Morton Marcus Poetry Profile – Splitting the World Open: An Interview with Ellen Bass
By Maggie Paul
Ellen Bass was born in Philadelphia in 1947 and grew up in New Jersey. She received a BA from Goucher College and an MA in creative writing from Boston University, where she studied with Anne Sexton. She later said that Anne Sexton “encouraged me to write more, to expand, to go deeper and wider. She breathed life back into the process. Without her, I might have given up.” She is the author of nine poetry collections, the most recent of which is Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). Her other books include Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), which The New York Times notes “pulses with sex, humor and compassion,” The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), Mules of Love (BOA Editions, 2002), and I’m Not Your Laughing Daughter (University of Massachusetts Press, 1973). She also worked with Florence Howe to edit the feminist poetry anthology No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (Doubleday, 1973). In addition to her poetry, Ellen Bass has written several works of nonfiction, including Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth—and Their Allies (Harper Perennial, 1996), which she cowrote with Kate Kaufman, and The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (Perennial Library, 1988), which she cowrote with Laura Davis and which has been translated into ten languages. Bass was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2017. She is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and two Pushcart Prizes. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University and lives in Santa Cruz, California.
Kinds of Love
Ellen Bass is a poet of relationships. By this I mean relationships in the broadest sense – to people, places, and things. Relationships form the very fabric of our lives, and so when Ellen Bass explores, examines, discovers and re-discovers hers, we can’t help but find a bit of ourselves in them.
“Compassion and connection are her gods,” Dorianne Laux observes. She is a “trustworthy guide,” whose poems “don’t flinch” in the face of life’s “irreconcilable losses,” says Marie Howe. The range of topics addressed in her poems is limitless; just think birth, love, sex, motherhood, environmental degradation, marriage, divorce, aging, death. Mary Oliver’s directive to “pay attention/be astonished/write about it” cannot help but echo in our ears when we consider the work of Ellen Bass.
She is also a poet of deep generosity. Anyone who has participated in her Living Room Craft Talks series, or has studied with her at Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program, attended workshops at Esalen in California’s Big Sur, or even bumped into her on her frequent walks by the sea in Santa Cruz, will attest to the bottomless well of camaraderie and encouragement she exudes, particularly when it comes to the art of the poem. And this excitement is contagious, even while she makes clear that the labor of writing is demanding, requires one’s full attention, and is not only an act of composition but a way of being in the world. She insists that we cannot fall asleep to the details, we must keep our ears tuned to the music and unwelcome noise of our world. Romance, tragedy, elation and suffering are all part of the whole cloth of our lives; poetry in the hands of this writer is not everything but the kitchen sink; it is the kitchen sink.
As a teacher and a poet, Bass is expansive in her approach, always learning, defining, re-defining, and gleaning inspiration from other poets. In this she resembles the jazz greats – those elders who passionately pass on their knowledge of jazz in an intellectual engagement with the younger generation. It is the way she helps keep the vital art of poetry alive that makes her such a bright beacon in the field.
In her Living Room Craft Series, (emphasis on living) Bass shares a wealth of friends in the world of poetry by inviting them to speak for a portion of each class. We meet Billy Collins, Patricia Smith, Maya Popova, Jane Hirschfield, Carolyn Forche – the list goes on. Six renowned contemporary poets appear per series, each of whom we would otherwise have to travel far and wide to see in person. A veteran of the AWP, I can attest that even in person, one may miss the opportunity to ask specific craft questions, or hear about poets’ practical and literary challenges in the fast-paced, technologically driven 21st century. Wealth, indeed!
Maggie Paul: In a 1960s tribute poem to the German sculptor Kathe Kollwitz, feminist poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” Over the past several decades, Ellen Bass’s poetry has been doing just that: splitting the world open.
Ellen Bass: I’m struck by the aptness that you begin talking about my poetry with these words from Muriel Rukeyser. When I first moved to Boulder Creek in the Santa Cruz Mountains, I made up fliers for a women’s writing workshop. This was in 1974 and we didn’t have computers or the internet, so I made up fliers, and this is the passage I wrote on them. It was on every flier and brochure for the next several decades. “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” And that’s very much what happened in those workshops. We created the space for women to write what had never—or almost never—been written. Including an outpouring of painful revelations about child sexual abuse, something I, naively, had never known about. I was shocked and horrified and also deeply impressed by the strength and beauty these women had maintained after such devastation, which led to my work with survivors of child sexual abuse.
One could argue that all of your poems are, on some level, love poems. Love of the world, of the seemingly random yet undeniably connected details of daily life; love of our human flaws; love of the places where one lives, struggles, then leaves behind; love of strangers walking by; love of sex and sensuality, and finally, love and compassion for all we inherit as part and parcel of arriving on this earth, no guidebook in hand, trying to navigate our way alone or in the company of others.
In Jane Hirshfield’s book of essays, Ten Windows: How Poems Transform the World, she comments on the power of art in general, and poetry in particular, to affect real change: “…words are weightless as illegible dust…Yet what is in them enters a person and becomes, as we say, ‘large as life,’ and life’s waistband suddenly needs letting out. Inclusion of the impossible, the unsayable, and paradox is some part of how the enlargement art brings us is made.” Ellen Bass’s poems address so many different kinds of love, that they expand the parameters of what love is.
