my life in the moment. 

How do you support your poetry habit? Do you have a ‘day job’?

Right now, my “day job” is the non-paying day-and-night job of publishing a poetry journal, Cave Wall. But over the past six years, while trying to complete and polish the poems in The Real Warnings, I’ve had several jobs, from teaching undergraduates at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, to working in my local comic book shop, Acme Comics. I miss teaching and hope to return to it soon.  

You are the editor of Cave Wall, a literary journal. How do you balance your work promoting and publishing other writers with your need to do your own writing and promote yourself? 

I love working on Cave Wall. I love every aspect of it: discovering poems and art that move me, figuring out the best layout, mailing a finished issue into the world, calling bookstores, opening the mailbox to find a huge stack of submissions. I spend more time on Cave Wall than on anything else in my life. And although it has taken away from my own writing time, I think it’s helped me grow as writer. It’s led me to appreciate more the moments I do have to work on my own writing so that I use that time more wisely.

Before I started Cave Wall, I was putting a lot of pressure on myself, feeling extra critical of every word I wrote. I still get that way sometimes, but Cave Wall has connected me with so many poetry-lovers and poets—not just those we end up publishing but all those who submit their work and all our readers—that gratitude has swept over me and outshined the self-anger and frustration. My writing now comes from a better place inside me. And just realizing how huge and varied the world of poetry is has inspired me. So I think the loss of some writing time is a small price to pay for that feeling of gratitude, inspiration, and awe that Cave Wall has awakened in me.

Balance is difficult both to achieve and to maintain. As soon as one finds it, watch out: something else is just around the corner, coming at you, and you will have to learn to balance all over again. But my advice to all writers out there who are trying to juggle many things (jobs, family, kids, etc.) is to try to catch the frustration as it rises and turn it into gratitude. It’s easier and more fulfilling to write from a place of gratitude. 

What poets would you like to emulate? What fiction has your interest?

I have way too many favorite writers to name here, but I will list some. I read a thousand times more than I write, in all styles and all genres. In fact, if I say I’m going to sit down and write this afternoon, that means I’m going to sit down with a stack of books and read and hope something moves me to write. Some of the poets whose work I return to often are Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Doty, Christine Garren, Jack Gilbert (especially The Great Fires), Jeffrey Harrison, Edward Hirsch (especially Wild Gratitude), Richard Hugo, A. Van Jordan, William Matthews, Theodore Roethke, William Butler Yeats, Robert Wrigley (especially Lives of the Animals), Adam Zagajewski.

Lately, I’ve been learning a lot from the poetry of Robert Dana, Sarah Lindsay, Erika Meitner, Jud Mitcham, Liz Robbins, Alison Stine, Natasha Trethewey, Cecilia Woloch…you can’t go wrong with any of those. My favorite novels include Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres, A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

I love short stories, as well, and have been spending a lot of time lately with beautiful stories by Holly Goddard Jones and Kevin Wilson. Also, one of the best short stories I’ve read recently was published earlier this year in the journal One Story. It’s called Hurt People by Cote Smith. I think it was his first published story, and I can’t wait for more by him.

I read many comic books, as well. My favorite recent titles are Alias by Brian Michael Bendis, Cassanova by Matt Fraction, Y the Last Man by Brian K. Vaughn, and Fables by Bill Willingham. 

I’m a collector of words and often have my students collect words, too. Do you have any favorite words?

The words that come to mind are the names of my cats: Charm, Chulita, and Pita; and Chulita’s nickname, Boombadoom. That’s weird. Maybe it’s because I say those words more often than other words throughout the day and associate them with happiness. Theodore Roethke wrote that poetry is giving a cat its right name, or something like that. So yeah, I’m gonna go with: Chulita, Pita, Charm.  

You’ve done many interviews and readings since your book was published. What question hasn’t been asked that you’d like to answer?

I haven’t been asked about the importance of revision. For me, the majority of the writing process, and the place where the magic happens, is revision. It’s not unusual for me to work on a poem for years before it’s ready for an audience.

There’s a sequence of poems in my book called Rescuing Princess Zelda. It’s made up of nine poems that take place in the adolescent wing of a state mental institution. From start to finish, I worked on that series for ten years. When I wrote the first poems for it, I didn’t know it was a series, so I guess I should clarify that I worked on the poems in it for ten years and worked on it as a series for about six years. I’m not quick to let go of a poem. I like to slow down, let a poem sit in a drawer for awhile, and return to it many times over many months to see what emerges.

