Review of Entering the House of Awe by Susanna Childress

Susanna Childress

Entering the House of Awe

New Issues Press

http://www.wmich.edu/newissues/

By the numbers

ISBN 978-1-936970-00-1
Publication: 2011
Total pages: 85
Number of poems: 43

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I first met Susanna Childress in the spring of 2008 while I was attending the Earlham School of Religion, a Quaker seminary. A professor at Hope College, she had been brought in as a guest instructor to teach a poetry course in the Writing-as-Ministry track. Susanna’s influence, both as a teacher and through her poetry, is one of the main reasons why I am involved in poetry today. I was swept away by her first book Jagged With Love. A fan of her writing, I am no less in love with this, her second book, discussed below. I also had the opportunity to interview her. Click here for the interview and to read more about her. —Nancy Chen Long

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Susanna Childress’ second book of poetry Entering the House of Awe is no quick read. It is filled with richly-layered poems that invite the reader to stay a while, to come back again and again. The title itself is the reader’s first clue of the layered-ness that will be found in the poems: the
phrase “entering the house of awe” is taken from Psalm 5, “But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, will enter your house, I will bow down toward your holy temple in awe of you” (NRSV translation). Notice that in crafting the title, Childress deviates a bit from the passage. Whereas the psalmist, who in a state of awe, enters a physical house (“your holy temple”), the poet enters a house that is not physical, but emotional: the house being entered is awe itself. In this turning of the phrase, Childress conflates the emotional state of being in awe with that of being in the house of God.

In addition, Childress’ selection of the word ‘awe’ is telling. If she would have selected a different translation of that passage, such as that of the New American Standard Bible or the King James Version, she could have, instead, applied the word “reverence" or the word “fear” respectively. But Childress selected a translation that yielded the word “awe”—a wonderful word that can mean opposite things, running the gamut from its newer connotation of wondrous admiration to its older connotation of fearful dread. Through the title of the book, Childress signals that the poetry contained in it will be grappling with matters of faith from a primarily Judeo-Christian perspective. But it is not a Pollyanna faith in which everything is roses. No—the poems in Entering the House of Awe at times confront the reader with an honesty that borders on raw.

Before moving to specifics, I’d like to take a look at the book as whole, by first covering some of the overarching themes that bind the poems together, followed by some of the primary poetic characteristics of the book.

Themes. While the title suggests something otherworldly, the book is definitely rooted in this world. The overarching theme of the book is relationship, both familial and societal. Two other primary themes include witness and the body: the poems of witness, in which the speaker gives voice to violence that s/he has seen, heard, or experienced, do not shrink from discomfort; they are unwavering. The poems of the body include exploration of its frailty, e.g., “Everybody Must Pass Stones,” which touches on a father’s ailments in his later years (and which you can read here—it’s the second poem on the page). But the theme of body is not centered only on frailty and illness. The sensual is also front and center. It is the tender kiss on a lover’s shoulder (“The Boiled Clean Feel of Your Bones”). It is a first orgasm with a lover (“Of Course I Hit at the Moon”). It is the absurdity of having sex while sick (“In the Middle of a Long Illness”). Taken as a whole, what you will find in this book is what Frank Burch Brown calls an immanent transcendence—the sacred immersed in the fullness of human experience.

Poetic characteristics. One of the major characteristics of Childress’ poetry is her love affair with words, her gift for language. You can see it in the brimming good wordiness of the poems. You know it in the way she wields her impressive vocabulary, which, depending on the reader, can be candy or kryptonite. (Keep your dictionary handy as you read this book!) You can feel it in her well-crafted turns of phrase. Take for example the last poem of the book “Sweetly from the Tree,” first published in Books & Culture, in which the speaker begins the poem by addressing the stamen of a flowering tree about how surrender/endings can be beginnings, how their surrender to bees fills the honeycomb:

Listen,stamen: your surrender is just a beginning,
the spinous distance between desire and the quiet
clinch of satisfaction. Take the hexagon, how it
will fill, fanned with wings that mean to bring
April's nascent truths. …

The word “spinous” to describe the distance between desire and satisfaction is slightly ambiguous. The primary meaning is “thorny” or filled with thorns—suggesting that to get from desire to satisfaction will be prickly and unpleasant. And at the same time, it also brings to mind the image of a spine, straight and narrow, a thin and easily traversed distance—suggesting that little distance stands between the desire and its satisfaction. Also, notice the word “nascent,” a beautiful word that refreshes the idea of beginnings mentioned in the first line, only to be followed by another meditation on surrender, the surrender that is winter, the surrender of the bees: “In winter, I will not ask / where the bees have gone. I will walk to the grove / in my old boots and give ear.” In the remainder of the poem, the speaker then turns to speak to the bees. Here are those remaining stanzas for you to enjoy:

                                       … . Littlest of lovers,
vested in pistil and comb, I speak now to you: dance

your tremble. Perhaps you of all, not drone but roamer, know
what purple means—given, some morning darker than

the human hymn of misgivings, you turn home
and make there what the orchid could not, alone.