MP: Some of your love poems are directives – suggestions for how to carry on in an imperfect world. For example, “The Thing Is,”urges us “to love life, to love it even/when you have no stomach for it/and everything you’ve held dear/crumbles like burnt paper in your hands.” Wouldn’t it be great if we had a guidebook for how to live? This is a question commonly blurted out by parents who are expected to know how to handle problems even if they are outside of their own experience.
The poem “How to Apologize” begins by giving us a few practical “how to’s,” on the road of love: like cooking a fish to serve to a lover, or walking or taking a train” to “let yourself/be soothed by the rocking/ on the rails.” The narrator has secured our trust in her recommendations. So much so, that the line “Each night/we dream thirty-six billion dreams” appears, we half-believe it. We’re hooked, pardon the pun, and easily convinced that “In one night/we could dream back everything lost.” Don’t we all wish we could, from time to time, do it over again, make better choices next time, correct our mistakes?
The poem ends ambiguously; we don’t know if the narrator is forgiven, after all.
“Wilderness” from the collection Indigo is another example of a poem that instructs for the sake of love. It establishes a tone of urgency as the narrator wants to be ever “rushing toward” her lover, even at death’s door: “Break me like bread. Take me/apart. Strip each rib down to light./Pour me out like a bucket of milk…But don’t let me go/until my body is a wilderness.”
One of the distinctive characteristics of your poems is how they contain so many moments of surprise and delight. How do you come upon new stances, new ways of expressing the desperation and elation of love, in the form of a poem?
EB: Oh that’s the big question for sure! I love John Ashbery’s poem, “Late Echo,” that begins:
Alone with our madness and favorite flower
We see that there really is nothing left to write about.
Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things
In the same way, repeating the same things over and over
For love to continue and be gradually different.People sometimes ask me if writing has gotten easier over time, but in some ways, for me, it’s gotten harder precisely because I’m compelled to write about “the same old things/In the same way.” How to do that and yet, as Ezra Pound admonished, “make it new?” The saving grace is that I and the world are also continually changing so the angle of reflection is never exactly the same.
MP: In “Can’t Get Over Her,” you address the let-down of romantic love. When your nephew’s been “dumped,” the narrator wonders whether or not he should be told the truth about love:
That he'll never get over her.
Love is rock in the surf off the Pacific.
Life batters it. No matter how small it gets
it will always be there - grain of sand
chafing the heart.”Marriage, both heterosexual and lesbian types of marriage, are recurring subjects. Some poems attest to the beauty and challenges of both, though your marriage to Janet and the poems that take a microscopic look at the nature of that union supersede the satisfaction of the marriage to your husband.
The poems speak about former relationships with tenderness as well as criticism. “Pay for It,” from Mules of Love, begins with an epigraph by Robert Bly: “Choose what you want and then pay for it.” This poem addresses the responsibility of choice, and ends with a perfect three lines: …I cannot/for the life of me, remember/why I left.” It reminds me of what Billy Collins says about endings – how they should be both surprising yet seem inevitable.
Do you think the nature of the marriages touched upon in this poem differs in ways beyond gender? Can you say how?
EB: I’ve been married twice and my first marriage—to a man–was a disaster, but not because he was a man. Gender doesn’t seem to play a big role in my erotic life.
Although a poet’s biography isn’t necessary in reading a poem, I’ll just say that the man I am dreaming about in “Pay for It” isn’t my husband. I wouldn’t be writing a poem like that for him.
Fortunately for me, my second marriage to Janet is different from the first in almost every way. After more than forty years together, our love, passion, understanding and support for each other continue to grow.
MP: “The Sad Truth” begins with “My lover is a woman. I cherish/her sex…” and surprises us further with her transparency when she confesses “Yet sometimes, I do miss a penis..” The poem resolves in being able to hold both truths: “I don’t want another lover, but/sometimes I recall it. That longing/grabs me by the waist, dips me back,/sweeps my hair across the polished floor.” This seems a courageous act of self-revelation. Does it free you, personally and poetically, to write with such total honesty about what others might keep secret, even from themselves?
EB: Yes. For sure. That’s where the power is. And although it may seem courageous, really the things I reveal aren’t that unusual. I think that most people experience desire in a multitude of ways. We don’t necessarily talk about those feelings in casual conversation, but I doubt anyone reading that poem is shocked. I don’t find it hard to write about myself with transparency, but when there are other people involved, that’s where it’s sometimes difficult to find a way in without trespassing.
MP: Loving and honoring the beauty and mystery of the female body is an important aspect of your work. “Mammogram Callback with Ultrasound” seems a foreboding title, but the poem takes us in a different direction – from fear to exuberance:. “… never has there been a joy like this/as I lie in the pale green cool of radiology.” The narrator is found to be healthy, in spite of “the lineage of death having swerved all around” her. She is ecstatic at being given a clean bill of health. She reflects upon her one “infinitesimal life,” the life she loves, and her relief is palpable.
