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"The Violence of Desire"
Ruth was in town (Tallahassee, Florida) to give a
reading, and we had decided to spend the afternoon
at the St. Marks wildlife refuge; it was a typical
November day in Tallahassee—near 70 degrees, sunny,
a slight breeze. On the way to St. Marks, we stopped
off at the Leon County geological sinks and hiked to
Hammock sink, which looks more like a small pond
with aqua-colored water. Under the bridge, the
plaque explains, is the opening to a cave system
with six white limestone rooms that are each large
enough to enclose a six story building. Another sign
warns that new sink holes could open at any time.
Perhaps no landscape is quite as metaphoric—the calm
surface that conceals the centuries of erosion, the
instability and beauty. It seemed an apt backdrop
for our talk, as one of Schwartz’ main themes is the
body and its transformations. We drove on to St.
Marks, where we sat on an inlet looking out into the
vast estuary, and talked about nature and writing
and desire. I’ve noticed a tension in many of your poems between urban and rural settings or between people and nature. I draw a lot of my inspiration from the natural world. But most of the time I’ve lived in and around environments that blended the natural world with the effects of human intrusion. Like Edgewater Park, on the west side of Cleveland. It’s this beautiful shoreline along Lake Erie, and it’s also—I heard different estimates—either the fifth or the eighth dirtiest beach in the country. And I loved that about it! [Laughter] It turned out that a lot of people from the east side of Cleveland had literally never been to Edgewater Park, because there was this perception that it was dirty, so why would you want to go there? And for me that made it a perfect place to write about, because there was always that tension between natural beauty and urban grittiness. The persistence of nature... Right. There were tiny sweet wild raspberries that grew between the rocks in July. I really did see a swan there once, [“The Swan at Edgewater Park,” from Edgewater Park], and the water was different colors on different days, and behaved differently, too. Sometimes it was calm and still like a big pond; other times the waves were so big it looked almost like an ocean. looked different on different days. And then there was, for me, the endless fascination of watching my own species there. And all the garbage. As I said in “The Swan...,” “candy wrappers, condoms in its tidal fringe...” I’m reminded of the title poem from Edgewater Park where you see the men having the sexual liaison, and you don’t see that as something negative in the poem, but rather as just a part of the scene, maybe even something natural. Yes. In that poem I not only see it as natural, but as positive, because it represents the urgency of desire and the possibility of contact, of touch. At times, reading your work, I thought of Mary Oliver and I wonder if you see her as an influence? I do in the sense that I’ve certainly read a lot of her work, and I really admire her both her close observation, and her sense of reverence and movement toward the ecstatic. And I think I share those impulses with her, though perhaps I concentrate more on what’s usually seen as the unbeautiful, than she does. Over and over, whether I’m writing about the natural world, or interaction between people – the men who don’t know each other but are having public sex, or the swarm of insects over the water – it feels as if my work as a poet is to see these things as beautiful, even holy. Maybe you could talk a little about some of your early poetic influences. When I was in tenth or eleventh grade, I used to hang out in bookstores after school, and I’d go back and forth between the sex manuals and the poetry. [Laughter] There was a W.S. Merwin poem that I loved then, and was haunted by. It’s called “Fly,” and it starts out “I have been cruel to a fat pigeon / because he would not fly.” The poem doesn’t have any sex in it, but it felt to me like it was about betrayal and how people betray what we love. And there was something that spoke to me very powerfully in that. In college I read a lot of Marge Piercy and Adrienne Rich, and also a Native American poet named Roberta Hill Whiteman. I used to name my cars after poets, and I had a blue VW bug named Marge, and then a blue Toyota Corolla station wagon named Roberta. When I was in my early to mid twenties, Mary Oliver and Sharon Olds were both important to me, though in different ways – they represented opposite poles in me. I don’t read either of them that much anymore. I love Robert Hass, particularly his more recent work – how honest and rangy and smart it is. I love C.K. Williams and his unflinching, incredibly accurate eye. I love Bruce Weigl – his poem, “The Impossible,” is a touchstone for me. “Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.” I mean, there are lots of poets I could name, whose work I love, and I think in some way I’m influenced by each thing that I love – not just poets but everything, everyone I love. So I don’t really know how to name just a few specific influences. I know that you moved around a lot in your childhood and early adulthood. Where are some of the places you’ve lived? New York, upstate New York, Bloomington, Indiana, Philadelphia, Seattle and Albuquerque, [and Michigan, Cleveland, Ohio, and California...] And no, my family wasn’t military. My parents were just young, and liked to move. How do you think that has affected you and/or your writing? I don’t know if it’s because of that – because the whole time I was growing up, the