Only your precision is a secret: prism of nectar, haven of gold—
I want what you want, and the stamen, and the sun.

Also related to language, another trademark characteristic of Childress’ current work is her penchant for long, expansive lines and complex syntax. As we’ll see later on, some sentences are parsed out over the course of five or more longer-lined stanzas.

A third major characteristic of the work in this particular book is the compelling formal variety. You’ll find a number of poems in the sonnet form. For example, there is a sonnet sequence in the book, and each of the four sections of the book ends in a sonnet. You’ll also find a few prose poems in the form of a block of solid text with flush right and left margins. There are free-verse poems written in standard stanzas, such as couplets and quatrains. And there are free-verse poems in what some might call an experimental form—shaped on the page. Childress is skilled in the use of white space to physically shape a poem in order to impact the pacing, to inject emotion, to signal emotional disruption, to effect tone. The look of these shaped poems on the page is compelling. But it isn’t only the free-verse poems that get shaped. She applies this skill to some of the sonnets and prose poems as well, which you will see later on.

Now that we’ve taken a brief look at the book as a whole, let’s delve into a bit more detail, starting with a short description of each of its four sections. In the first section, the primary motif is mother, and the poems range from poems about the speaker’s mother (e.g., “Mother as Water-Damaged Book”) to poems where a mother or mothers figure prominently (e.g. “The Wry World Shakes Its Head,” a mediation on Isaiah 40 in which Childress wryly presents a set of characters who would be the perfect guests on a Jerry Springer show), to those where mother is but a mention, an imprint (e.g., the ekphrasticpoem “Serpentine,” which you can read here, published under the titled “After Andrei Rublev's The Savior of Zvenigorod, 15th C.”).

The second section turns towards the male, be it a father (e.g., “In the Pocket of Your Winter Coat”) or a husband-lover (e.g. “All Hallow Even”) or a friend (e.g., “Why Every Man Should Knit”) or a critic (“Sōlus Meets Ispe,” which is smart and entertaining retort) or a nationally-celebrated man, long dead (e.g., “A Note to Martin Luther King, Jr.Regarding the Use of Certain Transitive and Intransitive Verbs) or even an imaginary secret admirer (“Love, Anonymous”).

In the third section, the motif that binds it together is the frailty of the human body, for example “Dashed to Pieces like the Potter’s Vessel,” which you can read here, published under the title “Letter to King's Daughter Hospital, Room 244.” This third section also turns more solidly to the speaker’s father. For example, in the Italian sonnet “Gallimaufry of Love,” the epigraph and the first two-and-a-half stanzas are about the father’s heart surgery. The volta in the sestet turns the poem from the consideration of the father’s heart, to a quick nod to blood, and then to female circumcision: “You hero, heart! You hapless blood: exact bouillon of my father’s / myocardium and Mariama Barrie’s infibulated clitoris, blood from skin / of labium minora and majora cut away. She, too, recumbent … .” A poem that starts off as a poem about a father’s surgery ends up being about a number of other things as well, including the idea of that modification of the body is art—the art of surgery—as the poem ends on both the speaker's father and Mariama Barrie (at the age of her circumcision): “Surgeries / make art of the body: marvel this canvas, age sixty-two, another, ten.”

The fourth section is shorter than the other sections, being comprised of three poems. The motif of beginnings and endings ties these three poems together, such as “Listen stamen: your surrender is just a beginning,” the first line of “Sweetly from the Tree,” which was discussed earlier. In addition, nature, while peppered throughout this book, figures prominently here. For example, “You Look across the Earth and See”—a poem in which the speaker addresses W. B. Yeats and weaves in lines and allusions to some his poems—begins with the wind: “Tell me you’ve found the wind to help hear all things loud and beautiful.” The poem then brings in pigeons, swans, ending with the sky, bees: “… tell me Unleash the Brigand God, held cold / and endless as the sky, as cold and restless as ourselves, all we who seek // the bee-loud glade: it does us good—doesn’t it?—to sleep, to old, to gray.”

With the overview of the sections under our belt, I’d like to take a look at “What’s Done,” which is the first poem of the book, and spend some time there because it embodies a good number of the major characteristics of the book.

You might recall that Psalm 5 is the inspiration for the title of book—it is a supplication addressed to God. And likewise the first poem of the book is also a supplication addressed to God. In addition, “What’s Done” also incorporates the elements of “mother” and “witness,” being a nine-stanza poem about mothers who abuse their children. The poem opens with the speaker addressing God:

Lord       about the women who pummel their children
in public                                Sweet Jesus
both you and I been angry enough to shake a baby to turn over tables    Lady

at the airport flinging her spatula of a girl again              and again
into a chair      SIT   loud enough to render an ocean still only
she isn’t     she wails   You saw

the one in the grocery store dangle her son by an ankle       drop him
head-first into her cart    Like Peter he stayed upside down
squalling and I swear                           I was a pillar of salt in the aisle

In the above stanzas, the speaker recounts in jagged spurts what she has seen, while in the third line she includes both herself and “Sweet Jesus” in the group of abusers. Throughout the poem, Childress skillfully juxtaposes the speaker’s witness of abuse with that of violence in the bible, e.g., a son dangling by an ankle upside down juxtaposed with Peter dangling from a cross upside down.