Why do you think we must almost lose something before we value you it fully? (One can’t help but think of Joni Mitchell’s line from Big Yellow Taxi: “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.”)
EB: It’s easy to take many things for granted. It’s almost impossible not to. But truly, every day we wake up is a day that might not have been ours. Every breath. Any of us could die at any moment. The more we can be aware of that, the more precious everything is. It’s so easy to lose awareness. I didn’t sleep much last night. I’ve just returned from a lovely vacation and was stung by a jellyfish and had an allergic reaction so I’m itchy, sore, and on antihistamines which make me feel crummy. But hey, I’m alive and I’m lucky to have these drugs, and Janet is in the kitchen making stuffed peppers and a plum galette and a friend is coming for dinner. And a day will come when I’ll be dead. At 77 I’m acutely aware of this and the only antidote to death, as far as I can figure out, is to live with as much attention and appreciation as I can.
MP: The poem “Because” describes the act of giving birth to your daughter in the clearest and most effective use of couplets. – a narrative I suspect played over and over in your memory, until you located its perfect telling in this poem. The anaphora “Because” provides such an elegant structure with which to render the complexity of facts and feelings involved in the birthing experience. The reason for leaving your husband, “who didn’t believe in hospitals,” sleeps beneath the surface of the narrative. There’s a cool remove yet tenderness that quietly touches upon these facts: “Because my husband slept//beside me and I let him sleep./Because it would be years before I left him.” The woman delivers the child and accommodates the man, but then the old story gets turned on its head in those four words: “before I left him.”
Was this a poem you lived with, in different versions and revised over time, an inspired gift that tumbled out, or something else?
EB: Pema Chodron, the Buddhist nun, was asked whether enlightenment comes slowly over time or suddenly, and she said that in her experience, sudden is the result of slowly over time. It’s the same with some of my poems and surely with this one. I’ve been trying, off and on, to write about giving birth for forty years and all those poems failed until, eventually, I had the distance and perspective and skill. I needed the anaphora of “Because” to avoid the poem sounding like “my sad birth story.” It also kept me anxious through the writing because because has to eventually be answered: because this, then that. And what was the that going to be? But that kind of anxiety is functional since genuine discovery needs to be at the heart of every poem.
MP: A daughter’s love for her parents is another form of love your poems describe. The endearing, infuriating, complex aspects of the relationship between a daughter and her parents seeps through multiple poems. Two favorites from Indigo are “Failure” and “Pearls.” As a young, confident teen, one whom your mother claimed was “in such a hurry to grow up,” you take on the task of feeding your father who has just returned home from the hospital: “It didn’t seem like it would be too hard/to feed my father. I can do it/I assured my mother.” But he can’t open his lips, the oatmeal dribbles down his chin. “My father,/I left him there. This was my first/entrance into the land of failure/a country I would visit so often/it would begin to feel like home.”
Could you talk about how you manage what I’ll call a sense of aesthetic restraint when it comes to poems that are clearly autobiographical? What is the effect of a narrator’s transparency upon the reader? Would you say the poem, as artifice, is best at directly getting to the core of a matter indirectly?
EB: As I tell my students, no one is interested in your life. No one reads my poems because they want to find out more about me. We read poems to enrich and enlarge ourselves and our understanding of the world we live in. But many writers before me have expressed the idea that the more personal we are, the more universal the poem is.
As the great novelist Doris Lessing said, “… the most curious thing is that the very passages that once caused me the most anxiety, the moments when I thought, no, I cannot put that on paper–are now the passages I’m proud of. That comfort me most out of all I’ve written. Because through letters and readers I discovered these were the moments when I spoke for other people. So paradoxical. Because at the time they seemed so hopelessly private…”
But of course that private writing has to be shaped. No one wants to wade through my journals. Not even me!
MP: “Pearls,” which begins so innocently and honestly, pulls us in the way a private conversation does, sharing what might be secrets that were kept inside until – the writing of the poem, the relaying of experience to one attentive, non-judgmental listener. Another poem of apology, “Pearls” is a list poem that reveals “failures” of the past that are now looked at straight on, and eventually address a “you.” It had me from the first stanza: “I’m sorry I didn’t buy my father the cashmere sweater with suede trim/that summer/I went to Europe./And I’m sorry I didn’t stay long with my mother after/he died.” As is said, it’s not what we do that we regret at life’s conclusion, it’s what we didn’t do. And who doesn’t regret the things they could have done differently, better? The way the poem ends is haunting: “Forgive me, the sun will burn out./I can’t hear your heart beating in the silence between us.” Again, we never know whether or not there is forgiveness, or if the distance between speaker and listener has grown too far.
Ending a poem in ambiguity and sometimes with a rhetorical question could be a strategy, but since the act of writing is a journey of discovery, and the adage “no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” echoes in my ears, I want to know, what is your method (or lack thereof) of preserving a sense of mystery at the endings of poems.
