Molly Fisk's first real encounter with poetry came
at an age when many poets have already worked up a substantial portfolio of
publications, and it took the form of necessity. At 35, after having earned
a degree from Harvard, traveled to Norway, run a successful sweater business,
gone back to school and earned a Masters in business, and switched careers
to become a banker, she returned to her native state of California. It was
at this time, during what was originally intended to be a brief stay with
her family, that she discovered she had been sexually abused as a child.
Poetry proved to be her lifeline. As Fisk describes it, "Two weeks after I'd
had my first repressed memory surface, and five minutes after reading Mary
Oliver's American Primitive" she wrote her
first poem, and she hasn't let loose of the pen since. "I would doubt that
poetry, in its stepchild position in American culture, would ever be powerful
enough to influence anything like media — it will be money that influences
media. But people will not relinquish poetry, no matter how marginalized it
gets, or we would have done it already. I think many of us will find ways
to fit poetry into whatever new thing is invented, just because we love poetry."
A well established radio personality on Nevada City's listener supported radio
station KVMR, author of Listening to Winter
and Using Your Turn Signal Promotes World Peace,
and poetry teacher both online, at Poetry
Boot Camp and offline, Molly was kind enough to take time out of a very
hectic schedule and share her experiences with us at Triplopia.
We welcome you to listen in on the conversation.
Triplopia: One of the things that intrigues
me about your work in poetry is how late in life you started--at least, late
as poetry goes. I remember interviewing Joy Harjo, who described herself as
a "late starter" for having gone to school for poetry at the ripe old age
of 22. I know I was taken aback by this description. Do you find there's any
real prejudice, within the poetry community, that "late starters" have to
contend with?
Molly Fisk: I think there's not a prejudice
so much as a lack of support--most of the people who do MFAs in their 20s
seem to have a support system that non-MFA students and late-starters don't
get, and I'm both.
T: Your first degree--in folklore and mythology--suggests
that you did have an early interest in fields that are closely associated
with poetry, but an article in The Union, "Poet Liberates Herself Through
Words," suggests that you were not a writer before the 90's--was this the
period in which an interest in writing first asserted itself?
M.F: In December, 1990, I wrote my first
poem and then I wrote all the time and never looked back. This was two weeks
after I'd had my first repressed memory surface, and five minutes after reading
Mary Oliver's American Primitive from cover
to cover.
T: When you first started writing, what
were some of the models you looked to? M.F: My first teacher was Anne Lamott,
but she's not a poet. Through her I found my first poetry teacher, Dorianne
Laux. I was greatly influenced by her--by her writing, by the wonderfully
quirky way she thought, and by her taste in poetry: I had no background in
poetry except Robert Frost and this one Mary Oliver book. Dorianne opened
the door to contemporary poetry for me. She had one book out when I met her,
and was teaching classes in her living room, which seems to me to be the perfect
way to learn to write. She introduced me to many of the poets in our region
whom I admire, and all were encouraging and kind: Bob Hass, Carolyn Kizer,
Jane Hirshfield, Kim Addonizio, Tom Centolella, Brenda Hillman, Stefanie Marlis.
Then I studied at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and that's where
I met my two writing buddies: Forrest Hamer and Dan Bellm, with whom I worked
monthly for about 12 years, and where I met what Dorianne likes to call the
Mount Rushmore of poetry: Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Lucille Clifton, Robert
Hass. I went there four times in the 90's and also worked with Marie Howe,
Cornelius Eady, Toi Derricotte, Cleopatra Mathis, Len Roberts--all kinds of
good writers.
The poets I read and read, though, at the beginning, the ones I depended on
for salvation, besides Dorianne, were Sharon Olds, Carolyn Forché, and Linda
McCarriston. They were writing about survival, and they knew the terrain.
