Christine Gelineau is the author of the book-length poetic sequence Appetite for the Divine (Editor’s Choice for the Robert McGovern Publication Prize)and Remorseless Loyalty (winner of the Richard Snyder Publication Prize), both from Ashland Poetry Press, and co-editor with Jack B. Bedell of the anthology French Connections: a Gathering of Franco-American Poets. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, Gelineau teaches at Binghamton University and in the low-residency MFA at Wilkes University. Gelineau lives with her husband on a farm in upstate New York.
Dear Christine,
Congratulations, and thank you so
much for agreeing to this email interview on the publication of Crave, your third full length book of poetry.
I reference it
briefly below, but just so our readers know at the beginning, this is in fact
the second time I interview you. The first was in 2010 when you put me in touch with Franco-American poets around the country, and I interviewed you (and many of them)
for a presentation in Montreal, which was
eventually published as an essay in the International Journal of Canadian Studies in 2011.
That first interview was by phone, and we were distant neighbors in
Central New York at the time—you along the southern border, me close to the
northern border. It’s nice to have the chance to “visit” again. OK, let’s get
started with my questions, and your answers.
1. Generally
speaking, the poems have to do with the relationship of public and private
worlds. In the first section, “Hard Evidence,” the poems seem to be more
grounded in the public implications, while poems in the second section, “Crave”
they are more grounded in private life, though both aspects are in most of the
poems in the book. Would you agree with this, and why or why not? How did you
decide to organize your manuscript in this way?
I like this question very much, especially the insight that a melding of the
public and the private are the province of the poems. Unless a book springs
from a particular concept, I think one reaches a certain number of poems and
starts looking to see if there are any ways in which the poems speak to one
another productively that might suggest a collection. The first time I went
looking for that in this group of poems, my initial focus was on a kind of
plain-spokenness in poems like Hard Evidence, Grace, Physical, What Men Do,
etc. and the words “Seeing Things” came to mind as a book title. I could see I
was immediately attaching to that title and that notion of what organized the
poems so before I got too infatuated I googled Seeing Things to determine if it
was "available." No doubt many will know that I quickly discovered
Seamus Heaney had beat me to that title a good number of years ago. So back to
the drawing board. I wrote some more, fiddled some more, and gradually I began
to notice there were poems with a kind of stubborn insistence on something like
optimism, or at least a desire and hunger for more that continued to propel us
in a sensation of moving forward and I began to attach the word “crave” to that
impulse. Maybe in part because I already had a poem called “Hard Evidence,” it
next occurred to me that there were a number of other poems that looked at the
many instances in which the world presents us with hard evidence that would
seem to contradict that impulse to crave. From there it was easy to make the
decision to group the “hard evidence” first, and allow the poems that “crave”
to have the last word. Perhaps your sense of the public and the private in the
poems suggests that much of what knocks us down emanates from the wider sphere
while much of what sustains us is embedded in the private. I would have to think
about that some more but I was interested to hear what qualities you saw the
poems as sharing.
2. I know from
FRENCH CONNECTIONS: A gathering of Franco-American Poets, and the interview you
granted me when I was researching Franco-American poets, that we share a
Franco-American heritage. And that your husband is Jewish, and you live on a
horse farm. Would you talk about how any or all these facts influence the poems
you write, and those you chose to include in Crave?
I do not think of my poems as a variant of memoir, nor do I try to occlude
their grounding in aspects of my actual life. Family heritage is a fact and
factor and thus is likely to pop up now and then. Poems like “Morning Prayers”
and “Fill” have settings that reflect some small sliver of Judaism in America ,
and the poems I wrote about the two weeks I was able to spend in France in May
of 2013 are included in CRAVE. My mother’s parents both immigrated from Ireland
and the poems from the trip to Ireland are in the first book REMORSELESS
LOYALTY. I am interested in cultural connections such as those but would hope
that any claims those poems might seem to make about speaking for a group are
very small and tentative claims, as that’s the most I would feel comfortable
with claiming. In her poem "Sources" in the book YOUR NATIVE LAND,
YOUR LIFE, Adrienne Rich considers the cultural narrative of "special
destiny," a concept appropriated by the Pilgrims from Jewish tradition,
and then folded into the narrative of America. I like that poem's interrogation
of how "special destiny" can at once be "a thought often
peculiar to those / who possess privilege" but simultaneously "the
faith / of those despised and endangered // that they are not merely the sum/
of damages done to them." A heritage cannot avoid being an inclusion and exclusion,
a comfort that we have to be alert to when it develops the potential to be a
cudgel. When your identity enfolds "American," "French
Canadian," "Irish," and through your husband and children,
"Jewish," then like Rich one occupies a position of privilege and
dispossession simultaneously. Finding the language to speak about racial and
cultural identity is surely one of the vital conversations of our times.
As
to the horse farm, the opportunity to have lived a life among other-than-human
animals of the size and power of horses seems to me the very best grounding I
could ever have had for poetry. Riding is a physical language you speak with
the whole of your body to another species. Rhythm is embodied, incorporated. The
skilled rider, like the poet with the emerging poem, does not control the
horse; rather she learns to control herself in order to allow the horse the
opportunity to express itself. What could be better training for a poet?
