laughter pedals smoothly,
speeding us so easily
after happily.
"AFTER HAVING CHILDREN, WE REINTRODUCE OURSELVES TO BICYCLES" in Local News from Someplace Else
Amazon's Marjorie Maddox Page
Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf & Stock 2013); a 2013 eBook of Perpendicular As I ( Kindle version, Nook version, Kobo version); print version of Perpendicular As I (1994 Sandstone Book Award); and six other award winning books, as well as over 450 poems, stories, and essays in journals and anthologies. She is the co-editor, with Jerry Wemple, of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State Press, 2005) and has two children’s books. The Working Poet: 75 Writing Exercises and a Poetry Anthology (Autumn House Press) contains three of her pedagogical essays, including poems by her former students. Her memoir essays are included in several collections.
Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation was a runner-up, finalist, or
semifinalist at 30 national competitions.
Local News From Someplace Else
has been a finalist for the Samuel French Morse Poetry Award, sponsored by
Northeastern University; for the Kentucky Women’s Prize, sponsored by
Sarabande; for the Magellan Prize, sponsored by Button Wood Press; for the
Mammoth Books Poetry Award; the Ashland Poetry Press Prize; and a semifinalist
for the Crab Orchard Poetry Award, and elsewhere.
Marjorie
studied with A. R. Ammons, Robert Morgan, Phyllis Janowitz, and Ken McClane at Cornell, where she received the Sage Graduate Fellowship for
her M.F.A. in poetry in 1989; with Sena Jeter Naslund at the University of Louisville, where she
received an M.A. in English; and with Beatrice Batson and Harold Fickett at Wheaton College, where she received a B.A. in Literature. Her numerous honors include Cornell
University’s Chasen Award, the 2000 Paumanok Poetry Award, an Academy of
American Poets Prize, the Seattle
Review’s Bentley Prize for Poetry, a Bread Loaf Scholarship, Pushcart
Prize nominations in both poetry and fiction, among other awards. She lives with her husband and two children
in Williamsport, Pa., birthplace of Little League and home of the Little League
World Series. She is the great grandniece of baseball legend Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who helped break the
color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson.
~~~
Come home, I cry,
unbridle me
from worry dolls
and leave me free
to mount this morning
and to start
to teach the squirrel
not to dart.
"Mount the Morning," The History of Bearing Children
Available for purchase at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod
Jacqueline Murray Loring
writes scripts, poetry
and stage plays. Her poetry collection The History of Bearing Children won
the 2012 of the Doire Irish International Prize. History was awarded 2nd place in the 2012 New Mexico Press Women
competition. Her plays have been produced at the Provincetown Theater
Company, Provincetown, MA. Her full-length play, Reflections for a Warm Day, was presented in 2007 at the
Provincetown Theater/New Provincetown Players Festival. No Matter What, about trafficking of women in present day, was
stage-read in 2010. Fight for Right and
Freedom was produced during the 2012 Provincetown Theater’s 24-hour Playwrights Festival.
Loring compiled, edited and published Summer Home Review, Volumes I & II.
Her poetry is published in journals and anthologies including the Scribner
anthology, From Both Sides Now, A Sense
of Place: An Anthology of Cape Women Writers and Cadence of Hooves. Loring
has received professional development grants and artist residencies from the
Ragdale Foundation in Forest Lake, IL and the Heinrich Böll cottage, Achill
Island, County Mayo, Ireland, among others. In July 2013, she was a co-writer
on the 'Real to Reel' team participating in the New Mexico 48 Hour Film
Project. She co-wrote the script, Sir Acheron’s Party. the Friends Of Film, Media And Video entry
in the 2014 New Mexico 48 Hour Film Project.
Loring
is the Coordinator of the Eventide Arts Full Length Playwriting Competition,
the past-president of the Cape Cod Chapter of the NLAPW and the past executive
director of the Cape Cod Writers Center. With the support of the Nam Vets
Association of the Cape and Islands, she is presently working on a nonfiction
book, Surviving The Peace After War. She
lives on her family ranch in Albuquerque, New Mexico’s South Valley. There she
writes, and helps her daughter care for the horses in her equestrian therapy
stables, Enchanted Equine Adventures New Mexico, LLC.
~~~
Thank
you for allowing me the honor of conducting this email interview. As you know, this review will look at each of
your books. Since both books examine how
tragedy and violence intrude into ordinary lives, and ways we respond to such
threats to our wellbeing, I thought it would be enlightening to have each poet
answer the same questions. So I would
like to introduce you, the poets and blog readers, to a very brief summary of both
works.
Local
News from Someplace Else, by Marjorie Maddox, examines concepts of home,
family, and community, as well as situations—as near as the uterus, as far as Croatia—that
affect people’s safety and happiness. The History of Bearing Children, by
Jacqueline Murray Loring, traces the course of love, marriage and family life
with a husband/father/Vietnam veteran haunted by his wartime experiences. The
following questions are for both of you.
~
INTERVIEW
WITH MARJORIE MADDOX
CL: As a poet who
came to the craft later in life, I’m always curious about when and how others
became poets. Would you describe your
journey to becoming a writer?
