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"To Look and Look and Look" Stacey Waite is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh. Her poems have most recently appeared in Chiron Review, Pearl, West Branch, and 5AM. Stacey first met Ruth in 2000 at the Antioch Writers' Workshop where they worked together in a poetry class. The poems in all your books seem to be a kind of exploration of erotic desire in its tragedy as well as its beauty. Do you approach your poems with the intent of studying the body or do your poems just always seem to lead you there? No, it's certainly not a conscious intent. Do poets ever choose their subjects? It just seems that the experience of having a human body, and the challenge of it -- the challenge of being both an intensely physical creature, and a metaphysical spirit, in a single package -- is one of the things that compels me most. There are lines in my poem "AIDS Education, Seventh Grade," which is in my first book, that I think could serve as an epigraph for everything I've written since: Look we've been given these bodies / we don't understand. We could spend our whole lives / learning how to live in them. As for the tragedy part: well, my life has brought me into a lot of contact with life-threatening illness and disability, which again, I certainly didn't consciously choose. But since I seem to be a student of bodily experience, it's been an important teacher. And even beyond illness, of course the experience of eros is full of tragedy -- unmet, sometimes unmeetable, sometimes destructive desire. What other poets do you feel connected to, canonical or otherwise, who would be considered poets "of the body"? Hmmm, "connected to" . . . I love Whitman, of course, but the truth is, my writing was Whitmanesque, that is, coming from a similar philosophical/sexual/embracing/ ecstatic place, long before I'd ever read Leaves of Grass. When I did read it, I was astonished. It made me think about the idea of lineage in a much broader way -- not just " influence." Of course, he achieved far more than I have or than I probably ever will, but I think in some way we are writing from the same source, tapped-into the same stream. There aren't very many ecstatic poets, past or present -- it's a small minority. I feel a kinship with Pattiann Rogers in this regard -- she is radically embracing and praiseful in her writing about sexuality as well as nature, though of course she's better-known for her nature poems. Tim Seibles and Galway Kinnell also have that kind of praiseful vision. Of course Sharon Olds was important to me when I first discovered her; she definitely modeled the telling of sexual truths, and women's sexual desire in particular, with a new level of explicitness. Dorianne Laux does something similar. C.K. Williams has been very important to me, not for how he's written about the body per se, but for how closely, finely, unflinchingly he's written about love (and all the other concomitant emotions and behaviors that go along with what we call love). Bob Hass does the same thing in an entirely different way; I've learned so much from both of them about what it is to be human. There are other poets whose work has given me that in smaller doses -- Stephen Dunn, Mark Doty. Mary Oliver is an ecstatic who never writes explicitly about the body -- at least, not about the human body -- yet it's always there underneath the text. Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet were tremendously important to my thinking about sexuality, love and relationships. Am I getting too far afield? All of these poets seem to me to have poetic "projects" -- to use your terminology -- which are quite different from my own, yet there are places of overlap. In Edgewater, specifically, your poems seem paced deliberately so that the syntax leaves me with the sense of "waiting." Do you see poetry as a kind of seduction, is there a relationship, for you, between poetry itself and the erotic? My work with pacing and rhythm tends to be very intuitive, so again, I can't say I've thought about that consciously. I think, though, that I do like the tension between lines or sections which hold back, and others which tumble forward in a rush. And I suppose you could see that as sexual, or erotic. But maybe it's also just a common life rhythm? Like the moments of more tentative music in a symphony, followed by the fierce onrushing sound. I often get the sense when I am reading your poems that your approach to eroticism and desire speaks to everyone. Do you think there is such a thing as a lesbian aesthetic and are there ways in which your poems work with or against such a thing? Well, I'm glad you think my work about desire can speak to anyone. I think the level I write from -- or at any rate, the level I aspire to write from -- is a human level, ultimately much deeper, more essential, more complex than the surface on which we get divided into binary categories of gender and sexual orientation. At the AWP conference recently, I was very happy when Allison Joseph told me that a straight male student of hers, a "frat boy," had discovered my work and gushed, "I love her sex poems!" At the same time, I'm very much a lesbian, and I wouldn't be the writer I am -- or the person I am -- if I weren't. I think the experience of being both the lover and the beloved -- the one who desires and the one who is desired -- is central to my sexuality and to my writing. And I suspect this experience is probably more common among lesbians than among heterosexual men or women -- only because it's so damned hard for men and women to get beyond socially-ordained gender roles in their sexual relationships with one another. But certainly some straight people do, and plenty of gay people don't, so it's not absolute either way Your poems are so political in that sense, and I wonder how you feel about the state of the contemporary political poem? Do you think young poets are falling victim to their own narratives? I don't think of my poems as having any sort of political agenda, but then, maybe it's because I "hold these truths to be self-evident" -- the truths I experience about the body, about desire. I suppose it's a political act to be committed to truth-telling at the deepest level, but don't all good poems share that commitment? Gwendolyn Brooks said, "I see no point in putting pen to paper -- unless I am going to consign that paper to the truth." As far as young poets "falling victim to their narratives" -- it's clear from her work that Brooks didn't think people had to be "confessional" or strictly autobiographical poets, and I don't think so, either. To me, truth-telling often has to go