Every now and then a poem will spill out almost whole, almost polished, in a first draft. This happens for me with maybe one out of every 25 poems I write. And that’s a great feeling, a boost in confidence and energy.

But I think, maybe, the more rewarding feeling for me is when a poem I’ve worked on for months, even years, comes together and all that time spent pouring over dictionaries and research, all that time switching around the syntax, pays off. The majority of my poems need that kind of time to find their right shape and language. I am a big believer in the transformative gifs that come from time and distance. 

Rick Campbell

Because a few direct questions can lead to endless insight, I'm happy to present Fast Five — short interviews with my favorite writers, and chances to win great books.

Rick Campbell is the director of Anhinga Press, teaches English at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida, and helps to run Other Words, an annual writing conference held at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida. He's written four poetry books: Dixmont, The Traveler’s Companion, Setting The World In Order, and A Day’s Work. He’s won a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Fellowship, and two fellowships from the Florida Arts Council. Born in Pittsburgh, he now lives in Gadsden County, Florida, with his wife and daughter.

You make good friends in the strangest places. Rick and I met at a high school reunion in which our spouses were reliving their adolescence. Desperate for conversation that traveled beyond the 1970s, Rick and I found common ground in poetry. Since then, we've enjoyed an ongoing conversation about writing, publishing and poems. 

We often talk about the music of poetry. Please, tell me, what makes a poem work?

For me, for most I guess, there are a lot of things that make the poem work. Music — whether it’s rhythm, a more traditional idea of beat or meter, or maybe some larger sense of sound, as in composing a song, a symphony maybe — it’s hard for me to define “music” in a poem. It’s like that saying I know it when I hear it. But music isn’t all that’s important; I think a poem needs to make a statement. It needs to say something about the world we live in. It has to tell us, maybe not a truth, but some sort of revelation. When I read a poem I want to say “yes,” that’s how it is, and it’s even better if the poem reveals something to me that I did not know, or that I had not seen before in the way it’s revealed to me. If a poem is going to work, then lots of things, maybe everything has to work. And, for me, not many poems really “work.”  

You are an accomplished poet, professor and publisher. What do you know now that you didn't know when you were first writing poems?

In the beginning, when I was 25, I didn’t know anything about poetry. I wanted to write songs. It took me a long time to become even a pretty good poet.  I could see what was good in what I was reading, and I read a lot of poetry, maybe 15 or 20 books a week in those first few years.  But that does not answer the question.   I guess the most important thing that I have learned is to trust the words, to let them come out and then see what happens. In the beginning I tried to force the words into the idea of the poem. Now I know that the words create the poem and the ideas.

Some people say "first thought best thought." Others edit a poem into place. What is your writing process?

I usually write the entire poem during the first draft. Then, if the poem seems worth it, worth hanging on to, I edit and rewrite it until it seems finished. There’s a poem in Setting the World in Order, “The Poem in the River” that I started in 1978 and finished in 1996. I worked on it in three different towns over 2000 miles apart. That’s pretty extreme, but I write and I rewrite. I think it’s sort of combination of first though best thought and think and think again. That phrase is a pretty dangerous thing for a teacher for a teacher to tell a young student. Beginning poets need to work poems for a long time, and take a careful look at each word, each step of the poem’s composition.

Finish this sentence: If not a poet, I'd be . . .

a centerfielder, an itinerant fisherman? I don’t know what I would I have been. I’m not sure I would even have gone to college if I didn’t want to write. I didn’t start college until I was 25; my first major was in anthropology, but I don’t know what it would be like to be one. And I was never good enough to play pro baseball, so I would have starved as a centerfielder.

What is your favorite poem in Dixmont, and why?

Tough one. But I think it’s Intelligent Design and the Click Beetle. 

. . . The beetle clicks, leaps, falls, assesses its heads

or tails state, then either crawls off somewhere

or begins again. If grand design

were measured by a success ratio, wouldn't

a simple rollover mechanism be a better idea?

The universe is full of little jokes and games

of chance. I had only a minute chance of getting

throat cancer and I got it. Then I had a 90% chance

of being cured, and maybe I am. The

odds were so slim that the drunk

who hit my wife's car that afternoon

on a lonely country road

would be speeding east as she drove west

on a blue May day . . .

I like the way it moves, how it gets so many things into one poem. I hope everything in it works. When I was first trying to write poems I was often told that I had too many things in one poem. I probably did back then, but I also believed that if I could do it right, then I could make a lot of things hang together and get the poem to leap and then land with grace.  I think that poem does it, and that’s why I like it best. In truth though, the poem I like best is always the one I just wrote.

