AN INTERVIEW WITH SYDNEY LEA - CONTINUED

Jordan: In re-reading Pursuit of a Wound, it seems to me you get inside the poem and work your way out. What's between the words seem to me such an important part of each poem as well as the sounds and rhythms of your words. I hear you singing.

Lea: There was a time in my life when I thought that I would like to try my hand in music. I wasn't quite talented enough. I was okay, but I wasn't really good enough. And I think that was a gift from God because I don't know what I'd do if I were a full-time musician and on the road all the time away from my wife and family.

It is true in some sense, that the rhythms and cadences of what I call Black classical music are probably more influential on my psyche than anything I've ever read. The heft of the old twelve bar blues is always in my mind to some extent. So I think it's important, though not consciously. After I've written something I'll look back and say well, you know, there was a key change there, or a modulation.

Jordan: You enter the details of the arrested moment. In fact, in the poem, "What He Knows," there's the line, I just like the life of which each detail is eloquent.

Lea: That's right, I wrote that in a poem, didn't I? (laughs) I do like my life, in which each last detail is eloquent. My family life primarily.

Jordan: Yes, the family theme is prevalent in your writing. At a point at the end of your poem, "Phases" the narrator stands outside on the grass in the moonlight smoking a cigar and looking at his house as his family sleeps inside. The effect is dramatic and deeply moving.

Lea: In that poem I address a mild bi-polarity in myself, I'm very mild compared to some people I know who suffer awfully with that condition. That I would walk in wonder in the valley of the shadow of death, I don't have to tell you, is a deliberate recall of the 23rd Psalm. It is the notion that one can keep on trucking no matter what is thrown in one's way.

Jordan: Tell me, as a teacher, and you've taught for 35 years, how do you teach students to be writers?

Lea: If I have no agenda as a writer, I have less a teacher. I can't instruct what a writer writes about. I'm not only a teacher of writing, but a teacher of literature and we have this notion that somehow literature is made of ideas. Whereas, in fact, literature is really made of feelings to some extent and the intellect to some extent, but it's mostly made of language. If people can be given permission to hear the language in their own heads, that's where they're going to be poets or writers. I can't say, "Here are ten rules that will teach you to write a poem." I don't think I teach people to be writers. I think I teach people to the extent that I can to hear their own voices and to try and figure out (I haven't referred to the cliché yet, but I am now) some version of what the architect Louis Kahn once asked of his students: "What does this building want to be?" What does the poem want to be? I think I can help the writer know what his or her writings want to be, and to free them in that sense. I can suggest to him or her how to present what's on her mind. To free them from the tyranny of us English teachers who say basically that poetry is criticism in reverse. I don't think I've ever written a poem or written in any genre that was ideationally driven. It was something else.

Jordan: What was that something else?

Lea: Well, as I said earlier, it's an itch. When I wrote "The Feud", I sat down and the first line came to me:

I don't know your stories. This one here/ is the meanest one I've got or ever hope to.
And then it took possession of me. One word followed another. I think at some level it's a poem about flouting the Lord's injunction about vengeance being His. But that was not foremost in my mind when that first sentence occurred to me.
You've heard me use the expression, Creeping MFAism where the whole pursuit is becoming more and more a profession than an art. I don't think that's healthy. I obviously wouldn't have taught creative writing in MFA programs for so many years if I didn't think there was a lot of value in them. But I fear that people are taking degrees in how to teach the writing of poetry rather than how to write it or think about writing it. When poetry becomes a kind of a practicum for the classroom, it troubles me.

Jordan: You speak of the writer's life as being one of unease.

Lea: Well, I have an easy life in all manner of ways, but I think there's a way in which people become writers because the activity of recording one's responses to that itch I mentioned earlier is an activity for which he or she cannot find a substitute. If I had been 10% better as a musician maybe I would have gone that way. It's a little bit like being thirsty. You have to have a drink of water to quell that unease. I have, since I was kid, had a tendency to the verbal, which is almost catastrophic. I talk and talk and talk and write and write and write. They are very similar activities. To get it down in a verbal way is something I have a hankering for.

