Jennifer Boyden is the author of The Mouths of Grazing Things, selected by Robert Pinsky as winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 2010. Her second book, The Deliverable Future, won the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press. [A number of poems from  her new collection will appear in the Spring 2013 print issue of basalt.—Ed.] She has been awarded the PEN Northwest Wilderness Writing Residency and has taught at numerous institutions, including Walla Walla Community College, Whitman College, the Sitka Center for the Arts and Ecology and Soochow University in Suzhou, China. She is a frequent collaborator with visual artists and is currently in the beginning stages of creating a new residency program called Grass Mountain to be located on the Oregon Coast. Jennifer and I conducted this interview via email in late November, 2012.

James Crews:

First, I wonder if you could talk a little about how you came to poetry. What sparked your commitment to writing poems that focus so heavily on environmental issues and the natural world?

Jennifer Boyden:

In terms of coming to poetry, I guess it was just the first language I experienced that felt electric and direct, it made sense. My friends joke about my near-total inability to make small talk, and poetry is nothing if not also devoid of that ability.

My poems focus on environmental issues because we live in a dying world, and part of how I understand my responsibility as a moral being is that I don’t feel like I can look away from that. The earth’s plight is a tragedy I am intimately involved with as both an individual and a cultural product. There’s just such a lot of it to reckon with, and on so many levels—every one of them a tension between danger and beauty, tenderness and violence. Kid toys with lead, Monsanto crops that are genetic nightmares, toxic breast milk, shopping as a pastime, clearcuts that are prelude to landslides, our old computers piling up in China where the metals leach into and wreck the water and soil, and plastic tops of organic milk that end up floating in the ocean where albatross scoop it up and feed it to their chicks until the chicks die, simultaneously stuffed with and choking on plastic. This is all just for starters.

I do understand that there are other things to write about, but all neural pathways seem to lead to an environment-related unease. But this is all thinky stuff. I also find that my ear responds to the sounds and rhythms of words left over from my days of thinking I’d grow up to be a biologist or naturalist. I like the language of forest, fur, teeth, and water—and how that stuff pushes up against the other world.

JC:

I’ve read your first book, The Mouths of Grazing Things, several times now, and I continue to be struck by the momentum you achieve and the risks those poems take. Your writing is so fearless. Has winning the Brittingham Prize for that book changed your life or the way you now approach your work?

JB:

I sent that book out for about ten years. Almost non-stop. I understood that at some point if it didn’t get accepted, I’d likely need to face a different reality. But then I’d think that before I accepted that other possibility, which was that I should stop writing and dedicate myself to something else, I should send it out again. Winning the Brittingham Prize validated my belief in my work as well as gave me permission to dedicate myself to poetry and writing.

One of the simultaneously marvelous and bewildering experiences of having been awarded that prize was that nothing externally noticeable changed in my life, but internally I suddenly felt I had a lot more permission to dedicate myself to writing. I’ve taken that permission pretty seriously, perhaps to an extreme. I’ve recently quit a tenured position because it did not leave me with significant enough chunks of time to write or think. To me, this is an important declaration of what I value.

JC:

Some writers abhor this question, but what’s your next project? Another book of poetry, or something else altogether?

JB:

For better or worse, I have several projects up next or ongoing. My second book of poetry is coming out in February under the University of Wisconsin’s Four Lakes Prize (your pal David Clewell’s book Taken Somehow by Surprise was the inaugural book in this series). It’s a much more environmentally agitated/ urgent book, very different from the first, and I like the sharper, less patient, ever hopeful voice.

I also have a book of essays I’d love to wrap up, but it’s a book about walking, and my walks keep getting longer and longer. I have finally accepted that whatever it is that I need to walk out of my system will take a very, very long time, so that book of essays will just have to be patient. As far as I can tell, I think the walking essays are my way of trying to understand the shape of the post-9/11 world, but for all the miles I’ve walked, I don’t think I’ve gotten any closer—maybe I should start running to get there faster? And then there’s the novel. Actually, two of them: one completed and one that’s growing pretty insistent, but I can’t dive into it until I wrap up my teaching position in a few weeks.