That was what I wanted to be able to do. Dorianne introduced me to books by
Olds and Forché (The Dead and the Living,
and The Country Between Us, respectively),
but I first heard of Linda McCarriston on Terry Gross's NPR program Fresh
Air. I was actually driving across the Golden Gate Bridge when Linda came
on and read a poem from her book Eva-Mary,
which had been a National Book Award finalist--and I had to pull out at the
"vista point," I couldn't keep driving, I was so floored. What does floored
mean? Excited, trembling with excitement, almost levitating--that someone
was daring to say these things I knew about and that were such American secrets.
I was so proud of her and wanted to call her up and thank her, and thank Terry
for having her on the show. I wanted to stop the cars crossing the bridge
and tell them to turn on their radios! I was ready for confetti and sparklers
that day.
T: Do you feel writing is a question of
survival for yourself, or is this a question of content--that is, do you feel
your writing is a response to a threat that is best addressed through it,
or is it that the theme of survival constitutes a particularly compelling
source of inspiration?
M.F: Hmmm. I like writing, and I do it naturally
now, as a way to sort out what I think or feel. I'm not sure I'd say I couldn't
survive without writing--I would feel its absence deeply, but I think I'd
still live. And I think while survival is a compelling topic for any writer--including
danger and heroism and pitfalls and reversals but redemption in the end--it's
certainly not more inspirational to me than other topics, like love or sex
or the ordinariness of small town life. Nature.
T: Your own origins as a writer are highly
personal, and suggest a "confessional" approach to poetry.
M.F: I actually don't hold with "confessional"
as a distinction, because it seems to brandish content before craft. I'll
go with Sharon Olds' label for what she writes as "the apparently personal."
I do write about my own life, but those same poems are political poems, nature
poems, small town social fabric poems--they cover lots of ground. And what
poet isn't writing from his or her experience of the world? Whether it's Billy
Collins looking out the window of his house at the lawn or Jack Gilbert thinking
that his dead wife has been reincarnated as a dog?
T: Your poem, "Surrender," appears to speak
directly to your biography, and to the rather sudden way poetry entered your
life. How would you describe the connection, as you see it, between poetry
and memory?
M.F: I don't write poems in order to remember
anything, but the process of writing them often brings sensory memory to my
mind, and I include it in the poem. This is true of many different kinds of
memory, not just the repressed abuse memories I was recovering in the early
'90s.
T: I'm interested in the distinction between
the "confessional" and what Olds refers to as "the apparently personal"--for
my part, I agree that writing comes from one's personal experience of the
world, but I'm also interested in getting at how that personal experience
is crafted--and for what reason. I note, on your website, the poem "Hawk,"
which appears to be taking place in frontier America--to work from an example,
how do you see this poem having come from your personal experience of the
world, and what, do you think, is behind the decision to craft that personal
experience into this particular form?
M.F: Well, I was attacked by this group
of poems, is the only way to really say it--I wrote the first four in one
day, at a friend's house. They were about a pioneer couple, just married,
starting out their life together. Now I have 40 of them, and I would say that
they're fictional more than "apparently personal"--there's nothing about either
of them that is me, per se, although there is some of my sensibility in both
of them, and since it all comes out of my head, how could I not be involved
in some way? I think this is a novel that expressed itself in poems (and may
stay in poems, I haven't decided yet, but is certainly going to be a long
connected narrative). It's called Walking Wheel--those
are the larger spinning wheels that you stand next to, that spin longer-fibered
materials like flax (into linen). The title came to me with the first four
poems. Now it's taken me another four years to write the rest of them, and
I haven't even figured out what the whole story is yet--I wish I had time
to really devote to that book, but my teaching just takes up too much of my
energy and brainpan. So it's coming slowly.
T: What do you think the role of craft is--how
it functions in poetry, whether it obscures or sheds light on something that
may be called "true," and how you understand the relationship between your
own poetry and craft?
M.F: I think the relationship of content
and craft is like the relationship of flesh and bone--but reversed: craft
is the bone, the scaffolding, on which one hangs the flesh of content. You
can't have a poem without both, in the same way that you can't have a body
without both. Neither is more important than the other, because without each
of them you'd be dead. So neither takes precedence.
