“Anna Interprets” is a brilliant poem that occupies both an erotic and terrifying space. How do you create a space in your poem to be multiple worlds for your readers?

 

Thank you for the compliment! “Erotic” and “terrifying” are certainly appropriate words to describe the poem, although I’m pretty sure that, while I was writing it, I didn’t deliberately set out to “create a space to be multiple worlds” for my readers. When I begin a poem, I’m usually groping through fog, not quite knowing where I’m headed. As I recall, “Anna Interprets” was no exception. It went through about 12 different versions, and the main image for about six of those versions was food! But once the postcard became the central image, a photo of two lovers on a 13th century Indian ivory (which took up only two lines in the original), all the emotions, images, and themes in the poem started to come together.

 

The emotional truths at the heart of “Anna Interprets” had been simmering away in me for some time before I wrote it. They just needed the right vehicle. And when I found the postcard (or maybe I looked for it? I can’t remember!) amongst a bunch of other papers on my desk, I fell into a reverie about the man who’d sent it. We were madly in love at the time, but I wrote the poem much later, during the long painful process of losing his love, when I was angry and filled with grief, yet knew, despite all, that I still had deep feelings for this guy. I think most readers can relate to that experience—of re-discovering old tokens of love that send them spinning off into memories and mixed feelings.

 

Another of the poem’s “worlds” has to do with the long history of violence against women, the exploitation of women. Maybe the age of the ivory (and my anger) set me musing about historical tradition: Is the love represented on the card mutual? Is the woman a prostitute? Is the man about to rape her? I’m easily outraged by injustice, in part perhaps because of my family’s history, especially our losses in the Holocaust—the kind of massive trauma that inevitably filters down through the generations—not to mention the sexism I grew up with in England. Later, I worked for civil rights organizations; and as a journalist, I did my tiny share of investigative work in an effort to stem the tide of evil in the world. On the whole, though, I can’t write poetry that way. I mean, I don’t usually write overtly political poems. But political concerns often creep into my poems sideways, as they do here—as they do in everyday life, as they do in sex. (Here’s the “erotic” aspect of my poem.) Sex is wonderful in that it can express the entire spread of human emotions, and that includes echoes of violence, even in sex of the most loving sort, where aggression can be silly or playful. So on the one hand, this is a poem about loss and anger and powerlessness and the darker aspects of sex and love, but on the other hand, it can’t help being a celebration of sex as a life force, of making love as a creative act (wordlessly, more like dancing or music), of the joy the narrator once had.

 

By using questions in the poem, I’m also addressing human connection in the broader sense of our continuing struggle to communicate with each other and with ourselves. How can we interpret accurately what we see and how we feel, when such things are impossibly fluid, hard to relay, hard to grasp, and mutable over time?  The narrator drank up her lover’s “words” when she first saw the card, but only now, after the affair, does she examine the artwork dispassionately, suggesting that one learns (one must learn, in order to stay sane!) to stand back from painful feelings, to make sense of them, synthesize them. That’s why the poem found its form in trimeter and neat little four-line stanzas, in the use of a third-person character instead of “I,” and in ekphrasis—that is, channeling the poem though another art form. These formal gambits simply reflect, I think, a natural human tendency to find containment in the face of chaos. I also believe that all the arts are parts of a whole, and I love it when they talk to each other, because it’s one more conversation, in a slightly different language, that might inch us towards understanding this complicated thing called “life.” So what might seem like distancing effects in my poem are actually intended to bring both writer and reader closer to the subject at hand, even perhaps towards some kind of enlightenment! I think this is true of many ekphrastic poems. One of my all-time favorites is Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in which highly charged language suggests that a headless statue is more infused with life than the narrator, prompting him to say to himself: “You must change your life.”