This first poem of the book also demonstrates Childress’ lean towards a longer, expansive line. Sometimes those long lines spill smoothly across the page, water from a pail. And sometimes, as is the case here, they fracture and sputter as Childress shapes the broken text to mirror human brokenness.

The above three-stanza snippet also shows Childress’ inventive formal use of spacing to shape the poem on the page. There are no sentences in this poem, only fragments, utterances sharp with emotion. Seven of the nine stanzas are like the three shown above, words parsed out over three lines per stanza. However, the remaining two stanzas consist of only one line each, both extremely short in contrast with the rest of the poem. This noticeable difference makes the lines stand out—they scream be read together: “The problem   Almighty // you.”

In addition, another characteristic of this first poem is the number of biblical references and allusions, which are braided throughout the stanzas. The final stanza of the first poem demonstrates how Childress weaves allusions into these poems such that knowledge of the allusion is not necessary in order to appreciate the poem:

spell out our own failings Holy One           about the women
who have not shame                              Split open the hazelnut under
our ribs               Let there be enough to go around                   and around

Here, the stanza stands on its own, with “the hazelnut under / our ribs” as a possible reference to the heart, and speaker therefore prays that there may be enough love-forgiveness-grace “to go around.” And the hazelnut could also be an allusion to the fourteenth-century Christian mystic Julian of Norwich and her Revelations of Divine Love, which stress compassion, and include her famous vision of the hazelnut placed in the palm of her hand: in a nutshell, God in all things; therefore, all will be well. Such a muted proclamation dangles uncomfortably after the fractured litany of witness, leaving the reader with perhaps a feeling of hope, perhaps a feeling of despair-abandonment, perhaps both.

Julian of Norwich is not the only historical woman-writer that inspires Childress. English noblewoman Mary Sidney, contemporary of Shakespeare and celebrated poet, also moves Childress to verse. The poem “The Hyssop Tub,” an ekphrasticpoem comprised of seven sonnets, is a response-exploration of one of the psalms in the Sidney Psalter, which is a series of poems based on the Psalms and co-authored by Mary Sidney. “The Hyssop Tub” is a beautiful poem—and an ambitious one because of the layered-ness of its ekphrasis:

Firstly, it is a meditation and exploration on Sidney’s “Psalm 51, Miserer mei Deus,” the fourth stanza of which serves as the epigraph to Childress’ sonnet sequence. Hyssop is a biblical herb used in cleansing and purification rituals and each sonnet explores purging, clarifying, cleaning, in some way, whether metaphorically, such as in the first sonnet in which the speaker tells of purging her very being—“I’ll erase myself if you want me to”—to literally, such as in the last sonnet in which the speaker is standing in a rainstorm.

Secondly, some of the sonnets are mediations on other works of art, such as the second sonnet in the sequence. Here we have the speaker talking to Degas’ about his painting Le Tub:

II.

 Let them have their dancers. I’m in love with the woman in Le Tub,

her russet sponge and russet hair. Russet jar delicate as a teapot, filled,

I want to imagine, with the oils of gardenia, some flowers from the family

of Rubiaceae, not the bitter leaves of Labiatae. She is a careful

woman, russet yarn between her needles on the counter. You, too,

loved her, I can tell. It would have been easy with each hatchmark to deliquesce

her body with water but you did not give a glistening—you gave the tub,

simple iron sphere, opening up and out, and the sempiternal

turning of her head, her body dry, ginger-ashen, like someone crouching

to a kiss a new land, say Praise be, saying I believed, and the crepuscular small

of her back knows how what is poured over her shoulders from the mouth

of splotched pitcher will rivulet. I see the hairbrush within reach, the towel.

Later, semi-submerged in bronze she practices the Portuguese she knows,

grips an instep, the tub’s rim, O Degas. She asks over and again Como ser limpo?

While the speaker begins the sonnet sequence with an offer to erase herself, and in this second sonnet asks how to be clean?, the four sonnets that follow present different artistic reflections to answer the question how to be clean? After flowing through these four reflections of cleansing, purification, and grace, we find in the last sonnet that the speaker herself has become an agent of cleansing: “I am not the blue jay / at all / I am / the rain.” This movement through the sonnet sequence, the poem’s careful language, its smart and ambitious engagement with visual and literary art, and so much more, make “The Hyssop Tub” an exceptional poem.

