__________
Greg Pape is the author of nine books, including
Border Crossings, Black Branches, Storm Pattern (all originally published by University of Pittsburgh
Press), Sunflower Facing the Sun
(winner of the Edwin Ford Piper Prize – now called the Iowa Prize – and
published by University of Iowa Press), American Flamingo (winner of a Crab Orchard Open Competition Award, and published by
Southern Illinois University Press), and Four Swans (published by Lynx House Press). His poems have been published widely in such magazines and literary reviews as The Atlantic, Iowa Review, The New Yorker, Northwest Review, and Poetry. He has received the Discovery / The Nation Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowships, the Pushcart Prize, the Richard Hugo Memorial Poetry Award, and his poems have been featured on NPR and read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. He teaches at the University of Montana, and in the Brief-Residency MFA program at Spalding University. He served as Poet Laureate of Montana from 2007 to 2009.
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GP: Four Swans was a
work-in-progress long before the idea for Animal
Time came to me. I have always been interested in animals and the ways we
human animals interact with other species, how we are connected, or
disconnected, with each other, how we share or infringe on each other's
habitats, what we give and take from each other. But the idea for the chapbook Animal Time grew out of a lecture I gave
at Spalding in which I considered the ways poets have engaged imaginatively
with animals. After looking at the work of Whitman and Dickinson, Elizabeth
Bishop, James Wright, Gerald Stern, Philip Levine, various Chinese and Japanese
poets, and others, I looked at my own work and made a gathering of poems in
which animals figure prominently. Those poems developed into the chapbook
Animal Time.
DP: That
deep interest in human and animal coexistence seems to be the
heartbeat of Four Swans. I
find myself often wondering what animals might think of us or say to us if they
could speak. For you, as a poet, how does this very human concern
become a poetry of coexistence?
GP:
I like your idea of a poetry of coexistence. Four
Swans, the book, began with the experiences presented in the title
poem. I had just spoken with my mother
on the phone. She was in the hospital in
California. I was worried about her,
thinking I needed to get down there and see her. I drove to the National Wildlife Refuge near
my home in the Bitterroot, a place I often go to walk, think, write, a place
set aside for people and other creatures to coexist. There were four swans on Whistler pond close
enough to observe without binoculars.
Beautiful creatures, calm, dignified—I describe them and name them in
the poem. They seemed to give me access
to something I needed. I don’t know what
they thought of me, but they were aware of my presence and seemed to be
untroubled by it. They were in complete
possession of themselves, at home on the ice and the water, feeding, preening,
stretching their big wings. I wondered
what it would be like to be one of them.
Then I thought in some way I am one of them. I guess that’s a poetry of coexistence.
DP: Your poem “Tracks & Traces” (Four
Swans 17-18) begins with the speaker expressing a nearly child-like curiosity
when he says, “It must be fun to be an otter” (line 6). However, at the end of
the poem there is a profound moment of coexistence revealed beneath an uprooted
Ponderosa pine, which you describe as “a time of violence / become a place of
shelter, part of the story / that houses us all” (50-52). Can you tell us more
about the curious and wise speaker of this poem?
GP:
The
speaker of “Tracks & Traces” is a guy like me walking through the woods in
winter reading the signs, the tracks left in the snow by animals, trying to
discern the stories those tracks tell.
It is something I do often in the winter, a form of walking meditation,
a state of concentration and observation much like a hunter’s, except I am
after something else besides deer or ducks and geese, some other kind of
sustenance. These winter walks can start
off serene and peaceful then turn, as the weather turns, fierce, or you come
upon the carcass of an elk with ravens feeding on it, or you step down into a
hole at the base of a lovely old Ponderosa pine that’s blown down in the last
storm. It’s hard not to think of the
violence as well as the beauty that’s written on the land, and in us.
DP: The presence of Nature in these poems,
captured in both the vivid imagery and a beautifully-wrought diction of the
land, is a powerful one. What is the importance of the human element that is
thinking and living within the powerful Nature of these poems?
GP: I think it’s important to describe
and try to articulate all sorts of experiences.
If our poems and other works of art help us live our lives, and that
seems to be one of the primary purposes of art, it is by articulating,
questioning, and shaping experience, sometimes making sense, providing insights
or feelings that can be shared, sometimes just putting something out there we
don’t completely understand, adding to the conversation. If we have learned anything it’s that the
human element is not something apart from Nature but something within Nature.
DP: There are four separate but very
carefully connected parts to the book Four Swans. How did each of these parts
become its own?
