If you enjoyed our interview two weeks ago with Natalie Diaz, here's another discussion with a fantastic writer, Jenny Factor. Below, she offers her perspective on everything from writing in the English language to food poetry to grieving over death. We hope you find Jenny's answers as thought-provoking as we do. Share your thoughts in the comments below.
In the Spring 2010 issue of Prairie Schooner, your lovely poem “Chilean Love Song,” adapted from poems by Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, takes on a haunting and musical quality through its wordplay and repetition. Other poems of yours, too, greatly experiment with language. What are some of the joys and challenges of writing in the English language, and do you think English is a good language to express what you need to express?
Good question. And I'm sure people with a better grounding in creativity and linguistics could better answer it.
English is the only language where my background is as deeply connatative as it is denotative—meaning I came into speech via the mid-20th century American English version of language, having absorbed the strangeness of nursery rhyme (Anglophone history), and the coherence and grumble of a Robert Frost poem—all within this language—and the concepts of shame and desire and despair came into my body via the word-markers within this language. And so I can't be fair or even-handed if I were to try to weigh English beside other languages or write poetry in other languages—much though I admire the tight geometric knot of Latin, the floridity and exuberance of Spanish...
I can't blush alone in a room in any language other than English. Where shame lives, there lives the resonance to transgress, to speak up against the pushed back pressure of a culture—all the ingredients one needs to have a certain type of poetry-level relationship to a language.
Appropos of which, how I admire poets like Fady Joudah and Nathalie Handel who come into their poet-selves in an exiled diction. But one reason their words surprise so much perhaps is that all the connotative pressure on their minds and speech comes from outside their writing sphere—their sense of deep narrative and shame is ported over from elsewhere.
In “The Lotus Eaters,” you explore the psychology of hunger and in “The Street Hawkers,” you describe a variety of luscious fruits and vegetables. So many poets write poems about food, but yours stand out as unique. What would you suggest to other creative writers wanting to tackle a subject and, as Ezra Pound says, “make it new” when it has been written about so many times before?
It's funny that you ask about food poetry, because it's been on my mind! A graduating poet from the Antioch University Low Residency MFA Program (where I teach) spoke about food poetry in a very compelling talk this past Friday morning. Her examples—from Kevin Young, Donald Hall, Pablo Neruda—were marvellous. Abby Templeton pointed out that some poetry is written about food and other poetry is written with food.
"The Lotus Eaters" and "The Street Hawkers" are poems with food—as in, the creative impetus for the poem came from outside the food—(in one case grief, and in the other, political empathy and despair) and the food rode in out of symbol and necessity.
Two funny (or at least strange) stories and then an answer to your question:
When (the poet) Myra Cohn Livingston died in 1996, I drove in some panic to her front yard where we'd spent many afternoons sitting on a picnic blanket in the grass, reading aloud. She was the mentor of my chidhood, and a soulmate and friend—and a woman who seemed to have swallowed up poetry whole so that it came back out of her in a gravelly, rivery stream—memorized or spoken—a woman with time and carefulness and patience in even her most banal speech.
I couldn't forget her. I couldn't let go of her. And I was sleepless (my first child only 6 months old) and in a bit of an altered state. I was also not that many years from having read about Thomas Hardy—how he once went down on his knees in the grass to find out what cows would taste—a fact that seemed romantic but also potent to me.
So I'm not sure exactly why I decided to try this, or how such an odd thought took hold of me in a flash, but on that strange and miserable and uncomfortable day, I kneeled down on that grass where we'd spent so much time, and not able to think of any other way to give honor to it, I ate a blade of grass from her front yard—thinking hard as I did so about the texture, about the tart and crunch of it about how it failed to satisfy, how it crinkled and was really a Nothing.
Within a week, I'd written the first draft of "The Lotus Eaters."
"Street Hawkers" was a lunch poem on a break from my job at EarthLink as an Internet editor. I watched a street vender—laden down with bags of cherries and oranges—almost run over not far from my office. The car hit him and he walked away uncomfortably from the scene. I'm not sure where the music that became a poem from that came from.
But to answer your question, I do believe in reading poems or finding applications from music, visual art, film—that make the poem on a topic come out into good company. That's my one easy tip. When I've decided to write a poem, or a new kind of poem, I always look for models, and I engage in what Richard Garcia calls "thievery"—but what I feel when I'm doing it is more communal and productive than that tongue-in-cheek word implies. Basically, I sing into that choir of other voices who have moved in the language that way first. Works like a charm.
Something remarkable about you is how early you became fascinated with and began seriously writing poetry—by first grade. What is the first poem that you remember reading and falling in love with?
I began writing poetry before I began reading it. When I was four years old, I began to have a fascination with objects and the words that seemed to adhere to them. I'd have rhythmic and repeating word clasts snagged in my head and would feel some actual pressure in the body to get rid of them. My mother would take out her pen and write them down and voila—all better. My mom used to quip that her friends' children needed the family to stop for bathroom breaks but I needed the family to stop for poem-breaks. And hence, with that small bit of parenting, I grew up feeling more of a sense of entitlement to my artist self than most people do. Much was made in my household of this thing that was really very little—an interest in sound and a sense that verbalizing (and then transcribing) was an urgent act after looking at or experiencing anything.
In first grade, my teachers already knew that I had this strange habit, and so they pushed on my behalf to have me embedded in the Poetry-in-the-Schools class that was then taught only to the gifted kids (among whom I had not placed via any standard of measurement). In fact, Myra Cohn Livingston taught that class—and it was she who first led me to poems rich in imagery like "The moon is the north wind's cookie", and poems by Carl Sandburg, Emily Dickinson, Gabriela Mistral even.
The day reading and writing came together for me, I was 10 years old. My parents had headed to friends for a bridge game and I was sitting alone in the living room at the friend's home bored—with access to no books except the ones in their rare and collectibles shelf. Aunt Edith and Uncle Manny (as I called this couple) let me browse any of those books I wanted, and I somehow by fate yanked down a first edition of Robert Frost's West-Running Brook. I can still recall how it felt to experience the book of poems—as a whole—to open it (it had a rice paper around it that crinkled and whispers when you'd turn the pages). I read the short poems first—then the remarkable title poem. They—and bless them for it!—let me borrow the book. I kept it for a few weeks, and then started to look at poetry books on my own. By the time I was a teenager, they'd gifted that book to me. I still have it.
Your first book of poems, Unraveling at the Name, won the attention of many. Now, you are nearing the completion of your second collection of poetry; congratulations! What writing project is next on your horizon?
The second collection is slow work, so it's hard to look beyond it. I've researched a romance novel set in
Bad excuses are worse than none.
Posted by: Jordan Flight 45 | August 13, 2010 at 03:41 AM