But I start from content, I am always tuned into what I am thinking or feeling
or seeing and mulling that over--a form may come to me as I write, sometimes
I play with strict form (as in sestina or pantoum), and I like syllabics,
although I'm wretched with meter--I just haven't taught myself enough about
it to use it well. My natural poetic meter seems to be dactylic, but it comes
and goes, I'm not trying to corral it much. Having said that, I might think
to myself, "Oh, maybe it's time to try writing a sonnet," and then a week
later start writing one, but by that time I will have found some content to
work with. I just wrote a modified crown of sonnets--it's really a tiara--about
computer dating, which was fun because the subject matter is at such odds
with the form and its uses as a vehicle for love.
T: "Surrender" and "Hawk" seem to be contrasting
poems in respect to craft and content. What is your sense of the function
of both craft and content in poetry? Are your feelings toward the label "confessional",
and the apparent brandishing of content over craft that it implies, indicative
of your own sense of which, if either, you feel should take precendence in
a given poem?
M.F: As someone who's only been writing
for 15 years, I still have momentous amounts to learn about craft, but that
doesn't mean I don't labor to polish each of my poems to the best of my ability.
Because I do so much teaching of new poets, I get a regular reminder of the
aspects of craft--what they're good for, how to approach them and not lose
your initial spark or your voice in applying them, etc.--and I'm always applying
the new things I learn to my own work-- sometimes directly and sometime just
by absorbing the things I say over and over to my students.
T: Should I understand you to be saying
that, in distinguishing a certain type of poetry as "confessional," content
is being brandished before craft? Is it the distinction itself that is troubling
to you?
M.F: I think that the word "confessional"
has become something many poets sneer at--both the term and the kind of poems,
and so in part I'm reacting to that, since nobody likes to be sneered at.
I don't use the word, myself. When people ask me what kind of poems I write,
I say that they're straightforward and readily understood poems about ordinary
life, including people, small towns, and the natural world. Sometimes it's
very directly my own life, and sometimes it's not. I do think that when someone
says "confessional" in that derogatory way, they're talking about content,
and not paying any attention to form or craft. They've reacted badly to the
subject matter.
I also think that ordinary people--non-poets--tend to always believe that
a poem is the truth, while a novel is fictional, and that's something I like
to talk about with my students. There's no reason whatsoever that a poem can't
be fictional, even though most of us--and I do it myself, to my own irritation--first
assume that what we hear is the true experience of the writer.
Pantoum Without Hope of Rescue
This time it's both of them,
half-clothed on their own double bed,
mother and father, husband and wife.
If this upsets you, by all means turn away.
Half-clothed on their own double bed,
their daughter naked between them.
If this upsets you, by all means turn away:
look at the expensive view of the Golden Gate.
Their daughter, naked between them,
used to being invisible flesh.
Look at the expensive view of the Golden Gate.
Think about justice as an abstraction.
Used to being invisible flesh,
she lies with her shoulders in her mother's lap.
Think about justice as an abstraction--
perhaps you'll never need a witness yourself.
She lies with her shoulders in her mother's lap.
They run their hands across her skin like feathers.
Perhaps you'll never need a witness yourself.
The father pushing his way into her.
They run their hands across her skin like feathers.
He likes to hold her legs up as if it's a game,
her father, pushing his way into her,
grinning and panting, saying how good it will feel.
He likes to hold her legs up as if it's a game,
leaning over the child to kiss his happy wife,
grinning and panting, saying how good it will feel,
palming her breasts, glazed with a fine sweat.
Leaning over the child to kiss his happy wife
as if they were alone there,
palming her breasts, glazed with a fine sweat.
No one is angry. No one cries.
As if they were alone there,
mother and father, husband and wife.
No one is angry. No one cries,
although this time, it's both of them.
Molly Fisk ©2000
T: A large portion of your work is tailored
toward radio, and specifically, National Public Radio.