GP: When I began organizing the poems,
written over several years, into a book, I found there was a kind of narrative
arc that traced the infirmity and death of my mother from the first poem,
written in winter, to the last poem, written in fall, and the seasons, more or
less evident in all the poems, shaped and commented in a strong way on the arc
of the book.
DP: The poem “Elegy for Big Red” (Four
Swans 38-40) is perhaps the most humorous yet equally heart-breaking poem of
the collection. In it the speaker tells the tale of a rooster named Big Red,
whom he describes as a “bastard hatched / in Nebraska, shipped to Montana / in
a box with dozens of others” (lines 1-3). Why was it important to have this
poem in Four Swans?
GP: Swans, roosters, people, the beautiful
as well as the good the bad and the ugly are all part of the tapestry. “Elegy for Big Red” is both a lament and a
celebration, and maybe a warning. My
relationship with Big Red was complex.
We seemed to bring out the worst in each other. But when I found him headless in the chicken
coop one morning I realized what a beautiful creature he was, and how petty and
self-indulgent I had been toward him at times, and how much I respected him and
would miss him.
DP: In the poem “Big Lost River Breakdown”
(Four Swans 57-60) you write “under the cottonwoods, the smoke / sweetening the
summer air dawn to dusk / makes us recall Dreamland” (lines 35-37). Some
readers may initially see this Dreamland as an imaginary place of the poet to
be further explored in the next stanza, but as a former native of Alabama, my
mind (and taste buds) went straight to the plate of Dreamland barbecue you
later describe. Do you find yourself thinking and writing about a place, like
Montana or Alabama, when you are surrounded by it, or do you tend to write
about a place when you are away from it, wondering about it, longing for it?
GP: I think I was writing in my journal
in Arco, Nevada sitting at a picnic table when I smelled that barbeque smoke,
so I was there, fully present, and certainly hungry. But that smell took me immediately to
Dreamland, which as you know is the name of a great barbeque place outside
Tuscaloosa. So the answer to your
question is both. By writing about one place you make
associations with other places, and depending on your aims or needs, you follow
your pencil. In this case to Dreamland.
DP: While nearly all of these poems occur
in a natural world, Parts III and IV contain many poems about people,
specifically family and friends. Can you describe the necessity of these more
human poems in Four Swans?
GP: I think all the poems occur in the
natural world. There are poems in Parts
III and IV that are elegies, poems that remember the lives and mourn the deaths
of friends and family, but they are mixed in with sketches of particular places
and people—life and death side by side of necessity.
DP: Several poems in Four Swans present a
speaker looking through a window, either out onto the natural world or into
some other world. What do these windows reveal, or hide, from the human element
of the poem?
GP: I like to write outdoors, and I do as
much as I can, even sometimes in winter.
But when I’m writing indoors I often keep in touch with the outdoors by
gazing out the window. Emerson said,
“the health of the eyes demands a horizon,” and I believe that is true
literally, as well as metaphorically. A
window lets light in, and lets one see out.
It is both an entrance and an exit.
I’m never completely comfortable in those rooms without windows.
DP: There is this consistent presence of
faith, hope, and patience in Four Swans. This is especially true of those poems
at the end of the book. Do you see these elements as an extension of yourself
in the poetry, or is it a result of the Nature, the possibility of regrowth, in
which many of these poems exist?
GP: Where does one find faith, hope, and
patience? More good names for
swans. Certainly we need those to get
through tough times. I think we discover
and develop those things in all sorts of ways.
We learn from each other, from literature, from religion, from rivers
and swans and ponderosa pines.
DP: The final poem of the book, “White
Church in Wiborg” (Four Swans 82-83), presents a speaker looking into the
window of a church and imagining a scene taking place inside. In that scene is
a captured moment of human, perhaps family, history. The speaker leaves this
imagined moment and follows another down the wagon-rutted mule path all the way
to Cumberland Falls, where one can “watch the Moonbow / rise above the river,
like an arched and lighted entrance / through earthly air that made those who
saw it lean closer” (33-35). Why did you choose to end the book with a sense of
entry into another world? Should we be anticipating anything? Another book
perhaps?
Greg Pape on-line:
"American Flamingo," The Atlantic
"Cemetery in Kentucky," Poetry Daily
"Fog," The Atlantic
interview: Alabama Writers' Forum Executive Director Jeanie Thompson interviews poets Greg Pape and Frank X. Walker about their literary work (audio)
poems featured on The Writer's Almanac
on the Montana Poet Laureate Program website: Nine poems from two of his books
reading selections of his poetry at Montana State University (MSU) Library (video)
review of American Flamingo at Valparaiso Poetry Review
review of Four Swans at Two Poets blog
