National Poetry Month 2020

Hello all! March may have felt like years for a lot of us given the current state of affairs, but we have at last made it to April. April, of course, means that it is National Poetry Month! Here on the blog all month long we will be posting a lot about poetry. We have interviews, reviews, and some virtual student readings in the works so be sure to tune in regularly!

All best, Lauren Miles (CW Program Apprentice)

Sarah Gridley is a poet writing, teaching, living in northeast Ohio. She is the author of four books: Weather Eye Open (University of California Press, 2005), Green is the Orator (University of California Press, 2010), Loom (Omnidawn, 2013), and her newest collection, Insofar (New Issues Press, 2020), which was the winner of the 2019 Green Rose Prize. Her poem, “Housework,” won the 2019 Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America.

My interest in Sarah’s poetry stems from her expertise in rendering vibrant and resonant the quietest of details. She is mindful in her observations of the world, both static and in motion, and she is expansive with a tireless attention to inhalations and exhalations. Thanks again to Sarah for taking part in this interview.

Hi Sarah! Let’s start with the present. You teach poetry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Close by are the botanical gardens, down the street is Little Italy. It’s nestled in the juncture of downtown and the East Cleveland suburbs. Further north is Euclid, where I was born, and of course, as of right now, a very chilled Lake Erie. Thinking of this I recall a small note you made in the final pages of Green is the Orator for the poem “The Bad Infinity” in which you say it was written “after a geological walking tour of Lakeview Cemetery.” All this to ask: how would you say the place you’re located within effects/affects your current writing and writing habits?

Hi Dylan! I’m always curious as to how location and perception go to work on each other. Place is a tutor to consciousness, and forms of consciousness shadow and illuminate place. Living repeated seasons in one place—my home in the woods—has deepened my sense of this reciprocity. Ohio is where I grew up. I lived away from here for large stretches of time, but I’ve spent most of the years of my life in northeastern Ohio. Yesterday I visited a small exhibit at the art museum, “Charles Burchfield: The Ohio Landscapes 1915-1920.” I could see in his drawings and watercolor paintings the way this region’s light, rain, and flora shaped his sensibility. The way a dying sunflower looks in November. The way a catalpa tree filters afternoon sun. Burchfield feels like a sibling sensibility.

When I was young, I loved to travel. In recent years, I’ve done most of my traveling in my garden. There’s more than enough to perceive sitting still and being where you happen to be. When I think of habits, writing ones or otherwise, I think of William James’s idea that the more we can consign to habit, to automaticity, the freer we are to follow our imagination. I like deepening my habits. Less fuss around my own daily procedures means a less encumbered consciousness, fewer barriers between being and place. Earth is generous. I try to remember and give thanks for this every day. I once read an essay on bioregionalism that offered a memorable thought experiment: what if our consciousness of borders were not marked by states, nations—i.e., politically organized/recognized territories—but by the micro and macro life systems we pass through within and across these designations? There’s a sign that tells me I’m passing out of Ohio into Indiana—but what if my sense of regionalism were more informed by biological and spirit-oriented specificities? What might that map look like? What sense of belonging might a finer-tuned relation to place create? There are maps here that predate and call up deeper forms of relation than “Ohio.” I love this part of the world, and more than ever I recognize its role in my poetry. I want a relationship between place and writing to be one of continued discovery and gratitude.

While we’re on the subject of northeast Ohio, what is the poetry (or more generally, writing) scene like? How is the community making itself heard? Have you noticed any changes over time?

I wish I could offer you a helpful response on this subject, but pretty much everything in me leans away from writing scenes, actual or virtual. I know there’s a lot of good work—support networks, reading series, community initiatives—being done in and around Cleveland. I think we need all kinds of writers: socially fluid ones, reclusive ones, and everyone in between. I lean toward the far end of the reclusion spectrum. From their inception, social media platforms felt harmful to me. I know I miss out on a lot of information and networking this way, but networking is a word that has always made me flinch. I am not good at moving seamlessly between social worlds and solitude. I don’t reject poetry scenes so much as lack the constitution to move in and out of them gracefully. I do notice that poets are far more adept at forms of self-promotion than we used to be. Poetry draws parallel to the art of marketing. Some of this is good news for poetry, increasing its reach and meaningfulness; some of it feels confusingly capitalistic.