M.F: I'd disagree with that. I've been writing
poems for 15 years, and have one collection out and two chapbooks, many prizes.
I teach poetry for my living. My whole writing life is based in poetry. The
radio commentary started as something I do for my local station, KVMR and
I only began in the fall of 2004. I've written, as of yesterday, 94 essays
for KVMR and 2 for NPR--both for The California Report,
out of KQED in San Francisco. So, while I'd like to become a big-time NPR
commentator, I'm not one yet.
The radio essays began as a lark--I was invited to do them by KVMR's News
Department., with virtually no constraints or guidelines except that they
be pretty close to three minutes. They're easy for me; they're like writing
a letter to a friend. I don't mean that they don't take some work, but it's
very very much easier than writing poems! Partly because there's this nice
firm deadline and I do them so often (once a week)--I've learned how to think
in three-minute bites, with an idea, some development, and then a conclusion
or punchline. I've gotten much better over this two-year period, and it's
fun to try something new. And a different part of my personality gets to show:
I'm more rowdy as an essayist, more able to be funny, and appalled, and political
in a more direct way than my poems allow.
T: Your involvement--and the urge that lies
behind it--is described to some extent on the website of KVMR-- how did you
first approach work as a broadcaster?
M.F: I started as a co-host of the show
Booktown, which was an hour, and gave me a chance to do interviews, which
I love. I've had a chance to talk to Bill Moyer and Alexander McCall Smith,
Frank McCourt, Naomi Shihab Nye, Terry Tempest Williams, a whole bunch of
people whose work I admire. After two years of that, I wanted to learn how
to run the board, which my co-host was doing, and KVMR has a very rare broadcaster
training program. I took that, I continued with Booktown for two more years,
and then joined the Women's Collective, so now I do shows once every three
months or so, involving books, sometimes, almost always reading some poetry,
and interviewing interesting women, but also very much based in music. And
I do the weekly essays, and I'm the Poet Laureate of one weekly show, so I
go on once in a while and read something or just chat with the broadcaster.
T: I've been listening to your radio essays
as I'm able, and I'm especially interested in the essay "DDT," in which you
describe your grandmother's response to Rachel Carson's writing. Her work
with birds also shows up in the poem "Nauset," and it seems clear that in
some sense, her growth as a person has been an important influence on your
writing. Would you describe yourself as an environmentalist? How important
are environmental issues to you, and how do you think this has influenced
your life's work?
M.F: My grandmother was a powerhouse, and
influenced me very deeply in all kinds of ways, including instilling in me
a knowledge of the delicate balance between the natural world and the encroaching
human world. I don't feel like an environmental activist per se, because I
don't help clean out my local river every year or anything like that, but
I am certainly as "green" as I can be in my daily life. (I know the name of
the river, and where it starts and where it meets salt water.) I think the
larger influence of my grandmother was that she introduced me to the natural
world which I wouldn't have known as closely without her. I write about birds
all the time, because she showed me birds — they enter my poems and sing
a while and then fly out again. But more than that, what she showed me, and
what that essay is really about, is that you can change. You can believe one
thing, and then by learning more about it, you can change your mind.
T: On your personal page at the KVMR website,
you describe the intimacy of the radio voice, and your enthusiasm for the
medium comes through very clearly. Given the comparison you make there between
television and radio, what are your thoughts regarding new media? Obviously,
your work with Poetry
Boot Camp has made you quite familiar with work on the internet--how would
you compare radio and the internet in terms of intimacy?
M.F: I'm not all that tuned in to new media,
and tend to be sort of a Luddite about technology. I got a cell phone only
two months ago and still can't turn the speaker phone off. But I found that
I needed a new way to make money after 9/11--it still surprises me that those
attacks affected the work-life of a poet in the Sierras, but they really did--and
so I took something I'd learned at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley--to
write a poem every day for a week--and brought it to my students to see what
would happen. I didn't want them all at my house for the week, in residence,
so we tried it via e-mail, and it worked like a charm.