Bonus Question: I'm a word collector. What are your favorite words?

I like provenance, epiphany, redemption, but I don’t know if I have a favorite. A friend and I counted how many times river appears in Setting the World in Order and it was like 33 times or something, but I love rivers far more than the word river.  I like “B Flat,” but only when I’m playing that harp.

Ce Rosenow

gratitude

a bit of sea foam

in my open hands

Because a few direct questions can lead to endless insight, I'm happy to present Fast Five — short interviews with my favorite writers.   

Ce Rosenow is president of the Haiku Society of America and the publisher of Mountains and Rivers Press. She lives in Eugene, Oregon where she teaches writing and literature at Lane Community College and the University of Oregon. Pacific is her fifth poetry collection.  

In the introduction to Pacific, Michael Dylan Welch says, “The greatness of the ocean is at once calming and frightening, repelling and attractive, and these poems dwell in such tensions.” What influences or inspirations led you to poetry?

I think the primary reason I was drawn to poetry was a combined love of language and realization that some kinds of knowledge and understanding are beyond the scope of language. Poetry not only accommodates those two responses to language but embraces them.

Why haiku?  What is it about this form that interests you?

Reading and writing haiku has the potential to become a life philosophy or a life practice. Haiku focus on a single moment and draw our attention to very specific happenings within that moment. So much of my work outside of haiku involves analysis. Recognizing haiku moments and writing haiku to convey them offer a balance to my analytical work by encouraging me to stay present and attentive to the individual moments I experience. 

so many stars

so much I don't know —

winter night

When we met at the Poets’ Concord in Newport, Oregon, we briefly discussed the haiku. Modern haiku is not constrained to the traditional 5-7-5 syllable format. Would you share more about what makes a poem a haiku?

There are so many different approaches to writing haiku in English. Personally, I am drawn to haiku that use images of two simultaneously-occurring events and suggest the interconnectedness of things. At least one of the images is of nature. The internal comparison, or the relationship between the two events, is also central for me in haiku. The poems can either follow a fixed syllable count or, more commonly, no syllable count at all, and I appreciate haiku that effectively utilize a pivot line so that there is some sense of surprise at the end of the poem. There are several books that explain in varying degrees of detail the different approaches to haiku, but I’ll just mention two: The Haiku Handbook by William J. Higginson (now available in the 20th anniversary edition) and Haiku: A Poet’s Guide by Lee Gurga.

What poets and writers would you like to emulate? 

I’m afraid I could produce an endless list of writers whose work includes things I admire. I do know that I am particularly drawn to writers who combine their interests in writing, editing, and translating, as well as in publishing the work of other poets. Cid Corman is a wonderful example of someone who dedicated his life to poetry. He wrote poems on a daily basis and engaged for decades in editing, translating, and publishing, as well.

arguing 

on the windy beach . . .

sand in my teeth

You are an accomplished poet, teacher and publisher, and have taken part in numerous readings and interviews. What question hasn’t been asked that you’d like to answer?

What a great question! My answer relates to my previous comments about writers I would like to emulate. I think it would be interesting to be asked about the relationship between writing, researching, teaching, editing, translating, and publishing. All of these things are in conversation with one another. They allow me to come at ideas and the expression of ideas through language from so many different perspectives, and those perspectives inform the ways in which I make poems.

Susan Rich

Lately, I am capable of small things.

Peeling an orange.

Drawing a bath.

Throwing the cat's tinsel balls.

Believe me, this is not unhappiness.

Only one question—

why this layering on of abeyance?

Though it is winter inside of me —

there is also spring and fall.

Yellow tulips in need of planting

root in a basket by the door. 

— Susan Rich
an excerpt from Letter to the End of the Year

Susan Rich is a poet, activist and educator. The author of three poetry collections, her latest book The Alchemist's Kitchen was published in April 2010. She has worked on staff for Amnesty International, as an electoral supervisor in Bosnia Herzegovina, and as a human rights trainer in Gaza and the West Bank. Rich lived in the Republic of Niger, West Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer, later moving to South Africa to teach at the University of Cape Town on a Fulbright Fellowship. She now lives in Seattle, Washington and teaches at Highline Community College.

In recommending your latest collection of poems, poet Jane Hirshfield praises your “kaleidoscopic curiosity” and your “powerfully kinesthetic language.”  What influences or inspirations led you to poetry, and to your “powerful and compassionate” poems? 

