AN INTERVIEW WITH SYDNEY LEA
The Writer's Chronicle September 2004
--Marie Jordan Giordano

Sydney Lea is known for his mastery of narrative and clear unwavering vision of the natural world and our place in it. He is author of seven poetry collections, the most recent of which, Pursuit Of A Wound, was a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize; his prior volume, To The Bone: New And Selected Poems, was co-winner of the 1998 Poets' Prize. Lea has also published A Place In Mind, a novel (Scribner '89, Story Line '92), and Hunting The Whole Way Home, a collection of memoirist essays, which was reissued by the Lyons Press in '01. Story Line Press will publish A Little Wildness: Some Notes on Rambling, his second nonfiction book, in spring '05. His eigth collection of poems, Ghost Pain, is due from Sarabande Books in April. To quote Stanley Plumly, Sydney Lea's writing "lives at the level at which lyricism is crowded with the daily lives of those who will not or cannot speak for themselves -- the doomed, the disenfranchised, the local dead." A well loved mentor and teacher of literature and writing for 35 years, he has been on the faculty at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Middlebury and Vermont colleges in the U.S. as well as at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest and Franklin College in Lugano abroad. He has held fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations, and he was founder, and for thirteen years, editor of New England Review. He lives with his wife Robin Barone, a lawyer/mediator, and his children in Newbury, Vermont.

Marie Jordan: Let's talk about your new non-fiction book which you've just completed.

Sydney Lea: I began writing it when I was teaching last year in Switzerland. It's a typical poet's prose book, rambly and meandering, and in fact, it's subtitle includes the word "ramblings." It's about my habit of getting up early in the morning and wandering off into the woods around here in Vermont with no set itinerary in mind: in fact, with a kind of adamant refusal to carry map, compass, what have you, almost wanting to get a bit lost. This is not Sierran California, this is not wild Montana; here, eventually, you stumble into civilization. I try fairly strenuously not to think about writing projects in the hope that ideas, as we call them lamely, will sneak up on me. I hope to have two projects done by the end of the academic year. (I'm an old fart, but I'm still thinking in terms of academic years. I'm not teaching at all this year.)

Jordan: Is the other project non-fiction, too?

Lea: Fiction. It started with the awful story of my friend whose twin children committed suicide, one in 1993 and one on the anniversary a year later. And so there is that germ of truth, whatever truth means, in the novel. But thereafter I began to connect it with all kinds of things in my own life and things I've heard about.

Jordan: You said once that fiction is the most liberating and visionary mode of writing for you. Why is that?

Lea: Fiction is a genre in which I feel I can invent things out of whole cloth. I don't say this in a moral sense, Marie, but somehow or another if I'm writing a poem and I say I have a sister, I'd better have a sister. It's testimonial in a way that fiction is not for me. For some reason I can't seem to write poetry as fiction unless it has a strong narrative element and a persona as protagonist. I feel that if I testify to a certain truth it had better be a true truth.

Jordan: In your fiction you incorporate what I think of as a Chekhovian technique. You allow reality to comment on itself.

Lea: Well! (laughs) Chekhov is a great hero of mine, to be sure, and if that's rubbed off, I'm happy. The possibilities in the flow of the ordinary! Oh God, I sound so damn pretentious. Now you're going to intimidate me and I'll realize I'm imitating Chekhov. (laughs) But I imitate myself all the time! Drives me nuts. I'll read a page proof of mine and think, "Oh God, another Syd Lea poem!"

Jordan: In your essay, "Show and Tell: A Case for Rhetoric in Contemporary Literature," you say that if we are to trust a fiction's rhetoric, then we must trust the rhetorician. Testimony, you say, must not float free of its characterological concerns. How does the writer use testimony or rhetoric to present his or her convictions?

Lea:Most writers will establish some credibly human and ideally, sympathetic characters, and then either explicitly or implicitly, identify his or her point of view with the character. Then the responsibility for testimony, for rhetoric, becomes the character's. This applies to poetry, too, as I try to practice it. If rhetoric- by which I mean the use of language that makes a case, that seeks to persuade- is part of your program, as I hope it is mine, then it has to come from someone whose authority we can trust, at least for the duration of the story or the poem or the novel or the essay. It has to come, in short, from a trustworthy character.

When we talk about 'empty rhetoric,' what we mean, I think, is formulaic stuff, the sort of thing that crops up in advertisement and political speechifying, stuff that has no real connection to anyone's human heart. 'A new world order,' say? What the hell is that? There's no life or blood in it, it's just a slogan. It's just telling; there is no showing. We don't therefore trust it, and good for us!

Jordan: Are you espousing the virtues of 'Show" versus 'tell'?

Lea: I'm for show AND tell. Would we take the nine-tenths of Frost's "Provide, Provide" that is argument and advise him (in some so-called workshop, probably), "Cut that. It's only rhetoric"? Would we sacrifice to so stupid a notion something like, "No memory of having starred /Atones for later disregard/Or keeps the end from being hard?" - Or Hemingway's observation about the father in one of his stories, of whom he says something piercingly accurate: "He was a sentimental person, and like all sentimental people he was both cruel and abused.

The point is that in either of these cases, we trust the voice of the speaker, trust his character, in part because the speaker in those cases has, yes, shown us the grounds on which he speaks.

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