MM: I’ve written about just that
experience—my “journey into poetry”—in detail at this blog post http://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/2013/06/04/journey-into-poetry-marjorie-maddox-hafer/
My
journey as a writer in general—I write poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction,
scholarly essays, and children’s literature—is similar. All writing, I believe, is creative, no
matter if it is a literary analysis of poet Marianne Moore; a book review of a
contemporary novel; or a poem, story, or memoir essay. From a young age, I
loved to immerse myself in words and in the worlds words can create through reading.
Most children, I believe, grow up
loving words—the rhythm of a story, the music in the nursery rhyme. That love
and passion can be encouraged (and I was fortunate in this aspect with
supportive parents) or, unfortunately, sometimes squashed. Too many times, I’ve
heard even teens describe the arts as impractical. But the opposite is true,
isn’t it? Literature has everything to
do with our lives.
I
have written poems and stories as far back as I can remember. (My first
published poem was in a Campfire Girl magazine.) I’ll never forget the thrill of
composing stories in elementary school—or the joy of presenting thank you and birthday
poems to teachers and playmates. Of course,
most of these were trite and clichéd, but I continued scribbling in notebooks,
taking classes, entering school writing competitions, and reading, reading,
reading! While I was in high school, my parents hired an OSU graduate student in
creative writing to tutor me in fiction. I went on to study literature and
writing at Wheaton College, then English and creative writing for my MA at the
University of Louisville with Sena Jeter Naslund. After working several years
as an editor, I applied for and was awarded the Sage Graduate Fellowship at
Cornell, where I earned my MFA in poetry, working closely with A. R. Ammons,
Bob Morgan, Ken McClane, and Phyllis Janowitz. These were wonderfully
instructive times (and luxurious—oh, to have that much uninterrupted writing
time again).
Now, more than twenty-five
years later, I still love to “write across the genres.” While poetry and short fiction are my first
and longest loves, sometimes the essay or children’s literature is more conducive
to what I am exploring. (For more on how I began writing children’s literature,
see http://davidlharrison.wordpress.com/2010/05/21/marjorie-maddox-today/ )
All in all, writing and I
are joined at the hip (and the brain, heart, and hand)! Though we sometimes
have a love/hate relationship (writing is, after all, a lot of work), I
wouldn’t have it any other way.
MM: Poetry is a confrontation
with our everyday lives, a way to discover the world and our place in it,
and—in the case of some of the poems in Local
News from Someplace Else—a way to wrestle with the tragedies around us. (As
I write these responses, the radio is broadcasting yet another school
shootings; 74 now it says since Newtown.) These events are in the poems because
they are in my life—in many of our lives—as we both grapple with and rejoice in
the world we call home.
But Local News from Someplace Else began as a much different book some
seventeen years ago. (I know because my daughter just turned seventeen and the
collection includes some poems on pregnancy.) After 9/11, the book’s original focus—having
and raising children—changed as the world changed. As have many of us, I began
thinking more and more about our unsafe world and particularly how best to
raise a family in such an environment. Society’s changing definition of what is
and isn’t “safe” affects how we view “home,” as well as how we see ourselves,
others, and the world in which we create that “home.” Often, after reading the
newspaper or listening to the radio, I find myself returning to the same
stories. A number of the poems in Local
News from Someplace Else poetically examine such headlines: the TWA Flight
800 plane crash, which especially impacted so many in Montoursville, PA, near
where I live; a toddler murdered in my city; school shootings; the Quecreek
mine rescue; the Nickel Mines Amish schoolhouse shooting; the Oklahoma
tornadoes; the 9/11 plane crash in Pennsylvania; a kidnapped Philadelphian girl
who escaped from her captors; a boy electrocuted on a bridge in Ohio; a Chicago
woman found frozen in her apartment; a jazz funeral after Katrina; the
aftermath of Hurricane Sandy; and a man, who—after struck by
lightning—miraculously survived. But I consider more lighthearted headlines as
well: a man getting a tattooed wedding ring; a wedding ceremony at Reptiland; a
woman suffering from amnesia who remarries her longtime husband—to name just a
few.
Nonetheless,
ultimately, this is a book about grace and joy. This is a book about how to live—joyfully
and in community—in today’s damaged world. Thus, I also examine small
pleasures—the ocean, a cup of coffee, a bike ride, an extra thick towel at a
hotel—along with the deeper riches of family, friends, and faith. The book
doesn’t have easy answers—there aren’t any—but it does, I hope, examine what
matters most in our lives.
CL: Do you think tragic and violent experiences can be redeemed, and if so, how?
CL: Do you think tragic and violent experiences can be redeemed, and if so, how?
CL: How are the
poems in your book an attempt to redeem the tragedy/violence that impinges on
personal lives?
MM: The
key word here is “personal”—making the experience personal, not just something happening
somewhere else or to somebody else, but to somebody human like me with dreams,
hopes, ambitions, fears. I try to enter the experience by better understanding
the mind of the individual within the experience. Because a mother’s fears or a
daughter’s grief are, at core, painful no matter the specific situation, identification
follows—as can hope or joy. Although I’ve been through my own wrenches of the
heart (and flesh), I am by nature a hopeful person, someone who gets back up
and keeps trying. I suspect that, too, comes through in the poems. There is
darkness here, but there also is light. There’s even quite a bit of humor, one
of nature’s best coping mechanisms.
CL: Despite the descriptions
and contemplations of suffering expressed in many of your poems, there are quiet
lines/poems accepting what cannot be changed; even covert and overt
celebrations of what is salvageable, as well as a determination to take the
next step. Would you say something about
the technical and emotional considerations involved in writing such poems?