Jordan: How many languages do you read and speak?

Lea: French is my good language. Italian is my next good language and then I can read Spanish well. And a little bit of Hungarian. Talk about a difficult language! It's not a Slavic language. It's a Finno-Ugric language. The only other relative it has is Finnish. It doesn't have any cognates as any Teutonic or Slavic or Indo- European language, so it's almost an entity unto itself. When I taught in Budapest, it was an aptly humbling experience not to be able to yak on and on as I often do.

Jordan: That's because you possess so much of interest to talk about! When did you decide in your academic life to pivot your concentration to writing?

Lea: Well, in 1976 I was teaching at Dartmouth College when I was informed I'd have to turn out some scholarly work. It was publish or perish, and this was shortly after I finished the nightmare of my inscrutable PhD dissertation on supernatural literature of the nineteenth century. So I went up into the stacks thinking I was going to write this critical book on Wordsworth and I remember, I can hear it in my own fading ears now, I kind of looked around the dusty stacks and said to myself, "This is not what I want to do when I grow up." I had always hoped at some time I would become a writer, and I mean, here I was in my mid- thirties.

Jordan: But you had been writing for a long time, hadn't you?

Lea: Oh sure. I wrote poetry if I broke up with a girlfriend or got drunk or lost a friend or something, and I wrote it in a spiel and didn't pay much more attention to it. But suddenly at that point I felt somehow lit from within to concentrate on writing poems.

Jordan: And the scholarly works?

Lea: My dissertation was my response to what were called the Yale critics, the first very influential generation of post-new critical critics at Yale. And it really didn't work for me. I was trying to speak a language whose value I still don't quite understand, if value there be. It was literary theory at its most extreme at the time. I didn't understand what they were saying. (I don't admit that proudly, but I admit it unashamedly.) I open up some of these post modern screeds influenced by Jacques Derrida and Paul De Man and I just don't know what is being said. Insofar as I can understand it, it seems banal to me. I talk about it in Hunting the Whole Way Home, that you discover having waded through such-and-such a discourse on meaning and signification and text and it turns out that words are not real, they aren't the same as the thing they describe. Characters are fictitious. Well, anybody who has written seriously in an imaginative fashion for oh, say 48 hours, somehow knows that.

I started to try and resuscitate parts of that dissertation to make them into scholarly articles and all of a sudden I stopped. Some little genius inside me said, well if you want to be a writer, you'd better write.

Jordan: Did you know what you'd write?

Lea: I was captivated by a generation of men and women I knew in New England, virtually all of them gone now, at least the ones that I knew well. They were essentially pre-industrial people who made their own entertainment, and the entertainment tended to take the shape of narrative, and I loved to hear those voices, male and female, as they rolled on and spun stories. I just loved the rhythms and the cadences of that language, and I said I'd like to write about them. I wanted to capture that quality. I had this notion that I could do it better in poetry than I could do in prose, because in prose I'd have to be a genius like Mark Twain and write dialect which was at once convincing and not condescending. Without having to imitate these old folks, I thought, rightly or wrongly, that I could get a little bit of the heft of their language if I used verse. Of course, since a lot of the stuff I heard from them was narrative, it's unsurprising that the poems took on a narrative direction. I was very lucky very early and got poems prominently placed and had a book out pretty soon. I worked a lot harder on my poetry then than I do now. I mean, I was a tiger. I worked every day from very early in the morning and I arranged my teaching schedule in the afternoons. 85% of the poetry wasn't very good , but what survived went into my first volume. The University of Illinois Press took that first book and I've had a good relationship with them ever since.

Jordan: How much re-writing do you do?

Lea: A lot. For me, the revision is really the fun part. I get to block the stuff down and then I try to make Michelangelo's oft-cited analogy about having a block of marble and trying to discover the sculpture within it. I feel a kindred impulse when I've got this mass of words and I have to discover how to make it all comely and shapely, and to find out what it really wants to be. I say, "Hey, there's something here. Now let's just find what it is." At least half the time a poem that will eventually see print is not the final draft I wrote, but maybe two or three before it because I can get so addicted to the process that I can over revise, or get cute, or add effects which are really a "Look Ma, no hands," kind of thing, and not really germane to the project. I work on no more than one poem at a time and I work in no more than one genre at a time.

