12 or 20 (second series) questions with Susan Stewart

Susan Stewart is a poet, scholar, and translator and the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities, emerita, at Princeton University.  Her most recent books are Bramble, a book of poems, The Ruins Lesson, and Poetry’s Nature: Four Lectures.

She has won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award for her poetry. A former MacArthur Fellow, Berlin Fellow, and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. 

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book made a difference in the way I thought about writing poems--writing a book became the project rather than the continuous, but incidental, practice of simply writing poems. This is my seventh book of poetry and since The Forest each book has had a particular relation to understanding the past. In that book, I explored the notion from psychoanalysis of generational haunting and addressed the accounts I had of family life before my birth; in Columbarium I wanted to rethink the genre of the georgic from a perspective of doubt and an acknowledgment of the indifference of nature; in Red Rover I thought about the medieval dream vision and forms of play as spheres of the imagination. In this book I turned to Mandelstam's use of the octet and the Biblical psalms as models for countering emergency and expressing grief. Considering the phenomenon of the bramble I hoped to learn something about the potential of natural symbols.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction? 
I have written poetry from childhood. I also like to work as a scholar. But I have never been successful at writing fiction. I don't seem to have a strong narrative sense.
 
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I am a very slow poet with only a few exceptions of poems that have come to me as I awakened in the night. Usually I have a phrase or concept in mind, or perhaps an image or memory, and I begin to make the poem.  I write drafts on long sheets of paper usually. And then I have to stop and put the poem away for quite a while--often months. Then I go back to it and try to resolve whatever seems unfinished to me.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
see above

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy doing readings in the rare periods when I have a new book that is finished. I always read my poems aloud to myself as I am writing them, but when I read in public I have a better sense of how they sound.
 
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Yes, I have many theoretical concerns. That is why I have written a number of scholarly books about poetics and aesthetics. I believe the most pressing question for poets of our time is the fate of both the senses and the imagination at a moment when we are surrendering our will to technologies largely in the service of greed.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be? 
Our job is to keep thinking and beauty alive and to pass on those values to future generations.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I don't think of this practice in terms of ease--it's more of a necessity for me. My poems and criticism are nourishing to one another and I practice translation not as a "professional," but as a means of friendship and helping English language literature be less parochial. 

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin? 
I don't follow a routine, for my life is too complicated for that--but I do go for a long walk and work in my garden almost every day. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
My writing doesn't become stalled because I don't have a schedule for it.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? 
honeysuckle

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
yes, all of those forms are an influence...and I often enjoy collaborating with composers and visual artists.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I have been so fortunate to spend my working life teaching the history of literature, art, and philosophy to young people and learning from others in university settings. Although I now have retired from teaching, I read in these fields every day and I don't feel a gulf of any kind between my work and the life outside my work.  My family life is also very much tied up with these worlds: and for all of us issues of social justice and citizenship have only increased in intensity under the current U.S. regime.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? 
Walk freely at night in any neighborhood of my city and know that no one suffers from hunger, witness the success of local public schools and the flourishing of the liberal arts and humanities in U.S. colleges and universities, see my family, friends, and neighbors able to afford the health care they need and certainly deserve, watch the collapse of the military-industrial complex, enjoy clean air and water and know it can be found anywhere on the planet...you get the idea.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I don't know. As I applied to college, women could not have their own financial accounts and many universities were not open to women. I have been fortunate to be able to write my way into an existence that has been fulfilling and in my private life I have been so lucky in many ways.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? 
The most recent great book I've read--this past week--is Jay Wright's beautiful Párodos.  The recent film I have most enjoyed is Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera.

20 - What are you currently working on? 
I have just published three books: Bramble, Poetry's Nature: Four Lectures, and Last Stops of the Night Journey, a co-translation of two recent books by Milo De Angelis.  I am finishing, with Patrizio Ceccagnoli, a translation of Antonella Anedda's Geografie, the companion volume to her Historiae, which Patrizio and I recently brought out with New York Review Books.  So now, free of deadlines, I have the luxury of figuring out what I want to do next.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rachel Trousdale