MM: These
are all wonderfully insightful questions and get right to the crux of what I hoped
to convey. Thank you. I’m also intrigued, but not surprised, that Jacqueline
Murray Loring and I are exploring similar themes in our books.
As
my collection evolved, I struggled to find the right balance of both
remembering and honoring what has been and continues to be lost and why it is
thus now even more important to cherish the small gifts in the day-to-day. I
admit I don’t always remember this. In fact, I often forget. I can be
overwhelmed by the increasing amount of violence and sorrow in our lives. I do,
though, try to remember the life-affirming
moments as well. Part of that “trying” comes through the actual process of
writing.
On
the cover of my book is an old-fashioned television, the kind with rabbit ears.
The screen is filled with static. Sometimes, that’s how our lives feel, so full
of static with no clear picture. We are nostalgic for what has been. We yearn
to be reconnected to what is important. There can be a sense of precariousness,
a sense that at any moment we might topple over the edge; ultimately, it’s our human
and spiritual relationships that keep us from doing just that.
On
a technical level, this precariousness is conveyed through sometimes startling
images and breaks. For example, I often use enjambment, one line falling into
another, to further emphasize the daily dangers we encounter.
In
putting together the collection, I struggled with balance. How could I most
effectively bring together the “safe” and “unsafe,” as well as what makes us
laugh and what makes us weep. I
completely rearranged the order of poems many, many times, pulling out some
pieces and adding in new ones. This is a collection that I started before several
of my other books were published; however, it is the one whose content changed most
drastically.
Naturally,
I also wanted to avoid sentimentality. It is difficult to write about children,
love, and even tragedy without veering into the clichéd or sentimental. Nevertheless
all poems (and perhaps these subjects in particular) demand that we do just
that. I tried to give an honest and full account of human experience. I hope that
I’ve succeeded.
CL: Do you
consider your poetry to be poetry of witness?
Why?
MM: I
would go so far as to say that in a broad sense most poetry—or at least much of
my poetry in this particular book—is poetry of witness. Poetry is all about precision (the right word
in the right place) and perspective (seeing the world from a slightly different
angle). It also is about observance and engagement. Even when I am writing a
persona poem, I am writing what I, or the character, observes about the world.
Giving witness goes beyond merely seeing, of course. To witness is to testify,
to give evidence of. Poetic evidence is
in the details, in the creation of, as Marianne Moore would say, “imaginary
gardens with real toads.” It also is in Emily Dickinson’s knock-the-top-of-your-head-off
impact, William Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” and T.
S. Eliot’s “objective correlative.” But what comes first in most cases is the
willingness to witness.
All
that being said, I’m partial to the lyrical and imagaic (I want to hear and see
the poem!) and shy away from the overtly political. (Though there can be an
overlap of themes/issues, some “political” poetry has, for my tastes, too much
of an agenda.) I’m often tempted by a
good narrative (what happened, when, and to whom?), and I can’t resist good
old-fashioned word play. Many of the poems in Local News from Someplace Else were just plain fun to write and are
fun to read. So there’s that as well.
But
yes, to get back to your question, I see many of these pieces as Carolyn
Forche’s type of poetry of witness. I observe, testify to, try to understand,
and as much as is possible attempt to transcend many of the violent and tragic
events of the last twenty years. I also,
though, bear witness to the safe havens of our lives.
CL: What is your
writing practice? How quickly do you
“finish” a poem, how do you begin a poem, bring it to completion, and how do
you know when it is finished? How do you
“track” the progress of a given poem from draft, to submission, to publication?
MM: More
good questions. Here are some answers.
1.)
Because I am a college professor with a heavy teaching load, as well as a spouse
and mother with two teenagers (one with Crohns), I get little time to write
during the school year. Like many of us, my days are jammed full with this and
that, and when I finally have a second to breathe, I try to do just that, breathe!
This doesn’t mean, however, that the process of writing isn’t still
somehow occurring deep in the brain. I think it is. In fact, I seem to get just
as much written over my school “breaks,” as I did before I had kids and had
more daily writing time. I do find, though, that I actually use my iPhone now to
jot down an idea or a line in the middle of a hectic day, so I can come back to
this note at another time.
Mostly,
though, I like to write on our back sun porch, where I can look outside, hear
the birds, but still plug in my laptop when the battery gets low. Sometimes, as
I tell my students, the idea for a poem comes through the front door. I know
that I want to write about a particular experience, situation, or memory. Other
times, a poem comes through the back door. A line or image keeps going through
my head, and I follow this to see where it will lead me.
At
times, I give myself assignments. Some of the headline poems came about this
way. I would read the morning paper and jot down ideas. Or maybe I’ll see a
call for an anthology on a particular topic, and so I’ll start brainstorming. Other
times I immerse myself in reading to get the music of poetry playing in my ear.
When
I am still stuck, I try to go do something more physical: walking, exercising,
doing the laundry, or even soaking in a hot bath. This can take the pressure off
of trying to fill the dreaded blank computer screen. The brain is open to free
associate when the body is moving (or, in the case of the hot bath, unwinding).
Typically, after any dry period, I have a day or two of just pacing the house
and procrastinating as I begin to gear up. I don’t like this part of the
process, but I’ve begun to accept it for what it is.