Beyond writing there is the gigantic project I’m excited about, which is to move to Oregon where I’ll be a writer-in-residence for a year before co-directing a new collaborative art, ecology, and writing program. So there’s all that, as well as the hope that this will leave some time to improve my fishing.

JC:

I know you recently spent some time teaching in Suzhou, China, and that you lived there with your family. How did you end up in China, and what was it like to live as a poet in what seems like such a proscriptive society?

JB:

My family and I went to Suzhou, China because it was time to evaluate what we were up to in Walla Walla—how it tied into our larger ideas of how we wanted to spend our time and what we wanted to be devoted to. We needed enough distance to be objective, and we couldn’t really get much further than China. Fortunately, my husband is fluent in Mandarin and has friends in Suzhou, so the move wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. Plus, I wanted to hang out in the bamboo groves of Li Po and Tu Fu’s old haunts.

I found living there harrowing, incredible, and relentless, but ultimately galvanizing. My students there often matter-of-factly stated they had no hopes of choosing their own academic paths, careers, regions to which they would be assigned, and so on. Some of them said they hoped to marry for love, but they doubted it would be possible. I can’t pretend to understand the nuances of Chinese culture, but I understand very clearly within myself when I am surrounded by paralyzed will, fear, and feelings of futility. I understand that when there is no nature left, there is no way to understand it, much less try to protect it and that this is also a form of brutality—to cut people from their own ground and to separate them from the sky. Sometimes when I proposed discussion topics, students would tell me that certain topics were too sensitive to discuss—things that to me seemed pretty basic.

My daughter is nine, so we spent a lot of time talking about what it means to have or not have freedom of expression. Somewhere along the way in these talks, we determined that, when we got back to the United States, because we would have freedom to make and to say things, we must. The simplicity of that framework changed our lives: because we can, we must. That was it. In the context of China (and since), this construct makes sense: we need to be more active as writers and artists and thinkers because we can. That’s what I mean when I say it was ultimately galvanizing. And once we’d made that decision and I knew it meant I’d have to leave the security of my job, other things suddenly opened up that I’m much more excited about, much as I’ll miss the place and people we’ve built relationships with for the past decade.

JC:

It sounds like the atmosphere in China had a profound effect on you as a writer and teacher—and as a mother too.

JB:

No surprise here, I’m sure, but Chinese education is a lot about conformity. For example, in a grade school art class a teacher might want students to draw a house. She would display a house that she drew, and would walk around the room pointing out where students’ houses went “wrong”—basically, where they didn’t look exactly like hers. The house that matches hers most closely would get hung up as a form of praise.

Most of my students seemed wrung out by their educations and the insanely intense years of high school where it is normal to study from 6 a.m. until midnight every single day for four years, to the exclusion of vacations, hanging out, seeing a movie, or anything else that might compromise their chances of getting into university. They are valued more for their class rank than for their individuality. By the time they get to university, they are exhausted and cynical about whether it was all worth losing their childhoods over.

Most students have no say in choosing their own majors, so even some of my Ph.D. students lacked the critical connection to content that’s so necessary in asking questions and recognizing a spark of potential in not knowing the answer. Because of this system, I spent a lot of time working to connect students’ interests to different areas of meaning within their literary disciplines or, for undergraduate students, in finding ways to apply their skills that felt rewarding. I guess this isn’t all that different from what I do as a teacher in the US, but I had to do it through a different cultural lens, so it required a different kind of approach which I found simultaneously intriguing and exhausting.

