The close examination of words in a poem and the close examination of the feeding habits of brown pelicans is quite similar work
An interview with Elizabeth Bradfield, poet and naturalist, author of INTEPRETIVE WORK.
You have in your hands your first collection of poetry: INTERPRETIVE WORK, which appeared in January 2008. How does it feel?
Seeing the book is both thrilling and terrifying. I’ve been working on the collection for many years, putting poems in, pulling poems out, trying to find a combination and arrangement that would feel like more than the sum of its parts. Now that the book is headed out into the world I just hope that the conversation I tried to make between the poems — about nature, work, and society — comes through. I hope “Interpretive Work” finds people who feel challenged and energized by the poems.
What kind of poetry do you write? In which “group” of American poets you consider yourself to belong?
That’s a difficult question because, like a lot of writers, I hesitate to ally myself with any particular movement/group. Maybe it’s easier to start with what I’m clearly not. I’m not an associative poet, someone whose poems rely primarily on sound and image rather than narrative for their energy and emotional impact. I’m also not a “new formalist,” someone whose work engages with traditional poetic forms such as the sonnet, triolet, pantoum, or villanelle. It’s fair to say I’m most interested in poems that have a strong narrative element but, at the same time, sometimes hold story in suspension because of a desire to linger in sound or image. The poet Linda Bierds has described herself as a “lyric narrative” poet, and I think that fits for me, too. There are elements of confessionalism, nature poetry, and the poetry of work in “Interpretive Work,” but it’s my hope to blur the boundaries between those subject categories, so I don’t know if I can wholly ally myself with any of them. I definitely feel that my poems are in conversation with nature poetry, but in the way that a rebellious activist might be in conversation with a government official.
Well, you are also a naturalist. What comes first: birds and marine life or poetry? I guess they mix together somehow, I could say reading your poetry…
They do mix together for me–my time in the field as a naturalist, the demands of attention in that work and the physicality of it, prepare the ground for my writing life. However, it’s surprising how little of my work comes directly from my work as a naturalist. There’s a series of poems in “Interpretive Work” that talk about how working as an naturalist, making a job from nature, shifts one’s relationship to it. I am truly interested in what we see or experience when we turn out attention to the natural world and what that reveals about our human selves.
There’s so much at stake right now in the world. Climate change demands that we re-examine our place and actions as a species. It also demands, I think, that we look good and hard at the lives and habitats and needs of other species. It’s valuable and important to learn as much as we can about animals and plants. Seeing them thrive or struggle and understanding their particularities is critical to understanding the vast reach of climate change. In a way, the close examination of words in a poem and the close examination of the feeding habits of brown pelicans is quite similar work. It’s grounded in the particular but reaches out toward bigger questions and implications.
You are also a damn good web designer. There is poetry now everywhere on the web, from specialized sites to blogs. But, sincerely: is it the same reading a printed poem, and on the screen? If you really really like a poem, do you read it again and again on the screen, or you printed out? Or you memorize it? What is the best “shape” to fit poetry? I don’t ask you to generalize, I’d like to know your feeling about it. And one more thing here: do you write directly on the computer, or your poems “are raising” usually on a piece of paper?
I love holding a book of poems in my hands, sitting down with it in a comfy chair or — better yet — outside. The feel of the pages, the sound of them turning, the ability to flip forward and back and to mark up the margins — reading work online can’t even come close to that pleasure for me. Time at the computer is “clocked time.” It’s task-oriented. When I sit down at a computer, I approach the desk with a working mind, not an exploratory mind. I can’t draft poems on a computer.
When I write, my first drafts are written in longhand in notebooks. Revision takes place for me at the computer. I appreciate the freedom word processing gives me to play with line breaks, stanzas, and other elements in a poem, but the quiet space of a notebook on the lap is the beginning of poetry for me, not the bright screen and efficient keyboard.
That said, I do seek out poems online. I regularly check sites like Poetry Daily and Verse Daily to see what’s out there in the world. If I read a poem I love, I share it via email. If I read a poem I truly love, I write it down (by hand!) on an index card and try to memorize it.
You started a very interesting project, called BROADSIDED. Please tell our readers what is it, why is, it and where is it going.
Broadsided is a virtual, grass-roots, contemporary incarnation of the traditional broadside. It is also an attempt to move poetry from books and bookstores and out onto the streets and into daily life. There have been, in America, a lot of discussions about the value of poetry in contemporary society — is it an ivory-tower form? is it only read by other poets? — projects like Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poems Project sought to find answers to those questions. I wanted to participate in the debate and to bring poetry out of the shadows.
I’ve always been interested in public art, from street performers to sculpture. I thought that if I could do something for poetry that could become as familiar as the indie music show flyers stuck up on telephone poles, it would be a good project. Hence, Broadsided.
On our website, www.broadsidedpress.org, we post an original literary/artistic collaboration each month. The writing is selected from email submissions. The art is produced by a team of artists. When we’ve chosen a poem or story to publish, we email the artists the piece, and whoever is inspired to create a visual response “dibses” it, or claims it. I merge the two into a pdf that is downloadable and letter-sized for easy printing from any home computer.