landscape around me kept changing -- but I know that my tendency in poetry and in life is to be wherever I am. Today, right now, sitting here, if I took out a paper and pen, I could write about this scene. But tomorrow I might not be able to. You mentioned [via email] the dearth of poems about my childhood -- and I think it’s mostly because I just don’t have the kind of memory that makes me go backward in time and focus acutely on the past. So you tend to compose in the moment? Usually I write first drafts in the moment. I have a friend who every week or two sits down at her computer and pours out all the images of things she’s seen and thought about for days. But for me, if I don’t write it down right away, it’s lost. I’m the kind of poet who always has to carry around scraps of paper and pens, usually leaky ones. Since you don’t see yourself as a poet of memory, would you characterize yourself as a poet of the present? I am a poet of my present. Although the present leads me into the past; if I were to pull out a notebook right now and start writing about the way these stalks look coming up from the ground, the way the birds look in the marsh, it might connect me to something someone said, or to some other place in time. But I always start in the present or the very recent past. We’ve already touched on this, but I’d like to talk about the role of desire and/or sexuality in your work. I know you’ve written about the “redemptive capabilities of sexuality and love.” I love desire. I mean, I enjoy being in a state of desire. And I love sexuality and the way it transforms people, frees people up. And I love seeing what looks to me like desire, and certainly is sexuality, in the natural world and the animal world. So I have tended to approach all of that from a place of unabashed reverence and celebration. But lately, I keep finding myself confronted with very graphic stories of sexual violence, and trying to find a way to integrate them into my poetic framework. Of course, these stories, these realities, have always been around, and I’ve dealt with them to some extent in my work before, but I feel like lately the world seems to be saying to me loudly and clearly: Desire isn’t always good. You can’t simply say desire is good. So I’ve been turning that one over in my head a lot, and I’m trying to come to a more complex relationship with it. I certainly don’t think I’ll ever say desire is bad. But I’m coming more and more to the place where I’m thinking that desire is just desire. In the new, really long poem that I was telling you about [tentatively titled “Green Fuse”], the 35- page poem, I have an image of ants swarming up a tree, finding baby birds that have just hatched, and eating them. And that seems to me to be an image of desire, and I don’t think I can say it’s good. Yet I certainly can’t say it’s bad, either. It’s just... there’s a violence in desire, which I’m trying to come to terms with. How each thing wants what it wants, and it’s not wrong for the ants to want to live, and it’s not wrong for the baby birds to want to live, either. There’s a tension there I haven’t yet worked out. That makes me think of the poem “Black Water,” in Singular Bodies, where you sort of, not empathize with the man who commits this violent act [of rape and attempted murder], but he’s seen as just a man with a desire— Yes, I think “Black Water” is kind of a precursor to what I’m working on now, because I don’t feel fully satisfied with it. But what I was trying to do, in that poem, was locate where the violence comes from, where it lives. In essence, I say there that his hands, as they’re attacking this woman, are just doing their work, because his hands love to work. That poem is based on a real case in San Francisco around 1997, and the guy involved was a contractor; he worked with his hands. And it seemed to me also that his penis was just doing its work, and the water was just doing its work as it took the woman’s body inside it. So in the poem I was asking: if each of these things is just doing its work, then where is evil, if there is evil -- where is the violence located? And I don’t think I arrived at an answer. Maybe no good poem can ever really arrive at any answers, but those were the questions haunting the poem. And then there was also the irony that this woman – this beaten-down prostitute, thrown into the bay and left for dead, who for all intents and purposes had seemed to be already dead in her life -- then came back to life, and survived, and identified the guy. The violence he did to her somehow prompted the life force to surge back up in her. And I’ve heard many stories like that. I’ve noticed you sometimes use newspaper headlines as epigraphs. The epigraph to that poem is from The San Francisco Chronicle. Yes, often something I read in the newspaper will stay with me, haunt me, and then show up in a poem. But the poem “Aliens Can See Us Now,” which has an epigraph attributed to the Weekly World News – well, I have to admit I made that one up. [Laughter] Reading newspapers, do you find yourself taking down a headline or a note? I clip out articles. I save files of clippings, articles that resonate with me in a certain way. And then I take off the price of the newspaper on my taxes. [Laughter] I give that as a writing assignment sometimes, to students [to write a poem from an article,] but I think it’s idiosyncratic which articles strike me in a way which can produce a poem. So each student has to find their own article. I wonder about the role that teaching plays in your life, and how it has influenced your work. I think teaching writing has been really good for my