Interview by Doug Holder
I noticed you quoted Rilke a number of times. Rilke wrote, " I know nothing has ever been real without my beholding it..." Is each day a sort of rebirth for you? Do you create your world, like you create a poem?
Yes, I think we all create the world each day. More and more I’m coming to understand how tenuous everything is. This is especially stark in the narratives that divide us. How we construct the world – our stories – is crucial and consequential.
The title sequence, “There is Only the Sacred and the Desecrated,” is an exploration of world-making; it includes the true story of a Ukrainian woman whose husband and daughter had died and whose son was in a penal colony because he drank and violently abused her. When she was seventy years old, she picked up a paintbrush for the first time and painted the interior of her house with bright, wondrous scenes of flowers, green vines and branches, and birds.
Francis of Assis asserted that all is sacred or desecrated, rather than sacred or profane. If all is essentially sacred, then there is the possibility of restitution for what has been desecrated. This is a very particular way of understanding our experience of life on earth, and, this is the lens for the title sequence.
You dedicate this book to the late Fanny Howe. She has been described as a poet who is most at home with bewilderment. Are you as the song goes, " Bewitched, bothered and bewildered' by the world?
Yes definitely I am all three! I relate to Fanny’s bewilderment, and feel that connection to the child self who is continually surprised by the cruelty and the beauty of the world, of others, and of the self. I think this is the locus of poetry – it is a place of wonder and curiosity and question. The place of knowing is prose.
In your poem " Uttering joyous leaves all its lives" dedicated to Walt Whitman, you seem to bond with a gnarled cheery tree, and then "wave to the other side." Back in the 70s when I experimented with hallucinatory drugs, I actually felt that I was merging with a tree. It was the most wonderful experience, I felt I was finally part of something bigger than the visible word...I felt a certain unity. Was this like your experience—nature as a portal for connection—something outside our failing flesh?
It sounds like you had a powerful experience that has stayed with you, Doug. I guess I like to be reminded that I am nature too. There is a distinct relief I feel when I’m in a beautiful natural setting. I remember hearing an author on NPR talk about being in the wilderness and realizing that, unlike in the human-made world, nothing in the wild is designed to get your attention, nothing is directly addressing you or asking something of you, there is no media message in the wilderness – and this affords real relief, the possibility of deep spiritual rest. The last poem in my book, “Song” (first published in Ibbetson!) directly speaks of this experience as I walked to school one morning along the Muddy River in the Fenway and observed the casual, unintentional beauty of the sun on the water, and felt “the I grow quiet/(except for the song).”
Your poetry deals with mortality, something I think about a lot as I get older. In your work, you seem to be standing back, observing your aging—a calm acceptance—a knowing nod. Do you fear death—or have you come to terms with it?
This is quite a question, Doug… Have I come to terms with death? I went to a Lutheran parochial school for my first twelve years of education and there was a lot of talk about death. It seemed like such a good idea to me – not to talk about it, but to be dead and in heaven. But at that point, I hadn’t really experienced loss yet, no one close to me had died. I think death is a disaster for the living. As you know, our poetry community has been hit especially hard these past couple of years with the loss of Danielle Legros Georges, Fanny Howe, Jennifer Martelli, Charles Coe, Neil Silberblatt, Karen Friedland, Ellin Sarot, Denise Washington.
What I know of death is the sadness of being left behind. I think about my mother who’s 95, soon to be 96, and who has outlived and lost her brothers and sisters and so many friends. I have a vivid memory of a particular morning when I was a child, mixing milk for the calves on our farm. We’d measure out the dry milk mix into a pail of warm water, using our fingers to break up the clumps, and then swirl it till it was fully dissolved. I was up to my elbow in milk (metaphor for childhood?) and it was really a lovely feeling, so silky and warm – this is Michigan, in a barn, in winter. So this one morning, as we were mixing the milk, my mother said, This is what your life is. You stir and stir and stir the water, and when you stop, the ripples circle just a little while longer. I looked at the milk whirling in the pail as my arm went round and round, then I pulled out my hand, and watched the milk grow still. I was like, Oh.
Why should we read your book?
I hope you read my book for the same reasons you read any book of poetry! That is, “to feel physically as if the top of [your] head were taken off” as Emily Dickinson described it, by which I think she means, when we read poetry we can escape the tyranny of the self. Ideally, it’s a kind of out-of-body, out-of-mind encounter. Poetry offers the opportunity to experience an authentic, genuine, wholly human and unique sensibility that is unlike our own. Reading poetry expands and deepens our attention (which is really what love is) and can transform how we understand our own life.
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