Once
I actually am writing, I follow what comes out. Sometimes a poem happens very
quickly. Usually, though, each poem goes through ten, twenty, or thirty
revisions. Even when I think a poem is “almost there,” I can’t stop
tinkering. I also do a lot of composing
out loud, and so I prefer to have the house, or at least the room, to
myself. (Obviously, that isn’t always
possible. The other option is to be where there are a lot of people but I am
anonymous, like at an airport or a coffee house.) Eventually, I let a poem sit,
then return to it a few days later to see if it is still working the way I
thought it was. Sometime it isn’t, and I start again.
Once
I have at least some poems down, it is easier to continue on to others. In
fact, some of the earlier poems in any of these sessions turn out to be mere stretching.
That’s OK. They’ve served their purpose and are all part of exercising the
brain, which is the process of writing.
2.
How do I know when a poem is finished?
Sometimes I don’t. Usually, though, I sense that thrill when I read a work
aloud, and each word seems to be in just the right place. I might keep playing
around with line breaks (one of the great advantages of composing on a
computer) and change the shape some, but in general I can tell when the music
of the poem sounds right to my ear.
3.
Once I reach this stage, I put the poem in an electronic folder labeled “Ready
to Send Out,” and the next time I am procrastinating from writing (yes, this is
when many of my poems get submitted), then I do just that, grouping poems
according to theme or to the readership of a particular journal or magazine. I
log my submissions electronically as well and keep track of each piece that way.
I used to use the old Filemaker Pro. As more and more journals are using
Submittable.com, I find many of my pieces are logged there instead.
CL: What poetic form(s) do you prefer and why?
MM: I write primarily in free verse but, as I mentioned earlier, my work tends to be lyrical and imagaic, so you’ll find a lot of attention to sound and image. I also play around with rhyme and repetition.
CL: What poetic form(s) do you prefer and why?
MM: I write primarily in free verse but, as I mentioned earlier, my work tends to be lyrical and imagaic, so you’ll find a lot of attention to sound and image. I also play around with rhyme and repetition.
CL: How do you decide what form is best for a given poem?
MM: Mostly, by experimentation—good old trial and error. Sound and sense need to work together.
Anniversary Coffee
On this side of plate glass,
the Pennsylvania sky
threatens
no one, calms us with what
we aren’t
such perfect summer squall
the calm
we love in morning
coffee and split croissant.
Those behind the counter
know us and know
when to save what we want,
can order for us, smile at
how we smile
at each other’s drenched
winsomeness. You are
not what I ordered but what
I order now
across the café table,
across the morning
spread with such detectable
savor.
In the poem’s opening lines,
I imply contrast between what you see when you look in from the outside at a
couple in a café vs. what is going on inside the relationship. The break after
“threatens,” dropping down to “no one” in the next stanza further creates
tension. I tried to continue this tension and surprise in such images as “split
croissant,” the line and stanza break of “smile/at each other’s drenched
winsomeness,” and “You are/not what I ordered but what I order now” with the play
on “order.” The slant rhyme of “You are” and the poem’s final word “savor”
rhythmically pull together the poem while also emphasizing unity. (So this
really felt like the ending to me immediately after I wrote it.) Throughout, I
tried to pay attention to rhythm, assonance, and consonance. There’s more, of
course, and much occurred subconsciously during the writing process, but given
your question, these are some of the choices that stand out to me now.
I am not sure that I have a “favorite” poem in the collection. “At the
Gynecologist’s” and “Cyde Peeling’s Reptiland” are great fun to read to a
crowd. One of the poems, though, that I think raises the central question of the
book—how do you raise a family in an unsafe world—is the piece “Safe.” When my children were young, there was a horrific murder in
my town. In the midst of a custody battle, a man stabbed his young daughter
numerous times. And so I had to decide whether to attend the funeral with my
daughter.
Safe
My baby and I
stay home
from the
funeral for the murdered child,
unrecognizably
battered and stabbed
in last week’s
news photos.
The police
arrive early
at the church,
the estranged wife
and husband,
separated by rows of pews,
glare at
photographers, suspect
each other.
They have both
aimed guns. My
husband lights
church candles
around the girl’s enlarged
classroom
photo, prays
for us. What is
safe lurks
nowhere near,
doubt encrypting
fear, the way
we cross
ourselves in
our cloistered home.
We stare
nightly at neighbors
walking too
close to the nursery window,
too close to
the woods
where the girl
was found,
her arms crisscrossed
just so
as if by a
parent who can
no longer sleep.
I wanted to create in this poem,
through careful word choice and line breaks, the great fear that we are not
always able to protect our children, especially when danger often appears at
the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected places.
CL: Who are the
poets that have most influenced you?
MM: This also is a hard one
because my answer seems always to be changing. Certainly, I’ve been influenced
by poets I fell in love with early on—Hopkins, Eliot, Sexton, Bishop, Moore, the
17th c. metaphysical poets—but just as importantly, I am always
learning from the works of contemporary poets and writers. My list of favorites is long, but here’s what’s currently on
my bedside table: Todd Davis’ In the
Kingdom of the Ditch; K. A. Hays’ Early
Creatures, Native Gods; Elizabeth Alexander’s American Sublime; Kerrin McCadden’s Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes; Tania Runyan’s Second Sky; The Nearest Poem Anthology, edited by Sofia Starnes; and Mary
Szybist’s Incardine. Recently, I also
reviewed Barbara Crooker’s wonderful new collection Gold, which I see you reviewed as well.