Also, my daughter went to a local Chinese school, and I wanted to support her creativity and imagination. She made a giant series of watercolor paintings, and we hung her work up gallery style in our apartment building and had an opening that we invited friends and students to. The students kept asking to see the “original” paintings that my daughter had copied from, and then were confused when I explained the paintings were the original. Then they wanted to know how anyone would be able to tell if the paintings were any good if we couldn’t see how closely it matched. For me, that experience was an extremely cogent articulation of cultural differences in understanding the role of creativity. It helped to frame what I feel so urgently now, which is that creativity must be understood as normative behavior, and that cultivating this for myself and others is essential.

JC:

You’ve been living and teaching in Walla Walla, Washington for several years now, but you’re about to relocate to the Oregon Coast in order to start a collaborative art, ecology, and writing program called Grass Mountain. What led to the genesis of this project?

JB:

When I was a freshman in college, I called home to find my parents’ number disconnected. They’d moved from the small farm where I’d grown up to a nearby suburb, and they hadn’t told me! It’s likely they’d told one of my siblings twice so thought they told me once, and I’m from a big, disorganized family, so this wasn’t as unusual as it might sound. Ever since, though, I’ve been semi-obsessive about place and aware of what it means to be without one to return to.

I used to think that when I died I’d be buried under a giant oak tree in the pasture near the lake where I grew up. But now I have nowhere to be buried—which I think is the same thing as not yet having made a home that resonates in the heart as the place the body belongs to. Restless, bereft, rootless—whatever you call it, I’ve struggled to figure out how to “make a place” that feels like a genuine extension of the world where I grew my imagination and childhood. But it hasn’t happened, which is, I guess, the great lesson of place. When it’s gone, that’s it.

My husband, however, can still return to the landscape of his childhood—the Oregon coast. These landscapes that call us back are as much spaces of the internal as the external, deeply informative and connective. We wanted to share this kind of connection with our daughter. When we were invited to help start a writing and arts residency program right where my husband grew up, we jumped at the chance. Not just for the place-based aspect of it, but also because it’s a very direct fit with our desires to be more fully dedicated to working together, and to making, writing, and providing creative opportunities for others.

JC:

How will your residency program be different from others in Oregon like Caldera, the Sitka Center and Signal Fire? What are your hopes for Grass Mountain?

JB:

Before we determine the exact shape of the program, we have a full year to live on the land, write, make art, and interview others who have done the same before us. We have a gift of time to get to know the land and the community, so that whatever we create will be responsive to the larger communities there.
That said, I am interested in collaborative projects and gathering unlikely people to make stuff together, and in projects related to environmental urgency. My hopes for Grass Mountain are that it will be a place of intensive making, and that there’s an appreciation for projects that are ongoing, accumulative, sometimes portable, and reflective of multiple visions, mediums, and ways of entering into an idea.

]]> http://www.eou.edu/basalt/2013/01/16/places-of-making-an-interview-with-jennifer-boyden/feed/ 0 http://www.eou.edu/basalt/2012/03/09/practical-advice-to-aspiring-poets-living-in-the-21st-century-by-travis-mossotti/ http://www.eou.edu/basalt/2012/03/09/practical-advice-to-aspiring-poets-living-in-the-21st-century-by-travis-mossotti/#comments Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:03:40 +0000 daxel http://www.basaltmagazine.com/?p=357 And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love…

~from Hart Crane’s, “The Broken Tower”

I suppose I could offer up nuggets of wisdom to you like: use number two pencils, write outdoors, listen to Bach’s Aria variata in A minor, look at the sky for the thing that’s missing, etc. Or I could argue that you should read everything by such-and-such poet, that such-and-such MFA program has a higher ranking and is therefore where you should definitely go, or that such-and-such publisher will give your work the attention it truly deserves. Don’t get me wrong, all of that is very nice and some of it might be helpful at times, but what I’ve been thinking about lately is “the vast gap between talent and genius,” as B.H. Fairchild put it, and what practical advice could possibly be offered to aspiring poets in the 21st century to help their work transcend mere talent.