Rachel Trousdale [photo credit: Nick Beauchamp] is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Her book of poems, Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem, won Wesleyan University Press’s Cardinal Poetry Prize. Her other books include Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination. @rvtrousdale, www.racheltrousdale.com.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I’ve been having so much fun with this book! My first books were scholarly—I’ve written one on transnational fiction, and one on humor in twentieth century American poetry, and also edited a collection on humor. I enjoyed writing them, but scholarship can be a very small world, and once a book comes out, all you do is wait six months and see if anyone reviews it. This is my first full-length poetry collection, and it’s been a delight getting to travel around, give readings, and meet people. Someone recently emailed me to tell me he’d used one of my poems in his wedding vows, which was a thrill.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

My dad used to come into my room when I was a kid and read or recite poems at me: TS Eliot, Robert Frost, Robert Service, silly rhymes from the Open Road for Boys circa 1936, Lewis Carroll. I’d put down the fantasy novel I was reading long enough to listen. Then, when I started trying to write fiction, I discovered that what I kept trying to do was write the single intense page of epiphany or revelation that you can’t reach until page 247 of a novel. That page doesn’t usually stand alone in prose, but it turns out you can do it pretty efficiently in poetry.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Individual poems tend to come quickly—I write in a fast burst. And then I edit them very, very slowly. Sometimes when I’m stuck on a poem it turns out to be because it was only the first half of something, or more accurately only half of the material I needed to discuss; when that’s the case, it may take months before I find the missing pieces of the puzzle.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

My critical books have begun as big ambitious questions. But in poetry, it’s so far been short pieces that accumulate into a larger project. Individual poems often suggest themselves around a single sticking point: an opening line; a closing line; a weird image. Can I write a poem in which an octopus climbs a palm tree? Then the challenge is how to find the other pieces that go along with that starting point, because you don’t want the poem to be just one thing—otherwise the octopus gets stuck.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love readings. Not just of my own work: I started life as a theater kid, and I’m always reciting bits of Shakespeare and Yeats at my children, or reading snippets of science fiction stories out loud to my students. I like to wave my arms around and do the voices, or gallop the meter like Robert Browning in that drunken-sounding wax cylinder recording.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I want to write things I haven’t seen before. There’s a genre of poetry I think of as “white poet looking out the window,” where a comfortable speaker looks at a nice safe world and thinks about how nature makes them feel. I desperately don’t want to write like that, which can be hard, since I am in fact a comfortable white woman who likes to take walks. I want accuracy and intensity and stakes, and if something’s been said already I don’t see any reason to say it again. That doesn’t mean I always manage originality, just that I wish I could. I’m also very interested in the role of pleasure, humor, and joy in art, especially art that addresses serious or difficult topics.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

On the one hand, I think it’s silly for writers to claim to be special people; I can’t pretend to be a Romantic-style poet-prophet or anything of that sort. On the other hand, I think that artists of any variety have an enormous responsibility to tell the truth in public. This is a political role, because when something is evil, you have to say so. And it’s an aesthetic role, because when something is beautiful, you have to enjoy it. And it’s a social role, because you’re speaking to other people, and inviting them to respond, and trying to create a conversation that goes beyond your own artwork. Writers of poetry, or of fiction or drama, can ask hard questions in very different and sometimes more challenging ways than journalists do. And unlike novelists or actors or even musicians, poets’ work is especially easy to share, and to take with you in your pocket, or keep whole in a corner of your head until you need it—no charger required.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential. About two weeks into the pandemic shutdowns, my friend Catherine Rockwood emailed me and two other friends from graduate school and said “we’re going to need poetry to get through this.” We formed an online writing group, giving feedback over Google Docs to weekly poem drafts. We eventually named ourselves the Harpies. Not only would my book of poems not exist without them, I would probably have gone full Yellow Wallpaper some time in November of 2020.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“Never try to make a happy baby happier.” This has nothing directly to do with writing, but it is the best advice I have ever gotten. Also “Stick a stamp on it,” from Stephanie Burt, when we were both in graduate school and I was dithering over whether an article I’d written was ready to send out. And “I’d like to see more wildness in this,” from Terrance Hayes, to me and multiple other people in a workshop he was teaching. And the Connecticut State Lottery: “You can’t win if you don’t play.” I don’t play the lottery, but it turns out that advice is useful in other contexts.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

I generally write because I’m trying to understand something. That takes different forms in poetry and critical prose, though. My first critical book was an attempt to figure out why novels by Vladimir Nabokov and Salman Rushdie tasted the same to me. My most recent one was trying to figure out why W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore’s humor felt like home (there wasn’t much mystery why Pound’s and Eliot’s didn’t). Both of those books started with an itchy feeling that there was a pattern I wanted to identify, linking different writers I admired. The process of writing really came down to explaining what that pattern was and finding a name for it.