MM: I have several diverse projects in the works
right now:
A) A middle grade biography of my great
granduncle Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who
helped break the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson. If you saw the movie
42, Branch Rickey was played by
Harrison Ford
2)
A short story collection, What She Was
Saying, that explores power, silences, and spirituality in women’s voices
3)
A dramatic rendition with music and dance of animal poems from my children’s
book A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry, as compiled and directed by Rob Thompson and his
troupe Phenomenal Animals, to be performed in schools in NJ and/or MD.
Thanks
so much for these terrific and perceptive questions! If your readers would like
more information, they may want to peruse my web site: www.marjoriemaddox.com
I
look forward now to learning more about Jacqueline Murray Loring’s The History of Bearing Children,
especially as it seems we’re drawn to similar themes.
~
INTERVIEW WITH JACQUELINE MURRAY LORING
CL: As a poet who came to the craft later in life, I’m
always curious about when and how others became poets. Would you describe your journey to becoming a
writer?
JL: When I was a kid, the grownups
turned to me for happy, rhyming verses at parties or special occasions. My parents,
my sisters and I lived down stairs from my grandparents and my Aunt Clare. I
read my grandfather’s Ray Bradbury books and wrote Sci-Fi short stories in
grammar school. It didn’t make me popular with the nuns at Saint Peter’s
School. Grandpa would read sport stories to us, and Grandma loved poetry. My
aunt was a career WAVE and traveled to fantastic places. I remember her shelves
of books. At one point, maybe 5th grade, I roamed the world through
Richard Halliburton’s books. I planned to see all the places for real. My
grandmother had a substantial collection of poetry books which, if we were good
kids, she would read. Treasured memory.
Unfortunately, by the time
I got to public high school, my stories and poems had been pretty beaten down
by the nuns. By 8th grade, I didn’t show anyone what I wrote. Fortunately
when I was a junior in public high school, I had a Civics teacher who encouraged
me to write, in any form that I liked at that moment. I don’t have any of those
journals but I often wonder what my space stories would read like today. She
took our class to see and hear Robert Frost read. Amazing.
By the time I was an adult,
the words I wrote seemed to fit into lines and stanzas rather than paragraphs
and chapters. Though I can’t remember thinking ‘this is a poem, this is a
story, this is true, this is a fable.’ Rather it was just my way of journal
writing, of making sense of life. Before the 1970s, I didn’t share my writings
with anyone.
My big shift began with
troubling times in my marriage. One evening my husband brought home a flyer
from the Vietnam Veteran’s Outreach Center in Hyannis. It advertised a two week
long writers’ workshop at UMass, Boston. Poetry became my life’s work. I wrote
daily, hours at a time. Except for the work I showed at the Joiner gatherings,
and a few that were published, most of the work I have written is still unseen.
Over the years I have written and edited several hundred poems, only a few of
which became part of my first chap book poetry collection in 2012. My next
collection will be a full length poetry book.
In the mid-1990s I was
writing only poetry, but at a Cape Cod writers conference I took a
screenwriting course and fell in love with the genre. Before my move to New
Mexico, I wrote daily, primarily screen and stage plays. My poetry background
helps me write dialogue that enacts what I want a character to express.
Poetry still holds an
important place in my creative life. I don’t know when a poem will want to be
written but when it happens, I have to write. When I NEED to write and can’t
due to life’s intrusions, I become very crabby.
CL:
What caused you to write the book under review?
JL: During the late 1990’s
and early 2000’s, I attended the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social
Consequence’s writers’ workshop at UMass, Boston. The faculty and the majority
of participants were Vietnam veterans. Within that community, I found a cocoon
of supportive writers, mostly poets, who allowed me to put into words, mostly
poems, my life’s struggles.
I was married in 1969, a
few months after my husband returned from Vietnam. I hadn’t known him before
his service. For many years, twenty or thirty maybe, I felt estranged from the
women and families around me. I was the mother of four children (and foster
kid), alienated from my own sisters and their husbands and families. What I
knew about married life, about being in a relationship, about being a member of
a larger community, I learned in the aftermath of my husband’s Vietnam
experience. Only at that time, I did not know that Vietnam was a part of my
daily life.
From the first day’s
poetry class with Vietnam veteran poet Bruce Weigl (2013 finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize), and workshops over the years with writers and poets like Tim
O’Brian, Lamont Steptoe, Larry Heinemann and others, my writing evolved along
with my self-esteem. Once I started sending out individual pieces of
publication, I had a great deal of success. But I was unable to find a publisher who would
publish the entire collection, so I abandoned the idea.
While at the two week summer
Joiner writers’ conference in 2002 and 2005, I gathered, edited and published
two anthologies of the participants’ work: SUMMER HOME REVIEW I and II. The
anthologies include the poems, prose, plays and translations. Many of these
works would never have been otherwise published. The books included photos of students
and faculty I had taken over the years. I still get thank you notes from
writers who say that their published photo with Lady Borton, Grace Paley,
Demetria Martinez, or Claribel Alegria has been the highlight of their lives.
The short version of how
my chapbook got published is that in the early 2000’s no one was interested in a
book, written by a veteran’s wife, about surviving the peace after Vietnam.
