HH: On being asked,
"What do you feel is a poet's responsibility to protest, his/her responsibility
to speak out?" Adrienne Rich says: "We as social beings have large questions
to ask ourselves and others." What do you consider to be your role? What is
your responsibility?
MF: I think it's a person's duty, in small
and in large ways, to tell the truth. Poetry is so marginalized in our culture.
Even though there's a big resurgence going on right now, you can judge it
by money. If it doesn't make money, it's not important to the culture. Because
poets are so marginalized, we get to tell the truth more often than other
people, I think, because there's less at stake. I sometimes talk to my students
about whether things are political and what the role of being political as
a poet means. For me, it's my job — I happen to write about something
that's a political issue in our culture: the abuse of children. I write about
a lot of other things, but that's really the subject I started out with...
I think every piece of writing, in a way, is just repeating over and over
again who the [writer] is: "This is what I care about, this is what I think
is important."
HH: Where do you
write?
MF: In this very restaurant (Broad St. Books
in Nevada City) and others. I did a lot of my early writing at the Parkside
Cafe in Stinson Beach, and for some reason I'm getting a lot of poems out
of a Cambodian restaurant in San Francisco called Angkor Wat, where I eat
sometimes. I went to Laos in 1989, and have written a lot about it —
that landscape comes back to me when I'm in the restaurant. I sort of like
the cacophony and anonymity of writing in restaurants. David Mamet's written
a whole book about this. I also write in bed and on the sofa. And sometimes
in the office on the computer, but that's very rare... I write most of my
poems — well, about 60% of them - at about four o'clock in the morning.
I tend to be attacked by poems. I'm not one of those people who is good about
scheduling time to write every day at the same time and all the things they
say that you might want to try doing to be a real writer and produce a lot.
That's not how my life is. So I tend to get attacked by poems either in the
middle of the night or while driving, so I have to pull over and write them
on the back of bank envelopes. I konw that I can lose poems if I don't write
them down. I get a certain feeling in my mind — a weird and non-verbal
combination of distraction and excitement — and I know that something's
there and I need to sit down and give it some room or I'll lose it. I've never
gotten anything back that I told myself I would remember. Anne Lamott says
you're supposed to keep index cards and pens with you everywhere so you can
write stuff down, but I've never been that organized. For me it's bank envelopes
and rest stops or nothing.
HH: Why did you relocate from the Bay Area to Nevada City? Why have you made other moves? How have these changes of scenery impacted your writing?
MF: I've been looking for something. I grew up in California, then went to college back east (Radcliffe, in Cambridge, MA) and stayed there for about 20 years. I spent a year in Norway right after college. I spent two years in Chicago being a banker after I went to business school. I've moved back and forth. It usually had to do with love or some disaster, someone in my family dying. The geographic solution to pain, which rarely works but you get to see a lot of countryside. When I moved back to California, it was to Stinson Beach, near where I grew up. Something about that landscape of my childhood brought me to remember having been molested as a kid, and also brought me to write poems, where before I'd just been a letter-writer — I hadn't written one word creatively, or even thought about it before I was 35. I feel as though my birth as a poet has a lot to do with that landscape. It took me a long time, after I moved here to Nevada City in 1996, to be able to write poems about this landscape and I've probably only written three worth keeping.
HH: Tell me about the workshops that you teach. What are they like? Why should someone take one?
MF: Because they're fun! People get to know each other in an intimate and generous way — giving their opinions and sitting in the reflected glow of poetry. I think everyone should have a place to bring their work — as an offering to the gods. Dorianne Laux was my first and definitive teacher and I try to do what she did with me, which is to have people do exercises based on model poems. Then they bring them to class and we critique them... One of the things I like about teaching is that it forces you to explain things that you think you already know, but you learn so much more as you break down the process into smaller steps and help other people and see what they come up with. I think it's also good for people to work together, it's good for our characters. It depends on what kind of person you are, but I was (and am) really bossy and thought I knew everything, even when I was first beginning to write. I learned to write poems by myself from reading Mary Oliver. And when I went to my first workshop it was hard because I got criticized. People basically liked my stuff (otherwise I wouldn't have been able to stand it) but they also had comments and changes they thought were important, and at the time I was appalled - I couldn't believe that they wanted to change my perfect poems! I'm making fun of how I felt then, but it was so hard to handle... yet it's crucial for people to hear how readers understand or don't understand their work. It was a life lesson for me. Both that you can be misunderstood, and that you can always, always make things better.
HH: When I first heard you read at Barnes & Noble, I thought of Bologna's "Rape of the Sabine Women."... This statue is frightening and dazzling at the same time. I think your series of incest poems is like this. Why do you choose to write about this subject matter so publicly?
MF: I don't really choose material — I don't think the process works that way. We're driven by our obsessions. I write about what comes into my head, which is usually something to do with my life or my questions about life. What I'm trying to do with those incest poems, besides just respond to what's trying to come out of me, is to describe the fact and circumstances of incest in language that's so unthreatening but so clear that people will be able and in some sense be forced to listen.
HH: Why read, why write, why not phone?
MF: Phoning is wonderful, and e-mail is great. But some of the things I'm writing are not just for the specific people whose phone numbers I have. Even when they are, I don't necessarily want to call those people and tell them whatever it is. It's somehow a bigger message. And I'm a poet, so some of what I have to say to the world comes out in poetry. Some of what I have to learn about the world, I can only understand through poetry. I didn't want to be a poet. I wasn't trained to be a poet. I sort of hate being a poet sometimes. How did I get into this racket that makes me no money and I have to scramble around doing so many peripheral things to make a living instead of just writing? But I don't have a choice — you don't get to choose your native language, just like you don't get to choose whom you love.
I've been thinking a lot lately about some of the ideas in Lewis Hyde's book The Gift, which posits an economic system outside the usual financial one we all operate in. This other system he calls the "gift economy," where giving is the purpose, not remuneration. He uses poetry as an example, because nobody pays for poetry, yet it's valuable. Maybe not to everyone, but incredibly valuable to some of us. After 9/11, poems of solace were whizzing all over the internet. One in particular, written by W.H. Auden about World War I, I got 38 times in the space of a week. That says something about what poetry means to people. Because poetry can speak at those times when everyday speech won't do, it's important. And you don't go to the store to buy a copy of that Auden poem, you find it in a book and e-mail it to all your friends. It's a gift. Pass it on. I have friends who are always tacking poems up on bulletin boards or in bathrooms they find themselves in. A guerilla form of gift-giving. I write poems in honor of stores and give them to the stores, give them a hundred copies so they can hand them out to their customers or hang them on the wall. Poetry should be in peoples' lives and it should be available, not hidden away in $50 hardcover anthologies. There are things in this world that don't, that will never, make money, but that are of immense value, and poetry's one of them.