poetry, because I’ve become much more conscious of craft – things that I did unconsciously before. Now I can better articulate what it is I’m doing, and why, and what I admire. This is only my fourth year at it, and it’s a little hard for me to imagine doing this uninterruptedly for another twenty years, but who knows? So far I’ve really enjoyed it; I thrive on it. I try to do each class differently. I don’t believe that much in workshopping; I don’t believe workshopping makes people into better poets. I think reading and writing, reading and writing, reading and writing, makes people better poets. So I try to get students to read a lot, and identify what they admire in what they read, and then study that. When we were walking earlier and stopped to look at the Yellow Silk spider, you mentioned an idea you’d had for a workshop, on writing about the self... Yes, the idea that I had was to teach a course on writing about the self through writing about different objects. Because I think, like it or not, most of us are usually writing about ourselves. Or maybe all of us always are, through whatever else it is that we choose to write about. But you and I were discussing how personal narratives can get so tedious -- so I was thinking it might be interesting to give students a different assignment each day. Like one day a newspaper article, one day some object in the natural world, like the spider, or these stalks poking up through the ground, or whatever, and just have them write as closely as they can about each of these things – and then I imagine we’d see how it would eventually, inevitably, lead them back to the self, but from a different angle. In your work there is often a linking of death and desire, or more specifically illness and desire. I’m reminded of Blanche DuBois’ line in Streetcar Named Desire, where she says “Death and desire are two sides of the same coin.” That’s irrelevant, but... But it’s a good line. For me, those two themes really did present themselves together in my life for a long time. When I moved to San Francisco in 1985 with my brand-new MFA, I became a legal secretary and was bored to death. So in ’86, when a secretarial job opened up at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, I grabbed it. I continued to work at the Foundation until 1992, and during my time there I got to do a lot of different kinds of work – coordinated an AIDS Hotline and a speaker’s bureau, led a lot of trainings. So I worked very closely with other staff members and volunteers who had HIV and AIDS, and of course on the hotline we talked about sex all the time – sex and illness, desire and death. Then in 1991 I became involved with Gladys, who had had diabetes for many years. We moved in together in ’93, and in ’94 her kidneys failed, and in ’95 I donated a kidney to her. So in that relationship, too, my life was full of desire -- because we had a very strong erotic connection -- and death, or the lurking possibility of it, and certainly a constant awareness of mortality which became inextricable from passion. So that duality was really the circumstance of my life, I didn’t have to go looking for it. And it also came to provide the tension in a lot of my poems. Yet after a certain point I started to feel tired of always writing about that tension... Wow, look at that swarm of birds... I started to be afraid that I was using it too much. I didn’t want every single one of my poems to do the same thing, basically to have some wonderful instance of life in it and then bring in the mortality card to make the poem more poignant. And then when I left AIDS work, and, years later, when I left that relationship, I did wonder, Okay, what am I going to write about now? I really didn’t know. But fortunately I did find other subject matter, or other ways of approaching my subject matter – which I think in an essential way always has been, and probably always will be, love, and the body, and the erotic, and the joys and dangers of living in the body. My next book, Edgewater, doesn’t have as much death in it because the circumstances of my life had changed. But it has other kinds of tensions. Have you attempted writing in other genres? In the mid-90s I became very drawn to creative non-fiction; there was so much happening in my life then that I wanted to be able to talk about in a more narrative form than my poetry allowed. I did write a few poems about the transplant, which are in Singular Bodies, but I think I have more strength as a lyric than as a narrative poet. So, I published some prose pieces in The Sun, a wonderful magazine that comes out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and in a few anthologies. After the transplant, I also wrote a book-length memoir, chronicling that first year. Will the memoir ever be published? Yes! Michigan State University Press will publish it in 2004, under the title Death in Reverse: A Love Story. This is an interesting story, in itself. After I completed the book, in 1997, I sent it out to quite a few agents and small presses, and got back a lot of nice responses, but basically the gist was that the book wasn't commercial enough. One agent said bluntly that people who wanted to read about lesbians weren't going to want to read about kidney transplants, and people who wanted to read about kidney transplants wouldn't want to read about lesbians. Of course, I tried to argue that the story transcended those specifics, and I really believe that. I even briefly contemplated trying to rewrite the book as if we'd been a heterosexual couple! But I couldn't do it. And there were a couple of other reasons why I eventually stopped trying to