1. Your collection is predominantly focused on family, ancestry, finding and/or defining home. What does the word ‘home’ mean to you?
Our family has its own word for baggy old clothes: schlumpfies. A schlumpfy fits comfortably with all the rips and stains of our history. Home for me is among people who share an understanding of our words – and also share our understanding of the world.
At home, when we change into our stretched-out clothes, or schlumpify, nothing binds or pinches. We schlumpf around the house, minds free to focus on whatever beckons at the time: tea, email, dinner prep, the next poem.
In Latvia, my parents, grandparents and their parents didn’t have our leisure to schlumpify. Yet a common understanding flows through us all. Behind my own family’s homegrown word, I hear these ancestors’ Yiddish voices talking around the table.
2. Naturally, a book that is focused on family roots relies heavily on memory. What role does memory play in your writing? And to turn the question around: what is poetry's role in shaping memory (does it have one?)
Memory is central in my writing. Even some poems about current experience create their own future memories. The poem “afterimage” ends with the lines “before dusk dissolves all this except / the sea’s pulse, the sharp salt air.”
I’m drawn to the whole idea of memory. Poems I wrote after visiting Newfoundland came from the stories people told me. Stories that cement an outport’s memories, like the one about the boy who gave his friend “marbles to drop in the sea, so he could always find her again.”
And I’ve lived long enough to accumulate layered memories. Choosing one layer to write about evokes other layers, and connects to other memories. The love poem “Past the landing” deepens when I realize my new lover is the age my father was when he died.
“My mascot,” I tell myself in the poem “15 fragments,” is a tiny cartoon-style artist on a New Yorker cover. He keeps painting different views of the same subject, like my pen that “circles again / and again to childhood, which arcs / to fit my frame.” Sadly, the woman who drew that cartoon became ill and now “remembers only the last few minutes.” She lacks the memories to understand this poem I wrote about her.
And yes, I do think poetry shapes memory. Certainly poetry writing, with its slow focus on word choice or form, solidifies a memory a poem expresses. Details I remember about my sister’s death are those that felt urgent to write about while they were raw. I won’t forget that she breathed for two days after doctors removed her air tube, or that she died in South Dakota.
And as a reader or listener of poetry, powerful poems stick in my mind – for their content, style, emotional punch, or whatever makes them, dare I say, memorable to me. Like “The Nomad Flute” W.S. Merwin wrote in his eighties, with its quiet lines about memory: “I have with me / all that I do not know / I have lost none of it.”
3. Many poetic forms appear in buckled into the sky (sonnet, villanelle, etc.) Can you speak to this? Was it a deliberate choice to use various poetic forms?
A deliberate choice, yes. In the right mood, I love the challenge of writing within the structure of a poetic form. The writing process becomes more restrained, lots of trial and error, until it clicks. Like fitting puzzle pieces.
But now and then a formal poem just seems to write itself, like the palindrome poem in the first section of the longer poem “tangled in flourishes.” I’d struggled with that section, so decided to try it as a palindrome. And there it was, all at once. No idea where it came from.
And sometimes a poem suggests its own form. I’m thinking of the villanelle “Billy,” about a childhood doll that, for some reason, I can’t get out of my mind. A villanelle seemed an appropriate way to write about it, since the lines keep coming back and back, more intense each time they repeat. A fun way to write about that plastic doll!
4. What is your favourite poem in the book?
Isn’t that sort of like asking parents to choose their favourite child? Each is a favourite for who or what it is – how it was born, the special way it grew, the particular parts of each writer/parent it embodies.
A tough choice in a book of almost seventy poems. But I guess I’d choose the last poem, “Directions to Suffern NY circa 1950.” This one includes so much of what I enjoy about writing and what, I hope, readers enjoy about the book.
It’s the longest poem, so the image in each section has space to resonate, and all the images have space to coalesce. The poem has room to play with the main themes of the book. Who wouldn’t want to go back in time to see their past through present-day eyes?
The structure is a set of directions, to help us find the seam that joins the past to the present. Many of the sections riff on childhood objects. A postcard ad for rooms to rent in the house I was later born into. A ticket stub from a recent trip to Suffern NY. My Grade 1 eyeglass case. As I write in my study, these objects surround me.
A dry-wood smell from my childhood attic rises on the stairs to my current attic bedroom. And a teenage boy really allowed my daughter and me to wander through my old house – until his father barked at us to leave!
5. Are there any specific writers or books that have influenced your work?
Though buckled into the sky is my second book, early versions of the poems range back over twenty years. Over that time, many writers and books have influenced my work, and it’s hard to say what influenced me when!
But some writers stand out. Patrick Lane with his everyday subjects that open into emotional space. Jane Munro with her compression and precise words. Stuart Ross with his playfulness. W.S. Merwin with his form and his distilled natural images. And most recently, Kaie Kellough, whose astounding Magnetic Equator I would take to a desert island.
6. Your poems are so rich in imagery
(From “sweet
life” –
yet up till the end
her spoon scraped
bowls of brown betty
she liked to call
ruth betty
its buttered brown sugar
thick on her tongue
"memory" –
how can my brain remember
to close my lips for the m
lower the tip of my tongue for the s
touch the roof of my mouth for the d
so I can utter the words
my sister died
after my sister’s brain forgot
how to breathe )
How do you start writing a poem (and what is your process in general)? Is the sensory aspect the seed of the poem or does that come later?
Almost always, an image sparks the poem. Some images are visual and actual, like the horse on the beach in “Crescent.” Some, like the phalanx in “Armour,” are fiction about real people or events.
Sometimes poems come from dreams. In “There,” a sister who died reappears in my bookcase. Or they come from thoughts that float: between “drowsy sense and dreams” as in “Bathwater reverie.”
And of course words, like “occasional poem,” also spark poems. Or a phrase, like “the question you never asked me,” that I answer, in “Airtime,” only after my sister died.
When I sit down to write, I always launch directly into the poem – no journals or paraphrase. I write on my laptop, for its speed and freedom. I keep all the changes in a separate folder, so they don’t clutter the current draft. But I know I can go back to them and that frees me to try new things.
I don’t overthink the first draft. As the writer and art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote, “When I finish something and it seems good, I’m dazed. It must have been fun to write. I wish I’d been there.” But I do revise like a fiend.
7. What in your opinion makes a great poem?
When I finish reading it, my breath seems to catch, though really it slows and expands.
A great poem slips through that elusive passage from our workaday world to the air we all share. Through gaps the writer left in the poem, we’re invited – maybe even hoisted – into that space.
We’re reminded of something we already know, but now understand. The writer led us there, but it’s our own world experience that makes the poem ours.