The best part about Broadsided, though, are the Vectors. These are people out in the world who like the project and who have said that, each month, they’ll print a couple copies of Broadsided and put them in a public place where they live. They’re the ones putting Broadsided out in the world, really. It’s my hope to have thousands of Vectors around the world, to have thousands of communities being presented with thought-provoking and beautiful broadsides each month.
I must inform our readers that this is not the only project you are involved in. In know that the composer Monica Houghton put your poem “Whalefall” to music, creating a score for soprano and piano. The premier performance was performed September 23, 2007. It must have been quite something for you, as the author the verses.
I can’t say how honored I am that Monica was inspired to make music from my poem. Monica and I met while I was working as a naturalist in Southeast Alaska. We had wonderful conversations about art and inspiration. That she was taken enough with one of my poems to respond to it in music is just overwhelming to me. It’s a lovely, lovely piece of music–I could never have imagined what she would create, but it’s haunting and genuine and gorgeous.
One of my projects for the future is videopoetry. I mean poetry videoclips (with action, drama), not poets reading their poems in a short film. The concept is new in Romania, but in the US, it is not. It seems to me that you are interested in projects promoting poetry thru unconventional means. So, what do you think about videopoetry?
I’ve never heard of it, but I’m intrigued! Is it like music videos? Is it coming from spoken word culture? It sounds like something I’d love to witness. At the same time, it sounds a little overwhelming! With printed poems, there’s a quietness to the experience that allows the poem’s strength to be in the reader’s internal response. Making a video of a poem externalizes all that and, in a way, removes the power of the reading/listening experience. I would say that I’m interested in videopoetry as a hook for reading poems, but it wouldn’t be the way I’d want to always experience poetry.
You are now a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. It is a fellowship for poetry. We don’t really have things like that in Romania. What is a fellowship for poetry, how does it work, and what do you personally expect from this fellowship?
There are five poets and five fiction writers who, each year, are awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. It’s a two-year fellowship, and we are all given a stipend to live on. We meet once a week to discuss our work. There’s no degree at the end, no obligation beyond those meetings — really, it’s a gift of time for emerging writers. Free of the need to earn a living, we can dive into our own work, challenge each other, read, write, and hopefully grow as writers. Personally, I hope that I leave this fellowship surprised by the work I’ve done. I have ideas for projects I want to work on, but I hope something completely unexpected turns up. The fellowship gives me the freedom to follow up on those kinds of unplanned gifts.
There is also in the US an institution we don’t have in Romania: Poet Laureate. Almost every state have it in the US, and there is also a National Poet Laureat. I’m trying to lobby the institution in Romania, my desire is to import it somehow. We must say that the Poet Laureate institution is different in the US (and Canada) from the institution which emerged it, the British one. But I better ask you: what is a Poet Laureate and what does he or she do?
I wish you all the luck I can! The job description of Poet Laureate in the United States has changed with each writer who has held it. I think that’s a strength. Each poet in the position has thought about poetry in the United States and taken on projects or activities that work to make more visible poetry’s place in our daily thought and lives; each laureateship has been as unique as the writer appointed to the position. In a way, the importance of the position is just as much the fact that it exists at all as what is done with it. Every time a new laureate is appointed, poetry is in the news, and the work and life of the poet is written about. It exposes poetry to a wide audience, introduces Americans to this strange creature: the living, writing poet.
The current Poet Laureate appointed by The Library of Congress is Charles Simic. Simic is born in former Yugoslavia. Serbia gave birth to quite a few wonderful poets in the past century. My last question would be: is the poetry from the Eastern Europe known in the US? Well, I know the answer is no, but I mean, between poets… And why isn’t? It is only a matter of language, and translation, or it is a “marketing” issue? Should be done anything about that, and what?
There are some names that cross the Atlantic to the United States from Europe–Wislawa Szymborska, Czesław Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski–obviously Polish poetry has a pretty good representation. But of course there are many more poets writing in Eastern Europe whose work is not widely known, or translated, in the United States. Why not? It’s so hard to say. It might, as you suggest, be a problem with getting it translated, although it seems to me that I’ve seen a real increase lately in grants and presses dedicated to translation, so that might change. It might be marketing.
I think one of the best ways poets become known in the US, though, is through word of mouth more than any high-budget campaign. It’s perhaps a primitive means of sharing information, but blogs and chats between writers are incredibly important in introducing new work. There is so much poetry being published in the United States that there are poets here who are as unknown as poets writing abroad, or nearly so. This doesn’t really answer your question, I know. I think eyes here are open for non-English work. Maybe Simic will bring some new writers to attention. We’re all enriched when we can read literature from other languages and cultures. Tell me who you would recommend as a poet from Romania that should be read by the world–I’d love to know who you think is writing moving and important poems in your country.