get it published. One was that I've always felt that on a purely literary level, I’m stronger as a poet than as a writer of prose. The other was that in 1998 I left the relationship – and since I’d framed the memoir as a love story, I was afraid it would then seem fraudulent. And it would have taken me a whole other book to write out the story of what had happened in the relationship, and why I could no longer stay. But then recently one of my colleagues at Fresno State, John Hales, invited me to come to his Creative Non-Fiction class as a guest speaker. He had his students read a number of my essays, and they were very moved by them. When I told them about the memoir, they strongly urged me to try again to get it published. So I went home that same night and emailed a query to Martha Bates at Michigan State – I’d met her at the Associated Writing Programs conference and we’d had some good conversations. She emailed back, and I sent the manuscript, and then she took it! So if all goes well, it should come out right around the nine-year anniversary of the transplant. How is Gladys doing now? She’s fine, basically. Well – her kidney function is fine, though she has many other chronic health problems. And she has a new girlfriend, and she’s in graduate school. You mentioned that you find your lyric poems stronger... I’m interested in the tension in your work between the lyrical and the more straightforwardly narrative poems. I write a lot more narrative poems than I publish. In Singular Bodies, I think there’s only one or two straight narrative poems. And I left them in because I like the ideas they talk about, but I feel like they’re more weighed-down than my more lyric work. I just can’t get the narratives to take off in the same way. And I guess I prefer poems that take off. And you do have a number of lyric sequences, both in Accordion Breathing and Dancing and in Singular Bodies, maybe less so in Edgewater, though I remember a couple. Yeah, there are a few there, too. And there was another long one in Edgewater that I took out. Jane Hirshfield [the judge who selected Edgewater for the National Poetry Series] said some things about my work that made me recognize some weaknesses.... [Laughter] She criticized me for having too much lyrical sweetness, too much dancing and shimmering and so on, and sometimes what she thought was a too-easily-arrived-at moment of redemption or grace. And, in looking back over the manuscript [of Edgewater] I came to agree with her. She wanted there to be more grit in the book to interlace with the sweetness, and so I tried to in that grit, and in some cases found I also had to take some of the sweetness out – including a long lyric love poem sequence, “Now,” which had been published in Chelsea magazine. Jane Hirshfield has a wonderful poem from her new book, Given Sugar, Given Salt, that’s also featured in Best American Poetry 2001, with an epigraph from Chekhov that says “If you want to move the reader, you must be colder.” Yes, I think that’s right. I think that usually one gains more power through understatement than through overstatement. The subject came up briefly on the drive here when we kept passing all of those signs in yards with an image of the American flag and the word “Pray,” in red letters, but I wonder if you could talk about the influence of religion or spirituality in your life and/or work. Well, I grew up Jewish in the sense that both my parents are Jewish and we went for Passover dinner at my grandmother’s house every year -- but we never went to synagogue. Neither of my parents were practicing Jews, and I’m not, either. I definitely have spiritual beliefs, but I don’t think that they fall into any neat category. Living in the Bay Area, I’ve been very influenced by Buddhism, but I’m not a Buddhist. My girlfriend, Marianne, is, so we have a lot of really interesting discussions about desire and attachment. Buddhists see desire, or peoples’ attachment to desire, as the source of our suffering – and I think they’re right -- but I also see it as the source of much of our joy. So I am attached to it! There’s a wonderful line in “Survival” from Singular Bodies: “The body prays / inside other bodies.” Yes, sex and sexual desire do feel religious to me, spiritual. And so does the natural world. That’s my church: the natural world and the body. Also, there are several poems with God in the title in Edgewater; in particular the poem that ends the collection, “Letter from God.” That poem resonated with the first poem in the book for me, “Fetch,” because in “Letter...” you write “everyone goes on running and dying / Like dogs on the beach, their bodies extended / Into forever, for nothing, for joy, for a stick.” I wonder if you could comment on the impetus...
Well, I love to write about God as an idea, as a
metaphor, in a way. I love to write about someone
making this world, designing it just as it is – even
though I don’t truly believe it happened that way.
“Letter from God” started out as a break-up poem –
the “you” in the poem was originally my ex-lover,
though in writing the poem I got interested in a
larger idea of desire, the things we (as humans)
desire, the futility of our desire – even the
absurdity of it – but also the absolute necessity of
it. I mean, that’s the life force in us! And I guess
the end of that poem, “this is it, take it or leave
it. Love,” leads into the work I’m doing now. The
ending of that poem could be the epigraph for the
new long poem I told you about. I think my poetic
stance is that I’m definitely going to take it --
but I don’t want to take it blindly. |
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