MiPOesias Magazine

Spencer Reece

Jenni Russell prepared the following interview.

What poets have influenced your work?

First of all, let me extend my gratitude to you for taking an interest in my book. Over the course of writing, there have been so many poets, novelists and non-fiction writers who have influenced me. But you asked about poets.. Where to begin? Shakespeare? His plays, the sonnets? Yes, there, but also George Herbert influenced me when I read him in graduate school with his ability to say very complicated religious things very simply. T.S. Eliot's poems have always spoken to me, from the time I first encountered them in college. The Wasteland intimidated me in my youth, but now it means more and more to me, I keep going back to it, reading the sections aloud. And The Four Quartets I will keep reading until I can read no more. One, inevitably, is perhaps most influenced by the poets that came in the preceding generation. And of that generation, besides Eliot, I have always loved Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens. I'm also quite keen on Irish poets, particularly Michael Longley. And I'm fond of Eastern European poets — Osip Mendelshtam and Anna Ahkamatova. James Merrill was a poet I knew in my youth who was quite helpful — encouraging me to continue, but to be patient, to wait until what I had arrived at was completely finished, or as finished as I could make it. He encouraged me to be discerning, to have humor about the writing process, and to enjoy life along the way. I think he had picked up the idea from Elizabeth Bishop that was important when poets got together to make a concerted effort to talk about anything else but poetry.

What is your favorite poem in "The Clerk's Tale"? Why is it your favorite — personal meaning, level of craft, something else?

How can I answer this question? I think when you write a book of poems, at least from my own experience, you've grown fond of each and every page, have gone over it, again and again, with the scrutiny of a parent, years of carefully keeping vigil over the appropriate noun or adjective, as the poem grew. Once they are released into the world, you must go on with your life, and hop and pray the world treats the poems kindly. I do not have a favorite poem in the book. I have a hard time looking at the book now. Each one represents a time and a place when I wrote it, some of them over many years. "Cape Cod" was written over seventeen years and I was rewriting it up years ago and hardly changed over the course of that time. But a favorite? No, I can't say there is a favorite. I've always hoped to strive towards remembering a time or a place or a person accurately. That is all.

If you would, tell me a little about your process. Are you a note-taker? Does the poem slowly develop over a period of time in your head? Or do you write with a blank slate and come to your subjects spontaneously?

Sometimes I come to the subject matter spontaneously. But other times, the thoughts have been there for years and years. I have bits and scraps of poems left over from my book I am still trying to work up into survivable poems. The idea of remembering my coworker in the title poem, creating a portrait of him, came to me rather unconsciously, I didn't know I was doing that at the start, but over the years that is what was materializing before me. And now I look back at it, and am so glad I remembered him, honored him that way. I am particularly proud that I remembered him.

Is there a poem in your collection that you feel is uncharacteristic of your style?

A poem that is uncharacteristic of my style, you ask? Since I am not conscious of what my style is, this also a difficult question for me to answer. Some poems were written with specific forms in mind, nearly all of the strict forms I worked with — the villanelle, the sestina, the sonnet — I threw away, as they didn't seem to serve my purposes in the end, but everywhere I look, there are vestiges of those forms. I wouldn't mind trying my hand at a successful sonnet, and am trying to do so these days. In the poem, "Addresses," which is in twenty parts, I did use a unifying principle, no punctuation, which was different for me, and somewhat freeing, I think, or I hope, it adds a dream-like quality to that poem, or sequence of poems. I found it hard to arrive at the personal nature of the three poems in the poem, "Triptych." I wanted to keep taking those poems out of the manuscript, but in the end, despite the pain they describe, I kept them; they added a certain layer. Louise Gluck liked them. If Louise had disliked them even a little, I would have dropped them.

There are seven ghazals in your collection. What attracts you to this form?

I learned about ghazals when I was in graduate school at Divinity School. I took a course on the Sufi poet, Rumi. This is where I learned of the form. Those two poems were written again, over a long period of time. I wrote them in the same way you might assemble a mosaic out of broken dishware, over time, gluing in a piece here or there. "Ghazals for Spring" was essentially finished much sooner, from when I lived in Minnesota, and "Florida Ghazals" was written after I'd moved down here in 1997. It was a way of yoking together great quantities and catalogues of material under one roof. I don't think I'll write any more of them. But I enjoyed rediscovering them. Also, at this time, when we are at war with the countries from which this form came, it was a great pleasure for me to take something beautiful from that culture and use it.

The last line of your title poem is "There is no longer any need to express ourselves." Can that be applied to the book as a whole — the "ourselves" being your poems? Or are you impatient to go past what you've already accomplished?

The last line of that poem came very late in the writing of that poem; it came when I was rewriting the poem with Louise before we were going to press with the book. After seven years, I finally found the ending to that poem. It was the part of the rewrites with Louise that I found hardest and that took the longest. The line came from a fragment of a poem I had worked on many years before. I suppose the line could be applied to the whole book, I'd not thought of it that way, but why not? There is a certain exhaustion one feels after finishing a piece of art, as though there is nothing left to express. The last part of your question, seems to be another question all by itself, and the answer is yes, I am eager to go past what I've already accomplished. As I slowly begin assembling the fragments for new poems — I can't even yet think of another book — I am eager to push myself, to make something new. How long does that take? I don't know. One has to wait for that new sound to come along so that one isn't simply repeating what they've already done. One has to wait, I think, for some more life to go by. And life is always changing, so, hopefully, my art will as well. I am eager to learn more about the land and places where I live. I've begun reading more books on Cuba and Haiti, as these cultures are such an integral part of where I live. I'm going to take a watercolor class in February and March, which I am looking forward to. I am going back to the Catholic Church to be confirmed in 2006, which is a year-long process. And I also hope to start taking Spanish classes. All these things will unequivocally affect what I write.