EB: It’s not so much preserving the mystery, but being open to the discovery. If you already know everything that’s in your poem, you’re still on the diving board, you haven’t jumped off. So we’re always trying to go deeper and further to find out something we didn’t know before we sat down to write the poem.
And Vivian Gornick, in her excellent book, The Situation and the Story, (the one book I think is most important for those of you writing memoirs and personal essays), puts it succinctly:
“Our job is not to answer the questions, but to deepen them.”
As for the openness of the ending, I appreciate poems that don’t get tied up with a bow. Most of life is open ended, unresolved, and sometimes unresolvable. So many writers have talked about this. Stanley Kunitz said, “To put a logical cap on a poem is to suffocate its original impulse. …. the kind of poetic closure that interests me bleeds out of its ending into the whole universe of feeling and thought. I like an ending that’s both a door and a window.” And Marvin Bell said, “The poem ends, but the poetry continues.” I could go on!
MP: One of the endearing things about your work is how the narrator is often complicit in her own struggles or pain. The humility and honesty your poems deliver creates an intimate space between the poem and the reader, which is really one of the unique gifts of poetry.
For example, I’m thinking of the poem “As Long as She Likes.” In this poem the narrator is headed to the cemetery where her mother is being buried. The mother’s voice echoes in her head: “God only gives you strength for one day at a time,/How many times did I hear her say this?/” The character of the hard-working liquor store owner/mother shines through as the narrator recounts poignant observations of those few moments when her mother was actually able to rest due to the Blue Laws in New Jersey prohibiting sales of alcohol on Sundays. “I’ve never returned to my mother’s grave,” she confesses, “But I see her every day.” That is an honest sharing of a fact between the poem and its reader which makes us trust the narrator utterly.
Was your mother aware of your identity as a poet? Were you able to share some of your work with her?
EB: Yes, my mother was proud of me as a poet. But I regret that she didn’t get to see most of the poems I’ve written about her. Some I wrote when she was dying and I was ambivalent about sharing those with her since they were so directly about her death, and then I’ve written quite a few about her since her death. I love writing about her because it makes me feel close to her again, brings her to life again for me. But it’s always bittersweet because I just wish I could call her up and read her the poem. She could come back to life just for a few minutes and then be dead again after that, but I’d love to just be able to read her the poems.
MP: “During the Pandemic I Listen to the July 26, 1965, Juan-les-Pins Recording of A Love Supreme” describes the comforting, visceral and ultimately spiritual effect of John Coltrane’s composition on the narrator whose daughter has been sick with Covid for seven weeks. The power of the song transports the narrator from the angst of her daughter’s possibly life-threatening illness to the “breath of his instrument/that refuses nothing/lavishing the grass, gutters, and trees,/concrete, cars, the gopher pulling down the lettuces.” The things of this world co-exist inside the breath – the very element that the virus threatens to destroy – and in a philosophical gesture, transcend the concrete to lead to a bigger question:
“And isn’t that god? Isn’t that it?
This shivering? This fall to my knees?
Gods do walk among us.
But humans are, after all, a broken promise. Titles can do a lot of work for a poem, and longer titles seem to appear more often of late. Has our regard for the role of poem titles changed over time?
EB: I love those Chinese poems with long, long titles. And I think of Billy Collins’ wonderful poem, “Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of their Titles.” And in my poem, the title gave me a chance to provide the context without cluttering up the poem. Titles can come in very handy that way.
MP: Also, can you talk about your choice of lower case in reference to “god” in this instance vs. how “God” is capitalized in “If There Is No God.” Were you brought up in a particular religion? Do your early experiences with that belief system affect your poems?
EB: I’m Jewish and have a strong cultural identity as a Jew. We celebrated Passover and Chanukah and went to services at Yom Kippur, but we weren’t observant Jews. My mother believed in God and talked to him, prayed in her own way. My father was an atheist. I was very close to my mother’s mother and she kept kosher. They all spoke Yiddish. But I don’t believe in a personified god. (I notice that I capitalize God here when I talk about my mother’s belief, but not when I talk about mine). For a long time I felt that I couldn’t put “god” in my poems because I didn’t believe in god, but then I realized that god was a cultural concept as well as a religious one and that I was cutting myself off from some language that could do work in my poems. The same with the word soul. So now I don’t restrict myself.
MP: In the opening section to the collection, Mules of Love, “If There Is No God,” imagines the implications of what the world would be in an absence of a divine being or essence at work behind all things. The title does double duty as it’s also the first line, setting up an If/Then structure:
“If There Is No God”
Then there’s no one/
to love us indiscriminately,
to twirl our planet like a globe…”
The loneliness of these first two lines is arresting. Then, details of natural phenomena on a microscopic level pour forth- xylem, phloem, mitochondria, the poly-peptide chain of spider silk – calling our attention to the wonder of the most minute aspects of an interconnected planet functioning in large ways and small – seemingly of its own accord. “The people of whole continents collapsing,” the poem ventures: viruses, T-cells, and radioactive fallout – are each woven into a stanza of alliterative beauty and precision.Without didacticism, the poem brings the reader to her knees by appealing to our senses with specifics, the real stuff of the planet, leaving the poem’s embedded question – Is there a God? – up to us.