After a lot of rejections, I stopped trying. In November of 2011 an Irish
friend and my husband convinced me I should try again. I bought Poets and
Writers Magazine, sent six to eight poems out to every contest listed in the
January/February issue. Several poems were accepted for publication. Then in
April, I got a call from Galway. I had received
the 2012 Doire Press International Chap Book prize, which included publication
of the book and seventy five copies. If I could get to Ireland they would
launch the book at a reading in Galway. In July 2012 I traveled to Ireland. The
publisher hosted a book launch, readings and book signings. Writing THE HISTORY
OF BEARING CHILDREN took me twenty years.
Final publication was a totally different journey.
CL:
Do you think tragic and violent experiences can be redeemed, and if so, how?
JL: My life to this time
has been a personal, unique and intimate journey of self-discovery. If this
question is supposed to reflect my life experiences, then I think “tragic and
violent” are harsh and concrete descriptions.
If by “redeemed” you mean ‘changed’ or ‘converted,’ then no I don’t
think that by writing down a life moment by moment, exactly as it happened
changes anything.
But I do think that there
is a ‘release’ or ‘liberation’ from the emotion that the poet can capture on
paper. What is the reality behind any specific poem, anyway? I think a poem
must be true to itself. What individual
words in a poem express is often ambiguous. A dog might bite you but in a poem
the experience could become waves of remorse or bitterness about how a winter’s
snow storm intrudes on a family event.
Or the poem could be full of hard sounds or disrupted end lines. Poets
show these situations in unique ways.
CL: How are the poems in your book an attempt to
redeem the tragedy/violence that impinges on personal lives?
JL: Once I was notified
that Doire Press had accepted my poems, I had to face the fact that they were
offering to publish a whole book of my work. Was I ready to publish these
intimate poems, allow them out into the world? I thought I was.
One friend I asked to read
and edit the manuscript told me that she was “horrified that my husband would
allow me to air our dirty laundry.” My husband supported the telling of our
tale. We agreed that if the book helps one veteran or one family, then it
should be published. I spent weeks second guessing my determination to get the
book published.
I believe that the
families of America’s new vets deserve to know that we survived, and that they
can and will also survive. Reading THE
HISTORY OF BEARING CHILDREN might give them some measure of understanding about
what life is like inside the family of a combat veteran.
A few years ago, before I
moved to New Mexico, I attended the funeral of a close friend’s husband. She
and I shared our children’s school years. She was the PTA president and I was
on the school committee. We were part of a larger group of women who were
active in our community. At her husband’s funeral I was intrigued by his
Vietnam medals and photographs. During all those years, I had not known he was
a Vietnam vet. In the months after the funeral, I asked several other women in
our circle if their husbands were vets, and I was astounded to find out most
were. How could I have not known that? Easy. As wives and mothers we focused
our community efforts on our children’s lives. We hardly ever talked about our
husbands or their lives. I wish THE HISTORY OF BEARING CHILDREN had been
published in the 1980s or 1990s. I now wish I had shared my story with my women
friends back then. I can only wonder now if my life and their lives might have been
different, if we had known we shared common ground.
I feel, in a small way,
that THE HISTORY OF BEARING CHILDREN is an important contribution to the genre
of books about surviving life after war. My poems are from the perspective of the
family and not the veteran. This gives them a valuable and a unique perspective
on how to survive the peace after war.
My new book’s working
title is PROJECT RESILIENCY: CONVERSATIONS WITH IN-COUNTRY VIETNAM VETERANS. It contains interviews with twelve
Vietnam veterans, and will be made up of dialogues between veterans of the war
in Vietnam. I hope it will be an
inspiration to readers, specifically to America’s new veterans and their
families. With over forty years of experiences behind them, Vietnam vets have
adjusted to the peace after war and have valuable insights to share about the
struggles and successes after combat. The book will allow me to help these
veterans to share their stories and “to pay forward” their knowledge and life
experiences for new vets and their families.
CL:
Despite the descriptions and contemplations of suffering expressed in many of
your poems, there are quiet lines/poems accepting what cannot be changed; even
covert and overt celebrations of what is salvageable, as well as a
determination to take the next step.
Would you say something about the technical and emotional considerations
involved in writing such poems?
JL: I think ‘Triple Canopy’
is an example of what you are asking. I was trying to express the turmoil that
occasionally can be part of a family’s journey. The day begins calmly, almost
serene, happy, but there is no way to predict when events or circumstances you
cannot foresee or control will force themselves upon you. In this poem I tried
to show that even in the face of awful events, if there is a bond between a man
and a woman, an overriding emotion that holds the relationship together, then
something as simple as seeing your engagement ring sparkle in the sunshine can
keep you going. It only takes a fraction
of a second to hold together a family during rough times. The last line
reflects the love, the sureness about the strength of a relationship, that allows a
woman to go on. Until it was included in THE HISTORY OF BEARING CHILDREN, the
title of the poem was TOMORROWS but my editor helped me to see the depth the
new title added to the poem.
triple canopy
Alone at the bow on a
sunset cruise
past Race Point, my
fingers grip the rail
the minute before I see
the ocean boil,
the moment before
salt-spray pebbles beat me,
the split second before
I hear
the propeller grind in
air, children scream,
I see my diamond
sparkle.
CL:
Do you consider your poetry to be poetry of witness? If so, why?