Cleansing and water are not uncommon elements in the Entering the House of Awe. The idea is introduced in a literal sense in the second poem of the book, “The Green Spider,” in which the speaker is small green spider that a woman sees while she’s taking a shower. This poem is a witness poem. The spider, who through its presence intends to distract the woman from things she might be thinking of, were she not distracted by a spider. The spider lists such thoughts for the reader, for example:

… the seven children
in Madagascar whose parents were taken with no
explanation, the children walking each day
past the prison until one them lobbed
a stolen fish through the bars for his mother, for which
he was shot: once in the hip and once in the ear. …

“The Green Spider” is also an example of the unusual point-of-view found in a good number of the poems in the book: the second-person point of view, in which the “you” is not explicitly identified, drives most poems in the first section, as well as a few poems in the other sections. In the above poem, as well as in most of the other poems that employ this point-of-view ( e.g., “Halfway to the Jesse James Wax Museum” and “Architecture of an Apology,” which is printed in its entirety at the end of this post), it’s safe to assume that the “you” is the speaker speaking to herself either directly, or in the case of “The Green Spider,” through the voice of spider. A prolonged stay in the second person, poem after poem, is difficult to pull off without the poems feeling forced or coming across as self-conscious. That Childress is able to do so successfully is to her credit.

“The Green Spider” is also another example of Childress’ inventiveness with form, with all lines flush to the right. In addition to the free-verse forms illustrated by “The Green Spider” and “What’s Done,” and the sonnet form mentioned earlier, Childress works in the form of prose poems as well. One example is “Chloé Phones after Three Weeks Working at the Home.” It is another witness poem, a telephone conversation between the speaker and a woman name Chloé about Chloé’s job at “the home.” Here is a snippet from the middle of the poem, in which Chloé is speaking right up until the last line displayed below, when the “I” then becomes ambiguous. It could still be Chloé speaking, but it could also be the speaker:

                                                                … Madison who can’t bathe by herself
having been raped by her stepfather    How about  “That’s nuts”    No      no good
“Insane”  Worse    “Whacky”  Well    then scalded in a bath    when  he  panicked
scrubbing at the spread of blood between her legs     I’ve  got  it        “That’s wild”
Another Maddy-ism  she says  is I already did a shitloaf of spelling words     and
There’s a shitloaf of dishes   ain’t there  That’s wild  she tries   that’s wild      It’ll
work  she says but isn’t satisfied  I can tell   It’s the way she laughs    hot   stippled

But not all is heavy with witness in this volume of poetry. There is some levity too, such as “Love, Anonymous,” a narrative poem about a teenager sending love notes to herself under the guise of a secret admirer. Another example of a lighter poem, also narrative, is “All Hallow Even,” in which the speaker is speaking to her lover about the night he first told her he loved her. They were at a Halloween party:

The night most of America snapped on
black capes and gauzy era-imitation dresses, our hostess
bearing her torso-length cleavage in a jumpsuit the color

of spinach tortilla, you tell me you love me. …

The poem continues with forays into humor, such as when the speaker sees her lover dance for the first time:

—but when you danced,

sharper than Brando in the only suit you owned, it was the outlandish

waggle of your neck, your eyes snapping open

like bean pods,your palms shimmying up as if to request

what you cannot sound out perdón, pelo, pequeñina …

As you can see, the above snippet starts in the middle of a sentence and goes on for four lines and doesn’t end—still, we’re in that same sentence. Childress is a master of extended syntax. The sentence that contains the above line spans over 6 stanzas, with punctuation and well-crafted phrases keeping the reader on track. Another example of her use of complex sentence structure is the narrative poem “After Your Father’s Fallen from the Roof and Not Broken a Thing:” 

After Your Father’s Fallen from the Roof and Not Broken a Thing 

He received the book you sent about Gettysburg and though he does not
tell you this you know he'll read most of it before bedtime and on the phone

he is grateful, he recalls the family trip to Antietam and how you,
nine years old, dropped your ice cream cone on someone's grave,

but it's your mother who tells you he's forgotten what to feed the hummingbirds
and all week long he's called your sister by your name though this

is not the worst of it: the doctor says it's like a bruise on the brain
and while the aphasia and disorientation will diminish,some things

may be lost forever. What's great, your father tells you, is that he can't
remember what's lost. It's that old bliss they tell you about, he says,

not knowing what you don't know you knew. After you hang up, you do not
cry like you thought you might, instead you get tangled in something

like prayer: what may be gone from him is last summer's drive to Tennessee,
hiking through white pine to the top of a mist-hung hill or perhaps

the paddy in Vietnam where a bullet struck his hip and flares smoked red
over the coming boats or perhaps the first time he touched your mother, or Hebrew,

or the color wheel, Star Wars, your brother's birth, the day he pulled
the mower over his foot, stuck in a gopher hole, toes-up. If last week God

held your father's body those twelve unconscious feet, you figure it's your job
to ask which things are shucked from his mind: your mouth, however,

has become a wide place, your tongue a useless oar, and looking down you see
your hands are the real supplicants, palms up, as if holding cantaloupe on your lap,

and when you fall asleep you dream a stretch of dandelions, some
whispering out thistle-tops in a pattern like rain, some smudging

across your skin that dewy, ocher language you cannot decipher.

"Your Father’s Fallen from the Roof and Not Broken a Thing” first published in IMAGE.

Notice that the first sentence spans over four stanzas, and is smartly followed by two relatively-shorter sentences. The above poem revels in language and narrative. As with most of Childress’ poems, the reader is propelled through the poem via these longer lines and the energy of the sentence—its extended syntax. Through the “you” of the poem and the vivid, specific details, we are given an intimate look into the speaker, the father, their relationship with one another, that relationship a gateway to our relationship with them.