I think of Patti-Ann Rogers, and the comment made by Peter Stitt in a review of Rogers’ first book: “Every poem manages somehow to present accurate knowledge of the physical universe, often in a multifaceted plethora of detail.” Poet and scientist Maya Popova, whom you featured in the 6th Series to discuss the relationship between Science and Poetry, discussed how the union of science and poetry was much more apparent in 19th century literature, and how we are now just reclaiming it.
You have emphasized the importance of being accurate when describing natural phenomena, animal characteristics and behaviors, etc. I remember on the Science and Poetry session with Maya Popova an anecdote about a lizard or small creature whose tongue you incorrectly described – and you were gently “called out” on this..:-)
Is research an integral part of your practice, or does the need for research typically arise out of an image you want to use about which you feel you do not have enough knowledge? Does research ever get in the way of the initial impetus of composing the poem, take you down a rabbit hole that then breaks up your momentum? Or do you hold off – make a note to look into the image/topic at a later time to keep your juices flowing toward the completion of a draft?
EB: I love research. I just love it. It does take me down rabbit holes and I can spend hours finding out about something that doesn’t even wind up in the finished poem, but I never regret that time. I think when I’m researching, my unconscious is working away on the poem. I don’t feel like it ever gets in the way. It sometimes leads me where I didn’t expect to go and that’s a good thing. I think all of us are on a bell curve of the way our minds work—from logical to wild. My mind is a little too far on the logical side for a poet, so I’m always looking for ways to invite in the wild. Sometimes that happens in the process of research.
The anecdote you remember happened early on in my relationship with my wife. I was writing about a snail and I said it chewed. She told me that snails don’t chew, they scrape. Oh! She’s an entomologist and I love all that she teaches me. When I was young I wasn’t interested in science. I only wanted to read novels and poetry. But now science seems the most interesting thing to me. It’s the world we live in!
MP: Mules of Love opens with the poem, “Everything on the Menu.” I love the way this poem asserts how hungry readers are for details, the actual stuff of ordinary life and therefore, how hungry we all are, for life itself:
In a poem it doesn't matter
if the house is dirty. Dust
that claims the photographs like a smothering
love. Sand spilled from a boy's sneaker,
the faceted grains scattered on the emerald rug
like the stars and planets of a tiny
solar system. Monopoly butted up again Dostoyevksy.“Monopoly butted up against Dostoyevsky” has got to be one of my favorite lines!
Two poems in Indigo draw upon your Jewish heritage: “Pines at Ponary” and “Photograph: Jews Probably Arriving to the Lodz Ghetto circa 1941-1942.” Both poems are rife with details of the senses: sight, sound, scent, and elements of surprise (translation – horror). For example, you describe the way the history of Nazi Germany lives on in the haunting sound of the train at the “Pines at Ponary”:
And before I have gone
ten feet into the forest, I hear the sound.
Of course, there would be a train.
But I hadn't expected it still to run
like this, people getting off and one with their packages.
I hadn't thought of the scent of resin spilling
into the cold afternoon. “Photograph: Jews Probably Arriving to the Lodz Ghetto circa 1941-1942” is a haunting poem in concise couplets, rich with innocent questions and stark images. The images tell the story more effectively than any commentary from a narrator could. The over-arching topic of the annihilation of the Jews in Nazi Germany is quickly brought into the realm of the personal when the narrator remarks how like her mother the woman in the photograph appears: “…in a dark coat/her hair parted on the side.” And the poem’s seemingly simple questions, innocently posed, stun us into the personal again: “What are the tight knots/of people saying to one another?…And the woman,/who could be but is not//my mother/still carries her canvas bag//and looking closer,/what might be a small purse.”
The poem renders the chaotic, disturbing scene of this photograph into an ordered narrative which ends on the very specific image of that one woman who could have been th narrator’s mother, carrying a small purse. This is yet another example of an unexpected, yet utterly inevitable ending. It really takes a reader’s breath away.
Did this ending surprise you? Was this photograph in your “arsenal” of materials to write from/about for a long time? Can you talk about the wide-angled approach to a poem which then narrows into the specific? Can you speak about how one can write about such a large historical subject using very specific details, how the microscoping in of the scene speaks to the whole, wide-range situation?
EB: I was asked to participate in a project called New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust in which writers were asked to respond to images from the Holocaust. I agreed with some trepidation because I can’t usually write what I’m asked to write. I wish I could! But I took a chance and said yes, hoping I’d be able to create a poem. We were each assigned an image and when I saw mine, I felt some relief. I felt there would be an opening there. I stared at the photograph a lot and what came to me were questions. The horses seemed so unexpected in the photo and that gave me an entrance. Strangely, I wrote the poem in Kauai. I was there for a writer’s conference and spent a few extra days there in a little apartment. I think being away from home and with a lot of space, as well as so much natural beauty, allowed me to make this voyage into the photograph. It’s hard to write about huge subjects, but the photo was so real and so specific that I could find a path into it.