Yesterday, I had the good fortune to travel to Southern Illinois University Carbondale and listen to Sandra Beasley read from her new book, I Was the Jukebox (2010, Norton), at the Little Grassy Literary Festival, and I had the added luck of traveling with writers James Crews and my sister Lindsay Mossotti—two wonderful writers in their own right. Beasley’s reading was spot on. She opened with the poem, “Osiris Speaks,” which tells the story of a dismembered king Osiris and Isis, his queen, gathering his remains in order to make him whole again. In the myth, Isis finds all “but his most kingly part,” as Beasley said in her introduction to the poem, which was believed to have been swallowed by a fish. Her delivery was nothing short of perfect, and the last four lines stayed with me long after the reading was over:

    …Every king, in the end, is his only
            audience. Every queen picks up the pieces.
            Isis, every fish in that river is a child
            of mine. You are my net. Hold me.

On the two hour drive back to St. Louis, we ended up talking at great length about what single quality can make a poem greater than the sum of its parts, can make it transcend aesthetic concerns, schools of thought, and even time itself. We resolved, more or less, that the quality lives in its emotional resilience, lives somewhere in the raw viscera of it, or as James put it: “it has to have the animal stink of human emotion.” With Beasley, that emotion was palpable. Even now, just look at how the king’s cold admission of culpability in those first two lines gets rounded off by his tender plea: “You are my net. Hold me.” True emotion is complicated like that. The truest emotional response is always going to possess that uniquely human blend of intimacy and insecurity.

But how does one learn to replicate that “animal stink” in his or her own work? Can it be taught, or is it something that can even be actively sought after? Dana Gioia’s infamous 1991 essay that appeared in The Atlantic, “Can Poetry Matter?” says that poetry demands “individual suffering,” and that even the threat of suffering provides “the collective cultural benefit of frightening away all but committed artists.” But if suffering is the key ingredient in producing emotional resilience, Gioia fails to specify exactly what kind or how much produces the best result (which makes for a terrible recipe really). Instead, he goes on to romanticize the days when poets were academically trained but were not institutional fixtures; when poets were visionaries; when poets were poorly paid critics and editors, or worked outside of the literary world altogether like Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams. Gioia’s twenty-year-old essay ends up having much in common with a present-day, right-wing conservative speaking nostalgically about the “good old days”—times when miscegenation laws were still in effect; when the vast majority of American’s never attended college; when homosexuality was considered a psychopathic, paranoid, and schizoid personality disorder; when a woman’s rightful place was at the helm of a vacuum cleaner; when the world was indeed anybody’s oyster (that is if you happened to be educated, straight, white and, of course, male).

But I don’t want to pick too much on Gioia’s unfair comparison of the present to the past because I’m still curious about his claim that individual suffering is the moniker of the true artist. There’s great precedent for his argument. Just think of all the “committed artists” who were often committed to institutions or ended up dying lonely, painful deaths believing in their hearts that they failed. Keats did so at only twenty-five years of age. Whitman wrote confidently in his thirties: “I am the man, I suffered, I was there,” but then on his deathbed in his seventies was reduced to: “I suffer all the time: I have no relief, no escape: it is monotony—monotony—monotony—in pain.” And these are only cursory examples. So many artists have suffered, and the hallmark of that suffering seems to be a deeper understanding of humankind’s emotional and physical fragility. But the question remains: how could one translate suffering into practical advice to aspiring poets in the 21st century?

Let’s imagine for a moment the single word “Suffer” written on the chalkboard on the first day of undergraduate workshop, the quiet murmur as one student wonders if the word is a prompt for a poetry exercise: “Maybe we’re supposed to write a sonnet about suffering, how should I know?” Then the teacher rises slowly from his seat, points to the word with one long, crooked finger and demands: “If you have never suffered from bipolar schizophrenic rage, third world poverty, violent drunkenness, racial and sexual bigotry, dengue fever, tuberculosis—if you have never been stabbed in the heart in a knife fight in Tijuana, trampled to death by a herd of angry bulls in Pamplona, lynched by a lynch mob in Alabama, dragged through the streets of New York City stark raving mad, then get the hell out of my classroom and stay out until you have!” Oh, what empty classrooms we all would have, and still the question would loom: can Gioia’s assertion be quantified in order to determine how much suffering is enough suffering to produce great art? The short answer is no.