Even though it's the marriage of an ancient form--poetry--and a new technology--the
internet--it's really more like fast letter-writing. We don't have chat rooms
or any other group setting, it's just a community based on very fast response.
What has completely amazed me is how intimate it feels. It's partly the complete
high of writing something new--that energy is like nothing else, and when
you're sharing it with people, it almost doesn't matter where they are--they
could be on the moon and you'd still feel a kinship with them in this common
endeavor. I think, too, that there's a simplicity in this way of working that
helps intimacy. I'm not sitting in a room with 12 people feeling all their
nervousness and concerns--will they like my writing, am I any good, that guy
over there is pretty cute, oh, no here's someone I knew in grad school whom
I never liked--all the social cacophony is removed, and we can just be writers
together, we don't have to like each other or respond in any way. It leaves
more space for the writing. And you cannot beat the intimacy engendered by
reading six poems someone has written, as they write them. It's very powerful.
I think e-mail is like passing notes in school--there's a casualness to it,
an informality that I love. And you can throw some letterhead around it or
make a PDF file and gussy it up, but it still seems very immediate and informal
to me. So in that sense, there's an intimacy to it. But the sound of someone's
voice, and someone's voice you recognize over time, speaking as if only to
you, on the other side of that little plastic grill--I don't think you can
get more intimate than that. I think radio wins, hands down. I just read a
mystery whose protagonist asks a friend why she's still single and the friend
says, "because Scott Simon still hasn't called." I laughed out loud--I can't
tell you how many women I know are mad for Scott Simon (host of NPR's Weekend
Edition). And most of us don't know what he looks like, and don't care. We
can hear his character through his voice, and that's what's so appealing.
I have met some of the participants of Poetry
Boot Camp now, and it's a little strange, actually, to have their physical
selves added to the process, even though I've liked them all and wanted to
meet them. It was interesting how it disturbed the equilibrium for a while.
T: How do you see poetry fitting in the
environment of radio and the internet? Is it hanging on for the ride, or do
you see it as a potential "player" in shaping the direction of the media it
makes use of?
M.F: I have no idea! I would doubt that
poetry, in its stepchild position in American culture, would ever be powerful
enough to influence anything like media--it will be money that influences
media. But people will not relinquish poetry, no matter how marginalized it
gets, or we would have done it already. I think many of us will find ways
to fit poetry into whatever new thing is invented, just because we love poetry.
I guess in that sense it's coming along for the ride. But it's in the front
seat, at least in my car.
T: You mentioned a shift, in terms of livelihood,
that was triggered by the 9/11 attacks. What were you doing at the time, and
how did these attacks come to have an effect on what you were doing?
M.F: I was teaching private poetry classes,
and classes at U.C. Davis Extension, and they all fell apart--no one wanted
to go out at night after 9/11, or spend money. So I scrambled around for other
ways to market poetry-teaching, and came up with Poetry
Boot Camp as well as a class I taught for several years to therapists
(for CEU credits), on how writing can boost the immune system.
T: I know that on poetry forums, one of
the biggest drawbacks is the question of personality, as one or two strong
voices can come to dominate a forum. I've also had the experience of being
somewhat uncomfortable in the presence of someone I first met online. Poetry
Boot Camp works somewhat differently, however, in that the participants
have paid to take part in an intensive workshop, with one person, at least
in some sense, guiding the workshop. What are the requirements for participation?
M.F: That you be willing to do the work
is pretty much the only requirement. One can be a beginner, or advanced--I've
got participants with far more literary credits than I have.
T: From the website, it appears that the
first ten participants to pay are the students for that particular month--are
there any other criteria by which they are selected? As a "moderator," have
you ever had trouble with "problem personalities," i.e. attacks via critique,
or any of the other many problems that can raise their heads in pretty much
any workshop setting? If you have, how have you dealt with them?
