Poet Elizabeth Lund is 'Un-Silenced'

 

Interview with Doug Holder

Recently, I caught up with poet Elizabeth Lund  to talk about her recent collection of poetry " Un-Silenced." (Cervena Barva Press) It seemed fitting because next month is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month.  Poet -Michael S. Glaser, Poet Laureate of Maryland 2004-2009 wrote of this book,

"Poetry is one of the few art forms that enables us to approach extremely difficult and complex human experiences without having to turn to didacticism or preaching. Lund's poems do this exquisitely as they grapple with the intense emotions of a woman trapped in an abusive relationship. Each poem is a compelling piece of a much larger puzzle - one that explores the effects of toxic masculinity and the debilitating fallacy that a woman can free her abuser from his own darkness.

With the concision of Emily Dickinson who taught us to "tell all the truth but tell it slant -," and a stream of consciousness narrative, Lund creates the perfect modality to convey an intense and painful journey that generations of women have experienced.

The result, Un-Silenced, is an absolutely stunning, heart-rattling read that implores us to open our hearts and minds."

This book deals with domestic violence. It has been said great pain brings great writing. Was it the pain of your aunt's murder by her husband that drove you to write this collection?

The short answer to that question is yes. The longer answer is that I never planned to write about my aunt’s death because I didn’t want people to think I was exploiting a family tragedy or dredging up painful memories that should fade into the past. Yet a few months after her murder, I was still so upset about what had happened and the fact that her life story had been reduced to “murder victim” in the press, that I wrote one poem. The act of writing made me feel better for a while because poetry allows us to address troubling topics and transform them in some way. I penned another poem a few months later, and another after that. Each time I wrote, I felt that I was challenging the silence that paralyzes so many victims of domestic violence and contributes to their pain.



I know when my wife died, I looked to birds for her presence. We had decided that she would communicate through a bird after she died. You use animals, nature-- as stunning metaphors for your aunt—and your world. Is it natural for you to pick up on these vibes—or has it been more of a long meditative process?

I’m glad that birds allowed you to feel your wife’s presence. I can definitely relate to that because I have always felt “vibes” from the natural world that remind me to look beyond the surface level of life and to examine the thoughts, feelings, and unseen currents that shape and underpin what we experience.

Once I realized that I was writing a series of poems – it felt like I was compelled to write them – birds and other animals appeared effortlessly, as if they wanted me to pay attention to the symbolic messages they were delivering. Birds, of course, can rise above us, migrate, and travel places we humans cannot go. Lion cubs represent strength and power that hasn’t been realized. I didn’t think about those meanings as I wrote, but once a poem was finished, the message became clear.

As the series expanded, I started to consider how the poems were connected. One group dealt with my aunt’s death; a second group presented the voices of other women who have been impacted by domestic violence; and a third group allowed me to grapple with my feelings about what had happened and try to find some sense of redemption.

For months those groups seemed disjointed because there was no connecting thread. Then an owl unexpectedly appeared in a poem I was revising. The raptor said what the humans couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see or articulate.

As I continued to revise, owls appeared in several other poems as well, acting like heavenly guides who were trying to nudge, direct, or rouse the struggling humans.



In an interview you speak of silence as being a killer? How does it kill, and what does it kill?

I love what Laurie Halse Anderson once said about silence: “When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time.”

That’s very true. Silence can seem like protection when you are dealing with someone who is angry or controlling. Yet over time, it erodes your confidence and your ability to speak up about situations that need to be changed.

When silence becomes a habit – a form of avoidance – it reinforces the idea that you must resign yourself to a small life, a life that’s defined or conscribed by fear. That view makes it extremely difficult to make life-changing choices, such as leaving an abusive situation, or even reclaiming your voice.

I learned this firsthand when I was engaged to someone in my early 20s. My fiancé often told me how worthless I was and how lucky I was that he loved me. As months passed, I became quieter and more passive, and my posture changed. I looked down constantly, both literally and figuratively. Deciding to leave was the most frightening thing I have ever done; people who intimidate or abuse others don’t like to lose control.