 

I should add that I took one or two liberties in my interpretation of the Indian ivory. The journalist in me had a twinge about that. But then I realized that few of my illustrious forebears offer literal transcriptions of the artwork at the center of their poems. W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” focuses largely on Pieter Breughel’s painting of Icarus but also refers to details in other paintings, some of them changed to suit the poem. What’s important is that Auden’s “Old Masters” enable him to talk about people’s indifference to suffering. The Indian ivory in my poem helps me to chip away at feelings of love and loss in search of—well, what?!

 

I know that as I wrote the poem, I wanted to show that it’s possible to have two opposite feelings at the same time—like Catullus’ “odi et amo” (I hate and I love). Hope is strong in the poem, but not certain. In my own case, I have such a yearning for goodness that I sometimes misinterpret what I see and hear—or, in my disappointment, swing to the other extreme and swim around in despair over the failings of the human race. But not for long. Only the bitterest cynics (or victims of unrelenting evil) lack all hope. Most of us can’t help but trudge onwards, even after the most awful experiences, with at least a smidgeon of optimism. Still, there are no answers in the poem. And I’d love all kinds of readers to ponder the poem’s questions and find their own place there.

 

 

Hm, memory—a very tricky thing! I’ll address your second question first, since the form of this poem, “The Day...” might be said to challenge my ideas about my own past, and to suggest that memory in general is unstable, or at least full of holes—just like this poem!

 

“The Day...” is part of a series of poems in my new chapbook, Licking the Serpent, that focus on troubled teenagers, most of them an amalgam of teens I’ve read about in newspapers or encountered in my teaching career, not real-life individuals. This poem, though, is based on a real event that happened when I was 15. My stepmother tried to commit suicide (she was very depressed). Her father decided that my father was to blame, came to our house, and beat him up—not badly, but it was pretty shocking.

 

Before I go on, I must confess that I wrote this poem in response to an exercise from the poet Marie Howe, which is: write about the hour before an event, and then about the hour after the event. I love exercises, since they help me to access subject matter I would never have thought to explore, or push me to write in different forms. And honestly, I don’t think I would have written this poem without that prompt. But as soon as I got it, the poem just clicked into place. I barely had to write two drafts. Very unusual for me! One reason might be that I had already tried (several times) to write about this disturbing upheaval in our lives, mostly as fiction, but never very successfully. I simply hadn’t found a way to say it. This form, this poem with a missing piece, feels right to me because, when I was younger, my father’s beating seemed like one of the most horrific things our family had ever experienced. Now, I’m not so sure that’s true. But the idea of writing about an event without even mentioning it—as the Big Unmentionable—seemed to fit perfectly. I wanted the immediacy of the teenager’s experience (her incommunicable fear) at the center of poem, with the adult interpretation hovering lightly in the background. Again, like “Anna Interprets,” it’s a formal poem, couplets in trimeter, with the factual details doing the emotional work—a restraint that suggests the struggle to contain chaos I mentioned earlier, and my difficulty over the years trying to describe what happened.

 

In both “The Day...” and “Late Light,” the third poem here, I set out to question some of my old ideas about my family. When you’re young, everything is about me-me-me, my hurt, my losses. As one grows older, one gains (or at least one tries to gain!) a little more perspective. I know that in recent years I’ve begun to see that my losses are not mine alone. My family, generations of my family, have suffered terribly. My grandmother’s parents were murdered by marauding Cossacks in Ukraine, and most of my relatives on my father’s side died in the Holocaust. My father, my aunt, and my grandmother escaped to England, but they all bore the internal scars of their treatment by the Nazis. My mother (who was English) died of pneumonia when I was four and my sister was three, and we both spent some time in foster care and in an orphanage. My losses, sure, but also my family’s losses.

 

Lately, I’ve written several poems about my father, to understand him and to honor him—and perhaps indirectly to forgive my younger self for my self-absorption. “Late Light” was my first attempt to speak to his loss, as well as mine. The final image of a young man on a barge with his wife refers to my parents’ honeymoon, which they spent on a boat on the Norfolk Broads, the fen country in the Eastern part of England. My father has a whole album of photos, and as a child I would look at them and think only that my mother was dead. Now I can see how happy my father was then—how happy they both were—and I can be glad they had that, for a short time at least, and feel sadness for my father’s loss.