And such things are hallmarks of Childress’ poetry. The whole of Entering the House of Awe is nothing if it is not about relationship—honest engagement, a clear-eyed look at what it means to be human, which has encapsulated within it the need for forgiveness. Childress crafts poems with effective and exact language, layered meaning, and innovative form. When it comes to the form of the poem—the look of it on the page—Childress is adept in the use of white space, indentation, the arrangement of words and the absence of words. Indeed, the book opens with an emotional stuttering embodied in the form, the jagged heaving that results from extended cry, with the speaker addressing God about physical abuse and uncontrolled anger, a yearning for grace. And the book ends in a controlled sonnet form, grace unfolding in language, image, metaphor, beginnings found in surrender, with the speaker addressing cohabitants in Nature—stamen and bees—what I imagine Childress would call “fellow residents” in this house of awe.

__________

[a poem from Entering the House of Awe]

Architecture of an Apology

When you see each other again                              this time under the pretext
of an apology he wants to make     in a hallway       after the plenary speaker


his wife stands there trying not to look uncomfortable            which at the moment is
impossible and gets you  feeling sorrier for her than for yourself            a particular
accomplishment            considering inside your coat pocket     two fingers


pinch a  balled-up gum wrapper like it's your  cherry stone of a brain  and this means
you're each sorry for something now      you      for her and she for him and he for


what?                mislabeling love is what you're guessing though in the actual air his
           Sorry     doesn't carry like you'd imagined    the lam of a beefy helicopter
and of course      now that you're standing here and now that he's said his apology


you can't for the life of you figure how to respond     this gulch between your mouth
and the long tunnel      to his ticker           Me too isn't what you mean at all


and  I  forgive you       also sounds  wrong  though  it's closer to what    belongs
in the space he's cleared     between you                          What  you manage
         is Thank  you          the one thing left on that short  list of possibilities


but when he says I'm  just tired    of being  pissed off      it's not hard  to fill in
at you    and  you could gasp      like you'd been smacked but he     with more curls


and  paunch  than  you remember      is the one gathering  up a raw breath as though
            it feels right to say these things to the woman  he          didn't  marry
for which you have shouted  at the moon—God's good eye—so  many


thanks         and for whatever  reason       the whole sweet speech you prepared
this morning    as you brushed  your teeth      has started  to slip away


Words  just      drop  their napkins  on their plates    and saunter  out the house
so all you can do is nod dumbly  that      Certainly       Being pissed off is a waste
of energy                  What  it seems         is that  his apology  has made a strange


shape   of your throat    you're  guessing a triangle  with too much       susurration
say    Isosceles        and  now the tiny pellet of gum wrapper has lodged itself beneath


a fingernail     like the hard angles of your youthful  mistakes    his      and  yours
each    of us      so ridiculous     we thought the house we built of cones     would stand
in the forest forever and by now    you're  ready to leave but can't  quite  make it


happen     unsure  how  to construct     a salutation for him or his wife       who was also
     your  friend  once         and  who    this whole time  has been inspecting the wiry flex
of her wrist       one  hand  rotating  back and forth like the smallest       nodding head


“Architecture of an Apology” first published in the Tampa Review

************** 

All poems printed or quoted in this post © Susanna Childress Entering the House of Awe (New Issues Press, 2011)

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Nancy Chen Long works at Indiana University and lives with her woodsman husband and blue-eyed dog in a small cedar cabin in the forested hills of south-central Indiana. At this time (September 2012), you'll find her recent and forthcoming work in Noctua Review, RHINO, Imitation Fruit, The Louisville Review, The Golden Key, Roanoke Review, and Adanna Literary Journal.

An Interview with Poet Susanna Childress

I want what you want, and the stamen, and the sun.
-from “Sweetly from the Tree,” Susanna Childress

Susanna Childress holds a Master’s from The University of Texas at Austin and a PhD from Florida State University. Her first book Jagged with Love was selected by Billy Collins for the Brittingham Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin and was awarded the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Her second book Entering the House of Awe was published in 2011 by New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University and was awarded the 2012 Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize. She has received an AWP Intro Journals Award, the National Career Award in Poetry from the National Society of Arts and Letters, and a Lilly post-doctoral fellowship. She teaches at Hope College and lives in Holland, Michigan.

*   *   *

I met Susanna back in 2008 when she was teaching a poetry intensive at the Earlham School of Religion, a seminary in the Quaker tradition, which I was attending at the time. Susanna’s influence,
both as a teacher and through her poetry, is one of the main reasons why I am involved in poetry today. So here is a bias alert: As I confessed in my recommendation-review of her recent book Entering the House of Awe, I love this woman’s work! In case you haven’t read the book or my review of it, here is a little bit about it:

From a content perspective, matters of faith factor into a good part of Susanna’s work and what you will find in Entering the House of Awe is a full-spectrum grapple with that faith. These poems do not insist that the world is always a monochrome of rosiness. Instead, they confront the reader with an honesty that at times borders on a kind of rawness; they offer witness that does not shrink from discomfort. In addition, the body, the sensual, is also prominent. Sometimes it’s the tender kiss on a lover’s shoulder. Sometimes it’s the absurdity of having sex while sick. What you’ll find in this work is an immanent transcendence—the sacred immersed in the fullness of human experience.