3. The “Crave”
section especially contains what I would call life course poems: from pregnancy
with your children to your long term marriage to the birth of grandchildren.
(At least I’m assuming you are writing about your life and not the anonymous
life of “the speaker”). When were the various poems written and what was you
rationale for including them in the same manuscript?
The
poems in CRAVE have all been written since APPETITE FOR THE DIVINE, my previous
book, was written. APPETITE came out in 2010. So these are the poems written since
then that seemed to me (and happily apparently also to my editor / publisher)
to work as a collection.
4. Would you
tell us the story of poem, “Sockanosset,” and how you won the Pushcart Prize
for that poem in 2013?
I have Patricia Smith to thank for Sockanosset. She was teaching a workshop at Binghamton University and suggested an exercise she had “borrowed” from someone else (whose name, I’m afraid, I cannot recall). The idea was to hand draw a map of your childhood neighborhood and see if any ideas for a poem leaked into the process. I had long wanted to write about this memory of us neighborhood kids pedaling our bikes around the neighborhood looking for clues that might lead to the boys who had recently escaped from the nearby reform school. I think what allowed the poem to move forward that time was the realization that the poem’s true point of view was that of the escaped boys. Maria Mazziotti Gillan published the poem in Paterson Literary Review and then later that year Lee Upton kindly put my name in as a nomination for the Pushcart Prize, which allowed me to submit three pieces I had had published that year for consideration for the prize. The Pushcart had two guest editors and I have to believe it was Maxine Kumin who pulled my poem out of the slush pile of nominations and that it was her notice of it that allowed the poem ultimately to be chosen for the edition. Thanks to Bill Henderson, of course, for his indefatigable work producing Pushcart all these years, including that one, but then thanks to the posse of women who inspired, supported, and championed the poem along the route to that selection.
I have Patricia Smith to thank for Sockanosset. She was teaching a workshop at Binghamton University and suggested an exercise she had “borrowed” from someone else (whose name, I’m afraid, I cannot recall). The idea was to hand draw a map of your childhood neighborhood and see if any ideas for a poem leaked into the process. I had long wanted to write about this memory of us neighborhood kids pedaling our bikes around the neighborhood looking for clues that might lead to the boys who had recently escaped from the nearby reform school. I think what allowed the poem to move forward that time was the realization that the poem’s true point of view was that of the escaped boys. Maria Mazziotti Gillan published the poem in Paterson Literary Review and then later that year Lee Upton kindly put my name in as a nomination for the Pushcart Prize, which allowed me to submit three pieces I had had published that year for consideration for the prize. The Pushcart had two guest editors and I have to believe it was Maxine Kumin who pulled my poem out of the slush pile of nominations and that it was her notice of it that allowed the poem ultimately to be chosen for the edition. Thanks to Bill Henderson, of course, for his indefatigable work producing Pushcart all these years, including that one, but then thanks to the posse of women who inspired, supported, and championed the poem along the route to that selection.
5. I also
appreciate how grounded in the rural life and the body many of the poems are.
They are not anti-intellectual, but neither are they steeped in
intellectualism. Would you comment on whether you think there is an
academic/industry bias toward urban intellectualism and a mind-body split in
much literature today?
Now this question I love. As you can see from my comment on the horses earlier,
I would identify this inclusion/melding/prioritizing of mind and body to be a
core value to my aesthetic. To my understanding of poetry, it is crucial to
have the body, not only the mind, in the poem--in its content, in its rhythms,
in a kinetic, physical sense of the poem as a made thing. A significant
percentage of the poetry published in our culture that gets the most attention
is certainly published by and produced by poets with an urban sensibility. Is
there really any debate over the idea that New York City, and to a lesser
extent a number of other urban centers, have the most impact on what content,
modes, and names are considered most significant in contemporary American
poetry? Just because you live in an urban area doesn't mean you have to champion
only work with an urban perspective to it but don’t we all find perspectives
closer to our own easier to enter? And haven’t those of us involved in poetry
all encountered some degree of dismissal of “nature poems”? Inevitably we are
all “rural,” all dependent upon the health and well-being of this one and only
planet but the utter dependence of urban centers on the rural areas that
support them can grow invisible to city dwellers. The impact of that on poetry promotion is, of
course, not the most important of its impacts but we poets do think about
it. I have a panel proposal in right now
to AWP for the 2017 conference in Washington, DC on the topic of The Nature of
the Natural in Poetry Today: Postpastoral, Antipastoral, and Beyond. I hope to
have the opportunity to have more to say (and hear about) the topic then.
6. What is your
favorite poem in the book, and why?
I
don't usually think in those terms. I like “Anniversary in Paris” because
lyricism is my first love and because "happy" poems are so
challenging to write, but each of the poems has some moment or aspect I favor.
I'd be more interested to know what is your favorite and why?
7. What’s next
on your writing agenda?
I
also love the essay form and I've been working on shaping up a book-length
collection of my essays. Any potential poetry projects are too young and tender
to be talked about until they've had a chance to more fully develop. But thanks
for asking.
Thanks again,
Christine.