 

To answer your question “how much do you think poetry functions as another form of memory” is more difficult. Especially that word “another.” Can one generalize about such matters? I’ve read quite a bit of fiction and memoir that tries to access memory in many different ways. One good example is Mary Gordon’s memoir The Shadow Man, in which she tries to uncover mysteries about her father who died when she was seven. She speaks in his voice at one point, she has conversations with him, she even puts him in an imaginary police line-up. Pretty bold strategies!

 

However, I was never able to write much at all about my family history until I began to write poetry. And I think I was only able to write poetry because I had reached a certain point in my life that allowed me to speak more honestly than before, to go more deeply into what I felt and why I felt it—and (perhaps) to set me on the road to a better understanding of others. Poetry has been so freeing for me—a joy!—enabling me to speak in what feels like a true, authentic voice. And maybe that’s what poetry can do for some writers, allow them to say what might otherwise seem unsayable. One hopes that this is also a benefit for readers and listeners. When, at public readings, I read another poem of mine (“Through the Window”) that’s about my mother, people invariably come up to me afterwards and say how moved they are—some have even cried! This is a poem that felt so personal to me I wasn’t able to read it in public for the longest time. Now I’m glad it’s not just my memory, or my poem, but also a pleasure and a comfort to others—proof that real human connection is possible after all, if only for a moment.

 

 

I would say: Persist! Don’t panic! There are times when poetry doesn’t come, and then it does—the mind just needs to rest and mull for a while. Even so, it’s probably important to keep on writing crappy poems through those down times. And sometimes, what seems like crap is actually a stepping stone to something good. I’d also say, try different forms and styles, imitate, never be satisfied, keep trying for the freshest language, but of course be true to your own voice and vision. In workshops, listen carefully, but don’t be intimidated. The good advice will usually stand out from the bad. It is helpful to have a poetry community of some sort, to share work, to have one special poetry buddy who’s generous but honest—if only to counter the necessary but sometimes lonely solitude of writing. I’ve been very lucky in this regard. I’ve had great workshop teachers and good poetry friends.

 

But most importantly, speaking as a fairly new poet myself (who still feels pretty ignorant about what’s out there), I would suggest that new poets read everything they can lay their hands on, and not just poetry—all kinds of writing, on all kinds of topics, because who knows from what strange substance the next poem will be fashioned! I love poems filtered through science or history or philosophy, like David Mason’s Ludlow on the 1914 massacre of mining families in Colorado; or John Donne and the metaphysical poets who put science, astronomy and mathematics to work in their love poems; or Brad Leithauser’s Darlington’s Fall, a novel-length poem about an early twentieth century, Mid-Western lepidopterist that’s about—well, everything, from Darwinian theory to falling in love! Also, I would speak to people who don’t even know they are poets. I was first drawn to poetry through literary fiction. I remember distinctly: it was when I was reading Rikki Ducornet’s gorgeous (terrifying!) novels that I realized I was in love with words more than anything else in the world. And that, I think, is step one, a love affair with language. If you feel that way, you might well be a poet.

 

 

In recent weeks, I’ve been writing a series of poems under the general title of Next. So far I’ve written four, and I can’t say much about them because I have no idea where they’re going, except that I keep adding poems to the pile! I also have a book-length manuscript that I’m reshaping, called Habitable Space. Very broadly it’s about finding one’s place in the world, both internally and externally—coming as I do from a family of refugees and travelers. I also have a vague idea for writing more about my grandfather, Bernhard Einzig, who died in the German concentration camp of Theresienstadt (now Terezin). Last year, a special memorial stone called a stolperstein was placed in front of the house he built (and where my father grew up) in Berlin. My cousin and I have plans to go back and visit, and then to go on to Terezin. It’s all a bit hazy at the moment, but I think some poetry will come out of this—I just don’t know what form it will take. One thing I do know is that I want to try writing in other people’s voices—persona poems. I have a couple in my most recent chapbook Licking the Serpent, and I’d like to do more. Who knows? That’s what’s exciting to me about poetry. You don’t always know what’s coming next, and then something builds in you, and you write it!