From a writing/poetry/craft perspective, Susanna’s poetry is many things, including a jubilant celebration of language. It is evocative, smart, exact. Her vocabulary will end up increasing your word power. It also a celebration of the line. Her poems currently tend towards longer, expansive lines—Whitmanesque. In addition, the poems in this book are ripe with image and allusion, usually biblical or ekphrastic. That said, knowledge of the allusions is not necessary in order to appreciate the poems: They stand on their own. The last characteristic I’d like to highlight before moving to the interview is that there is a strong narrative aspect to most of these poems, a narrative focused on relationship, be it familial or societal. The narrative is not a straightforward beginning—middle—end sort of thing. No, this poetry does not spoon-feed the reader. It requires that the reader be engaged, pay attention. And so here is my testimony: The effort to engage and pay attention is well worth it. I return to repeatedly to Susanna’s poetry. It is work at a level of depth, honesty, and mindfulness that I aspire to. One need only read the response to the first question of the interview about her experience in writing a second book to get an inkling of the depth and honesty of her work, the mindful attention she gives to language.

This interview was conducted via email in August 2012.

—Nancy Chen Long

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While getting a first book of poetry published is difficult, getting a second published is even more so. Please share with us how you got your second book published.

SC: I won’t look at my records, since the actual numbers aren’t as significant as the emotional landscape of this process, but over a three-year period, I sent the manuscript out roughly 200 times, in various forms. I kept revising and reworking, adding new poems, changing the order, taking out poems, creating new sections and sequencing, and sending out, sending out, sending out. I changed the stupid title four times. It was a semi-finalist or finalist 22 times, and in its final form, I got three offers from different presses, almost simultaneously. But if you do the math, you’ll notice how many rejection letters got sent my way; it felt like a trillion. This is all to say it was a long, long road and intermittently I got very, very discouraged.

What made me keep trying were those few nods as a semi-finalist or finalist; I knew I was getting closer to making a better book as those nods accumulated, and I can’t say—honestly, I cannot say—how grateful I am that it didn’t get published in any of its earlier versions, that I had to spend all that time and all that effort transforming the book again and again, that I had to engage so acutely and so steadfastly in the craft of individual poems and the craft of the manuscript as a whole. I would never have chosen to do that; I had to have it chosen for me, because, let’s be honest, I’m lazy and insecure and short-sighted (i.e., I want to win big and right away, without much suffering). I’m awfully glad it’s over, but, truly, I learned much about putting a manuscript together and about poetry in general along the way.

The book’s publication didn’t come as a result of winning a prize this time, though, and that was hard for me; I felt all this pressure (mostly internal but certainly some external) to land something even bigger and better than the Brittingham. I didn’t. But I love New Issues and it was great to be named the runner-up of the Green Rose Prize. In many ways, it’s been a better experience sans prize at New Issues than with the Brittingham at University of Wisconsin Press, since UW doesn’t specialize in publishing and marketing books of creative writing like New Issues. What I mean is that there are advantages and disadvantages to each of these publishing scenarios.

Your poetry has strong narrative elements with long lines that sweep like prose. I was wondering if you also wrote fiction or creative nonfiction? Are you working any prose right now?

SC: I do write short stories, though I’ve only published three of them, and currently I am attempting some creative nonfiction with an essay on motherhood and also one about sleep disorders. Let’s hope my penchant for narrative serves me well in both these genres.

At the 2011 AWP Conference, there was a panel on the poetry-prose dynamic. Some of the panelists said they found it difficult to smoothly switch between the two genres, one panelist in part because she want to break or control the line, and another because of the compression of language that his poetry seeks. On the other hand, some of the panelists said they had no difficulty going from one to the other. If you do write prose, how is your experience with switching between genres?

SC: Each genre for me has a very different feel; at least so far, I haven’t had much trouble switching back and forth. In fact, I often need to, just to have a bit of space from what I’m doing in one genre and think or work with language and form in a different way. What do people say—“taking a breather”? And sometimes my “breathers” are a happy means of procrastination, which I allow myself because it is almost always generative instead of paralyzing.

With the arrival of your son, how do you make time for your writing?

SC: We actually have two sons now, a toddler and an infant. I make time by hiring a babysitter for about 10 hours a week,  somehow it’s doable and I get a little bit of writing done here and there; I squeeze it in on nights and weekends and during the summer bliss of May, June, July. 

What’s true for me is that the more I write, the more time I find, somehow, carving it and stealing it and squirreling away, to write.

Your change in parent status notwithstanding, have you noticed other changes in your writing life and process since your first book?

