MiPO 2005

I'll start with this one. I'm also a stargazer. How far back do you trace your interest in the constellations?

“Ahhhhhh!”— as everyone said that night, when they saw a shooting star. The stars— I’ve never been good at studying them, that is, the constellations. The line spoken by one of the others in the poem— “How do you see a swan / in just five points?”— echoes a childhood frustration of wanting to see the pictures everyone else doesn’t seem to have trouble discerning. Which is probably why the line went in one ear and stayed there the night of the poem. Interest in stargazing though—oh, back to the beginning, early as I can remember. But isn’t that most—all?—of us, at least as kids? I’m fascinated to mind-boggled by the stars, not the least of which is that that immeasurable circus of infinite center rings all fits through the pupil of my eye, is in my head—(along with you, MiPOesias, my dead great great great grandfather, pyramids, rock concerts, hummingbirds. . .), while I am in It. There is a line in another of my poems I’m trying to express that—

And I am amazed how neatly
                       sewn together we are, the way
                                    everything fits through the eye,
through all
                                               my senses—it all in me,

                me in it—all of us
                        this breathing, cosmic blossom, opening,
                                    closing in the vast sea of
lightyears.


            —from, “Call Into Evening”

And then, too, there’s all kinds of other stuff around stars: I love the names of some, like Antares, Betelgeuse, which are, by the way, red giants, which takes us into the life and death of stars, which, “do you know,” are the kilns in which we’re all made. And then, there’s one of my favorite etymologies: the prefix, “dis-” means without; and “-aster,” or course, is star. O my! disaster means to lose one’s star.

Years ago my brother who was living in New Hampshire sent me an NPR tape of the Maine poets, I don't know if you were on it, but one poet wrote "I think of the California poets/ How easy it is for them." I live in California. What does Maine, the sense of place of where you live, represent to your poetry?

If my poems have become for others more engaging, more meaningful, richer experiences than my earlier writing, as they have for me, that in part must reflect a gradual coming out of myself, an opening and growing attention to others and everything else in the world. And when—if — I come to some discovery of myself, or anyone or thing in my poems, it may be that such discovery becomes tangible and accessible only through images I find in the world. I think we are what we experience, that the world is in me surely as I am in it, one and inseparable—(Is that Whitman? who also says, “If I repeat myself, then I repeat myself?”). Wherever I am has to be in my poems, as Eagle Lake, in the Adirondacks, along with the some good slice of the cosmos, is in my poem, “A Short History of Time,” here in this issue of MiPOesias. Obviously, that poem could not have been written without my body in that place in that moment. As Whitman wrote in “There Was a Child Went Forth”:

And the first object he looked upon, that object he became,
        And that object became part of him for the day. . .
        Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

        The early lilacs became part of this child,
        And grass and white and red morning glories, and white and red
clover,
            and the song of the phoebe-bird. . .

Etcetera. So, your question—Yes, Maine is very much in my poems, what I feel-think-care about resonating in images of what I experience—wherever I am. I think of one of my recent poems (“The Nameless,” too long to quote here, which appears in the first issue of Chautauqua Literary Journal), which can be thought of as interior, that is, about my emotional life rather than environment, for which I could only find satisfactory resolution, or an ending, in an image of two seagulls I happened to see on a walk along the coast.

Interview finalized October 2004