I remember years ago interviewing Lois Ames, who wrote the introduction to the Bell Jar by Slyvia Plath. Plath was abused by her husband Ted Hughes, and it led to her suicide. Ames told me in the 50s and 60s it was a revolutionary act for a woman to step out of the kitchen. Things have changed, and things haven't changed. What is your take on this?

Many women experienced domestic violence in the 50s and 60s, yet despite the gains women have made in many areas since then, violence is still pervasive today. The US Department of Justice estimates that 1.3 million women (and 835,000 men) are victims of physical violence by a partner every year.

As #DomesticViolenceAwareness notes, abuse often begins with a partner putting you down, acting jealous or possessive – i.e., constantly checking up on your whereabouts and wanting to know who you’ve been with. Abusers “attack your intelligence, looks, mental health, or capabilities. They blame you for all of their violent outbursts and tell you nobody will want you if you leave.”

As the site also states, abusive behavior leads to the self-esteem of victims being “totally destroyed,” which makes it difficult to even consider escaping. When someone does leave, that’s the most dangerous time. “Women are 70 times more likely to be killed in the weeks after leaving their abusive partner that at any other time in the relationship,” according to the Domestic Violence Intervention program.



Why should we read your collection?

Domestic violence is so pervasive that many of us will have a friend or family member who deals with abuse at some point in their lives. My book shines a literary spotlight on that struggle and the devastating impact that abuse can have on everyone involved. To put it another way, the poems provide a series of snapshots -- rather than statistics – which allows readers to understand viscerally both the warning signs of violence and the pain that victims feel.

I’ve been told by several women who escaped abusive relationships that my book beautifully captured their experience and helped them realize how strong and wise they really were. Others have told me that the poems helped them release any lingering doubts about their self-worth or the idea that they somehow deserved what happened.

Still other readers have said that they appreciate how the book moves from darkness toward light and reminds them that no one deserves to be silenced or afraid. I’m deeply touched by such comments.

Thank you, Doug, for your thoughtful comments about my poems, especially since National Domestic Violence Awareness Month is coming up in October.




Remembering Elaine



One great blue heron

punctuates the shore,

huddling in first snow.



What keeps this steel-eyed

juvenile here, weeks after

the others have flown?



Gray on gray she stands

like a wrought-iron

question mark.



What does she read

in the tinfoil sky,

its indecipherable script?



Does she stand, like me,

awaiting a sign, has she

hunkered too far down?



How do winged creatures

lose their lift, their bold

exclamation point?



One could say the sky

turns a deaf ear, that some

stories are meant to trail off.



She stands ramrod straight,

like a stubborn suicide

or a righteous sacrifice.



But I’m not ready to let

her go, as the season’s

first storm spits and swirls.

---Elizabeth Lund

Red Letter Poem #223

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #223

 

 

 

 

 

Some Women Marry Houses

 

 

Sexton’s house, in my hometown,
is still margarine yellow with blue

shutters, a square Colonial sensible

as a durable shoe on a quiet road

abutting woods, its lawn gracious

as a lap smoothed to perfection:

Nature, plotted, hedged and bedded,

a prelude to the garden of garters

and stays, silky slips.  Garments meant

to seduce, contain, or govern the approach

to bounty, feminine reward, what awaited

men in their return from the capital wars.

 

To live in a rectangular fashion, by right

angles, in rooms assigned their functions:
a tidy house keeping mum about its lusts

and layaways, its pang, its plan.  To play

croquet beside the flagstone patio,

wielding mallets, nudging balls inside

all the pretty little wickets while flank

steaks sizzle and pop in their own blood

juice, and the martini pitcher perspires

along its long glass handle as the afternoon

marinates in a pointed jest, subtle rebuke,

something edging to break loose.

 

 

                            ––Heather Treseler

 

 

 

I couldn’t choose just one.