Juxtaposition
MP: So, let’s talk about your fascination with laundry…! It’s so satisfying that a common chore that traditionally has fallen into the territory of women is used as a vehicle to portray some of life’s most important truths.
The short poem “Laundry” in Mules of Love sheds light on the way a mother’s, or any parent’s mind works. It concisely exposes how the smallest detail – “…two wet footprints/on the bathmat” can resound with ghostly significance when one imagines “if anything/ ever happened” to their child. The nature of time – a before and after perspective – is pivotal and also appears in your new poem “Laundry,” published by the New Yorker in April. The recent poem is so expansive! It moves between observation, parental reflection, cosmological connection, ecological concern, and a reverence for women.
Do you use, at least in early drafts, free association? Can you talk about the skill and agility required for a poem to cover so much terrain without being cluttered or without losing its reader?
EB: I love laundry. It runs in my maternal line. My mother loved laundry and so does my daughter. When my parents went on vacation, my father used to say that the only thing that would have made my mother happier was if she could have brought her washing machine!
Writing the poem “Laundry” was a joy. My granddaughter, who wasn’t quite two years old, was with me when I was stripping sheets off a bed and she took it upon herself to drag them one by one to the washing machine and got to work stuffing them in. I was taken by her focus and intensity, how she was figuring out how to pass such a big swatch of cloth from one hand to another and into the machine. She was into it!
The poem does cover a lot of ground. Children heighten our sense of the precariousness of life, the danger in the world. I experienced that when my own children were born and now, with this baby I’m back in it. We were hit with both wildfires and flooding, so I was feeling the impact of the climate crisis very personally. And the day before I wrote the poem, I’d read about the galaxy LEDA 2046648 and seen the image of it in the Times, so that was on my mind as well. Juxtaposition reflects the complexity of our actual lives where many things are going on at the same time. And by putting things side-by-side without explanation, there’s room for the reader to enter the poem, to engage and participate in making meaning. Of course the things need enough connection so they don’t seem random or senseless or, as you say, clutter.
My early drafts are often messy and I encourage my students to allow themselves to be messy too. Eventually, of course, everything has to earn its keep, but if we don’t allow our minds to make associations freely, we censor too early and too much.
Many artists have written about the power and opportunities of juxtaposition. I especially love this from Pablo Picasso: “What a sad fate for a painter who loves blondes, but who refrains from putting them in his picture because they don’t go with the basket of fruit! What misery for a painter who hates apples to be obliged to use them all the time because they go with the cloth! I put everything I love in my pictures. So much the worse for the things, they have only to arrange themselves with one another.”
And this from Jane Hirshfield from her book Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World: “Cognitive and creative discoveries are made in much the same way as much of biological life is: by acts of generative recombination. Disparate elements are brought together to see if they might make a viable new whole… Creative epiphany is much the same: a knowledge won against the patterns of predictable thought, feeling, or phrase.
“Surprise, then, is epiphany’s first flavor. It is the emotion by which we register shifted knowledge, in a poem, in a life.”
The Importance of Place
MP: There’s a way in which poems rooted in specific places seem to elevate their significance, mythologize them even. When did you move from New Jersey to CA? What was the impetus for this move? How has making Santa Cruz your home shaped your life and your art?
Adrienne Rich famously moved from New York to Santa Cruz on the recommendation of her physicians who prescribed a warmer climate for her arthritis. From the poem “An Atlas of a Difficult World,” she describes Santa Cruz:
Within two miles of the Pacific rounding
this long bay, sheening the light for miles
inland, floating its fog through redwood rifts and over
strawberry and artichoke fields, its bottomless mind
returning always to the same rocks, the same cliffs, with
ever-changing words, always the same language
—this is where I live now. If you had known me
once, you'd still know me now though in a different
light and life. This is no place you ever knew me.Your poem, “Birdsong from My Patio” from The Human Line (and which appeared in the anthology, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed edited by former poet laureate Robert Hass in 2010), situates us in a place of beauty, hearing the trill of birdsong. It begins as a pastoral (even the title seduces us into a natural paradise) and just as we are being lulled into harmony by the birds, the poem intersperses the reality of pesticides, contamination, and acid rain into its description. Beauty is juxtaposed with the reality of ecological ruin:“Everything is drenched with loss.”
The juxtaposition of natural beauty with the human interference of industrial chemicals keeps the poem grounded, and also allows us to feel the loss: “With all that’s been ruined/these songs impale the air/with their sharp, insistent needles.”
Galway Kinnell once said that poetry, to him, is a way of saying “what it’s like be alive in this place, at this time.” Does writing about the actuality of the environment in all its beauty and flaws help you to manage the loss?
EB: This is a tough question. I’m not sure anything quite helps me to manage the loss. But it does give me a way to face reality and to grapple with it. And I also have to believe that art is meaningful. That it can do actual work in the world. One of my poems, “The Big Picture,” is included in an excellent book, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. Along with essays by women at the forefront of the climate movement, the editors chose to include poems because they believed it was essential for us to connect thought and feeling.
