All interviews done by SR interns
Conversation with an Emerging Poet: Alexis Lathem
SR: Would you describe the particular challenges of writing a piece like "Alphabet of Bones" (published in Issue 3 of the Saranac Review)? How do you sustain a long poem? How is the process of writing a long poem different for you than writing a shorter one?AL: “Alphabet of Bones” was probably the first long poem I ever wrote. It was the material of the poem that required the larger format. It’s a landscape poem about the vast, wide-open landscape of the northern forest-tundra, where caribou make their epic journey in unfathomably enormous herds. It simply required a large canvas. The poem refers to the construction of a colossal hydroelectric project and the consequent reconfiguration of the landscape. I don’t think it’s not a subject that can be dealt with in a short poem. Over a period of four years I made many visits to the aboriginal communities that were opposing these projects – communities that have a 9,000 year history with a particular place. So I was responding to the sense of a millennial connection to place, something that is foreign to a culture that can’t remember as far back as last week.
I’m not sure that the process of writing a long poem is any different than writing a short poem and I certainly don’t sit down with the intention to write a long poem. Sometimes a poem just keeps going. But my poems have tended to get longer as I develop as a poet, more narrative and the language more open. The poems are less opaque than they used to be, more translucent. I think my earlier poems were too dense, too ornamental and the language was too in love with itself. I used to be a jeweler, literally, and I think the process of making a poem was too much like crafting a precious object.
SR: A lot of your poetry has natural-world influences. Would you talk about that? Where does that connection come from and how does it find expression in your work?
AL: Mostly, I write out of my experience. On occasion I will write a poem that is based on something I’ve read, or a story I was told, but most of my poems come out of my direct experience, much of which is urban, because I grew up in large cities (London, England and Brooklyn, New York). All of the poems that refer to my childhood experiences are very urban poems. But for the last fifteen years I have lived in Vermont, in a rural/suburban setting, and before coming here I traveled around France and the UK, working on small farms. For more than a decade, I have been an environmental and agricultural activist. I dedicated four years of my life towards raising awareness about the tragedy of hydro-development schemes in the north. (Most of that electricity is used here in the northeastern United States.) I had the privilege of visiting some very remote, wild areas of the sub-arctic, sometimes for weeks at a time, with people who until very recently lived off the land as hunters and trappers and who have a very intimate relationship with that landscape. These were eye-opening experiences for me and so naturally I have explored them poetically.
SR: You have an impeccable sense of sound and rhythm. How does that work for you? Do you "hear" the poem or do you have some other process of revision?
AL: The music and rhythm of a poem come instinctively. I do think a poem comes to me almost as a song would come to a song- writer. If the language is not driven by the rhythm and by the music and movement of images, then I will write prose, because I am also a prose writer. Sometimes my word choices don’t really make sense, except rhythmically. For instance, in “Alphabet of Bones,” I refer to the caribou as deer, only because the word caribou has too many syllables. I can get away with it because some people in the north refer to the caribou as deer, as in Farley Mowat’s book, The People of the Deer. Here is a classic example of the poet’s conflict between her loyalty to the inner music of a poem, and the relationship of words to the world.
I have had some musical training. My mother was a musician and a music producer and I grew up going to concerts and hanging around composers and musicians. I studied the violin as a child, and later the piano, without sticking to either instrument--to my great regret. Lately, I have taken up the recorder. But I have a terrible singing voice. I think to be able to sing is a truly great gift; perhaps if I were able to sing beautifully then I wouldn’t have had such a need to write poetry.
SR: What are some of your main poetic influences?
AL: It’s hard to say which poets have influenced me; so many have because I learned to write by imitation. I have never had that peculiar anxiety about influence. Long before I ever signed up for a poetry workshop, I apprenticed myself to the poets I admired. But there are two great poems that come to mind – both long poems – that I have responded to very deeply, and those are Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares, and Blaise Cendrars’ La Prose de Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, which I wrote my thesis on for my MFA at Vermont College. Cendrars’ poem is an under-appreciated masterpiece, a seventeen page-long poem written in 1913 that records the poet’s journey, as a fifteen year-old runaway, from St. Petersburg to Paris on the newly completed transsibberean railroad. The poem anticipates many of the innovations of the high modernists, without the esotericism of those works. The language is still fresh and translucent, but beneath the surface, it is a dazzlingly complex poem. I still think the poem has a lot to teach us about what a poem can do. But then there have been other poets, like Elizabeth Bishop and H.D. and Muriel Rukeyser, who have been important to me.
SR: How would you describe the state of poetry--and the particular challenges of the emerging poet at this time? How do you keep writing in a market that doesn't support poetry?