JL: I didn’t years ago but
yes, I guess with this book, I want to offer readers a glimpse into the
workings of a different reality than they might know. I believe that for a wife
and children, living within the
construct of a husband’s/father’s PTSD creates a world that cannot be
understood or judged from outside. I’ve often tried to write prose about my
forty five years of marriage and have failed miserably. I recently have
outlined a new screenplay based roughly on a couple of months of my marriage
when a ½ scale replica of the Vietnam Veteran’s traveling wall visited our
town. Since the publication of History, I
find I am much less hesitant to ‘tell’ stories about my marriage and life when
talking with a veteran who suffers from PTSD.
CL:
What is your writing practice? How
quickly do you “finish” a poem, how do you begin a poem, bring it to completion,
and how do you know when it is finished?
How do you “track” the progress of a given poem from draft, to
submission, to publication?
JL: Most frequently the
title or last line of a poetic thought comes to me first. The thoughts fill
themselves in as I write. On the other hand, I have a poem about my sister’s
last few months before she died that I still haven’t written fully after ten
years. I accumulate lines I must add into poems and they sit on paper or in
computer files. I’ll get to it one day
soon.
I have a title, “On the
night of missed chemo” that haunts me because I know what I want to say but I
can’t find the right words, or settle into a form, or even a complete thought.
I am afraid I won’t do it justice so I wait. My problem is that I want to get
the poem to reflect the actual even. The poem wants to be a poem. “On the
night…” runs for more than ten pages at this point.
But mostly when the idea
for a poem comes, it won’t let me go until the words are on paper in some
reasonable form. A new poem is usually insistent and demands closure. I drive
when this happens, and I pull over when enough words crowd my head that they
need to be written down. I’ve missed important meetings or gatherings while
this is happening. But the feeling that I get when the right words appear on
the page and express, unedited, exactly what I want to say, is worth all the
effort. That moment of quiet, personal elation is an important moment my poetic
life. On the other hand, all poems that
work their way through a writer’s critique group benefit from that additional
edit.
I use to be terrible about
tracking poems I submitted. I had to master the process once I started sending
out screenplays. I use an excel spread sheet to track all my submissions. It is
hard work that I don’t enjoy, but I have a friend who had two poems published
in two magazines in the same month. Neither magazine would accept her work
after that. A lesson well learned.
CL: What poetic form(s) do you prefer
and why? How do you decide what form is
best for a given poem? Would you
illustrate the decision making process with one of the poems from your book?
JL: I have written sonnets
and sestinas and in 2012 I wrote an Ode, but I think I prefer free verse
because it allows my thoughts to flow instinctively, not held to a form the
nuns insisted I use when I was a kid. I don’t decide ahead of time what form a
new idea will take, just as I am not committed to the line or stanza, or end
lines. In general my inspiration comes with a title, or an ending or a couple
of words. From there I write in my notebook (I prefer an unlined artist paper
notebook) with a pencil. I pour all the thoughts and ideas I have that go with
the emotion or idea onto the page, unedited. I may write in lines or as a
paragraph but I am not attached to the form. I have had a few gifts from the
muse, poems that come complete and need little or no editing. But whether it
seems complete or begins with a few words on the page, once I begin a poem I usually
stay with it till the first draft is done. By that I mean the poem works itself
out in my head. It writes itself when I am sleeping, when I’m not at my desk,
when I drive or even when I try to concentrate on someone’s conversation. I
return to my paper frequently in this stage, maybe daily, possibly several
times in a day, sometimes till very late at night.
Some poems require
research for facts or specific wording, some demand language beyond what comes
easily. Beautiful words sometimes hide till they are damn well ready to be
written down. Occasionally, I remember another poem with a word or thought that
could help me complete a thought, so I go back to poetry books that inspire me.
RIVER TET is one such poem. I had an Ah-ha moment one night and realized that
my life flowed like a river beginning at the start of the Tet Offensive in
Vietnam and progressing through the year to Tet again. Once I had that clarity,
the poems wrote itself but I needed words like pools, tributaries, deltas and
rapids to move the poem along. Those I researched and added.
Once a poems seems to be
happy on the page, I delve into the meaning expressed and hidden. I’m not
really familiar with myths, but I can recognize a poem that needs images from
mythology. So, depending upon a specific poem, I spend time reading what I
think could matter to the poem, and add words that might give the reader a
different or additional entrance into the poem or verse. I am always surprised
when the myth, or character, or fable appears, and it is just what I need. I’d hate it if a reader thought my poems were
first drafts. Like Ted Kooser, many of my poems have had more than thirty
rewrites. Once a poem seems happy, I leave it. I seem to know when it is ready
for other eyes. I do a lot of editing before I read a poem to anyone, or
consider it done. Almost all of my poems
have been worked in a critique group.
The last part of my first
attempt to edit the poem is the most fun. I write what I have as a paragraph. I
especially like enjamed lines, and lines that reflect a whole thought on their
own. That’s how I find my line endings. Looking at the words of some poems as
sentences in a paragraph allows me to see what has been hidden from me as I
write. Sometimes there is a surprise waiting, even for me. I love that. Sometimes I hate the entire poem, put it away,
and demand to know, “Who said you can write poems?”