Jordan: In your essay on rhetoric which I mentioned to you earlier, you write that we have so persistently brainwashed ourselves into simultaneous rejection of rhetoric and advocacy of image and corrected ourselves for "telling," not "showing," that we have knee-jerk response to our most impassioned utterances, and thus we edit them out. Do you have a revision check list?

Lea: Well, not exactly. I'm not much of a list maker. Or actually, I am, because I'm so scatterbrained that I need to be: I write errand reminders on the back of my hand like a little kid, or else I forget everything. But not for poems. For one thing, I hope that the poems are diverse enough that one list wouldn't do for all. I do make sure that I've done all I can to make the source of testimony clear, that people know who's talking, and maybe to whom, and surely why. I also want people to know, once they have finished a story or poem ... No, once they so much as enter one of my poems and stories, that they are in an identifiable place. It's probably someplace in New England, and of course, I can't expect everyone to have been there, but I can hope they'll imagine they have when I'm through with them, just as I imagined when I read Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, whose renderings of New Mexican places were so vivid I knew they were right ... as they proved to be, once I visited that beautiful state.

Jordan: How do you organize your administrative work time?

Lea: I'm not terribly organized or disciplined. I'm not a very good administrator. Fortunately, my wife, Robin, was the managing editor of my magazine [The New England Review] or it would have gone into shambles immediately. Same with my family's daily life.

Jordan: Do you have someone you look to critique your work?

Lea: My wife. She is really a good reader because she is immensely literate. But she's not literary, if you know what I mean. She's evolved a rather humorous set of shorthand editorial notations, one of which is NASG. You know what that stands for? New Age Sensitive Guy. Which can be translated as, "Give me a break. You aren't that good, honey." She's telling me I'm trying to win favor, or what I'm saying doesn't belong in the poem.

Jordan: There's a fine line, isn't there? Like in your poem, "Poor Fool Blues" that ends, "We look for meaning and form. If patterns and breaches of pattern wear out our words, we still mean to do some good before we die." You're able to say things like this without being coy, or coming off as self conscious and deliberate --

Lea: That's why my wife writes NASG in the margin. I'm not more immune than the next guy from the temptation to walk into a situation and conclude very quickly the proper moral stance, and to strike toward it.

One wakes up in the morning and there's a lot to be concerned about. I'm concerned about peace in the middle east, for example. There's the old bumper sticker slogan, "Think globally and act locally". In the 60's, like every other spoiled rich kid of my generation, I wanted to fix the world. Now I'm thinking more in local terms. I'm sixty years old. I'm thinking if I can make one little contribution to change the immediate life here in my neighborhood, that's about all I can do. You're concerned for your concerns. They inform your writing.

Jordan: One of your major concerns in the community now is literacy, isn't it?

Lea: I've gotten very involved in literacy. I'm a board member of a state wide literacy foundation. Originally, thinking as a man of words that illiteracy was a matter of decoding language, I then realized as I became involved as a tutor that it was a kind of entire social pathology. There are people who can't balance checkbooks and are terrified to go to the grocery store because they can't make change, that kind of thing. One of my earliest clients told me she couldn't read or write, but she wanted to be a writer. And now she's writing articles for the local complimentary paper you get at the grocery store. She is blooming and thriving. She reads to her kids and the TV isn't on 24 hours a day.

Jordan: How long did it take for her to develop to such a level?

Lea: It only took about a year because she was motivated. These are people who are usually dismissed as trailer trash. I'm thinking of making literacy a full time commitment. I want to open a private foundation, thanks to my mother's largesse, and see if that can't be what I do in my late innings.

Jordan: Your concerns also include the environment.

Lea: To be sure. That'll be another concern I'll address in the foundation. I own over 300 acres of land here in Vermont. I can be as insulated as I like, but I still have to get in my car like everyone else who's ruining the planet and head down the road and do things that should appall us, and do appall me anyway.