I’m drawn to your poetry because of its attentiveness and sensitivity—fixated on particular sounds and syllabic dynamics, almost as if a seismograph. Does form and prosody offer us anything when it comes to being in productive or healthful conversation with ourselves, others, our environment?

Thank you. I love this concept of a compositional seismograph. I think healthful conversation is critical to these areas of attention you outline, and I think we have to work at it every day, whatever our occupation may be. The longer I practice poetry, the more I see it as a living form, akin to a martial art, or a religious practice. For me, poetry springs from the tension between regulation and deregulation, “ruliness” and unruliness. Clearer dispositions and intentions do emerge from sustained engagement with these dynamics.

My father is from Wales, and the first poet I really knew and loved was Dylan Thomas. Thomas worked quite a bit in syllabics, and while I’ve never done so consciously myself, I think I might have absorbed some of his obsession with measure, the tensions one can create by measuring sonic exuberance against silence. Dylan, as you likely already know (J) means “son of the wave.” With their great lunar sensitivity, rising and falling oceans are our paramount example of formal organization in tension with fluid, biotic life. You can hear this exact tension in the last lines of “Fern Hill”: “Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” Another British poet, Charles Tomlinson, provides this beautiful mini-treatise on measure: “To handle measure…seems a human thing to do: your recurrences are never so pat as to seem simply mechanical, your outgrowths never so rambling or brambled as to spread to mere vegetation. A human measure, surrounded by surprises, impenetrables, and unknowables, but always reasserting itself, this could be a salutary aim—one in which rhythm and tone are both allies—, faced as we always are by the temptation to exaggerate and to overvalue the claims of self.” I recently discovered that the etymology of “fathom” ties this measurement back to a human arm-span. It’s curious to think that the term “unfathomable” expresses that which exceeds our grasp while also embodying it—particularly now, in the face of environmental crisis. I have a philosopher friend who argues for the term “the age of anthroponomy” in place of the trending term, Anthropocene. Anthroponomy puts the emphasis on human responsibility in a forward-leaning direction. In its compound we get the call to manage (nemein), to self-regulate. This friend and I were part of a reading group called “Living Forms.” Think about how many disciplines can lean into conversation with this heading. Poetry included.

Okay, I’d like to get specific. A poem of yours I love very much is “Second Inspirations of the Nitrous Oxide.” The voice of the poem reads a bit different than the rest of the collection as if it’s driven by an urge to catalogue like a historian would, but at the same time it wants to wander. It also proposes a sort of continual processing and adjusting in our languages, communities, memories. That when thinking of “greenness” we are also thinking of the space around it. The poem begins in a peculiar and small scene from the life of Peter Roget, so I’d like to know what originally drew you to this story and did its role alter as you examined it further?

Thank you. I’m glad you get something from this poem. And I think you’re exactly right that it wants to wander—perhaps in resistance to Roget’s desire for an organized compendium. If you look at a thesaurus for sale today, it will be making claims to being the most “comprehensive,” “definitive,” and “up-to-date.” But the likelihood of revised editions makes these claims provisional, perhaps even a bit comical. When I read about it, Roget’s thesaurus project seemed both hubristic and endearing. When I learned that the root meaning of thesaurus is treasure or storehouse, I began thinking of Roget’s work as a kind of heroic descent into the underworld, since Pluto, Latinized from the Greek Plouton, also means wealth or riches. I think of Heraclitus’ fragment #45: “You could not find the boundaries of soul though you travelled every way, so deep is its logos.” I love your idea that when thinking of “greenness,” we are also thinking of a space around it. That circumambient space can be threatening, promising, or anything in between—a space into which to branch, flower, leaf—or a space that consumes habitat, closing in on inhabitable and expressible greenness.