 

When I received an advanced copy of Heather Treseler’s debut collection, Auguries & Divinations, I knew I wanted to alert Red Letter readers to this quietly-astonishing poet’s work.  So I reread the poems with an eye toward an ideal choice.  The task proved impossible.  At first, I wanted to highlight the lush and wrenching “Purpura,” a description of the slow reassessment of our maternal bonds when we first come to know our parent’s mortality (when we learn, at the same time, how unfathomable love’s hold on a mother’s psychology, knowing from the outset it must eventually be relinquished.)  Or might I highlight one of “The Lucie Odes,” a sequence of ten 21-line poems that came to my attention when they were awarded the 2019 Jeffrey E. Smith Prize from the Missouri Review.  These poems are so rich and psychologically devasting––forming the biography of a love that was everywhere informed by her partner’s previous abuse and clearly indomitable spirit––but I think readers ought to read these poems together, as intended.  So I finally decided to focus on “Some Women Marry Houses” because it helps situate Heather in a long tradition of Feminist poets, and highlights the musical and metaphorical charge that is central to her work.

 

It seems almost laughable to say this now, but back in the 1960’s, when the male bastions of publishing and academia were begrudgingly admitting more women to its ranks, some editors and literature professors actually gave this advice to young women who were aspiring writers: don’t bother tackling those broad and consequential themes which men have traditionally explored––things like war, peace, life, death, the resonance history; focus instead on more novel topics central to a woman’s experience: domesticity, family, love.  Shockingly, many of these female firebrands decided to do just that––only not at all in the manner the men had anticipated.  Poets like Denise Levertov, Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Diane Wakowski, Lucille Clifton, Louise Gluck (the list is too extensive to do justice here) made it their business to overthrow every stereotype concerning a woman’s imaginative domain (bruising many male psyches in the process.)  I should add one more name to that Feminist pantheon: May Sarton, because it was the prize named for that prolific poet, offered by Bauhan Publishing, that ushered Auguries… into print.  It’s clear that Heather is charged with helping to carry that new tradition into 21^st century territories.  Today’s poem begins modestly: “Sexton’s house, in my hometown,/ is still margarine yellow with blue/ shutters” (and didn’t the use of “margarine” set up a certain homey expectation. . .like a metaphorical lit fuse?), “a square Colonial sensible/ as a durable shoe”.  But clearly the shoe did not fit when, growing up, Heather witnessed the empty promise of suburban paradise.  The tone of words like “gracious,” that smoothed “lap,” are suddenly subverted by a line like “Nature, plotted, hedged and bedded,” where every single word is a double-entendre, the sexual politics on the verge of eruption.  “lusts/ and layaways, its pang, its plan”––this is not the Ladies Home Journal’s version of marriage––and don’t get me started on balls nudged through those “pretty little wickets.”  The stanza ‘sizzles and pops’ with consonance and enjambments as the sexual frustration threatens to boil over.  Is this merely a way of increasing sensual intensity (forget the garden tool, check out the urban dictionary for the contemporary meaning of “edging”)––or is subjugation on the menu?  We’re provoked and left to question. 

 

In a later poem, “Honey and Silk,” Heather writes of Clodia, the muse and lover of the Roman poet Catullus (a poet in her own right, I should add.)  Even Cicero, on the Senate floor, decried such a wanton widow who had control of her own wealth, chose lovers for her own satisfaction, and was willing to accept (and even relish) “the sheer bright robe of her lonesomeness” once an affair concluded.  He sees this as nothing less than a threat to the empire.  Consult our recent headlines if you think such a sordid argument is no longer politically potent, two millennia down the road.  Heather has made the commitment to follow her own imaginative path wherever it leads; to risk accessing the heart’s taproot of desire, despite the consequences; and to labor making any poetry that grows from that process as vibrant and musically complex as her skills can accomplish.  In other words: women’s work.  We men (perhaps we’re coming to realize) have no say in the matter––though we can certainly stand back and admire the beauty that results.

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

Red Letter Poem #222

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #222

 

 

 

 

 

Searching for John Murillo’s Demo Tapes

in the Library of Congress

 

 

 

Which is to say I imagine the tapes like

lost arrow heads having served their purpose,

having been found again like a man frozen in ice,

a rock in a basket of blades shorn from their roots.