I have a series of poems
that will go in my next collection, poems from my time at the John Meier
Medical Center in Oakland when my sister was dying. Some of the poems have been
edited dozens of times over the years and are mostly complete. Some are
fragments. In the ten years since she died, I have not been able to complete some
poems. Putting them together into a book has been impossible. It is my plan to
squirrel myself away soon and face the sadness that awaits me. If the poetry
fairy allows, I might even finish “On the night of missed chemo….”
CL: What is your favorite poem in the book and why?
JL: My favorite poem is “Mount
the Morning.”
Your tomboy torso
rises atop
rises atop
vine like legs
in brown, suede pots
to the helmet of velvet
I've made you wear
under your Stetson
all these years.
to saddle that horse,
I sigh,
more hands than I have
grown you high,
till you recite
the litany of
"I's",
include the numbers
you've memorized.
Trace for me
the wild life trails
the wild life trails
you'll ride
along the abandoned rails.
Promise not to cross
for any reason.
Kids and horses
have no season.
Don't leave
with just my love your
guard.
You're small, I warn
and concretes hard
on braids if Lady falls
on slippery blades
that wait beneath
that wait beneath
your club's parade.
No jumping
rotting trees or bees.
Skies threaten
to dampen leaves.
Dragons fly above mirrored
ponds
where monsters doze,
hide breakfast
from the crows.
Come home,
I cry, unbridle me
I cry, unbridle me
from worry dolls
and leave me free
to mount this morning
and to start
to teach the squirrel
not to dart.
I love this poem because
it tells about a time when my oldest daughter was twelve. It was the lowest
point in my life and the time when I was the most crazed. There was a decade
during the mid-1980s when I think I lost track of who I was. Daily life was
chaotic, filled with unpredictability. My husband’s PTSD had not been diagnosed
and the children we adopted came to us at age eight and nine. I struggled to
work a forty hour week as a labor and delivery nurse and teach childbirth
classes at night and still keep the household running. At that time in my
marriage, my husband had had twelve jobs in twelve years. Money was hard to
come by. A poem in THE HISTORY OF BEARING CHILDREN titled NO OTHER CHOICE gives
a glimpse into those days. I compensated for the imbalance I felt by trying to
control the children and their world, and to keep equilibrium with the children
and my husband. The more I tightened the reins the more everyone fought back. One
of my daughters rode horses with her 4-H club. I was terrified each time they
went out riding. MOUNT THE MORNING describes me at my most controlling, crazed
phase. During those years I wrote poetry as a way to deal. When my husband received support for his
PTSD, life in the house became less stressful.
I love how this poem tells my story.
CL:
Who are the poets that have most influenced you?
JL: I went to parochial
school as a child and poetry and elocution were part of the curriculum. My
early favorites were Emily Dickenson (“I’m nobody who are you”) and Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow. Most of his best known works I memorized in school. He
was also one of my grandmother’s favorites. She left me one of his books. I
love Longfellow. I credit him and his work with my innate sense of the ‘three
act structure’ and with my evolution into writing screen and stage plays.
In the 4th or 5th grade, I memorized THE CHILDREN’S
HOUR. I could probably recite it now if I had to. I remember one specific night
when my father read it to us girls. I especially loved this poem because there
were three of us sisters at the time, one with ‘golden’ hair.
I love too many poets to
list. When I moved from Cape Cod to Albuquerque one of the hardest tasks was to
do something with hundreds of poetry book, most signed by the poet that sat on
my books shelves. I donated many to my library, gave some to friends, but in
the end I had to sell many. I brought with me to New Mexico several cartons of
my collection of ‘war’ poetry books that I just couldn’t part with.
Among today’s poets, I
worship Bruce Weigl. “When words turned stupid” from the “CIRCLE OF HAHN” is
one of my favorite phrases in literature. I have several close friends who are
Vietnam veterans who are among America’s best modern poets. I treasure being
able to say that.
I guess my best answer to
your question came in an interview while I was on Cape Cod. I was asked by a
reporter what my very favorite book was and I think it is still a good answer.
I told her the one I am reading at this moment.
CL: Would you say something about what you are working
on now?
JL: I’m working on a
second poetry collection of already-written poems which is being edited by
Irish poet and short story writer Geraldine Mills. Presently, the manuscript is
titled, WHAT MY SISTER SAID. My plan is to have it edited by the end of the
year and published in 2015.
I’ve been working on a non-fiction
book presently titled, CONVERSATIONS WITH COMBAT VIETNAM VETERANS for three
years now. I hope to have the interviews transcribed and the individual stories
completely written by the end of this year. I think this book will be important,
and I want it to be perfect. Each veteran’s story is unique but all of them
overlap. I am very proud of the project.
~~~
Caroline LeBlanc, MFA, MS, RN is Writer in Residence at the Museum
of the American Military Family. Presently she is co-producer/writer for Telling, Albuquerque, (part of the
national Telling Project) a 9/11/2104 testimonial theatrical event where
military veterans and family members perform their own stories. In 2014 she directed 4 Voices on the 4th, a collaborative spoken word
performance with three other women military family members. Since relocating to Albuquerque in 2013, she
has hosted a writing salon for women military veterans and family members. In 2011 Spalding University awarded her an
MFA in Creative Writing. Her poems have
been published in her 2010 chapbook, Smoky
Ink and a Touch of Honeysuckle, as well as online and in a number of print
journals. Her art pieces have been
included in a number of group shows in the Albuquerque area.
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