SC: I have noticed other changes; I wish I could say they result from maturing as a writer and as a person, but the truth is that much of my writing life and process degenerated soon after my first book, before I had kids. About seven years ago I started noticing a severe problem with fatigue; after a few years of tests and theories and treatments, I was diagnosed with a critical sleep disorder, hypersomnia (cousin to narcolepsy), which, among other things, cripples my ability to focus and to find words. Each day, though, I have tiny windows of clarity and alertness. I try to write during those periods (maybe 30 minutes at a stretch) but as they do not follow a pattern or arrive consistently, that happens maybe once a week. So I find myself writing shorter poems, with simpler images, humbler subject matter. Most of these will never amount to anything. I almost feel as though, skill-wise, I am starting from the beginning, with nothing, except the looming pressure of not being a beginner anymore. People expect something different—evolution in voice, style—in a second book and especially a third book, don’t they?

Because of how I’m struggling, I’ve had long stretches of writing absolutely nothing, which makes me a little bonkers, so I’ve started to come to terms with a different kind of writing process and a different kind of writing. I write my shitty little poems and file them away and write more shitty little poems and file them away and even though there are files full of total crapola all over my computer, I stay sane and believe that, a bit at a time, I will find my way. Since there is no cure for my disorder and few means of successful treatment, I can’t think of “recovery” or “recovering” because that would mean going back to something I had or trying to reclaim something I was. No—I mean finding my way along a new path, and it will look and feel and seem different than what I expect(ed), but if I know anything, it’s that I mustwrite, and so I do, in fits and spurts and fog and muck and streams and glory. It’s like everything else: a good, hard journey.

There are wonderful ekphrastic poems in both of your books, such as the poems “Like the Nudes of Lucian Freud” and “After The Virgin of Vladimir, 12th c., Anon.” in your first book, and the poems “The Hyssop Tub” and “Serpentine” in your recent book. How strong is the inter-relatedness of the arts to you? What process do you go through in deciding to write ekphrastically—does a piece find you or you it? What moves you to engage the art? Just curious, do you paint or draw?

SC: I wish I were a visual artist; I am not. But I do find huge inspiration in the visual arts; they are manifestly generative for me. Sometimes if I’m stuck in a poem, I pick up a book of art (history) just to clear my head or rest the certain parts of my brain that are being overtaxed and I fall into a painting or sculpture and come away with a connection to the poem I was writing or a new direction for it. Once, for a class in graduate school, I gave myself the assignment (which I didn’t fully complete) of working through Henri Nouwen’s Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons (Ava Maria Press 2007), which is where “After the Virgin…” and “Serpentine” come from. In this case, it worked quite well as a prompt, so I’ve occasionally done more of that, with no expectations of completing a set of poems but letting it go where it will. I spend a lot of time with the visual piece, do several free-writes, then put it all away (including the visual piece), and see if a poem will emerge on its own. I guess I see art, then, not as lashing itself to language and driving land-ho but as a way of coaxing a poem, gently, where there wasn’t one before.

Speaking of “The Hyssop Tub,” I am captivated by that poem, the way you play with form in a sequence of sonnets. Could you tell us a little more about the poem? How did you arrive at the form?

SC: Robert Lowell wrote (though I can’t recall where) that he liked to write in form because it gave him “cabinetry” in which to contain the language of his emotion(s) and his experience(s). This metaphor stuck with me and so when it came to writing a poem about something as wild and gargantuan as forgiveness (of others, from others, and one’s self), I needed a sonnet-like set of cabinets, the constraints of 14 lines and a final rhyming couplet—and yes, I took a lot of liberties with the form and cherry-picked these characteristics as opposed to the whole shebang.

As for the sequence, I didn’t exactly know why as I was writing the poem, but it came out naturally in sections, and now I think this is because the subject matter is perhaps less about a “thing” and more about a process, which is to say not just about “forgiveness” but if and how forgiving and being forgiven might lead to peace and joy and wholeness. Now that I’ve written it out (ahem, for the first time) it strikes me that nearly all my poems are about this process of forgiveness in one way or another, but “The Hyssop Tub” is about the process of forgiveness surrounding something intensely personal—the potential and capability of both loving and being loved, and how sexuality gets all muddled up in that.

It was so personal and so intense, in fact, that I needed the artwork to speak for me—Degas, Cassatt, Ribera—especially those pieces portraying a woman’s bare back, which felt like the right correspondence for vulnerability, for cleansing, for individuation, for desire. I couldn’t tell all the truth unless, like Dickinson suggests, I told it slant; that’s part of what the artwork did for me. And I needed the form to help contain it. In the end, then, perhaps the choice of sonnet was a subconscious reflection of subject matter.

I’m a fan of the way you arrange the poem on the page and your play with white space and lineation, syntax and punctuation. The question here concerns punctuation. Some of your poems have capital letters, but no punctuation. Are you able to articulate what moves or inspires you to shape the poem in that way?