I can’t remember what first drew me to reading about Roget. Perhaps it was learning that he’d participated in experiments with nitrous oxide. One of the funniest memories I have from my childhood is being high on laughing gas with my brother. We’d both been given dental nitrous oxide for teeth pulling and were put in a shared recovery room to “sober up.” As kids, we were good at egging each other on and making each other laugh under any circumstances, but being under the influence of laughing gas took our comedic interplay to new levels. Roget’s dispassionate report to the Pneumatic Institute (“I cannot remember that I experienced the least pleasure from any of these sensations…”) made me think, What a party pooper! Though he was contemporary with Romantic poets, Roget seemed a throwback to Enlightenment values and methods. That he set his sights on language for the application of these methods and aims seems farcical, elaborately doomed. Language was his Hydra, the regenerative water-snake that resists the cut-up work of analysis, even as it calls us to this form of attention and control.

Given our current political and cultural landscape in the United States, I would be understating it by saying things are dire. What role does ecopoetics serve in enacting change?

I agree that things are dire. But a wise woman told me this summer, in response to my catalogues of worry, that we can’t do the work of repair while miring ourselves in despair. Despair is incapacitating. What we need now is a sense of human capability. Culpability is there, most certainly. But capability, in the sense of receptivity or capaciousness, is where paradigm shifts come from. The other sense of capability—able to grasp or hold—has to do with the kind of human self-regulation my friend in philosophy terms anthroponomy. I used to teach a course I termed eco-poetics, but I have decided to drop that term because of the implications of the Greek term, oikos. This was a term for the family, the family’s property, the house—one’s estate. In its original use, this “holding” would include slaves.

While eco- has become ubiquitous as a prefix expressing “green” thinking, I think the more accurate Greek borrowing would be nostos, i.e., the long and difficult act of homecoming, an orientation that is fundamentally shared as opposed to myopically privatized. I think the critical piece in this homecoming effort will be coming to our senses. I do think poetry can be helpful in that effort. Look at Robert Frost’s “Directive.” I think poetry is an art of discernment joined to a posture of longing. I think poetry can effect social change and environmental change because it operates on spirit. We need all our forms of optimism and commitment now. There’s another Greek word I like to invoke with my students: xenia, meaning guest-friendship, or hospitality. I’m curious about the experiences that poetry is capable of hosting, the worlds it asks people to inhabit. Rudolf Steiner believed that the thoughts of people today will determine earth’s physical properties in the future. That makes for a lot of responsibility, but also a lot of opportunity. At its best, poetry is an art of making for: in the navigational sense, and in the sense of dedication.

Lastly, an encompassing question from a poet starting out: how do you feel your poetry has evolved? What kind of adaptations has it made? Oftentimes I think this is the appropriate time to ask what book or poem was most formative, and you can answer that if you’d like, but I want to veer somewhere else and ask what encounter, conversation, or even moment of solitude do you return to the most?

I think we all start out as poets, that is, as children. I was lucky to have parents who made reading a joy to me, a communal and a self-directed practice of discovery and aesthetic development. I think when I started my formal training in poetry, at the University of Montana, I was still rollicking around in language joy, not very cognizant of what sort of spaces I wanted to host for readers. I had a wonderful teacher at Montana who gently suggested I didn’t need to “flash my trash” so much, linguistically speaking. I think I have been growing into that realization for a very long time. While I will always be drawn to poets who make language fly and sing—Thomas and Hopkins are so near to my heart—in middle age, I am wanting to understand the power of silence, to investigate the tonal and conceptual complexities built up from quiet diction. I teach a first-year seminar on silence, and I think the reading I’ve done to structure this course put good kinds of pressure on my practice. My last book, Loom, was deeply concerned with forms of solitude, taking Tennyson’s treatment of the Lady of Shalott legend as its focal point. And my newest book, Insofar (forthcoming from New Issues Press in spring 2020), extends that meditation, considers the forms of thinking available to us when we are willing to be alone and listen to our thoughts. Solitude has always been very important to me. I don’t recall single, touchstone moments of solitude so much as a general disposition to being contemplative. I do love conversation. Friendship is the vitalizing form of relationship in my life. But I also love being at home with books, pencils, trees, dog, and cat, listening for what happens next. Adaptation is one of the key promises that poetry makes to its practitioners. I quote an aphorism (attributed to Rousseau) in my new book: “Patience is bitter but its fruit is sweet.” Here’s to that sweetness. Here’s wishing it to you, and to all of us who keep at it faithfully over time.