On Teaching
MP: Your website and mailing list is like a Grand Central Station for poets; it includes calls for submission, workshop announcements, and “good news” from former students whose work has been published. It’s a community. Of course we would be remiss if we were not to mention the consistent and reliable assistance of Jen ….. How did did she become your assistant?
EB: Jen Petras, my assistant, is a wonder. And a gift. My mentor, Florence Howe, gave her to me! Florence was the co-founder of The Feminist Press, the longest running women’s press in the world and is known as “the mother of Women’s Studies.” I had the great good fortune to have her as my teacher in college and she generously invited me to co-edit the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women, that we published in 1973. We remained very close until her death in 2020. But before that, I was visiting her in New York where she lived and bemoaning that I needed an assistant and she suggested Jen. Jen had worked at the Press and, after Florence retired, had continued to help her with her blog and other work. She invited Jen over for bagels and lox and I had a computer glitch that Jen immediately fixed. She just started tapping keys and got into the back of the laptop, which I don’t understand at all, and presto! It turned out that was just the first of her skills. She’s tech savy in all ways, smart, a good writer, terrific with people, hard-working, enthusiastic, usually has better judgment than me and is just an all-around pleasure to partner with. I couldn’t do what I do without her.
MP: Your online teaching series, aptly called “Living Room Crafts Talks,” provides a wide array of accomplished poets (I count 24!) each sharing their expertise on craft of poetry. This is the best use of zoom I’ve ever seen! One word to describe this unique series is inclusiveness: the invitation to engage with this series is open to both beginning and experienced writers – including those writing fiction and non-fiction. The topics are wide-reaching. From your studio in Santa Cruz and into our living rooms, we sit in on live conversations with accomplished poets who discuss their work, and get into the nitty-gritty details of their own practice. A partial list of guest poets includes: Marie Howe, Billy Collins, Carolyn Forche, Maya Popova, Jane Hirshfield, Arthur Sze, Diane Seuss, Ada Limón, Chris Abani, Donika Kelly, Naomi Shihab Nye, and the list goes on.
How did this series come about? I seem to recall it started during the pandemic, when writers, musicians, artists and teachers were turning to zoom to continue to practice their craft and share it publicly.
EB: Yes, I began this teaching near the start of the pandemic. It was all my wife’s idea! We were taking a walk—one of the few things we felt safe enough to do—and she said she thought I should offer craft talks online. She said that there weren’t many places where poets could seriously study the craft if they weren’t in an MFA program and that this would be a real service. I love teaching and giving talks in person, but I told her I couldn’t—and didn’t want to–do something that felt “produced” like a TED talk. She said, no, it didn’t have to be like that. I could just talk to writers the way I did in our living room (I’d taught classes in our living room for decades) and I should call it Living Room Craft Talks. Oh, I said, I could do that. And on that walk we made the plan—how many sessions, how long they’d be, the whole thing. So she had the idea and I did all the work!
MP: What has been your favorite aspect of engaging with poets and writing students online? Will you continue or are you planning to take a hiatus?
EB: There are so many things I’ve loved about offering these talks. I love looking closely at poems I admire, taking them apart and discovering how they work. I love all the research—reading what others have said about the poems and about various aspects of the craft and the challenge of taking weeks and months of research and distilling it into two or two and a half hours. I also like the challenge of talking to a very diverse group of writers—from beginners to those with published books and MFAs. I teach to the highest denominator and one of my super powers is being able to talk about complex things in clear and simple ways. I also find it gratifying that because this is online and a webinar, I can offer scholarships to people who couldn’t attend otherwise. And also people who can’t travel because of other commitments or disabilities can attend. People attend from all over the world. The talks are recorded so it doesn’t matter what time zone they live in, though sometimes folks will attend live even if it’s in the middle of their night. I do an immense amount of preparation for each talk—it takes me the better part of a year to prepare for six sessions—but they’re also casual—living room!—so if my chickens are clucking in the background, that’s what you hear. And of course the poets who visit and generously share their poems and their craft are absolutely wonderful.
MP: In 2013 you founded a highly-successful poetry program in the Salinas Valley State Prison and Santa Cruz County Jails. The poets who teach in this program attest to the value of these workshops for inmates and for all involved. To get a sense of this, your startling poem: “Bringing Flowers to Salinas Valley State Prison,” portrays the unspeakable gratitude of the inmates. The kind gesture of bringing small paper cups of flowers to the workshop causes profound reactions: “This is the first flower I’ve smelled in twenty years,” comments one man; “I’ll have such a short time with these” mutters another. As the workshop ends and the men are expected to leave the flowers behind– a “Mr. S,” refused, demanding “a right to his rituals,” as a Native American, to take the sacred plant back to his cell. The most dramatic and unforgettable moment of the poem follows: “He raised his cup and drank the water the flowers were drinking,” and proceeded to “bite the heads off the Peruvian lilies…swallowing/the silvery filaments, their dark/ pollen-laden anthers, his mouth frothing with blossoms.” So much is at stake in this poem, so much is stake in these lives.