M.F: I've had very minor problems with people
wanting to critique a lot--often these are teachers, who are just so used
to that model--and some problems with people not knowing how to critique and
wanting to spend very little time at it. Both of these I try to solve at the
outset, by handing out a sheet of suggestions about how I like critiquing
to be done. And I ask people who are having trouble with a critique to run
it by me so I can help. But I've had very little trouble with discord in the
workshops, and at this writing have done 46 of them. I think we had one political
argument, back in 2004, between two participants, but they were grown-ups
and stopped sniping after a while. And it's not a group situation in terms
of meeting--everything happens one-on-on--so there's less of an audience for
people who might want to grandstand, and therefore they're less likely to
do it.
T: The site also mentions Private Boot Camps:
how is this arranged?
M.F: The private ones are just like the
others, only you're doing it with your friends and no strangers. I critique
all the poems every day, and each writer critiques one poem per day, according
to a matrix that I compose, as well as writing his/her poem.
T: What do you see the primary benefits
of such a program being from the vantage point of the working poet?
M.F: Benefits of private vs. regular camp?
Just that it would be fun to do it with your friends, and might further the
work of the group if, say, you got your writing group to do one together.
You'd have all learned the same things by participating, and could then take
those ideas/practices farther in your work as a group down the road. Benefits
of Boot Camp to a working poet? Well, it's great to get six new poems at the
end of a week and not have had to travel to a workshop or conference, schmooze
with all those people, or pay a huge fee. Quite a few of my participants are
mothers of young kids, people who work many jobs, and people who live in out-of-the-way
places (Cyprus, Guam, the South Pole) and aren't going to be able to find
a workshop in their area. I think this workshop is very efficient. It doesn't
work for everyone, because some people just aren't able to write so quickly,
even to generate first drafts. But the people it works for, it really works
for. My return rate is something like 65%.
T: If I were approached, as a perspective
participant in an online poetry workshop, I suspect I'd be a very tough sell,
although I'm not at all adverse to the workshop model, and I'm not taken aback
by meeting others on the web. What would concern me would be, first, the ability
of the instructor to help me improve my work, and second, the cost. I'll be
honest--the cost of Poetry Boot Camp represents a fair portion of of my weekly
wages. How would you sell the program to someone like me?
M.F: I started Poetry
Boot Camp (it says this on the website) because one year, none of my students
got into the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and I wanted them to know
what it was like to write in that intense way--one poem a day and critiquing
every day--because I found it to be such a revelation for me and my work.
I had no idea I could just sit down and write a poem--I was always waiting
for inspiration to strike.
Since I didn't want a bunch of people camping in my yard, I organized the
workshop via e-mail, and offered it for free to my in-person students (the
only kind I had back then). It was a rip-roaring success. So after about six
months, I structured and launched the business. I wasn't a techie, but I certainly
knew how to send e-mails, and that's why I say I'm a Luddite--the workshop
doesn't involve chat rooms or any sort of real-time interaction, because I
don't know how to do any of that. E-mail is rudimentary, and even 90-yr-olds
like Alice in Fairfield can manage to do it and be part of Boot Camp.
In terms of selling you the program, I don't really sell it, I offer it. People
try it and many of them return because it's been so useful to them. And the
usefulness is generally two-fold: that they wrote six new poems, and that
my critiquing is good. Many good poets are not good critiquers, so judging
me by my own work isn't a way to know if the workshop would be good for you.
But I happen to be good at it, and Boot Camp has made me immeasurably better.
That's something you're not going to know without experience, although you
can read the testimonials on my website for some sense of peoples' reactions,
and often I refer interested participants to past Campers to get more of their
questions answered.