 

 

 

 

Pens click in the inkwells,

nibs scratch on the page.

 

 

The blind shudders and clacks.

 

*

 

Over at my teacher’s cottage

the trees rustle and bend.

 

So many trees, it feels

like night’s already come.

 

I sit on the cold stone steps,

hug my knees and wait.

 

Through the letter box, I see

the cats are licking their plates.

 

 

Mooncars arrive daily at the pairport

unloading love with root-rot. At the docks

hares toot that the wormy cargo is theirs.

Curloot, curloot. Desolate nightbirds peck

dust for old kisses they’ll revive with spit.

Hares grow fat on failed dreams, but for these birds

pairports are palaces of healing, not cafés.

So many people are waiting, they quaver,

not for snouty grubbing in grey lots, for flight—

look, they are gazing upward even now,

thirsting for moon-struck love to come sailing

home. How they hope! But the hares growl, let them.

 

 

 

 

 

she finds the old note in a vase,

not sure if it’s sad or sweet.

 

The card’s of an Indian ivory,

of lovers bound with pearls.

Then, it was words that mattered,

now it’s the art she observes:

 

the man who’s pointing a dildo

behind the woman’s arse,

as she reaches out for his nipple,

or the dagger strapped to his arm,

 

a piece of which is missing,

along with a sliver of her hand.

Flowers are pouring upside down.

Anna struggles to understand.

 

Is she pressing her breasts against him?

(Anna notes he inclines his head.)

Her left hand is light on his shoulder.

Do her toes caress his leg?

 

And his hand around her forearm—

guiding or pushing back?

Oh surely his look is tender,

and both their smiles rapt.

 

 

 

 

 

You say your painted elephant dreams of fruit.

Me? My summer eyes are turning upward

to a sky that is sky, reliably infinite,

like the dream of fruit that orbits your elephant’s ears.

 

Melons, apples, pears—this curled one,

foetus or just sleeping, would eat forever

in all our dreams, if we’d let her. If only

we’d see the grace and beauty of first steps,

the trunk waving in salutation to apple

crunch, sweet melon, burnished pears.

 

Life isn’t all hard rind.

We know, the elephant and I, the lusciousness

of sleep and waking up again. It’s simple:

sleep, dream, eat—bow gracefully

to beautiful trees as they weep their leafy tears

and sough and sigh that fall will come. It will,

and so will summer clouds, rolling like toasted

macaroons from the upturned bowl of the sky.

 

 

 

 

 

Ripped open. The pliable softness of skin.

Shock of white bone. Her body. Shivering.

Winter. A slip of the opener on a frozen tin.

Her gashed hand. The young girl staring,

 

pulling tea-towels from a drawer to stanch

the red flow, rivers of red, oceans—

how can she still be standing, still seeping?

She’s panicked. Since her mother died,

 

her father’s driven frantic by the simplest illness,

by anything. A wrong word, any word,

can bring a cuff on the ear. And now she’s slipped.

But she’s too frightened. She can’t hide this.

 

He’s typing in his study, takes one look—

and drives her quickly to the doctor’s to be stitched and bandaged.

She’s quiet, a brave girl… Everything stays.

Except for her father. What did he say?

 

Today, light angles through a curtain crack

to a cramped little space the past suddenly

pours into. The years are fashioning a key.

Bitterness settles like sand in a drowned village

 

and her cache of fears shrinks to doll-sized,

to lightness. Today, she’s flying over patched fields,

a canal muddy in late light, and a barge

with a young man steering, and his young wife.