The long, more clinical sounding answer would say something like: the severity and duration of the pain (psychological, emotional and physical) that one must experience before the supreme and enduring perspective surfaces in the art (an end which is by no means guaranteed) is something not consciously determined or controlled by the artist. An end can be determined of course, meaning, Sylvia Plath can keep sticking her head in that oven, Weldon Kees can forever launch his body into San Francisco Bay, and Frank Stanford can pump bullet after bullet into his sodden heart, but the cause of the torment cannot. So the suffering must be organic in a sense, or at least unavoidable, which means the imaginary “suffering assignment” proposed earlier is out of the question.

But maybe we don’t need any disorders, diseases, violence, assignments or gimmickry at all. Maybe “to live,” as Nietzsche said, “is to suffer” and “to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” Following his logic, we could argue that to have survived the genetic lottery, to have been yanked screaming into this world and to have lived the sum of a life in the face of disease, war, and natural disaster, is to have suffered. And don’t we already assume the collective burden of humankind’s suffering every time we open a newspaper or open a history book whose pages may as well have been printed with the blood of martyrs—the trick must lie somewhere in its meaning, in our ability to make sense out of all that suffering.

In truth, that imaginary, undergraduate workshop teacher could have just as well written the word “Love” on the board and berated his students for their lack of experience in that department; for, as Ezra Pound wrote in Canto 116 (Pound, a life-long sufferer of psychotic-organic depression as the clinicians dubbed it), “If love be not in the house there is nothing.” But finally, what I’m talking about here (what Gioia should have talked more about in his essay) is not suffering or love at all; I’m talking about life, plain and simple; I’m talking about the cumulative kind of experience Ron Wallace jokes about in an essay where he discusses a poem that only took him half an hour to write: “Did [it] take thirty minutes to write? Or thirty years?” I’m talking about the boldness and bravado of Whitman’s claim: “I am the man, I suffered, I was there.” I’m talking about the “animal stink of human emotion” that saturates the best poems of every generation.

So here it is: the boiled-down, real, and practical advice I’d give to aspiring poets in the 21st century: go out and do something, anything! You needn’t drive across the country to a literary festival or board a rocket ship bound for one of Jupiter’s moons in order to achieve this—think local, think love. There’s something timeless and universally palatable lurking in the most trivial of human interactions, in even the smallest eyelash of human emotion, but it’s your duty to gather and organize them into lines. Elements of craft can be learned. Life can only be experienced. Now, go out and experience it, get the hell out of my classroom!

Stacy Heiney of Portland, Oregon is the winner of the first annual Bunchgrass Poetry Prize for her poem “The Breaking Around Us Is Huge.” The judge for this year’s competition was Christopher Howell. In addition to publication in the spring 2011 print and electronic versions of basalt, Ms. Heiney will receive a cash award of $500.

Finalists for the Bunchgrass Poetry Prize 2011 also included:

Heather Bremicker, Philomath, OR
Lara Egger, Watertown, MA
Linnea Harper, Waldport, OR
Lyall Harris, San Francisco, CA
Robert Mammano, Flushing, NY
Sue Parman, Hillsboro, OR
Melissa Reeser, Portland, OR
Erin Quick, St. Louis, MO
Ingrid Wendt, Eugene, OR

All finalists will have their work considered for publication in the spring issue of basalt. All contestants for this year’s Bunchgrass Poetry Prize will receive a one-year complimentary subscription to basalt.

Guidelines for the Bunchgrass Poetry Prize 2012 will appear on our website later this spring. We encourage you to visit our blog at basaltmagazine.com for recent news updates, essays, reviews, and information.

We wish to thank everyone for their participation and hope that you will consider basalt again in the future as both contributors and readers.

Sincerely,

The Editors