In terms of cost, I based it in relation to what other week-long workshops
cost. Squaw Valley is around $500, not including the room and board. Since
I'm me and not Sharon Olds or Robert Hass, and since there's only one of me
instead of the 5 or 6 they have, the price needed to be less than that. In
2003 I started at $125, and the price has gone up about every two years by
$25. At the current price of $175, you're getting six poems critiqued, meeting
other poets, and having me organize the workshop and be on call for six days
to answer your questions. There's also the fact that I'm "holding the space"
as we say in California: providing a tone and an atmosphere of kindness, intelligence,
and safety, in which everyone can write this hard. Of course, not everyone
can afford this. But many people can, and it's the price at which I'm willing
to do this much hard work in this short a time period. In comparison to the
costs of getting yourself to, say, Split Rock or Breadloaf or Squaw, paying
for room and board, and then tuition, it's quite a deal. And the make-up of
my students reflects those travel costs, too--as I said earlier, quite a few
of them live in far-away places.
Kindness
Half-way through our nap the rain begins, hits the window,
plashes through the double-needled pines, and splurts down
onto the mules ears and rein orchids, the clustered blue-faced
penstemons, sinking without a trace into the granite soil.
I roll gently out from under his arm and watch him sleeping the sleep
of the sunburned, of the good son, the wall-primer and painter,
the sleep of a man who is truly tired and knows someone
loves him, since I unaccountably began to cry about it over lunch
and couldn't stop, watching him eat was suddenly
too much for me, thinking how easily he could have died
in that fall, how he wandered lonely in the wilderness of his own mind,
never mind that people cared for him, for so long, twenty years,
long enough for me to get my second wind, to begin again
to grow up, so that I recognized true love when I saw it, looked
beyond the gnarled teeth and broken nose, the central, equatorial scar
that runs his length from trachea to pubis, beyond the lost names
and repeated stories into kindness, so that when he began the steep
climb out of his brainpan's maze into stronger light, how lucky
I was there at the top of the stairs, passing by.
Molly Fisk ©1997
T: I recently heard that you have an appearance
planned with Utah Phillips, but that one condition he has placed on the appearance
is that you memorize all of your work. How did you arrange that performance,
and how is the memorization coming along? Is memorization your usual style,
or do you tend to make more use of the paper?
M.F: When I first began doing readings,
I followed the style of my teacher, Dorianne Laux, and memorized many of the
poems and spoke them--I really like what that does to the tension between
audience and reader, how much more immediate and intimate things are when
you are looking at each other (even though I often look over their heads so
I don't get distracted from the recitation by starting to think about them).
But then I got a little lazy and don't do it as much any more. It always surprises
people when a poet recites, though, and I think it's good to wow them a little.
The challenge from Utah was a good one, but he's hit a snag with tendonitis
and some other problems so we're not doing that gig together in April, he's
going to do it alone, just post-surgery, probably without using his guitar
at all. Instead, we are going to write something together (his words) and
do a joint event in the early fall. I don't know what he means by writing
things together, but I'll find out! He's a friend here in town, and has been
a mentor to me in various ways, despite our differing genres.
T: How do you see the practice of memorization
re-shaping the relationship between the poet and the audience? You describe
it as tension: what do you see the elements of that tension as being, and
how do they work to change the performance? Do you feel this particular tension
is extraneous to the poem? I guess what I'm asking here is, in comparing the
two approaches to reading, do you feel you have a different relationship to
the same poem depending upon whether it's been memorized or not, and to what
extent, if any, do you feel those differences become part of the given poem?
M.F: I think that when you memorize a poem
and speak it to the audience instead of reading it, you are being more intimate
with them. It doesn't change the poem's meaning or interpretation, but it
deepens the experience--that's what I meant by tension. When I look an audience
in the face for three minutes while I'm speaking the poem, they have less
of a chance to build distance from me and my words than if I were dropping
my eyes to read from the page and then lifting them again. There's no rest
from whatever I might be wanting them to feel, when I keep looking at them.
So it's a much more powerful way to present the work, I think, but it doesn't
change my relationship to the poem at all. And that's what Utah was after,
too--not letting anything come between him (me) and the audience. He feels
very strongly about it.
T: You've done readings with Forrest Hamer
and Dan Bellm, with whom you collaborated on the collection Terrain.