Jordan: When you say "appalled," how do you get inside it? Where does that come from, because it comes from a very private place, doesn't it? Conscience, a relationship with God, the universe? What is it that touches you to bring you to the place of your concerns?

Lea: You know there are times in life when you feel you've reached a kind of a bench mark? When things will never be the same again? For me it was when my boy (a wonderful writer, by the way) was born. I felt transformed. I said that's what it's all about- the delicacy and fragility of human flesh! I watched my four other babies born after that, and I was reminded again how important human life is. You can talk about that in an abstract way, but when it smacked me across the face, I think I really became committed to do what little I could to help people thrive.

Jordan: And that realization extends beyond the family ...

Lea: I'll tell you a story. A very dear local friend, he's about ten years younger than I am, and I were off hunting at my camp up in Maine. We'd been busting through the brush all day long. One's guard goes down when you're tired, so I was cooking supper and my friend, Joe, says to me (he calls me Professor Woodcock), he says, "Professor, what are you going to do in your next life?"

I thought and then I said probably not a hell of a lot different from what I was doing now. I said I'd probably spend less time worrying about what people thought about me. Then I said, "How about you?"

He said, "Well, first thing I'd do is pay a little attention in high school."
I said, "What do you mean?"
He said, "I can't read."

Now this is a brilliant guy with a great gift of gab. He said, "I can't read." Nobody knew he couldn't read. Brightest guy you ever met, and he couldn't read.

Jordan: Your characters live with integrity and beauty in their sorrows and losses, and yet there is a "holding together" theme of your writing. You don't have that intention in your life or work?

Lea: No I don't. Whatever I am, I am. The word "agenda" keeps coming up in my mind.

Jordan: How do you come at a poem like "Poor Fool Blues" and this whole idea of useless death? I read that poem and I could hear you singing it, almost like Lady Day's "Strange Fruit".

Lea: It was the testimony at the moment. The poem came out of stopping to see this tree that was part of the memory of my son's best friend and the coincidence of hearing Buddy Guy on the radio. A nice thing that Jon Holden once said about me, he said, "You can't fake character." You can't jerryrig that kind of thing.

Jordan: You often speak about your love of poetic form. Why do you like writing in form?

Lea: I enjoy the pressure that form puts upon me. Rather than being confining, it's a kind of liberation that can get me thinking about something other than my solitary little self. I already fear that my poems may be too solipsistic, but if I grant myself the freedom that free verse offers to me I think too often I can just sort of get wandering in selfhood. I like to be distracted from that. I like an element of play, no matter how somber the poem may be. I like to play around with material. That's the fun part for me. And I think if I can distract myself in that way, whatever there is of the unconscious or subliminal in me, emerges more freely than if I'm just trying to write straight ahead and say this is what I'm thinking. You know, I'm the man. I'm suffering. Here I am.

I like to cheat with form and I don't write sonnets and villanelles, at least not very many of them, but the forms I come up with tend to be kind of penumbral forms, not quite improvised and not quite not-forms, but ones that don't follow any set of specific rules. I do write ballads periodically, and that is form, but if you think of folk ballads, they're open ended and could go on forever. Pantoum or villanelle are difficult and defined forms. Sometimes I flirt with the idea of those. I have a poem in my book, Prayer for the Little City called "Pianissimo," which kind of plays with the idea of the villanelle, but it's not a villanelle. I will write in meter, to be sure, and I'll write in iambic pentameter and tetrameter, but in terms of rhyme scheme and of standard schemes, that just sort of emerges of its own. I try a lot of different ways and if I like one better than the other, that's the one I choose.

I was oddly uncertain about my book, Pursuit of a Wound, when I sent it to my editor. There were all those kind of quasi-prose poems, which were new to me. I didn't know if they'd go over with my publisher or with anybody else. They're not really prose poems, they're block poems. They're full of meters and internal rhymes and why I chose that format ultimately, like the title poem, I can't properly say, except I am always interested in playing around in form and this seemed like one I'd never used before. Frost noted that when we talk about music we talk about strains, and I like to strain a little bit against the form.

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