SC:  I can’t say that I have a theory or principle as to what I’m doing or why, since much of it is just impulse (stylized and made consistent through revision), but I do have a sense that if I eschew any grammatical or syntactical norms it might somehow reflect the experience I’m trying to portray in the poems. Therefore, the poems that are most emotionally intense or psychologically strained can’t be offered in syntactical units that represent complete equilibrium. While I’m far from being a writer of what Tony Hoagland calls “skittery poetry,” this is one small, surface way of representing the disorientation of human experience, of conveying turbulent thoughts and/or feelings.

Indiana, where you grew up, is mentioned in both books, as well as other specific places and landmarks, for example the poems “Fetching” and “Halfway to the Jesse James Wax Museum.” I pick up a sense of respect for place. What is your approach or your thoughts about place in your poems?

SC:  Until recently, I haven’t thought of myself as a Midland author or, really, a writer with much regional bearing at all. I come mostly from a place that is categorically a bit lost: rural southern Indiana, right along the Ohio River. It technically isn’t, but it really ought to be part of Appalachia, as it borders Kentucky and carries more of Kentucky’s cultural, idiomatic and geographical characteristics than of central or northern Indiana; it’s these aspects—culture, idiom, and geography—that I am discovering, somehow, deep in my bones. My grandmother’s tongue, a warm and soft and holy hillbilly-speak, comes to me in my dreams and haunts my ear. Way up here in Michigan where I can hear how distinct they are, I miss the good sounds of her mouth; I listen to surreptitious recordings I have made of our phone conversations.

Of course, it’s not just sounds; it’s also sensibilities, and though the place where I grew up was backwards in so many ways (e.g. a few families flew Confederate flags on their properties), even that darkness is part of understanding where I come from, who I am. Though I don’t consciously mean to be working these things through in my poems, I am aware that it happens and intrigued by what I discover about the sense of place I didn’t know I had.

Faith seems to be pivotal in your poetry. For example, two of the ekphrastic poems mentioned earlier concerned Byzantine religious icons, the title of your second book is taken from Psalm 5, and there are biblical and faith references throughout both books. Since you are up-front and open about your faith, have you found that others try to pigeon-hole you or make assumptions about you or your work?

SC:  Perhaps they do make assumptions; more often, though, I am aware of others’ surprise or appreciation that I identify as a person of faith but write the kind of poetry I do, which, I suppose, is pretty raw. If people are frustrated by my faith, they aren’t saying so to my face (and let’s pretend that means they aren’t frustrated—which, to be honest, wouldn’t bother me); I hope there’s yet room to explore what belief is, what it makes of us and us of it, and how art inevitably, though at times inexplicably, is part of that exploration.

Any plans for your 3rd book of poetry?

SC: I have been writing a few poems here and there (especially when I try to write in other genres—the poems seem to want to pop out then, as if to say, Don’t forget your first love!). I have a publisher asking for a chapbook within the next year, so I would like to aim for something humble and simple—maybe 20-30 pages of poetry.

Who are you reading now? Do you have a favorite poet or poets?

SC:  Right now I’m reading Jane Springer’s Murder Ballad(Alice James 2012); Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s Poetry in America (UPitt 2011); John Estes’ Kingdom Come (C&R 2011); Corey Marks’ The Radio Tree (New Issues 2011); Bobby C. Rogers’ Paper Anniversary (UPitt 2009); and Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy(Graywolf 2007). Maurice Manning is a favorite right now— after hearing him read recently, I am so enjoying his voice in my head; he has several stunning collections. I also keep coming back to the poems of, as I call them, “my queens”—Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Anne Sexton, Maxine Cumin, Sharon Olds, Joy Harjo, Marie Howe, Naomi Shihab Nye, Dorianne Laux.

Finally, what advice would you give to an aspiring writer?

SC:  I should have a good answer to this by now but it genuinely trips me up to try and give advice, if only because each writer and her process and compulsions and abilities and druthers are so different. Maybe, though, what is applicable to all aspiring writers is something my husband has had to tell me over and over and over: be faithful and attend to the craft. This mantra covers a multitude of ugliness—from lack of motivation/ writer’s block to despairing at the “biz” part of “poe-biz,” from coveting another writer’s achievement(s) to feeling as though my writing style is out of style. If I am faithful and attend to the craft (which, like all advice, sounds easy and is awfully hard), then good things—perhaps just small or humble or quiet things, which are still (so, so) good—will come of it.

Susanna’s website: http://www.susannachildress.com/

Some of her poems on-line:

“Man as Walnut,” at the bottom of the book's page at New Issues Press

“When at Night Zane Says His Prayers,” interview at Antler, poem is at the end of the interview

“Halfway to the Jesse James Wax Museum,” Avatar Review

“A Note to Martin Luther King, Jr. Regarding the Use of Certain Transitive and Intransitive Verbs,” Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought

“Prose, I Say, Plasma,” Verse Daily

“What You Meant Was,” Blackbird Journal

Two poems: “This Day Is in Love with Me” and “After Your Father has Fallen from the Roof and Not Broken a Thing,” Lutheran Festival of Writing

“We Take the Sky,” Utmost Christian Writers

“Finishing the House,” The Missouri Review

“Muchas Gracias, My Love,” The Missouri Review