Do you enjoy collaborative work more than individual work?
M.F: I like them both--we didn't write collaboratively,
we just had worked together for many years as a little writing group and it
seemed like a good time to put our work together - even after 10 years it
was still so different, we had not overtly influenced each others' styles.
I am really good at putting an anthology together, which I had learned from
doing them for California Poets in the Schools several times, so I got to
do the ordering after each of us had chosen what we wanted in there. But the
best part was doing readings, and reading the poems in that order. It was
like listening to a chorale singing instead of a regular poetry reading, and
was really fun. More interwoven, more connected than other times, when we've
read together as a threesome but separate work.
T: Reading your work, I'm particularly struck
by the way the tension is handled in the pantoum, "Pantoum Without Hope of
Rescue": the form seems to contribute heavily in this one, largely, of course,
through the repetition, but also because of the matter-of-fact way in which
the situation is described. The daughter is described in passive terms, and
in at least one line ("If this upsets you, by all means turn away") the reader
is directly addressed. The final line--which is also the opening line--undergoes
a fundamental transformation as a result of what the poem contains, and as
the closing line, it forces the reader to reflect upon the title. This strikes
me as a very apt illustration of the relationship between form and content,
as the repeating lines consistently warn the reader away--they act as clues
as to what happens next, and shift by the time they are repeated. Your own
experience with poetry, closely aligned with your own recognition of abuse
in your past, would appear to be of such a nature as to make writing about
this subject particularly difficult. Is it?
M.F: No, it's not difficult--it just pours
out of me, in a way that some of the less intense subjects do not.
T: When such a poem asks to be written,
do you find it a revisitation of those abuses, or does it serve as source
of some comfort?
M.F: Well, neither, really--I feel as though
I see the events from a distance, with great clarity, and that to write the
images down has elements of both exorcism and redemption. Part of my job,
I think, as someone who went through such traumatic stuff, is to explain it
to people who have not had the experience, in a way that they might understand
it better, and be more aware that it goes on. So I think that when a poem
like this comes to me, it's exciting because it's more evidence to bring to
the overall explanation of what many children go through.
What's hard, where the revisitation comes in, is reading them in public. I
used to read lots of abuse poems in any given reading, back when I was starting
out and felt very militant about "telling"--since as a kid I was told that
awful things would happen if I "told." But the more used to knowing about
the abuse I've gotten (I didn't know about it until I was 35), and the more
I'm able to be present to my feelings as they arise, the harder it's gotten
to read those poems in public. I tend to read one, if any, depending on the
audience. More than that and I begin to dissociate, and get really uncomfortable.
One more thing to say about this poem--the repetition works very well on a
subject like this, because you have to restate it. People don't at first want
to hear what you're saying, so the repetition helps them realize it's true,
that you really did say that, and mean it, and it's going to keep going on.
As a writer, you're being kind by helping them understand, at the same time
that you're being fierce, and stating the situation over and over.
T: It occurs to me that an important aspect
of your work might be summed up in the word "transformation": certainly your
reflections on the essay "DDT" point up the ability to change one's mind as
a central concern, and, I'd argue, the structure of "Pantoum Without Hope
of Rescue" works heavily upon this principle. How central do you think the
theme of change--and specifically, our ability as humans to change, is to
your work? What light do you feel this casts upon your own outlook on life?
M.F: I'm not sure what I think about transformation
and change, although I can see what you mean--it's strung through the work
like Xmas lights. I guess my own outlook on life has to do with distillation
more than change per se. I think that people throughout their lives come to
be truly themselves--taking on attitudes or ideas or jobs, shedding them again,
finding themselves in the end. That's certainly how I feel about myself: that
I am at work paring myself down to the essence, the distillation of my self.
It requires enormous change, and sometimes transformation, but it's not exactly
the same thing. It's what I try to do with poems, too, as a writer and also
a teacher: what is the real poem here, where is its heart, and can we pare
away all that is not essential so that the heart can shine most brightly?