When I’m writing a poem, though, I’m trying to answer different kind of question, often a more open-ended “what if” — what happens if I take this metaphor to a logical extreme? Can I make a sestina behave like a hologram? Can I understand something unfathomable (eternity, the depths of interstellar space) by thinking about how it feels to drive on a fourteen-hour road trip? So instead of the itchy feeling that I was missing something, which is where the critical books started, poems are like hiking a bit farther to see around the next corner, or learning to juggle: can I just get one more angle on the view? can I do this while balancing a plate on my nose? What happens if I swap one of the juggling balls for an orange? and so on.

But you asked whether it was easy to move between genres. For me, it’s vital. If I’m not trying to write poems, I’m liable to miss some of the weirdness and ambition of the poems I’m reading. And if I’m not writing critically, I’m liable to repeat other people’s experiments instead of coming up with new ones of my own.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I wish that a predictable writing routine were compatible with having an academic job and two kids. During the summer, I have the luxury of time: breakfast, take the kids to camp, write for an hour or two, do some reading, have lunch, repeat. The other three seasons, writing takes place in stolen time: composing a poem in my head during my drive to work and scribbling it down in the ten minutes before class, or an intense week-long writing binge during January break once the kids are back in school.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Few things get me unstuck better than a long talk with my spouse, who asks the right kind of hard questions. When we don’t have the luxury of a long talk, though, I find it helpful to do something with my hands: make a complicated dinner, or even just do laundry. Is it preposterous to find inspiration in laundry? Solving one problem — the problem that the kids need clean socks — helps make bigger problems seem more manageable.

But that’s not very inspiring-sounding, is it? Obviously another answer would be a list of poets I admire, even if my work doesn’t resemble theirs. Harryette Mullen, Alice Oswald, Gwendolyn Brooks, C. D. Wright. I’ve been getting a lot of poem ideas from Kevin Stroud’s History of English Podcast. My students. Books about raven cognition. Travel planning.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Butter melting in a hot cast-iron pan.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I write a lot of science poems. I’m interested in physics, and animal behavior. If you’re going to write about birds, you need to know something about their musculature and nesting habits and territorial behavior.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I recite Keats to myself when I’m anxious. I studied Italian in college in order to read the Inferno, and finally managed it last year, just 25 years after setting myself the challenge. Virginia Woolf. I’ve read the Anne of Green Gables series an uncountable number of times. I consume big piles of fantasy novels, preferably with cranky female protagonists; I’m a big fan of Naomi Novik. Oliver Sacks. For moral philosophy, Edith Stein, Martin Buber, and the Marx Brothers.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

In Tobago, you can canoe through the nesting grounds of the scarlet ibis—I’ve wanted to do that for years. I have also not hiked enough of the Appalachian Trail. I don’t need to do the whole six month pilgrimage, section hiking will do. And I can’t believe I haven’t made it to the Himalayas—who’s been in charge here?

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Most of my working hours are as a teacher. I could do that without writing, and some years I have. But for an entirely different career: I think I could be very happy as a baker, or an interpreter, or a travel guide.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

This is such an interesting question, and one I have never understood. What is it that compels us to write things down, instead of just thinking them through and moving on? I think it’s that same itchy feeling that something is missing. If I write something down, I have a better chance of seeing the gaps in the sequence, the places I haven’t actually figured out the problem I’m puzzling over. Then the next mystifying question is why, once we’ve written something down, we feel the need to publish it. Shouldn’t it be enough that I’ve solved the problem to my own satisfaction? But no, there the poem is, vibrating on the page and demanding to be looked at, like in Woolf’s Orlando when the manuscript leaps out of the bosom of Orlando’s dress. All I can do is send it on its way and wish it luck.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Last great book: Evie Shockley’s Suddenly We. Not a film but a TV show: we’re watching Adventure Time with the kids and I revel in its cheerful weirdness.

20 - What are you currently working on?

My fall syllabi! But also: I’m writing a sequence of poems that are the answers in an advice column. Not the questions, just the answers. Some familiar people write in — Galileo, maybe a Shakespeare villain or two, fairy tale characters, Gargamel from the Smurfs, I’m not sure yet. I’m open to suggestions.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

70 Canadian Poets, ed. Gary Geddes

My review of 70 Canadian Poets (Oxford, 2014), ed. Gary Geddes, is now online at Cordite Poetry Review.