As an undergraduate, I was lucky enough to study with Madeline DeFrees and she introduced me to the work of Carolyn Forche. The Country Between Us was a pivotal book for me. Here was a woman, a young woman, who had traveled outside of the United States to El Salvador and who had come back to write poems concerning things that mattered — life in extremity. I had just returned from two years living outside the United States as well and wanted to believe that I, too, had permission to write about my life.

The Alchemist’s Kitchen is a wonderful blend of the everyday and the ethereal, and includes many poems inspired by paintings and photographs. What is your favorite poem in this collection? Why?

Oh dear. My favorite? Isn’t that a bit like asking a parent to choose their favorite child? I can’t do it. But what I can do is choose several favorites with the caveat that these “favorite” categories are fluid.  If you were to ask me tomorrow, the choices I’d make would be different. Given that I am in the throws of planning a reading for tomorrow night, I can focus on poems that are fun to read — that are meant for the air. One of these is “Mr. Myra Wiggins Recalls Their Arrangement.” It’s a persona poem in the voice of Myra Wiggins’ husband. I had never written from a man’s point of view before and I found it oddly liberating. “The 4 O’ Clock News @ House of Sky” is a poem that I like to read aloud. This poem is dedicated to my very dear friend, the poet Kelli Russell Agodon. I wrote it while in Spain but it concerns our friendship and goes off in some strange directions. The most personal poem in the book might be “The Never Born Becomes of Age” and what I like about it is that I did not want to write it, yet it persisted. I like to write poems that I don’t want to write. 

Can you tell us about the title of your book? Where it came from? What it means to you?

The title of this collection came to me far more easily than the titles of either of my past books. I was re-reading Denise Levertov’s New and  Selected Essays – many of which were written I believe — during her time in Seattle. In her essay Biography and the Poet (1992), Levertov  takes up the question of literary biography of poets (and by extension, she expands, all biographies) as to whether we need to know about the drugs and dalliances of the life or if they are “the chaff which the the imagination has discarded.” For the most part, she rallies against being too inquisitive regarding the facts of the poets life. But the essay is balanced with praise for certain biographies such as Walter Jackson Bates Life of Keats, where the biography is in service to the poems or to essays or journal pages some poets had published.  Sometimes, Levertov says, understanding the life of the poet  “one is grateful for a glimpse into the alchemist’s kitchen.” I immediately felt myself drawn to the phrase. 

I’ve re-interpreted Levertov’s original sense of looking at a poet’s memoir or biography being the alchemist’s kitchen to the poems themselves being the material of alchemy — the ordinary objects turned to gold. In researching more on the nature of alchemist– in its original meaning – I learned that Alchemy has a double origin in Greek philosophy and Egyptian texts. That the origins of the word itself is thought to be Arabic. But what fascinated me the most was that the alchemists were not merely interested in turning base metals into gold but that there was a spiritual discipline and that the transformation of metals was secondary to the wisdom that the alchemist would himself attain through their work. One of my favorite quotes by the poet Stanley Kunitz goes like this: “the first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.” So to answer your question, I’ve used the term “alchemist’s kitchen” as a metaphor for the process of writing poems. That said, I also am a great lover of food — growing it, preparing it, bringing friends together to enjoy it. 

You teach community college students. How do you balance your work teaching and encouraging students with your own writing and book promotion?

Your question implies that there is balance in my life. Hmm. Most of my own writing happens during the summer, over winter break and on sabbaticals. I think that’s why I’ve embraced the technology of the blog. I began the blog this past November as an experiment. I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve enjoyed the blogosphere — and I suspect it is because I can maintain a small handhold on my creative life even during term time. My teaching life is also creative, but in a different way. 

Your book was recently published and you’ve embarked on a tour that includes both the traditional (bookstore readings, print interviews, etc) and non-traditional (in-home ‘salon’ readings, virtual readings and interactive readings, etc). Where is your ideal reading? 

My ideal reading? I would like to read in a really wonderful restaurant. A place that uses as much locally grown food as possible and that’s housed in an old building. Maybe the building is made of stone and was once a dance hall or flour mill. After a scrumptious meal and perhaps a bit of live music — while the guests tapped the tops of their crème brulee, I would read my poems. I would read food poems about “glazed florentines and praline hearts” or “tiramisu and lemon tarts.” I’ve read my poems in a variety of venues, but I’m still waiting to be asked to read in a restaurant. I would like that.