beyond the literal truth of any one person's life, into some larger landscape. Generally the poetry that interests me most -- both to write and to read -- does go beyond the strictly personal, identity-politics kind of narrative. On the other hand, having said that, I just read a fantastic personal-narrative-style poem by Gray Jacobik, called, appropriately enough, "The Shabby Truth." It's so naked and so brave that its power radiates far beyond its own highly specific story. You seem fascinated by the natural world -- in particular birds and insects. How do you see them as part of your project as a poet? I think I'm equally fascinated by all animals; it's just that I write about what I see, and, living in the city, I mostly see birds and insects. And, okay, there's something about flight which really gets to me. The idea of having wings, being able to move against gravity like that -- it's so profound both literally and metaphorically. But since I've been driving the California highways so much, I've written a lot more about cows. I spent about fifteen minutes by the side of the road the other day staring at a flock of sheep. They were ragged and mud-caked and dreadlocked and they radiated absolute sheepliness -- sheepishness? -- and I was completely captivated. I also think the animals in my poems are both completely themselves -- at least, I hope they are -- and, at the same time, metaphors for human beings. They do almost everything we do; they enact all the same dramas of desire, risk, dominance, mortality. It's all right there, and sometimes easier for me to see or describe in other species than in my own. Maybe it's partly because animals don't have their own obfuscating complicated narratives about why they do what they do; they just do it, without self-consciousness, in plain view. Also, nature is always intricate and resourceful, but with insects, it's especially profligate. Most mammals have no more than a few babies at once (though possums have 16-18, each one the size of a grain of rice! I love collecting animal trivia). But I once counted 57 tiny baby daddy-longlegs on my porch ceiling next to the big mama (mama daddy?) longlegs. Of course that made it into a poem. I have termites in my Oakland house which emerge in my kitchen each spring -- I call Terminix, they drill holes in my floor and walls and spray chemicals everywhere, and the termites vanish for a year and then reappear, cheerfully, right on schedule the following March -- hundreds of them, swarming. I hate having termites in my kitchen, but at the same time I can't help admiring the exuberance of their life force. What do you love most about being outdoors when you are not recording for the purposes of creating a poem? Just about everything (well, as long as I'm not too hot or too cold or too wet, I guess. I do prefer moderate climates.) I love looking at things -- hills, grass, insects, birds, the sky, leaves. It puts me into a kind of ecstatic trance. I've been like this since I was a baby, I've been told. Sight is my favorite sense, but of course I also love the other four. I hike a lot. I love picking blackberries in the summer, and any other fruit I can find -- I'm kind of a forager and harvester by nature. I go for urban walks with my best friend, Alison Luterman (who's also a wonderful poet), and we liberate loquats from trees, and I eat nasturtiums, and those yellow wildflowers with the lemony stems, and fennel, which grows all over the place here in California. I'm too lazy to have my own garden, but I'm fortunate to live in a state where nature is so profligate. You've lived in and visited many parts of the world and Edgewater seems to convey that you are very influenced by a sense of place. Can you talk about how your work is influenced by your geography and how your move from Ohio to California has affected your writing? I don't have a very good memory, so my poems almost always start with where I am in the present. This might also be because I moved around a lot as a kid. These days, because I teach in Fresno but live half-time in Oakland, I spend a lot of time driving, and I've written quite a few poems about Highway Five. As highways go, it's very evocative. There are beautiful hillsides, big snorting trucks, lots of cows and sheep and horses, almond and orange groves, redtailed hawks, magnificent shiny crows. When I lived in Cleveland, Edgewater Park was five minutes from my house, and it had everything I could possibly want -- it was one-stop shopping for me as a poet! All in one place, a great big moody body of water, birds, fish, insects, dead animals, live animals, urban pollution, human diversity, tiny wild raspberries growing between the rocks. Much of California is either gorgeous or gritty -- it's harder to find the places which are both. But of course I've written a lot about the Bay Area, because it's the landscape that feels like home to me; except for my two years in Cleveland (1998-2000), I've lived here since 1985. Even so, the shore birds -- egrets, pelicans, cormorants -- still strike me as amazingly exotic. Do you encourage your students to make use of nature in their poems or do you worry about the possibility that nature will bring them to clichéd writing? I encourage my students to look as closely as they can at the world around them -- to look and look and look. Nature is one of the things I suggest they look at, though certainly not the only one. We all write best about the things that move us most -- for some of us, that's the natural world, and for some of us it's not. The danger of writing a clichéd poem -- and the possibility of writing a great poem -- is always there, I think, no matter what the subject matter. So, how do you see your work as a teacher connected to your work as a poet in the world? Teaching creative writing continually forces me to articulate what it is I love about poetry, and what I think is most important for those of us who are trying to write it. Hearing myself say these things, I realize "what I didn't know I knew," as Audre Lorde said. And sometimes after I've been exhorting my students to look look look, I leave class and find myself looking more widely and deeply myself. We all need to be reminded; there's so much overstimulation in our culture that most of us walk around numb and half-conscious most of the time. I love Neruda's statement that "You learn poetry moving step by step among things and beings, never isolating, but rather containing them all within a blind expansion of love." To me this seems like the essential stance, not only for poets but for human beings.
Copyright 2003, Stacey Waite |
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