AL: I am probably not the best person to answer these questions, as I am particularly thin-skinned and easily discouraged. What I find difficult –more difficult that the market aspect – is that so few people I am close to in my life are interested in reading poems. If I were a mechanical engineer, or an astrophysicist, I wouldn’t expect my friends or family members to read my papers, but I don’t accept that poetry is a specialized field, like advanced mathematics or physics, that can only be appreciated by other specialists.
I think that poetry has opened up in the last few years to allow for a wider range of human experience. Certain areas of reality were considered taboo to poetry (anything that might be considered topical or political) but now we see poets taking on these subjects – the war, for instance. I suspect that this will mean that poetry will gain more of an audience. (Grace Paley used to thank Laura Bush because her invitation to poets to the White House in 2003 provoked a storm of protest poetry, for making it acceptable to write political poems.) Milosz said that “the poetic act changes with the amount of background reality embraced by the poet’s consciousness ”. That is what we’re seeing in American poetry, more “background reality” pressing down on the poet’s consciousness. A decade ago I would have been shocked to see some of the poems that are appearing now in periodicals like the New Yorker, which deal with subjects such as global warming, or the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
Regarding challenges: I am suspicious of the whole business of submitting poems. The sheer volume of poetry submissions that are out there in the world, in search of homes like unwanted children, is a consequence of the personal computer, which allows us to do this on an industrial scale. I know one poet who has set up a cottage industry – she has even hired an assistant to help her churn out cover letters and stuff envelopes. Finally, after winning second place seventy-seven times in book contests, her manuscript was published, which it deserved to be. Even with computers, it is enormously time-consuming, and the impersonal nature of the process--all those form letters and anonymous contests and invisible readers can be numbing. The responses, whether negative or positive, begin to feel very arbitrary and confusing. Is this a healthy process for a writer? Probably not.
SR: What are some of the larger themes that you explore in your writing?
AL: Many of my poems address the destruction of the natural world that is going on all around us; many of them deal with extinction. Relationships between humans and animals are a common theme. Sometimes a poem will address a sympathetic relationship, or a mystical one, sometimes a perverse one. Many of the poems are concerned with memory, with a very ancient memory of the relationship between humans and other creatures that sustained us over the millennia, until very, very recently, and with the erasure of memory that comes with the obliteration of natural and cultural spaces.
But I also write about family, about love, and especially about grief, which are traditional subjects for lyric poetry. I m still very interested in exploring these inner landscapes, as well as in natural landscapes.
SR: Do you see yourself as a lyric, narrative, or some hybrid? How would you describe your aesthetic?
AL: I don’t really concern myself with questions about where I fit into these critical categories. But since you asked, I think my poems probably belong more in the tradition of the lyric. Lately, I have even been experimenting with reading my poems to guitar accompaniment, which brings me back full circle to the origins of the lyric. When I began writing poetry, I was driven by very powerful feelings, by an intense subjectivity, as well as by a desire to write beautifully. The early poems were over-wrought short lyrics. As I developed, I became much more concerned with clarity. But I’m not interested in creating “mythologies of the self,” to use Stevens’ expression, or in being a “priest of the invisible” – if that is what it means to be a lyric poet. I do worry about the relationship of words to the world. In this sense, and because I am concerned with history, and with blurring the boundaries between literary and ordinary language, I have more in common with Pound and Williams and their ilk. A long poem can incorporate both lyric and narrative; it can incorporate the historical fragment, and include all kinds of non-poetic discourses. That is interesting to me – poems that flirt with boundaries, with the limits of what a poem can be – like Cendrars Prose, or Rukeyser’s documentary poems. Poetry itself may be seen as a kind of membrane or boundary between self and world, language and silence, music and consciousness, and it needs to be porous and fluid for it to be alive.
SR: What advice do you have for other emerging writers?
AL: I am not one to give advice. Probably the best advice I can give is not to listen to anyone’s advice.
SR: Can you describe your writing process? When do you write best? Describe your writing desk and what it says about you as a poet.
AL: I have to have a very regular, uninterrupted daily practice. If my life is disorganized, and I cannot establish a regular rhythm, then I can’t produce poems. It’s like milking a cow: you have to do it every day! I need to work first thing in the morning, because I am less anxious then, and anxiety creates blocks. It is best to write when I am half-awake, when I’ve just rolled out of bed and I can keep my ear close to the murmurings of the unconscious, which is the source of our images. I write longhand, in a notebook, and only after a poem has gone through several revisions do I type it up; then I have a very different relationship to it. My writing desk has to be before a window, preferably a window with a view, the kind of view that induces daydreaming and reverie. I read somewhere (I think its was Andrei Cordescu) that writers used to gaze out the window when they looked up from their typewriters, and now they look up at computer screens. I’m an old-fashioned writer who still gazes out the window.