 

Which is to say I did not find the demo tapes;

instead, I watched their evolution, a track

becoming poem, becoming book, becoming

a number one hit, and yet the track remained silent.

 

And I ask, “What’re you going to do now

after you’ve achieved some financial independence?”

and the poet of the lost-demo-tapes tells me,

“Man, I’m married—there’s no such thing.”

 

And what he wants, I’m told, is what all poets want:

a bike to work off the extra pounds, a redone backyard,

and a stage for the poets we love and no one knows,

the poets that will likely never get a piece of this

 

arbitrary pie—the poets we hope will win so we can

read more of them and through them, their verse,

be less lonely, find company in words strung like pearls

and lost somewhere in the Library of Congress.

 

 

 

                            ––Ryan Clinesmith Montalvo

 

 

 

I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of the potlatch.  Stemming from the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest of Canada and the US, it is centered around a huge feast intended to reaffirm the bonds of family, friendship, and connection to the spirit world.  One of the primary features of the celebration is gift-giving, and it’s always incumbent upon each participant to give greater gifts than you receive.  That gesture not only demonstrates your wealth, it establishes generosity as a foundational element of abundance itself.  I can remember when I was a young poet, hoping to enter the vast literary brother/sisterhood, how surprised and delighted I was to find a similar ethos in operation.  Immersing myself in the seemingly-bottomless reservoir of world literature, my poet-friends and I couldn’t help but be impressed by the lengths some older writers would go to nurture members of a younger generation.  Decades later, after completing a two-year interview project for the Christian Science Monitor newspaper, I collected those conversations in a book I named Giving Their Word.  It was one of the greatest learning experiences of my life––due mainly to the generosity of spirit of these accomplished poets sharing their insights.  In my introductory comments, I hoped to make the case for this idea of gifts exchanged––across cultures and unbound by time––as a fundamental feature of all language and art-making.

 

These memories were stirred up anew when I received today’s poem from Ryan Clinesmith Montalvo, who is himself a young poet at the start of a promising career.  As he explained to me, Ryan studied and interned with the poet John Murillo while working toward his MFA at Hunter College.  One of the tasks he took on for his mentor was to try and track down the ‘demo tapes’ a young Murillo sent to the Library of Congress.  The recordings gathered, not only his own poems, but the work of other emerging spoken word artists and musicians around him.  Now that Murillo had achieved a certain degree of fame, he still felt the imperative to make sure others were not simply forgotten.  As you’ve read in today’s Letter, Ryan’s efforts were not successful––at least not as he’d hoped––but the resulting poem demonstrates that Murillo’s implied lesson had not been lost on his protégé.  In a literary landscape that has, over the years, become alarmingly careerist––harnessing new technologies in the hope of building readership and reputation, while vision and true craft often languish ––Ryan received (as he explained to me) this immeasurably valuable gift from his teacher: “how to genuinely practice the craft of poetry despite the trappings of achievement; and how to use a poem, book, or career's success as a way to uplift the art of others.”  I don’t know which poets helped create such a desire in John Murillo, but I like to imagine the satisfaction they must feel (in this world or another) to see their gifts, passed down now to poets like Ryan, continuing to share the bounty of that creative impulse upon which all our hearts rely.

 

I don’t expect it will be long before we readers get to share Ryan’s debut manuscript, Epilogue to Paradise.  It was a Letras Latinas-ILS/Notre Dame––Andres Montoya Poetry Prize Finalist; reached the C&R Press 2022 Poetry Award longlist; and received an honorable mention in the Southern Collective Latin American Chapbook Competition.  His poems have appeared or are forthcoming from the Penn Journal of Arts and Sciences, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Ibbetson Street Press, and other magazines.  It feels clear to me that Ryan has begun to see how the discipline of poetic practice, and an attention to the inner and outer voices of his life, will yield great discoveries over time.  But had he not also come to understand how his life and work are intimately connected to others in a broad community, I fear his capacity would be undermined.  My wish for him, for his friends and colleagues: relish the immensity of the gift you’ve been given––and develop the most articulate and unimaginably beautiful means for giving it all away.    

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner