Fleda Brown’s The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems, was chosen by Ted Kooser for his University of Nebraska poetry series in 2017. She has nine previous collections of poems. Her work has twice appeared in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her memoir, Driving With Dvorak, was published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. She now lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan, and is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington.


I love the daily intimacies in these poems: a person finding a pair of glasses after a mudslide or someone sitting in a hospital waiting room, expecting news. What is the importance, for you, of using intimate detail in poetry?

Well, of course, all sorts of news arrives through the loudspeaker of the news media or Facebook, or Twitter. The specialty of the poem is the sotto voce, what can barely be heard or barely even said. The whisper in the ear. Or, sometimes it can’t be said at all. I doubt that the man who found the glasses could say how he felt, holding them. So the poem looks for ways to get close to what can’t be said. What can stand in for it. Don’t we anchor our yearnings, our inarticulate anguish, in images? In the hospital room, the needle and thread. The other, earlier, details in that poem feel stitched into the fabric of that moment, which ends up being felt as an artful suspension of real life.


There’s another intimacy I admire in these poems, and that is the one between writer and reader. For instance, in “Glasses,” the speaker states “What I imagined, reading this,” referring to a worker picking a pair of glasses out of mudslide sludge. Not only does this phrase create a bridge between images, but it connects writer and reader by inviting whomever might be listening into the speaker's thoughts. Could you talk more about how you encourage this intimacy with the reader in your work? What are some ways writers can develop closeness with readers?

I think there’s always a danger in turning pontifical in poems. At least I am likely to start preaching if I don’t bring myself down to earth by reminding myself, in the poem, that it’s only me here, trying to work through this, trying to say something in the middle of a feeling that really has no words, but I’m slogging away at it. That does, as you say, create a bridge. I like to turn to the reader. In “Stump,” when I write, “Find something else to look at, I’ll bet you’re thinking, /the old man is about worn out, find another poem, / but this is the one I keep writing. . . “ I’ve gotten myself in a dark place and thinking of how to justify it. So I want to talk to the reader about that. It’s a conversation I’m having with her.

Sometimes when I run across parenthetical expressions in other people’s poems, I copy them down to have them available, like: “let the record show,” “I know, I was there,” “that’s it,” “oh, I should mention.” And so on. They break into the poem and actually make a different poem, one that, as you say, feels like a collusion, a vulnerability. Like Whitman when he says, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” The charm—shall I use that word?— of those lines is that he both interrupts himself to acknowledge what the reader must be thinking (Do I contradict myself?) and he makes himself vulnerable by admitting, yes, true, he’s contradicted himself.


Your poem “Suspension” states, “You can sit there and be inside / of art, sort of, nothing falling,” and in this poem is a single moment (or series of moments) taken into account by the writer who has come to a place they want to figure out. What happens in the journey of the poem might seem, as the poem states, “the exaggeration,” but in light of the last line, art is much more than a journey of the imagination. Could you talk more about the poem as a work of art?

Art has a quality of exaggeration, partly because it concentrates the ordinary, so we can see it differently. But when you’re in the middle of ordinary life, when there’s tension and worry and collapse—all utterly human—if you’re able to look closely at what's there, it’s hard to tell “life” from “art.” But then again, you have this poem! Something about it is “not falling.” It is holding up these disparate pieces, all together, in a form. In a poem. You can sit and have your coffee and read this. There is that separation (and suspension) that actually allows for a deeper seeing. I think that’s what I was doing there, but I’m only the writer. Don’t take my word for it. I was sitting on the balcony of our building, feet propped up, listening to the sounds around me. That’s how it started.


I’d like to go back to the vulnerability in poetry that you mentioned earlier. Not only are your poems filled with intimate detail, but they examine the fears we experience as humans. “Ode on Terror” is a wonderful example of this. There’s a word, terror (“Tear and Roar”) that represents everything we can and can’t see. “You can see the teeth, / you can hear the barking dog. You can’t / see the thoughts that caused the killings, the bombings, / flying loose, thumbing against the sky.” This isn’t the only vulnerability in the poem: by the last line, terror itself seems to be vulnerable. I love the movement of this poem from thought to thought, and wondered if you could talk about the genesis of this poem.

I’ve been writing these things I call odes, for no particular reason except that they seem to praise or glorify. They don’t have the classic three-part structure of an ode, though. You ask about the genesis. I think it was way back, after 9/11, when one day I was driving along and thought, what’s to keep the oncoming cars from crossing the yellow line? Only a mutual agreement. It’s law, in its broadest sense. Such a thin line. Then I started thinking of all the other safeties I’ve taken for granted (we all did), until they weren’t there. And cancer? Whoever thought my cells would go haywire? The root fear is fear of dying. I finally had to get to that in a poem about terror.

Actually, as I look closely at this poem I realize I unconsciously did organize into strophe, antistrophe, and epode. The terror, trying to escape the terror, and finally, when the worst happens and there is no Me. Is that so terrible? I write from a Buddhist perspective. Not the death of Me, but the death of the fear of not being. It’s the ego that’s been so fearful. When the ego gives up and falls into the great, grand, mutual sea, then terror will finally have to give up. Again, don’t trust my exegesis. I’m only the writer.


Fleda, thank you so much for talking with me about your poems and your process, which are both inspiring. On that same note, what are your current sources of inspiration?

They’re nearly always the same for me—images, visual triggers, that ignite feelings which often I find are attached to things far-flung from the original image. Then those feelings send up a whole new batch of images. And so on. I usually don’t know what the heck I’m doing. I often feel total despair that anything will arrive. I’ve been writing all these years, and still I begin with the belief that there’s nothing there, that I’ve emptied the bucket. Lately it seems harder to bring up what’s needed, but when I do, it’s better than before, I think. Harder to get to—maybe because it’s more complex (I’ve lived a long time)—but better for it. But I have no initial confidence. I head out across a wilderness.

I’ve written a series of prose poems that are letters to artists about their paintings. I’ve written a series of odes (you have one of them here). The odes started after I read some poems in American Poetry Review by Barbara Hanby that she called odes. I liked the shape of the poems, every other line indented, so I started with that form in mind (unusual for me). No reason except that it gave me something to hang my hat on, so to speak. That’s how the image works for me: something to hang my hat on.

I don’t believe in inspiration. This is not an original thought, of course. You plod along, you fill the white space, you have nothing, then at some point, if you’re lucky, the unconscious finds a way to poke through the barrage of words. There’s one phrase, one sentence, that feels inspired. It didn’t seem to come from anywhere, it’s unparaphraseable, yet feels utterly true. That’s the divine, in the root sense of the word “inspiration”—under the immediate influence of a god.