How did the idea for this program come about, and are these types of programs spreading in other locations?
EB: Many of the paths my work takes aren’t the result of my own intentions, but rather happen because someone asks something of me and I say yes. And that’s how this came about. Ben Bloch, a poet and prison psychologist at Salinas Valley State Prison, a maximum security prison, called me one day and invited me to start a poetry workshop there. I’d always been interested in doing that, but I don’t think I would have taken the initiative if he hadn’t called. I said yes right away and the experience was deeply gratifying. I’d expected the men to be mainly interested in writing their own poems, but I was surprised that they were equally passionate about reading and discussing poems that I brought in.
Usually when I teach a class, I’ll read a poem, talk a little about it, and then invite the group to reflect on the poem. But at the first class, I never got a chance to talk about the poem before the men jumped in and started pointing out what they admired. One pointed out the metaphors and another said, yes, but look at that ending! They were so excited that two men got into an argument about whether a pronoun referred to the speaker or his son. I had to gently intervene and say that many interpretations of a poem are valid. But wow, they were arguing about syntax in the first half hour!
Because of my schedule I only taught there for a short time, but I’m a Tom Sawyer type and good at getting others involved in painting the fence, so some dedicated poets and teachers from the area volunteered and have kept the program going.
When I was Santa Cruz Poet Laureate, I also co-founded, with Nancy Miller Gomez, poetry workshops in the Santa Cruz jails. Again, I only taught in the program briefly, but others stepped in and we now have eight on-going weekly workshops in the county jails.
I’m aware of many programs throughout the country that offer poetry workshops in the prisons and jails. If anyone wants to get involved, it’s possible there’s a program in their area or they could start one. There’s a certain amount of bureaucracy to make your way through, but it’s not that arduous in most places and certainly worth it.
MP: You’ve been teaching in the highly-regarded low-residency MFA Program at Pacific University in Oregon since 2007. Aside from its excellent faculty which includes Dorianne Laux, Joe Millar, Chris Abani, Kwame Dawes, Danusha Lameris, Frank Gaspar and others, what are some of the distinctive elements of this program compared with other low-residency programs?
EB: Yes, we have an amazing poetry faculty! We’re also known for our combination of rigor and a supportive community. We believe in being collaborative, rather than competitive. We believe that we’re in a grand conversation and we each have a part to contribute. The faculty doesn’t stay aloof from the students. At our residencies we eat together, we take walks together, share a coffee or a glass of wine. I’ve remained close with a number of my students after graduation. One is now living in the Santa Cruz mountains and texting me with images from her forthcoming book as we speak. One spends Thanksgiving at my house every year and has become part of the family. One became a dear friend with whom I’ve co-taught workshops. And that doesn’t even count the students who I already knew well before they entered the program! I know that other faculty have also formed deep bonds with students that have continued even after their time in the program has ended. We’ve chosen this ethos of respect and mutual support consciously. It was one of the cornerstones when the program was founded and we continue to uphold it. I haven’t taught in other low-res programs, but from what I hear from those who have taught and been students there (some have transferred into Pacific), our community is special.
MP: You are the honorary guest for the 15th Annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading this year, which takes place November 7, 2024 at the Merrill Cultural Center on the University of CA-Santa Cruz campus.
Can you share your experience Morton Marcus, renowned Santa Cruz poet, Cabrillo College instructor, and film devotee? Did his work and presence on the poetry scene influence you as a younger poet? How might you characterize his poems, and his affect on the literary community?
EB: I met Morton Marcus in October of 1974. I’d just moved to Boulder Creek in the Santa Cruz mountains and was going to be reading poems at an event in town. When Mort introduced me, he told us that Anne Sexton had just died and said the baton was being passed to me. I had been Anne’s student in Boston University’s MA program in Creative Writing a few years before and was deeply sad to hear that she’d ended her life. I was also stunned by the idea that someone thought I might carry her baton—or even a little chip of it. But Mort was generous that way, lifting up poets and poetry. I don’t think there were any poets in the area who didn’t receive, in one way or another, support and encouragement from Mort.
Mort’s own poetry reflects his generosity of spirit, his open-hearted intelligence, his close attention and curiosity. His poems are finely wrought, imaginative, and addictive. You read one and just want to read the next. Here is one of his prose poems that I particularly love and think of often:
Blinking
You’ve got to love life so much that you don’t want to miss a moment of it, and pay such close attention to whatever you’re doing that each time you blink you can hear your eyelashes applauding what you’ve just seen.
In each eye there are more than eighty eyelashes, forty above and forty below, like forty pairs of arms working, eighty pairs in both eyes, a whole audience clapping so loud you can hardly bear to listen.
One hundred sixty hands batter each other every time you blink. “Bravo!” they call, “Encore! Encore!”
Paralyzed in a hospital bed, or watching the cold rain from under a bridge—remember this.
-- Morton Marcus, from Moments Without Names: New & Selected Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2002)The 15th Annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading will feature Ellen Bass at 6pm on November 7th, 2024 at the UC Santa Cruz Merrill Cultural Center. Learn more and register here.